Disclaimer: As always, the world is not mine, only this particular play within it.
A/N: Just a little something that popped into my head after seeing the OotP movie; I reeeeeeaaaallly liked how they did the Veil. Please hit the little button at the bottom and review; I like to see what other people think.
The Girl Who Heard Death
"It would just be-"
"Absolutely not! This is no place for children, Hawkins!"
"Just once, please-"
"No."
"I don't have anyone else to-"
The Ministry provides a daycare for its employees."
"They close before my shift is over. Please, Gossett!"
Ketheriel hadn't known then how much it had cost her father to plead for her sake, but she had heard the low anguish in his voice, a voice still cracked and raw from copious weeping. She had seen his head bow and his hands clench into fists at his sides, but hadn't given it much thought. After all, there were all those neat little paper airplanes flying overhead.
Louisa Gossett put her hands on her ample hips and studied her subordinate with resignation. She'd been an Unspeakable for over thirty years and she was proud of her post as Supervisor of the After Squad. She hadn't gotten there by being soft. It wasn't that she didn't have sympathy for Hawkins, she did; the man had just lost his wife, after all. She understood his difficulties in suddenly having to raise his daughter on his own. But the Department of Mysteries was no place to bring a child!
With a sigh, she glanced down the entrance hall at the child in question. She sat perfectly still on the edge of the lesser of the great fountains, her hands clasped in her lap. Though her feet dangled a foot or more above the ground, she didn't kick. As far as she could tell, the child hadn't moved at all in the half-hour since her father had told her to sit there. Only her wide lavender eyes showed any sign of life, tracking the memos flying overhead. Well, she decided reluctantly, at least the chit was well-behaved.
So Ketheriel Hawkins started accompanying her father to work. A day became a week, a week became a month, until her presence was entirely unremarkable. Despite Gossett's initial misgivings, her good behavior didn't change in the slightest. The nine year old made a nest in the corner of the main office, occupying herself out of everyone's way with books or drawings. She only bothered the adults when she had to ask one of them to please walk her to the lavatory, which she did so politely that none could begrudge her the interruption.
In time, Gossett even came to pity the poor girl. Her black mourning robes were too adult and elegant for a child, and she had her suspicions that Hawkins had merely shrunk his wife's clothing for his daughter. She was her mother in miniature, right down to the pale blonde hair and delicate nose, and exacerbating the comparison couldn't be healthy for either father or daughter. In truth, it could only wreak havoc in the years to come. From time to time, when she saw the child from the corner of her eye, Gossett considered transferring Hawkins to a department that didn't study death and afterwards. He was running from his grief, burying himself in work, but then, another supervisor might not be so understanding.
"The Minister is coming to inspect the Department," Gossett announced one day, pointedly not looking in Ketheriel's corner. "Everything must be perfectly to regulation in this office."
So, without saying a word about it, the office decided to hide Ketheriel. They'd picked up her nest of blankets, her lunchbox, her books, her parchment, her quill, her crayons, and walked out the door. Ketheriel followed them without question, dragging her large, purple stuffed dragon by the tail.
"Now, Theri," her father told her, kneeling to look her in the eye. "If you need someone, come get me, but otherwise stay in this room. And don't touch anything."
She nodded gravely. It was a department-wide rule, one far older than she was. If it isn't your job, don't touch it. Her father ushered her inside and closed the door firmly behind her, leaving her to look around curiously.
It was a large room, surprising given how little was in it. Stone benches filled the floor in concentric circles, leading down to the raised stone dais at the bottom of the pit. Ignoring her nest, Ketheriel walked slowly down to the center of the room, clutching Saint George's tail a little tighter for courage. Her father had reminded her not to touch anything but there was no rule against looking.
The arch was obviously very old, so old that the edges were crumbling and falling away. It seemed like it would collapse with very little assistance, and she wondered briefly why they hadn't supported it if it was important enough to have so much space to itself. A thin silver-black curtain hung from the top of the arch, disappearing in the weathered stone without any visible means of creation or suspension. It was sheer, but she couldn't trust her perception of what she saw through it, not with the way the veil was rippling, like there was a wind she couldn't feel.
