It turns out I'm an emotional drunk after all. Shocking, I know, but that's the only way I can explain my decision to write all this down like some fourth year schoolgirl. I'm gonna cringe if I read this in the morning, but fuck it. I don't care about all that right now.Â
I do have a good reason for this. Death's a good reason, right? Well if anything is, it's that. Especially this kind of death. It's about as fucked up as it gets, so I guess anything goes in response to it. Anyway, I'm rambling, so I'm gonna just say it.
I saw someone die today.Â
It was a last minute mission, really rushed. Someone had tipped us off about a planned attack on a household somewhere in Manchester. I knew that joining the Order would involve stuff like this, and to be honest when I first got the patronus telling me to meet at a backstreet near the place I was a kind of excited to be called up. I've only been on a few missions, and they were all surveillance type stuff, really boring and quiet. I wanted action, and I was getting it.Â
It was a family with kids, which caught me off guard. Someone, I can't remember who, whispered to me that the parents were a couple of muggleborns. It's weird, but you don't really think about that sort of thing when you read about numbers in the Prophet or hear them at meetings. The numbers are terrible, but the reality was...scary.
We were just a few seconds too late. The original plan was to get in there to warn them, guard the house and maybe take them to a safe location if we had the time. But when we got there, it was just panic. I know that we followed everything we'd been told to do when things went wrong, but was still absolute chaos. Flashes of spells were flying everywhere, people were yelling orders and screaming and I can't even remember how many of them there were because it was all just a blur and the masks made them all look the same. One thing I do remember was how the masks didn't look as ridiculous when when there's someone behind it pointing a wand at you with your death in mind.Â
They'd cornered the family in an upstairs room, and somehow I managed to make it up there before the others. Everyone else was still downstairs. It was the parent's room, and when I got in there, they'd already killed three of them. The mother and father, and a little girl. I don't wanna talk much about the last one, other than the fact that I think he was about Milly's age and I was there just in time to see him die but not soon enough to do anything about it.Â
And then it was over. The two Death Eaters turned on me, but by that time their friends had disapparated from downstairs and the rest of the Order members had come up. They were outnumbered, so they vanished too before we could grab them. I know we went somewhere for a debrief, before any Aurors could get there, but I left as soon as I could. I didn't wanna talk to anybody. I came home, and seven(?) drinks later I'm shaking and writing this.
I don't think I'll be sleeping tonight.
