Just a little one shot that popped into my head after reading "On an Athlete Dying Young" by A.E. Housman the other day. It my first one shot, so tell me what you think!

If you recognize it, I don't own it.

I watched her process down the aisle to accept her new auror badge, now I watch her funeral procession approach her grave. I watched her walk down the aisle to marry her love, and now I watch as she is laid beside him for eternity. Such a tragic death for one so young! She was in her prime years when she was cut down by age old family prejudice. Her baby and her widowed mother cry as the strains of a funeral hymn reverberate through the graveyard. The music mingles with the cries to form a bitter anthem. They are given a state funeral, as is befitting for war heroes. I can't help but think the distinguished, austere ceremony clashes ironically with the bright, vivacious woman she was in life.

I look at her mother again and think maybe it is better this way. She did not live to be the last frail and broken fragment of something beautiful. She is where no one can harm her. She will never attend the funeral of her husband after he left her for the final time. They say he died first; I wonder if she knew. I hope she didn't. It would have made her final moments much more painful. Now they will never be parted again. She will never throw the first handful of dirt on her baby's casket, as her mother is now doing for her only child, a wailing grandson clutched in her arms. She is at peace now; we are the poor pitiful ones struggling to carry on after so much loss in the world below.

She went out at the peak of her years; her blaze of life plunged suddenly into darkness. She did not live to watch her own light fade into insignificance. She will not have to contend with the political game that awaited her in whatever position the minister, now weeping among the mourners, chose to place her. She always hated politics, but she would have done it for her friend. She will not have to adjust to a peace time world where fighters still hold their healthy paranoia, but no one understands.

Her life would have been happy and one day she would have approached her grave a contented old woman, but we will never know for sure. She will miss so much, good and bad. She will always be remembered for who she was in her last moments: a lover and a fighter. Her name will be glorified among those who gave their lives for peace. She was buried in the flower of her youth, young and whole and that is how she will be remembered, a candle burning so brightly despite the storm that it could not last the night. No matter how young she was, no one can say she did not live.