And it was talking.
With the scholastic meticulousness of her Ravenclaw mother, she corrected her own observation, scanning the room to see if anything else was affected by the strange breeze. She couldn't tell if the arch was talking or if it was merely the path by which the voices traveled. Either way, though, there were definitely voices, voices that murmured in swells that rose and crested against the silence, receding to whispers that she barely heard. Individual words were indistinguishable in the muted tumult but she knew instinctively that it was not just meaningless sound, it was speech. She knew the sound had meaning, even if she didn't know what that meaning was.
Ketheriel wanted to understand.
Skipping back up to the door, she retrieved her blankets and returned to the dais to make a new nest before the arch. After some consideration, she adjusted the placement, changing it several times before she was satisfied. She was near enough to hear to choir of voices, but not so near that she could be brushed with the more violent flutterings of the tattered hanging. She sank down into her nest, settling the stuffed dragon in her lap, and listened.
She was still sitting there when her father came to collect her after the inspection, many hours later. Her chin rested atop Saint George's head, giving the dragon a squashed, almost worried expression. Violet eyes, always a little too large for her face, stared distantly past the arch.
Anael Hawkins recognized that look. He'd seen it all too often on his wife's face when she stared into flames, or still pools of water, or spirals of dust suspended in eddies of wind. He'd seen it when she woke up trying to decipher the dreams still lurking on the backs of her eyelids. Anael had long suspected that his daughter had inherited far more than an echo of her mother's Visions but it was still disconcerting to see that far away look on her face.
"Ketheriel!" he called loudly, purposefully snapping her out of her reverie.
She blinked sluggishly, turning to look at him with questioning eyes. "Papa?"
"Time to go, Theri."
She smiled slightly, a tiny quirk of the lips that was practically a belly-laugh in his undemonstrative child. "Can you hear them?"
"Hear-?" He frowned, wanting to go to her but not wanting to go any closer to the enigmatic arch. He'd always hated this room. Since his very first day as an Unspeakable, he'd avoided this room as much as humanly possible, avoided the goose-bumps that shivered up and down his arms and spine each time he saw the fluttering scrap of fabric. The benefit to hiding her here had been that Minister Fudge hated the place almost as much as he did. "It's only us here."
"I know, but can you hear them?"
"There's nothing to hear, Theri," he said firmly. "Now come. It's time to go home."
"But-"
"Ketheriel!"
She fell silent, standing and shaking out her blankets. Her mind was racing even as she took Saint George by the tail and obediently followed her father from the room.
Her father couldn't hear the voices.
But he couldn't see thestrals, either.
For some reason, her mind told her that was a very important connection to draw, even if she didn't understand why yet. She resolved to remember it, so she could figure it out when she was older and knew more.
Despite her father's dislike of the room, Ketheriel was back in front of the arch the next day, and the day after. It was the only obstinacy she'd ever shown and he quickly gave way before it. As soon as Supervisor Gossett found out the child could hear voices from the Veil, she'd given permission for Ketheriel to be there as much as she wanted. Hawkins had his questions, naturally, but the woman reminded him that he was assigned to ghosts, not the contents of that forbidding room.
In time, the child learned to distinguish individual words and voices. She couldn't do it all the time; sometimes there were just too many voices, all clamoring to be heard and none willing to give way to another. It was worst in the morning, when she first came into the room. Her head would pound with the chaos of sound, a sudden explosion of volume before the voices returned to their urgent murmurings.
They seemed to know when someone was listening. Occasionally, other Unspeakables from the After Squad would come in singly or in pairs to observe of perform tests. She was never entirely certain what they were looking for but she respectfully removed herself to the top of the amphitheatre while they went about their tasks. The voices got louder when she went farther from the Veil, as if they realized there was no one listening specifically to them. Gatry, a lean man with fierce, hawk-like features, always looked at her contemplatively when this happened, but never said anything. None of the others ever seemed to notice.
