- Maya -
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. c h a p t e r e l e v e n .
Over and Over
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STOP.
This time, we're only going back a little.
Regret, I'd say, is a form of sorrow—a monster birthed from guilt, from irony, from death. I have always regretted.
I've regretted so intensely that I had believed, once, that if I screwed my eyes tight, if I closed away the world with all my might and pushed as hard as I could, and just wished, that I could bring back anything that was lost. That all those things that are unattainable, those promised delicacies that my life was graced with as a child, that I could reach those with sheer will. I wanted so badly that I would have given anything. I would have given everything.
When I opened my eyes, everything was still in flames. Ashes danced before me and the world shook, a great tremor rippling up through its fragile skeleton and rupturing the carefully crafted bones of existence. When I opened my eyes, all I saw was grey and red; there was no white and there was no black and there was no soft or careful or love. When I opened my eyes, I saw the truth.
That I would have to give everything if I wanted anything. And I couldn't just close my eyes and wait anymore; I had to dive forward into this ocean of monotones and scarlet reds while the high tide rose to colossal new peaks and I struggled to breathe. Straining and flailing and pushing would only move me inches further, yet I had to keep on, had to keep forward. It was the one thing that was important to me in this world.
Right now, these feelings—this nympholepsy of determined rage, this endless fervor and passionate devotion, this unending sacrificial need—they feel alien to me. I am confused. They are not new, yet my brain is flooded with a conundrum of opposition. They feel like some other person's wants, some outside being's undying fidelity. Then came the wash of guilt that poured over me like acid, and this too felt unfamiliar in the oddest of ways. Why did it hurt so much? I couldn't remember a time when the pain of my regret was so great, yet I knew it had been—I knew it in the depths of my mind and the reflections of my memories. Still, they screamed at me that this is different. This isn't what I think it is.
Something is wrong.
Again, we hiss, flitting through the dark; again, we say:
What is this terrible sense of foreboding?
See, though, now we go back. We're only going back a little. (Regret, I'd say, is a form of sorrow...)
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REWIND.
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PLAY.
Picture this: there are six children, and then there are five. The problem with this is simple.
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(There should be six of them, where's the last, why isn't she there?)
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This is familiar.
The catch of his lips, the trembling hands, the widened eyes, vacant, despairing—he howls her name to the heavens and both syllables echo without hindrance.
Yes, this is very familiar.
Desperation is gripping at him now, pulling from him the last shreds of hope and leaving them barren on the ground. I feel as if this is the part where he vomits and out spill all the words he wished he'd said but never had. The letters will crawl around like ants in a line, working together to form nonsense and wrap around the palms of his hands where the soft flesh meets the earth. His lungs will crumple up inside of him; his brain will burn like fire; his stomach will rot and mold and dissolve, and he will be in pieces. His face is filled with horror, with discovery, with terrible, tremendous sadness that grabs hold of him like a vice and tightens, and, oh God, it's so familiar that I can feel it in my very soul.
"GINNY!"
His voice rips through the air like shrapnel and plunges into everyone it passes. The silence pauses; the silence cries; the silence sings, and then the silence has ended.
Eventually we all have to remember that there is a battle around us.
This feels like war.
(This feels familiar. This feels like reaching out a hand that's unsteady and desperate, like a scream that yearns for a sibling, for a brother, for a mother, for family. For wanting and losing and never receiving, and oh no we've lost everything.)
There are five children where there should be six, and they are all looking at the same thing. Ron is a mass of quaking misery and has already wrenched the only sounds that could possibly accompany this scene from his own vocal chords, so the others say nothing. They stand one step behind the kneeling boy, fixed and rigid in the silence - loud, loud, loud, loud, loud, loud, loud, it's loud - then they break one at a time. In increments of the smallest unit they follow the youngest brother's example, and there are brothers surrounding her now (she is the sixth child, not where she's supposed to be, why isn't she there?), three of them, and they all bend at the seams in their anguish. There is a young woman dead. A child. A little girl...
...and it's my fault.
I couldn't even save one little girl.
It hurts even more the second time.
It's my fault. Because...
...I'd moved out of the way. That should have been me. That should have been me! I want to scream; I want to rip someone apart; I want Ron to fly from the ground and stab a dagger into my heart because this is horrifying and terrible and all my fault and that should have been me! I want to break every bone in every Death Eater's body. I want to lay on the ground by Ginny's side and have her rise from her stillness, reach out her hands and steal my breath. I want to give her back her life. I don't want to have to be the one who has taken it from her.
