The day I died has never been clear to me. It comes back to me in little bits and pieces— singular scenes that I connect, so maybe over time I'll be able to recall the entire day.
Sometimes it's memories: walking through the Forbidden Forest with Scorpius and looking at the trees, gaze lighting on the one just the right height for my plan. Or, more rarely, I see it in the third person. Blue fingers scrabbling at a not-quite-tight-enough noose in that fleeting moment of regret, before they drop to my sides as death takes hold and the inevitable rigor mortis begins to set in.
Today, it's a sound. Worse than nails on a chalkboard, or a fork scraping against an empty dinner plate. No, it's the soft yet ear-splitting sound of fragile vertebrae crushing and the choked gurgle that emits from a collapsing trachea in the final breath. It would be enough to send a shiver down my spine, if I had one.
I'm still in the in between, stuck between the living realm and Eternity. It's the same plane that holds people who were murdered, and the souls of people who got the Dementor's Kiss. Nobody talks here, even though we're perfectly capable. We just stare into the living realm longingly. These are the broken souls, the ones with scars deep enough that they won't be able to enjoy the bliss Eternity offers on the other side. When I get bored of watching my family on the living side, I watch the ones who pass through into Eternity. Occasionally, there will be one that is stopped. They stream in one after the other, gliding easily through this realm until they reach the end. Suddenly somebody will stop, and block up the divide kicking and screaming like a wee child until one of us is kind enough to guide them over to where we stand and gaze down upon the ones who are mourning us.
Sometimes, that's why we get stuck. Somebody Living can't let go, and we can't pass through until they die or move on.
The old lady who led me away from the divide is the only one who I've ever heard speak, besides the newcomers. Her name is Edna, and she was beaten to death by a drunk in the subway. Her brother has been in denial for six years, and she's still waiting to cross over.
For me, I think it's Scorpius.
Lily was the first to let go. When it got to much, she Obliviated all her memories of me. The charm was administered improperly, and she's in St. Mungo's now, without even a memory of her own name. James doesn't talk about me, and I'm starting to think he pretends I never existed.
Mum and Dad held on for six months before they stopped completely. Sometimes Mum still cries, or has a nightmare, and Dad holds her through it and they will whisper something funny they remember about me that would make me flush if I was capable. Dad went back to work and got caught up in other people's deaths, and soon it was like I had only been a filler chapter in a very long book.
Scorpius goes and sits by the tree where they found me every day, rain or shine. He talks to me, and I hear him, but I can't reply. His voice is no longer smooth, but uneven and quiet, and it's rough against my ears in a way that reminds me of a snowball smacking against my face.
In the trunk of my tree, he's carved our initials, like something they do on the Muggle soaps Grandma Weasley watches. He looks more and more like his father every day, and acts like him less and less. When I died, he only had one scar, on his thumb from an angry Doxy. Now, he's got six more, identical to mine, little lines marking up his wrist that are too symmetrical to be the cat scratch he says they are.
When I died, he took three of my tee shirts. He wears them to bed most nights, or sleeps with one of them clutched against his chest when it's too hot in the summer. On what would've been my seventeenth birthday last week, he wore one under his robes.
James has the sweater Grandma knitted for me two Christmases past, even though it's too small. He takes it out of his closet sometimes and smiles the way you smile during a sad movie. His dark eyes, the same hazel brown as Mum's, sparkle with unshed tears. He brings it to the hospital sometimes, trying to jog Lily's memory. She doesn't remember a thing, and it just confuses her more.
Sometimes Mum lays in my bed and whispers apologies to me, about how she was never a good enough mother. She curls up in my blankets, fisting my sheets, and lets herself cry for a few short minutes. Her orangey hair splays out over my pillow, like pumpkin juice spilled on a white tablecloth. I think this is how she managed her grief without breaking down, but it's so unlike her I just want to slap her and tell her to snap out of it. The mum I had would never be meek and apologetic. My mum wouldn't beg for forgiveness from somebody dead.
Aunt Hermione has a photograph of me in her desk drawer that she looks at when she's by herself. She doesn't cry, just stares for a moment before slipping it back under the stack of Post-It notes. Uncle Ron knows it's there, and sometimes he sneaks into her office and does the same thing when Hermione's not around. She knows that Ron has found it, and she pretends she doesn't notice when it's absent.
Scorpius hardly talks to anybody, save for his father and mother. They pulled him out of school when his grades started slipping, and mostly he just sits in the woods by my tree. More than once, he's gone out there with a potent sleeping potion, ready to drink the whole bottle, then dumps it on the ground and watches it seep into the dirt. He's caught in the in between, just like me. Stuck between life and death, indecisive of what he wants.
Dad comes to my room and finds my wand. He shoots curses at random things, then the counter curses, then he dissolves to tears in my closet. He's tall enough that if he sits on the floor, his head vanishes into the robes hanging above him. One day, he found my blades. He Banished them, then cried because there isn't a way to bring back Banished objects.
Scorpius climbed my tree on a sunny Wednesday morning. He sat in the thick boughs, straddling the branch that I had dangled from before I was found. He had a bag of Paracetamol on his pocket, something he'd bought at a Muggle pharmacy. He didn't use them, just threw them into the trees and traced his finger over a notch in the bark. Then he sat there for a long time, and cried.