Harry&Molly
Harry walked into the Great Hall, staring wide-eyed at how completely changed it looked from lunch earlier that day. When he had come in earlier, it had just been a simple Great Hall. Not that the Great Hall on a normal day was simple by any means, with its floating candles and huge arching ceilings with colloids drifting by on it.
But now, instead of floating candles, there were hundreds of Jack-O-Lanterns floating above his head, all manner of grinning faces, some evil, some comedic. One was even carved in the distinct shape of the Headmaster, with his half-moon spectacles and pointy hat set at a crooked angle on his head. But the Jack-O-Lanterns weren't the only change to the Hall. Instead of the normally accurate ceiling, it was now a dark cloudless night with a full, blood-red moon sitting high in the sky. Harry knew for a fact that there were clouds outside and that there was certainly no blood moon, but he appreciated the setting of the atmosphere. And as he watched the ceiling, a cloud of bats appeared at one end of the visage, swirling around, blotting out the moon before beating their wings and disappearing from view on the other end of the ceiling, before appearing to repeat it all over again.
The finishing touches were the cobwebs adorning the walls and the phantom spiders that seemed to make them move as they crawled along the walls. Ron was not happy about the latest addition, and he purposefully changed his seat to the other side of the table so his back would not be to the wall, glaring at it as they assembled.
Once Harry sat down, however, something strange happened. Hagrid, who Harry had had occasional conversations with a few times over the last few months, shambled over to where Harry was sitting and got down on one knee in an attempt to be level with Harry. It didn’t work, however, seeing as he was still at least a foot taller even on his knees. The strangest thing, besides him coming over and kneeling beside Harry of course, was that his large beard seems to be wet with tears that trickled from his eyes as he peered at Harry.
“What’s wrong, Hagrid?” he asked worriedly as he turned to fully face the big man.
Hagrid sniffled and swiped at his nose, offering a weak smile. “Oh, don’t mind my big blubbering face, ‘Arry. I just can’t believe how big you’ve grown.” He held out one massive hand. “Aye, I still remember when you was a wee lad and I cradled you in my arms. Exactly ten years ago today, it was. How time has flown. And now look at yer! All grown up already, with your dad’s jawline and your mum’s eyes.”
Harry leaned forward, intrigued. “You were there on…that night?” All day, since there was no class, his mind had been free to dwell and he had found himself thinking a lot on what today symbolized. The anniversary of his birth parents’ death, ten years gone. He had meant what he had said to Dumbledore, of course, about how Michael and Charity were his true parents. But still, he couldn’t help but wonder, especially on days such as this.
“Aye. I-“ the big giant's voice seemed to break, and Harry put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I was the first one there at the scene. Was closest by, you see. Was in the area for some other business, don’t even remember what it was no more. But the Headmaster sent me a message and I rushed over there as quickly as I could. Was too late, though. Found you all alone, crying in the rubble of the ruined nursery. I held you in my arms as you slowly fell asleep, till Dumbledore came. Seems like just yesterday.”
Around Harry, he noticed that the others were subtly listening in, and that the Great Hall was mostly filled up, with the exception of some of the Slytherins. Focusing back on Hagrid, though, he asked, “So you knew my parents well?”
“Aye, aye, I did. Some of the finest people I ever knew, they were. And they would be so proud of you, if they could see you now. Such a fine young man, and in the same house as them. Er, I’m not saying they would be less proud if you was in a different house, of course.” He said, quickly backtracking over his words.
Harry smiled. “Thank you, Hagrid. Maybe we can get together for lunch sometime soon and you can tell me more about my parents?”
This seemed to delight the man, and he beamed widely. “Why, I would love that! I’m not much of a cook, but maybe I can rustle something up for yeh when you come.” He began to get up, putting one hand on the table to push himself up, which groaned alarmingly as he did so. He began to turn away before turning back suddenly.
“Almost forgot my whole point in coming over here, I did. I wanted to give you this gift.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a picture frame, delicately inlaid with silver and with an black and white moving picture inside it. Harry took it carefully and looked at the picture. It was of a waving young couple holding a baby in front of a sign that said, Welcome to Godric’s Hollow! in big, bold letters. Harry had never seen a picture of his parents before, but he figured out who they were at once.
