Pick Up The Pieces

When the field mediwitch looked him over briskly and said, "He's gone", I couldn't quite believe it. He was shamming, faking it, this wasn't him, lying there on the ground like a broken doll. It shouldn't be so simple to kill him. But everyone else was acting as though it was real, and so I accepted their reality, for a change. He was bundled up to be returned to his family. We restrained and transported the living to the holding cells in the basement of the building, and, with the excuse of the knee I'd twisted dodging a curse, I went home.

I never saw a need to put much art up. I have technicolor memories that take their place, tinged green around the edges with the killing curse, flaring acid-sharp with pain. He was always there, it seemed, in the shadows, on the edges, and his face was at once the powerful face of a dark angel and young and unformed, glancing at me across the classroom with a sneer and nasty comment.

I shower, but it doesn't make me feel clean, and search the refrigerator for something that hasn't gone green. I really don't want to go out until my world resettles. I wonder if the others feel this disconnect. I lived and breathed for this all my life, it seems. I put off everything for it. And I wouldn't change that at all, it gave me the victory. It's just that I don't know where to go from here.

I could play Quidditch until I take a Bludger to the head and wind up in St. Mungo's. Old Mad-Eye Moody wants me as an Auror. But what do I want to do? I don't know.

No one ever told me the death of your enemies leaves such a hole. I feel gutted and purposeless. But for the last ten years, they've been trying to kill me. I have to say they. In the end, I gave mercy to something that wasn't human, wasn't living or dead, and I think I saw relief in his eyes. The thinking had been done by his circle for a long time. And now they too are dead. How strange it feels.

I think again of Lucius Malfoy, his face twisted in a sneer even as he fell back into death, and wonder about his son. He was always his father's reflection and spy...and I wonder, without Voldemort, without the Death Eaters...could those two children have been friends? And in the new world of ordinary life that I begin to feel drawing down about me, can the men they became perhaps...not be enemies?

Whatever he may have thought...whatever he may be, the man I killed today was his father. And now he too has great unfinished business with him, just as I have with mine. I find myself taking quill and parchment, letting formal words of condolence spill across the page. Hedwig is off with it before I reconsider. But there's nothing in the formal words to take offense to. Nothing to regret.

So many dead. They've whispered to me for all these years, and now... now they are silent. The silence echoes in my apartment, in my head. I think of my friends, of one in particular, who understood when I told her "someday"....and I realize that "someday" is here. I can date. I can have a normal life, without fear. He's dead. I'm alive. I wonder how long it will be before I can sleep without nightmares and my wand in my hand.

Nothing here. I'll need to go out tonight and buy groceries. I can hear the radio from downstairs...the celebrations are already beginning. And oddly enough, I feel a kind of grief.