One quiet morning, when she'd been there for an hour or so, she heard something she'd never before heard within the chorus. She started violently from her meditative pose, Saint George falling from her lap to lie neglected on the rough stone floor. She stared at the fluttering fabric, uncertain of her own ears.
But no, there it was again. She got to her knees, impossible hope blooming in her eyes. "Mummy?"
"Ketheriel…"
There it was again, the barest whisper. The other voices were nearly silent, merely an accompaniment to the ethereal greeting.
"Mummy? Is that you?"
"Ketheriel…"
"Mummy? Mummy, where are you? Mummy!"
"Here, precious." The Veil shifted, somehow more solid, forming an undulating face, and echo of the face she saw every night in her dreams. "I'm here, Ketheriel."
"Mummy!" She shot to her feet, hand outstretched, but her mother's voice stopped her.
"No, Ketheriel, you must not touch it."
The child nodded obediently, hands falling to her sides to twitch at her elegant black robes, the robes that had once been her mother's. It was off to see the beautiful face pressing into the gauze, like a death mask or a long-dead pharaoh. Atalanta had been a stunning woman, the older image of the angelic child she'd produced. "I thought you were gone."
"Oh, I am, Theri, dear Ketheriel, I am. But here…"
Her eyes widened in sudden understanding. "Oh…"
Anael Hawkins was perhaps not the most observant man in the world when it pertained to his daughter, but even he noticed the difference in the quality of her silence that night. Louisa Gossett was aware of it, too, but only Gatry actually said aught about it.
"So you found her, lass?"
Gaze full of wonderment, she turned to him and nodded gravely.
"What do you mean?"
Rather than answer Hawkins, Gatry smiled to himself and strolled away.
The unsettling silence continued until they were standing before one of the great hearths to head home. "What did he mean, Theri? Who did you find?"
"Mummy says what you're doing isn't healthy," she told him quietly. "She's worried about you. And me," she added after a moment's reflection. "She says it isn't healthy and you ought to know better."
He dropped her hand like a hot poker, staring down at her with ill-disguised fear.
Ketheriel made no more mention of it, not even when she found a new lavender frock at the foot of her bed. Not even when she noticed that it was actually meant for a child.
But having found a place within her conscious understanding, the new discovery did not suddenly fade back into silence. They could still be awfully selfish sometimes, clamoring over each other, but it was increasingly often that they took upon themselves a measure of grace and patience. Gradually, she learned their stories, learned of the anguish and humor they took with them to the other side of the Veil.
For the first time since her mother's death, Ketheriel didn't feel lonely. She learned to distinguish the voices in the crowd, imprinting the varying timbres and patterns. She learned to find the differences in the faces that appeared in wind-blown curtain. After her father's poor reaction, she hadn't said anything to anyone else, keeping her secret safe within her customary silence.
It was to Gatry that she spoke, when she finally did. The notion had been troubling her for several days and she didn't know to whom else to turn. One of the voices had asked her to give a message to his nephew. It was a simple enough message but she just wasn't sure what the rules governing such a situation would be.
Gatry didn't answer at first, tugging at the long tawny ponytail draping over his shoulder. "Lie to them," he said finally. "Give them the comfort they long for, lass. They'll never find out differently."
"There's a reason, then? Why we can't do as they ask?"
His hunter's eyes raked over her appraisingly. "We're Unspeakables, lass. Secrets, mysteries…they're the very language we speak. The thing is, we don't really understand any of it."
"And to speak of what you don't understand is to invite disaster."
He chuckled dryly. "You'll be a dangerous woman."
She wasn't at all sure what that meant, nor did she ask. She had a feeling it would be one of those things that she was too young to understand.
Just before summer, there was a large uproar that sent the entire Department of Mysteries into a flurry of chaos and confusion. Sensing the atmosphere, she made no inquiry, though she was burning with curiosity. She was not allowed in the room with the arch and no one would tell her why. She did over hear Gatry insisting that 'the lass may be the only way to find out', but he and Gossett moved away as soon as he noticed her watching.
