nekare

Title: Hold Your Last Breath
Raiting: R-ish. (for gore?)
Word Count: 1985
Summary: Voldemort has won the war, and he held the Trio captive, tortured, poisoned, broken.
Warnings: Dark, angst, blood.
Author Notes: Written for darkones's challenge: Unhappy Endings, Beta-ed ultra fast by the lovely why_me_why_not, and crossposted to omniocular.


Ron dies three days after his birthday, blood on his lips and forgiveness for Harry as his last words.

Harry watches, bleeding from all the thousand places the ropes that hold him to the pillar of the dark church cut into his skin. Tears stream from his eyes, dripping over crossed new scars that come to live in the last minutes of Ron’s. The moonlight enters the tall windows, coloring the dusty floor with the mosaic’s glass, tinting Ron’s bruised figure with the blue of his eyes (forever closed), red (as he and Hermione’s child’s hair) and the green of the curse that killed him (green as envy, as jealousy, as life, as irony).

Hermione screams herself hoarse on the pillar on his left, and her wedding ring shines in the dim light in the same way their tears do. Nagini wraps around Ron’s body, tainting him, poisoning him, hissing taunts that only reach Harry’s ears.

Voldemort laughs, Hermione screams, Harry cries.

And the world as Harry knows it falls to pieces.

- - - - -

There’s a leak somewhere on the ceiling, and a drop of oily water with rainbows of forgotten happiness splashes on the hard floor exactly four and a half inches from where Harry’s head rests (he’s counted). He keeps his breathing in tune with it, breath leaving him and fogging bright white in the cold place everytime the echoes of water fill the room with noise too loud for Harry’s ears.

Splash.

A drop of blood falls to the ground in Harry’s mind, Ginny’s face going paler and paler until the freckles on her nose and the scarlet running along her arms, legs, chest, are the only color in her body.

Splash.

The drop slides the length of Ginny’s fingers and falls heavily to the white linoleum of the flat Harry hasn’t seen for months. It reminds him of the fairy tale, blood against snow, but Ginny’s lips are blue-ish and cold when he leans down to kiss her goodbye, and her hair too bright even in death. There’s no apple caught in her throat.

She doesn’t wake up.

The water stops falling for a minute and fourteen seconds every two days and Harry holds his breath, keeps the rhythm, and wonders if he can stop breathing for good.

(His face goes a bit green when he tries to find out, and when air fills his lungs once again it tastes like guilt).

- - - - -


Hermione is held two cells away from his, far enough so they can’t see their faces in the dim lighted hallway, close enough so they can hear each other’s screams when they’re tortured.

They talk, some days, when they don’t ache too much to drag themselves and sit up shakily, white knuckles around cold steel bars burning with magic just below the surface. They talk about how light the air was in Hogwarts, and force themselves to remember the sunny days beneath trees talking about nothing, the laughter and dreams and smiles.

Hermione’s baby should be almost two now, and Hermione sobs the most when she tells him about the first time he walked into his father’s arms. Harry cries with her, and he tells her how blue the sky used to be, before Voldemort had filled the world with shadows.

They try to remember, but sometimes Harry thinks happiness is just a figment of his imagination.

- - - - -

At nights, Harry can hear the waves eating slowly the rocks eight stories down; and he can almost imagine it, dark water and light foam, moving up and down in complete freedom under the now-perpetual gray sky. There’s salt on his lips, stinging his wounds.

He had always thought Azkaban was a place of nightmares.

He was right.

- - - - -

The last day of his life, Harry wakes up to the sound of gold tinkling by his ear. When he opens his eyes, fumbles for the broken glasses, he sees Hermione’s wedding ring, the only bright spot of the room with its mossy walls and decaying blood. He’s been fed this last three days, so he is able to drag himself up and call for Hermione in whispers, broken voice and eyes not open completely.

“Wear it, Harry,” she says softly, and he can barely see the way her glistening tears enter her mouth and get lost in her voice. “A little gift for my brother.”

The words last gift are not pronounced, but they both hear them crawling at their skin, leaving bloody nails’ imprints on their wake.

Harry slips the ring on his right index finger, and the remnants of Hermione’s magic dance around his fingers, red sparks that make the now-ever-constant pain ebb away. He rests his head against the bars, eyes closed, the ring creating metallic sounds as it’s held between the steel and his own hand, cutting into his skin, his finger turning just the barest of purples.

“Thank you,” he says in a choked whisper, and he lays on the floor, hand outstretched to Hermione through the bars, squinting in the darkness when he hears a rustle of cloth and a grunt as Hermione stretches her arm too.

They stay there, hands looking for each other, too far to touch, close enough to hear the tears forming clear pools on the gray floor.

In silence, they wait for the end.

