Disclaimer: Anything you recognize isn't mine.
A/N: Written for a challenge at the Hogwarts Online Forum for Ravenclaw house. Each House member chose a Ravenclaw, and was given three other characters, one from each of the three lesser houses. The challenge was to write a series of three linking stories featuring the Ravenclaw and the three others. My Ravenclaw was Anthony Goldstein, and I was given Fred Weasley, Cedric Diggory, and Severus Snape.
Three Dead Men
He thought he knew everything, until people started dying.
I. Cedric.
Cedric Diggory just been another stupid pretty boy at Hogwarts, the kind of kid that pretended to like everyone when he didn't really care one iota about any of them, especially slightly nerdy boys in Ravenclaw. Anthony had never liked him.
So he wasn't sure why he felt like sobbing all the time now, why he couldn't focus on his studies anymore. He used to stay up late reading ahead in his History of Magic textbook and now, he just laid in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling, wishing away the stupid lump that seemed to have permanently lodged itself in his throat.
It was just… he'd never known anyone that just died before, so suddenly, without warning. Sure, his great-aunt Elise had passed away a few years back, but that had been expected, natural, even, and besides, he'd only met her a couple times. And even though Anthony had probably talked to his great-aunt more than he'd talked to the Golden Boy of Hufflepuff, Diggory's death was one hundred times more difficult to deal with.
There was just something different about someone like Cedric – tall, athletic, young, infinite – just dying. One day, he'd been in the corridors, smiling the way that made girls swoon like they never would for Anthony, and the next, he was gone. Death had always seemed strangely distant to him, almost predictable – sick people died, old people died, people he'd never met died. Now, it seemed as if the rhythm had been disrupted, and for the first time, he wondered when he would die, and how, and where.
What did it feel like, to have the life snuffed out of you? Had Cedric known what was going to happen before it did, when the jet of green light flashed in front of him?
What did he feel like now? Where was he?
For the first time in his life, he couldn't figure out the answers, couldn't just look it up in a library book. He tried asking the ghosts and the portraits, but there was nothing, no answer, a blank.
Maybe that was what bugged him so much about death. He was smart, Anthony knew that, and he liked – he needed – to know all the answers.
And this time, there weren't any.
II. Fred
He'd never liked Cedric much, but he'd hated Fred Weasley. He'd hated George too, seeing as he never managed to tell them apart. His feelings towards them began as a vague sort of dislike, the same sort of feeling all the "class clowns" inspired in him. Fred and George were loud, annoying, obnoxious, and certainly not funny, but he didn't hate them until fourth year, when he realized they weren't stupid.
It seemed almost backwards, but it bugged him. He'd heard that they only gotten three O.W.L.s each, but they were inventing things that were way beyond his magical capabilities. Those Canary Creams? He couldn't have even explained how they worked, much less have made one himself.
Ginny told him they wanted to start a joke shop, but he didn't get why. Surely, they could do better than that? When they actually started Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes a few years later, leading some people to speculate that they'd be millionaires before they turned twenty-one, Anthony was pissed. It made him feel like grades and his own hard work didn't matter, didn't mean anything about his intelligence, since the twins had pranked their way through Hogwarts, flown away on their broomsticks instead of graduating, and still managed to start a booming business less than two years layer. He actually refused to go into the shop with Michael the summer before his sixth year.
It wasn't until after Fred's death that he understood. He'd been walking aimlessly around Diagon Alley, hoping to find something, anything, to take his mind off Terri, his friend, who he would never see again. He'd been intending to find a good, uplifting book (one where no one died), but instead, he found himself at the entrance of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes. He almost turned around, but then said the hell with it. In the face of all that had happened, stupid, schoolboy animosities seemed like nothing.
Fred and George weren't there anymore – he supposed George couldn't face it – but Ron was, looking more determined than Anthony had ever seen him. Before Anthony knew it, he'd walked up to the counter and bought some Canary Creams.
He snuck one into Michael's dinner that night, when he went over there to hang out and talk – or not talk – about Terri. He got this incredible rush when Michael turned into a canary, like he hadn't felt for – Merlin, he didn't know. Maybe ever.
Michael's face was so surprised when he turned back into himself that it made Anthony laugh – hard. Soon, Michael laughed too, and it just felt good to laugh like that, with someone else. It wasn't like he'd never cracked a smile before; he'd just always been sort of serious, and the last year, in particular, even before Terri died, had been incredibly depressing.
And in that moment, Anthony got it for the first time. Sometimes, hard work and books, seriousness and even intelligence weren't enough.
Sometimes, you just needed a good laugh.
III. Snape
It was odd, but after seven years of having the same professors, you started to think that you knew them, inside and out. Even hearing the news that Professor Snape had murdered Dumbledore wasn't as shocking as hearing that he'd loved Harry Potter's mum, that he'd been working all his life to save Harry for her.
Learning that Snape was a killer was obviously unexpected, but it sort of fit. Snape had always seemed like a bitter, angry man. He was Head of Slytherin and was forever favoring them in his classes. It wasn't exactly a stretch of the imagination to see him as a Death Eater.
Despite all that, however, Anthony hadn't hated him before he'd killed Dumbledore. He'd respected nearly all of his professors, except for Professor Umbridge, because she hadn't taught anything. Anthony could see that Snape was a smart man, and his class challenged him, and so, even though Michael and Terri would always rag on him for saying so, he liked him, as a teacher, at least, if not a person.
That had, of course, changed, at the end of his sixth year. Anthony had loved the Headmaster of Hogwarts. Dumbledore had been his hero, a brilliant man dedicated to teaching others. And so he'd grown to hate a man whose class he had once enjoyed, but the truth was that was anywhere near as hard as accepting that Snape had been a hero, had loved so deeply that instead of turning to revenge on Lily Potter for choosing another man, he'd risked his life to save her son.
It was both amazing and improbable. Shocking. Perhaps, if the he'd been a Gryffindor, it would have been different, but he'd been in Slytherin, the house that was supposed to care only about themselves.
It made him wonder how hard that had been for Snape, how brave he must have been, but most of all, it made him wonder if he would have done the same. Anthony had liked a fair few girls – had even come quite close to loving one in Morag MscDougal – but couldn't imagine being in Snape's position. It made him think a lot about courage and cowardice, heroism and love.
And perhaps that was why the night he proposed to Morag, the imagine of Snape – a man who, during his life, was nothing more to Anthony than a professor he respected – flashed through his mind.
He would, he thought, try to love her as much as Severus Snape had loved Lily Potter.
They are not the only three men that he knew who ever died, or even the first three, but they stick out in his head. They taught him things that his books never had, that they never could.
He didn't know everything, and after their deaths, he realized that he never would.