Carrie walked across the green grass with weary steps, glad of her decision to wear flats. The rain that had poured on her way to the cemetery had caused the ground to become soft and soggy, and heels certainly would have created holes wherever she stepped and caused her to trip. Her clumsiness was in its top form ever since Christian’s death. Taking a place in one of the front seats, covered in a thick, woolly blue material, she smoothed her dress, allowing her mind to wander. Her eyes strayed to the outfit she had on and its many sequins, to her hands, pale and ghostly looking against the beautiful material. They lay in her lap. She folded her hands together and she heard a soft crack, the sound her knuckles made as they popped. The wrinkles her fingers made as she bunched them together, and moved them apart, occupied her until the other guests began to arrive. The attractive ring on her third finger caught her eye and she immediately looked away.
The stress and worry of the funeral, of finally burying Christian, losing him, once and for all, had caused her to become extremely tired. Even as she sat there, watching the preacher’s lips move, Christian’s body being brought out and propped smoothly against the machine that would lower him into the earth, people shaking their heads sympathetically toward her, her eyelids drooped and she felt her body giving in. Slowly, ensuring she didn’t press a creak from the chair, she sat up, forcing her eyelids open with the quick rubbing of her eyes and focusing on the vicar in front of her. Another reference to her and Christian’s parents was made, and Carrie gave a forced smile to the ground, to no one, in case they glanced her way. The people standing in the back hovered over the ground like zombies, listening to the procession of words, the funeral, go by in a blur. There was only a fraction of what remained from the church present, standing nearby. All were weeping, all having known Christian closely, but a stray man stood behind a tree adjacent to the crowd, his mind ready to speak what was on his mind, his legs strong enough to carry him across that grass whenever the funeral was over.
“Mrs. Lowe, you may come and tuck in your son one last time.”
Mrs. Lowe stood, her legs wobbling and shaking, and began to go toward the open casket. Her son, her only son, lay inside that casket. She soon felt a hand touch her back and lead her toward it. Realizing it was her husband, her spirit softened, allowing her to force her legs to walk, not just drag. When she had made it to the casket, she tucked the pillows neatly beneath his head, smoothed his hair, and kissed his pale cheek without a word. They continued to stand there for a brief moment, husband and wife staring at son. Finally turning on their heel to take their seats, the preacher closed the casket, shaking his head at the life that had been stolen.
After the coffer had been closed, sealed accordingly, and it had been confirmed that no stray object was hanging out of it, the preacher turned back to the group of about sixty and held an item up in his hand. Its slender, light wood stuck out sorely from the congregations’ many black suits and shirts, just like Carrie in her wedding dress. The preacher then said a prayer, an enchantment, and the wand broke itself in two. He handed the pieces, solemnly, to Mr. And Mrs. Lowe, who strained to hold within the tears that threatened to come forth. Mrs. Lowe’s face was almost crimson from the effort. She slipped the ruined portions of the wand into her cloak pocket and stared off into the dark sky above them. Carrie wondered if she was hoping Christian was up there, really in Heaven like the preacher had said. Maybe she was just whispering a few loving words to her son. Carrie didn’t know, but she put a comforting hand to her shoulder anyhow, caressing the skin in a reassuring way.
The preacher bowed his head and began to close the funeral in prayer. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Amen.”
The people stirred in their seats, and the group stood. But Carrie remained seated, watching the body of her love being lowered into the ground by a machine that was worked by the hand of a person Carrie had never seen before. The tomb inched its way into the dark soil as the wind began to blow with great intensity, stirring the strands of hair that had been freed from her ponytail. A nearby man, one unrecognizable to her that had apparently appeared out of nowhere, walked over and was now speaking quietly with the preacher. The preacher then reached out an arm and a finger, pointing right toward Carrie. The man glanced her way, displaying a knowing look, and turned back to the man to thank him. The preacher excused himself and walked away to speak with members of the family, leaving the two strangers alone to dwell. Carrie almost made a break for it, uncrossing her legs to walk away before this man could speak to her, but he was already by her side. It would have been rude and unnecessary for her to depart then.
