In His Shoes

It was the eyes that would haunt him the most and follow him down through the years. Of course it was. They were wide and cold and dead and vaguely accusatory, grey stones to match the tottering headstones that surrounded them. But he would also remember the shoes, brown and heavy and caked with dirt from the maze.

Never figured him for the practical sort, Harry thought stupidly as he stared at Cedric's body in horrified disbelief.

It was a ridiculous thought to have with Peter Pettigrew advancing on him across the wet graveyard with that terrible, mewling bundle in his arms; it was, in fact, a suicidal thought to be having, but he could not banish it. It lodged at the base of his brain, persistent and niggling as a popcorn kernel trapped betwixt teeth, and he could not tear his gaze from Cedric's splayed feet.

You thought he'd wear a bit of extravagance, didn't you? asked the not-unkind voice of Professor Sprout inside his head. A pair of pointy-toed, ankle-high swashbuckler's boots, velvet and polished leather and rakish, smug pomposity. Those were the sort of shoes to suit a cocky twat like him, foppish and useless as Gilderoy Lockhart and his too-white smile. Never mind that his father was the salt of the earth, with callused, work-knobbled hands and a booming laugh that shook his ample belly. That he shod his feet in vanity was a given because only a self-absorbed prat would dare sweep Cho Chang off her feet and beyond your amorous grasp. You wanted to believe it because it made it easier to hate him.

He had never hated Cedric. His mouth had tasted bitter jealousy and envy acrid as greenbark on his tongue, but never the burning gall of loathing. And even if he had, in his darkest and most shameful moments, fantasized about him falling victim to a rogue bludger and retiring from the world a tragically maimed cripple, he had never wished death upon him. No one deserved to end this way, crumpled in the dirt like a discarded doll, rain falling into their open eyes and dripping down their cheeks like tears.

Kill the spare, the grating, reedy voice from the bundle of rags in Pettigrew's arms had commanded, and now Cedric was dead, and all his secrets had been laid bare.

Harry's hands itched to pull down the hem of Cedric's robes and cover his feet and the shoes that made a mockery of his petty jealousies and scathing judgments. They were thick-soled and rounded and plain, silent witnesses to the pragmatism beneath the braggadocio. Aunt Petunia would have sniffed disdainfully down her narrow nose and called them brogans, but they were perfect for tramping through the mud and grasping foliage of the maze, certainly sturdier than the scuffed trainers he had chosen, and he wondered why he hadn't thought of them.

Bet they'd make brilliant Quidditch boots. You could get a really good push-off without rolling your ankles.

Pettigrew was drawing ever nearer, and with every step, his scar prickled and throbbed. Soon, it would be too late, and the pain would swallow him whole, a rolling tide of crushing, black thunder that blinded him and turned his bowels to water, but he was rooted to the spot, mesmerized by those impossible, brown shoes. The voice of self-preservation buzzed inside his skull, frantic and insectile, but it was muffled and insignificant, and his fingers did little more than twitch dreamily around the shaft of his wand.

He watched a drop of rain rill languidly down the sole of Cedric's boot and mingle with the soil there, and it occurred to him that not all of the dirt had come from the maze or this godforsaken graveyard where phantoms drifted through the fog with the Devil at their breast and nightmares rose uneasily from the earth. Some of it must have come from happier days, when the pitch was unmarred by vicious hedgerows and Acromantulas older than the forest in which they dwelt.

He saw Cedric in his mind's eye, leaving the earth with a push from his strong legs and soaring high above the castle grounds until the parapets were little more than quill points below him. The wind was in his face, and it blew the hair from his forehead and reddened his cheeks. His fingers were curled around the shaft of his broom, and he bent until he was almost parallel to the polished wood on which he sat. His ankles were crossed beneath him, and he was smiling, smiling like Icarus as he chased the golden sun and sought to capture it in the palm of his hand.

Just last fall, he was chasing the sun, bright and fierce as a bumblebee in his yellow Quidditch robes and tenacious as the badger that adorned his House crest. People are so quick to dismiss his achievement, to say that his victory came only because the Dementors strayed onto the pitch, but you know better because you were beside him as you rode the wind together in pursuit of gold. He was a worthy competitor and then some, every bit as hungry for the Quidditch Cup as you were, and even if you hadn't plummeted from your broom beneath the smothering weight of formless memories, your victory was far from assured.