“Is this…?” he asked Hagrid, just to be sure.
“Aye, it is. The day they bought a house for the three of you. Was so proud to be living in their own property they bought with their own hard work, instead of using the old Potter properties that they had previously been living in. Yer Dad never liked living through charity, even if it was his own family’s.”
Harry stared down at the picture, the happy young couple who had just bought a house and wanted to document it waving into the camera, forever waving and waving. His eyes stung and he got up and wrapped his arms around the big game’s keeper.
“Thank you,” he mumbled into his large leg, face squished against it as the man hugged him back.
“Of course. Just glad something happy made it out of that house, I am,” Hagrid said, and then untangled himself from Harry, and he made his way up the raised steps and sat down at the teachers table. Everyone was there, even Professor Binns, taking Professor DuPont’s seat since she had been sick the last few days. He didn’t usually attend meals, because he couldn’t actually eat–he said it was more depressing to be reminded of what it used to be like when he did attend. But he had decided to attend the Great Halloween feast. The Headmaster was dressed especially nicely for the occasion wearing dark blue robes adorned with golden stars and the moon.
Weirdly enough, a few of the Slytherins had still not shown up, including his sister. He shook his head, hoping she would get here soon for the holiday feast as the doors slowly swung closed to the Great Hall. Now whenever they did choose to show up, they would have to suffer the embarrassment of opening the doors in front of the entire school. Knowing Molly, she probably wouldn’t even be embarrassed though, he thought with a wry smile.
He began to dig into the appetizers that had appeared on his plate, laughing and joking with Hermione and Ron, along with Dean and Seamus, who no longer seemed wary of him or in awe that he was the Boy-Who-Lived. Even Sally and Lavender joined in, when they usually avoided them and stayed in their own little friend group, giggling about whatever girls giggled about.
He was at the end of his appetizers when the doors to the Great Hall finally swung open, creaking slowly. He turned, his slight worry that had been growing now replaced by annoyance. What the heck had taken them so long?
But it wasn’t Molly who was standing there – it was Grey. Grey stood panting, leaning against the door frame, his face deathly pale. As the door opened all the way, Harry’s eyes widened in horror. Grey was clutching his left arm. Or, where his left arm used to be, at least. Now it was a jagged stump, with a piece of bone sticking out of it. Despite putting pressure on it, blood trickled out between his fingers as he slowly slid along the door frame to the ground. He managed to gather his strength and shouted into the now silent Great Hall.
“Attack! Monster in the dungeons! They are trapped down there!” His voice then lost its fervor, and he said in a hoarse, desperate voice. “Help us. Please.”
And then he closed his eyes and slumped completely to the floor, blood still flowing from his ruined stump where Harry had once, so many weeks ago, shaken his hand.
* * *
Molly sat in the Slytherin Common Room, one of the half a dozen people who had not left yet. The only reason that they were allowed to be late was because they had a prefect, the girl named Gemma Farley, staying with them. She was also the reason they were all late, however, as she hunched over one of her classmates and hurriedly waved the wand over his hair.
“Seriously, Gemma,” said Penelope, exasperated. “Why would you decide to practice your transfiguration on our hair so close to dinner? We literally had all day to do it.”
“I was busy studying for my other OWLs, thank you very much!” Gemma snapped back, still undoing the effect of the different colored hair on the older boy. “Now sit still and let me work! I have to reverse all these transfigurations on you before we go to the feast, otherwise Professor McGonogall will have our heads!” She finished on the boy and pushed him up. “Alright, you can go.” He nodded and walked out the door to head to the feast, while Gemma started on Grey, whose hair was a vibrant shade of blue.
“Daphne, you can go, you know. Your hair isn’t even a different color.” Gemma had attempted to change her hair color, but Daphne had grabbed her wrist and explained in a very even tone exactly where she would stick that wand if she attempted to change her red hair to a different color. Gemma had gulped and simply moved on.
“And do what? Sit with Draco and those losers? No thank you. I will wait here with you,” Daphne said, where she was reclined reading a book.
