Chapter Twenty-One: The Burial
It was like plummeting into a bad dream - for a moment he knelt again beside Cedric's bloody, mangled body in the ancient cemetery, but in reality he was staring at a bloody, mangled owl body curled upon a filthy, sweat stained, urine soaked rag. Harry's voice was still wailing, "Hedwiiiiiig...Hedwiiiiig..." even though he knew that the owl was dead and couldn't answer him.
After about a quarter of an hour of shamelessly wailing the dead bird's name in absolute misery, he realized that he was, after all, in the right place, for here were his disciples, gathering round him as he knelt over the dead owl.
"Hermione?" He said suddenly. "Where is she?"
"George has locked her in the attic - don't worry, we made sure Buckbeak was safely out of the way, he's down in the kitchen having tea with Sirius and Lupin. She won't be harming anyone up there." Fred reassured him.
"Good." Harry muttered. He looked back down at Hedwig. He reached out a hand and gently wiped some of the crusty blood from her now alarmingly squishy face, then took off his own t shirt and covered Hedwig in it like a blanket, carelessly tossing Dobby's disgusting rag under the bed.
The wind was rushing through the drafty old house, signaling an oncoming storm - Harry listened to it while the others talked, discussing matters which he gave zero fucks about and making decisions that were unimportant to him now that Hedwig was dead. Fred kept Ron in a chokehold to prevent him from lunging at Harry again until George rejoined them and took Ron by the feet while Fred held him by the hands and they began to swing him round like a jump rope, hooting and hollering whilst Ron chuntered in angry protest.
Now Dudley and Luna were making suggestions about burying the owl. Harry agreed without really knowing or caring what he was saying or agreeing to. As he did so, he stared down at the feathered body with empty, haunted eyes, and his scar prickled and burned before it exploded once more with agonizing pain. His rage was dreadful and yet Harry's grief for Hedwig seemed to deaden it, so that it became a distant storm that reached Harry from across a vast, silent ocean. Kind of like the distant storm that was moving in from Azkaban which was, coincidentally, also across a vast, silent ocean.
"I want to do it properly," Harry insisted melodramatically. "Not by magic or by just tossing her into the fire or flushing her down the toilet." He looked up at Sirius who had magically appeared in the room with Lupin beside him. "Have you got a spade?"
Before long he had set to work, alone, digging the grave in the place Sirius had shown him at the bottom of the overgrown back garden, up against a rotting old shed. He dug with a kind of ferocious brutality, relishing the hard manual labour and the excuse to stab something repeatedly, even if it was just the flat, emotionless earth. He was glorying in the violence of it, for every drop of his sweat, every plunge of the spade, every angrily ejaculated curse word and every blister felt like an act of revenge against a cruel and uncaring world that would allow his beloved owl to die.
His scar exploded again, but he was now The Boy Who Mastered Pain - he felt it, yet he was removed from it. Maybe he had finally learned to control it at last, through absolute apeshit ultraviolence. Violence, it seemed, drove the pain out...though Dumbledore, of course, would have said it was love...
But what did that old pot smoking hippie know, anyway - especially when it came to love?
On Harry dug, penetrating deeper and deeper into the cold, hard, unforgiving earth, soaking his rage in sweat, ignoring the pain in his scar. In the silence of the twilight gloom, with nothing but the sound of his own breath and the storm swirling above his head to distract him, the things that had happened over the last few weeks returned to him, particularly the events of that very first night...the screaming he had heard the first time his scar exploded came back to him, along with the dim memory of the voices he had forgotten hearing around him while he lay curled on the kitchen floor in agony. And knowledge germinated in the darkness.
The chaotic rhythm of his stabbing arms beat in time with his thoughts. The pain. The blackout. The magical spell. The tortured scream. The electrical explosions that tore through his scar now every time he became angry. He had been right. He WAS being punished for his anger, for standing up for himself.
Dumbledore was more sadistic than his useless old Boomer, washed up hippie stoner act would have one believe.
He felt as though he had been slapped in the face and roundhouse kicked awake again.
Deeper and deeper Harry descended into the grave, digging furiously, violently, the once dry, hard earth now growing muddy as the sky overhead opened up and rain began pissing relentlessly down upon him.
Harry lost track of time. He knew only that the darkness had grown by at least a few degrees when he was rejoined by Dudley, Luna, Fred, George, and a now much more calm and collected Ron, who was strong armed between his two older brothers for added protection.
"How's Hermione?"
"Still causing a bloody ruckus. Sirius and Lupin called in Tonks and Mad Eye to keep an eye on her because even they can't handle her bullshit right now. She's lost the bloody plot, mate." George reported with a sad shake of his head.
Harry had his scathing comeback ready for when they asked him why he had not simply created a perfect grave by magic, or cooked Hedwig into a good old fashioned Sunday owl roast, or used her for magical target practice, or thrown her into a dumpster, or left her corpse to simply rot, or learned necromancy to bring her back from the dead, but he did not need it. They all jumped and slid down into the muddy hole he had made with spades of their own, and together they worked in silence until the muddy hole seemed deep enough.
