Of Shadows and Flame

Virginia Weasley opened her eyes as the sun's dawning rays flooded through the open window and on to their lids in a blanket of warmth, only to be assaulted by the sudden whiteness. Everything around her was of a painstakingly pure white. The hospital wing. She became fully awake now, allowing everything to flow back.

She got up, striding quietly from the room. She didn't want to be there when her family came to call. When they found her, she knew, they would talk to her like a little girl, and tell her that none of it was her fault. Frankly, she didn't want to hear it.

She walked with silent strength, gained from a year of darkness. She knew well what her family had missed. For she had been a little girl before this year. A youngster full of laughter, dark red locks glistening in the sunlight, face tanned and freckled from countless summer wrestling with her brothers, climbing trees and running beneath the sun. Puppy eyes and a head full of fairy tales, seeing the world in black and white. Teased by her brothers, but sheltered from everything else by them. Shy of the world, lacking the silent strength and grace she now possessed. But she had walked in shadows, and there was no turning back. She was separated from even her family now, for they would not, and were not capable of understanding the subtle change in her. For it wasn't something to know at a glance, nor something explainable.

She had faced many hardships, but she wasn't the only one. It was the type of hardship that had single her out from the rest. For although they had witnessed dark times, they had been through nothing to cause them to question themselves, or their views of the world. They had always been situated in positions supporting the light, so it was all too easy for them to antagonize those who opposed them, and disregard the darkness that they each, like everyone else, contained some of. So she was alone in her new knowledge, and in her self-acknowledged darkness.

She missed him, despite everything. It seemed so impossible, so unreal, that it was over, that he was gone. She had walked through the year by his side, hearing his lies, telling her soul. She'd been twisted, bent, toyed with, possessed, and exposed to his soul, until it forced her to question everything she had once believed in. And after everything she'd been through, it was all suddenly, and completely over. In spite of the deep bond he had foraged in order to possess her, he had been defeated, destroyed.

Everything had been a lie between them to begin with. He had given her support and 'understanding,' which she had been too naive to question. But slowly, some truth had seeped through, as he began to pour just a little of his own soul into her, in order to possess her. She missed his darkness, a thing the world around her lacked. She had learned from his ideas, and recognized their flaws. The world she had lived in had shattered, and the one she lived in now felt empty, and full of lies. Because after what she had faced, so much else seemed trivial. There was a time when homework, and whether she would do well in Hogwarts, and whether Harry liked her, and her brothers playful teasing, had seemed to matter. They didn't now.