Chapter Text
“Kill the spare,” a voice hissed.
It was different, wrong, high pitched and almost childlike despite the fact that Cedric could tell that it was the voice of a grown man. There wasn’t much time to process the words though, not when-
“Avada Kedavra!”
Cedric blinked.
It was dark, darker than it had been moments before, the shadows around him bleeding into his mind. He swallowed or well, tried to swallow, it didn’t quite feel right when he did.
It was cold where he was, not the bitter cold of a Scottish winter that bit at every scrap of skin left uncovered but the cold that floated just out of reach. The cold of a day where the sun had been out but wasn’t anymore, one where you’d forgotten your sweater and the cold sank through you, settling into your bones like a second skeleton.
“Where am I?” Cedric asked.
He didn’t know how, he couldn’t open his mouth, he didn’t think he had a mouth actually, not anymore. The words hung in his head, the last words, the death words that had torn through him and something inside him ached, like it had been cut open, gutted.
“Where am I?” Cedric asked again.
“Oh, sweetheart, you’re too young,” a voice murmured from somewhere to his right.
It was female and faint, it sounded shredded, like someone had dragged a knife through the words. It was recognizable, but barely, he hadn’t heard her voice before, didn’t know who she was but he could see her in his head, her voice carrying her image with it like the faintest of breezes.
She was aged, not old exactly but her face carried the scars and lines of a hard life, her eyes were a watery brown, like mud at the bottom of a puddle. Her hair had been blonde once but it was mostly gray now and tangled like it hadn’t been brushed or washed in a while.
But the most striking thing was the frayed look around her outline, the washed out splotches across her face. She looked like an old handkerchief with a hole beginning to wear its way into the center.
“Who are you?” Cedric asked.
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “I was someone once, I’m not anymore. Are you?”
“What?” Cedric breathed, except he didn’t because he couldn’t, not anymore, he’d never breathe again.
Cedric was dead.
Cedric was dead and he was trapped in the wand of the man who had killed him, the foreign magic pressing against him, trying to catch at the edges of his consciousness, to pull him to pieces in its wake belonged to someone.
“I’m sorry,” a different voice said.
And Cedric saw James Potter, a man whose face he’d seen at least once a month, once a week until he’d gone to Hogwarts. His father had a picture of the Potters on his desk; it had been taken at their wedding, one of the most published weddings of the century even if the guest list had been restricted.
Cedric wondered if Harry had ever seen that picture, Lily Potter looked like nothing less than the embodiment of Magic herself in elaborately embroidered wedding robes. James Potter had looked so in love, eyes wide with shocked pleasure at the knowledge that the woman next to him had bound herself to him in magical matrimony.
There was a roar around him, not a sound, not a sensation but a mixture of both and if he had hands Cedric would be clutching at his ears.
There was a surge of magic and then-
Cedric popped into existence next to Voldemort, Voldemort, the man that the Wizarding World still feared, even years after his defeat and death. Not so dead, clearly, since he was standing in the middle of the graveyard, face as pale as a corpse and eyes red in a bloody parody of a snake’s.
Everything was a bit of a blur after that, the sight of his murderer, the pull of the portkey as Harry desperately grabbed Cedric’s body and the cup at the same time. That had been overwhelming, the magic of a portkey almost too much to bear without the assistance of a mortal body.
He’d watched as Harry declared Voldemort to be alive, Cedric smiled then, smiled at the thought that his death hadn’t been for nothing, that he would be the proof that the Ministry needed. There might not be as much death this time around, there might not be families exterminated through hate if the Ministry got its act together.
Voldemort had brought himself back to life with all the dark theater that such a feat required, it hadn’t been subtle. His death would be avenged, there would be justice for both him and Harry.
Cedric began to fade then, keeping a bare thread of awareness on Harry as he drifted. It was easy, was the thing, the feeling of death creeping closer and closer, the only anchor keeping him in the living world being the fact that Harry wasn’t being treated, his injuries standing out starkling in Cedric’s ghostly sight.