Gemma just rolled her eyes and continued to work on Grey as Molly admired her hair in the mirror next to the fireplace. Her hair had been turned black, with dark green highlights on the sides of it. She had been one of the later ones, and in an attempt to challenge herself, Gemma had tried to make Molly’s hair two colors in accordance with the Slytherin colors. It had worked admirably, and now Molly was slightly sad to know her hair would soon return to the blonde it normally was. But she didn’t fancy getting in trouble with the Professor for allowing transfiguration to be performed on her, so she quietly admired herself while she still could.
Gemma had just finished fixing Grey, and was about to move onto Penelope when Molly heard a strange noise from the dungeon’s corridor. It sounded like someone whispering something far away, or something scraping across the floor.
“Does anyone else hear that noise?” Molly asked the group, and Daphne, Gemma, Grey and Penelope along with a shy older boy and girl, second years whose names she didn’t know, all looked up at her.
“Probably just the castle making weird noises while it shifts as it usually does,” Gemma said dismissively, going back to her work.
Molly wasn’t so sure, so she stepped to the doorway, robes swishing behind her. She peered out into the hallway. Nope. Still cold and creepy-looking as always, but undeniably empty. She shrugged and turned back inside towards the warmth of the fireplace when suddenly she was hit by something. With a grunt, she fell to the ground, thankfully landing on the soft carpet instead of the hard stone floor. She twisted her neck to see what had hit her, and found the boy who had left just a minute earlier panting and laying on top of her.
“Get off me! What the heck is wrong with you!” she growled, annoyed. He hastily scrambled up, and as Molly pulled herself up she heard a shout from Grey.
“Oi! Jimmy, what happened? You're bleeding!”
As Molly got up, she took a closer look and saw that, yes, in fact he was bleeding. There was a long jagged cut on the right side of his face that stopped at his jaw. A second gash ran down his right arm with the same jaggedness of the scratch on his face, seemingly one long, continuous wound.
“Someth-something in the dungeons,” Jimmy panted, clutching his teeth against the pain. “Attacked me. Managed to get away, but some of the others… Not so lucky. Saw them laying on the floor.”
“Bugger,” Gemma swore, who hurriedly abandoned her efforts on Penelope and moved to get to Jimmy. She guided him to a chair and sat him down. “Can you tell me what it looked like?”
Jimmy was already shaking his head before she even finished, an act that made the blood spray from his ruined cheek and he cried out in a hiss of pain. “Too dark. Just…big. In a robe.”
Gemma knelt down beside Jimmy and raised her wand, tracing it gently above the cut. It didn’t seem to do much, but she continued working on it. “Molly! Go see if you can get the Headmaster! Or Professor Snape! Or Pomfrey or anyone! You live in a city, right? That means you know how to slip down alleyways undetected. Just imagine the hallways are alleys!”
Molly opened her mouth to point out the numerous ways this was ridiculous, stereotyping and just plain wrong but before she could get a word in, Daphne spoke up.
“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. It’s here,” Daphne said, a tinge of panic entering her voice. The first genuine emotion that wasn’t patronizing that Molly had ever heard from her.
Molly slowly turned and looked at the doorway, where everyone else had been facing. She saw the horror and fear on their faces and knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t good. But still, even expecting that, what she saw took her breath away.
It was a huge beast, standing on two legs, so tall that even hunched over, its head scraped the ceiling several feet above her. It was wearing an old tattered brown robe with many holes in it and the firelight flickered and reflected on its body. But there were no reflections of the fire in its eyes, because it had no eyes. It had no nose or ears or tongue or anything like that. From what Molly could see under the hood of the robe, it had no skin at all. It was a large skull, but it was just a skull. Its head moved back and forth, and when it moved its head its huge horns that touched each end of the wall scraping against the walls, leaving scratch marks on the stone. Molly scrambled backwards from the entranceway as it reached out one long dangling arm to grasp the doorframe, huge claws the size of her forearm adorning the end of its hand, digging into the wood as if it was butter. It lowered its head and grunted, looking right at her with empty eye sockets. Somehow she knew that it saw her all the same.
“What the hell is that!” shouted Grey. He grabbed Molly and pulled her even farther away from the beast.
“By Merlin and the Founders! It’s a Rawhead. I’ve only read about them. Hagrid said that they all had mostly died out by now. Judging by its size, this thing must be at least a century old, if not more.” Gemma cried. where she had given up on the healing magic and had just tied a piece of cloth around Jimmy’s arm, whose face was staring in wide-eyed horror at the beast.
