Harry Potter was screaming.
Standing close enough to reach out and touch Potter’s arm, Cedric Diggory had never in his life heard such an unholy sound. He could only stare as the famed fourth-year lost grip of his wand as he reached for his face, could only watch as the Boy-Who-Lived lost his equilibrium and collapsed to the muddy grass of this dark and overgrown graveyard.
It was then that Cedric decided that they had left the Third Task behind when the Cup had transported them off the Hogwarts grounds, and that whatever place this was, it was entirely unrelated to the Tournament. Several questions should have occurred to him at that moment, had they not been drowned out by the stomach-churning sound surging from the crumpled boy writhing on the ground.
Only one consideration made it to the surface: who, precisely, was this short and faceless figure that had materialized out of the night. Cedric dared not lower his wand as the mysterious individual stood swathed in shadow beside a towering marble headstone. It held what looked like, but was assuredly not, a bundle of robes as it watched the two teenagers impassively. Cedric forced down the rising tide of icy panic that swelled in his chest, threatening to overwhelm his capacity for coherent thought.
It was only a moment before he composed himself enough to speak. He got his mouth halfway open, fully intending to demand that the figure identify itself, when, just under Potter’s terrible keening, Cedric heard a high, cold voice order, “kill the spare.”
Cedric blinked. While he might have been unfamiliar with the nature of “the spare,” the directive to murder was perfectly clear. He felt himself turn toward Potter, his free hand starting to reach for the younger boy; some underlying part of his mind had concluded that Potter was being tortured with a nonverbal Cruciatus Curse, but Cedric would be damned if he’d let the figure finish the job while he had strength left in him.
And then he heard a swishing sound as the figure swung its arm out from under the bundle it carried. A wand flashed in the moonlight, aimed high, too high to strike at a victim lying on the ground. And that underlying part of Cedric’s mind discarded its previous theory in favor of a new one, because in that moment he somehow understood:
He was The Spare.
This did not surprise him nearly as much as he would have liked. It had been Potter, after all, who had unmasked Quirrell and prevented him from stealing the Philosopher’s Stone; Potter who had discovered the location of the mythical Chamber of Secrets and drawn the fabled sword of Godric Gryffindor to slay an ancient Basilisk; Potter who had survived a confrontation with a convicted mass murderer that had escaped from Azkaban Prison. Potter who was, to this day, the only man to have survived the Killing Curse.
Of the two of them, it always seemed to be Potter who found himself at the epicenter of attention. That he was competing in the Tournament at all was just another example of the extraordinary events that swirled around him. So many, especially this year, thought of Harry as little more than a shameless fame-seeker intoxicated on his own celebrity.
And yet, Cedric had always sensed in Potter a powerful longing for anonymity and normalcy, a desperate desire to be unburdened from fantastical circumstances that were constantly thrust upon him. Others envied the Boy Who Lived, and many resented him his notoriety. Cedric, however, had always felt a shapeless sympathy for this kid whose life was commanded by so many forces outside of his own control, and whose daily existence had become such a public spectacle without his consent.
The figure had its wand trained on Cedric “ on his chest, he knew without knowing how; on his heart “ and a reedy voice trembled with exhilarated terror as it screeched into the barren sky: “Avada Kedavra!”
Those fatal words had hardly been uttered when Cedric ordered his body to move, actually felt his limbs beginning to respond, and realized with a kind of soothing dread that it would not be enough. There was no way that he would be able to dodge this most evil of Unforgivable Curses, no way that he could even deflect it or defend against it.
He felt time become flexible around him, softening until the entirety of this moment crystallized with spectacular clarity, and he thought perhaps that this was how it was in the end, because he knew beyond knowing that this was his final moment. He saw the flash of green light that would kill him slashing through the thick night air like an arc of electric fire; he heard the warbling pitch of Potter’s agonized howling and wished that he’d been better prepared to help the kid; he tasted the coppery flavor of distilled terror dripping down the back of his throat; he felt each bead of sweat that popped across his flesh, and the chill of the churning darkness gnawing into his core, and the grained ashwood wand still clutched uselessly in his hand; and in the final moment that he would ever have, he smelled, of all improbable things, the sweetness of honeysuckle.
