TITLE:  In The Country Of Last Things

AUTHOR: eudaimon

RATING: R for Sex and Character Death.

WORD COUNT: Around 4000

SUMMARY: One, two, three and Cedric Diggory died.

WARNINGS: Character death.

A/N: I wrote the line “And the sky went out for Cedric Diggory” and saved it in my mobile phone the first time that I saw GOBLET OF FIRE.  This entire fic came out of that one line, and was written for _shades_.  Thankyou to the mods for accepting my application.

 (1. oubliette)

A son lost is still a son; a child doesn't stop being a child and a father is still a father even given a lack of discernable truth.  Amos wants to shield his son with his shoulders, keep prying eyes from him, not let them see.  There is something unsanitary about all of those eyes.  Amos remembers the day when a dragon had dropped dead in a holding pen.  The walls had suddenly been lined with eyes and Charlie Weasley had shaken his head sadly and whispered about some things being private things.  Amos scrubs at Cedric's cheek with the edge of his robe.  Grave dirt clings.  Fudge is talking about 'the body'.  'Albus, we must move the body'.  This is not a body.  This is a boy; a beautiful, bonny and brave boy.  Amos Diggory has no real concept of heroes - working for the Ministry, he missed out of the first war.   It is beyond him why the next war, why this war, had to start here, with his handsome son who had been shouting and laughing, who had only been a hero if heroism has the most to do with doing your best, always.  Amos has always had the feeling that heroes are slip-shod characters, swords in hand, helmets on backwards, arse and face and cocking everything up, leaving messes for good and ordinary men to come in and sweep away.  On his knees in a circle of eyes, Amos goes from dragons to heroes to push-brooms and his beautiful son is still dead.

Cedric was not a hero.  Later, there'll be talk of heroes, but that is not what Cedric was.  His son was a school boy who had nothing to do with war, though he'd played at - dragons and drownings and dyings.  Death is cold fingers on the back of Amos' neck.  He has the sinking realisation that he often told Cedric how proud he was, but he can't quite remember if he ever told Cedric quite how much he loved.  Unbidden comes the thought of Barty Crouch, who sent his son to Azkaban, that forgetting place across the cold water and never recovered.  The French, Marie (God, how will he tell Marie?) has often told him, have a word for a hole in the ground where you put someone to forget; oubliette.  Such a pretty word for something so cruel.  He's thinking about graves again.

He is aware of a hush when he leans down over his son.  His lips, Amos' lips, will keep that chill of Cedric's cheek forever.  His heart...Well, he isn't a poet.  He just knows that he is broken in two, and that Marie will never forgive him now.  A light rain is falling and Amos leans across his son, just wanting to keep him dry.

(2. three, two, one)

After all of that with Moody who isn't Moody and the things which Dumbledore says (which make him feel exactly fourteen), Mrs Diggory is something of a relief.  She's French in a way that shows in the way that she holds her mouth, and, while Mr Diggory cries softly, she holds out her hand to Harry.

"I'm sorry, Mrs Diggory," he says, and she tries to smile, but it dies on her French mouth.

"You did your best, 'arry, and we thank you.  Merci, mon cher.  We do. We know exactly where 'e is, now."  She has already waved away the gold with her gloved hand.  "Give it to the school," she says.  "Cedric loved it 'ere."

We know exactly where he is.  Under white in the chapel which Harry hadn't even know that Hogwarts had.  The Castle knows what's needed.  Harry needs for it to be easy, this evening, after Mrs Diggory kisses his cheek and tells him not to be sorry.  He needs for the stairs to take him.  He isn't surprised when he finds himself at the prefect's bathroom on the fifth floor.  HE ducks inside and locks the door behind him.  It isn't until he starts to take off his clothes that he realises how tired he is.  He sheds layers and shrinks.  He remembers Cedric holding out his hand, and he thinks that if he'd been a bit less noble, if he'd lunged instead of hanging back.  If he'd been the only one to go...

Three, two, one and Cedric Diggory died.