“I don’t give a damn how common it is, Gemma! Tell us something useful,” Daphne snapped, who had begun to move the couches to form a barricade, along with the older boy and Penelope.
“Uh…” Gemma seemed to panic and stall, and Daphne gave her an icy glare. “It’s a Class XXXX creature, highly dangerous. Slightly less intelligent than your average Hill Giant.”
Molly moved slowly backwards and to the side, hoping to get out of the creature's eyesight as Gemma spoke. Once she felt the pressure of the gaze shift, Molly yanked her wands out of her robe pocket and in her haste she dropped one of them. It fell with a clatter to the ground and it might as well have been as loud as thunder to her ears. She dove for it, as the skull swung towards her, that terrible pressure focusing on her once again. She swore and in a desperate need to do something, anything, to drive this creature off, she raised her wands and shouted the first spell that came to mind.
“Diffindo!!” she shouted, aiming at its arm. She was hoping to blast apart the arm at the joints, like she had seen it do book bindings, sending the book pages fluttering every which way in the air. Instead, all it did was rip the robe off the creature, revealing the creature in all its horror.
It was huge, and Molly now saw that it was bending its body almost in double to scrape down the hallway. Its horns were long and curled, ending in wicked looking points that were tipped with bright red blood. Each claw was as long as her forearm, also coated with bright red blood, but to her shock that was just the thing's smaller arm. The horrible creature had mismatched arms, with the right one being at least a foot longer than its left. It had fewer fingers on its right arm, only three there, though there clearly used to be more. And on that hand, the claw that curved out of them was as long and wide as her head. It also had a long, thin tail–almost monkey-like–but it ended in a horrible spike, like a scorpion’s. It seemed to be a mismatch of all different animals, with some bones tiny and others huge and one leg ending in just a club with no foot even there. All the bones were yellowed with age. Fear turned Molly’s blood to ice as its gaze bore into her. What was this horrible, ancient creature and why was it so angry at her? But out of all the details, arguably the strangest one was the fact that it had some strange black substance on it. It drifted off its body like steam off a pond of boiling water. And that strange black substance was in all the creature’s joints, holding it together in some infinite darkness. It hurt to look at it.
The robe fluttered and hit the ground in the time it took Molly to process all of this. Only then did she realize that the others had still been speaking.
“…and it’s mostly impervious to magic of all kinds,” Gemma finished with a sigh, and Molly ducked out of the way of a swinging claw and rolled away to duck behind a couch with the rest of her classmates.
“Why the heck didn’t you start with that?!” Molly shouted at Gemma as the creature roared again and pushed its shoulders and head into the room.
“Why the hell would you attack something before you had all the information about it?!” Gemma shot back as they ducked behind the couch, feeling the swish of air as an arm swished over their heads.
“I needed to do something to get that terrible pressure off of me,” Molly said with a shiver, still feeling her skin crawl at the thought of that pressure, that heavy pressure like flailing in deep water as her body slowly gave over to bone numbing weariness.
She thought quickly and desperately, trying to think of what to do. But before she could think of anything, she watched as the second couch that Jimmy and the older boy and girl were hiding behind was smashed with a claw right down on the middle of the couch. They screamed and scrambled back, but Jimmy was just a tad too slow, probably due to his injuries.
Quicker than Molly’s eye could follow, the rawhead shot its long tail down like a whip and the long spike pierced his foot, pinning him to the ground and stopping his scramble backwards.
“Jimmy!” shouted the girl as he screamed, his blood pooling into a puddle on the floor as he desperately tried to jerk his foot away from where it was stuck. The creature reached out one long arm and curled the claws around Jimmy’s torso, releasing his foot as it did so, making even more blood seep out. It began to lift the poor struggling boy off the ground, the other hand preparing to slice him from neck to stomach, one claw sticking out delicately.
“Oh no you don’t,” muttered Molly, seeing that everyone else was paralyzed in place, watching as Jimmy tracked the claw with his eyes as it got closer and closer to his face. “Hey ugly!” she shouted, and the thing's head turned and gazed at her, and she felt that horrible pressure once again focus completely on her. She fought through it and focused on her objective. “Be impervious to this.” She then swung her wands to one of the objects behind the creature and flicked her wands in tandem in a swishing motion. “Wingardium Leviosa!”
