when: january 6th.
where: york, near baudouin polignac’s estate
who: features charlotte meadowes, isolde bell and sage diggory (and baudouin polignac).
So this is what it feels like, to kill.
Dove stands still and watches. She hears commotion, knows that Charlotte needs her help, that they need to move, that they can’t stay here, with Baudouin bleeding out, with the chance of being caught growing with every second they stay there.
She watches the blood leave his body and wonders why she doesn’t feel anything. She tries to dig inside herself, to reach to the place where all her anger lies, and finds it undisturbed. She wants to feel something, even disgust or fear would be better than this, this lack of anything. She watches Baudouin and she feels frozen, ice cold.
Dove wants to scream, for a second. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen: she was supposed to feel victorious, to feel justified, vindicated, but in stead she feels nothing. No pity, no guilt, nothing.
Someone she knew is bleeding out in front of her and it was her who dealt the death sentence, it was her who spoke that final curse. She feels a wind pass through her, as if she’s hollow. Her knees tremble, as if she’s ready to collapse, but she stays standing. Staring. There’s nothing inside her.
The blood continues to flow. She remembers hitting a bludger in Baudouin’s direction on the Quidditch pitch and shooting him a shit eating grin --- all fun and games, back then. Her hatred for him had existed back then already, but it was different now. Now her hatred had been a weapon.
She thinks of her father, and wonders what he’d think. He would hate Baudouin, too, she knows --- Baudouin is a murderer, a worse one than she is now, one who killed someone younger than he was, one who killed someone who was good. Baudouin Polignac deserved no mercy. And though her dad would have hated him, she doubts he’d do the same as she did. She feels nothing at that, either.
And he’s still gone, he’s still dead, so what the fuck is the point of all this? She still feels the same. She still misses her dad. That gap that he left is still there, and it’s no smaller. She wants to scream, but resists.
She watches Baudouin take his last breath. He gasps. He stops. He’s as frozen as she feels.
She feels nothing but an endless abyss inside herself. A hole that she’ll never fill.
She has killed now, and she thought she’d feel changed. Like a fury, an erinyes, a goddess --- but in stead she feels lost. Still filled with a longing for something she can’t reach, can’t have, can’t touch.
Has this changed nothing, then? Is she still a shelled out being?
She turns to Char, Sage and Izzy and hopes they don’t see the ice in her eyes, the hollowness of her body, the emptiness of her hands. “We need to get out of here,” she says. “He’s dead.”
