Chapter Text
People liked to believe that time did something useful to grief. That it softened the sharpest edges, taught the body how to carry the unbearable, left enough distance between a person and the worst day of their life that breathing eventually became instinct again. They were wrong.
Two months passed after my father's death. Time had done nothing except teach me how to keep my occlumency standing for longer.
It became less of a discipline and more of a necessity. I held it through breakfast, through lessons, through endless evenings repairing the Vanishing Cabinet beside Draco, through conversations with professors who mistook silence for resilience. Every morning, I built the walls before I even climbed out of bed, sealing away memories, voices, green light, until there was nothing left inside my mind that could interrupt the simple act of surviving another day.
People thought I was getting better. In truth, I had simply become more efficient at hiding the damage.
The frightening part was that occlumency was never meant to be permanent. No mind could sustain walls like that forever. They cracked in small, ordinary moments: when someone laughed with the same crooked smile my father had worn, when an owl landed too heavily beside me in the Great Hall, when I caught sight of the Hayward ring resting against my collarbone, when I woke before dawn and forgot, for one merciful heartbeat, that there was no home left to return to. The walls would slip.
For a long time, grief came rushing through first. It stole my breath. It hollowed out my chest. It left me shaking so violently I could barely remember how to hold my wand.
Then, somewhere over those two months, something changed. Grief stopped arriving alone. Or perhaps it stopped arriving first. Every time the walls came down, anger reached me before sorrow ever could. It was quicker, easier to carry. It burned instead of breaking. It demanded instead of mourning. It gave my hands something to do besides tremble and my mind somewhere to look besides the dining room floor where my father had died.
That frightened me more than the grief ever had. Not because I believed I was becoming Bellatrix but because I was beginning to understand why she had smiled so often.
Anger could stand through Potions, smile politely at Slughorn's dinners, repair cursed cabinets, answer questions, and sleep for three uninterrupted hours beside Draco without waking the entire castle. Grief could do none of those things. So every morning, I chose the walls. Every evening, they cracked. And every time they did, I found a little less of my father waiting behind them and a little more of Bellatrix.
This was what they had wanted. Not my obedience, not even my loyalty. They had wanted this version of me. A girl who had learned to mistake anger for strength and survival for victory. A weapon was easier to control than a daughter. Easier than a friend. Easier than a girl who still believed there was something in the world worth protecting.
Sometimes, I was terrified they had succeeded. Sometimes, I was terrified they had succeeded so completely that I no longer remembered where Katherine Hayward ended and whatever they had built in her place began. And yet… there was still one thing they had never accounted for. Draco.
There were days I caught my reflection in dark windows and did not recognise the girl looking back. She wore my face, my uniform, my mouth curved into my sharp little expressions. She answered to my name. She sat beside my friends. She kissed Draco in empty corridors and slept with his arm around her waist.
But sometimes her eyes were wrong. Sometimes I looked at myself and thought, there she is. The thing they made. The thing that survived. Draco saw it too. He never said it like that. But he saw it and he stayed. That was the part I still did not know what to do with.
He stayed. Through nightmares. Through silence. Through the nights I woke with my hand clawing at my sleeve and could not remember whether I was in Hogwarts or the Manor. Through the mornings I refused to speak until he put tea in my hands. Through the afternoons when I was so angry I could not sit still and he dragged me to the Room of Requirement to work because anger, if left unattended, became dangerous.
We argued constantly. About methods. About whether Draco needed sleep. About whether I needed food. About whether either of us had any right to lecture the other on self-preservation when we were both spectacular failures in the field.
But we were better together. That was the problem. I hated the cabinet. I hated what it meant. I hated that progress felt like betrayal and failure felt like a death sentence. But in that room, with Draco beside me, sleeves brushing, wands moving through the same damaged magic, I could almost believe we were doing more than building a door for monsters.
On the nights it was not, Draco did not ask me to be all right. He had stopped making that mistake. He only pulled me against him, tucked my head beneath his chin, and held on until my breathing stopped trying to become panic.
“You are still here,” he would murmur sometimes, half asleep, like he was reminding both of us. I never answered. But I stayed. For two months, I stayed. Badly. Angrily. With anger under my tongue and violence in my hands and the ghost of my father following me through every corridor.
I sat at the Slytherin table with Pansy on one side and Draco on the other, watching snow blur the enchanted ceiling into a pale, endless grey. Draco had barely touched his food. That was not unusual anymore.
His hand rested near his goblet, fingers tense against the wood, his sleeve pulled low over his wrist. He looked tired in the way he always looked tired lately: carefully arranged, ruined only if one knew where to look. I knew where to look. “You need to eat,” I murmured.