Slowly, in bits and pieces that she couldn't quite connect, she heard the stories. The brains unsettled and out of their tanks, Time offended against Nature, the entire Hall of Prophecy smashed…she'd seen for herself the damage to the entrance hall and the fountains. She wasn't sure what had occurred, but it was clear that the occasion was of the first magnitude, whatever it was.
More than a month passed in this fashion. She heard all the rumors, beginning to understand what some of them meant. Voldemort had returned, a battle had taken place within the Ministry itself.
Ketheriel sat moodily in her nest- restored to the corner of the - with an anxious Saint George curled into the crook of her neck. She was worried for those that lay beyond the Veil; had anyone explained this to them? She knew they weren't ghosts but she felt sure that they had a distinct awareness. Didn't her conversations with them prove that?
Finally, she couldn't stand the separation any longer and she asked Gatry to take her to the room. Her request startled him, but then got such a satisfied smile that she was sure he must have been hoping for just such a thing.
The room had been damaged but the arch stood as it ever had. For the first time in many months, the voices were truly mourning, tumultuous in their keening grief. She clapped a hand to her ears, looking her question up at the Unspeakable.
"You've understood by now quite was the Veil is?" he asked quietly, slowly walking down the steps with her. When she nodded, he continued. "We don't know how it functions, what decides which voices are heard, but we do know that a person needn't have any prior contact with it to yet appear within its nothingness."
"But something has changed?"
"Not exactly." He frowned, but not at her. "A man named Sirius Black was hit with the Killing Curse, Ketheriel, here in this very room. But his body…"
At his hesitation, she turned her attention back to the arch. He would speak, she knew, when he was ready, or not.
"There is no body, Ketheriel. Do you know what that means?"
"Mummy said I mustn't touch the Veil, nor let it touch me."
"Nothing like this has ever happened in this history of this department."
Clutching Saint George by the tail, the little girl walked the rest of the way with the purple stuffed dragon, leaving the Unspeakable at the bottom circle of benches. The tempest slowed, dimming to a less painful level, and her mother's face fluttered near the base of the Veil.
"Be brave, Ketheriel," she whispered. "Be strong."
And then another face appeared in the restlessly shifting fabric, a face that was gaunt and drawn. "Harry? Harry!"
"There isn't a Harry here."
The sunken eyes fixed on her. "Who are you?"
"My name is Ketheriel Hawkins," she replied politely. "And you?"
His answer was distracted, his gaze searching the room behind her. "Sirius Blac. Harry, where is Harry?"
"Harry?"
"Harry Potter. My godson, where is he?"
"At school, perhaps, or with his family."
"I am his family," he snarled. He broke off suddenly, staring at her. "You can…you can hear me!"
"Yes, I can hear you."
"Then you must tell him for me! Tell him that I'm sorry, that this isn't his fault. Tell him that there's nothing he could have done to prevent this. Tell him he isn't to blame. Tell him!"
Involuntarily, she glanced back at Gatry, her heart shaken by the shade's desperation.
The Unspeakable shook his head. "Lie," his mouth said, only no sound emerged.
Tears trembling on her lashes, she turned back to the Veil, to the commanding face. "I will," she told him, voice soft with pain. "I'll tell him, Mister Black."
"Thank you." His urgency gone, the face faded back into formlessness and a fluttering, ancient hanging. The voices welcomed him into their chorus.
"Be brave, Ketheriel," her mother whispered again. "Be strong."
Ketheriel suddenly understood why the Unspeakables were unspeakable; who in the world outside the door to the Department of Mysteries could comprehend the debt and the lie owed to the dead?
And who would be prepared to listen?
With the trust Saint George clutched comfortingly to her chest and Gatry watching thoughtfully from behind her, Ketheriel sank to the stone before the arch and made of herself a vessel in which the lost could find peace.