A lone blue jay rested on a tree limb, its feathers ruffled and broken leg hanging behind him. A solitary, crumpling leaf swayed on the edge of the branch, its rough texture satisfying when felt by a smooth hand. It broke off and descended the fifty feet to the ground, coming to a rest untouched by anything but the wind. It swirled above the land as the breeze lifted it into the air a few feet away and tossed it around. The bird chirped once, twice, calling out for a mate that no longer existed.
“You and me both,” Carrie told the bird somberly, resting her elbow on the windowsill and her chin on the heel of her hand. She watched the blue jay continue to twitter and sing his sad song. The peaceful sound the animal made calmed Carrie, and she found her eyes closing to the sweet sound.
September and October came and went, slow and dull. Carrie immersed herself in her work, always tugging a briefcase-full home of papers and un-typed documents in case she would awaken in the middle of the night crying for someone who couldn’t comfort her or come back. She sheltered her feelings instead of confronting them. The first snow had come early this year, at the end of November. December brought the chill that the month before had began. The trees were now grey and leafless, the grass dull, the land unexciting.
Today the forecast was party cloudy with a one hundred percent chance of depression and tears. Carrie had been released from work, told to go home and rest, spend time with family, for the Christmas holidays two whole weeks early, her boss compassionate and understanding as to what she was going through. He obviously didn’t grasp the situation fully enough though, because this only left Carrie with nothing to do but wallow in her feelings and long that she had someone to spend time with. She was a form of an accountant at a small firm, living concealed in the Magical world where no one could find or bother her with sympathetic apologies and gifts of flowers or casseroles. Her boss had confiscated the briefcase that she towed home every day with his best intentions and locked it inside a file cabinet in his office. Carrie could no longer disappear behind her job. No longer able to occupy herself with filing and computers to conceal her true feelings, her wishes to perish or fall off the face of the earth showed greatly. She had known that she couldn’t live without Christian the second she had found him dead. Only living, plastering on that sweet smile of hers, to satisfy Mr. and Mrs. Lowe, kept her going. The simple act of ‘just living’ shouldn’t have a ‘just’ in front of it; it wasn’t that easy. Her whole life had been Christian as soon as she had met him and they had started dating. The past year had been spent deep in wedding plans and spending time with him. Now that the wedding was off and Christian dead, the funeral had been what she was expecting. Now that it had ended, she didn’t know what to do with herself. Any normal boss would have told her to move on or be fired, but her own had sympathized, having known Christian himself, and allowed her to still work there, and was not disappointed with the amount of workload she finished in such small amounts of time.
Carrie’s grieving process had remained perplexed all through the months, every second of the days she spent alone. She hadn’t seen Samuel since the day they had met and he had explained to her all that she hadn’t needed to understand. Thinking on it greatly, she knew that if she had had the choice she would have chosen not to know why Christian had been killed. Carrie had already been branded with the knowledge of how he had been killed, but why, she hadn’t. The first few days following his murder, the feeling of ambiguity had taken over her senses, numbed them. After her meeting with Samuel she had figured out why Christian had died, why he had sacrificed himself. But now Carrie had no idea as to how she should react. The fact that Christian had died to save a little girl that she didn’t know was . . . very hard to accept. Not only could she not come to terms with it, she felt anger toward Alice, Samuel, and their family for allowing Christian to do such a thing. But she knew that it wasn’t their fault. Not matter how devoted he had been to her, Christian took great pride in his patients, and once he had made up his mind, he would not change his decisions for anything. Dying for one of them should not have been so easy, she thought. But was she, Carrie, a loyal fiancée, supposed to avenge his death? That thought had crossed Carrie’s mind many times but she had never undertaken the deed, she wasn’t strong enough. Even knowing his murderer didn’t help; it just made things worse, caused her to feel more and more powerless the longer she thought on it. The friends she once had were now gone, someone to confide in vanished. A few had moved away, many had just discarded Carrie altogether, refusing to go out or continue to be friends with someone so . . . lonely and miserable. Carrie hadn’t thought of how ludicrous their reasons were, hadn’t cared, at the time, depressed as she was. Even now she couldn’t see how horrid of friends they had been. Instead of comforting her at her lowest time, they had ignored her, disappearing and leaving her alone to dwell on morbid thoughts.