Moaning Myrtle is here but he doesn't care.  He lets her see him.  He has nothing else to hide, feels transparent, without content, void.  He feels like he cracked open and ran away.  He's almost surprised when Myrtle doesn't look - when she hides her eyes behind her hands until he's into the water.  The last time that he was here, his world had been centred on a golden egg.  Now, he has nothing to centre him - he's spreading out on all sides like oil on the surface of the water  Myrtle sits cross-legged on the surface of the bath, her insubstantial chin cradled in her hand.

"Where is he?"  She said.  "The pretty boy?  He used to come and see me, you know.  So kind.  Not like other boys."

"He isn't coming."  It feels cruel to talk to Myrtle about death; who wants to be always reminded or reminding.

"I thought that I saw him," says Myrtle, quietly.  "Passing through.  He was very quiet.  The new ones are."  Myrtle understands, which makes him sorrier.

Harry ducks his head beneath the surface of the water, no gillyweed to breath, and drowns, and drowns.

(3. not enough but enough)

Pomona Sprout has always been a deep thinker; thoughtfulness runs in those who tend towards plants.  She imagines that it’s because plants aren’t much in the way of conversation.  Pomona sits at her desk in the warm little conservatory that serves as an office and she sketches the shapes of leaves on the edge of a piece of parchment which is otherwise empty except for a single name written in her own elaborate hand.  She stabs at the bag of gold which jingles.  The Diggorys have sent it back.  She doesn’t blame them.  Gold never did buy anything which did much good.

            She reads the name, then writes it twice more.  Cedric Cedric Cedric Diggory Diggory Diggory.   If Pomona was the sort of woman who took to weeping, she might have cried herself silly for Diggory, who had never had much of a hand for herbology, but that was all that she could hold against him, that mandrake roots had a tendency to bite him and that things often died under his hapless but well meaning ministrations.  So he couldn’t do plants, most people couldn’t – that boy made people bloom.  He had had a careful way of listening.  Pomona had seen him at the stupid ball with that pretty Ravenclaw girl, dancing like he’d always known how to dance.  That girl had been pretty, but, when Cedric had whirled her, that girl had bloomed.  It made Pomona sad, to think of fruit withering on the branch, in the sudden winter which had killed the just born spring.

            Do him justice, Pomona, Albus Dumbledore had said.  How to do justice to a boy who should be been remarkable.

            What she decides on is an oak tree on the hill that heads down to Hagrid’s cottage and the lake beyond that.  Oak trees are marvellous old men.  He’s young now, but he will be remarkable one day and push against the sky, like Diggory should have.  She plants the sapling herself.  As the head of a bereaved house, it’s only one of the things she does.  Mostly, she leaves the students to each other, but her door is always standing open, letting in the chill.  She hears the whispering weeping in the walls.

            Pomona pats the slender and yet sturdy trunk with dirty fingers, gold letters in the bark.  She brushes her hair back with her wrist.

REMEMBER CEDRIC DIGGORY.

“Do him proud, old man,” Pomona tells the tree, knowing that it’ll hear and remember, bending for her spade.

(4. not right but better)

Neville tries not to think about anything in the past tense.  He has no memory of his mother and father before St Mungos.  He prefers to think of them as being without a past at all.  He loves his gran but it’s not the same.  On good days, his mother is a kind stranger.  What he wants to do is crawl up on the bed with her and lie with his head on her and sleep.  He has elaborate fantasies about the way she’d smell if he did that. 

            What he does is make polite conversation about biscuits and the print on her dress.  Up to his elbows in mulch, Neville knows that this is nothing to do with his mom and dad at all.  The school reels with shock, but Neville grew up with a soft shocked feeling always with him.  He pours over his books, dog-earred and soft edged and loved.  He treats it like a spell, takes time and due care, making notes, trudging the length of the green house on flat feet, taking clippings here and there.

            Aloe for grief (he didn’t know Cedric, but burying someone your own age means that you won’t live forever either.  You see the end of your own life).  Camelia for admiration (Neville wishes to be brave).  Fennel for someone worthy of praise…purple heather for admiration and pansies for memory.  Thyme for courage.  Rosemary for remembrance. 

            He asks her to come with him to leave them at the tree.  She does, a straw hat pulled down over her long red hair.  When he’s done, she reaches up to press a kiss to his cheek.  They hold hands as they walk back.  Later, his fingers smell of herbs and tears.

