The Art of An Ending

Chapter Thirty-Two: The State of the In-Between

She lay face down, listening to the silence. She was perfectly alone. Nobody was watching. Nobody else was there. She was not perfectly sure that she was there herself, in this place of non-existence.

A long time later, or perhaps no time at all, it came to her that she must exist, and that she must be more than disembodied thought, because she was lying, definitely lying, on some surface. Therefore, she had a sense of touch so she must have a body, and the thing against which she lay existed to.

Almost as soon as she had reached this conclusion, Erica became conscious that she was naked. Convinced as she was of her total solitude, this didn't concern her, but she found herself slightly intrigued. She wondered whether, as she could feel, she would be able to see. In opening them, she discovered she had eyes.

She lay in a bright mist, though it was not like mist she had ever experienced before. Her surroundings were not hidden by cloudy vapour, but rather the cloudy vapour had not yet formed into surroundings. The floor on which she lay seemed to be white, neither warn nor cold, but simply there, a flat, blank something on which to be. Even as she thought that was strange, wood stretched out beneath her as the floor transformed into something familiar, and she relaxed slightly when she felt the familiar creak of floorboards beneath her.

She sat up. Her body appeared unscathed. She touched her face. That seemed perfectly intact as well. She looked at her right leg, which was made of skin and bone again, whole as it had not been in life. She knew, immediately, that she was dead.

That realisation did not startle her as perhaps it should have done. She did, she remembered, plan this after all, and perhaps it had come a little earlier than she had hoped, but her friends would be able to continue on and complete the tasks she had laid out in her journal without her.

As her fingers quested over her skin, marvelling at her own body, for the first time she felt the desire to be clothed.

Barely had the wish formed in her head, than clothing appeared a short distance away. She crawled over to the small pile, noting the denim skirt and the sheepskin jumper with the frayed sleeves as she pulled them on. They were almost exact replicas of what she had worn in life, though soft, clean and warm. It was extraordinary how they had appeared, just like that, the moment she had wanted them...

She stood up, looking around. Was she in some great Room of Requirement? Was this the afterlife, constantly wishing for things and having them granted? The longer she looked, the more there was to see. Walls formed around her, white paint peeling with bare wood support frames, and even as she watched a fireplace formed a short distance off, a partition dividing the room in half, tables and chairs springing up out of the mist, which all at once seemed to recede slightly, blurred around the walls as though waiting.

She recognised the place immediately as the muggle pub that Fred had taken her to when he first asked her out the summer before her third year at Hogwarts. Even as this thought formed a mug appeared at one of the tables, steaming slightly, and as she slipped down onto a chair she noted that it was hot chocolate, and when she sipped at it cautiously she was delighted to find that it was exactly the same as it had been in life, though better, perhaps, because she had none of the problems she had in life plaguing her as she drank it.

She set the mug down and reached up for her throat and a pendant materialised here, her pendant, though she couldn't feel her magic beneath it and it was like when she had first gotten it, empty but for meaning. She thought, then, of Fred, of how he had looked during the battle, glorious and fierce, and how her body had moved to cover his before the thought had even processed, before she even really realised what she was doing, pure instinct driving her to protect him.