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This isn’t how the war ends.
There are no sparks, the earth is not consumed by flames. Not here, nestled deep in the Forbidden Forest, away from the stone courtyard where Harry Potter will finally kill Voldemort. There: that’s where it happens. On the weathered rock, surrounded by children who will come of age in a world without the rhetoric of hate. She doesn’t know why she trusts that they will win, that there will be a better tomorrow; she just knows it to be true.
The war doesn’t end out here, covered in soil and the brush of spring. The trees are distant, a blur on the horizon when Harry casts the final curse. The war is won with the sun breaking over the cloudbank, with light on his skin.
The battle that occurs in the Forbidden Forest is blacker, shrouded in shade, an evil more obtuse. Malfoy had followed Bellatrix when she slipped away during the carnage, and Hermione doesn’t know—doesn’t understand why—so, she followed him too. It was drilled into her, not to let those on her side be alone, never let them face danger without a partner.
So she left Harry behind with Ron, behind with everyone who stood on their side, and disappeared into the trees behind a boy she never understood.
It’s a blur of curses, of hexes and rebounds, something like a game as Malfoy’s wand slashes counter patterns to Bellatrix’s whirl of her own. He waves a hand at Hermione, tells her to stay back, that this is something he has to do, a fight he must finish.
A mistake occurs in every battle. No plan is ever executed perfectly clean. When her first name passes through his lips, it is like Bellatrix knows, instantly, and suddenly Hermione is included in the game. A tick of Bellatrix’s jaw, a tilt to her head, and then, a spell aimed at Hermione.
He jumps in front of the curse.
She sees every jolt in his body, the way the current wracks him, lightning stitched into his veins. Bellatrix’s wand screams with light, an unholy crack of thunder.
Draco Malfoy has always been a chasm, contradiction carved into every inch. She didn’t understand him—hadn’t since he showed up at Grimmauld, since he’d said, “Hello, Draco here,” since he’d tried to prove time and again that he was on their side now. She didn’t trust him at the tent, not in the Forest of Dean, not by firelight when grief cracked his voice as he admitted he’d lost his mother, too.
She didn’t trust him then. She barely trusts him now. Forgiveness came slow, pulled thread by thread as he loosened the knots she tied around her chest. And yet—here he burns before her, lightning carving him open. He chose the curse for her.
Bellatrix laughs, a high, stuttering crack, but falters when she realises what she’s done. Hermione doesn’t think. Her arm raises before thought catches up, and her eyes flick to the dark pools of the crazed witch as the spell is halfway off her tongue.
“Avada Kedavra.”
The trees swallow the green light. Bellatrix dies in the Forbidden Forest, body crumpled on wet, dark earth, with a stunned look etched on her face.
And yet, it changes nothing. The war ends elsewhere.
She moves towards Draco, watching the energy of the curse that burns him, the sparks fizzling against his skin like embers refusing to die. His breath rasps, shallow but stubborn, as though fire itself has been grafted into him.
And in the back of her mind, like some cruel refrain, came the words she’d laughed off years ago in Divination: you’ll end up with a powerful wizard.
It was an insult. She was a powerful wizard. She chose her own fate, subjected herself to battles and came out on the other side. Still, late at night, when the future seemed intangible, and the four of them lay on cots in a cramped tent with empty stomachs, the promise of something, this fortune—however sparse—kept her going. She had thought of Viktor, of Ron, of anyone else. But never him. Never the boy who made her bleed, never the man who would choose to bleed for her.
The war is ending somewhere beyond the trees, but here, here another begins. A battle kicks up as Malfoy’s heartbeat grows stronger, as saltwater burns her eyelids, and she demands that he stick around for her study. The struggle to understand him, to reconcile flame with flood, fury with mercy. Draco Malfoy burns, and she is water; there is no other word for it, the way she always tries to quench, to soothe, to erode. They are opposites, bound not by choice but by collision.
This isn’t how the war ends. It ends with Harry. But hers—that prophecy, a battle in fate, in firelight and lightning and floodwater reckoning—begins with Draco.