- - - - -


At six forty-seven that evening, two masked figures enter the cell pavilion for the first time in a week, lips curled and gloved hands holding their robes so they won’t have to touch the filth on the floor. Harry doesn’t look up when they enter, and the sound of their thick black robes cutting the air is all he needs to know they’re there. When his cell door is opened, steel screeching in the heavy silence of the pavilion, he expects to feel something, fear maybe.

Instead of that… Instead of that, there’s nothing.

The two figures hoist him up, hissing in disgust at the task. Harry can no longer keep himself up, so they drag him, his bare fingertips touching the floor. They walk back to the end of the hallway, Harry dangling useless and boneless in their strong grip. The white mask makes their eyes look like twin black holes, unfathomable and never ending; it’s almost grotesque, inhumane.

They pass Hermione’s cell, and Harry gets to look at her face in the small light of one of the masked man’s wand, and he turns to her until she’s out of sight again; the last image of her is burned in his brain, tear-streaked face, a broken reflection of the happy wife and mother from only six months ago. She mouths I love you, with all of the strength she’s got left, both hands tight around the bars as for her not to stumble back to the floor.

He says Goodbye, in the last moment in which the light makes her tears glisten, and knows he will never see her again.

- - - - -

They go out into a hallway, and Harry can see a bit of the gray ocean when they pass the tall windows, thick glass and thicker steel bars outside. There are bones on the ground, of small animals, mostly, but Harry can see some lonely skulls by the walls, yellow with age, laying broken with their jaws extended in a silent scream. Azkaban has been Voldemort’s hideout for the last three years, and the walls are covered in dried blood, velvety red against dark stone.

Harry’s blood runs cold in his veins, but he doesn’t fight as the masked men drag him along. His lips tremble, and he convinces himself that is only because of the cold. One of the bones cuts him in the sole of his left foot, and he doesn’t even grimace with the pain. They keep going, and Harry’s blood leaves the imprint of a scarlet path along the hallway.

Harry’s hope died along with Ron.

- - - - -


Harry’s eyes close on their own when they reach the middle of the prison, every window open and the most sunlight he’s seen in months filtering through the gray and purple ominous clouds that have covered the sky for the last seven months. The center hall in Azkaban is shaped as a madness-inducing rune, and the curls and dips of the stone walls fill Harry’s mind with delirious edges. His eyes settle on the figure in the middle of the room, tall and smirking, the only one not affected by the rune.

Voldemort’s mad enough already.

The room is filled with people, villagers from the closest town, Harry supposes, ashen faces and shaking limbs, all of them. The two Death Eaters drag him to a small dais close to Voldemort’s high chair, and they tie his wrists with ropes that hang from the opposite sides of the room. Harry is too weak to stand, so he’s left there to swing in the air, muscles taut and eyes half closed, still looking at the crowd of terrified people that hug each other as they cry; hands and feet blackened with what must be the slavery work the new Lord has them do.

The circle of Death Eaters close around Harry as Voldemort stands in front of him, laughing manically. White masks surround him, twisting and changing forms in Harry’s feverish mind, his worst dreams come to life and the Devil himself being played by the man-creature with a snake around his shoulders and bright red eyes.

“And this,” says Voldemort, hissing out every syllable, every letter. “This is what happens to anyone who stands against Lord Voldemort and his wishes.” He raises his wand, and Harry finally lifts his head, panting just with the exertion of that little movement, looking death in the eye. “Sectumsempra.”

The first slash is made on his forehead, just below his scar, and blood instantly clouds Harry’s vision. He always knew he wouldn’t be given a clean death, and Voldemort laughs with mirth as he slashes along his body; the Death Eaters alive with bloodlust. Bellatrix Lestrange takes her mask off and walks three steps into the circle, extending long fingers until she caresses a cut on Harry’s cheek, softly, reverently, and Harry winces when she takes her red coated fingertips to her lips, smearing them scarlet.

There’s laughter, and no matter how much he wants too, Harry refuses to cry in front of them.

An hour later, his tattered robes are almost gone and blood pours from what feels like every inch of his body, thick, warm, sliding against pale skin and dark hair, overflowing the dais and painting the ground crimson; getting muddled as some of the Death Eaters dance around him, chanting hateful words, sparks of magic – Dark Magic, making the room beat in tempo with Harry’s slowing heart.

A girl behind the Death Eaters shies away when the blood is almost touching her feet, face scrunched with fear and hate and everything a child that age shouldn’t know. Harry watches her with his last strength, vision blurring and blackness fading in and out, blood streaming out of his mouth.

“Take this as a lesson!” screams Voldemort with his arms outstretched and his eyes looking beyond the ceiling. “Not even your mighty Harry Potter can save you now.”

Harry lets his head go down, avoids the eyes of these people he was supposed to have delivered. He failed them, the way he failed Ron and Ginny and Lupin and Hermione all alone in that dark cell.

Bellatrix’s screams of joy fill his ears as Voldemort slashes the air one last time, and Harry’s carotid artery, an inch up from his heart, bursts. Broken life, broken dreams, broken heart.

Harry dies, and hope dies with him.