The Cruciatus damage was the worst of it, he could see the miniscule cracks in Harry’s bones and the fine lines of torn muscle glowed in Cedric’s vision. Harry was shaking, trembling as he walked, trying to hide the fact that he was injured and succeeding to an extent.
That was a habit, Cedric had noticed it a few times during Quidditch, had written it off as every Quidditch player’s desire to keep playing until they were no longer physically able. That assumption suddenly seemed childishly naive to him, now that he had the space to see.
And then Cedric found out that their Defense professor had been a Death Eater for the entirety of their school year. It all devolved from there, death stretching and snapping like a flag in the wind.
He should have left once Harry was safe, or well as safe as Harry could ever be, and maybe that was what kept him there, following Harry in a half sleeping dreamlike state. Cedric wasn’t really a ghost, not with more than half his spirit already slipping beyond the veil.
Harry was hurt, Harry was scared and while Cedric felt tired, like he’d never had a good night’s sleep in his life, he could not leave the younger boy alone. It was instinct at that point, the desire to protect the younger boy, the innocent that had been thrust into a war that should have been long over before then.
Cedric blinked in surprise as Snape, a man who had never been nice though he was achingly, desperately kind in a way no one would be able to recognize if they weren’t looking for it, shoved his Dark Mark under Minister Fudge’s nose.
Cho had gone into a furious research binge one week, Cedric could remember it in a cloudy way, and the two of them had looked at the statistics.
Snape was the youngest Potions Master, ever, and he’d been recruited as a professor directly after the war, before that Mastery had a chance to become fully legal. He had, nonetheless, the least number of classroom accidents resulting in injury, and he had never lost a student to one of those accidents. He was the first half-blood Slytherin Head of House in at least a hundred and fifty years and Cedric could respect that.
And the Minister of Magic, the man meant to lead their society, the only man in the world that could declare Voldemort alive once more, who could declare them at war , like they clearly were, looked at the Dark Mark and denied its existence.
If Cedric had been alive he would have blinked, the slow, predatory blink of a snake, lazy and reptilian and cold .
Cedric was cold, so very cold, anger taking root in his bones in a way he had never felt before. It wasn’t warm, fiery, snapping like a campfire, instead it was frost creeping up the phantom feeling of a throat that wasn’t truly there anymore.
Minister Fudge had gotten rid of the evidence, or what he had thought was the evidence, and then when confronted with the evidence he hadn't managed to damage, he had denied it. Minister Fudge was a coward and with foresight that barely extended past the next purse of galleons from his many… benefactors.
He was weak, he didn’t deserve the position he was in, a position gained by being the least threatening candidate possible and then settling in as the familiar option. Nothing had gone wrong during his tenure, well, nothing beyond Sirius Black’s escape but that couldn’t really be pinned on him.
Now could it?
Minister Fudge was comfortable where he was and didn’t want anything to change. Minister Fudge had a lot to lose if Voldemort was back, if the Death Eaters were going to return in force instead of just getting drunk and harassing a few hapless muggles.
Entire families had been wiped out during the first wizarding war, the population hadn’t recovered yet, Voldemort’s forces hadn’t needed to do much to have the country living in fear. Cedric had spent most of his childhood living in fear of a man he’d never seen, the illusion of his power pulling back by the barest inches until he was staring at a truth that was uncomfortable to know.
Britain’s magical population had lived in fear of a few dozen witches and wizards hyped up on power and magic they couldn’t control, that they’d been too high off of to notice. More families with a dark leaning had been killed than those with a light leaning and still Britain lived in fear of a man with no nose and an innate ability to converse with serpents.
A man they all thought was dead.
Cedric felt himself swell up in indignant fury, rage building him into something more alive than dead, snatching energy away from the void as it grew. It was a feedback loop, the more Cedric thought about what Minister Fudge wasn’t going to do the angrier he got, the angrier he got the more he thought about what Minister Fudge wasn’t going to do, and on and on and on.
