Hailey slammed into the ground, Cedric’s body still warm in her hands, and she felt the world stop spinning beneath her.
There were people speaking, screaming, shouting from every direction. Someone tried valiantly to pull her off of him, fingers pulling roughly on her shoulders when the gentle hand that was placed on her head did nothing to move her, but there was no way she would be ripped from him.
She felt like she was outside of her body, watching the events folding out from above. Sounds were muffled; she was underwater again, drowning again, lost in the silence.
And then the hands on her shoulders were switched with rougher ones, calloused palms practically burning against her mostly-bare shoulders. They ripped her away from him, practically threw her off of his body, and Hailey screamed as she was pulled back into reality.
“Don’t touch me!” she could barely hear herself, barely hear anything at all, just knew that her fingers were cold, cold and missing the warmth of Cedric’s, and then she bent over, and screamed, and screamed, because she knew in that moment that her fingers were going to be cold for the rest of forever, because Cedric was dead, he was dead and gone and soon his body would be cold too, and so she screamed so loud it felt like her vocal chords were going to be shredded to pieces.
Her scream faded, faded away because she had been screaming all night already, with her arm still bleeding sluggishly from how deeply Wormtail had cut it and her whole body shaking, aftershocks of the countless crucio’s or perhaps the astonishment of seeing her parents fold themselves out of a wand or maybe the sight of one of her best friend’s laying dead in front of her, eyes wide open and hair still messy-
Someone was in front of her, not touching, but in front of her, and she looked up from the grass, shoulders shaking from her silent sobbing.
“Potter,” Snape said, his eyes dark and cold as ever, skin paler than she had ever seen, and he whispered, “Potter-Black!” and when she still didn’t respond, he reached out a hand, clasped it around her upper arm, the one that wasn’t bleeding, and whispered, with great urgency, “Evans.”
Hailey shook, and she shook, but she looked up to him, at this man she hated with every fiber of her being, and she felt nothing but sorrow. “I can’t.”
He understood what she was saying without prompt, and said, “Yes, you can,” with no question behind it. It was a statement, one held in fact and belief at once. “And you will. You must.”
She stayed silent; his grip tightened around her arm until it was nearly painful, and he said simply, “Now, Hailey.”
Hailey rose, standing on shaky, shaky legs. It felt like she was going to collapse at any moment; her ankle was still twisted terribly from her fall in the maze, her right arm was drenched in blood, there were scrapes all down her knees and she could feel the familiar dark red liquid dripping from a cut above her eyebrow and one on her cheek, and her Tournament jersey, custom made and a deep red, had been ripped to near shreds; she was standing practically in muggle athletic shorts and a sports bra. Her hair was in twin braids on the side of her head (done meticulously by Parvati only hours ago) but was filled with sticks and grass and leaves and blood, and she knew she looked horrible.
There was no glorifying it. Hailey Potter was beautiful but not like this, not in her grief and not in rage so deep it made her wish she was dead. She wished she was dead, wished to be anywhere else, and she stood, stood as tall as she could in the face of the everlasting emptiness that she had been left with, and she took a deep breath, raised her wand to her throat, and murmured the familiar favourite spell of Ludo Bagman, the one that made her voice amplified by twenty.
“He’s back,” Hailey said, and she said it with such certainty that no one could possibly question it. “Voldemort is back!”
The stadium descended into complete silence, and then erupted into noise.
Snape gave her a nod, right hand gripping his left arm, and turned away.
“Come with me, Potter,” said Professor Moody, and grabbed her, grabbed her bloody, bleeding arm. She let out a shout of pain, and Snape turned around - but Hailey had already been pulled away, to a place deep in fake- Moody’s office where she would begin to learn the secret of how the events of that night had unfolded from the very beginning.