Two Trains
There was red fire, brightly lit spells, a green killing curse, and splintering blue from the shattered protego…then I blinked and all I saw was white. Ash had filled the air so thick I could barely breathe, but in this white place, it was so pure I thought the only explanation could be that I had died. In a way, I suppose I had.
I didn't see the woman at first, too distracted by the death rattle from the Horntail. She lay on her side – what was left of it – her open chest cavity leaking frothy blood on the pristine white floor. Her back half and right wing were gone entirely like they had been torn from her…or splinched.
I took a few steps closer, still wary of the damage she could impose even with the mortal wounds inflicted upon her.
"Do not pity her," a voice halted my faulting steps and I turned to it. A woman clad in a robe just as white as the pillars and floor stood there, under a brightly lit arch. Her hair was a light shade of red and her cheeks were dotted with a thousand tiny freckles, but her eyes were exactly like mine. Or, I suppose, mine were like hers.
"Mum?" I whispered the word in disbelief, so quietly I don't know how she heard, but she did.
"Hi baby," she replied, smiling so brightly at me that I almost started to cry. I don't think anyone has ever looked that happy to see me before.
"Mum!" I ran to her, tears falling as I collided with her still body. It was really real, I could feel her in my embrace, feel her arms wrap around my back. She was really here. "How are you here?" I questioned, tightening my grip when she moved to separate.
She indulged me for a while longer, humming softly as she ran her fingers through my darker locks. "Where do you think you are?" She asked me after a long moment. I finally let her pull away far enough to look at my surroundings, though I kept my grip tight around her waist, fisting my fingers into her robe, afraid she would disappear if I let go.
My eyes were blurry from crying and I used my torn sleeve to quickly wipe them before I took in my surroundings for the first time.
"Kings Cross?" I asked, confused as I took in the white pillars, benches, platforms, and bricks. It was so bright as to be nearly blinding. And while it looked like the train station I had come to know so well…it also very much didn't. Everything was too clean, too white. The tiled floor was seamless, like one piece of marble that stretched on and on. The pillars rose up from the floor like spires that grew from the ground, the bricks so even and perfect that I knew this couldn't be real.
"In a sense," Mum replied, turning as she grabbed my hand and led me away from the dying Horntail. "Dead," she said, smiling softly down at me. "Not dying, she's already dead." I frowned, turning to look at the dragon over my shoulder. One of her orange eyes caught mine as she took another rattling breath. The brood mother didn't look to be dead yet, but I knew she soon would be. No amount of magic could fix a wound like hers.
Mum placed a hand around my shoulders and turned me away. The dragon's death rattle faded behind us and an unease began to settle over me in the heavy silence. "Mum?" I asked hesitantly, slowing to a stop. When I darted a quick look back, the dragon was gone. "Where are we?" She continued on for a few paces before turning back to me with that soft smile that made my chest hurt.
"What do you remember happening last, before you awoke here?" She asked instead of answering my question.
I frowned, my brow scrunching in what Hermione called my 'thinking face'. The memory surfaced slowly, coming to me as if through a thick fog, before it snapped into sharp focus and I gasped. "Oh," I breathed out, the air escaping me like I had been punched right in the gut. Everything was starting to finally make sense. "I'm dead, aren't I?"
My mother smiled at me again, brushing a lock of loose black hair behind my ear. The words I spoke stretched out between us in the silence, but they didn't make me sad or despondent….they didn't make me feel anything at all.
"Yes," she said after a long moment of stillness, "and no."
Confusion settled over me once more, but before I could form the question that was already building in my mind, a sound not unlike a baby crying drew my attention. I turned to look, and my mother moved with me.
My eyes flitted across the empty station before I was able to locate where the sound was coming from. I crouched down, my hands pressing into the smooth tile that was neither warm nor cold, it just was. My unbound hair spooled over my splayed fingers, tickling the back of my hands. The sensation distracted me for a moment…the longer I spent here, the more numb everything seemed to feel.
At first, I wasn't certain what it was I was looking at. The thing beneath the bench was malformed and so twisted that all I could do was stare at it in stupefaction. Only once it moved, whimpering pitifully from beneath the bench did I recoil in disgust.
"What is that?" I scrambled to my feet, breathing a sigh of relief when the bench obscured it once more. It had looked like a baby at first, but its limbs were too long, its face not fully formed, and its skin seemed to have been melted off. "What's wrong with it?"