There was nothing he could do about it, he wasn’t an old enough ghost to do anything unless he warped himself into a poltergeist, twisted himself around and around until all he was was a being of rage that knew nothing about why it was furious. Peeves had been worse centuries ago, when he’d first appeared, Cedric had read the accounts for a DADA essay during sixth year.
Cedric didn’t want that, he might be caught in a well of anger and pain and frustration but he didn’t want to do that. He might hurt Harry or Cho or one of the first years and that was unacceptable .
Cho.
They’d started dating two years ago, off and on, diverging at points but always coming back together again eventually. They’d stayed up late in the library once, studying for their OWLs and they’d gone off on a tangent.
Magical Britain was insular, so insular that Cedric hadn’t even known about some of the creatures she’d started telling him about. He’d told her that they didn’t exist and she’d looked at him, like he’d grown a second head, like she’d thought better of him and then she’d sagged.
“Of course, the Ministry doesn’t like giving us information about how other cultures use magic,” she’d said into her folded arms, dark hair splayed out around her like a midnight halo.
Cho told him about China, about her grandmother’s home land and how she’d left after she’d fallen in love with an English man. How they’d kept the name Cho even though she was marrying into his family instead of the other way around and then had been hyphenated when her mother had married in. And then she’d told about yin and yang, what he would have called dark and light, about resentful energy and walking corpses that were nothing like inferi and beasts that had been animals until they were twisted into something else.
Cedric shimmered on the edge of the world as time passed in trickling drips of hours. The land remembered, centuries and millennia of patterns and beliefs soaked into the soil, into the ambient magic of the country, into the concepts of the people who made up the national identity, and changed it.
Britain had never had anything like what China did when the restless dead began to stir but…
Britain had been an empire once, even if it had been forced to give up most of its lands decades ago. Britain had been an empire and part of China had been a part of that empire, Hong Kong was still a British territory.
Cedric drifted over to his body, it had been a few days but the body was still under a preservation charm, ensuring that it hadn’t changed a second past when Harry had taken them back to Hogwarts. It was strange, looking down at himself, or what was left of his presence in the physical world.
He knew, in an abstract way, that his parents weren’t ready to let him go but that didn’t seem to matter anymore. No, it didn’t really, all that mattered was that fact that he was dead and his death didn’t seem to matter.
Harry cared, Cho cared, his parents cared, those friends he had made in his time at school probably cared as well but while they mattered they weren’t the people who were going to be able to do anything about how he had died. And that, that made him angry, made want to bring attention to himself, rip apart all the pretty little paper lies that Fudge had to be telling in an attempt to save his career.
Cedric’s father had been getting progressively more nervous over the past few years, The International Wizarding Court’s attention was starting to pivot towards Britain. There had been a great deal to draw their attention in the past few years, especially concerning what little they had gleaned from what had been happening at Hogwarts.
This might be what pushed them over the edge, especially after the stink China had to be raising over the Chinese Fireball that had been requested for the Tournament. Cedric felt his fury spike, going sharp with pleasure as vengeance tripped its way over his nonexistent tongue.
Cedric bent down until what had been his mouth was level with his body’s ear, pushing anger into dead flesh until he was half inside and half outside of the body. It was strange, like a set of chains looped around him but only on his left side.
“Wake up,” he called, voice purring through the air like a smug kneazle.
The corpse’s eyes snapped open, blank and full of swirling dark motes of energy. Cedric could see himself in those depths, a wispy silver spector skimming across a black mirror.
Cedric tugged on the body, his body, it didn’t feel like it was his anymore, it moved like he was pulling strings on a marionette. The body sat up slowly, oh so slowly, the sheet falling down its body in a cascade of bleached cotton to reveal the dirty clothes he’d been murdered in.
A stunning spell was fired off and it hit the corpse square in the chest. Cedric saw it coming, didn’t even bother trying to dodge, he didn’t think himself good enough to even try to evade it. It did absolutely nothing to him or to the body, the magic impacting and splattering across the corpse’s chest before fading out.
Someone screamed in terror.
Well, at least everyone was aware of the situation now.