(A/N: I read too much Tim O'Brien and Chuck Palahniuk, and now I'm writing schlock like this. Five different scenarios. Guess who's who, it shouldn't be too difficult. Please please please r/r and put food on my table. Some slash, some shit, and a whole buttload of angst. Sorry about that one. If you need a pick-me-up, please go read the parody, Grip, that I wrote with my boyfriend and best friend – I'm much fonder of that one than I ever will be of this.)

Stages

I.

It doesn't start until the morning after, or maybe a few days later. You don't notice until then. The news doesn't sink in. You hear it, he's gone, he's gone, and the tears flow in free-fall, but you don't really feel it yet. You cry on command. There are no services, but you want to talk to those who knew him too… you want to know that there was actually a time when he existed. You don't get drunk. You sit in your house, reading, doing what you normally do, with no interruptions. Nothing changed, nothing missed. Denial is a rainbow.

The moon comes, and then you begin to feel it. Simple things, the loss of a pack, and the canine instinct… there is no one but you and these trees. No markings, no smells and the pine whistles so sorrowfully. There is no awareness, and you howl decisively, even under the effects of your potion. You wake to a mass of goose down and an embroidered pillow strewn across the bed. I love you, I love you, I love you… I hate you. You repeat it like a mantra and it becomes stuck in your head, a pillar of rational thought amidst the single feather floating downwards. You hold your head in your hands as you cannot cry.

The word please, over and over again. They hear it in your sleep. They're worried about you, they stay to watch after you, and of course, you're fine. Just pale, but fine. Asking God won't do any good, don't be silly. But at night, of course, you ask so hard your throat bleeds and maybe, just maybe, if you ask hard enough, there will be a brief reprieve. You feel embarrassed for asking and pleading. You lock the doors to your bedroom every night and burn incense in some curling, iridescent bargain. And always before you sleep… take me instead. The third stage has been marked on the calendar in a brief testament to logic.

To touch, to be touched. You look around for brief mementoes and forget to eat. You find yourself in dreams, when you finally get to sleep, and you see him there. He is beautiful, and you make love and laugh the way you always did, and you would give your soul to stay in this dream forever. It is waking up that becomes hard. Later, the dreams become stale and he is a demon there… no man can return to the world of the living and still truly be alive. He is not yours, not ever, and you are skeptical. To touch, to be touched, and not in dreams for once… you need it. A life of solitude catches up to you. You fall asleep reading his letters and where he signed your annuals – love forever.

You visit him. He never liked flowers. You smile down at him, a creeping smile, just so he can see. It doesn't reach your eyes. Maybe he won't notice… maybe.

Later, you hold his cousin and stroke her hair as she sleeps because she smells like him.

II.

She brushed your hair back from your face. You can still remember it, almost. The feel of it. In the night, like a ghost limb would feel, you reckon – there is a tingle across your forehead and you think perhaps she isn't really gone. Once, Hermione played you a song from an old muggle musical that had the lyrics, "maybe far away, or maybe real nearby… they'll be there calling me baby…" or some such rubbish. You asked her, astonished, how she got the muggle device to work inside the castle, bitterly ignoring the redheaded orphan on the gramophone. Her words. Her pain.

Her pain is not your pain. You say that, over and over, when you try your hardest to tear up every wrapper your mother ever gave you, but then your hands slip and fumble over the glossed wrapping. Your mother's fingers? Her fat, oily, clumsy fingers? No. If she had been there, if he had been there, would your hands have grown slender and practiced and subtle? Would some of them have rubbed off on you? You watch the whole world surround the other boy, the other boy with his scar and you think, you're not the only orphan here. You aren't the only one with scars. And then maybe, if your parents had actually died too… then maybe you'd be as well off and loved as the Boy who Got Lucky.

Then you feel that those are horrible things to think and you stuff a sock into your mouth so that the other boys don't hear you cry at night, still thinking those horrible things. During the day, your whole world explodes around you and you're hanging on by a simple string of mediocrity. When it's summer, you see mum and dad and you add another piece of paper to the collection. When it's summer, you fall to your knees begging, begging please remember me. Remember why you love me. Some of the nurses say, look who's here to visit you! Do you remember your son? And she puts her hands through your hair like the Madonna in the Pieta and you sit there, small, and not a savior at all.

You sleep gradually. Very late at night. Sometimes you wonder if that's why you can't seem to operate quite right – because you haven't gotten enough sleep since you were very small, you've slept maybe 4 hours a night at most, usually less. Is that why you drop everything, explode the world, with your fat fucking fingers, your clumsy fucking fingers? They're no good, and you're no good and oh why oh why can't mum and dad wake up? You crawl into bed with the sock in your mouth, tears streaming down your cheek because they are the only company you ever get at night.

