Flowers for the Dead

It wasn't till three days after the attack that Hermione Granger dragged herself to the library. Marta Prince, a Ravenclaw sixth year, had died just as Marta herself predicted.

Hermione remembered how, in Marta's first year, the Sorting Hat had paused...what, three minutes? It seemed to Hermione like it took an hour, while the hat volleyed through "Sly--Gry--Huff--Rave--" as though it were a game of "Eeenie Meenie Mynee Mo". And even though Marta could have been Hermione's twin in fashion--no heels, no makeup, even in the sixth year--the whole school knew the rumors. "She's one egg short of a dozen," Hermione had once told Ron, recounting Marta's tentative approach for help on a Potions assignment. Nonetheless, she had taken some pity--after all, amidst the house rivalries, it didn't help Marta to be considered an intellectually inferior outsider by those who should have been her friends--the other Ravenclaws.

When she claimed in last week's Divination class to have foreseen both Voldemort's attack and her own death, few had believed her. Some of the Gryffindors accused her of conspiring with the Death Eaters; others believed she was vying for attention, and Hermione had let her know in no uncertain terms how she felt about dramatically crying "fire" in a theatre--and related deeds.

Now she was dead, Voldemort was repulsed, and Professor Dumbledore was quietly enduring the guilt of having a student walk directly into a line of mage fire aimed at him.

Hermione walked into the library and found the gray trash bin she wanted in the corner--it was full, to be emptied later this afternoon, but it had been nearly empty when she threw Marta's card away. It had been a blank card, made of a thick cream paper, with an ugly green rose taped inside. The edges had been flecked with yellow where the dye hadn't spread, but the effect, Hermione had thought, was more than ugly. It had been a yellow rose, but Marta's own handiwork had corrupted it. Coming in the aftermath of Hermione's lecture, it had seemed like an insult--she had thrown it in the trash bin while Marta watched, and in dignity couldn't pull it out again, even when calmer thoughts prevailed.

But now she drew it out, and knew, even before she found the herbology books to show it, that what Marta had claimed that day was true. The rose wasn't dyed at all--it was Marta's own work; something that she had grown in her room, and then in a single afternoon, had clipped and given away. The petals, when Hermione looked at them now, were shriveled and brown.

She could see Marta, with her short, curly light brown hair and sharp-lined face, and her vague, distant eyes, as absent-minded as Neville. She was, in Hermione's mind, as much an apparition as Moaning Myrtle, following her though her classes, listening to her conversations with Harry and Dumbledore, weighing down her words and thoughts whenever the question of Voldemort's power and plans arose. Hermione walked as though in a daze, and nearly believed in her own capacity for visions. Voldemort, who had fled, would return. This time it would be she who died. She haunted the greenhouse like a ghost, having asked Sprout for the seeds of the rare green roses. They were hard to raise, Sprout had said. They ought to be, Hermione thought--it takes more than a bouquet of pink carnations to appease the dead.

Harry and Ron gaped in disbelief when she announced her vision in the Great Hall at dinner. Another attack was coming in three days, Hermione said. Harry and Dumbledore were again the targets, and Voldemort himself would be there. Her eyes were wild, and when Ron had turned away in disbelief, she'd shaken his shoulders as though he needed to be roused from a coma. "Get a grip, 'Mione, please!" he said. "See Madame Pomfrey, okay? I love you, but you don't know what's happening to yourself."

There was laughter from the Slytherin table, some of it gloating, some of it tinged with discomfort. Draco Malfoy didn't settle for just laughter. His Death Eater's mark, newly burned into his arm, made him privy to plans for the attack. The tension in the room was thick, suffocating. Moving his gaze around the room, he couldn't help meeting the eyes of children--a thirteen year old Hufflepuff boy, who was looking blankly at the wall as though looking through it, a older look of loss in his eyes; an eleven year old Slytherin girl who wasn't laughing at all, but was digging the nails of one hand into her other, as if one side of her body wanted to rend the other apart.

