Chapter 31: James

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The whirlwind of colors turned into the forest overhead. I sat up and asked, "Is everyone okay? Albus?"

"Here."

"Hugo?"

"Here!"

"Hermione and Ginny?"

"We're all here and okay, James," came Hermione's voice.

"Lily?"

No reply.

"LILY? LILY!" I yelled and turned around.

Lily sat on the ground, her face horrified. Without speaking, she raised both of her palms for me to see. They were stained with blood.

"Lily..." I said weakly, afraid to accept that she was dying. Why Lily? Sweet, little Lily—

She shook her head and pointed at what lay in front of her. Colin lay on the ground, bloodstained and chest heaving slowly. He took deep and rasping breaths. A silver knife protruded from his chest.

The others stared, horrorstruck, tears sliding down their faces. There was so much blood, so, so much. At least, with Molly, it had been quick.

"Wh—" Albus started.

"IT'S MY FAULT!" Lily wailed, her voice hiccuping with sobs, "I— The knife was coming at me and I— he— he pushed me out of the way—"

Colin grabbed Lily's wrist and looked at her helplessly.

She cried, "Why? Why would you—"

And then he smiled faintly. With his last dying breath, he softly muttered, almost inaudibly, but we all heard it, "No regrets."

And the cannon sounded.

~

"Let's go," Hugo said after a while.

Ginny shook her head and pointed at Lily, still crying over Colin's body. "Don't be so insensitive."

"I'm not! It's just that we never even knew Colin very well, so why's she crying over him?" Hugo asked bluntly.

Scorpius rolled his eyes and said sarcastically, "Maybe it's because of the fact that Colin took that knife for her."

"Oh, yeah."

I kept silent, not wanting to tell them that deep down, very, very deep down, I was sort of relived Colin died. Call me sick and twisted, but if I had a choice of who I could save between Lily or Colin, I would have picked Lily.

"How did we get out of there, anyway?" Scorpius said, cutting into my thoughts.

"We Apparated," I answered.

"How? None of us learned to do so."

"Mum taught James and I," Hermione said with a sort of wistful tone, "Thought it'd be useful."

"What are you doing?" Scorpius suddenly asked, "We might need that."

Lily had placed her A Wizard's Guide to the Esssentials book onto Colin's chest, over the ugly wound.

"He told me he quite liked that book," Lily stated plainly, "Let's go now."

We walked off, leaving Colin's body. Minutes later, we saw a body float over the trees and vanish.

~

Second author's note! So, if you've noticed in your notifications, it says I've updated previous chapters. This is only because I've gone through editing, nothing major, but just fixing grammatical errors. One important edit, though: Frank isn't in the Games because Hugo volunteered for him in the beginning and I had totally forgotten. So, I'm really sorry about that, but just erase Frank from your memory right now and I'm fixing it. Thanks for understanding, guys.

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