The Ballad of a Broken Heart | Cedric Diggory

1

Welcome to the panic room
Where all your darkest fears are gonna come for you
                                          - Panic Room by AU/RA
-

Cedric watched as Harry's hand closed around the goblet's handle and betrayal filled his gut.

The roots that wrapped around his torso, arms, and ankles felt like shackles as he stayed pinned and unmoving from within the maze's walls. He'd been trying desperately to wiggle free as he'd called for Harry - begged Harry not to leave him like this.

But he did.

Cedric didn't particularly blame Harry. He deserved to win the tournament as much as any of them, and he wasn't obligated to help Cedric.

But it still felt like a kick to the gut.

Cedric was busy wallowing in self-pity when he felt it. Smelled the stench of death like an awaiting noose in the shadows.

He stopped wiggling against the hold of the roots, going utterly still. He didn't dare to breathe, for he didn't know what creature was approaching with near silent steps and the most formidable presence Cedric had ever felt.

It all happened so fast. One minute he was there, thinking the creature had finally gone away, and the next minute a pair of crimson eyes were boring into his own right before his world was overcome with pain worse than that of being burned alive.

He was able to do nothing but scream. Nothing but scream as the roots held him still while he burned on and on.

It was through his screaming that he heard the creature's words, "This is the beginning of the end."

Cedric didn't know how much time went by before he heard people searching the maze, calling out for him. His voice was too raw from his previous screaming for him to even so much as whisper, but his mind was still too clouded by the never-ending agony for him to care. And so, he burned on and on, even as those who searched for him passed his body hidden within the maze's walls, overlooking him as he willed himself to reach out to them, despite the fact that he couldn't so much as even twitch his fingers.

Another unknown amount of time went by before Cedric was finally found, and by Harry, no less. At that point the pain had started to feel more like he was being held over a fire, rather than actually being cooked inside of one, and the feeling had also slowly started to dissipate, starting with his fingertips.

"Cedric!" Harry exclaimed, having heard him rustle the leaves just barely. Harry shined the light at the tip of his wand towards where the rustling came from.

Cedric couldn't focus on the fact that Harry was freeing him from the roots that still bound his wrists and ankles, or the fact that it was even Harry at all. The only sensation he could feel was that of ravenous hunger. Hunger for the blood that he could hear coursing through Harry's veins.

"They all said you must've run away or died, but I knew that couldn't have been true," Harry was saying. "I couldn't live knowing that I'd just left you to die- Hey, Ced, what're you-"

Harry's eyes - his wide, green eyes - widened impossibly further as Cedric let all reason go to shit and allowed his feral, vampiric instincts to take over.

Harry was only the first of many people Cedric changed or killed that day before he was stunned and thrown into an inescapable dungeon by Albus Dumbledore.

By the time he was regenerated and allowed to move again, the cell had been shut and his memories had caught up to him.

In a frenzy of bloodlust, Cedric had killed half of his peers and changed the other half into vampires before a spell casted at him had actually worked.

He choked back a sob. He'd killed. And not just anyone. He'd killed his friends. He'd turned others into the monster that he'd become if he didn't get the chance to drain their blood all the way.

He gasped, sliding down against the cold, stone wall. Cho. He remembered it clearly. Her face as she'd begged for mercy. As her soft, terrified voice had said, "Ced, it's me. Don't do this! Please."

As her body went limp beneath his hands and he'd discarded her to the side like everyone else he'd killed or drained of blood to the point of limpness. Like a piece of trash.

Cedric was in that dungeon, rotting and grieving over all he'd done, for 400 years.

The dark, inescapable cell was a nightmare designed to create madness. Create insanity and desperation and evil in whoever was its inhabitant.

It was around year 107 when the voices started.

At first, Cedric thought there were people outside of his cell. People taunting him. Haunting him.

It took him several days before he realized that the chatter was in his own head.

It didn't matter which voice he focused on. Each one was less comforting than the other.

You killed them. Killed her.

They didn't even reach adulthood.

You're never getting out of this cell.

You'll waste away in here for all of eternity.

Cedric's throat was too raw from the deprivation of blood for him to be able to talk, let alone scream at the voices to stop.

Madness. Insanity. Anger. Grief.

Cedric had become the embodiment of each.

For the majority of the 400 years he was in that cell, Cedric vowed that he would find a way to kill himself when he finally escaped. Finally kill the monster that he'd become, so he could no longer harm another being.

Eventually he realized that he probably was never being let out of that cell, which was an even worse thought than promising the world that he would kill himself given the first opportunity.

Something fascinating about life is that oftentimes if you're just desperate enough, it will provide you a gateway. A gateway out of your hole of desperation and despair, because life doesn't like the toll such emotions take on it.

For Cedric, this gateway came on the day that he decided he no longer wanted to die. Whether it was the voices who convinced him of this, or just his own sheer desperation, on the 146,000th day, he silently promised the world that if he was let out of that cage, he would no longer seek death. He would live his life to its full extent, if only he'd be granted a way out of that cell.

Because nothing, nothing was worth wasting away in the darkness for another minute. Nothing was worth being left alone with his voices and starvation and grief for a minute longer.

Death clearly wasn't coming to his rescue, so maybe life would.

And it did.

It was like a pull coming from the opposite corner of the cell. A tug on fate. A sensation of wistfulness.

Cedric, weaker than a mortal and more broken than shattered glass, dragged himself over on his hands and knees to where the pull in the everlasting darkness was coming from.

At first, he didn't see it, only sensed it. Convinced himself that his insanity had forced him through the struggle of moving his body that was drained of life and starved past the point of malnourishment.

He was about to slump down. Lay there for the rest of eternity in defeat and hopelessness.

But it was there. Small and shimmering and convincingly just a figment of his imagination. Something that his mind was convincing him he was seeing to give him a shred of hope to hold onto. A transparent, glimmering, hyperbolic shape that was floating before his eyes. It looked like a glitch in reality. A ripple in the atmosphere.

Cedric didn't give himself time to think twice before reaching forward and touching it.