Someone had once said: life is most beautiful the moment before death.
He wasn't so sure now, felt distinctly like his flesh was trying to leap away from its encasement, his muscles just barely holding onto their bony frames. A sinking feeling, mostly, only it was a sinking that never stopped, his skin literally crawling down, down, down as if to disappear into the ground. Peculiar, that. It didn't hurt, or maybe it did and he just didn't know – he had had such pain in the last hours that it didn't seem entirely unreasonable to him that his sinews would have forgotten what it was like without it. It didn't really seem to matter, either way – his eyes were pushing inward, his skin slipping away, his tendons and tissues melting and there was a faint burning, now, inside of his mouth. Maybe his tongue was missing, or maybe that wasn't possible because could you scream without a tongue? Maybe he wasn't screaming. He could see Hermione now, blackened with smoke and death and Ron like a torch in the night on the battlefield, red red red. He could imagine them kneeling here, finding him, and he hoped they might have a way to know it was him. For a moment he briefly wondered how he could still be hoping this, when all of his body was pulling downward, getting away, his wrist his shoulders his hips his ankles flattened against the rock, being peeled; wasn't he supposed to be dead yet, just now here where everything was smoky and dark and pain was dimly finding his brain, now, dull and throbbing and far-away. He would have closed his eyes but found he didn't have any anymore. Maybe this was it then, dying, not responding but thinking knowing feeling all the same. Maybe it was the curse biting its way in, loosening every loop of flesh around his bones, unravelling him harshly harshly and his lungs felt like punctured balloons against his ribcage fighting to break the skin and leap away.
Something was happening now though, like finally his brain was catching on and trickling downward – there was Ginny, flowers in her hair, and skirt transparent with water from the pond and Ron was pushing Hermione in, teeth white against freckled skin. Mrs. Weasley baking him cookies for his birthday, sharing one with Ginny, giving one to Ron, pretending not knowing he'd already taken one. Reading to Hermione when she was sick, touching her face because it eased the fever, the dreams, hoping she'd soon wake up. His mother, soothing his defeated body with long warm fingers on his forehead, his father, lending him a hand. Pulling him up.
Upward.