His eyes flicked to me, an almost smile on his face. “You have become very fond of saying things you ignore.”
Then the Great Hall shifted. A ripple at the Gryffindor table. Someone gasping softly enough to make several people look over. I followed the movement, more out of instinct than interest, and saw Katie Bell standing near the entrance.
For a second, I did not understand what I was seeing. Of course she was alive. We had heard she was improving. We had heard she might return after Christmas. We had heard many things, because Hogwarts fed on rumour the way old houses fed on damp.
But seeing her was different. She looked pale. Her friends crowded her at once, relief and shock all tangled together in the way people touched someone they had almost lost and did not know how to make touching normal again.
Across the Hall, Potter stood. Draco went still beside me. The almost-smile vanished from his face as if it had never been there. I felt the change before I looked at him. His shoulders had locked. His hand around the goblet had tightened too hard. For one horrible second, I thought the glass might crack beneath his fingers.
“Draco,” I said quietly. He did not answer.
Katie was speaking to Potter now. I could not hear her from where we sat, not over the sudden swelling of voices, but Potter’s face changed as she spoke. Suspicion sharpened into something close to certainty. My stomach turned. Draco stood.
“Draco, wait—”
“I need air.”
“No, you need—” But he was already moving, leaving the bench with that horrible speed that meant panic had found somewhere to hide behind posture. He did not look back. He did not look at Katie. He did not look at Potter.
That was the problem. Potter saw him leave. His head turned at once, eyes narrowing, and then he was moving too. I stood so quickly Pansy caught my sleeve, pleading with her eyes to not make a scene.
By the time I pushed free, Potter had already vanished through the doors after Draco. “Move,” I snapped at a fourth-year who stepped directly into my path.
The corridors outside the Great Hall were chaos. Students had spilled out after breakfast, voices bouncing off stone, everyone carrying some version of the same story in their mouths before the truth had even finished forming. I caught a glimpse of dark hair turning a corner ahead, but then a pair of Hufflepuffs crossed in front of me, and by the time I forced my way through, Potter was gone too. Damn it.
I knew where Draco would go if he wanted to disappear. Not the Room of Requirement. Not this time. Too far. He would need somewhere immediate. Somewhere empty. I took the wrong staircase first. By the time I realised, my heart was hammering hard enough to make my ribs ache. The castle seemed to stretch itself on purpose, corridors lengthening, portraits interrupting, suits of armour choosing today of all days to creak into my path.
Then I heard it. Not Draco’s voice. Potter’s. Low, furious, carrying through the corridor from somewhere ahead. I ran. Then— “Sectumsempra!” The word tore through the air. I stopped breathing.
I moved. I do not remember reaching the bathroom door. I remember the cold shock of tile beneath my shoes, the smell of water, the sound of it running somewhere too loudly, and Potter standing frozen with his wand still in his hand.
And Draco— Draco was on the floor. Blood spread beneath him in impossible, violent lines, blooming across his white shirt, running down his face, his chest, his arms. Cuts opened like blades had found every soft place at once. His body jerked once against the tiles, a horrible wet sound catching in his throat.
For a moment, I did not understand. My mind refused it. Draco could not be on the floor. Draco could not be bleeding like that. Draco could not be looking at me with his eyes wide and shocked
Then the world came back so hard it nearly knocked me down. “Draco!” I dropped beside him, my knees hitting the flooded tile. Blood soaked instantly into my skirt. My hands hovered for half a second because there was too much of it, too many wounds, too much red, and I did not know where to touch without making it worse.
He tried to say something. Only blood came out. “No,” I said, and my voice did not sound like mine. “No, no, look at me. Draco, look at me.” His eyes flickered. Good, he is alive. Behind me, Potter moved. I turned on him so fast he stopped dead. “What did you do?”
His face was white. “I did not— I did not know what it did.”
The words entered me and found no mercy. None. For one second, I was not in the bathroom anymore. I was in a dining room with green light in my eyes. I was on a dormitory floor with my nails buried in my own skin. I was every ugly, furious thing grief had made of me, and Potter was standing there with his wand in his hand and Draco’s blood on the floor between us.
I stood. Slowly. Water and blood dragged at the hem of my skirt. My hands were slick and red, and my wand was in my fingers before I remembered drawing it. Potter’s eyes dropped to it. “I will kill you, Potter,” I said, and my voice was so calm it frightened even me. “If Draco dies today, I will rip your heart out with my bare hands and make you watch me do it.”
His face twisted. “Katherine, I—”
“Do not say my name.”