(5. one of seven or one of one)

When she thinks about how it could so easily have been Harry, she finds herself vicious with anger.  After the walk with Neville, sunburn spreading on the bridge of her nose, she sits in the common room and punches cushions and feels futile and very young.  She’s sick of it, sick of being the youngest, of being coddled and protected.  They all have different ways of doing it; Fred and George push and joke to keep from telling her anything, Charlie talks about other things, Percy uses long words.  Bill tells stories.  Ron’s the only one who ever includes her in anything, and it’s grudging, more to do with Hermione than anything.  Ginny knows that they’re a matched set, her brother, Hermione and Harry.  She doesn’t quite fit, but that’s okay – she’s got friends of her own after all.  Her friends are thrumming with shock because, if Cedric Diggory can come back dead then anybody can.  He was so alive yesterday and, if it was him, it could be Harry or Ron.  Ginny thinks about their mother’s clock.  Mortal peril is as bad as it can get in her mother’s world; there is no marking on the face for DEATH.  One of seven would be just as hard to lose as one of one.  She imagines her mother turning around and iron hands flying all around her.  Because Cedric is dead, suddenly, everybody could be.  Because Cedric died, death has come rushing into the world.  Ginny thinks about death.

            If it was her dad, at least mum would have the seven of them.  Same for dad.

            If it was Fred or George it had better be both of them.  They wouldn’t work alone.  Whichever one of them was left would be a mess of indentations where the other one used to fit.

            Charlie would want to burn up.  Bill would want something you could tell stories about, something to make the girls cry.

            If Harry goes, it’ll be Ron as well, Ginny knows it.  She isn’t quite sure what it is that she feels for Harry.  It used to be a crush, and that was fine, but now there’s a strange weak feeling between her legs and in her chest and when she thinks of the sight of him leaning across Cedric’s body she wants to scream and push the walls down and hold him in his arms and tell him that it’s alright.  It might be alright.  It won’t be alright, but there are the four of them, now, and one of them might die, but the four of them together are stronger.  She wants to babble nonsense.  She wants to do something because she certainly can’t bloody grieve because it isn’t her place to grieve because she didn’t know him, didn’t know Cedric Diggory, wasn’t one of the silly girls who followed him about and swooned and didn’t care what time he took showers at and didn’t try and sneak glimpses of him in his pants through open changing room doors and it isn’t that she doesn’t care that he’s dead because she does, oh she does, but it isn’t her place and it’s Harry who she worries for.  Ginny buries her face in her knees in front of the common room fire and if somebody comes in, she doesn’t hear them, and she doesn’t cry, but she shakes.

            If Ginny dies, she wants it to be quick and she wants nobody to suffer for her loss.  If none of them are going to live forever, she wants them all, all seven of them and Harry and Hermione and the whole world to die at once.

(6. do not wither, do not fade)

The only ones for them, and they’ve thought about it, are the ones who go with a pop-bang-crash and a very bright light.  The twins do not believe in heroes.  They believe in mad men and sad men and men who are sheer bloody brilliant but they think that society calls people heroes when they’re not sure what to make of them.  What Cedric Diggory was was a fucking miracle on a broom, a brilliant seeker, a jolly good chap.  What he was was brave and kind and a good laugh.  What he was was better than either of them with women (though Angelina’s pretty smitten), and probably cleverer than both of them but nowhere near as bad.  He was, at the end of the day, fucking sound and all of this talking and wailing is very good and very nice but it doesn’t achieve anything and it’s no way at all to say goodbye.  What they need is a whoop wailing drunken send off, a howling at the moon dust up.  What it’s about, Fred says, is not going quietly.  What it comes down, George mentions, is not giving up and going quietly into any damn dark.

            The summer nights are still cool and very clear.  Perfect for what they have in mind.  Well away from any of the trees, they line them up, a hundred rockets in glass bottles pointing up.  There’s a small crowd, which is how it should be.  No dirges in the dark for Cedric Diggory, oh no.  They say goodbye with fire and showers of sparks.  They light the rockets the Muggle way, matches and burnt finger.  Fred’s arm finds it’s way around George’s neck. They suck their fingertips and salute a sky which is momentarily bright and filled with whistling noise. 

