Finding Comfort

~*Finding Comfort*~

It was the worst day of my life. When she told me, I remember thinking that I no longer had a life, not a proper one, not a life that I would be able to recognise.

"I'm sorry, Hannah, but there's no easy way to tell you this." I can remember that the lines on McGonagall's face seemed pulled taught, and her complexion looked positively grey. Her lips had completely disappeared, leaving a thin, grim line from which she was speaking the words much softer than I ever remembered hearing before. "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, dear, his Death Eaters attacked your family home last night. Your mother was found dead."

I sat there in her hard-backed chair, staring disbelievingly at her. It took a couple of seconds for the words to sink in, then it felt like the bottom had dropped out of my stomach, and out of my whole world. I felt sick, and I felt both too hot and too cold at the same time. My eyes were stinging, and I couldn't breathe.

"I...I don't," I stammered, my brain seeming to short-circuit and leaving me unable to articulate what I needed to say, "I don't understand...I...how? What?"

"Your mother is dead, Hannah. The Death Eaters murdered her last night." I could see that her eyes were brimming with tears which I knew would never quite escape down her cheeks. And suddenly I couldn't stand to be in the same room as her. I hated her.

She had no right to be feeling tearful. It was my mother who had died, not hers. She had never even met her. And somehow, at the same time, the fact that she was controlling her tears, that she couldn't quite spare the emotion or the time to cry them, made it even worse. How dare she think my mother was not worth her tears? I didn't care that I would have been angry with her whether she had cried or not; I didn't care about anything, and I certainly didn't care about her.

How dare she tell me something like that? How dare she have to break it to me in that...that...hideous voice of hers? How dare she call me by my first name? How dare she even look at me?

I stood up so sharply that I felt the air rush past my ears, and I turned and ran from her office, ran as fast as I could. I had to get away from her, get away from that stupid office, get away from what she had told me. If I ran away from it, it might not have happened. If I could get far enough away, it would never need to happen.

I stumbled into the girls' bathroom at the end of the corridor and shut myself in one of the cubicles, slamming the door loudly and pulling the lock across so violently that I almost wrenched it free of the door. I wanted to break something, anything. Make it break like I had been broken. I didn't have time for tears or sadness, just anger and hatred. And injustice.

Why us? Why had You-Know-Who chosen my family? Why? I kicked the toilet bowl as hard as I could, and the pain in my toes, the throbbing, blinding second of pain somehow felt wonderful. I kicked it again, and a small scream escaped my lips. This was what I needed, some other pain to take away the truth, to cancel it out. I wanted to kick it a third time, but suddenly I couldn't. I just collapsed on the floor as if I had been winded. In a way, I had.

It had just sunk in, and I couldn't move, wouldn't move, refused to breathe. She was dead. He had killed her. Murdered her. Mum. Dead. Dead...

I felt my body convulse, shuddering, and suddenly I was retching and sobbing. The burning acid was choking me, my tears were blinding me. I rolled onto my knees and fumbled blindly for the toilet seat. I retched again, coughing up my grief, crying out my pain. She was gone, she was lost to me, gone forever...

What about my dad, and baby Jason? Where had they been? Were they alright? I retched again, and again, my stomach churning and my throat burning. How was I supposed to deal with this? What was I supposed to do? I was too young, far to young for this to be happening to me. I was seventeen, still at school. My children should have been this age before she was...

And I couldn't bring myself to think it, to think the word that would make it final. So I didn't. I wouldn't. I refused to think it, to accept it. There must have been a mistake, my mother couldn't be...not my mother, someone else's, anyone else's, I didn't care. Just not my mother...

I heard the door to the bathroom creak open on its hinges, and the footsteps on the cold stone floor, but I was beyond caring. I didn't care if whoever-it-was could hear me being sick, could hear me sobbing. I didn't care about anything anymore.

"Hannah?" It was McGonagall. I retched particularly violently, and suddenly the inside of my nose was burning too. I bit down on my lip, trying to keep the next wave of nausea from taking over, and I could taste blood on the inside of my lips. "Is that you?"

I mumbled something incoherent, and then I was bending over the toilet bowl again, coughing up yellow bile that felt like the very lining of my stomach.

"Hannah, your father is here to take you home." There was a slight quaver in her voice that set my tears off again, and the taste in my mouth was foul: salt, metal and acid. It made me sick all over again.

Finally, she opened the door - I presume she must have unlocked it using her wand - and she helped me gently to my feet and over to the line of sinks on the far wall. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror, and immediately wished I hadn't. It wasn't the fact that I was deathly white, or that my eyes were red and puffy, or that I had a small trickle of blood seeping from where my teeth had punctured my lip. I still looked like my mum.

"Let's get you cleaned up first, and then you can go and see your father." she said, her voice regaining some of its briskness, which strangely calmed me. She transfigured a bar of soap into a face cloth, and held it under one of the taps, soaking it. Then she gently dabbed my face with it, the warm water soothing the blotchy skin. "There, much better."