He felt his mind retreat into a desperate kind of thought-time, and he didn’t know if that was normal, and he didn’t care. Time “ that silly notion of minutes and hours and days and years “ had finally given way completely, and memory mixed at random with sensation and thought. He was on the southern bank of the Black Lake “ no, he was remembering being on the southern bank of the Black Lake, though the distinction between being and remembering was, at this particular moment, utterly meaningless.
He was as near to the border of the Forbidden Forest as any student could reasonably expect to get, lounging on the soft grass beneath a hunched sallow-tree on a glorious Saturday afternoon toward the end of April. It seemed quite impossible that this had been a mere two months before the Third Task. It seemed like it must have been a different life, perhaps one lived by a different Cedric Diggory who would not be murdered in a desolate graveyard by a faceless figure.
His dog-eared copy of Advanced Potion Making lay forgotten in the shade, open to the immensely complex formula for the equally worthwhile Felix Felicis. He’d briefly entertained the notion of using the potent brew to gain an edge in the Third Task. He had not yet known what that Task would be, had dared not even conceive of the unthinkable forces he’d be up against after facing the Swedish Short-Snout and the Merpeople of the Black Lake. But he knew that he’d need every advantage in order to conquer the Tournament, because he knew now that the Tournament was his only real opponent. As early as the First Task, he had stopped thinking of Krum and Delacour and Potter as his competition in pursuit of the Cup.
Dumbledore had spoken true when he’d warned that each of them would stand alone.
While it was well-known that Felix had long been banned from all levels of organized Quidditch “ due in large part to the World Cup scandal of 1862 which also led, among other reforms in the sport, to the quadrennial hosting of the game “ Cedric had learned, with a good deal of research by Professor Sprout, that the Triwizard Tournament had no such clear guidelines because the bylaws hadn’t been updated since the last hosting by the Durmstrang Institute. The only update in the last two centuries, it seemed, were plans to hold the competition every four years “ during the school year following the World Cup, as it were “ instead of every half-decade.
And, of course, the new age requirement, which gave Cedric no end of amusement; as if seventeen-year-olds were any harder to kill than fourteen-year-olds. Professor Sprout had even intimated clandestinely that she thought Cedric would be very well justified in using Felix given the outrageously perilous nature of the Tasks.
Regrettably, this was one advantage that Cedric would not be able to take. Just about the time that Cedric had nearly convinced himself that using just a little Felix Felicis wouldn’t really count as cheating exactly, he had consulted with Professor Snape to learn that safely preparing a viable sample of liquid-luck required a minimum of six months. Coupled with the fact that several of the rarer ingredients weren’t even kept in the school’s stock, Cedric conceded that the idea just wouldn’t work. Perhaps if he’d set to work on the potion immediately after his name had issued from the Goblet of Fire back on Halloween night, maybe it might have been ready, assuming of course that he could manage the complicated recipe without fouling it up and brewing a poison instead.
But he still found the subject fascinating, and well worth studying for his own self-edification, which was why Mr. Borage’s textbook lay open, albeit forgotten, in the shade of a sallow-tree on the southern bank of the Black Lake on a glorious Saturday afternoon.
The book had, however, been forgotten in favor of an altogether more fascinating subject. Cedric glanced up to the dark-haired girl nestled into the tree’s bulging exposed roots, her vaguely almond eyes scanning the water’s glassy surface.
“Cho,” he said, tasting the word, enjoying it. She turned to him then, and he saw the momentary distance in her eyes before she focused back onto him and smiled. She only had one dimple, in the left corner of her mouth; Cedric noticed that, and memorized it. “You didn’t hear a word I just said, did you?” he teased.
“Nope,” she confirmed with that breezy smile. “Was it important?”
Now Cedric smiled; “Not terribly. Just something about your O.W.L.s coming up in a month, and all the studying you still need to do to pass Charms.”
Cho flashed him a patronized grin; “You can’t really expect me to think about exams right now.” She set aside her unopened edition of the Standard Book of Spells: Year Five. “I mean seriously, Ced; you’re in first place, in the Triwizard Tournament.”
“Tied for first, actually,” he corrected.
Cho sighed, pushed herself up to sit cross-legged in the grass, and asked, “Does anyone else have more points in the competition than you do?”
Cedric ruminated for a moment, leery of getting caught by a trick question, before finally answering: “No.”
