Because I love Mad-Eye, and his death was so silly and pointless, and I'm in denial.
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Liberty
Liberty Jones, paramedic and aspiring alcoholic, dropped her bag by the front door, her other hand reaching up to flick on the lights. She felt a little better with the darkness held at bay, and made her way through the living room toward the kitchen, switching on lights as she went. Even as a child, she had never feared the dark or any unnamed thing that might lurk in it. Even after years as a medic, once the nightmares had started, she had seldom been bothered by the night. Lately, though, with the strange things that had begun happening with increasing frequency, injuries and deaths she couldn't even comprehend, let alone treat, the darkness of her room had thrown her into a blind panic, and she had taken to sleeping with the lights on.
She would turn them off in the morning, when she left to run errands before her shift.
Tugging the refrigerator door open, she retrieved a beer bottle from the shelf and twisted it open. She lifted it and drained a long gulp before collapsing into a chair, closing her eyes. She pressed her eyelids closed as tightly as she could, but it was not enough to hold back the tears. It never was. She opened her eyes again, staring at the open bottle on the table before her, wishing it were enough to erase the horrors of the last few weeks from her mind. It never was.
Tonight had been the worst yet. It began with three men in the bus station simply dead, with no sign of trauma except the looks of unspeakable pain and horror on their faces. She would never forget those expressions, those silent screams. Almost as soon as they had cleared the scene, dispatch had sent them across town to a family who had been—no. Her mind stopped. The mutilation was too horrible for words. And on it went, on top of the unusual number of car crashes and other accidents that somehow felt not quite accidental. The ambulance service in this parish had never been so busy.
The flashes of light outside her window caught her attention, momentarily banishing the morbid parade of images from her mind. She had moved out here into the boondocks to escape from the noise and lights of the city, but it seemed there was no peace to be had these days. The news stories of strange lights in the sky briefly occurred to her, and as curiosity overcame prudence, weariness, and alcohol, she stood, moving toward the door.
Her hand brushed the light switch as she passed, engulfing her kitchen in darkness before she eased the back door open, peering cautiously around the doorframe and up to the dazzling show in the sky above. Four dark figures, too large to be birds, too low and too small to be aircraft, swooped and dodged through the black and silver sky, flashes of brilliantly colored light or showers of sparks erupting between them. Two of the dark figures seemed to be chasing the other two. As she watched, one of the apparently pursued seemed to simply vanish. A moment later, one of the pursuers also simply ceased to be.
One of the remaining two figures swooped lower to dodge a flare of green, returning with a spray of red sparks, but the other figure pursued. She saw a flash of blue engulf the fleeing figure, and then the black outline of a falling man plummeted earthward. Although she would deny if afterward, had anyone asked, she screamed. The air just beneath the dark form seemed to lighten for a moment, and then the falling bulk slammed into her compost heap at the edge of the lawn, missing the fence with its sharpened wooden pickets by less than a foot.
Above her, the third figure vanished as the first had done, but she never saw it happen. She dashed across the lawn, feet crunching on the dry grass toward the dark, still bulk of something undeniably human and barely alive.
He lay sprawled atop the compost heap, a large man in a strangely old-fashioned cloak, one arm twisted at an impossible angle beneath him. One leg jutted out abnormally, but at a glance it proved to be a rather odd prosthesis. The light of the storm lantern revealed blood from a wound high on one cheek, covering one side of the man's face and obscuring features ravaged by terrible scars. One eye stared sightlessly up at the empty night sky; the other socket lay empty save for shattered bone and pooling blood.
She would be sick later.
The open eye moved toward her as she approached, and the man moaned faintly.
"I'm a paramedic," she said, putting as much reassurance in her voice as she could muster. "I'll help you until the ambulance gets her to take you to a hospital. Just hold on, I've got to go get my kit." She was already moving toward the house as she said the words, but the hand weakly gripping her ankle stopped her.
"Muggle…" The faint word made no sense, and she dismissed it. "No… hospital… no…" She muttered a curse, knowing she could do nothing if he refused treatment, and knowing equally that if she did nothing, the man would surely die; he might die anyway. Before she could protest, his hand fell away from her ankle, limp, and the single narrowed eye closed as consciousness fled the battered body. Whirling toward the house, she sprinted toward the door.
Barely a minute later, she returned. Dropping her kit, she knelt at the man's shoulder. She could see no rise and fall of chest that might indicate breathing, and she weighed the options in less time than it would have taken to put her reasoning into words; after a fall like that, his back might be injured. Even the slightest movement could sever the spinal cord and kill or paralyze him. If he continued not breathing, though, he was dead anyway. "Nothing to lose," she muttered. She cupped one hand around the back of his head, lightly placing her other two fingers beneath his chin, and gingerly tilted his head back, leaning down to place her ear alongside his mouth, straining to catch the faintest trace of a breath.
Silence.
Her fingers felt his throat, just below the jawline, and she was grateful for the gloves as they slipped in the blood trickling down from his cheek. Her mouth set in a grim line, she waited for a pulse.
Stillness.
You do not—she recalled the words from a book she had once read—give up on a human being simply because he has stopped breathing.
She reached back for her kit, her fingers instinctively finding what she sought, a masklike device with a one-way valve, which she sealed over the lower half of his face before pinching his nose shut and exhaling into the valve.
Even before becoming a paramedic, she had kept one of these and a set of gloves on her at all times; having some passed-out drunk throw up in one's mouth a time or two usually spelled the end for rash acts of humanitarianism.
Turning her head, she watched his chest rise with the breath. A pause, and she blew in another breath. The man's chest rose once, fell, and was still.
No surprise. It was never this quick. Usually, she remembered an instructor telling her, if you have to resort to this, they're already gone, but you do it anyway, because sometimes it works.
Straightening, she placed the heel of her hand over his sternum, well above the xiphoid process, and the other hand came to rest atop the first, fingers interlocking, and she pushed down with all her weight. She was a small woman, albeit sturdy for her size, and chest compressions usually meant nearly falling on the victim in order to accomplish anything, especially with a big fellow like this one.
The ribs broke with a crack and a sickening sensation of sudden give with her second stroke, and her job became only moderately easier.
Fifteen compressions later, she checked his pulse once more. Still nothing, no trace of life. Two more breaths, and he lay still.
Three cycles later, she cursed herself for not ordering an AED sooner.
Seven cycles later, she pondered why she had not taken the time to call for help. She told herself she had panicked, but she knew better; Liberty never panicked. It had been the sudden fear in the man's eyes at the mention of the hospital, a fear even greater than the knowledge of his own coming death.
Ten cycles later, she wondered when he would stop being the victim and qualify as the corpse. Her arms ached.
Eleven cycles later, she knew she could stop only when she collapsed. She wondered how long that would be.
Twelve cycles later, her fingers at his carotid artery felt a faint jump that slowly steadied into a pulse, and his chest swelled suddenly with a ragged breath that devolved into a fit of coughing.
She met his wild, wary one-eyed gaze with an almost giddy grin. "Welcome back to the land of the living."
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AN: Oh, yes, there will be more.