I didn't look in the mirror to check, even though I was sure she expected me too. Maybe she had realised why I didn't want to look, but she didn't press the point. Her hand holding my shoulder firmly, she walked me silently down to the entrance hall where my dad was waiting.

I wasn't aware of anything else from the moment I saw him. I could tell that he had been crying, just as I'm sure he could tell that I had been too, and I ran, almost tripping, down the marble staircase and into his outstretched arms. The soft wool of his favourite jumper tickled my cheeks as I held onto him as though the world would end if I didn't. Nothing could have loosened my grip then, nothing in all the world.

We couldn't have stood there for more than a couple of minutes, but it seemed like a lifetime. The warm comfort of his arms slackened from around me, and he was wiping his face hastily with his sleeve.

"We'll...be getting off home." he managed, and McGonagall shook his hand bracingly, although she squeezed it gently just before letting go. I could have sworn I saw a single, lone tear poised on her angular cheekbone.

*

The next few days passed in a blur of tears, restless nightmares and heavy silence. I spent most of my time curled up in bed, knees drawn up to my chest, hugging myself. Sometimes the tears would fall, sometimes I would just feel a cold, stony detachment, as though nothing could ever bring me happiness again.

I couldn't bring myself to eat more than a mouthful at a time, but dad and Gran didn't seem to mind. I don't think they could, either.

Gran had decided to stay with us to help look after Jason. He was only two, and he didn't understand why mum wasn't around anymore. He kept crying for her, and dad had to disappear from the room every time he started. Somehow, Gran managed to cope with it.

Her daughter was dead, but she still managed to put on a brave face, playing merrily with Jason, cooking us all hearty meals that she knew we wouldn't be able to eat. I suppose it gave her something to do, something to take her mind off the cold, hard truth.

The night before the funeral, after she'd finally managed to stop Jason crying and got him off to sleep, she knocked softly on my door. When I didn't answer, she opened it anyway, and sank down onto the bed beside me.

"Hannah, dear, you're looking awful pale," she said softly, stroking my hair gently off my face. "Are you sure you can't manage anything to eat?"

I shook my head vigorously, and turned away from her, blinking back my tears. I found myself constantly fighting not to cry in those days after...it happened. The slightest thing would set me off, and then I'd be there for hours, until my eyelids burned in protest.

"Have you looked out something to wear for tomorrow?" I could hear her voice become steely when she said it. She was determined not to cry, trying to show me that she was strong and that she was coping.

"No."

"Well, I'd best do that for you then. You can't go in your pyjamas." She smiled weakly, and patted my shoulder before opening the doors to my wardrobe. "What about the robes you got for Christmas?"

"No!" I almost shouted at her, clapping my hand over my mouth as I did so. Mum and dad had given them to me, but I knew that it was mum who had picked them out. She had been gone the whole day to Diagon Alley, and come back with only that one bag from Madame Malkin's. She must have spent hours getting the right ones made for me. "I can't."

"Alright dear, no need to worry about it. You've got plenty of other robes you could wear." She asked about a few more, until we had settled on the ones she had given me for my last birthday. They were dark navy blue with golden stars around the hem. I'd worn them so often, but they seemed the most suitable, the most subdued.

"Well, goodnight, dear," she said, kissing the top of my head and giving my shoulders a little squeeze. "And if you need anyone to talk to, I'm here." I knew that must have been hard for her to say, but I couldn't find the words to reply. I just nodded numbly and lay back down, wanting to fall into a dreamless sleep that I knew would never come.

*

I don't know why, but the next morning, I woke up and immediately put the navy blue robes back into the wardrobe. I took my Christmas robes out with trembling hands, feeling the beautifully soft velvet against my skin. They were a deep rosy pink, with purple orchids embroidered onto the front panel of the bodice, and gold stitching on all of the hems. They were beautiful.

Somehow, I managed to put them on myself, and I knew why they had taken so long to make. They fit like a glove, and made me look much curvier than I actually was. I smiled sadly to myself, thinking how ironic it was that the first time I got to wear them would be at my mother's funeral.

I felt like I was in a kind of trance. The tears that had been so close and threatening over the past few days seemed a million miles away as I pinned my hair up, careful that not even a strand was out of place. I knew better than to put on any eye make-up; I had a feeling that I would shed some tears yet that day, although I couldn't imagine doing it right then. I put on some lipstick though, lipstick I'd stolen from my mum's drawer years ago. It complimented my robes perfectly.

Breakfast was silent, as I would have expected. Dad had to run quickly to the bathroom when he saw which robes I was wearing, but Gran smiled more radiantly than she had in the past four days. I wonder if she knew I was going to switch my robes that morning, or if it was a surprise.

For some reason, I found that I had suddenly regained my appetite, and I ate three pieces of toast smeared in homemade strawberry jam. I tried not to think that it was mum who had lovingly spent an evening making it, but reminders of her seemed to be all around me, wherever I went that day.