"It's a soul shard," Mum replied softly, moving to stand next to me, her hand coming up to run through my loose strands. "Broken off from the main host, it has become twisted."
Her simple explanation of the thing beneath the bench stunned me and it took a long while to voice the question that had suddenly gripped my heart in fear. "Is it…is it mine?"
Green eyes, so much like mine, gazed into me and I fought not to squirm under it. "No," she blinked, and relief flooded into me, chasing away the unease that had settled into me when under her stare. "It broke off from the original host's already fractured soul a long time ago and latched onto the only magical thing strong enough to sustain it."
Her fingers brushed my hair back around an ear as her thumb trailed over my forehead, right where my scar was. Her fingers were like the floor, neither cold nor warm…they just were. Realization was slow to come, but once it did a feeling of nausea turned my stomach. "Voldemort," I whispered, asking for confirmation even as I desperately wished to never know the answer. Her smile was enough to confirm my fears and I was suddenly fighting the urge to vomit.
"But why does it…why does he look like…" I gestured to the bench. Mum smiled at me again and waited patiently for me to continue. "I mean, if it's a soul shard, why dies it look like a baby?"
"Oh sweetheart," she stroked my cheek with gentle fingers, still smiling sweetly in that way that made her eyes light up and soften. "Nothing here is as it seems." My brow wrinkled in confusion and her thumb came up to ease the tension. Her eyes followed her fingers as if she were trying to remember every part of my features. "The shard appears to be a malformed baby because you see it that way. We're in Kings Cross because to you this is a place of transition. Everything here is how you see it."
I stood there for a long while, absorbing her words and trying to understand her meaning. "And you?" I asked hesitantly, afraid of the answer. "Are you as I want to see you?"
She only continued to smile that soft smile at me, her fingers drawing away so she could clasp them in front of her and I knew my answer. "You're not her, are you?"
"No," the thing wearing my mother's face answered and I felt warm tears spill down my cheeks. "And yes."
I blinked at her in confusion, wiping my eyes quickly, embarrassed at the tears. "How can you be both my mum and not?" It was a cruel joke, whatever this was. To have finally met her, only for it to be a lie. "What are you?" I was angry at her, at it for wearing her face.
"I am the one who guides those to peace," she replied, seemingly unfazed by my outburst. "I take on the visage of a past loved one to those who appear before me."
"But why?!" I cried, covering my face with my hands, trying to stem the sobs building in my chest. "Why her?!"
"Because," she replied just as gently as when she was pretending to be my mother. "This was who you needed to see. Lily Potter nee Evans and no other." I choked on a sob at her answer.
"But you're not her!" I shouted back, my anger draining from me. The fatigue and sadness that took the place of my anger left me feeling hollow. There wasn't room for anything else but the heavy feeling of despair as I gazed at the thing that was pretending to be my mum.
"No," it replied, just as softly. "But I could be. I am as she was. I care because she did. She, like your father and countless souls that have all passed through my halls, are all a part of me…as I am now a part of them. I am the first and the last. I am –"
"Death," the word left my lips like a sigh and a prayer. It was whispered in both hope and fear. This was my moment, my last. What was my anger worth in these last few precious moments?
"Yes," she smiled at me the same way Hermione does when I figured out something clever.
"So, I am dead."
"Not quite," Death hummed, reaching for my hand. Her grip was just the same as it had been since I first thought her my mum, solid and inviting. I thought it would be cold once I realized what she really was, but it hadn't changed at all. I almost pulled away, still upset about the trick, but even as I wiped the last of my tears away, I couldn't find it in myself to genuinely care.
I felt I should be worried. The longer I was here, in this 'place of transition' as Death called it, the less things seemed to matter. Even now, her grip that was strong and warm, felt like a memory, there but not.
"Do you remember what happened?" She asked again, tucking my hand into her elbow, her other coming up to clasp my fingers in place as she led me away from the soul shard still crying softly beneath the bench. When I turned to look back, nothing was there, just an endless track with endless arches and identical benches stretching behind us as far as I could see. Like the Horntail it was here and then gone. My gaze returned to the front and I grunted in surprise, just now noticing that here too seemed to go on forever as well.
Where Death was leading us, I didn't know, it all looked the same to me. And after a while it seemed as if we hadn't moved at all. "I remember the arena," I answered after what could have been a moment or an eternity had passed. It was impossible to tell in a place like this.
