Get to air…
Everything was green-blue, and eerily quite. The sounds of the wind and snow above were muffled efficiently by the water. Light refracting through the ice made the green-blue color brighter, and where the water was disturbed strange shapes, silvery green snakes appeared.
Get to air…
Harry had finally opened his eyes. He needed to breathe; his lungs screamed for precious oxygen, sobbed for air. His head was heavy, his eyes drooped, he could feel his heart pumping the poisonous oxygen-deprived blood through his body. His limbs were frozen, as if he’d been put under the Full-Body Bind. All he could do was float, his fingers stiff around Ron’s wrist as the urge to breathe in began to overpower him. Blackness tinged his vision as he sank lower and lower away from the ice and air, his body heavy. Maybe it was time to die…
That small, sickening, final thought, brought Harry back to his senses. It was as if someone had pushed his head above water and allowed him one final breath. A shock went through him and his eyes shot open. His brain seemed to have received a jump start. Harry’s fingers tightened around Ron’s wrist, but he didn’t turn to look at his friend or to see if Ron was still alive. Even the thought was unbearable.
Harry could see the crack in the ice that he and Ron had fallen through. He swam towards it, pumping his arms and legs slowly, wearily, pulled back by his heavy clothes and the extra weight that was Ron. It seemed to take an age to get there.
Finally, when red and white spots began to pop in front of his eyes, Harry’s hand shot up through the water to the surface. He grabbed on to the ice (his hand seemed to freeze onto it) and pushed his head above water, gasping for air. His chest heaved, and he could here little pop sounds in his ears. His heart beat so rapidly in his chest that it was painful.
Harry pulled himself up onto the surface, cold wind slapping his face. He was coughing and choking and gasping for much needed air, but still he heaved, pulling himself back onto the ice, dragging Ron behind him.
He shivered uncontrollably, on his hands and knees, his eyes closed, as he sucked in breath after precious breath. Ron! screamed his brain, but his body refused to move until it had received its due share of oxygen.
At last, his body cooperated, and Harry spun to look at Ron.
Perhaps, it would have been better if he had been too cowardly to see if his best friend was alive or dead. Perhaps it would have been better if he had not made it out of the lake at all.
Harry was in shock. It was the only word close enough to explain what he was feeling.
There is no word in the English language, or in any language, to explain the devastating, sickening feeling that swept through Harry as he stared and stared down at what lay on the ice beside him.
It was beyond nausea; beyond pain; beyond hopelessness; beyond the feeling that the cause of a millions deaths was your fault, because you made a mistake. It was beyond feeling.
It was as if his mind had shut down from the pain and horror, as if he had fainted, but in a way that he could still see what lay before his eyes. As if the world was laughing at his mistake, even in his grief, laughing and making sure that he would never forget what he had done.
He wasn’t staring at his best friend.
He wasn’t staring at a frozen, blue, bloated corpse.
He wasn’t staring at Ron’s dead body.
He was staring at a large finely whittled cylinder of soggy wood. Exactly the same diameter that a half-starving, seventeen-year-old’s wrist might have been.
He sat there for a long time. He didn’t know how long: it could have been minutes, hours, days, weeks, even months. But he sat, staring, his eyes glazed.
Around him, the world seemed to change. Had he cared enough to look, he would have seen it. The wind died down, and the sky cleared. It stopped snowing. The cloudless sky was picturesque. Dawn approached. The sky lightened from velvety blue to a lighter, softer, creamy blue. The beginnings of a small golden orb peeped over the horizon, sending a heavenly glow into the sky. The powder blue transformed into a mix of pink and lavender fluff, streaking the sky magnificently. A few birds awoke, began to sing their morning songs, merry, joyous that a new day had begun. The golden orb rose higher and became more visible, shining onto the white dust that covered the ground. Shadows grew.
The sun rose to Harry’s back, casting a shadow in front of him, bathing the large branch of wood in gray. It was very big and only one part of it, a large broad branch, had been shaved and whittled to be smooth. The rest was as it had grown, with thin and thick branches and tendrils growing out of the whittled area, like claws and long, jointed fingers. One particularly curved and sharp-looking branch was broken, hanging by a thread to the rest of the wood. No wonder he hadn’t been able to pull it up at first. It had probably been stuck somewhere.
But these thoughts and sights did not register with Harry as he sat on the iced over lake, freezing and shivering and wet, staring at that large branch with his brilliant emerald eyes that glowed in the dawn, but seemed cold and distant still… like emerald ice.
The world moved on. It had no feelings, no emotions to plague it. It faced loss every single day. It faced death and disease and destruction. It moved on. The world continued to pass through time, but for those few hours that Harry sat on the ice, for him, time had stopped. The world knew nothing. It was amazing. There, right in its midst, a life had been lost. A friend grieved for a friend; a brother for a brother. But the world knew not.
It moved on.
It felt nothing.