Now she found herself bored, with nothing on television to watch and only visions of Christian surfacing. Thoughts of ‘what if’ entered her brain. What would they be doing right now, if he were alive? Would they be watching television together? Would they be enjoying a nice romantic dinner? Would they be exchanging early Christmas presents? Would they be making love on this very sofa?
Carrie’s heart surged with affection for him, still. She couldn’t accept the fact that he was truly gone. Her mind told her that he was dead, but her heart told her that he would return to her, that he was just away on a business trip and would come home soon. Carrie was just an empty shell that showed up for work more often than she should, one that inhabited a body that was unrecognizable from the one she had possessed when Christian was alive. When he was thriving beside her, Carrie had always felt the need, actually the desire, to be neat and proper, looking her best for him. It wasn’t something that was required for the position of wife that Christian had given her: it was something that she loved spending time doing. Now she only showered, allowing her hair to naturally wave and fall to her shoulders, grooming only enough so she wouldn’t be looked at disgustingly. She no longer spent hours on her hair, make up, getting dressed. If she couldn’t look her best for Christian, she wouldn’t for anyone. A thin line divided her life, one side labeled pure happiness and the other utter devastation.That was how her life was sorted as now. Before Christian and After Christian.
Ever since she had seen Christian’s wand destroyed into two, her desire for using magic had slackened as well. Tempted as Carrie would have been before Christian’s death to use her wand instead of a pencil to fill out reports on things she found worthless, she now noticed her wand as more of an actual weapon than assistant. It also would have allowed her to finish her tasks quicker, something she didn’t need. Every thought, every task she did, reminded her of Christian in some way. His smile, his face would float into her mind’s eye and she’d run from the room or collapse on the floor into tears. It had been months and still, her grieving had yet to end. She didn’t know how much longer she could live like this. A life of sadness, of yearning for someone who was dead, wasn’t healthful. But she didn’t know how to impede the tears or the crushing, plummeting sensation in her heart and stomach when she awoke in the morning and found no Christian lying next to her.
A stirring noise erupted from her glowing fireplace and she nearly leapt from the couch from being so frightened. A face that she recognized, but only from searching his eyes with great effort, emerged from the ashes and soot, sputtering.
“Carrie?” he asked timidly. His voice was surging with excitement, she identified that immediately. The fear that had been in his voice so long ago still had not faltered. The surety that someone was behind him at every corner was still there. “Carrie, is it you?” he whispered. He glimpsed her across the room with a slender cup of tea in one hand and a scrapbook in the other and seemed to relax somewhat.
“Sorry to disturb you, dear,” he told her compassionately, seeing the pictures she held in her hands, discerning the tears that ran down her cheeks. Carrie realized this and wiped them away with the sleeve of her sweatshirt and turned back to him, sniffling once.
“Yes, Samuel?” she asked, bewildered, once again, at his presence.
He stared at her for a moment, pursing his lips, sucking his teeth while he thought for the correct words.
“What is it, Samuel? What’s happened? Is Alice all right?”
He nodded and finally opened his mouth to speak.
“They’ve caught him. They’ve caught Avery.” He sighed, waiting for her reaction. “He’s at the Ministry of Magic now.”
Carrie seized her cloak and fled the room, forgetting to lock the door behind her as she Apparated with a loud crack on her front steps to the Ministry.
~ * ~
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I can’t tell you anything at this time.”
“That man in there killed my husband. I think that I have every right---”
“Even more of a reason not to allow you to go in there. We can’t have a victim’s family member avenging their death,” she added sarcastically, her mocking tone causing Carrie to be outraged. But she somehow held it within her and stared at the woman, searching for answers. “I can tell you that a small group of three, including him, was captured. That’s all even I know.”
“What do I do now? I can’t just sit here.”