Our cat, Benjy, was playing with a pair of her old slippers as we left the house. I found the book that she had lost several months ago under my seat in the car. The radio played her favourite song...it was inescapable, she was inescapable, but somehow it felt comforting, knowing that she had left traces of herself everywhere. She hadn't completely disappeared yet.

*

Gran took Jason straight home from the funeral, and I went too. I had cried more in that half hour than I had in all four of the previous days, if that was possible, and I didn't want anybody else coming up to me and telling me how sorry they were. Sorry meant nothing to me, despite the fact that I knew it was the only way they could express their much more complicated feelings. That word had always seemed pointless to me, so devoid of actual meaning.

While Gran gave Jason a bath, I sat at the kitchen table, drumming my fingers to no particular rhythm, other than that of the tears that fell steadily from my eyes. That morning, the constant reminders of mum had seemed comforting, but now they were just like salt in a wound. The photographs pinned to the notice board, the reminders on the fridge, the apron hanging on the back of the door...I couldn't get away from her, and all I could do was cry in silence, hoping that I would be able to stop.

There was a knock on the door, and I seriously contemplating not answering it, but eventually I heaved myself from my seat with much more effort than I usually used, and opened the door.

Ernie was standing there, a small backpack on the ground beside him. "Dumbledore let me come. It's Friday, and if you want I could stay for the weekend." The smile that had been slipping slowly from his face was now almost gone. "If you just want me to leave, then I'll go now..."

But I didn't. I'd never been more glad to see anyone in my life. Again, words didn't seem to suffice, so I threw my arms around his neck instead, breathing in the fresh smell of the aftershave he'd taken to wearing since the summer holidays. It was so calming and familiar, and he was still Ernie, still exactly the way he was before...before she died (I found that after the funeral, I could think that word now; denial wasn't going to bring her back), while everything else had changed. And he was there.

We spent the evening watching our favourite Muggle films and eating shortbread in the living room, just like we'd done in the summer holidays. Dad had shut himself away in his bedroom, and Gran was busy trying to get Jason to fall asleep.

It must have been well past midnight when the last film ended, and Ernie yawned hugely, "Well, I'm not sure about you but I'm about to fall asleep on the sofa."

"I don't really want to go to sleep." Every time I tried, I would have terrifying visions of my mum's death, and I couldn't bear to shut my eyes and try, just in case they would come back. "I keep dreaming about...her."

"Hannah, I..." He had the same look in his eyes that everyone at the funeral had, when they told me they were sorry. It was the last thing I wanted to hear from him.

"Don't. Please, don't say you're sorry." Tears pricked my eyelids again, and my throat burned. I would have made myself sick if I'd cried again. "You don't have to say anything." I twisted round so that I could lie my head on his shoulder. "Just be here for me."

"I will be," he mumbled softly, putting his arms around my shoulders and squeezing me tightly. "I'll always be here."

*

I didn't remember drifting off, but we both must have. I woke up in the morning after a dreamless sleep, feeling refreshed and contented for the first time in days. My head was nestled comfortably in the crook of Ernie's arm, my hair spread out like a fan.

"Good morning," he smiled, stretching and sitting up. "Sleep well?"

"Yeah, I did." And I smiled. I smiled properly: a true, happy smile. "I've got a crick in my neck, though."

"Sorry." He looked slightly sheepish, and we both laughed. "Your Gran came in about an hour ago. I don't know what she thought was going on, but the look on her face was priceless!"

"I can imagine!" Laughing about my shocked and morally affronted Grandmother, I sat up and massaged my neck. "Did you just lie there for an hour so that you didn't wake me up?"

"Well, I've been awake for nearly two, but yes." The sheepish grin was back, "You just looked so peaceful, and I guessed you hadn't been sleeping very well before. I thought you needed a lie-in."

"I did." And I'd never loved him more: Ernie, my best friend in the whole world. He might have been pompous, but he was willing to spare two hours of boredom for the sake of my health. He always looked out for me, and helped me whenever he could. People used to joke that we would end up married, and in truth, I wouldn't mind if we did. After all, he is quite good looking, and he's the most wonderful person I've ever met. I like the thought of us growing old together. "Thank you."

"No problem," he assured me, standing up and offering me a hand, which I took. "Do you want breakfast?"

"I'd love it." He pulled me to my feet, and we started towards the kitchen together. "I'm starving."

And I knew then that I was going to be ok. My mum was dead, but my best friend was always going to be there for me. I wasn't deluded enough to think that everything would be plain sailing; I knew it wouldn't be.

There would be times when I would feel as though the sky was falling in on me, where I would feel like I was sinking, drowning, dying, where nothing and no-one would be able to comfort me. But I also knew that the sun was still going to shine down on me, that my friends and family would help me and support me and love me like they always had, and that made all the difference.

I could accept that my mum was dead as long as I knew that my own life would be worth living. And besides, I will see her again one day. Just not yet.