Now he was dead and broken, and he would never chase the sun again with his fingers stretched forth to snag the light from the heavens. There would be only darkness and dirt in his mouth and rain in his unprotected eyes. His yeoman's shoes jutted from beneath his robes, and a sliver of ankle was visible in the settling darkness, white as bone. It was obscene, and it was unfair, and anger boiled away the stuporous numbness, hot and poisonous as quicksilver under his skin.

Voldemort. It always comes back to Voldemort in the end. He consumes everything in your life. He stole your parents in a flash of green and burned their home to cinders. There isn't even a foundation stone to visit, just a barren depression where not even the thorns will grow. His vaunted magic failed him, and his inexplicable ineptitude earned you the mantle of The Boy Who Lived and eleven years in a broom cupboard under the stairs. He robbed you of your youth and your godfather of his freedom, and now he has even stolen your envy of a boy who stole the girl you fancied. It was shameful and unflattering, but it was also a shred of normality amid the bedlam. It was your right to be jealous at fourteen, and to think that the bloke who won your fair maiden's hand was a soulless prick who wore foppish boots and wanked to his own face in the dormitory mirror.

What's the matter, Potter? sneered Draco Malfoy inside his head. Role of avenging martyr grown tiresome after all this time? Pity. The old Gryffindor bitch will be terribly disappointed.

Sod off, Malfoy. It was savage and hysterical and blind, and his lips pulled from his teeth in a feral snarl.

"Expelliarmus!" Pettigrew's voice, high and simpering in the rain and creeping fog.

Harry's wand wrenched itself from his logy grasp and landed in Pettigrew's outstretched, dirty-nailed palm. Harry made a lunge for it, but it was too little, too late. He could only stand with his heart in his constricted throat and wait. Pettigrew smiled at him and revealed crooked, blackened teeth and mottled gums, and Harry swallowed a surge of nauseated disgust. He could scarcely believe that his father had ever been foolish enough to call him friend.

He wasn't always this way, Harry, Remus said gently inside his head. He might not have been brave or daring like James or Sirius, but he wasn't bad. He might have been afraid of the Whomping Willow, and of what I became when the moon was full and the poison in my blood rose to the surface like curdled whey, but he always went. He was the first one in and the last one out, as a matter of fact, and that alone made him worthy of Gryffindor scarlet. He was quiet and nervous and shy, content to flit at the corners of everyone's vision while others stood in the spotlight. He was the wallflower no one noticed until he was no longer there. Maybe that was why James chose him as the Secret Keeper, because nobody bothered to see him. Peter was a ghost all his life, and your father was counting on it to stay that way.

He was wrong. We all were, but we were young and rash, and we didn't realize that shy Peter, who never raised his voice or his wand in anger, and who shied from the merest whiff of confrontation with his tail between his legs, was nursing hatreds long and deep. If we had, we would have tried harder to draw him out, to make him more than the woeful tagalong who slouched and scurried in our wake. By the time we knew what was happening, the blow had already been struck.

Harry stared at Pettigrew across the distance and tried to imagine the boy he had once been. He had seen him once in the shimmering, swirling waters of Dumbledore's Pensieve, short and thin and furtive, too much of a coward to even torment Snape as he dangled helplessly in the air with his dingy underpants exposed. Remus said he had been brave, and Harry had no reason to disbelieve him, but he could find neither courage nor honor in his doughy, jaundiced features. He was shrunken and shriveled and spineless, propelled not by bones or sinew, but by the primitive, craven will to survive.

It's what Voldemort made him, Harry, what He's done to him. It's twisted him, robbed him of his humanity and transformed him into this pathetic wreck. It isn't fair. Peter deserved better, from us and from life. We all did.

Not for the first time, Harry thought that Professor Lupin was a better man than he could ever hope to be. Professor Lupin was still capable of pity for his enemies. He supposed it was the broken calling to the broken, the howling of the wolf in a human tongue. But he could find no empathy in his heart for the man in front of him, only a dull, thudding hatred that stung his eyes and massed in his bones like molten iron.

