Safe and Sound

Everything was white. At first it was hard to see, the brightness of everything completely disorienting. My eyes struggled to see, but when they did, I wasn’t sure what it was exactly I was seeing. Everything was faint, as if blurred by the light bending around me. Spinning, I could only see that I was in some sort of field, a large tree standing next to me. I had never seen the tree before.

Grass was beneath my feet, which were bare. I ran my foot over the earth, feeling how soft and fertile it was. Looking down at my clothes, they were completely clean. I had on a plain black dress, thin straps star against my white skin. Looking up, I saw a figure leaning against the tree.
Licking my lips, I took a step towards it. “Hello?”

The shadow moved and I stopped in my tracks. I was staring at myself, except I wasn’t. It was me, that much was obvious. But my mirror image was dressed in white, not black like myself. “After all this time, we come face to face.”

“You’re the voice,” I said more than asked. “The one that I heard in my head, my split personality.”

She nodded. “Do you know what duarum mentiumases' is?”

“It’s a curse that splits your personality when you make a change of heart.”

My other self nodded. She leaned against the strange tree, watching me. It was disorienting to look at myself, knowing that it wasn’t a mirror. “Yes. Essentially it splits your mind in half, keeping your primary self and your secondary self at war with one another. Very hard to manage.”

“I grasped that.”

“And unlike most disorders that this can exist within, it creates and actual being within you. I had my own mind, I could thing inside of you. It’s like two minds working in one brain… excruciating isn’t it?”

I nodded. “What is this place?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Are we dead?”

“Sort of.” She pushed herself off the tree. “That last moment before you were struck by the killing curse, you loss control of your motor skills.”

“That was you. You threw me- us- in front of Harry and said-"

“That it was the only way to fix things.”

“You wanted to kill me for turning, didn’t you? For switching alliances.”

She shrugged. “At first. But you know that, so let’s not discuss that. Let us discuss what I actually did in that last minute. You noticed I had been quiet, resolved within myself. That was because I was becoming more you, less me. So I saved my strength- believe me, it’s hard to project thought with a shared brain- and at the last minute, I threw all of myself into moving in front of Harry.”

“You saved him.”

“And you.”

“But-"

“Duarum mentiumases' doesn’t have a cure because it doesn’t always cure the victim,” she said, cutting me off. She talked so much like me- because she was me- and it made me uncomfortable. “But there is a way around it. Think about it, Reagan. You know what I’m talking about. I got the answer from you.”

Biting my lip, I thought hard. Hermione had said that there wasn’t a way to fix it. But I thought back to when my mind had first gone through the split, when I began to hear my own voice in my head. I had panicked, and in my mental state I had fried everything around me in attempt to mute it.

Except that my later voice, it was hidden in me. You can’t hurt a person that’s inside of you unless- “You brought yourself to my surface,” I murmured, nodding as I thought about it. She smirked. “You took control for that second, shoved me in my own consciousness. Instead of the curse hitting both of us like it would in normal circumstances… it hit you while I was latent.”

“You’re smarter than they give you credit for. They’d probably think you brighter if you weren’t around Granger all the time.”

“I don’t understand why you did it.”

“Because I am you, at least in essence. And the only way to be with Draco was to be who you are now and to eliminate myself in the process. A self sacrifice that I technically won out in the end.”
I shook my head. “This is weird. It hardly makes sense.”

“Few things in the wizarding world make sense. You know that best of all. All that matters is this: The part that was inside of you, me, I was hit with the curse. Not you.”

“So I can live?”

“You’re actually alive right now. You’ve stopped breathing, so you should probably go back. It’s about to hit almost two minutes without you breathing- you’re not going to last much longer.”
I nodded, hesitating. “How did you figure out how to do that?”

“The answer was in your head when you tried to harm me but hurt yourself. I figured if our minds were reversed…”

“That it would kill you. Because the killing curse isn’t a killing of the body.”

“Exactly. It extinguishes the mind.”

“Wow. We’re brilliant.”

She nodded. “You really need to get going.”

Licking my lips, I nodded. “How do I go back?”

“Close your eyes.”

I did. “Now what?”

There was no answer. There was just silence. If possible, the silence seemed to only grow in volume until there was a ringing in my ears. The ringing was loud, making me cringe away from it before the ringing turned into yelling. At first I thought that it was just a throbbing sound in my ears, but I could distinctly make out the yelling as it got deeper, taking shape into someone’s voice.

Draco.

My eyes opened, wanting to see his face. I gasped, my lungs screaming for the air I desperately needed. Oxygen flushed into my lungs as I sat up, throwing someone off of me, breathing heavily and swinging my head around. I had been pulled to a different part of the hall way, my vision blurry before coming back again.

Draco was on the ground in front of me. He was sitting on his knees, his face blank, tears staining his sharp cheekbones. His hands covered his mouth, blood on them. Behind him, Blaise stood, tears on his face as well. A single hand was on Draco’s shoulder, as if he had been pulling Draco backwards.

Turning to my left, Ron dropped his hands from Harry’s shoulders. Hermione was standing close to me, dropped down on one knee, her face pulled into a mask of confusion. Harry clung to Ron viciously, looking at me. He was the first to move, throwing Ron aside and rushing me.

