Entry for the "The Unforgiven Competition" - Category 1: Choose a character and write a oneshot about this character using one of the Unforgivable Curses. My Character: Fay Dunbar
Seriously, I don't know if this is good at all, I just wrote what came into my mind... please leave a comment about what you are thinking...
Innocence is something that seems to be very rare in this world, even though this precious treasure is inside the souls and hearts of every human being when it was born.
Children are innocent, unaware of the evil in this world, or at least they do not understand its full extent. They are telling the truth because they do not yet know how much you could possibly gain by telling lies, by betraying others.
As teeangers, they lost that kind of innocence by making their experiences in this world, but still there is something left in them.
Of course, there is sexual innocence... But the one that is more important is the innocence about love. When we are young, we believe that love is something like magic, we don't know that it can also hurt us in the deepest parts of our souls. That it can break people apart because they loved too much.
And then, there is another kind of innocence. The one that stays with some people until their dying day. Innocence about violence.
We may be hurting people in our surroundings verbally, but that does not mean we are loosing it. This innocence can only be lost by raising your hand against someone – or by killing someone.
As mentioned, many of us never loose this innocence.
But some of us do.
Out of pure malice, because they find joy in causing pain and grief.
Or out of a situation in which things slipped out of their control.
Regardless due to which situation the innocence is lost, some things are sure about all kinds of innocence – it never stays and you cannot truly restore it once it is lost.
oOo
Horrible screams of pain and fear filled the castle of Hogwarts. Curses were flying through the air, hitting some of the combatants or, if they missed their target, rebounded from the stone walls.
The floor was covered in debris where curses had exploded and shattered the walls and ceilings. Here and there, limp bodies were lying on the ground, people stepping and stumbling over them while paying more attention to their opponents than to where they were placing their feet.
This all seemed like a nightmare to Fay Dunbar.
She was at the edge of the battlefield in the Great Hall, barely involving herself into the combat because she felt like she did not know what to do first, or better: which friend, which classmate to support first.
To her left, she could see Lavender Brown running from something or someone, her face warped in horror, on her right her best friend Leandra was trying to oppose a Death Eater.
Fear was so prominent inside of herself that she was wondering why her legs were still obeying her instead of shaking like hell.
Never in her life had she ever been so afraid, but that surely was normal for an ordinary student like her – having to fear for your naked life was not something that happened to you every day.
A piercing scream sliced the air apart and Fays eyes widened in horror as she saw her classmate Lavender being pushed onto the floor by Fenrir Greyback, who attacked the girl within the same second.
How could all of this be real?! They were students, teenagers, they were at the beginning of their lifes, but still she could see her classmates dying in front of her eyes. Being killed for a cause that was so much bigger than the world they were used to.
They should not be worrying if they would see the sun rise again tomorrow, they were way too young.
Fay was ripped back into reality by a curse zooming by just a hand-width from her ear and she had to block another one within the next second.
As she found herself being attacked while her friend Leandra was struck down by a Stunning Spell and in the far corner, Greyback lifted his head and wiped Lavenders blood from the corners of his mouth, something snapped in her.
Where she had felt practically numb a few moments ago, surprised and stunned by the things that happened around her, feelings were rushing down at her in one huge wave.
Despair about all of this made her short breaths come out even more shakily while helplessness flooded her body as she saw out of the corner of her eye how yet another student from her year was knocked off his feet and was left lying on the floor.
She feared that something like this could happen to her too. That the man in front of her would knock her out without thinking about how young she still was, that he had a barely seventeen year old girl in front of him.
Somehow, her fear gave her strength and she found the courage to refrain from only blocking the spells the Death Eater aimed at her.
"Stupefy!"
Her voice sounded surprisingly steady to her and she could not believe her eyes at first as her spell actually hit the man in the stomach and did send him to the ground, unconscious.
"Fay, watch out!," she suddenly heard Leandra scream weakly. The young Gryffindor took her gaze away from the man she had just stunned only to see another one approaching her, wand at the ready, a cruel grin on his face.
And in this moment, she realised it. These people did not care at all how old their opponents were, not in the slightest. They were killing them, taking away the future of young people because they were here, trying to help to defend things that were important to them. To defend their future.