You're wrong, Professor, he countered. Voldemort didn't twist him; he just pared away the Gryffindor façade to reveal the Slytherin core. Wormtail wasn't brave because he wanted to be, but because he had to be. He went into the Whomping Willow and the tunnel under the Shrieking Shack because if he didn't, he would be alone, and solitude is the one thing he can't stand. He hates it so much that he lived in a cage at the Burrow for fifteen years and slept in a nest of shavings and his own shit because it was better than huddling in the sewer and sleeping in someone else's. He was always an opportunist, and Voldemort showed him for it.

Pettigrew smiled weakly at him, and for an instant, he thought he saw remorse in his watery, feverish eyes. Or perhaps it was pity. Then his pasty, grimy hands pushed aside the fabric of the bundle in his arms, and the power of critical analysis was devoured by all-consuming anguish. He dropped to his knees, hands clapped to his ears in a futile effort to stopper them against the agony, and keened. Tears blurred his vision and fogged his spectacles with a blotchy rime of salt, and he pitched forward into the cold, wet dirt.

I have death in my mouth. Why does it taste so much like Aunt Petunia's bread? He was dimly aware that he was screaming into the earth, but the pain was a thunderous, hot hammerspike in his forehead and temples, and he could not stop. Nor could he resist Pettigrew's hands as they set him upright and lashed him to the tombstone with a Binding Spell.

Cedric was still where circumstance had left him, and throughout the horror that followed-the gelid, wet plop of Pettigrew's hand as it fell into the cauldron, the stinging heat of a dagger blade piercing the flesh of his forearm, and the hallucinogenic dismay of seeing Voldemort arise from the cauldron, naked and bloodless and obscenely arachnid in spite of his narrow, serpentine face-Harry never lost sight of his shoes, pitiful, twin hillocks in the shadows. They acted as anchors, tethered him to his body when the urge to slip into numb oblivion beckoned, and as long as he saw them, he knew he was not dead.

He was not at all surprised when Cedric's ghost appeared to him with the shoes still bound to his transparent, silver feet and implored him to return his sloughed body to his father. Nearly Headless Nick had been wearing the neck ruffle in which he had died for four hundred years, and Moaning Myrtle peered disconsolately at the world through the lenses of the spectacles that had reflected the glittering yellow eyes of the basilisk fifty-two years before. The dead clung to the things they had once carried as fiercely as the living, and he had little doubt that when he died, the memory of his hand would still be curled protectively around the shaft of his wand and longing for the sturdy heft of his Firebolt.

Yet the incorporeal shoes that did not touch the ground struck a deeper chord within him. Shoes were invested with ancient magic, after all, or so his Muggle childhood, with its tales of the old woman who lived in a shoe and a Kansas farmgirl with a pair of ruby slippers, had told him.

It's not just Muggle tales that tell you so. You've seen their magic with your own eyes. The first Portkey you ever touched was a manky, old boot on Stoat's Head Hill. You thought Mr. Weasley was having a go at you when he said that it would whisk you to the rapture of the Quidditch World Cup. It was filthy and creased and smelled of damp and febrile sweat, but when you put your dubious finger on its mud-caked toe, it was alive and organic. In the instant before the searching tendril of magic found its mark behind your navel and tugged you headlong into the wonderland of brooms faster than imagination, you swore it rippled, a sigh and a fare thee well as you sped headlong through the land of neverwhere.

It hadn't been his first brush with magic; three years stood between Hagrid battering down the door of the ramshackle cottage in which Uncle Vernon had sought refuge from the owls and this squalid, forgotten graveyard, and in that time, there had been lessons and Quidditch and so much magic that he tasted it on the air, but few moments had ever been as sweet or as awesome. Hurtling through the air with Ron and Mr. Weasley and the twins beside and behind him in a merry, madcap jostle, he'd gotten his first unblinkered glimpse of the possibilities offered him by the slender shaft of polished wood in his hand.