“Carrie? Carrie West?”
Carrie showed obviously her confusion through her facial features and nodded.
“I’m sorry. I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I just needed to meet you. I needed to meet anyone who knew him. He talked of you all the time. You’re just as beautiful as he said you were.” His words flew out of his mouth so fast that Carrie could hardly understand him. His nervousness had certainly showed when speaking, something he had been afraid of. It dawned quickly upon Carrie that he was speaking of Christian. Her cheeks blushed scarlet as she realized that while he knew her name, she did not know his.
“I’m sorry--- who are you?” she asked, staring at him oddly.
“Oh, gosh--- I don’t think that would be the best idea. But you could call me Samuel.”
“Samuel,” she voiced, allowing the word to run off her tongue pleasantly. “May I ask why you didn’t come and sit with the rest of the group? You seem to have known him so well.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t answer that completely either. I shouldn’t be here.” He peered over his shoulder knowingly, expecting someone to be there. His cheeks were pale, nervous, as if he knew very well that he wasn’t supposed to, as if he were going to be in great danger from someone if he were caught. “I need to go.”
“No, please, stay. We can go somewhere if you need to. A café? I’m starving. If that’s all right, I mean---” Carrie was vulnerable. She felt that this man hadn’t come all this way just to introduce himself, that he must be there for a superior reason. Samuel stared at her for a moment, running the arrangement through his mind. “Please?” she added. The side of his mouth twitched as his eyes strayed behind him again.
“All right,” he told her, “I guess that I owe you that much.”
Carrie shifted her gaze to her right, furrowing her brow, wondering what he had meant by that last sentence, but decided to keep her questions at bay until they were inside a safe place. He really seemed to be worried, panicky about something. Peering over his shoulder was a normal a thing as blinking for him. She decided she could at least reach the restaurant before they would speak.
“Just a moment, please.” She walked over to where Christian now was, six feet under, and grasped a handful of fresh, cool dirt in her fingers. She closed her eyes, trying to feel him beside her, to see if he was still with her, and spread the dirt over his coffin.
“Goodbye, Christian. I’ll always love you,” she whispered.
~ * ~
The waitress walked away with two menus under her arm, their orders inside her head. After she had completely departed, walking into the back kitchen, Carrie folded her hands in front of her and found that she had so many questions to ask this man in front of her. Samuel had kept on his coat even despite the stuffy atmosphere of the restaurant, pushing up the collar so it sat upright against his neck, as if hiding behind the fabric so whomever it was he was covering himself from would not see him.
“So, please, Samuel.” Carrie reached a comforting hand across the table to him and grasped it with her own. She knew, deep within, that he had something deeply imposing to inform her about. About Christian. “Please tell me what you’re doing here.” He peered over his shoulder again.
“Samuel. No one is coming for you. If they are, I’ll tell you before they can reach you and allow you to Apparate.” She was facing the door. It was a ridiculous excuse to get him to settle down, but it worked.
Finally relaxing, allowing his shoulders to loosen and lean against the booth, he took off his coat and placed it beside him, giving the entrance one last look for quick measure. Samuel was now gathering his thoughts. His fingers now tensed with each other under the table and he took a sip of his coffee. Carrie, too, took a long, drawling sip of the hot tea that had been placed in front of her. Carrie looked down onto the table, its many scratches. Staring at the flawless, porcelain teacup, she found no chips or flakes in the glass. She became annoyed at how much detail she was noticing lately of the most ordinary things. Her hands. Her dress. The table. It was ridiculous.