He stopped. For once, blessedly, he stopped. My wand lifted another inch. The spell sat at the back of my teeth, eager and hot and familiar in a way that should have horrified me. It did not. Not with Draco choking on his own blood behind me.
Then Draco made a sound. Small and broken. The rage snapped sideways. I turned back so quickly my knees nearly slipped on the tiles. Draco’s eyes were unfocused, his breathing shallow and wrong, blood still opening across him in impossible red lines. “No,” I whispered.
Potter moved again behind me, uselessly, stupidly, like guilt had given him legs but no direction. I looked over my shoulder. “Go get Snape.” He stared at me. “Now.”
“I can—”
“You can do nothing,” I snapped. “You have done enough. Get Snape before I change my mind about which one of you I am saving first.” Potter ran.
I dropped back to my knees beside Draco, one hand pressing uselessly near the worst of the blood, the other finding his face because I needed him to look at me. Needed proof. Needed something in the room that was not red.
“Draco,” I said, and my voice broke on his name. “No. No, you look at me. You do not get to do this.” His eyes flickered. Barely. Enough to ruin me.
“Do you hear me?” I leaned closer, my hair falling around us, my hands shaking so badly I could hardly keep pressure where I needed it. “Do not you dare leave me yet. You kept me here for a reason, right? That is what you said. You made me stay. You sat on that floor and begged me to stay for tonight, and tomorrow, and the next minute, and whatever other impossible little pieces you thought I could survive.”
His breathing hitched. Blood touched his lips again. I wiped it away with my thumb and nearly sobbed at the intimacy of it, at the horror of it, at the fact that my hands had known his face in warmth and now knew it like this.
“So now you do it,” I whispered fiercely. “You stay. You stay because you asked me to. You stay because I stayed when I did not want to, and you do not get to make me regret that. Do you understand me? I cannot do this without you.”
His fingers twitched against the tile. I caught his hand at once. It was cold. Too cold. “No,” I said, pressing his hand between both of mine as if I could force warmth back into him by anger alone. “No, I refuse. I absolutely fucking refuse.”
Footsteps thundered somewhere beyond the bathroom. “Snape!” I screamed, not looking away from Draco. “Snape!”
Draco’s eyelids fluttered. “Do not close your eyes,” I said, panic tearing through every word now. “Do not. Look at me. I am right here. I am here, Draco, and you are not leaving me in this bloody bathroom with your stupid honour and all the things you still have not said.”
His gaze shifted. Found mine. For one second, he was there. Terrified. In pain. I bent over him, pressing my forehead briefly to his because I did not know what else to do with all the things breaking inside me. “You know what I want to tell you right now?” I whispered, and my voice shook so hard the words nearly fell apart. “I am not saying it either. Not here. Not like this. So you have to stay long enough to hear it properly, you arrogant, impossible, selfish bastard.”
A shadow fell across us. “Move.” Snape’s voice. For once, I had never been so relieved to hear it. I did not move. His robes swept into the water beside me. “Miss Hayward. Move.”
“I am not leaving him.”
“I cannot heal him through you.” I shifted back just enough for Snape to kneel beside Draco, but I did not let go of his hand. Snape’s eyes flicked to our joined fingers, then to Draco’s wounds, then to the blood pooling too quickly beneath him.
His face went colder than I had ever seen it. “Potter,” he said, without looking back. Harry was in the doorway, breathing hard, face grey. Snape’s voice dropped. “Outside.”
“But—”
“Outside.” Potter vanished. Snape lifted his wand and began to chant, low and precise. The spell moved through the bathroom like a command given to death itself. Wounds knitted slowly beneath his wand, blood slowing, then slowing further, though not enough, never enough.
I watched for one second. Draco’s chest rose. Snape was there now. Snape had him. And Potter was outside. Potter, who had used a curse he did not understand. Potter, who had stood there with his wand in his hand and Draco’s blood at his feet. Potter, who always chased the truth like the damage done on the way did not matter as long as he arrived righteous enough at the end. My fingers loosened from Draco’s hand.
Snape’s head snapped toward me. “Miss Hayward.”
I was already standing. Blood dripped from my hands onto the tile. Draco’s blood. It had soaked into my skirt, smeared across my sleeves, dried tacky between my fingers. I looked down at myself and felt something inside me go very quiet.
“Miss Hayward,” Snape said again, sharper now. “Do not.”
I looked at Draco once. His eyes were half-closed, his face white against the floor, his breathing held together by Snape’s spell and nothing else. Then I turned and ran.
“Katherine!”
I did not stop.