(7. contrition)

Mon Dieu, j’regrette…

She’s sorry, very sorry, when he doesn’t come home.

(8. fragrant dreams of shadows)

What Viktor doesn’t understand and it isn’t because he’s slow or he’s foreign, is all of this swearing to Merlin.  Why?  What does Merlin do?  It strikes him as being as stupid as swearing to the candlestick or the textbook.  These things, they are inanimate and inconsequential.  This Merlin, if he existed, once – what help can he be now?  Viktor has thought about it many times.  He does not sleep since Cedric died.  He finds it difficult, like sleep is one step too close to death.  He wants at the edge of the lake, the heels of his boots sinking in the soft, dry loam and he thinks about the inside of the maze.  He is haunted by the thought that maybe he tried to kill one of them, all of them.  He is disturbed by the knowledge of his own darkness.  He skims pebbles across the surface of the dark water.  He has pockets full of pebbles.  He tries to think of Hermione, but he keeps coming back to Cedric Diggory, who is dead now.

            He doesn’t understand this swearing to Merlin shit.  What good is Merlin going to do?  It seems to him like counting on a fairy tale as an intercessor.  It seems a long time since he stopped to say prayers; no privacy in the shared Champions tent, on the crowded decks of the ship.  His mother would weep to know him.  In Bulgaria, there is a custom, a belief that those in Heaven, those already in Heaven, are sainted.  While you pray to God you may talk to saints as you would have done while they were alive, and hope that they give you help.  To Viktor that seems like a good, right thing.

            He kneels in the sand, and speaks and hopes that, somewhere, Cedric Diggory hears him.  He says goodbye and thank you; he’s glad of the opportunity to meet a boy such as that one.  Between Cedric and Harry potter, Krum believes that these English wizards and strange and brave and brilliant.  He prays (talks) for a long time and then later, he goes to his bed and dreams fragrant dreams of the shadows between Hermione Granger’s breasts.

            Never once does it occur to him to wish that he had been the one who touched the cup with Harry potter, side by side.

(9. oh, it’s been such hell)

Nothing will ever be the same again.  She’ll be afraid forever now.  The tree on the hill draws her and she walks there, with him and alone.  The tree draws her, though she wishes that it wouldn’t, and she rubs her fingers over golden letters.  It isn’t him, though she’s sorry.  It’s the thought of the other two.  Young men die in wars.  Hermione’s read enough books, heard enough stories from her mum’s dad who flew planes to know that young men die easier than almost anybody.  Hogwarts has a strange, quiet feel – people don’t mix, seek out the company of that which they already know.  She spends a lot of time with Viktor.  He’ll be leaving soon, and there’s something quietly comforting about his strange.  She feels like she could be safe with him.  He’s older.  He’s very brave.  So are Ron and Harry.  So was Cedric.  So often, young men mistake bravery for armour.  Hermione wishes that they looked a bit more afraid sometimes.  The castle itself is very quiet.  Hermione thinks that it’s a bit like a mother who’s lost a son.  She remembers the glimpse she caught of Cedric’s mother; so beautiful, as beautiful as her son.  Hogwarts is a lot like Mrs Diggory; still and silent, muted by grief.  The castle’s heart got taken home with Cedric to be buried.

            How can it ever be the same again?  It’s only been days but it could have been years and years already.  They could have grown up knowing that they weren’t going to live forever.  She feels her fingers contract around Viktor’s.  He doesn’t smile but he squeezes her hand back.    They sit on the grass, the two of them, and he lays his head in her lap and she runs her fingers across the fuzzy shortness of his hair which is nothing like Ron’s unkempt rat’s nest and is somehow not as nice.    She wants to talk about how things won’t be the same anymore, but finds that she can’t.  She wants to talk about Quidditch matches and dinner in the great hall and normal things.  She tries not to think about watching Cedric walk down corridors (everybody did).  Looking towards Hogwarts, still grieving in the heavy light, she pushes her fingers through Viktor’s hair and she doesn’t think about Cedric Diggory, which will make her feel guilty later.

