A Dead Girl's Last
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.
Author's Note: Done for the Opposite Day Challenge on HPCF.
When Mandy leaves the Charms' corridor and the fighting there and slides down the side of a castle wall to help her friends by dying inconspicuously and out of the way she isn't really thinking about the hole in her stomach or the fact that every breath is a tortuous effort of stubborn will. She's thinking about her family in Kent and wishing that Hogwarts had cell service so that she could at least call them and say her goodbyes.
She wants more than anything to hold her little brother tighter than is strictly necessary and ruffle his blond curls and call him Mickey mouse and grin widely when he growls at her and insists his name is Michael.
She wants to tug on the end of Jillian's long strawberry colored ponytail and tease her about Andy Hopkins who sits behind her in her French literature class.
She wants to tell her mum that she loves her more than anything and that she's sorry she was so difficult about Roger and that she just wants her to be happy.
She wants to assure Roger, her step-father, that she doesn't care if he's a muggle, that he's done more for her than her own arsehole father had ever managed and she doesn't actually hate him for marrying her mum.
She can feel the longing welling up from her stomach to close her throat as tears prick at the corners of her eyes and start running down her cheeks. Mandy wants to scream at the unfairness of it all. If the world and the school weren't falling to pieces she would be graduating as one of the top five students in all her courses, she knew scads of wonderful and terrible and ordinary and unbelievable magic and none of it could connect her to the people she most wanted to be with in her last moments.
She slams an open palm against the cool stones she's leaning against in a sudden defiant motion and is glad that the numbness of shock is creeping over her and it's not actually all that painful to move even if it takes a colossal effort.
Her hand falls from the wall and she studies the perfect imprint of her palm done in a dark morbid purple-red-brown on the slate grey of the stone. As she studies it an idea strikes her. Drawing in a shuddering breath and coughing up a teaspoon of blood for her efforts she draws away the tatters of Anthony's robes and sticks her blood soaked hand into the bloody mess that is her torso.
It burns and aches and Mandy whimpers as she uses the last of the strength in her shaking hands to draw the runes on the wall next to the handprint. The sensation of the rune magic setting flicks over her hands and arms and she's abruptly reminded of why they tell you to be wary of working with blood runes.
The intent sizzles through her, a white-hot fiery agony that's so much worse than the cold of death that's creeping through her.
She grits her teeth. If she's going to die anyway then she'll be damned if she lets a little pain keep her from telling the people who matter most to her that she loves them, that this was her choice, that she didn't tell them how bad it really was because she wanted to protect them.
She says it over and over again until her voice cracks and dies and the last of her blood leaks from her body into the grout between the stones of the castle, until only her voice lingers, echoing faintly in the hall, endlessly chanting a goodbye that for a long while only she can hear.
It's Anthony that finds her there, long hours after the battle is over and when he smooths the tangle of hair from her ashen face, her lips are still parted mid-word an expression of blazing determination etched across her features.
It's Anthony who pulls the stone from the walls of Hogwarts itself and takes it with him to the rundown three bedroom in Kent and hands it to Madeline Brocklehurst-McFadden personally so that the people who mattered most to Mandy can know all the things she wanted them to know.