When you stare up at the ceiling, the ceiling seems too bright and the whole sky plays on it. That's when you pull the blankets up over your head and the fabric brushes you in just such a way, you feel your mother's fingers checking for fever.

III.

He slips farther and farther away, every moment. You may as well remove any trace of him from the house. Because he isn't there anymore. Sometimes she wishes he were dead because then she could mourn him. But when, like a specter, he shows up on Christmas and says two words and leaves… then you have to mourn all over again and it's really very frustrating. Funny how you wake up reciting the recipes to his favorite meals, or saying happy birthday to the sky on his birthday. Funny how some nights, you write him a letter asking him how he's doing and telling him what you're doing and hoping he's very well, and that you love him. Funnier how every other night, you write back to yourself, saying that everything is fine, mother, and I love you very much.

Your husband sees you doing it and then he turns off the lanterns and wraps his arms around you and he cries. You're not the one who cries. Funny how that works.

Then, one morning, you look at one of your other boys, and the way they bend or the glint in their hair very suddenly reminds you of your lost one. And you bite back tears and you want to scream, how could you do this to me? I raised you, I clothed you, I fed you, I loved you…! I love you! But instead, what comes out is why haven't you done the dishes yet, why can't you ever stop fooling around and get down to business. The worst part it how your sons look at you when you do this and know exactly how you feel.

Sometimes the letters ask him to come home. But you burn those letters. You think, maybe, he writes letters to you asking you to take him back, and then he burns those too.

You feel as though you were split into seven equal parts and one of them has left you forever. No matter if four of your boys leave and start their own businesses – they still pop round now and then. No matter if one of your boys is mutilated and battered in the war – he did it bravely. There is nothing brave, nothing, about what your middle son has done. Nothing at all. And yet, that part still calls out to you, and you cry into your husband at night. He looks at the wall opposite him and sighs.

The worst part is seeing him every once in a while. Because then it has to all begin again. Every time.

IV.

There is nothing like the frustration of being completely alone.

You are surrounded by fat, smelling people. People? And they tease and poke and prod you, and with every day and every prod, your eyes grow wider and wider and redder. It hurts, as loathe as you are to admit it.

It is also a very strange feeling to grieve for someone you never met. Your family must have been wonderful. You would have been a great credit to society, had the world fallen into place the way it ought. In frustration, you make the others scream out and cry out in the way your very soul does.

And with every outside scream, the inner ones quiet, and then purr.

You hold the mementoes of your world around you in case, just in case, they too are ripped from you.

You are special. You are special. You miss a certain normalcy you've never felt; you miss something you've never felt. You smile sometimes.

V.

There are wingbeats against your heart. Every moment you flee, every second, you keep running, and there is a firebird behind and around you. Do the wings lift you, or guide you, or guilt you, following you, following orders, as you followed orders…? And you think, it cannot be true. Even though you felt it through your own fingers and your own wand and your whole soul, it didn't actually happen. What a strange feeling, to look down at yourself. To look down and even see the boy beneath the invisibility cloak, stock-still, and to see you with a jolt and oh God.

Oh, God.

That stupid old man. He should have let you die. You told him, the night, the very night, that you made the oath. You told him with your face shining, and he smiled that horrible serene smile. And he told you, you must promise to follow every order I give you. You must follow every order or my trust in you will have been for nothing. And then, remember – death is only the next great adventure. Your feet yearn to kick the nearest anything, to stretch out and run until you collapse like a tired horse and then someone has to put you out of your misery. Stupid, stupid old man.

You came to terms with it over the year. You saw him, and asked him, every meeting, please. Let me do something, anything, and you only received a watery twinkle in return. The whole damned thing made you very sick.

You remember when you first killed someone. When you started the whole goddamn war, it seems. You remember when you first orphaned a child, and then when you had to look that child in the eyes and hate him because of what you did to him. Stupid. Old. Man.

There are catacombs where you hide with your young charge. You stare at the walls and the shelves of decay and rot and cool, with old bones shoved to the rear and fresh eye sockets staring right at you. And you think, this is me. This, all of this, is me.

That stupid old man was the only thing who could ever have been a father to you. No horrible muggle, who left your mother ragged and torn and undone; no one like that was your father. It was only the man who opened his arms to the prodigal. It was only the man who asked you serenely to kill him, and then you did without a second thought. It is the lack of hesitation that scares you so much.

There are wingbeats, fiery wingbeats against your heels as you flee while you sleep.

You silly fool, you say. You got the easy way out. It is the survivors who enter hell, through the back door.