A/N: Written for the Bingo Card Drabbles Competition, medium Card 10: Cedric Diggory, and for Ashleigh's monthly competitions, January: Choose a scene - any scene - from the series and write it as if everyone lives in a Muggle world. I think it's obvious which scene I picked. :D
In the Back of a Truck
Cedric awoke to a kick to the side and a muffled grunt.
He didn't move a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the dim lighting. The scent of burning rubber accompanied the screeching of two very different materials battling for dominance, and the floor beneath him shook. He could make out the yellow from cracks that made a rectangle – no, two, he realised after a pause. Two rectangles joined together, as though they were the outlines of doors that opened outwards.
He looked the other way, seeing Harry looking sickly green even in the almost non-existent light. He was sitting up, leaning against one wall with injured leg drawn up and held tight. The other foot's shining buckle caught the light that seeped through cracks in the door; Cedric supposed it was that foot that kicked him.
He opened his mouth: to ask where they were, how they were, why they were – but then the vehicle screeched to a stop and they were both thrown to the other end with two unequal thumps and a cloud of dirt – dirt from the Football Pitch, from its…unique smell.
Harry stifled a cry of pain as his injured leg crashed against Cedric's, and Cedric mumbled an apology as he tried to find a hold.
The doors slammed open before could, and Cedric and Harry were both momentarily blinded. There was a cry of shock – not Harry's, Cedric noticed – and then a click and a bang.
Cedric caught the image of the short mousy-haired man and his smoking gun before his vision blacked out. He heard Harry's scream – though his words were garbled, indistinct and quickly swallowed by the lonely dark. He didn't feel anything though; nothing, not even the cold steel wall he'd touched mere seconds before.
He definitely did not feel his body hitting the dirt-coated truck floor with a soft thump, nor did he feel his body dragged out of the truck – by Harry, holding his wrist because he just couldn't let go – until a living man would have been tender and bruised all over. And he didn't feel the soft fingers brushing his eyelids closed hours later, when the police and the teachers had caught up after the kidnapping from underground – the kidnappers cleverly digging under the soft earth that made their prided Football Pitch and setting the entrance to open up the moment someone lifted the Cup.