Oliver Wood and the Muggleborn's Wand
Chapter 20
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Not For Profit work. Harry Potter and related materials © J.K. Rowling.

The world felt like a dream. It felt like the dreams Oliver had every now and then involving his red-eyed doppelganger, and yet, it obviously wasn't a dream. He knew he hadn't gone to sleep, knew that he hadn't been knocked unconscious in the fight.

And yet, here he was, standing in a black void. There was a ground, and air, but he couldn't see the ground or anything else. Still, he was sure his eyes were open.

I don't know what exactly's going on, but I have a pretty good hunch...

Closing his eyes, even though he could see nothing, Oliver tried to make out more of the words. They sounded far away, on the other side of the world, and the speaker wasn't making any effort to be loud.

But why won't he wake up?

He's still fighting...maybe for his life, I don't know, I don't have first-hand experience...

That sounded strange...Oliver felt pretty awake. The voices must've been talking about someone else.

Everything was different when he opened his eyes. The empty nothing was gone, a lush forest in its place. The colors were brilliant, the green of the leaves on the trees, the sparkling water in a little brook nearby...it was the most vibrant thing Oliver had ever seen. He knew it couldn't have been real. Even the bark on the trees and the dirt on the ground seemed radiant.

The sun shone down from high above, bright enough to give everything a faint aura. Real or not, it was beautiful. Following the stream, Oliver soon looked up, over the tree line, and felt the awe return in full force.

It was a Quidditch pitch, one that put the Japanese national stadium to shame. The idea of playing a game here held an instant appeal; the swamps of Puddletown weren't the most pleasing of sights. They certainly didn't smell of fresh fruit and clean water like this place, either.

Picking his pace up into a jog, Oliver headed for a set of goal hoops, hoping to find the center. The foliage grew thicker, shading him from the sun, but it never became dark. The little babbling brook, Oliver realized, was running down the middle of the pitch. When he reached the center, it became intricate, splitting and forming the circle.

This was where the beauty ended. Nothing changed with the pitch, the trees were still normal, the grass and dirt still soft under Oliver's feet. Dead-center of the pitch, a single tree had a rope tied to one branch. A man hung from that rope, by his neck, and Oliver realized immediately that he was already dead.

Another detail soon became clear; it was Crabbe, as dead as the day Oliver had murdered him, his Death Eater robes hanging ignobly and billowing with the breeze. Blood dripped from the body, a slow trickle with no open wound to speak of, soaking into the ground below.

Oliver felt compelled to stare, compelled to stay right where he was instead of running for cover. He wanted the corpse dangling by a proverbial thread would speak and tell him the meaning of life.

"Doesn't really go with the scenery, does it?"

Crabbe wasn't the source of the voice. Turning to the side, Oliver saw his red-eyed self in one of the trees, hanging upside-down by his legs. He was still wearing his dark-red Quidditch robes, but he seemed almost casual, despite being around the hanged man.

He was casual despite being an unreal doppelganger, for that matter. Oliver wasn't entirely sure how to respond. "What?"

It made the Other chuckle as he curled up, reaching to the branch he hung from for leverage to pull himself over and off. He walked around the tree, fixing Oliver with a penetrating stare. "Crabbe, up there," he said, as if Oliver wouldn't recognize him, "He doesn't really fit here. Neither do I, I suppose. I guess that's the nature of the beast."

A question that Oliver realized he should've asked some time ago came to him. Why he never thought of it in his dreams, he didn't know. "Who are you?"

His other laughed at him, a roaring, happy laugh. "Oliver, what are you, a First Year? Aren't you looking at me, can't you tell?"

"But," Oliver stammered, trying to wrap his brain around the implication that it was just that simple, "You can't be me. I'm standing right here."

"Mostly," the Other added. "Mostly." As Oliver watched, his Other strolled by him, a bounce in his step as he passed, effortlessly climbing the tree that was home to Crabbe. He ascended in a circle, rounding the tree and coming back around next to Crabbe's body. Standing on a thick branch, he leaned against the trunk with his arms crossed, completely unbothered by what hung next to him. "So, here we are...I don't know what you'd call it. Purgatory, maybe? But you're not dead. You can't be dead while I'm around, after all...but I'm pretty sure that if you're here, it means you're thinking about," he cocked his head towards Crabbe, "That."

"I think about it all the time," Oliver said, knowing, immediately, that it wasn't true. He didn't know why he said it, knew that he thought of Katie less and less as the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months. It frightened him, that this could happen and he hadn't even noticed it. That he hadn't even realized he was starting to have trouble remembering what her face looked like until he looked at her picture.

Or what her voice sounded like. He couldn't look at a picture to remind himself what she sounded like.

"You're lying," the Other said. There wasn't any anger in his voice. He sounded sad.

Staring at him for a good, long while, Oliver took in every detail. He was looking at himself, a dead ringer for a mirror, almost. The eyes weren't the worst thing, especially now, as he looked up at Crabbe with every bit of emotion Oliver had not felt for murdering the man. "You would know."

"Took you awhile to realize that," Other smiled broadly at him. "Never thought I'd see you here, though. I almost want to be happy about it...it gets lonely here."