“My little girl---“ He dug inside his bulky coat pocket and retrieved a wallet-size photo of a beautiful eight-year-old girl. His voice had startled Carrie and she smoothed her dress so that the flinch she had given would go unnoticed. The girl’s blonde hair was as long as her waist, shining brighter than her teeth, white as milk, and eyes, green as a ripe olive. “Alice, her name is. This was taken about a week ago. She was a very sick child when we brought her into St. Mungo’s; she looked nothing like this then. We thought she only had some kind of a cold. A disease of the blood cells, they said, when she was diagnosed. Cancer. Her doctor was your---” He seemed to think better of finishing the sentence with ‘husband’, but instead just nodded, confirming that her doctor had been Christian. “Muggle hospitals did next to nothing. Only made her sicker, her spirit weaker. The Magical side of the family comes from me, so I thought it would be all right to bring her to St. Mungo’s. About two weeks after her treatments started, she began to show signs of recovery --- the medicines there worked wonders for her, much better than what the Muggle doctors gave her. A month after that, they said she was ready to go home. My family celebrated, her friends at her daycare all came to visit and threw her a party. The kind spirit she possessed allowed her to create many friendships with the younger, sicker children there and she received many sweets as goodbye presents.”
“Christian talked of an Alice often. Your daughter has to be her, then. I never met her, but he thought greatly of her.” Carrie gave him a warm smile and nodded, urging him to go on.
“We brought her home and sent her back to daycare soon after that. But we noticed that something was different about Alice. She wasn’t the same girl she had once been. Yes, I know, there shouldn’t be much cause for alarm: she had obviously gone through a life-changing event, coming so close to death, but she wasn’t in the right state of mind. She didn’t speak. Not one word came from her mouth, her teacher said, her first three weeks back at school. When she was called on, she just shrugged. She didn’t play with the other children and she sat alone at lunch. The teacher said that my little girl always seemed to have something on her mind, but never could find the words to express it. I noticed it as well, at home, but thought it was only because we were so busy --- someone had to work to pay off the medical bills, the housing, the daycare. I thought she just didn’t have anyone to talk to. Instead of talking, she had reduced herself to a shell, a person that none of us recognized. One day, my wife and I sat her down, demanding that she come out with whatever it was she was hiding. She forced us to lock all the doors and windows, check under the beds, inside the closets, until she could speak to us. We were shocked, confused, to say the least, but we did as she told us to. When we returned to the room, she told us that a man, a doctor, had killed one of the little kids in the room with her.”
Carrie’s eyes widened in their sockets. “You’re not telling me that Christian was the one to . . .“
“No! No, Merlin, I’m so sorry. Not Christian, no.” Carrie slackened from the rigid posture she had just gained and he went on. “Another one of the doctors. A man by the name of Avery. It could have been his name, could not have been. We didn’t know at the time. Alice told us that the little boy had said that name before he had been murdered. She said that he, Avery, wasn’t a real doctor, and that was the only time she had ever seen him. She figured he had stolen the white coat and proper uniform from one of the other doctors that was on break. Alice told us that the man had muttered the forbidden curse --- Avada Kedavra --- to the child, and she had seen a flash of bright green light from behind the curtain. She had pretended to be asleep. The next day the nurses had come in and the boy was still, dead. Nowhere else has my daughter seen or heard of this curse. She knows that it is called the forbidden curse, but she did not know the color or the words. How else could she have known the details of the spell unless she had seen it herself? We believed her, not only because she was our child, but also because of these facts. And because she was so terrified. She had forced us to lock those doors before telling us a thing for a reason: she thought that, if he knew she had told someone, that he would come after her next. We went to the Ministry of Magic and spoke to them, but they didn’t believe us. That, or they found it unworthy of being investigated. So we then we set up an appointment with the board of doctors at St. Mungo’s. We felt that the boy’s parents were owed the right to know how their son had died. They listened and told us that they would do everything in their power to find out who had done it, and they would explore as to how this person had slipped past the many securities they had placed on the hospital.
“So that was that. We didn’t know what else to do after that. Alice became more talkative, a note from the teacher informed us, the next day, and her grades began to increase. Life soon was back to normal, but she often asked us, every day when she got home from school, actually, if the man had been caught yet. The answer was always the same, no, even with the hospital, mostly Christian, calling on us at all hours, questioning Alice of the smallest of details that no one could have remembered. But she always knew what he was asking of, and gave them an appropriate response.