It had been a heady realization, and he had often turned it over in his head in the slumberous darkness of the boys' dormitory, secretly reveling in all its facets and winking, glorious textures. It was balm to a soul that had seen far too much of the wanton cruelty afforded wizards by magic and far too little of the joy kinder hands could fashion from its gossamer, spun-sugar threads. He lay in his canopied bed and recalled the exhilarating rush of the wind in his ears and the stuttering kaleidoscope of colors that blazed behind his closed eyelids, and when morning came and the smothering pall of uncertainty descended on the castle and clung to its moss-covered ramparts like fog, he curled his fingers around the memory in a possessive clutch and thrust it into the pockets of his trousers, a private touchstone to ease the fears that never seemed to leave him.

There was no magic in Cedric's phantom shoes, just the ghostly outlines of his feet as he hovered within the blinding dome of light cast by his and Voldemort's wand. Cedric watched the struggle from his place on the periphery of the duel, a wistful smile on his translucent lips.

"Bring my body back, Harry," he pleaded wistfully. "Bring my body back to my father."

And so he did. What other choice did he have? It was his fault that Cedric wound up here in the first bloody place. His damnable Gryffindor fairness had gotten him killed; now his equally damnable Gryffindor bravery would bring him home again. If only he hadn't been so generous. Maybe Snape and the scions of Slytherin were right. Maybe selfishness was a virtue, after all.

It was a wretched, lunatic thought, and he found himself laughing as he raced towards Cedric's body and the hypnotic, ethereal glow of the Portkey. Then his fingers grazed Cedric's cold wrist, and the laughter died, replaced by choking sobs. He grappled with Cedric's body with one hand and pointed his wand at the Portkey with the other. Cedric's spirit may have shunned this unhallowed ground, but his body was reluctant to part from it, as though the soil from which he was formed had found its brethren in the damp earth of the graveyard. It was heavy and unwieldy in his arms, and his head lolled grotesquely on his neck. Cedric's glazed, marble eyes stared at him, wide and forever fixed in an expression of utmost bewilderment. I'm not supposed to be here, they said. There has been a mistake. I was supposed to grow into a man, have children, and make my proud father even prouder still. Where have all my promised years gone, Harry? Why have you taken them? Wasn't it enough to be the Boy Who Lived once? Why not me as well?

Those were good questions, just questions, but they were questions to which he had no answers, and so he did the only thing he could. "Accio Portkey!" he gasped, and the Tri-Wizard Cup flew into his outstretched hand.

This time, there was no exhilaration in the journey. He screamed all the way to Hogwarts, Cedric's corpse trailing behind him like a Grim.

When next he saw the shoes, he was huddled over Cedric's body on the sodden ground of the Quidditch pitch, shielding him from the prying eyes of the crowd and the cold rain that fell onto his burning nape and dangled from the end of his nose. They jutted from beneath his robes, and Harry seized the soaked, rumpled hem and tugged it down. He would not let them see him naked.

You'll be his Secret Keeper, whispered Professor Lupin, and that was exactly right. Harry would keep his secret for him, preserve his image as the handsome, cocksure boy with the pointy-toed boots and the girls' hearts in his hands. His memory could swagger down the corridors of Hogwarts, and no one would be the wiser to the truth. No one would know that he'd died with the square, unglamorous brogans of a farmer on his feet.

Someone tugged on his shoulder, urging him to come away, but he shrugged them off. Cedric was his responsibility, and he wasn't going to leave him here in the rain like a bit of compost, leave him exposed to the elements and the craning necks of onlookers and the scalding flash of Rita Skeeter's camera. He prostrated himself over the body and dug his numb fingers into the fabric of Cedric's robes. This close, Cedric smelled of earth and rain and bits of bramble from the maze.

"Let him go, Harry." Dumbledore, tender and pleading in his ear.

Harry shook his head, droplets of water flying from his hair, and clung to Cedric all the more fiercely. "No. No. I can't. I won't."

Long, slender fingers beneath his chin, and then he was gazing into Dumbledore's eyes. For once, they were utterly devoid of their merry twinkle, and though Harry's vision blurred with rain and tears and fogged spectacles, he saw deep grooves around the Headmaster's eyes and mouth, as though sorrow had chiseled them there. When he spoke, his voice was gentle, but implacable.

"It's all right, Harry. You've done all you can for him. You've brought him home."

