Chapter Four

When Harry woke up,
he was lying sprawled in the middle of a mud puddle.

He sat up,
groaning. It felt like something very hard and very painful had hit
him square on the chest, but when he felt around, there was nothing
there—no bruises, no welts, nothing.

He turned over,
wincing at the dull, pounding ache. Hermione was beside him, her face
smeared with mud, hair streaming out around her, slowly blackening as
it seeped into her scalp. She moaned and clutched at her stomach in
the exact same place as Harry's pain, then fell still for a moment.

“Hermione,”
Harry whispered, ignoring the throb of his chest. “Hermione,
there's no Death Eaters around.”

This got her
attention. She opened her eyes and gasped, bolting upright with a
sort of manic fear in her expression, but the pain in her stomach
sent her back down again. She shivered.

“Where—where
are we?” Harry croaked, his throat parched, his glasses askew. From
what he could tell, they lay in the middle of a small, wet clearing,
penned in on all four sides by the faded backs of brown houses, their
chimneys rising in salute to a single mill that towered east over the
rooftops. It seemed a very dank, filthy place, and the river itself
gave way to rotten piles of sludge and sewage every few meters. He
wondered incredulously why anyone would ever live here, no matter how
dire the situation.

“We need to
find—friends,” He said, trying to sound determined, but the
exhaustion in his voice betrayed his true feelings. He had been
almost snapped in half by the events of the past few days, and he
doubted that he would ever have the strength to pull himself out of
the mudbank and drag his broken body toward help. Judging by the
looks of Hermione, she wouldn't even make it to sitting up again.

He sighed and
slumped back down into the mud, feeling as though he would very much
like to sink in it and never have to look at the living world again.
The sun descended lower and lower over the crooked streets, and he
fell trustingly into the weary embrace of the darkness, and the
sticky softness of the riverbank, until his glasses slipped off his
nose and he was almost gone, at the very gates of the realm of sleep,
where nothing could hurt him and nothing had hurt him for many
months.

And then he saw it,
shining so clearly through the darkness its purpose could be
unmistakeable, the very face of Ron, his ginger hair unfluttering
despite the gentle breeze, his expression set.

“Mate,” He
said, but his voice seemed distant and other, like it had travelled
for eternity to reach Harry. “Mate, you have to find help. Take
care of Hermione, and find help. Don't wait. . . don't sleep. . .
mate, please.”

Harry didn't know if Ron's face in the darkness was truly a message
from the realm of the dead, or if it was just a figment of his
imagination, but something inside him, something that had snapped the
moment he'd told the Death Eaters his final choice, gently pieced
itself back together again. It was not perfectly fixed. It hurt like
hell. But it gave him one tiny ounce of strength, just enough to pull
him from the muddy riverbank and grab Hermione's arm, take one deep
breath, and disappear with a defiant crack from the place they called
Spinner's End.