The armchair that had been sitting quietly by the fire, completely undisturbed by all the chaos around it, rose from the ground and with another swish of her dual wands, smashed against the side of the creature’s face with a sickening crack, with the force of a very angry elephant charging. Its head snapped to the side, and it dropped Jimmy on the ground as it roared in pain. Daphne stood up too, getting the idea, and used her wand to flick smaller objects like books or logs from the fire at the beast. Steadily, she and Daphne drove it back towards the doorway, where it retreated on all four of its limbs. From the corner of her eye, she saw Penelope drag Jimmy back behind the one non-busted couch, trying to stop the bleeding on his foot.
The creature was now in the hallway once more, with its head still sticking in the doorway. Once they drove it there, she hurled her armchair at it once more, trying to keep a constant barrage on it. But that was when Molly realized the trap she had let herself fall into. Now that it was in the enclosed hallway, there was only one angle that she could attack from, straight on. The thing didn't have to worry about protecting its sides because the walls shielded it more than enough. So when she hurled it once more, it did make contact with his face, but then it reached out one hand, the longer one, and pierced the chair’s upholstery with its fingers and smashed it down on the ground, pinning it there. She tried to lodge it free with her wands, but it was no use.
The beast grunted and looked once more directly at her, and this time she got a sense of distinct triumph from it. It then raised its hand, the chair still dangling from it, and then hurled it at her.
She dove, and watched as the chair came closer and closer, and then it sailed right past her. Lying prone on the ground, she tracked the chair with her eyes as it sailed past her, and she felt the air stir her hair as it went past. Time seemed to slow and she could hear someone’s voice shouting to the older Slytherin girl to get out of the way, who was standing directly in the path of the chair. Molly watched in slow motion as the girl turned her head, eyes wide with horror, and began to duck out of the way with a shriek. She managed to get most of her body out of the way, but not all of it. The chair, hurled with the strength of a raging monster, hit her right in the neck and kept going till it smashed to pieces against the wall. Molly felt herself screaming, screaming and screaming but unable to do anything but look at the horrible sight in front of her.
The girl's head was gone. Just… gone. Where her head used to be was just a neck that was profusely bleeding. The girl's body still twitched, but there were no signals anymore to tell it what to do. Slowly, with a thunk that reverberated in Molly’s ears with an air of finality to it, the girl’s body tumbled over and hit the ground, stopping its twitching. Stopping any movement. Forever.
Molly could hear herself screaming the word help over and over again as she crawled towards the body, as if she could actually do anything. But she was helpless to stop herself from calling out.
On her third yelling of the word help, something completely unexpected happened to her. As the shock was fading away and she was pulling herself up, there was a small Pop! and a small creature appeared in front of her, in a small vest with the Hogwarts symbol on the breast and floppy ears.
“You called, Mis-” the little House-Elf said, before being cut off by a roar from the beast, which Daphne had just pegged in the eye socket with a flaming piece of wood from the fire, bringing Molly back to the present and the danger they were in.
“Why the heck are you here?” she snapped, her nerves too frayed from just watching a girl be beheaded right in front of her for politeness.
“You summoned us with your calling of help three times!” the House-elf said, narrowly avoiding a tail that aimed to pierce his little body.
“Us?!” Molly swore and looked around, noticing that there were half a dozen of these little creatures now scattered throughout the room, three of them trying to tend to Jimmy’s and Penelope’s wounds. She had taken a claw to the shoulder that Molly hadn’t noticed in the pandemonium.
“Oh for the love of God,” Molly said exasperatedly as she moved in front of the creature, knowing that she had six more creatures she now had to protect. “Can you go and teleport to the Headmaster, get us help?” Before the creature could answer, Molly turned and saw one of the House-Elves be speared through the chest with the spiked tail and be thrown into the wall, where it slid down the wall, leaving a trail of blood, dead before impact. Molly just registered that with the practical part of her brain, her horror and emotions long gone numb.
