mahogany ; d.m

54 - memoriam

She didn't sleep that night.

She didn't sleep any night following. What once had been night and day, blended into one long suffering stretch of consciousness. An everlasting nightmare that one couldn't wake from. Just a constant darkness shadowed over the world.

A week had gone by, starved of sleep—only staying awake through the consumption of Wideye Potion that Athena smuggled from the store cupboard when no one was paying any attention.

Every student, every Professor, the ghosts, the portraits, the House elves, even the creatures, all in despair over the events of that night a week ago.

Dumbledore was dead. Killed brutally by Professor Snape as Harry had explained. He hadn't hesitated to mention everything else that had happened that night in the Astronomy Tower—of all places. How ironic, she'd thought.

Harry told them who exactly had been there—who had failed in his given task that now became so very apparent to Athena. So very obvious.

She'd known Draco had been trying to take someone's life, and disregarded it. Naive fool.

An uproar of grief cloaked Hogwarts. There wasn't a place without at least one person weeping.

The tears, the sorrow, the pain all acting as a reminder that Cedric was dead. He'd saved her life, and he was dead. Gone, never coming back.

Very few learned what had happened that night. Athena couldn't even bare to explain the events to McGonagall, instead having had her memory extracted for the Professor to observe in the Pensieve. She hadn't made clear how much of it she had seen. Athena only hoped she'd stopped viewing after the curse had hit him.

McGonagall, Athena and a few Order members were the only people in Hogwarts to know exactly what had happened to Cedric. It had been revealed to everyone else that he'd been murdered by a Death Eater (not disclosing which), and that Athena had been with him when it happened. Therefore, marking her as someone to be considerate around.

But they didn't know that he'd saved her life—thrown himself in front of the Killing Curse that wasn't meant for him.

Wrong time, wrong place.

Collateral damage.

Among the grief, all she could feel was guilt. A gut wrenching guilt that made her want to rid herself of every emotion. Of feeling.

There had been a time when she had liked to feel. She'd strived for it. It was the thing she loved most in the world.

But now there was nothing she wanted more than to be numbed to it all—the pain, the remorse, the guilt.

She hadn't cried since that night—just felt everything, all locked inside of her, weighing her down. Stubbornly unable to forget the green flash of light that'd struck him dead.

She'd managed to teach herself Occlumency—forced herself to learn it. When she'd had the miscarriage, she'd attempted to use it to remove the trauma from the forefront of her mind. But her skills were weak then and her motivation was not at its peak.

Now it was. She spent a lot of her extra time in the library reading up about it, practicing by herself—clearing her mind of it all. It worked to an extent.

She didn't think about him at all. Couldn't. All of the memories pushed back and locked up into a vault within her mind.

Never even thought about that particular scar that burned white hot into the flesh of her hip.

The pain of Cedric's death was enough to bare and even then, she could hardly keep herself together. Constantly trying to numb the pain, but failing. Blaming herself for his death.