Train to the Afterlife Meme

[argyle_plaid]

Train to the Afterlife Meme

Congratulations: You are dead.

Maybe you know how, maybe you don't. Perhaps the memory is fuzzy, or perhaps it's crystal clear down to the look in your comrades' eyes. Maybe it was your time; you've done all you wanted to. Or maybe you weren't at all ready to go, maybe you went out kicking and screaming - but none of it matters. You know you're dead, and the train is taking you to an afterlife. Perhaps an afterlife of your choice; you might've earned that heaven. Or perhaps you've earned something else entirely.

It'll be a bit of a journey, though, so you might as well take your time and talk to the other people in your coach. Death knows no place: most of them are strangers, even from faraway worlds. But death knows no time either, so who knows, some of them may be people you know, even if last you knew, they were alive - or long gone.

Oh look, here comes the snack cart.


All the usual:

• Post with your character's name and canon in the subject line.
  
• Said character is now dead for whatever reason - canon, AU, what have you. They are on a train with other dead people from many other times, places and worlds.
  
• Characters don't know for a fact where they're headed - just a general awareness that they're going to some kind of afterlife. Whatever they think it is is up to the player.
  
• This meme is built especially for cross-canon interaction, and potentially for threadjacking and group threading - if you're interested, may be a good idea to state as much in your subject line.
  
• Tag around and play nice!

TRIGGER WARNING: Meme obviously deals with death and may deal with other unpleasant themes as a result. Please be cautious.

Comments

oh boy oh boy

[scinlac]

I did. ( All the better to call a spade a spade: ) I failed.

( She knows what he is thinking, and it's all this has been ever since he escaped Azkaban and agreed to help her carry out her Lord's wishes, carry them to term, as it were; she knows he thinks the battle lost. Were she still within the realm of reason, she would agree, but like this, she can't. She needed the war, and were she alive, she would continue to need it. There is no alternative to her anymore, and what else could there be? Losing was never one: they would leave the battlefield victories, or Bella would not leave alive, this much had been clear when they had prepared for battle. Victory... what would victory have meant? Motherhood looms over her like the worst of all outcomes – in the end, it had not mattered who had fathered the child, that it was sheer luck the girl came out black of hair instead of pale blond, nothing could make a mother of Bellatrix, not even this.

Why had she lost? Against Molly Weasley, of them all? The birth was too recent, her body still recovering. She had been fighting for hours. Her sister had betrayed the Cause, had betrayed her, had robbed her son of his chance at glory and dragged Lucius to an early grave with her. Had they won, what would the verdict have been?

Perhaps they still won. In that case, the Dark Lord would carry the sentence out himself. Had she lived, had Lucius lived, between the two of them, who would have been the one to execute Narcissa? Bella, for all the ways she'd sworn to eradicate every traitor in her family tree, even if she had to tear out the roots? Lucius, to torture him further? Or would Narcissa have snapped, and laughed in His face, and told Him who fathered his child, killing the lot of them?

It doesn't matter, now.

Or perhaps Bella is just tired. There's a flash of blond hair against the backdrop of the battle-dusted floor. Had she caught this glimpse in life, or was her mind filling in gaps, picturing his dead frame?

She seats herself by his side. )

Thank you for returning.

( She doesn't wish to picture any alternative reasons. There's pride in her voice, and a little bit of nothing at all, and something very tired, too. )

[malificence]

[ He doesn't know. It's been so long since he could see a world in which they were victorious - since Azkaban, at least. As the worst of thought exercises, he can imagine that killing Narcissa would be one more punishment the Lord would have heaped on him. He can imagine Him insisting that Bella watch while Lucius did it. It's monstrous, and yet...Lucius came back to fight his war regardless.

In the end, the Cause had defined him too much for him to leave it behind. He could guess what the world would have been like for him, if the Order won. Either Azkaban or a horrible half-life. He can't tolerate either one.

And then there's her. Her skirts brush against his thigh, and he finds himself reaching for her hand. They couldn't have had this, alive.]

In the end, the Cause was everything, wasn't it?

[ There's something horribly tragic about that, and he raises her fingers to her lips. He doesn't think about what could have been. They could have lived, run away with Lyra, but it wouldn't have been the happy life he might have imagined. ]

And you.

[scinlac]

As we swore it would be.

( The Dark Lord had, after all, only ever taken what she had sworn to give – that this wasn't fair, that giving everything was hardly sane or healthy, that a good leader would never have taken all that there is to take, these things she does not think of.