The House-Elf in front of her seemed to grow some inner strength, and when he turned back towards her, there was a steeliness in his eyes. “No. We can only teleport to where we are summoned in Hogwarts.” He then turned to his brethren and began shouting out something quickly to the other House-Elves. Then of all things, he grabbed one of the pieces of broken wood on the ground and charged the monster, shouting something. The other House-Elves, the three that were left, also grabbed whatever they could find and ran towards the beast.
With jumps that were far larger than they should have possibly been, the House-Elves landed on the back of the beast and began to jab their makeshift weapons into the joints of the beast, causing it to thrash in an effort to dislodge the beasts.
“Maybe while it’s distracted we can make a run for it!” Molly said, to which she began to move towards the door, Daphne the only other one still putting up a vicious fight against the thing.
Thankfully, the others snapped out of their stupor at those words. “I got an idea,” said Gemma, and those words were like a miracle in itself to Molly’s ears.
“What is it?” Finally. She didn’t add that last part in, of course, but she most certainly thought it.
“The Sticking Hex. Perhaps if we use it on the floor of the Rawhead, it will work since it doesn’t actually touch the thing!” she said, her eyes shining bright with the prospect of an idea.
“Great! I don’t know it though. Daphne?” Molly said, face flushing with embarrassment at not knowing such a simple spell.
“Little busy here,” Daphne grunted as she jumped out of the way of the bone tail and almost slipped on the blood coating the floor by her.
“I know it,” the older Slytherin boy said, who had seemed to just recover his voice, his face still stricken with tears.
“Okay good. If you can stick it, even for just a little while, I can try and make a run for it,” Molly said, beginning to slide her wands into her pocket and pulling up her robe above her ankles.
“No, let me do it,” Grey interjected, pushing his way out from behind the broken couch, where he had been breaking pieces of wood off the shattered couch into smaller pieces for Daphne to hurl at the beast.
“I’m a fast runner, the fastest I know, and the only wizard I know who also does running for fun. Besides, you’re the only one who seems to be putting up an effective fight against this thing and keeping your head,” Grey said simply, and he put his wand away and drew one foot back in a running pose. “Go for it, Gemma and Charlie.”
The older Slytherin boy, Charlie, stepped forward and readied his wand with Gemma. Meanwhile, Molly pulled back out her own wands and used the Levitation Charm to lift a five foot potted plant from the back corner of the room and prepared to hurl it as well. There was only one house elf left on the creature, one chewed up and on the ground and the other one split down the middle by a claw. She averted her eyes, and saw the last house elf bravely still fighting, jabbing its stick in between the cracks in the things back, trying to split some bones and distract it.
“Now!” shouted Gemma, and she and Charlie both shouted the word “Collitio!”, aiming their wands at the floor below the beast. It seemed to work, as its two back legs stopped shifting and moving and its two arms froze as well. It roared and thrashed its tail in place, and Grey took off running at a breakneck speed towards the doorway. Molly hurled the heavy potted plant at the tail as it whipped towards Grey and managed to knock it off its trajectory and the spike buried itself in the wall. The monster tried to jerk itself free but was not fast enough to catch him. And Daphne managed to help also by, whether by skill or pure luck, managed to log a bar of metal that used to be part of the frame of the unfortunate armchair into the jaws of the monster as it snapped its maw at Grey, the metal bar preventing the mouth from closing.
Everything seemed to be going good, with Grey almost past the creature when the last House-Elf was flung from the bony back with a flexing of bone, and fell in Grey’s path, its neck snapped on impact. Grey corrected himself almost immediately, but the damage was done. It gave the Rawhead just enough time to lodge its arm free, with a flaring of the strange blackness in its joints, giving it some means of resistance against the sticking hex that Gemma and Charlie were straining to keep up. It reached out one claw and Molly heard the swish of the claw in the air as it arched down and down and then Molly could hear, all the way from where she was standing, a slick wet sound, like a knife cutting through steak, the claws diced up Grey’s arm into three or four distinct pieces. She gasped and cried out as the pieces of Grey’s arm fell to the ground and the sharp, acrid smell of blood once again burned her nose.
Her cry was not as loud as his, however, as he howled in agony. But amazingly, he kept on going, moving ever forward. He stumbled and almost fell, but still he kept running, hopefully to get the help they so desperately needed. The moment that he was past, the hex failed completely and Gemma and Charlie dropped to the ground with exhaustion. Molly was feeling the weight of the magic on her body too, and she struggled to stay upright. Only the rigorous training she had done with her Dad and brother many times in the backyard gave her the stamina to not pass out.
