Safe and Sound

A blast rocked the earth, almost knocking me off of my feet. Draco grabbed me, and pulled me to the ground and out of the way of a large piece of building that had blown away. My skin scrapped across the floor, breaking and bleeding. I hissed in pain. My ears rang with the sound of it.

I sat up slowly. My vision blurred for a moment before it clear. Draco sat up next to me, hurrying and grabbing my arms, helping me get up. A section of the hall had been blown up, a death eater force moving through it.

Tilting on my feet, I grabbed Blaise and helped him up. Together, the three of us pushed forward, wands raised. The group saw us and took us on, almost as if they were excited. What they doubted was the three of us together. Blaise, Draco and I had grown up together, had learned together and we had fought together.

We disarmed them, destroyed them, and dismantled the group without so much as a struggle. They didn’t stand a chance against us, three people trained in the dark arts. And I, I was a prodigy in knowing fifty ways how to kill a person without the killing curse. I knew how to dismantle, disrupt and destroy the body without more than a single curse.

As I stepped towards the hall, something caught my eye. It was a flash of red hair, a boy leaning over something, trying to pull them out of the rubble. Because I only knew one family with red hair, I hurried over to see a boy older than myself crying and pulling at a hand sticking out of the rubble.

“Cover us,” I barked at Draco and Blaise. The two boys closed us in, their backs to us as they fended off spells. I bent down thinking quickly. “I’m going to lift as many of these pieces as I can, and I want you to pull, do you understand?”

He nodded as I stood up looking at the rubble. I wouldn’t be able to lift it all with just a levitating spell. But I could move it all at once, though it would be extremely hard. Licking my lips, I said clearly, “Locomotor rubble!” The rubble trembled in place but didn’t move. Taking a better stance, I said angrily, “Locomotor rubble!”

Upon the second time, the rubble shook, and began to lift. I held strong to the wand, raising it slowly as the rubble over the body began to shift and rise. I was carefully not to let go of the spell, fighting tooth and nail to keep the spell intact, to not break my stance. “Pull him now!”

The boy pulled hard, removing the body from the debris just as my concentration broke, the heavy pieces of rock and stone falling down, crumbling on top of one another. Breathing hard, I looked down to see the boy cradling the victim, and my blood went cold.

Kneeling down, I looked up at the boy. “Are you Percy?” He nodded. The twin lay in his laps, breathing shallow, eyes fluttering. His face was almost impossible to identify, blood whipped across the skin, swelling taking over from the rocks. “Fred.”

He barely opened his eyes and looked at his older brother. “Good joke, Perc. Haven’t heard one in a while.” His eyes looked at me and I felt sick. The light from his eyes was vanishing rapidly. “Always knew you were a Potter. Perc? Tell George-"

The sentence fell flat from his lips and the last of his breath escaped on his words. Percy sat there for a minute, mouth open and shaking his head. He looked confused and then looked at me, waiting for my response. When he saw my look of sympathy, when he saw the tears in my eyes I shook my head, that’s when it happened. That’s when it occurred to him what had happened.

The utterance of the word ‘no’ came in rapid succession. Percy was shaking his head and tears were spilling out of his eyes. He was clutching Fred by his head, his hand stroking his brothers hair as he rocked back and forth, the word ‘no’ growing in volume. I knew that we had to move, but I couldn’t find it in me to move.

“Reagan,” Draco shouted over the noise. “We have to move. We’re going to be out numbered any second now.”

“Percy, we have to move him.” Percy was shaking his head, lowering himself on his brother and crying hard, screaming. “Percy come on, we’re going to move his body okay? Blaise and Draco are going to protect us and we’re going to carry him to the Great Hall where he will be safe, okay?”

Percy nodded wiping his eyes. “Okay. Okay.”

“On three. One… two… three.”

Together, we lifted Fred’s lifeless body. Screams echoed around us. The sounds of curses hitting walls, people and distant objects were everywhere. People were dropping, getting back up to their feet, stumbling and fighting. It was an absolute massacre, and Draco and Blaise tried to shield us, whipping their wands as Percy and I carried Fred.

It was faster by hand. Carrying his body by magic would have taken longer, and with the way that Percy gripped his brother’s arms, I knew that he did not want to let go. I had both of Fred’s feet in one hand, pressing them against my up to bear the weight. My other hand held fast to my wand, as I was first in our procession, Draco on the right of Fred’s horizontal body, Blaise on the left.

On the walk to the Great Hall, I fended of two dementors, a giant spider and two death eaters. The Great Hall was still a safe place, the Hogwarts students, staff and other witches and wizards keeping it as a strong hold. It had not been breached as of yet, and when we approached, we were rushed in.

No one seemed to register that Fred wasn’t just injured. I was almost numb to it, forgetting myself that we were hurrying an injured Fred into the great hall. We were carrying a dead boy, only a few years older than myself. We were carrying a friend, a brother and a son who had lost his life into the Great Hall. He was a twin. All I could think about was what it would feel like not to be a twin anymore. And that almost made me crumble.

When we set him down I leapt away from him. My mind came out of the numbing I had used to get Fred there, to help Percy carry him. Now it was seeping in through the cracks, and I was registering that one of the Weasley Twins had died, and I had carried his body.

Closing my eyes, I breathed in deeply. I repeated the process, exhaling and inhaling. When I opened my eyes, I bent down, my hands no longer trembling like they had been, my heart no longer pounding. I raised my wand, clearing away the cuts, the swelling and the blood from Fred’s face.

Percy just watched me, sitting on the ground next to Fred with his hands holding his head up. He was shaking his head. “I don’t know what he wanted me to tell George.”

I licked my lips. “Tell George that he was the last thing Fred was thinking about, Percy. That his brother died and could only think of him. Tell him that, okay?”

Percy nodded. “Thank you.”

“Percy? What are you-“ I turned to see Arthur Weasley’s sentence fall dead. He looked over my shoulder and I moved slightly, giving him a view that he deserved to see. His face went white. “Is that my son?”