By the way, the standard disclaimer; I don't own Harry Potter or anything about it.
The should-be-pink one is different.
Among the four vessels that defend here, setting their patrols and watches, defending the weaker prey, seeking out confrontations, or even among the selection of prey at large, she is strange to us.
When we approach her, tugging at the bright flame of her life like a hungry tide, she seems the same. Her already-muted radiance dims and the scent of her fear is enticing. This one's anguish is not at all difficult to find: perhaps it should be a warning, that her despair lies so close to the surface and yet she has turned away our mists for weeks and months of human time.
It is not difficult, for when called to her heart wails of murdered friends, of senseless cruelties and horrors, of massacres and the null blankness in the eyes of those who have embraced the Mist.
Her mind feebly answers with a sunny day at the zoo with her parents, her hair cheerily mimicking brightly-plumed birds as her small, dark eyes sparkle with curiosity, and we feast greedily, for such ploys are appetizers only, and remind her the sad state of her brightly-plumed hair now, how her others worry for her behind her back, and press forward with the thought of a beloved cousin, wasting away in our native halls and then in his own, meeting the Farewell because she had failed.
She rallies again, answering with cozy, firelit nights with that same cousin, curled up on the floor against the sofa, cards exploding in her hand as she laughs, and the men's smiling eyes, even her quiet, serious one. These memories, too, we drink happily from her soul, and it tastes like her remembered firewhiskey and chocolate to remind her where both of them are now: beyond the Veil, and...
At barely a touch, her resonant essence supplies visions of hunger and misery and cold, of savagery and cruelty and shame, sees her beloved turn from her with ghosts in his eyes, clothed in rags, and vanish into the darkness forever to be torn apart.
We close in greedily, moths to a dying flame, tasting the tears in her eyes from meters away.
We never do seem to learn this lesson, but making her dream of him is too enticing a mistake. In her despair, in our song, the lost one she loves appears to her clearly, vividly, heartbreakingly; that is why sorrowful widows wander into the Mist, drawn to it like Death's Stone. Her anguish is like a drug, her yearning for the tired man in the patched robes, how he has hurt her with his distance and denial, too old, too poor, too dangerous...
I don't care.
We are too slow, always too slow, to realize that it is not the grasping embrace of the Mist that has faded her pinkness to dust; another lover's kiss has claimed her soul already. She needn't pretend that her quiet one has consented, or that he is hers. To imagine him near, ever ready to defend her, is enough to fill her heart. At her whispered word and merest thought of wiry, strong arms holding her close, our rival appears to defend what is his.
I don't care.
The moon-bright wolf lunges forward, piercing the darkness, banishing the fear, searing the mist away like a flame, scattering our robes before it like startled ravens.
She will turn her embattled brilliance on him next, the moment he returns to her- alive and whole!- and she will make him see sense, fight and shout and kiss and shake and plead-
I don't care!
The last murmur of mist echoes in the still, quiet Hogsmeade air.
Forget me, Nymphadora... I am no good for you at all.
The only fog she sees now is her own ragged breath against the snow.
"Like hell, you prat, I love you... and don't call me Nymphadora!"