He was fixated on her hands, and a wave of chaos rose within him. He thought of the potential for friendship, love, trust--things he had briefly flirted with in his what-ifs, his dreams, ever since childhood. He had always pushed them away as fairy tales--delusions that would make him vulnerable to be trodden over, destroyed. He was the one who would do the trampling, he thought, with a particularly vicious laugh. No one else would have the pleasure, much as Hermione might like to gloat at a "reformed Death Eater's" confession.

"Crabbe heard you were at the greenhouse today," he drawled. "Seems you wanted to get yourself all prettied up with flowers for the day of the attack. Learning from Marta's style, are you? Seems like a vicious thing, trying to get the attention she got from dying, just by faking a repeat for a few days later. Well, Granger, see how much Harry likes you when Voldemort doesn't show."

He had covered the fact of the planned attack--just what Narcissa would have wanted, had his mother still been alive. The Ravenclaws picked up the thread of the argument, talking about how a second attack couldn't come so soon--not without a chance to regroup and recover. The Hufflepuffs' conversation took off on a similar thread--Hermione hadn't seen a vision, they said, but she was distraught, and anyone might be prone to hallucinations and trauma on days like these.

Harry didn't pay attention to what was going on at the Gryffindor table--he was haunted by last week's battle, the last minute intervention of Narcissa Malfoy, and the way it had distracted Dumbledore nearly enough for Voldemort to kill him. He remembered the way she had talked then--yelled really, in between curses, about self-righteousness, blindness to pain, hypocrisy. Those pauses between "Avada Kedavra" had allowed him time for his own spell, and he hadn't bypassed the chance.

By the time Draco Malfoy had burst through the doors into the great hall, Voldemort had fled with his remaining Death Eaters, leaving Draco no chance for both life and vengeance right then. He was Slytherin--he had the practicality to wait for the right moment. The fact that Potter--the person who personified that chaotic wave of unexplored emotion, "delusion"--had slaughtered his own mother, made it easier to hold to her standard of pride. Pride and strength in her cause were all Draco had left.

The attack came like a hurricane in an insane asylum, a massacre committed on ghosts. Dumbledore was down. Then Hermione, Ron, Cho. Then Snape, Sprout. Voldemort pointed a "Crucio" straight at Potter, and Draco followed a moment later with "Avada", hissed out as he remembered Narcissa's frozen agony on the silent graveyard floor of the Great Hall after the previous battle. He half expected Potter to recover--to see the lightning scar repel that curse just as it had repelled Voldemort's curse in his infancy. But the haunted nobility in the green eyes froze, along with the incipient pain of the "Crucio" spell. A slender arm dropped a slender wand, and in the clamor of the battle, yet another body slumped to the ground. For Voldemort it was the beginning of a great triumph.

In the weeks to follow, the neatly kept gardens in the Muggle communities filled with weeds, here and there, as their owners locked themselves in their houses, or spilled their blood in Death Eater attacks and never returned. A faint singing of hymns could be heard sometimes, distant as though underground--a persistent secret funeral rite, along with the sickly smell of sweet flowers on mass graves. Draco remembered, then, Narcissa's fondness for sweet, pure music. For silver--silver roses? For affection, approval, belief. The madness rose in him.

In the greenhouse at Hogwarts, where he walked one day to get away from the screams in the street, he found Hermione's old seedlings, barely sprouted and long turned crisp and brown. A label stood out from the dry soil--"green roses". Green with envy, Slytherin green. Draco thought of the house of Slytherin at Hogwarts--the struggle for closeness and trust given up, the defense against deceit achieved by deceit, the cruelties exacted in the hope that there would be no pain when you were attacked in return. He thought of the pain in noble green eyes that were blank and dead in the space of a moment, at his hand. And he thought of the distress that had driven his mother, and Marta herself, to a form of madness. One by one the pots smashed against the glass of the greenhouse, their force enhanced by spells of momentum.

Splintering sounds encompassed the whole glass dome. The noise was like thunder, and the separate shards caught the sun, sending off little bolts of light in all directions, just before Draco Malfoy died, stabbed by glass everywhere, still holding flowers for the dead.