“Then there you go,” Cho concluded, quite pleased with her logical accomplishment. “No one is better than you.”
Cedric gave a small laugh at that, “tough to argue with rationale like that.”
“Accepting that I’m right is probably easier,” she agreed. “Good general policy, too.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Cedric assured her. He angled himself to settle his head into the crook where her ankles came together, plucking absently at the fringe of the blue-and-bronze house scarf that, through Spring and Summer, doubled as a belt instead. “So what were you thinking about while I was trying to give you sensible academic advice?”
Cho thought a moment, smiling at the memory “ or maybe it wasn’t really a memory; maybe she had actually gone back to wherever and whenever it had been that had so enthralled her “ before explaining, “Just remembering a dream I had in that bewitched-sleep.”
Cedric felt Cho’s fingernails kneading gently across his scalp as she ran her fingertips through his hair. “Two months ago?” he asked; “must’ve been pretty good.”
“Amazing, really,” she corrected, “and totally real. I think maybe I was seeing…” She considered the matter privately for a moment, then proceeded; “Ced, what do you think you’ll do after school?”
Cedric sighed through a small smile, the sound of a man who has already dedicated too much thought to a tiresome topic. “Who knows,” he said dismissively, then laughed; “my father has been keeping after me about an entry-level internship with the Office of Misinformation, but I don’t know…” he shook his head, but never quite lost that small smile. “I don’t know if I want to spend my life in government work.”
“Let me rephrase that, then,” Cho amended. “What do you want to do after school?”
Cedric looked up at her then: “Ideal scenario?” She nodded, and he glanced toward the abandoned Quidditch pitch. “Take the summer off, visit the Isle of Mann where my mother’s family is from, maybe travel the rest of Ireland and Scotland before coming back and trying out for Puddlemere United. Eventually get on the British National Team and win a World Cup.”
“A couple of light, easily-attainable goals, in other words,” Cho kidded.
“Exactly,” Cedric agreed; “nothing too ambitious. After a couple of decades I’ll retire, and hire someone to write my biography, starting with my stunning victory in the Triwizard Tournament of 1995.”
Cho smirked, “Are there any supporting players in this international bestseller?”
Cedric tilted his head up to look at her with a soft smile, and a stray rivulet of sunlight sparkled off his eye; “A few.” He looked back over the Lake, watching the fiery day play on the surface of the water. “There’s about half-a-dozen kids in there somewhere with an obscenely brilliant wife whose intellect is rivaled only by her stunning beauty and “ ”
“Wait,” Cho interrupted with an incredulous half-smile; “Did you just say six kids?”
“At least,” Cedric nodded. “Three pairs of twins would work; two sets of triplets would be better; sextuplets would be perfect.” He glanced up to her again and cocked a lopsided grin; “I need enough for my own Quidditch team, after all.”
Cho laughed, “We’d be a regular Weasley clan.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Cedric laughed back. “Fred and George may act like blundering jesters, but they’ve got pristine magical mechanics and enough brilliant ideas to fill a Vanishing Cabinet. And Ginny Weasley’s just…” He paused, thought better of continuing, and laughed again instead.
The comment was not lost on Cho, however, who answered by giving Cedric a light playful smack on the forehead. “Ginny Weasley’s just what?”
“Nothing,” Cedric hedged, still grinning. “Great with a bat-bogey hex, is all. From what I hear.”
Cho leaned over his face to look him in the eye and tell him sweetly, “It better just be what you hear.”
Cedric cracked into a smile and lifted his head toward Cho; “you don’t even know how pretty you are when you’re jealous.” By the time the last word came out, he’d reached her face. Her hand had made its way from his hair to his cheek. She exhaled; her warm breath splashed over his lips. She leaned in and pressed her mouth to his.
Cedric felt his own hand brush through Cho’s dark hair, and heard a gentle breeze rush through the canopy of leaves. A pure kind of energy crackled across his brain, lighting his blood on fire and making his senses sparkle. He tasted strawberries on Cho’s lips, and smelled honeysuckle like the world was made of it because it was Cho that smelled like honeysuckle and right here right now she was the world.