She exhales, which feels a bit superfluous now that she is dead, and yet she does it, anyway. Her fingers curl around his. There are footsteps outside the compartment, and for the moment, she freezes as habitually as she breathes, but the steps pass.

They weren't His, anyway. )

I suppose this is the good in it?

( The fact that they are together, as she had treacherously wished more than once these past months, this past year. )

I wished for this, though I rather doubted I could have had it.

[malificence]

[ He goes as still as she as the footsteps go past, both of them almost like statues in their compartment - and somehow he's noticing it for the first time, these reactions he's had for months before his death. What he became, he thinks, was a hunted man among his allies, in his own house.

Maybe death was where happiness could be had. Maybe Bella is right.

His smile is slight, but a bit more real. ]

I don't think we could have, on the other side of the veil. But maybe we can have it here?

[scinlac]

Maybe.

( She doesn't say that this is likely not all, that there could be something coming after the train, and that this can be a temporary reprieve. But then, isn't that the most they have had since they fell in with each other? He got away from a broken marriage, with someone who understood what Azkaban can do to a person. Bella lived, thanks to him, because the Dark Lord surely would have blamed her for not conceiving the child He'd wanted –– regardless of it, perhaps, being his failure.

She lived for a little while, and hated most of the end of it, thanks to the living, breathing proof of her treason against the Dark Lord.

Now, she leans against him, just slightly. )

For the time being, at least.

( She hesitates, then: )

Do you reckon the war will be won?

[malificence]

[ His fingers play with the ends of her hair. So much of it had fallen loose in the battle, and for a moment he can imagine too well what it would have looked like to see her fall. He knows then that he wouldn't have been able to let it happen.

But he fell first. More, he'd stepped into the battle with the express purpose of at least dying a glorious death for the Cause. He cannot tell her that.

He can be honest about something else. ]

No, I do not think it will.

Perhaps we might win the battle [ He didn't see enough to know it was hopeless. ] But the war? No. I do not think we have the advantage.

[scinlac]

( She closes her eyes and exhales. She feels like screaming, fighting, arguing, but to what avail? There is only he in the compartment, and he fought until he died, much like she had. Still, the Cause had been what she had dedicated more than thirty years of her life to –– just the idea of it falling apart, of Him dead for good –– )

Did you suffer?

( It is a broad question, and rather sudden, but she wants to know. Was it a killing curse to the chest, short and so quick he would barely have registered it? He looks unhurt, as unhurt as they both looked, ravaged by Azkaban and all that came after. )

[malificence]

[ Even death, it seems, does not heal what Azkaban wreaks. Even so, he's in must better shape than he was in the halls of Hogwarts, where it wasn't a simple killing curse that Shacklebolt caught him with.

He knows so easily what he would tell Narcissa.]

It could have been quicker, but I didn't linger long.

[ He'd been alone, dying on the floor as the battle raged around him, and perhaps that's why he's so convinced they cannot win. He could hear them losing. ]

Did you?

[scinlac]

( It's the most ironic of questions – they both suffered for their Cause, one way or another, if Bella acknowledges it or not. Still, she could swear she'd seen him on the ground, but then, it's been a recurring...

She's hard pressed to call it a fear. It's not a fear, she has none of that, and besides, to die in battle is the most glorious death of all, but then, he would have been gone, and had she lived... She would have lived alone. )

No.

( Her lips twist. )

I did not see it coming.

( But then, who did? Perhaps she hadn't taken the duel as seriously as she should have, but then, over the course of the battle, she had more than once duelled – and defeated –– two or three opponents at the same time. Had routinely done so, over the course of two wars. What on earth did Molly Weasley have on her? Except for her own wand, the horror of a dead child and a need for vengeance against the world, having not spent nearly as much time battling prior to the duel as Bella had, and the need to defend a living breathing daughter. Most of these, Bella doesn't consider factors at all. )

Did you?

[malificence]

[ He's silent for a moment. He's too practiced, he thinks, at slipping along the edge of the truth, of utilizing charm and elegance as a weapon to turn the tides of society in his favor. Bella hates all of that/ She's the blunter instrument, and he can't give her a diplomatic answer. Neither can he lie. ]

I didn't walk into the castle thinking I would walk out again, Bella. I knew it would come, and it would probably be once I ran into someone with some skill.

