Challenge 014: Cold Smile
Characters/Pairings: George Weasley
Timeframe: Post Deathly Hallows Battle
They all hold hands and dance in circles.
Zig, zig, zag. You can see in the crowd
The king dancing among the peasants.
But hist! All of a sudden, they leave the dance,
They push forward, they fly; the cock has crowed.
Oh what a beautiful night for the poor world!
Long live death and equality!
- La Danse Macabre
Bodies lay recumbent in the main hall. Fifty or more gazing blankly at the bewitched ceiling, indifferent to the weather. Outside in the dark grounds the grass was still flattened where fallen warriors (children, dead in their pajamas) had lain.
If ever you've walked in an old graveyard where the outer walls are crumbling and ravens sit on tombstones covered in ivy, the skull and crossbones motif and epitaph barely legible, you will notice how distant death seems in comparison to the sleek new cemetery down the road, where each gravestone shines black or slate grey in the watery sunlight and the earth is freshly turned.
Here, like the new cemetery, death hung thick in the air like a shroud over the castle, permeating the very walls of Hogwarts. And I knotted my fingers in his hair, each red strand identical to my own, and tried in vain to pull him away from the rhythm of that timeless dance. But off he'd gone, with no path for me to follow.
And yet, in every way that counted, I too was dead.
On the surface, I shrugged and grinned, and comforted, and joked, because you had to, didn't you? You can't lose yourself to the grave, even if inside you're screaming and weeping and howling like an animal. La Danse Macabre goes on, indifferent to whom it picks up in the rhythm, but often it will take a piece of your heart first before it takes the whole package.
And sometimes it buries your smile before your flesh.
oOo
A/N: I think this kind of sums up how I picture George after the Battle of Hogwarts. I don't think he's the type who will ever stop smiling, with or without Fred, but the quality of his smile has certainly changed.
The thing about the graveyard - I always feel comfortable in old graveyards. For example, there's a very old 14th/15th century graveyard in my uni town and whether it's the middle of the day or middle of the night I never feel spooked out by it. The neighbouring new graveyard on the other hand scares the freakin' beejeebus out of me. You'd think it would be the other way around, but no. XD It's the same deal in my home town.