Other's head turned as he spoke the last few words. He looked back at Crabbe, and Oliver wondered if, maybe, he wasn't talking about the Quidditch pitch when he'd said 'it's beautiful.' As if cued, the sun went down over the stands, but the darkening sky wasn't nearly as realistic as it had been in the daylight. Bands of auroras danced overhead, and the stars weren't normal, but colorful, sometimes large, decorated with winding bands of cosmic dust with nebula that would never be clearly seen by the naked eye sprinkled about. The moon was enormous, taking up a quarter of the sky above the pitch stands.

It was still a gorgeous sight, and the pitch itself went through its own transition. Taking another look around, Oliver felt like he hadn't even been here five minutes ago. Bright moonlight danced over moist trees and grass, fireflies floated in and out of the woods...and in the end, Crabbe still hung from the center. "Why...why didn't you think I'd come here? You come to me in my dreams..."

"Because you're close to me," the Other answered, deadpan, bored with the question. He sounded like he'd figured it out long ago. "And that gets my attention. But it doesn't work the other way around, you're just here because of," he cocked his head towards Crabbe, "That."

Around a lump in his throat, Oliver said, "I...I don't understand..."

"Of course you do," snarling, Other walked over to him, his hands balled into fists and his muscles tense. He was clearly annoyed. "You're just too afraid to admit it! If you'd just stop lying to yourself and move on with your life, we'd never be having this conversation!"

"I'm not lying to myself about anything!" Yelling back at him, Oliver refused to back down. He was done running from things that went bump in the night; if he couldn't do anything about it, the least he could do was try.

"Oh, please. 'No, I just don't want him to hurt my friends'" the Other mocked him, "'I only thought of killing him because I was going to die too.' Do you have to be so stupidly pragmatic? Did you kill him," he pointed over to Crabbe, "because you had to, or because you wanted to?"

"I had to!" Oliver shouted, his hands raising as if it would make his point. His words came automatically. "He killed Kate, I had to!"

Oliver's face was red, his hands shook uncontrollably. He'd been thinking this exact thing for months, at thirty seconds every day. Hearing the words being said, even from, perhaps especially from his own mouth made them seem much more hollow. It made them seem much more ridiculous.

"You wanted to," the Other said, his voice low. "It's not the end of the world to admit it, Oliver! You're not the only person who's ever given in to anger, you're not even the only person that night who murdered in the name of avenging a loved one!"

Trying to think of something to say, some magical tell-all response that would fix everything, Oliver fixed his double with the best glare he could manage. He stayed that way for ten seconds, then twenty...before thirty, the tears came, and soon after, his breathing grew ragged.

He backed up to the closest tree and collapsed against it, shaking hard from the pain as much as the tears. "I never would've...if I'd just been thinking I never would've...would've k-killed him...I just...I h-hated him...so...much...right then..."

In stark contrast to the attitude he'd had during the shouting, Other sat down next to Oliver without any anger, and when he talked again, his voice was low, comforting. "You weren't thinking. It's okay."

Before he realized what he was doing, Oliver grabbed onto him, desperate for an anchor to reality despite not even being in reality at the moment. Some of the fireflies moving about the trees became blurred, solid lines through his tears, and he felt an arm rest tentatively across his shoulders. "What...what are you supposed to be? My conscience? Or my anger just...justifying what I did?"

Chuckling softly, the Other said, "Hardly. I've just got your best interests at heart, and carrying guilt around is like poison. Poison that I'm not immune from, either."

"Wait," Oliver scooted away from him, far enough away that the arm over his back went away, far enough to look at him. His tears stopped as thoughts began to form, as Oliver felt on the cusp of some grand revelation. "What?"

They were the same person. That much was obvious. And yet, they weren't exactly the same. The Other had red eyes, different clothes...and, Oliver realized, a different attitude. He didn't have the guilt like Oliver did. He wasn't traumatized by it, he didn't go over it in his head to figure out if he had an excuse for not doing anything differently...what could the guilt possibly do to him if, in purely literal terms, they were two separate 'people?'

The Other was a little surprised that Oliver would go down this train of thought. The answer seemed obvious to him. "Well...I can't very well worry about your best interests if I'm worrying about mine, can I?"

"Why does my guilt have anything to do with you?" He stood up, looking down at the Other and waiting for an answer. He didn't know what he was expecting, but whatever it was, he knew it was important.

"Well," the Other didn't move to stand at all, "When you figure that out, I guess you'll know everything."

"Go away," Oliver told him. "Get out of my head!"

"Oliver," he finally stood up, slowly, his voice condescending, "This is my home. You came here.

"Consider yourself evicted," Oliver spat.

"Sorry," the Other smiled. "I like it here."

Oliver never saw it coming. His double lunged forward, and Oliver grabbed at his stomach where the pain came from, where he felt something wet on his fingers, something wet over something cold and solid.

The sight wasn't pretty when he finally looked down. The combat knife was one he'd seen at King's Guard Surplus, buried into his stomach almost to the hilt. The sudden urge to cough brought blood up his throat.