Time buckled and swirled around them, but did not intrude upon the shade of their sallow-tree. It was certainly not Cedric’s first kiss, but it was the first kiss that mattered, and in this improbable exochronic fissure it occurred to each of them, separately and at nearly the same instant, that this moment was about as close to perfection as any two people could reasonably expect to get. It was a kiss he would remember to his dying day.
I knew love. The thought thundered through his head as that green spark of silent death sliced across the dark and overgrown graveyard. And that will have to be enough.
He didn’t know why it occurred to him to conjure his Patronus, but before he could even think the first syllable of the incantation, the furious energy of that wretched spell hit him like a psychic wind powerful enough to blast him from his own body, severing his mind from the brain that housed it. The whole of reality crumbled away as if his entire life had been a confusing staccato dream. He was thought and emotion, but all corporeal sense of a physical world was gone, and with it went any conception of time.
He was for one preternatural moment suspended in the nothingness of being in-between, caught in a nonplace that did not exist in the impossible spacelessness that separates worlds. And then he felt himself simultaneously pulled in two quite opposite directions, although calling them “directions” at all was a crudely inaccurate description of the nature of things. But Cedric had no understanding by which to integrate this absurd sensation of being torn between two states of existence: onward and behind.
Before he could make any decision on the matter, the natural force drawing him onward was temporarily overpowered by the more concentrated artificial force compelling him to stay behind. He was aware of himself being dragged through the darkness and squeezed out of a very narrow tunnel, though he knew absently that the sensation must be a self-deception since he no longer had a body to drag or squeeze.
And then the graveyard materialized around him again, hazy and grainy like an old photograph, and lit by what looked like a massive dome of interweaving filaments of golden light. At the center of the electrified auditorium he found two men struggling tremendously against one another in a magnificent battle. To the left he saw Potter clutching his wand tightly, trembling under the strain of maintaining a spell.
That spell linked him to the figure to the right, a taller wizard with pale waxy flesh, blazing red eyes, and slits in place of a nose.
That, Cedric thought simply and without fear, is Voldemort.
Between the two, like nothing Cedric had ever seen in his admittedly short life, raged a fiery golden thread, locking them in a desperate duel. Cedric looked the length of that spectacular thread from wand to wand, then turned to Potter, told him: “Hold on, Harry.”
He became aware of the presence of people, sensed their roiling malice more than anything as they stalked around the periphery of the golden dome, locked out. But before he could realize that those people were not here for Potter’s benefit, Cedric saw a dense grey smoke emerging from the tip of Voldemort’s wand, and all other thoughts were flung aside. He suddenly understood that what he was seeing was also how he had reappeared himself, and with that came a host of realizations at once.
If he had been called forth from Voldemort’s wand, then something was causing that wand to cycle through its own history of spell-casting. And while Potter was an advanced student to be sure, Cedric doubted that he could have cast the prior incantato spell, which meant only that the priori incantatem variation had been triggered. That, in turn, meant that the interaction between Potter’s wand and Voldemort’s was more complex than that of any two random wands, and Cedric would have bet, based on this spectacle, that it was the twin-cores effect.
And on the heels of that string of inference came the most powerful realization:
Potter had a chance.
It was slim, and it relied on more luck than most people experience in a lifetime, but if one person could defeat Voldemort, it was the one person who had done it before. By the time that Cedric had sorted through this chain of revelations, the grey smoke pouring from Voldemort’s wand had formed itself into a person. Cedric didn’t know the man, and yet somehow he did. He knew that Frank Bryce had been the gardener of the Riddle Estate, and he knew that Bryce had been murdered by the wand in Voldemort’s hand. He couldn’t have explained how he knew those things. He knew only that they were true.
Bryce marveled at the sparkling web arching overhead, and at the men bound at the wands by a churning golden thread, with the unchecked astonishment of a Muggle in the presence of real magic.
“He was a real wizard, then?” Bryce mused to Cedric, watching Voldemort. “Killed me, that one did…” Then, to Potter: “You fight him, boy…”
As Bryce lent his encouragement to the outmatched teenager, Cedric saw another dense grey smoke issue from Voldemort’s wand, and he wondered if every last one of the Dark Wizard’s victims was going to step out of that yew staff. And that thought planted another that gave Cedric the most brilliant idea of his life just minutes after that life had ended. He watched the smoke bloom from Voldemort’s wand into the form of another person, a woman, and this time he recognized Bertha Jorkins from his living days.