Bollocks! Harry wanted to shout. If I had done all I could for him, he wouldn't be lying on the Quidditch pitch like a sack of straw. He would still be alive, and Voldemort would still be living a bodiless half-life in Albania.

"N-no, you don't understand. I've got to look after him. I-,"

He had to make Dumbledore understand, but there were more people around him now, hushed, strangled voices and flashes of robe, and more were hurrying onto the pitch, endless and inexorable as a column of ants. There was the hideous tartan of Professor McGonagall and the billow of puritanical black that marked the approach of that bastard Snape. Cornelius Fudge was lumbering towards them, his repugnant, lime-green bowler hat clutched between perpetually kneading fingers, and bringing up the rear was Amos Diggory, his normally ruddy face bleached white with shock and his mouth a perfect O of anguished realization.

Then rougher hands than the Headmaster's pulled him to his feet, and a gravelly, harsh voice was sour and hot against his ear, Firewhiskey and spoiled cabbage. "Come, boy. It's all right. I've got you. I've got you."

He didn't want to be had. He twisted in Moody's grip, but the arm across his chest was too strong, almost throttling, and he could only stagger drunkenly as Moody led him away from the knot of people surrounding Cedric. Then Amos Diggory was pushing through the throng, and the cry he sent up at the wonder that a particularly malicious God had wrought spiraled to the heavens like smoke and was beaten down by the rain. It was a savage blade against his wet, frozen skin, crueler than the cut of Wormtail's knife, and the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes against it was Cedric's shoes, rocking slowly in time to his father's lament.

"My(forward)boy(back)! My(forward)boy(back)!" A lullaby from which Cedric would never awaken.

He's not a boy anymore. He's a puppet. Pinocchio, Harry thought numbly, and then Moody was leading him towards his office, muttering and limping and smelling of fermented cabbage.

The last time he saw the shoes, they rose from beneath the temporary winding sheet a whey-faced, tear-stained Madam Pomfrey had placed over his still, stiffening face. The Diggorys would be taking Cedric home to Glasgow in the morning, but neither was in any shape to Apparate or travel by Floo tonight, and after today, he doubted either one of them would lay hands on a Portkey again. So Cedric occupied the bed furthest from the doors and eyes of curious students, and Harry held vigil over him.

They were alone now. Mrs. Weasley had been reluctant to leave him, but Dumbledore had persuaded her that there was nothing more she could do, and she had gone, though the warm scent of oft-laundered wool and baking lingered in his nose. Pomfrey, too, was absent. Cedric's wounds were mortal, and his were beyond the gentle touch of the healing arts. In all likelihood, she was cloistered in the somber confines of her office, tossing and turning fretfully on her cot and listening for the sounds of anguish.

The stark, sad form haunted him, but his gaze was inexorably drawn to Cedric's feet, poking through the bedclothes like twin exclamation points. The end! they proclaimed, and they brooked no argument.

He closed his eyes to find them emblazoned on the darkness behind his eyelids, and he opened them again. Turning away from them was no better because he invariably wound up facing them once more. Eventually, he slipped from his bed and crept over to Cedric's cot. It was nearly summer, but the stone floor was cool as he padded across it to stand at the foot of the cot.

He flipped back the sheet with a flick of his wrist and stared at the shoes. One of the laces had come undone, and he reached out and tied it with mindlessly twitches of his fingers. The soles were worn, and the tread was covered in dirt from the graveyard. He reached for his wand, intending to clean them, and then stopped. What did it matter? Nothing lived in Cedric's shoes anymore; they held only dead flesh and unfulfilled dreams, and soon enough, the dirt from the graveyard would spread like contagion and cover him altogether.

It was one more in an unending string of bitter ironies. Once, shoes had represented the wonder and enchantment of magic, and now they were just another symbol of hollow chance, like Sirius and Professor Lupin before them, another false hope that his life might really be better. He replaced the sheet over Cedric's shoes and smoothed out the creases.

The end! the exclamation points screamed, and in a way, Harry thought, it was.

His own trainers were peeking from beneath the bed as he returned to his cot, and he kicked them further under, well out of sight. He climbed beneath the covers and resumed his watch.