Dear Diggory

chapter 69

My patience had been wearing terribly thin, especially since if she spotted me in the hallways alone, she usually tried to bump into me, claiming innocently that it was an accident.

My eyes drifted back to Cedric who had his arm above her head as he leant into her, there was an intimacy to his body language that didn't sit right in my heart.

They appeared to be talking in hushed voices, but Cedric said something and Penelope giggled in response, batting her eyelashes.

I tried to ignore the knife twisting in my gut as I watched them converse. Their unusual snug stance told me one thing: they were completely unaware of my presence behind them.

I frowned to myself, deeply displeased at how close they looked in my absence.

My mind screamed at me to say something or move, to make my existence known, but I couldn't bring myself to do so.

Some greater instinct told me to continue watching, that there was something more to see.

It felt like when you drive past a car overturned at the side of the road, you know you shouldn't look, because you're not going to see something you like. And yet you can't help it, wanting to watch the disaster unfold for yourself.

Crumpled vehicles.
Metallic debris.
Wounded victims.
Bodies.
The entire horror show.

Cedric leaned even closer to Penelope and his hand cupped her face, stroking tenderly along her sharp jaw like he'd done it a thousand times before.

My breathing hitched in my throat, stuck there like thick slime. I felt the inkling of nausea rise in my stomach as I stared.

This wasn't right. Very wrong in fact.

That was Cedric, my Cedric.

And he was touching her like... like how he touched me. With such extreme affection and care that only he was capable of.

I felt my hands beginning to shake with anger, wanting to tear them apart. I knew I could do it with ease, tear some of Penelope's perfectly sleek hair from her head as I did so, claim it was an accident afterwards.

My eyes stung as I watched them remain so wrapped up in one another, every blood vessel in my eyeballs twitching with tension.

Finally, devastatingly, Cedric leaned down and kissed Penelope forcefully on the lips. She reacted back instantly, and I watched her hands snake into his hair.

They were embraced, intoxicated with one another.

I could see it so clearly, even from where I stood. There was so much affection between them that I was certain you would have been able to see it from the astronomy tower.

And I hated it profoundly.

Even so, I just stood there speechless, unable to move or scream or whisper. My body remained entirely static as I watched a nightmare unfold in front of me.

Like a car crash unfurling in slow motion, my own personal one.

But there were no air bags.
No safety cushion to lessen the impact.

It was my feelings splattered all over the ground in the place of blood.

But as my boyfriend gripped Penelope's neck, pushing her against him in a desperate, crushing lock of bodies, I wished that it was my blood instead.

Gallons of it, a puddle thick enough to stain the concrete ground.

Because anything was better than this.

My mind felt scrambled as it struggled to pull a coherent thought together, my Ravenclaw instinct searching desperately for a logical explanation.

My Cedric, and Penelope?

I blinked hard, hoping that each time I reopened my eyes it would all just be a mistake. But of course it wasn't.
It was real.

They stood there kissing one another as if their lives depended on it; I had the desperate urge to be sick, to empty the contents of my body onto the ground as I watched the way they touched one another.

But finally, after what felt like an agonising amount of time, they broke their locked lips and Cedric pulled Penelope close to him.

His strong arms cradled her just as they did to me in the intimate moments of the night and my mind screamed in agony for him to stop.

Before I could even digest what I'd seen, the second bomb came.

He opened his mouth and delivered the final painstaking blow to my heart.

"I love you Penelope."

That's the thing about the second bomb.

You never expect it, quite the opposite in fact.

You assume that you are entirely safe.

That the war-zone had passed.

That you have survived.

That you got lucky.

And then your world implodes in on itself.