Harry wrapped the crispy owl more snugly in his t shirt. Ron sat on the edge of the grave and took off his muddy shoes and socks, which he placed upon the owl's bare feet until Harry gave him a "have you lost your fucking mind like Hermione?" sort of look, and he pulled them off and put them back on his own feet before slinking back off with Fred and George who were shaking their heads at him in twin disbelief.
"We should close her eyes." Trilled Luna, who was still smiling dreamily, even in the face of death, and before anyone could respond, she crouched down and placed her fingers tenderly upon each of the bird's eyelids, sliding them over her bloodshot, glassy, dead-eyed stare.
"There," she said softly, indicating to the half burned, half bloodied, fully decomposing owl corpse, "Now she could be sleeping."
Harry placed the owl in the grave, arranged her head and wings so that she might have been resting, then climbed out, sliding back down on on the mud several times on the way up, and looked for the last time upon the feathered body.
He forced himself not to break down weeping and wailing again as he remembered all the times the owl had hooted happily at him, or kept him company during the lonely summer holidays, or nipped his hand playfully with her beak, or delivered the post, or watched him jerk off or shag Dudley...
"I think we ought to say something," Squeaked Luna in her high pitched, ghostly voice. "I'll go first, shall I?"
And as everybody looked at her in stunned disbelief, she addressed the dead owl at the bottom of the mud filled grave.
"Thank you so much, Hedwig, for being my best friend. It's so unfair that you had to die, when you were so good and brave and didn't care what anyone thought of you OR your radish earrings. I'll always remember what a wonderful best friend you were. I hope you're happy now."
Everyone exchanged "yikes, what the fuck kind of delusional shite is she on about now?!" kind of looks behind Luna's back before she turned and looked expectantly at Ron, who cleared his throat and said in a thick, phlegmatic voice, "Sorry for putting my muddy socks and shoes on you, Hedwig."
"You were a real one, Hedwig, you could always take a joke - even if it did sometimes ruffle a few feathers." Fred winked in a comedically exaggerated fashion.
"Yeah, mate, pour one out for Hedwig, the last of the real ones." George said, waving his wand and magically conjuring up a bottle of fire whiskey and two fistfuls of glasses. He began handing out shots to the rest of the children.
Dudley took a glass from George and necked his shot before looking down at the owl, his face flushing and voice cracking with emotion, "'Bye, Hedwig." He croaked sadly. "I...I loved you and I'll always miss you."
Harry swallowed.
"Goodbye, Hedwig," he said. It was all he could manage, but Dudley had said it all for him. Fred raised his wand, and the pile of muddy earth beside the grave flew up into the air and splashed down messily upon it, splattering the mourners in mud.
"D'you mind if I stay here a moment?" Harry asked the others, who were looking none too pleased at being covered in mud over a dead bird. They murmured words that he did not bother to listen to as he felt weary thumps upon his back, and then they all wandered off back towards Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, leaving Harry alone beside the bloodied, burnt, decomposing and now mud splattered, owl.
He looked around: there were a number of large, broken bricks laying around by the old shed. He picked up two of the largest ones and laid them, crucifix-like, over the place where Hedwig's head now rested. He then felt in his pocket for a wand.
There were three in there. He had taken to carrying not only his own wand with him, but the wands he and Dudley had confiscated from Mad Eye and Snape, as well. He could no longer remember whose wand was whose. He selected the greasier of the three, which felt more powerful in his hand, and pointed it at the brick crucifix.
Slowly, under his chuntered instructions, deep cuts, slashes and gouges appeared upon the brick's surface. He knew that Hermione, Luna, Fred, George, Neville Longbottom, Colin Creevey, Hagrid or fuck, even Ron, could have done it more neatly, and probably more quickly, but he wanted to mark the grave just as he had wanted to dig it. When Harry stood up again, the brick read:
Here lies Hedwig, a Free Bitch, Baby.
He looked down at his crude handiwork and admired it for a few more minutes, then walked away, his scar still burning and electrifying him and his mind full of those thoughts that had come to him in the grave, ideas that had taken form in the muddy gloom, ideas both enraging and terrifying.
They were all sitting in the drawing room when he entered the hall, their attention focused on Sirius, who was doing drunken impressions of Snape. Harry wasn't in the mood for shenanigans, so he wiped his muddy trainers on the hall carpet pointedly before marching into the living room, bypassing Dudley and going straight to Ron, whose face immediately lit up hopefully.
Harry knelt down on the floor in front of Ron, who was sitting on the couch between his brothers. He took Ron's hand tenderly in his own whilst Fred and George looked on shocked.
"Ron," he said, looking deeply, earnestly into his best mate's eyes. "In my time of greatest sorrow, I have a need that only you can fulfill." He squeezed Ron's hand gently, meaningfully.
Ron started hyperventilating. "Uh...uh...of course, Harry, anything, anything at all, you know I'd do anything for you." He gibbered hopelessly.
Harry smiled up at Ron and squeezed his hand even tighter before getting up off the floor and slapping his best mate on the back jovially in thanks.
"Good! Because I'm going to need to borrow Pigwidgeon for awhile."