“Christian and Alice were very close, Carrie. She wouldn’t allow anyone else but Christian to sit with her during her treatments. A doctor always had to be present, even when family members were, for safety reasons and he always made time for my daughter, scheduling the other things he had to at different times. He constantly showed her the love that she gave to him clearly, and that made us, her family, very much appreciate him. When we were at work or needed to go home and get rest, we always knew that Alice had someone at the hospital to keep her company. He was a very good man.”
“About a month after she had revealed the murder, Alice was kidnapped. The teacher told us through the Floo Network that she hadn’t shown up for school that day. I knew that my wife had Apparated her there herself. Skipping the details, the Death Eaters had her, knew she had told on the man that had killed the little boy. They had my little girl, and I was the one that was scared. There was no telling how frightened she was, being the one that had actually been kidnapped. They had killed that little boy easily . . .” he drifted off. Carrie allowed him to wander through his thoughts for a few minutes. While he thought, the food came. Carrie set his own dish in front of him, and he mindlessly thanked the waitress and dipped a fork into his pasta and took a bite. He chewed, still pondering, Carrie thought, on what had happened to his daughter while she had been gone.
“Again, to make a long story short, Christian, the person that had worked on the case she had presented against this man, as well as her doctor and friend, thought it his duty to help find her,” he said. “Christian then collected a group of Aurors that would work on the new case--- a kidnapping case, now. They found her shortly after and she was returned to us through some form of a compromise. I didn’t learn of the circumstances until later. The compromise was that someone had to adopt her place, if she was to be returned safely. Christian was that compromise, Carrie. He saved my little girl.”
Carrie remained silent. She dropped her fork and it clattered from her plate to the table with a loud clanging noise.
“He thought he could get out of it. He thought that he could outsmart them. The Death Eaters believed they could force him to switch sides, torture him until he decided that pain wasn’t worth being a moral, respectable person on the Light Side. But Christian, apparently,” he said, coming back to the present, “did. He never gave in.” The words were harsh, but true. “I now have my little girl, this little girl,” he continued, holding up Alice’s picture, “because of your courageous husband.”
Carrie didn’t know how to react. She knew that Christian had been murdered, but she had not known why. She wasn’t sure whether or not to blame this man or his daughter for Christian’s death, or to weep because she finally knew why he had been killed. She was going to weep either way, she knew, in the end. Deep down she was proud that Christian had thought enough of the girl to sacrifice himself for her, but she was outraged that he could have gone and done something like this, something as final as dying for someone she didn’t know, without talking it over with those who loved him. Her mind was extremely . . . baffled, bewildered, confused. As of then she had a very hazy picture as to what had happened. She knew why he had been murdered and what the circumstances were. But why had they murdered Christian? Why had they even allowed the compromise? Death Eaters were brutal beings; they wouldn’t just permit a trade to happen. They’d kill the girl, then kidnap Christian, then kill him. Death Eaters were intelligent, evil people; only few had outsmarted them. They knew how to work trades so they could always get what they wanted, causing heartbreak to those who didn’t. There had to be more to the story, but she knew that Samuel wasn’t holding anything back.
“When Alice was kidnapped and we were searching for her, we left our home and fled--- only Christian knew our whereabouts. He was the one that recommended going into hiding was the best thing for us to do, so I didn’t end up losing my wife or other child. Christian was threatened several times by the Death Eaters, but he never revealed where we were. He was too good to us. We had never done anything to deserve the kind of compassion he showed toward us.
“This is why I could not tell you my name. Though the compromise has been fulfilled, a life for another, I don’t think that the Death Eaters are completely satisfied. I’m sure that it was Avery that killed Christian. I can’t help but think that they’re still after us, living so long like this.”
Carrie smiled, attempting to uphold her emotions, to keep them in check. She was nearly shaking with the effort not to just burst out with a furious, helpless, fulfilled scream, all at the same time. They finished their food in silence, nothing left to say to the other.
*Thanks to dearest Fresca for editing
*Reviews would be lovely if you have the time :)