Who: Chas & T / Chas & Patience What: Sigh. Barty dies and Chas breaks. Where: Hogwarts When: The Battle. Warnings: Yep. Status: In progress.
When Chas was fighting it was like everything around her came into this strange sort of focus; things became more sharp and clear, like she could hear and see and smell better. Like she knew when to turn and when to duck, when to slash her wand and hex someone, when to raise it to block a spell. It was instinct, a fighter's instinct, pure and simple and she obeyed every command it gave her.
So when that instinct told her to turn, she did.
Except this time it wasn't a spell coming at her, or an opponent racing to do battle. It was Barty. There was one brief second when she saw him that she actually felt herself smile, felt herself feel hopeful. If she was fighting alongside him, they would win this, because together they were unstoppable. And then that moment was gone and the reality became clear. Barty was falling to the ground. In that moment, everything seemed to slow down and she was acutely aware of the tiniest things. The way his robes fluttered as he fell, the way his wand slipped from his hands, the way a tiny bit of hair was curled over his forehead... She took a single step forward as his body hit the ground, the heavy thump of his body hitting the stone floor echoing through her mind.
Then suddenly she was aware of someone screaming. It came in one of those strange moments in a battle where everything seems to sink into a brief low, where the sounds of fighting grow quiet and there's this strange almost sort of hush. And cutting through that was the sound of someone screaming, the word 'no' long and drawn out, filled with more pain than Chas had ever heard in a lifetime of making people scream that very same word.
And then she realized it was her. She was the one screaming as Barty lay motionless (dead) on the floor, she was the one with hot tears stinging her cheeks, she was the one whose eyes were locked on the lifeless body a short distance away, completely oblivious to anything else but him. In that second as she looked at him, saw that curl of dark hair over his forehead, she remembered; Lying in bed beneath him, his eyes dark as they looked down at her and blood on his lips, her blood. The faint dull ache of all the marks he'd left on her, the deliciously sated feeling that came after he took her. That little dark curl of hair fell forward, and she'd reached up and brushed it off his forehead, fingers grazing his skin, and then his lips had been hard on hers, and then... She blinked and it was gone, only a split-second memory, and he was dead. That curl of hair on his forehead was stained in blood from where he'd been cracked over the head.
Something inside of her snapped. It felt like her insides were all sharp jagged edges; darkness and rage now clouding out the pain and desperation as her eyes narrowed. Her eyes slowly drifted up to find the man collapsed on his knees next ti Barty's dead body. She took all that emotion and focused with single-minded purpose on that man. The man who had killed Barty. The man who had taken from her the only man she'd ever really loved. In this moment, with all those jagged pieces inside her, she couldn't deny that she did love him, and that man had ripped that away from her before she'd had a chance to tell him.
It was like there was a brief flash of light in the darkness that was her mind, four words appearing perfectly clear in a white-hot flash. He has to die.
All of this had happened in just a few short seconds, and now finally she moved. Her mouth opened once more in a scream of rage as Chas launched herself towards Ronald Weasley, but this time the scream turned into an angry roar as midway there Chas shifted from human to jaguar. Wild with rage and completely out of control the large and powerful wildcat raced towards her prey, the muscles in her hind legs bunching as she pushed off the ground and launched herself through the air...