[ The silence is almost deafening. He could see how Molly might prevail - the birth had not been long before, it had been him who'd named the girl Lyra, the girl with her blessedly dark hair from the Blacks, and with eyes that were a muddy shade between blue and gray right now. And Molly was full of rage; Fred Weasley had fallen even before he had. ]

It was Shacklebolt.

[ There's an irony in the way Lucius feels about it; at least he's Sacred Twenty-Eight. ]

[scinlac]

( The silence draws on, and he will know that she is at war with herself. She isn't one to give up, she isn't one to see how all the things that have happened in the past three years could have resulted in Lucius making this very conscious decision, but then, she's spent enough years in Azkaban to not see much reason at all.

Eventually, she answers. )

Molly Weasley.

( She sounds incredulous even as she says it, but then, would it really occur to her? Molly Weasley had lost both her brothers to the Death Eaters, her husband was with the Ministry most of the day and well into the night, at the height of the war. She was alone in a wizarding home, married to a blood-traitor, with a house full of small children. Someone needed to defend them, and Molly would have trained to be that person, at least a little. At least enough to defeat Bella at what was arguably less than her best.

It would, frankly, not occur to Bella to stand between Lyra and an Order member, not unless ordered, and not out of cowardice.

Molly Weasley loves her children, though. There's a difference. )

You gave up on the war.

[malificence]

[ His nose wrinkles, and it's both at the idea of Molly defeating Bella, his Bella, and at the tangential thought of Arthur Weasley, a man he disliked so much that he'd goaded him into a fistfight in a bookstore in between slipping the Lord's diary into his daughter's bag.

But then she rather hits the nail on the head, and Lucius gives her a sidelong glance. His lips tighten, and it's hard to tell if it's a smirk or a grimace, but given the conversation, the latter is more likely. ]

The war gave up on me, I believe, first, and after that there was only one thing worth living for, and we were always on borrowed time.

[scinlac]

( Her eyes widen at his words – this is a subject they have danced around, before. Really, it's been more a matter of aggressive avoidance in the name of their own safety, but now, the worst has come to pass.

Someone more optimistic might call what has happened in Bella's mind a form of compartmentalisation, but to say that some things were seriously broken during her fourteen years in Azkaban is closer to the truth. Odds are some of the cracks were there even before the dementors ever took a swing at her. At what point, exactly, has she begun to view Voldemort as her only reason for living? How often, when she spoke of the Cause, did she really mean 'anything He says'?

She's still not in a place where she can question this, least of all comfortably, but he's used to feeling her tense up whenever they get anywhere close to the subject.

And then, of course, there's Lucius, who has muddied the waters. )

I deserved to die for my treason, didn't I?

( It was the true inevitable ending. )

More so because you died first and I... ( He has, somewhat, kept her stable, these past months. As stable as she can be, while also being alive. What would she be without him? Would she have wanted to be without him? )

[malificence]

We both have gotten what we've deserved, I think.

[ It's an oblique statement if there ever was one. They are dead, of course, on this train to nowhere, or the Mudblood hell, or what have you. But they're together, and there's no consequences to them being found together - though it'll be some time before they realize that death is the great equalizer this way.

So is this punishment or a reward? A reasonable person would say they've spent their life doing terrible things. A reasonable person might also say they were tortured by a maddened Lord. A person who had spent their life as they have - might say they committed the utmost betrayal and deserved to die. A true purist would say that they had betrayed the Lord but served the Cause by leaving behind an heiress from two of the purest bloodlines in the wizarding world - Black and Malfoy.

Lucius isn't thinking so philosphically about things. His hands come up to frame her face. ]

I fell in love with you, Bella. I cannot be in too much despair about the fact that we're together now.

[scinlac]

( Bellatrix, by and large, considers what she has done on Voldemort's orders perfectly justified, but then, this could still be leading to a punishment –– after all, His orders hardly included feeling anything at all towards Lucius.

And that she does have feelings for him, well, it's about a year too late to deny that. )

It's not you, or being with you, it's...

( It's thirty years of her life, most of that her adult life, ended in treason, and failure, and yes, death. She leans into his hand and closes her eyes. )

I was so certain of this victory, even if I could not picture what would come after it.

[malificence]

I know. I was certain of it too.

[ Not as long. Not as deeply, perhaps, and he'd failed that way. His hand slips into her hair, and he leans in to kiss her. It's the first time he's done so since she entered the compartment, and he watched her eyes get caught somewhere between happiness and sorrow. ]

Where are we going, do you think?