Another random ficlet I wrote tonight, after shoving on my Goblet DVD and getting to the bit where Cedric dies (sadly, not as sad in the film as in the book by a LONG shot) then wondering how it looks from HIS point of view.
It's a strange feeling to arrive at the grand old age of seventeen and suddenly discover that your grandmother has been lying to you for your entire life. Not maliciously, by any means - not even intentionally. Merely ignorantly, naively. It's odd to find out the hard way that the glorious afterlife isn't so glorious.
My entire life I half believed the words that would slip from a small pinched mouth slackened with age - I would tuck them discreetly into my pockets when no one was looking and peruse them later, on my own in bed at night. I would listen as she slid boiled sweets into my eagerly receiving mouth and told me of the wondrous things that awaited me after my death. I had no reason not to believe what my grandmother told me, not even when I later asked my father about Heaven and Hell. He took my face in his calloused hands and chuckled as he discredited what she had told me.
'There is nothing after you die, Ced. Your body becomes dust and that's that.'
I felt the shape of his words, ran my tongue over the sharp edges of them and I spat them back. The idea of returning to dust and nothingness failed to sate my delicate hopes as satisfactorily as did my grandmother's tales of cherubic choirs and everlasting peace. As strange as her ideologies seemed, as farfetched as they sounded even to my young ears, I clung to them to quell the fear of my inevitable demise. Her misguided revelations provided me with a ready-made safety net, and I had no need to contemplate what might happen later. I had no reason to confront the fragility of my mortality, and so I never did. I simply accepted my grandmother's words almost as gospel, and went on with the process of living.
And as I felt the edges of this world fray and I slipped through the torn seam, I still believed her. I looked around with hungry eyes, ready to drink in the beauty that I was sure would surround me.
I saw nothing.
Initially I was unsure what had happened. After all, your own death is not something with which you are daily confronted, and consequently my mind, confused and disbelieving, was closed to reality. I did not, would not, accept that I had died. But there is something about seeing a crumpled body, spread-eagled in the dust, and feeling the inescapable knot of truth sledgehammer into you, unforgiving and relentless.
I lingered only momentarily, but it was enough.
In life I was something of an innocent. I believed in purity. Honesty. I tried to see the good in everyone. Issues like death and torture, evil and violence - these were simply not in my vocabulary. I avoided them and pretended they did not exist.
In death, there is no such pretending. Death cracks the sturdiest of masks, ripping down all veils. In death, everything is stark, and real, and close up. In death, I am no longer an innocent.
The worst part was not the dying, as you might think. Avada Kedavra in as painless a death as anyone could hope for. It leaves no mark on the corpse of the victim. The life is simply expelled from their body. For me, one of the worst parts was thinking of what I had left behind.
I thought of my mother, and every pained tear I pictured on her beautiful face was like a fracture along the seam of my heart.
I thought of my father, and how I had disappointed him. I thought of all the things I had wanted to tell him, to ask him, and now never could.
But the very worst part, the part I would erase from my mind if I only could forget the image which is seared like a brand into my memory, was seeing what I had left behind.
It wasn't right. I watched him leaning over my empty body and I heard his dry sobs, and my heart ached for this boy, not yet a man, who had been through so much. It wasn't right that a boy of fourteen should see so much death. The last that I saw as I faded away into the void was a cluster of shadowy, death-clad figures approaching him, and then I was cast unwillingly into the ether.
My father was right. There is nothing after death. I drifted aimlessly through the shadows for a long time - that is, I assume it was a long time.
Time itself has no substance in the ether. I was entirely alone. And I had all the time in the world to think about all the things I'd refused to so vehemently in life.