            She thinks about how every death leaves the world changed and how different they’ll all end up, in the end.

(10. and leave no room for death)

Nobody will touch her either, so she knows how Harry Potter feels.  It’s something about being too close to death.  She thinks maybe she feels chilled now.  In summer she sits in the Ravenclaw tower in cardigans and thick socks, unable to shake the chill out of her bones.  Two days ago, she took her dress, her Yule ball gown, out and hung it at the foot of the bed.  She sits look at it a lot because silver on white silk recalls the way that Cedric looked at her, that smile which lifted the corner of his mouth just so.  There’s a Cedric which the world wants to remember; good and kind and loyal, a Hufflepuff to his very core, a good boy, a good student.  He was that as well.  What Cho wants to remember, what she really wants to linger on is the night of the Yule Ball, walking out for the first dance, dancing first, her hand on his arm.  What she wants to remember is the warm weight of his hand in the small of her back and slipping lower as he turned her.  She wants to remember the way that his voice broke, when he asked her if she wanted to take a walk.

            It wasn’t slow or romantic or even comfortable, but it wasn’t the first time so she forgave him.  Her knickers had ended up balled up in the pocket of his dress robes (it wasn’t until later that she remembered).  He muttered charms under his breath as he gathered her against him, between his body and the wall, as he lifted her a little and pushed into her without asking.  She was wet and ready for him, and she groaned, pushed the little sound into his mouth, and didn’t let it ring.  She’d snarled her fingers through his hair and pressed kisses to the corner of his lips and the bridge of his nose and his eyelids as he’d moved inside her.  She hadn’t been in love with him, but she’d wanted him very much indeed and it was difficult to ignore the glow that came with having him.  She remembered the first time that she’d played Quidditch against him; how he’d caught the light and almost dazzled.  He pressed his finger between them, his fingertip cold when it found her between her legs, rubbing in time with this thrusts, and when she came, she pushed her whimpers against his closed eyes which moved under lids like he was dreaming.

            Kissing her at the common room door, he’d walked away with her knickers in his pocket, and she’d never asked for them back.  Draped in blankets and cardigans and socks, Cho wanted desperately to remember Cedric like that.  It would have been so easy to forget him as a person and make him into a symbol, a cause.  She wants to remember him laughing and wheeling, and the way that he’d kissed the corner of her mouth when he set her down, his hands arranging her skirts.

            “Thank you for a lovely evening,” he said at the door, and she’d known that he’d meant the shag as much as the dancing if not more, and she didn’t hold it against him.  She doesn’t want to remember Cedric as a construct, a flat and faded thing.  She wants to remember that kiss, that shag, the way he done a few steps of a dance as he walked away from her in shiny shoes.

            More than anything, she wants to believe that, when death came, he put out both of his arms, made himself impossibly big, left no room.  She hopes that, at the very least, he went ahead of it like a King.  Like a lover might.

 It seems a life time ago now, that shambling little dance with a turn and a heel-click.

She hopes that he left no room for death in dancing.

(11. the truth, and only that)

Dumbledore sits alone in the empty hall and thinks about what he’ll say.  Something about what is right, and what is easy, but that isn’t enough.  How do you tell a room full of waiting children that a war has begun or is beginning and innocence is over with and done.  How do you look into their faces and tell them that Cedric was the first but he will not be the last?  What do you say to girls who a grieving and boys who are frightened; what words, in the face of all those tears.  Dumbledore studies the wheeling circle of stars above his head, picks out Sirius and Orion and the shadow of a fading moon.  What to say, what to say.

            The truth, and only that.  Sometimes, he feels guilt that there is not more that he can do or say.  He has heard it said that he remembers the name of every witch and wizard who has attended the school during his time.  They’re right.  The faces and the names haunt him.

            Remember Cedric Diggory, and he will.  He never forgets a face.  He lifts his wand, pondering rain clouds or a flat, featureless snow-sky.  In the end, he decides on rafters, and particular, fragile way in which the light shafts through the high windows.  With a flick of his wrist, it’s done, moments before the school comes filing in.

            And the sky goes out for Cedric Diggory.