When she caught sight of the titanic conflict unfolding among the headstones, she spun toward Potter. “Don’t let go, now!” Cedric heard her bellow; “Don’t let him get you, Harry “ don’t let go!”
Bertha made for Potter then, and Cedric turned to Bryce, “his only chance of getting out of here alive is that trophy. It’s a Portkey that’ll take him back to Hogwarts.”
“A Portkey…to Hogwarts…” Bryce repeated, like he was testing out a foreign language. But Cedric didn’t much care if the man understood what the words meant so long as he could repeat them correctly when it mattered.
“Portkey to Hogwarts,” Cedric confirmed; “make sure he goes for it when the spell breaks down.”
Bryce nodded and hobbled off along the inside of the dome toward Bertha, while Cedric followed the curve of the web toward the most powerful practitioner of the Dark Arts the world had ever known. There was no fear in his approach; there was nothing left that Voldemort could take from him. But he saw fear flashing in those red eyes as they regarded him, an apparition of the most horrible crime come back for a final reckoning.
“You don’t really think you can win, do you?” Cedric said as if the idea was preposterous. “You can’t possibly think that you can beat him.” He felt Voldemort’s terror and rage and hatred swelling to a chaotic pitch even as the next smoky phantasm streamed from the tip of his wand. It was a man with untidy hair who looked so much like Potter someday would that Cedric was entirely unsurprised to know that it was Harry’s father.
“You couldn’t even finish the job when he was an infant,” Cedric hissed at Voldemort, who shuddered with the effort of sustaining his murderous spell. He caught sight of Bryce conferring with Jorkins and James, and had to trust that his message was being conveyed. Either way, he was too focused on Voldemort to worry about it now; “He was helpless and defenseless and utterly alone, because everyone who could have protected him was dead. You saw to that.”
And as Cedric drove home each word like a venomous spike, another grey specter spilled from Voldemort’s deadly wand, and another woman fell to the grass and straightened up to join the others, and there was no doubt in the universe that she was Harry’s mother. Cedric nodded from Voldemort’s side toward the shifting nebula of ethereal bystanders; “And yet here we are, all the bodies that lay at your feet. All of the blood on your hands welling up to consume you.”
Cedric stepped around the Dark Wizard. The golden dome pulsed with the immense energy of two such powerful wills clashing. “Look at him: just a terrified boy. But you failed to kill him when he was a wandless baby.” Cedric looked back to Potter, encircled by the spirits of people he loved, people he never knew, fighting for his life, and holding his own, against the insurmountable forces of evil. Cedric turned back to Voldemort and cocked a lopsided grin; “How could you hope to have a chance against him now?”
Voldemort intensified the effort he was pouring into his spell, charging that golden thread with a deathly heat. But Potter would not be shaken, and Cedric coughed out a small laugh as he looked the Dark Wizard in the eyes.
“You are a fool, Riddle,” he said plainly; “And you will lose everything.” The words felt so piercing and right and satisfying, and he knew that they were true when he saw the echo of madness that flashed in Voldemort’s eyes. With a tight smirk, Cedric crossed the graveyard again to join Bryce and Jorkins and the Potters just as Lily said “”to the Portkey, it will return you to Hogwarts…do you understand, Harry?”
“Yes,” Potter gasped, fighting with every bit of strength to hold onto his wand.
Cedric moved toward the kid, and whispered to him, “Harry…take my body back, will you?” He met Harry’s gaze, his own eyes lit with desperation. “Take my body back to my parents…”
“I will,” said Harry, and Cedric believed him.
It was clear just how little he had left in him as Harry’s father whispered to his son, “Do it now…be ready to run…do it now…”
And all at once, with a force Cedric wouldn’t have believed possible, Potter reared back on his wand and roared into the depths of the summer night: “NOW!”
The golden thread splintered and disappeared; the crackling dome surged for one luminous instant, then blinked out as well; the sound of panicked people rushed in to fill the breach. Cedric lost track of Potter almost immediately as he and the wraiths of Voldemort’s victims charged their executioner, shielding the Boy Who Had Lived Once More from him with their own misty forms. They clawed at him with immaterial hands, descended upon him like a thickening air, closed in around him until he screamed with unholy wrath and swiped mightily at them as if to kill them all again.
