The Dissolution of All Things

The Dissolution of All Things.

Sometime between the end of the world and her next conscious breath, Cho Chang learns to draw the closed circulatory system of a human body. She can dissect the entire universe with a sharp quill and some quiet, and then put it all back together again as though it had never been touched. Red ink for arteries (away, always, from the heart) and blue for veins that are thick and sluggish, cold with unsteady bicarbonate ions. A Polyprotic Acid is what it's called, she learns. A Chamaeleon of loose atoms, it accepts when asked and gives, too, when the world becomes a little too bitter and begins to burn, too Basic. All it takes is a severing of limbs, a sacrifice, and the asphyxiating dizziness shimmers and fades to color before her eyes. All it takes is drawing of breath. She is sputtering and choking, her head above water, and sucking in life again before her vision even clouds. The pH plummets like the pressure running through her veins and acid rises like the rush of bile to her throat.

Cho, you've been in there for ages, Marietta calls, worry staining the edges of every word. Are you all right?

Yes. It comes out a little breathless and drips with resentment. Yes, I just fell asleep in the bath, is all.

Oh. Well. Be careful.

Yes. I'll be finished in a minute, and even as she promises she knows that the longest she's lasted is twelve seconds.

The brain, she learns, is terrifyingly brilliant. It regulates and controls, commands and discriminates. Above all, in its gentle pulsations and impulses, it survives. A human can live, she reads, without any part of the brain but the brain stem. An anencephalic baby has an extraordinarily underdeveloped brain. Most of the time, he does not even have a skull cap to cover the hollow space where their frontal and parietal lobes are meant to be. But he is alive, in the most basic sense of the word. He breathes and his tiny heart beats; he sneezes, coughs, swallows, suckles, and vomits. The brain is aflush with nerve endings, dendrites and axons. She smiles at the thought that a couple of neurons (that she can't even see, even if she were to drag a blade beneath her skin, lay everything glistening and bare on a clean tabletop) can override her will and her judgment, when she holds her breath a little too long underwater and her lungs scream and claw for oxygen.

But then again, one doesn't need much to survive.

Sometime between the end of the world and her first smile in months, Cho learns about the neuromuscular system. From neuron to neuron to muscle filament, it's simple enough on paper. Primitive, even, the way it all works. The grace of the nerve impulse frightens her with its severe finality. It is all-or-nothing, no bartering or trading or leverage of any kind. And yet, there is a simple sort of justice in the way the only currency of passage is fixed in both its value and identity. All it takes is a flush of ions and her muscles act as she wills. Two fingers down her throat. Her stomach walls contract violently the first time and her throat closes, as though they are surprised. Her heart is frantic. Afterwards, she wipes at her mouth with the back of her hand and glides back to the Great Hall, the neurons of her brain positively shooting fireworks of serotonin and adrenaline.

Cho, says Harry, a little breathless, and she knows that she is a vision of bright eyes and flushed cheeks.

Hi, Harry. She mimics his excitement. Her heart is still livid, desperately trying to recover, and she indulges Harry in that maybe it's beating like this for him.

He looks determinedly at his shoes when he asks her to Hogsmeade and his green eyes widen in time to catch all of her smile.

(She wonders vaguely how his muscles look under the Cruciatus. If the rate of ion influx explode in all that writhing and twitching and screaming. She wonders if Cedric's Avada Kedavra hit him in the heart, if the force of it jolted the pulsing nodes in his heart and if that's why how he died, really.)

Sometime between the end of the world and her last ounce of control, she learns about the digestive system. She tests the words cautiously, letting them sit and roll on her tongue, and sometimes cut the roof of her mouth. Amylase, Phosphatase, Pepsin: such pretty words for things that destroy, burn, and dissolve Things into Nothing. (They are pretty words like Money and Power and Blood, she laughs.) Bread crumbles into glucose to carbons and hydrogens that disappear into the bloodstream, with never a thought spared to their existence. The oil that seeps and blossoms on her white napkin when she presses on a slice of buttered toast, that's made up of lipids, she tells Michael Corner, who watches her skeptically. Lipids slide against each other and melt into glycerol heads and fatty acid chains and dissolve. Proteins, they are her favorite, because proteins snap into individual amino acids. Proteins are what humans are made of, just an accumulation of atoms, really. She cuts a chicken breast in half. And then halves the half. And again and again and again until the sliver of flesh is too small to be speared by her fork. Sally Fawcett catches her wrist, forefinger and thumb closing easily over the circumference of brittle bone. Are you all right? she asks but she looks away and Cho knows that she doesn't really want to know, anyway. Pansy Parkinson catches Cho's eye from across the hall and crushes ice between her teeth, slowly. Beside her, Draco Malfoy picks a strawberry tart and sets it on her stoically empty plate, nodding. Cho brushes a finger across her mouth and marvels at the sensation; it's the only thing that has touched her lips in days.

Cho? I - I mean, I was wondering - it's Pansy, you see. She's...fading. Cho does not see, but hears Draco Malfoy sit down hesitantly next to her in the grass.

Hush, hush. Listen.

Her veins run hollow and when she presses her white and blue wrists against his ears, he thinks he hears the ebbing tide.

She can destroy the world with a quill and some quiet. Only now she can't quite put it back together.

- Fin -