“Then go back home. It’s the only thing I can say to you right now. They’ll have everything tomorrow in the Prophet.”
“That piece of garbage? I won’t get any truth from that. I want the facts, what he’s told the Aurors.”
The associate breathed a sigh, praying mentally within for strength, and turned back to the woman in front of her. “They’re not disclosing that right now. If you are a friend of one of the victims, then they may call you in for questioning. I’m sorry.” She turned on her heel, shuffling a stack of papers in her hands and walking into the very room Carrie wished to be in. Questioning was taking place there; the Aurors and officials would be inside. Avery would be there. Her heart told her to sneak into the room, attempt to go undetected, but if caught, she would never learn anything.
She’d rather hear something now than later, her heart told her. It wasn’t just a wish to know, it was a need. Mentally she pleaded for the bravery she knew she would require by walking into the next room. Thinking about it for only a split second, she picked up her feet and entered the room before she could change her mind. That or her brain kicked into gear and she realized how horridly erroneous her plan was. She had no plan, that was the problem. Carrie just had to know.
Pulling her cloak tighter around her body, twisting the thick material in her fingers she stepped forward, swinging open the thick double doors a crack before stepping inside. Only two or three members of the Wizengamot looked up, but they turned back to the accused when he began to speak once again.
“I was not the one who carried out those acts.”
“So you’re saying to me, to the Wizengamot itself, that you did not murder anyone?”
Carrie noticed that a man, seated at the head of the courtroom, was the one asking all the questions. Immediately identifying him from the papers as the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, she knew his name to be David Faraday. He had been the one to recently replace Dumbledore after his death. The criminal seemed to wait for a moment before speaking, his jaw set tight, as if struggling with something.
“No. I did not murder anyone.”
“You plead not guilty?”
“Not guilty.”
“Not guilty to the murder of Barbara Taylor?”
“Not guilty.”
“Not guilty of murder of Pansy Parkinson?”
“Of course not. Was my best mate’s girl.” Faraday’s eyes narrowed and he continued.
“Christian Lowe?”
Carrie’s heart nearly stopped.
“Not guilty.”
“Alison Walker?”
“Not. Guilty. Sir.” He paused for effect, searching the room. “Everyone.” He was young. His blonde, matted hair fell into his face, dirty compared to the pompous form of the group. He didn’t look any older than seventeen. Carrie found it ironic how the man--- well, boy--- had been raised to become a Death Eater but still found it necessary to call Grey ‘sir’, no matter how arrogant he sounded. Weren’t Death Eaters usually rude, cold-blooded beings?
Carrie looked up and saw that the man was not Avery, as she had thought he would be, but another man, unrecognizable to her. His face showed fear in every stress line, in every wrinkle. He was bound to the chair by broad chains, shackled around his ankles and hands. Because of the numerous amounts of questions, he began to obtain a mocking tone.
David Faraday was taller than she had imagined, his height towering over the many heads of the others seated behind him. His thin, bristly mustache was blonde, a different color than his hair, red. She almost burst into laughter from the odd sight as she leaned back into her seat, slouching absurdly to avoid detection. His clothes were too tight and a thin layer of sweat lay in the fold of his arms, as well as on his lower back. He clicked his long fingernails together as he thought and his shoes made a gentle clopping noise as they paced across the marble flooring.
“Dementors!” he called, clapping his hands once, as if summoning them. Carrie gradually felt the room becoming colder and colder. Teeth chattering, she wrapped her arms tighter into her cloak, pulling the hood up. Christian’s face suddenly floated into her mind’s eye. But it wasn’t the pleasant, happy man that she knew--- it was the corpse she had found in his bedroom that inauspicious day. That horrid face seemed glued, tattooed, to the inside of her eyelids. Thus, when she blinked or closed her eyes to rid herself of the view of the dirty creatures taking away the boy, his face surfaced and she stifled the urge to weep. She believed that she would never be cheerful again.
Carrie fled, hiding from view, before the Dementors noticed the stranger leaving. Before they chose to take away what was left of her own soul.
-
*Thanks to the lovely Fresca for beta-ing so quickly.