There was only one spell that could have a comparable effect on the dead, and it took Voldemort three seconds more than he could afford to recall it. And for the second time that night, Cedric felt the psychic wind that swept him up when the spell hit him as the Darkest Wizard ever known screeched with his mind the final incantation: DELETRIUS!
And then…then, everything was gone.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
A light and pleasant fog swirled softly through a vivid and limitless everywhere-light.
He wondered briefly where he was, then wondered briefly if “where” was even a meaningful notion anymore, then wondered briefly how it was that he could wonder anything at all. And as soon as he had begun to ponder his own ability to ponder, he understood that he had always known that he was not merely drifting through a light and pleasant fog. He was the fog, which, he knew, wasn’t a fog at all but rather the nebulous collection of all of his thoughts and emotions. Which were, he knew, all that remained now that the inconvenient physical matter had been abandoned.
With that simple realization, he found himself capable of recreating the image of his former self. It was an illusion, he knew, nothing more than a reconstruction of his own memory of himself, but it was something familiar to cling to in this strange circumstance.
Cedric lay facedown, quite content to listen to the silence. While he did so, it occurred to him that the surface upon which he had come to rest was a uniform shade of light grey, with a rough texture that he now, realizing it, found mildly irritating. He was not so content to lay with his face mashed against coarse concrete, so he pushed himself from the floor that wasn’t really a floor and climbed back to his feet that weren’t really his feet.
That nothing was really what it was pretending to be did not concern him.
Now that he had reconstituted the thing that used to be him, he wondered again what this condition of unbeing was. This time, though, the vivid and limitless everywhere-light seemed to react to his speculation by resolving itself into the semblance of a “where.” He saw then the vaulted glass dome soaring far above him, scattering what looked like, but was assuredly not, the gleaming light of dawn. He found himself in the midst of a wide-open space, bright and clean, stretching for hundreds of meters both right and left, and he in the middle with nowhere to go.
This massive cavern of glass and light dwarfed even the Great Hall of Hogwarts.
And there were red-brick walls, he saw those now, materializing out of the depths of his own memory, and carved stone facades rising out of the glittering light to complete his surroundings. And all at once he knew what, though not how, this place was with an astonishment only that it should have taken him so long to figure it all out.
Cedric stood on Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters at King’s Cross railway station in downtown London. The platform was completely abandoned and more pristine than Cedric had ever seen it. The station looked, he imagined, like it must have the day before it first opened.
Cedric stood static on the concourse, absorbing the magnitude of this somehow ageless marvel, basking in the velveteen silence of a perpetual Now until he became aware of another presence. He turned, unafraid and utterly consumed with curiosity, to find a tall figure with a long silvery beard and sweeping robes of midnight blue striding comfortably toward him. But before he could even begin to wonder who this new figure was, Cedric was horrorstruck to see the gentle, smiling face of Albus Dumbledore behind a pair of halfmoon spectacles.
If Dumbledore had fallen, then all must surely be lost.
“Potter failed then?” Cedric asked bleakly. A gnashing grief threatened to suffocate him at the thought of so many who must surely have suffered so greatly.
But Dumbledore’s smile did not falter, and he only shook his head once. “Your sacrifice was not in vain.” He considered, added: “Harry stumbled, many times, but he won out in the end.”
Cedric sighed, his relief tempered by his confusion. “Then why,” he asked, “are you here?”
Dumbledore’s eyes took on an aspect of wise regret, the corners of his smile betraying an inevitable submission. “Because the price of victory,” he explained, “is measured in lives.”
“Yours,” Cedric stated numbly, comprehension dawning as his mind stretched vaguely around the concept. “And mine.”
Dumbledore nodded. “And so many others.”
Cedric took in the vastness of the empty space and asked, “Where are they?”
“I imagine,” Dumbledore proposed in his endearing manner of not really explaining things, “that they have gone ahead.” He flashed a perceptive smirk then; “Onward, you might say.”
The word registered with Cedric. He understood its implications in a subliminal sort of way, so he pressed on: “Then where are we?”
“Does the place not look familiar,” Dumbledore questioned inscrutably.
A grin wrinkled the edges of Cedric’s lips. “It does,” he affirmed, “but it isn’t.”