This was all so confusing, she could not catch a clear thought... And when she had to dodge a jet of green light coming towards her and came face to face with a blankly staring Colin Creevy lying on the floor only a step away, it seemed like she lost control over herself.
"No...," she whispered and her vision blurred slightly. Rage was rising inside of her, hot and thick and only a second from exploding. Never had she felt like this, so angry, so ready to hurt...
And that all because she felt so horribly helpless. Friends of her were dying all around her and there was nothing she could do to save them. She did not have the skills to make any big impact on this battle, she was barely able to defend herself here...
But as the man who had hurt Leandra, her best friend who was like a sister to her, approached her, it was like her body was acting without her mind navigating it.
"Don't ya worry, kitty, I will deal with you after I killed your little friend here," the man grinned, addressing Leandra while fixing his eyes on Fay.
Fay did not sense how her wandhand rised, she did not actually know where the determination and power for her next move came from. Everything happened so fast... And the only thought she could really catch was:"Not my friends. Not more."
Her lips moved in a scream without her actually intending to and it was as if she heard her own voice from a great distance as it voiced the words that she had never ever dreamed of of coming out of her mouth:"Avada Kedavra!"
oOo
Fay did not know what had happened after that.
The last thing she remembered when she woke up was herself watching how a stream of green light had erupted from the tip of her wand and hit the man right in the chest. He had looked at her with such surprise in his formerly cruel eyes... And when his dead body had hit the floor, everything around her had went black too.
The fighting was over, somebody told her, the whole war was over. While she had been unconscious, Voldemort had been killed by Harry Potter.
The good side had won.
But all that did not seem to matter to her.
All she could think about was what she had done.
It was hard to believe, even for herself, that she, a normally quiet, nearly shy person, had been capable of killing someone. It took will to perform the Killing Curse.
The thought that she had wanted to kill scared Fay horribly. How could she have lost control like that?!
She had been defending herself, but how on earth had this happened? Fighting to defend yourself was one thing, but killing was completely different.
Her emotional memory seemed to be wiped blank, it was as if somebody else had controlled her body during this split second.
No matter how much she thought about it, she could not explain it to herself. Was there something evil buried inside of her? What if... what if she could easily become such a ruthless person like those they had been fighting?!
It was as if something had shattered inside of her. She knew that she would never be the same person again, that she had changed because of what she had done. It was happening, without her even wanting it to.
In the first hours after waking up, she felt completely nothing about that incident, as if she was not human any more – a condition that made her fear even bigger.
But as Leandra was suddenly running across the Entrance Hall to pull her into a ribcrushing hug, everything returned.
At first, it was if guilt wanted to overwhelm her, and she started to cry, not able to think of something else than the fact that she had killed a man, that she had ended a life. Leandra had had to sling her arms around her to support her, otherwise she would have collapsed, sobbing uncontrollably.
It took her some time to realise that Leandra was trying to say something to her, a concerned expression on her face as she talked to Fay without her really hearing her.
Only slowly her best friends voice drifted into her focus of attention and she had to repeat her words until Fay was understanding their meaning:"Fay, you saved me! You saved more of us than you know! Look at me! You saved me!"
In this moment, Fay was still doubting if it had truly been an act of love and friendship to kill this Death Eater. Of course, he had threatened to kill someone she saw as family... but was that enough to awaken such rage inside of someone that they were acting like they were not themselves any more?
Some days had had to pass and many people had to counsel her until Fay could finally start to realise that she did not have to fear that she was somehow turning evil.
Even though it always sounded wrong at first, she eventually accepted that it had been love she had acted on, a love that only showed itself in the most dangerous situations. It had been her determination to protect loved ones that had enabled her to perform the Killing Curse, she had been acting on her intuition.
Slowly, day after day, she started to understand it all. She started to live with it and a tiny bit of herself felt happiness every time she looked at Leandra.
But still, the guilt about having killed somebody, even though he was a killer himself, did never disappear. Sometimes it even grew so powerful that she could not look into the mirror any more. The face of this man haunted her in her sleep in those times.
And still she felt like she had lost a part of herself in the moment the words had sprung over her lips.
Her innocence.