As he watched, Other twisted the knife. He wasn't slow, he made the motion in a quick jerk, and then did it again, turning the knife until the serrated edge pointed straight up. "This is what you want? You want to give me up, for what? For that?" He pointed at Crabbe once more, and added, "Well, too bad, Oliver! It's not that easy! Remorse takes work!"

Feeling himself being shoved against a tree, Oliver hacked up a mouthful of blood. One of his feet balanced at the edge of the little stream of water, it's bubbling very audible. "I..."

The knife came out, torn out in an upward motion to rip through more flesh before the Other jammed it right back in, near the original wound. Blood flowed from Oliver's abdomen, soaking his clothes and giving the water running underneath him a red tint. "You chose this, Oliver! All you have to do is say the word and I'll stop, but you can't, can you? No, you have to feel bad for our sins. Don't think I want this, don't think I want to die because you can't help but be a do-gooder...but like I said before, it's your decision, after all!"

Barely able to stay on his feet, certain that he wouldn't be if he weren't being shoved against a tree, Oliver managed to form words around the blood in his mouth. "And I...decide...to have...a...soul..."

This time, the motion with the knife was a slash, and more of a tearing rather than cutting, bisecting the stab wounds. The pain was so great that Oliver finally noticed it, heard something wet hit the ground, but he didn't look.

His hands became heavy...but Oliver realized, only one hand was weighted down. When he looked, he saw that his fingers were clutching the handle of a sword...a sword with a sparkling ruby in the hilt.

The Other was close to him, right on top of him...Oliver could feel his breath, would've smelled it if not for the blood. And the knowledge of what he had to do came to him then, that proximity inspiring him. They were one person. Whatever else they were...different parts of the same person, an original with a faulty duplicate, or a clone made from the Dark Arts...wherever his Other came from, he was just as much Oliver Wood as the original. Then neither of us can die, while the other survives...

He had no doubts, no regrets about what he planned. He could see no other option; if this was the only way to repent, it was alright.

The Other didn't notice when he raised the sword up. He was so close, it came up behind the double, where Oliver let the blade point down like a dagger. He reached around his Other with the empty hand and held on tight with both, raising the sword high and then bringing it down. The sword hit home with tremendous force, more than Oliver's fading strength or gravity could possibly account for.

After the tip passed cleanly through Other, it went through Oliver. It went through the tree, pinning them to it as much as to each other.

The job done, Oliver let his hands fall from the sword. He couldn't see his Other's face, but he heard the shock, felt him tense up, felt him let go of the knife. Other's head rested on Oliver's shoulder once he fell against him. "Oliver...I...I'm afraid..."

"Me too," Oliver whispered. The pain hit him; he had no more distractions, nothing more to accomplish. It was now his sole focus, and it hurt so badly that he saw spots, tried to inhale a sharp breath but choked on the blood in his mouth.

Through his fading vision, Oliver squinted his eyes and looked at the pitch. It was still beautiful, so vibrant and full of life. He saw Crabbe's body fall from the rope hanging him, saw him turn to dirt and become ground...he was glad his last sight could be one more look at this place, and, weakly raising one hand, he patted his Other on the back.

When everything went black, small lines of light stayed, remnants from focusing his eyes on the fireflies going about their business in the foliage.

Soon enough, that faded away.

"Oh my god..."

When Oliver started screaming, Jessica's first thought was dropping down to the ground and grabbing him to...she didn't know what she was going to do. Seeing him go from perfectly quiet and serene-looking to this was more than shocking. One second, he'd been laying perfectly still with Katie's wand clutched to his chest, held protectively under both arms. And then...

The scream he let out was pained. His back arched, his eyes clenched shut tighter than before, and the sound wasn't something ever meant to be heard by others, let alone by friends. It was the sound of torture, the sound of the Cruciatus Curse, perhaps the sound of a human being's final moments on Earth when the words 'avada kedavra' weren't involved.

"Don't touch him!"

Harry Potter went to the ground as well, but he followed his own advice, and he stayed still, watching intently. In the corner of his eye, distorted by the edge of his glasses, he saw Conner wrap his arms around Jessica from behind, and the look on his face suggested it wasn't for her so much as it was for himself.

It seemed to go on forever. Oliver didn't take another breath to keep screaming; as he faded, a thin trail of smoke blew out from the tip of Katie's wand. Regarding it curiously, Harry felt certain that he knew what was going on...and he wasn't surprised when a quick, bright flame engulfed the wand. It burned for only a second before flickering out, leaving behind a charred, brittle piece of bark that crumbled as Oliver's substantially large arms twitched about.

He was still after that, perfectly peaceful. "He looks like he's sleeping," Jessica choked.

Conner couldn't bring himself to ask the obvious question. "He's...he's not..."

It was Harry who checked, pulling at one of Oliver's arms until he had it straightened out, laying on the ground. Soot from what was once Katie's wand rubbed onto his fingers, and it rubbed onto Oliver's wrist when Harry checked for a pulse.

Unable to hold it in, Jessica started to cry, and Conner held her more tightly.

The look Harry gave them had said it all.