“What?” he slid to his knees, grabbing my face in his hands and looking in my face for some sign. “That isn’t possible.”

“Don’t do that,” I managed to get out. “I have a head ache.”

“Reagan,” Draco whispered. He was still sitting on his knees, staring at me. “How…”

“I couldn’t exactly leave you idiots to save the world, could I?” I shook Harry’s hands off of me. He stood up, helping me to my feet. My knees shook slightly as I stood up. “What kind of world is it without Reagan Potter?”

“Duarum mentiumases,” Hermione whispered. Everyone looked at her. She was grinning at me and I mimicked her grin.

“What the hell is that?”

I glared at Draco for his harshness. “That,” Hermione answered, “Is what just saved her. It’s a split personality curse that supposed to be incurable.”

“Yeah well it wasn’t exactly a curse as much it was an accident,” I told her.

“It hit your split personality, the other half.” I nodded. “Fascinating.”

“Yes, dying is fascinating. Now, do we have somewhere else to be?”

“I need to go to the docks,” Harry said, “I have to get to the snake.”

“Alright.” I looked at Draco. He stood up, still looking at me with wonder. “We’re going to fight.”

Harry held my arm. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”

I nodded. “Promise.”

Reluctantly, Harry, Ron and Hermione ran off. I remained standing and looked at Draco. He looked paler than normal and he still had a look on his face that I didn’t quiet understand. I took a step towards him and that was all he needed. He crashed into me, knocking me back into the wall and holding me, smothering me and crushing me into his chest.

Every ounce of him was pressed against me. I could breathe him in, smelling him and letting myself cry. I didn’t know how badly I wanted to cry until I was pressed up against Draco, the one person that I did everything for, the one person in my life who had been a constant. No one else in the entire world had been with me forever, but Draco had. Even when we were away, I lived for him and I breathed for him.

I loved Draco more than I loved almost everything in the world. The only person who could contend with him was Harry, but even then I knew that I would follow Draco anywhere in the world and that he would follow me. And the thought of leaving him by death struck me as I held on to him. the thought of leaving him behind made me hate myself for scaring him.

“Don’t you ever do that to me again,” he hollered, startling me at the anger and the desperation in his voice. “Do not ever scare me like that again. I thought you were dead, Reagan. I wanted to die seeing that happen to you. I will never feel like that again, do you understand?”

“Yes, I swear.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, but right now we have to go fight.” We stepped away from one another. I looked at him and Blaise. Blaise had approached us, clapping a hand on my shoulder, squeezing. “Are you too ready for this?”

They looked at one another. Blaise nodded. “We will follow you, Rea. You’re my best mate.”

She smiled. “And you’re mine.”

Everyone always talked about the golden trio. Harry, Ron and Hermione were always taking on the world, saving lives and doing good. But no one ever talked about my trio. My two boys and I, we were a trio too. Maybe we weren’t golden. We weren’t polished, we were dark trying to turn light. We were the Tarnished Trio, trying to regain some sort of shine.

Together our tarnished trio hurried through the castle. My heart began racing, realizing what we were about to be thrown into. We were about to be thrown into the throng of the fight, and I was going to be killing people that I had known my entire life, defending people that I didn’t even know the names off.

Nothing felt like the adrenaline that seared through my bloodstream, burning it’s way through my system as we ran to the steps of the school, ducking as curses were thrown at us. We retaliated, my wand arm strong as I threw curses, defensive spells.

Back to back, the three of us made it to the court yard and in that moment, I realized that all of the times that I had felt scared, that every moment I thought ‘this is it, this is the end’ changed. I realized that this is what desolation looked like. The school was in flames, rock and rubble spraying across the air, giants bellowing and swinging their clubs, killing anyone they touched. Death eaters spun in black, green and red light lancing like lightning all over the grounds of the school, people desperately trying to defend themselves and those around them.

Creatures tumbled from the forest into the school, horrid spiders that stood several feet tall scrambling on their eight legs, screaming as they took victims, death eaters and students alike. This was war. And it was not glorious, it was not heroic and it did not make me feel liberated like I had always heard it would. It made me feel afraid, it made me feel despair and it made my heart quake with the shaking of the school around me.

Mercy did not befall me as I took people out. I recognized countless faces, and I didn’t care. None of them had been close counterparts with me. They were on the lower ranks, no one of importance.

A blast knocked me down on the ground, my skin scraping across the floor as I rolled and got back to my feet. Draco leaned over to make sure I was alright so I kissed him on the cheek, looking towards the entrance to the court yard where hundreds of dementors were coming towards the fighting.

Running towards them, I saw that Aberforth had cast a patronus, the silver blasting the figures away. I cast my own, standing next to him as my dragon joined his patronus. Draco cast one besides me, shocking me as a silver lion emit from his wand, the strangest of all things.

Others joined, a dozen patronuses charging and protecting the school from the darkness of the dementors. There was a moment of peace for me, watching the scene. There in the middle of battle, stood the purest forms of magic.

When the dementors were gone, I turned to Draco, cocking my head to the side. “A lion?”

He shrugged. “You’re middle name is Lea.”

I blinked in surprise. “Well, yes.”

“Lea means lion.”

“Wow. I really like you.”

“I like you too. Let’s go.”