The corridor outside the bathroom was already crowded. Students had gathered in small, frightened clusters, drawn by the scream, by Potter running, by blood and rumour and the awful magnetic pull of violence. They turned when I burst through the doorway.
Every face changed. Of course it did. I was covered in blood. His blood. Draco’s blood on my hands, my robes, my throat where I must have touched myself without noticing. Blood dark against the green of my skirt. Blood beneath my nails. Blood drying across my fingers around my wand.
Someone gasped. Someone said my name. I heard none of it properly. All I saw was Potter at the end of the corridor, turning back at the sound of me. For one second, our eyes met. “Potter!” He ran. So did I.
The corridor blurred around me. Students scattered out of my path with cries I barely registered. A younger girl dropped her books and pressed herself against the wall, staring at me like I was the thing from every story adults told children to make them behave. Perhaps I was.
Potter took the stairs two at a time. I followed. My breath tore at my throat. My shoes slipped once on stone because there was still blood on them. I caught myself against the wall and kept going, fury shoving pain and fear and logic aside until there was nothing left in me but the shape of him ahead and Draco on the floor behind us.
“Stop running,” I shouted, and the sound of my own voice barely sounded human. “You wanted to know what I was, Potter? Stop running and find out.”
He turned at the next landing, wand raised. Finally. “Expelliarmus!” His spell shot toward me.
I cut it aside with a shield so hard the impact cracked against the wall and sent a portrait shrieking awake. I did not slow. “Depulso!”
The spell hit him in the chest and threw him back against the stone. Not hard enough to break him. Hard enough to make him grunt, hard enough to steal the air from his lungs, hard enough to make the hallway fall silent around us. He stumbled, caught himself, lifted his wand again.
Another spell struck the wall beside his head and split stone into dust. Another tore his wand arm sideways so hard he stumbled. Another sent sparks snapping around his feet like chained lightning. He tried to answer, mouth shaping a curse, but I was faster.
Potter barely kept up. His shield flared again, weaker this time, buckling as another silent curse slammed into it. He backed away. Then again. His shoulder hit the wall, glasses knocked crooked, breath coming too fast.
“Katherine, stop!” His voice sounded far away. Ridiculous. Stop? As if stopping had ever saved anyone I loved.
My wand cut through the air before the thought had even finished forming. "Diffindo."
Potter twisted away at the last second. The curse carved through the stone pillar behind him instead, spraying shards of rock across the corridor. One struck his cheek. Another caught his shoulder.
He barely seemed to notice. "Protego!" The shield burst into existence just as another curse slammed against it. The impact reverberated through the corridor, forcing him back another step. His boots scraped across the stone, his arm shaking with the effort of holding the barrier together.
"Katherine, listen to me!"
"No." I flicked my wrist. The shield shattered. It simply gave way beneath the force of the spell, splintering into silver fragments that vanished before they touched the floor. Potter's eyes widened. For the first time since I had known him he looked uncertain.
He fired three spells in quick succession. "Expelliarmus." I stepped aside. "Stupefy." A lazy twist of my wand sent it crashing harmlessly into the ceiling. "Impedimenta!" I broke it apart before it reached me. The corridor echoed with the crack of colliding magic. Too slow. Everything was too slow.
Bellatrix had once told me that the first duel was fought with magic. The second was fought with timing. The third was already decided before either wand moved. Potter was still fighting the duel. I had already decided the outcome.
Another curse left my wand without a spoken incantation. He blocked it. Barely. The force spun him sideways, his shoulder slamming into the wall hard enough to knock a portrait crooked. The old wizard inside it shouted something indignant before fleeing into the next frame.
Potter's breathing had become ragged. I kept walking. Every step forced him another one backwards. "You don't understand," he said, swallowing hard. "I didn't mean—"
"I know." The words came out so quietly they frightened even me. "I know you didn't mean to." Another curse. He blocked it. "I don't care."
My next spell struck the floor directly in front of him. The stone exploded upward. He stumbled through the dust, coughing, blinking grit from his eyes, and by the time he found me again I was already close enough to see the panic beginning to replace determination.
For one impossible heartbeat I understood exactly why Bellatrix enjoyed this. Not the violence. The control. The certainty that the other person had already realised they were losing.
She smiled because there came a moment in every duel when the other person stopped fighting and started surviving. I saw that moment settle over Potter now. And to my horror I understood her.
The intoxicating, terrible certainty of knowing exactly what another person would do before they did it, of breaking every defence almost before it existed, of watching confidence unravel into instinct and instinct into fear.
Something cold curled quietly beneath my ribs. It wasn't satisfaction. It was worse because it felt right. For one unbearable heartbeat, I wanted to see how far I could push him before he broke. The thought horrified me but it didn’t stop me.