I wrench my eyes away from her unmoving form (she is so still that it frightens me. I can't watch her like this—I can't see her like this—I can't) and meet a pair of roving green eyes. Harry Potter meets my gaze, and it bores into me for a whole, long moment. I do not look away. I wait for accusation; I wait for reproach; I crave it. Blame me! I want to shake him, slap him, scream in his face, It should have been me! Yet I cannot read what he sees. I cannot know.
I burst forth then, an animal set on revenge, searching for prey with an inferno of rage flaring in its eyes. Whipping around wildly, I scan the area for any remaining Death Eaters. I'll fucking kill them. I'll drown them in their own fluids and tear their tongues from their mouths—I'll...
(This anger presses somewhere deep inside of me, and I feel a protest rising to the forefront of my mind. This isn't you. This isn't you. It is wrong, still; it is petrifying. It was, it it, it will be...)
...I'll drag them to hell and... and...
...they are all gone.
Every one of them.
With nothing left to direct my anger toward, I feel an enormous wave of exhaustion wrap around me. My body screams and my muscles cry and my heart clenches in manic, acute dysphoria. A recognizable sensation of vertigo and gut-wrenching nausea floods over me and I choke in response, my breath stopping somewhere on its way up my trachea and fleeing back to the realm of my diaphragm. When I fall, I hit the ground hard, and I can taste the iron in my mouth before I can even comprehend what the metallic tang means. It flows down my chin, spreading across the ground and edging slowly into my vision. And I think chastely about how much of a fuck-up I am—I couldn't even protect a little girl. That should have been me. Why isn't she there?—before the world fades away.
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(This feels like war.)
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Ever had that feeling? That feeling that something is going to go (terribly, hideously, irrevocably) wrong.
Then something goes wrong. But...
But the feeling doesn't go away. And when you awaken from your unwitting slumber of despair, it hits you at a new high. Dread is rising up in your throat; you are calling out for hope because it has abandoned you. You feel as if the world will shatter, because the sensation in the very pits of your soul is so ominous that you do not want to know what it will lead to.
...and Ginny has died, oh Ginny has died, and yet this feeling still remains. And...
And it comes in increments that are not steady and not easy and not regular and not incremental at all, really. It saturates you in doubt and remorse; it asphyxiates you with a horror-filled promise, a banshee's scream, a soulless breath, one... last... and then...
... And then I open my eyes. Then there are people all about me, and I am somewhere unfamiliar—though it could be familiar, and I would not be any surer—who were oblivious to my awakening. Then there are memories of bright red and flashing green and anguished cries and Ginny'sdeadbutitshouldhavebeenme.
But I realize with a start that the people around me are discussing... Me. Unaware of their new listener, they keep on, and my ears tune out the screams and the death to hear past the chaos to their words. This is important, I know it is.
"...murderer—" the word stuns me where I lay, and I know that if I had been standing I would have fallen. Murderer? Murderer? Murderer. Murderer!
"—he's not... He didn't mean to—! It wasn't his... No—it's... not... and..."
STOP.
This is the part where I stop listening, before I really begin to listen at all. This is the part where my mind is covered with large bold print, and the word murderer rings in my eardrums like the blare of a horn. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes.
Yes, this is where I stop listening. Yet if I would have listened then, I would have found out what would befall me much quicker, and possibly avoided some needless grief on my part.
This is when words like suspicious and death and Voldemort come into play. Where the accusations begin to fly and Malfoy is a Death Eater and we saw him with Edward is exposed to the light. There are eye witnesses that have seen me fraternizing with the enemy, so clearly I must have been planning this all along. Clearly I must have intended this to happen. I must hate the Weasleys, hate their guts—I must have killed their daughter out of pure spite. The spell must have never been for me—it was always for her, I had just accidentally been in the way, and only a bit. Maybe it wouldn't have hit me even if I hadn't moved. After all, it's a spell for redheads, isn't it? Made special for just that girl. Some vendetta I have has been nibbling away at me for countless hours now, enticing my murderous heart. This must be the truth.
The children are not allowed into the Order meetings.
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FAST FORWARD.
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Listen. Linger. Concentrate, please. You'll hear them whispering, in the echo chamber, the endless winding halls; you'll hear the omens sing.