“No,” Dumbledore agreed; “I should think not.”
The point seemed significant, and yet Cedric found it somehow meaningless that this place should not be what it was clearly trying to be. But then it occurred to him that perhaps it was this place that was real; that the sooty, crowded platform in that sooty, crowded life on the other side of the veil was the one merely pretending. The thought made him light-headed, and that made him laugh, because he knew that he had no head that could be rendered light by any thoughts.
Dumbledore chuckled with him, for all the world as if he got the joke. Cedric started to speak, perhaps to give voice to this profound revelation of his, when Dumbledore turned. A moment later, a scarlet steam engine broke through the light, the digits 5972 painted in white on the nose, chimney billowing clear white clouds into the terminus. Cedric instantly recognized the train, and thought it odd that the sign reading Hogwarts Express, 11 o’clock which usually hung overhead was not hanging overhead.
He knew that this meant a great many things, most of which he did not understand.
The train glided to a stop near the student and his teacher, and Cedric looked back to Dumbledore. He couldn’t help smiling when he asked, “Do I have to go?”
“No,” the professor told him. “There is nothing that you have to do anymore.”
“But I can’t go back,” Cedric said, asking as much as stating, sure of the answer and needing to hear it anyhow. “Not all the way.”
“No,” Dumbledore said again, and that regretful wisdom flashed in his eyes once more.
Cedric looked from the Headmaster to the idling locomotive that would, he felt quite certain, wait in this station for however-long he took to come to a decision. “Cho,” he said then, tasting the word, enjoying it, wincing in the blinding heat as it tore a seam in his soul. He felt himself coming loose into misty emotion and thought, felt that force compelling him to stay behind.
“It is a complicated choice,” Dumbledore explained. “If you stay, you can see her now, and every day for the rest of her life.”
His need to be near her almost overcame him then. He felt that engine powering up to exit the terminal and leave him behind, but Dumbledore’s words caught him. “But in doing so, you will haunt her. And you of all people know that every life, hers included, is only temporary.”
“But if I go on,” Cedric labored; “if I wait, then I can truly be with her. Not just see her.”
Dumbledore’s smile was all the answer he needed, but he added, “I think you will find that Time has a slippery quality here. I, for instance, crossed over two years after you, and yet,” he spread his hands as to demonstrate some incomprehensible magic, “here we are, face to face.”
Cedric realized then that his mind had already made itself up. He looked into the weathered face and brilliant blue eyes of Albus Dumbledore, and said, “I don’t have my bags.”
“I am certain,” Dumbledore assured him, “that you have everything you need for this trip.”
Cedric nodded, patted at his pockets quickly before realizing that he would find no ticket for this journey. He laughed, once, at his own habitual nature, and crossed the platform toward the train. It was seven steps, and they were the seven longest steps he had ever taken.
“Professor,” he said as he reached the door to a car. He stopped with one foot on the step, one hand on the railing, turned to Dumbledore. “Where does it go?”
“I expect that this train,” Dumbledore looked over the locomotive with candid fondness, “will take you anywhere you want.”
Cedric smiled at that, because he knew without knowing that it was true. “Will you?”
“Not yet, I think,” Dumbledore said with his most knowing of smiles. “There is one more bit of business that I have yet to finish.”
It was a perfectly Dumbledorian response, and Cedric could have hoped for no better. “Thank you, professor,” he said, and climbed the steps into the car. He headed down the aisle, passing closed doors with blinds drawn over the windows. He heard voices in those compartments, and he heard their laughter. A few sounded familiar, and many of them Cedric had never heard before. But he would meet them all, he felt. They would all be familiar.
He found an empty compartment with an open door and stepped inside. Excitement surged through him; the same excitement he had felt on a foggy September morning six years ago. The morning he had met the Weasley twins on this same train; had it been this same compartment?
Cedric dropped into the seat near the window, and did not look out onto the platform. In the overhead rack above the seat opposite him, he saw a tattered Cleansweep Five broomstick that looked somehow familiar, and next to it a piece of secondhand luggage with an advertisement sticker reading U-NO-POO as well as. He tried to place the memory, couldn’t, gave it up. He leaned back against the headrest, closed his eyes as the train began to roll.
Cedric thought then of a hunched sallow-tree, and he smiled.