She – it – hummed softly in approval and after a moment I continued. "We were attacked, Snape – Professor Snape –" I amended quickly. I was so used to others instantly correcting me every time I failed to include his proper title that it was nearly a second nature. "He saved me, and then…" I trailed off, remembering the shattered protego, the bright spells, the dragon fire, and then the sensation of a portkey.
"I died," I told her, the thing still pretending to be my mother. I wanted to tell it to stop wearing her face, but I was afraid. I was afraid it would refuse, but mostly I was afraid it would do as I asked. It may have not been my mum, but this was the closest I had ever come to meeting her, and I didn't want to give that up. An aspect of my mother was better than nothing at all.
"Not exactly," she said after a long moment.
"But the curse!" I stopped walking and pulled my hand from the crook of her arm. I had no idea where she was leading me anyways, the station just seemed to go on endlessly and if I didn't know any better, I would thought we hadn't moved at all. But then again, maybe we hadn't. Everything here looked exactly the same. "The killing curse hit me; I saw it…I felt it."
She smiled at me, that same gentle smile, the one Hermione always uses when I failed to see the big picture or connect the dots. "Yes," the visage of Death replied patiently. "But what does the Killing Curse do exactly?"
'It kills' I wanted to say, but I knew that that wasn't the answer she was looking for. I could feel my brow scrunching again as I tried to recall Professor Moody's lesson on the Unforgivables. Just thinking on it made me uncomfortable, especially since Neville had been in class too. But nevertheless, I endeavored to giver her a proper answer.
"It kills by violently separating the soul from the body," I replied after a moment and she gazed at me in approval. The question was on the tip of my tongue, the one I had always wanted to ask Professor Moody but never got the courage. But I supposed if anyone knew the answer it would be Death.
"You want to know why Avada Kedavra kills where a Dementors Kiss does not," she spoke softly as if we were discussing a great secret. I could only nod my head, still unable to bring voice to the question even at the disgruntled feeling settled low in my chest. I hated speaking about the Unforgivables, hated even thinking of them and I wondered if I was truly that easy to read.
She smiled at me, the corners of her mouth twitching in a way I recognized when I saw it in the mirror. She was amused. Her hand reached up to brush my unruly hair back once more and already the gesture felt familiar as if my mother had done it all my life. I swallowed around the lump in my throat and willed myself not to cry. I had already shed enough tears in its presence.
"That is because while a Dementor separates the soul from the body and consumes it, the soul still exists in the same plane as the host, while the curse completely renders the soul from existence all together…essentially killing it." She replied after a long moment and then remained silent while I took in the information.
"Is that what happened to me?" I asked hesitantly, remembering the green light that struck me. Had my soul been rendered from my body?
"Yes, and no," I grunted in frustration, sick of the mixed answers she loved to give me every time I asked a question.
"Can't you just give me a straight answer!?" I shouted, frustrated, and confused. I could feel my eyes start to well up again, but I gritted my teeth and shook my head until they subsided. She just continued to smile at me, and my hands clenched into fists. "Please," I begged, bowing my head. I was desperate for an answer, any actual answer, and wasn't above prostrating myself to get it.
"You had two souls inhabiting your body," her hand looped into my elbow and she pulled me forward until we continued our journey to wherever it was that she was leading me. "The killing curse will render a soul from the plane of the living…a soul." She enunciated and suddenly it made sense.
"So, I'm not dead," I whispered. "Because I've got two souls?"
She smiled down at me, her head tilting to the side and hair spilling over her shoulder. "But you could be, if you want." As she finished the words a train pulled silently into the station. It was just as white as everything else in this place, and utterly soundless. Death pulled us to a stop and turned us to face it as the doors opened. "This train will take you on, and that one," she turned again, and I looked behind me to see another train had pulled into the other side of the terminal. "That one will take you back."
It wasn't really a decision. The moment I saw both trains I already knew which one I was going to board. I pulled my hand from hers and took a step towards the one behind us, the one that would take me back, but her words made me falter. "Be aware that if you choose to return to the land of the living, it won't be as you think."
I glanced at her over my shoulder. She was standing beneath the arch that separated one side of the platform from the other. "You mean as a ghost?"
"Not at all," she laughed. "Your body is still intact; your soul will have no trouble finding it. It just won't be as you think."
I snorted, suddenly amused by her cryptic nonsense. It didn't deter me, and I continued forward. I had one foot on the train when an odd gurgling noise drew my attention. A part of me was whispering to ignore it, board the train, return to the land of the living before I was stuck in limbo forever, but that just wasn't my way. I turned and gasped in horror at the sight.
