DRAGON'S HEARTSTRINGS || dramione | harry potter

Chapter Twenty-Six

Hermione believed death would save her from the all-consuming pain, but as it turned out, death brought only more pain, and it was never-ending. She was sure that what she saw before her were hallucinations. Writhing in agony, she saw Luna's face looming over her, the lines of it blurry. Then Luna transformed into a snake and kept biting her, making Hermione scream. But the snake wasn't real, it wasn't there, it was dead, its' butchered pieces on the floor with Gryffindor's sword next to it, its' dark blood glistening on the black tiles, its' vicious black eyes cold and venomous even in death.

The ring was squeezing the finger of the hand that had been bitten, and Hermione was certain she would soon lose her hand either from the poison or from the horrendous clenching of the finger that stopped all blood flow there. The imagines in front of her changed as Luna turned to snake, the snake turned to Harry, turned to Voldemort, and the real dead Nagini turned to Ron, laying helplessly on the floor, drawing his last breath, until finally he died and died again and again in front of her – Hermione was about to join him soon. She accepted the thought of dying with immense relief because that meant she could finally meet the ones she had lost – her friends, her loved ones, all the innocent lives she never got to save, all of those she had wanted to switch places with, all those she would've rather died for than watch them die herself. But it also meant that the pain would end. Death would be a sweet mercy from the suffering – not only the physical one she was experiencing now, as she was dying from poison, but the emotional one that had its' clutches on her ever since the war started and ever since she started blaming every bad thing that happened on herself. Soon, all that misery will be just a memory belonging to someone else, and she will be free even from a shadow of it.

She barely registered the two men in front of them, she had forgotten Luna was there, holding her in her arms, speaking sweet nothings into her ear, begging her to stay alive a little longer. Time and space and people no longer existed to her – she was only a pile of nerve-endings set on fire. She was only a flesh of misery, a screeching mess of soon-to-be-dead molecules. She didn't know her name, didn't know her gender, didn't know what the word Mudblood meant, and it was both freeing and terrifying. Luna's hands were switched with something else, something firm and hot and a solid, and she saw a shock of platinum blond hair ghost over her vision. She saw a skull-like mask and she was sure death had come to her at last. If she saw as good as dead, then why didn't the pain lessen? Wasn't death supposed to be peaceful? Didn't she deserve complete senselessness on the last moments of her life? Wasn't she good enough for a mercy like that? Then the mask was gone, and she saw a face which she did not recognize. A scar, similar to hers, on an exquisitely handsome face that she couldn't put a name on.

They were somewhere else now, and the other people that had surrounded them were now gone – there were just the two of them, her, a dying person, and him, a man without a skull mask, and somehow even her spatially incapable brain somehow managed to grasp that information. It distracted her from a fire in her body. He grabbed her left hand, the one with ferociously swollen bitemarks on it, and he put his lips on the injury. At first, she thought he was kissing it. But then, unimaginable pained soared through her like a tidal wave, wrecking her whole being on the way. She didn't know there could be agony worse than that of poison, but if there was, this was definitely it. The man's teeth closed around the wound where the snake's fangs had just been, and his jaw worked its way through her skin, tearing into her flesh, causing misery so awful she passed out from it. Only to regain consciousness mere seconds later, watching the way he bit her, then drew back, then bit her again before leaning away once more as if he were repeating a strange ritual of sadism. He was a snake, he was worse than a snake, he tortured her because he liked it, she knew it. He drank her blood only to spit it out as if the taste was wrong. Was he a vampire? Is that what was lurking for her in the dark all this time?