I flicked my wand again, and the spell caught him hard enough to wrench him from the floor. Potter jerked upward, robes twisting, feet leaving stone, his wand hand trapped at an awkward angle as invisible force pinned him there.
The corridor erupted. Voices. Footsteps. Someone screamed. I stepped closer. Blood dripped from my fingers onto the stone. “Now you want me to stop?” I asked, and my voice was shaking so badly it sounded almost calm. “Now that it is you against the wall? Now that you are the one who cannot breathe properly?”
His face was flushed, terrified, furious, guilty. All of it. I saw all of it and felt nothing clean enough to be mercy. His jaw tightened. “I did not mean to—”
“To what?” I snapped. “To cut him open? To leave him bleeding on a bathroom floor? To stand there uselessly while he choked because you were too arrogant to wonder what a curse did before you threw it at him?”
More footsteps thundered closer. I heard Hermione before I saw her. “Harry!” She appeared at the end of the corridor, Ron beside her, both of them stopping dead at the sight of him suspended in the air and me standing beneath him covered in blood. Hermione’s face went white.
Ron lifted his wand. I turned mine toward him so quickly he froze. “Do not.”
Hermione caught his sleeve. “Ron, no.” Smart girl.
Behind them, more movement. Pansy. Daphne. Theo and Blaise just behind them. Pansy’s hand flew to her mouth. They all saw me. All of them. Blood-covered, shaking, wand raised, holding Harry Potter in the air like a thing to be punished.
For one second, I wanted to cast what I hated most. The thought came bright and clear and terrible. One word. One curse. The one Bellatrix had smiled through. The one I had used and still felt under my skin like rot. I could do it. I knew I could. That was the horror.
Not that I wanted him dead. Death was too clean, too quick, too silent for the fury tearing through me. I wanted him to hurt. I wanted him to understand what it meant for pain to become the whole room. I wanted to take every second Draco had spent bleeding and put it somewhere Potter could not escape.
My wand hand trembled. Pansy made a small sound, broken and terrified. “Kath.” The sound of her voice hit something in me. Not enough to stop. Enough to make me speak.
“If Draco does not make it out alive,” I said, looking up at Potter, each word quieter than the last and worse for it, “then neither will you. Do you understand me? If he dies today, you will not stand a chance of walking out of this castle alive.”
Harry stared at me. No answer. I tightened the spell holding him. His breath caught. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” he forced out. The word should have been enough. It was not. Nothing was enough anymore.
“Katherine.” Snape’s voice cut through the corridor. I did not turn. Potter’s eyes flicked past me, but he did not look relieved. Good. He had learned something, at least. “Release him,” Snape said.
My fingers tightened around my wand. “No.”
The corridor went impossibly silent. Snape stepped closer. I could feel him behind me now, black robes like a shadow at my back, but his voice did not rise. That was worse. “Mr Malfoy is alive.”
My breath caught. For one second, the world stopped. Alive. The word went through me with such force that my knees nearly gave. Snape continued, voice sharp enough to hold me upright. “He is being taken to the hospital wing. If you want to see him, release Potter before you make yourself the more urgent problem.”
My wand shook. The curse I hated most still sat behind my teeth. Bellatrix would have smiled. I looked at Potter one last time. He looked back at me, pale and hanging helpless in the air, and for the first time since I had known him, Harry Potter looked less righteous than afraid.
I flicked my wand. He dropped. Ron lunged forward to catch him badly. Hermione was already moving, one hand on Harry’s arm, her eyes still on me like she had just watched a door open and did not know how close I had come to walking through it.
Pansy reached me first. “Kath,” she whispered.
I looked down at myself. At my hands. At the blood drying under my nails. Draco’s blood. The rage drained so quickly it left nothing beneath it. My knees buckled. Theo moved, but Draco’s name came out of me before anyone could catch me. “I need to see him.”
Snape looked at me for a long second. Then his eyes moved to Pansy and Daphne. “Take her to the hospital wing. If she raises her wand at anyone else, remove it from her hand.”
Pansy’s face sharpened through her tears. “Gladly.”
Daphne came to my other side, pale and trembling only if one knew where to look. Blaise stepped ahead of us, his voice suddenly smooth and cold as he told the crowd to move unless they wanted to become part of the problem. The students parted.
As Pansy and Daphne guided me down the corridor, I looked back once. Potter was on the floor, Hermione crouched beside him, Ron standing half in front of them with his wand still lifted and his face white with shock.
For the first time since my father died, I understood something with terrifying certainty. If Draco had died… There would have been no one left to stop me.