What is this terrible sense of foreboding?
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PLAY.
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"There is a girl dead, Mister Elric. What do you have to say for yourself?"
"Nothing. I have nothing to say for myself. But I didn't kill her, I didn't want her... I didn't..." It should have been me. "I didn't kill her."
"Did you meet with Lucius Malfoy before the attack on Hogsmeade?"
"Yes, I did."
"And did you send word to the Death Eaters that the children were going to be taking a trip to Hogsmeade on the discussed weekend?"
"No! I don't even know who they are! You can't be seriously accusing me of this! It's ridiculous. I did not kill Ginny Weasley. I would never do that."
It's all my fault.
That should have been me.
Loud, loud, loud, loud, loud, loud, loud, it's loud.
Listen. Linger.
Concentrate, please.
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SLOW MOTION.
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My head lies against the wood of the desk, and my mouth is pulled into a straight, grim line. I eagerly follow each grain of the solid oak as they travel away from my hooded eyes. Anything to distract me, ease my worry, numb the distress, if only for a moment. The room is still (she was so still that it frightened me, I couldn't...) and quiet (the silence pauses, the silence cries, the silence...); an accommodating familiarity washes over me and I bless my luck that I be in this room at this moment. That I should have an opportunity to calm myself and put everything into perspective. For what awaits me, in the near future, I am sure will be disastrous. Trouble has a way of following me around, no matter where I went...
...and Goddamnit all must I always get other people involved?
The terrible cruelty of it all rings true in my mind, but I know I have no right to complain. This is because it appears that despite all of my inauspicious luck, I am the one who Fate decides to spare. So many times I should have died, it should have been me, and instead someone else suffers for my mistakes. I can't stand this; this hand that Truth has dealt me is another form of suffering entirely. Deciding that in this life I should watch again and again as those around me fall, and I am powerless to do anything about it.
But no—I am not powerless. I could have done something. That should have been me, right? And... And there were a million things I could have done, a thousand ways I could have saved that girl's life, but I failed in every possible way.
Like always, a whisper calls from the back of my head, trudging enthusiastically to the forefront of my conscious thought, like always. Failure. Alone. It's all your fault.
I haven't even comprehended my own movement until the loud SMACK of my right fist splintering my desk reaches my own ears. Sitting up, startled, I stare long and hard at the place where my knuckles have impacted the wood. The pain lances through me immediately after, and I wonder at my desk. Where there should be a compressed dent of fury, splintering cracks, peaking slivers rising out of the oak...there is only dead skin and the slightest glimmer of blood. Slowly, I raise my hand up before my face, and for a moment the fingers look alien to me. Too long, too real, too fleshy, too scraped with the rue of the desk's silent wrath. Touch me again, I picture it hissing, I'll eat your knuckles and suck on your bones.
Shaking my head does nothing to help, and only serves to make me increasingly dizzy. Gripping at the arms of my chair I steady myself, glaring out at the empty desks that sit like silent sentinels on the opposite end of the room. There are alchemy circles scattered about, and for a brief moment I feel like rising from my perch and simply tearing everything in this room apart. Alchemy has done nothing but make people suffer, cause harm, bring me here.
Then I take a deep breath and remember, remember that that is the whole point behind everything. Alchemy is beautiful, grounding; it is a miracle waiting to happen, and that it should be used for any intention other than good is horrible. But that's what I have to change. That's what I have to turn around. Alchemist, be thou for thy people.
Yet... I let her die.
A frustrated scream tears from my lungs and I fall from the chair in a spurt of boundless madness, launching my arms outward and losing my already precarious balance almost instantly. "Shit!" I yell, as I hit the floor hard and lay there. I don't dare to move. There is a lump in my throat, one that I cannot find the strength to swallow around, and there is a fire kindling behind the veiled walls of each of my individual sinuses.
Yes, this is very familiar.
I have to be strong. I have to be strong.
That I would have to give everything if I ever wanted anything.
I want, I want so much. I want to take back everything I have done. I want to redo my life from the start, not to disappoint, not to fail, not to make mistakes. I want them all to live—everyone who had died. I want to take their place, offer up my meager existence so that they may have a minute to be again. I want to fix everything. I want so badly.
No. But—no.
I couldn't even save one little girl.
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[Three hours, twenty nine minutes.]
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