She saw Grey disappearing down the hallway, clutching his hand to his ruined arm. But then she lost sight of him as he turned the corner.
But in her distraction, she had taken her eyes off the Rawhead, and it took full opportunity of the lapse of paying attention to try and take out its most aggravating nuisance, namely her. So out of the corner of her eye she saw it coming but couldn't get out of the way fast enough. The hand backsided her on the head, and slammed her hard into the wall. It was so hard, in fact, she didn’t even feel the impact. One minute she was standing up, and the next moment her head was numb and there was no feeling as she hit the wall, blood covering her eyes, the sharp smell of it burning her nose as it ran down the side of her head in rivulets. She struggled to stand, but could not get her feet working properly and gave up. She slumped on the ground, pulling out her wands and sending blasting spells at the hide of the creature. Useless, yes. But it was enough to provide an annoyance to the beast, like an itch that couldn’t be scratched, she imagined.
Time seemed to drag on and on forever as she waited for Grey to get help, hoping he would be able to fight through the pain to get to the teachers upstairs. Jimmy had long passed out from blood loss, and Daphne was visibly tiring, but still sending anything she could into the creature's face. Gemma and Charlie were out of commission, and she was next to useless. Dead House-Elves littered the ground, and the poor Slytherin girl was… Well, she wasn't going anywhere anytime fast. Even the creature wasn't attacking with as much fervor, seeming to know it had its prey cornered and was taking its time to recover.
Finally, she thought she heard something over the sounds of blasting spells hitting the Rawhead and the wood clacking against the bone of the skull. She could have sworn she heard voices coming from far away, steadily getting closer and closer. She grabbed the wall and hauled herself to her feet, determined to distract the creature from the voices, if they were indeed voices and she was not just going delusional with exhaustion from fighting and draining her magic.
She raised her wands, both now coated with blood, whether it was her own or someone else’s she could no longer tell, and aimed them at the ceiling, sending a double-blast into the stone blocks above its head. It didn't actually do much to damage the ceiling, but that was not her intention. It did succeed in sending fist-sized pieces of stone out from the ceiling and they broke over the back of the beast, distracting it as it searched for the source of the falling stone.
Molly was elated to see that she had not been imagining the voices, as she saw a figure running down the hallway, robes flaring behind them. They were too far away to make out who it was, and she didn't care. All she cared about was that help was coming. To her left, Daphne let out a yell. Fearing the worst, she turned to see why Daphne had uttered the noise. But instead of something bad, it was a yell of triumph. She had managed to shoot a piece of wood deep enough at the reaching hand that she had severed one of the fingers by its middle knuckle, the wood now all twisted and black, steaming just like the beast was. It was a minor victory to be sure, but a victory all the same. This pissed the monster off immensely, but by then the figure from down the dungeon’s had appeared, and she could see several more people behind him, a bit farther down the hallway.
She now saw that it was Professor Snape, his pale face even paler and his angry face looking even angrier. “Look away!” he shouted at Molly and Daphne, and Molly hurriedly averted her eyes, not even questioning the order, happy to have a strong and commanding voice to listen to instead of being that voice.
She felt a wash of heat over her, and a blinding light that hurt her eyes, even behind tightly closed eyelids. She smelt burned flesh and when she opened her eyes she saw that the bones were even burned and blackened in some places, scorched blackness and not the unnatural blackness of the creature's joints.
She didn’t see anything else clearly, as the weight of everything that had transpired finally hit her all at once and she collapsed to the ground, blacking out. She woke up briefly and caught glimpses of things she couldn’t comprehend. She saw Dumbledore and Professor Flitwick all pulling on ropes attached to the creature. She saw Professor Snape come over and scoop her in his arms, cradling her gently. She felt him running, and saw glimpses of dark hallways and crumpled forms on the ground, the children who had left early.
She saw Snape burst into the medical wing, yelling for help. She saw the Professor sitting by her bedside and watching with his deep intense eyes, and then she passed out completely for good, and drifted into a deep, restless sleep.