Light As She Goes (PG)
Light As She Goes
{Not many will find her name on any memorial, not many will remember. She's just a nameless, anonymous casualty, but even in her last moments, Lisa Turpin can't regret.}
Her name, whatever it is (she can’t remember it at this point, and the time she could spend casting around for it would be wasted, and she hasn’t any to spare), will be on the memorial. This is one of her last thoughts.
It probably won’t mean much to many people. Just a few scratches in granite or marble on some plaque or statue or monument. Just a few scratches to fade away in time, lost amongst the many, pale underneath the names of the great.
Not many will care. Eyes will skate over the scratches on rock meant to sum up her every breath, her every action, and they will be nothing within a week, a month, a century. She should care, she thinks (it’s almost a distracted thought, because the soft warmth of her dirty, muggle-bred blood is running away from her over the flagstones, she’s growing cooler and someone something’s creeping towards her.)
She should care, she’s sure.
She doesn’t.
She doesn’t give up easily, but she lets go gracefully. She won’t beat at a closed curtain. She’s taken her bow, it’s time for a world outside the theatre.
And she is only a name on a yet-to-be memorial to a war still hours from conclusion. It doesn’t matter at all. Next year some muggleborn eleven year-old will wander across this spot and not know, marveling over this new magical life, this fairy tale somehow made real.
She laughs a little to herself even as her vision voids to black. She thinks of all of the muggleborn kids who are going to walk this castle, cross this floor grouted with her blood, and decides that’s a better memorial than any etchings in marble, no matter how grand.
She doesn’t need a name for that (it’s just as well, she’s not sure anyone knows it anyway.) She’s sure she wouldn’t have thought anything like this an hour ago, when her remaining in the Great Hall as students were evacuated felt more like an inability to move, a complete paralysis of mind and body, than anything resembling bravery.
And then she breathes one last time. On the exhale, she wonder if, when Wayne Hopkins told her she looked like a Granian under the influence of the tact potion she’d brewed disastrously wrong, and then subsequently waxed poetic on ‘the most magnificent of the winged horses’, he meant he thought she was pretty.
It’s not a very dignified last thought (especially in light of the epiphany-like understanding of a certain kind of immortality in her second-last) and if Lisa’d had another, she would’ve thought so. But there’s a warm little light of memory as she goes, and, all in all, it isn’t a bad note to leave on.