[AN: revised]

What Lavender Knows

Lavender swears she must be a bad person because they're meant to be fighting a war and she knows that people are going missing every day. That they're dying and families are being torn apart and society has been rattled to its core and tossed upon its back. She knows that her life's counting down not in years anymore, but months, weeks, days, and yet she still takes the time in the morning to do her hair and apply her make-up and sometimes her mind wanders to fit boys while they're training and the world's still spinning and sometimes she just forgets and is there something wrong with her, or has it just not hit her yet? Free-falling, eyes shut, heart in her throat. She's grasping blindly in the darkness.

Lavender doesn't know what she's in for.

There's a storm brewing. They can feel it lurking beneath the surface of every word, every action. There's suspicion and there's fear and Lavender's still forgetting, but it's forgetting to eat and forgetting where she is or what she's doing. Goosebumps lace her skin as a cold chill sinks in, slowly freezing her to the core.

But Lavender ties a black ribbon in her hair in memory of those they've lost and smiles to hide she's falling apart. She keeps her head held high because that's what you do when you're trying to pretend you're someone you're not (someone strong), but there's only so much pretending you can do when you're just an "are you okay?" from losing it.

Lavender doesn't know yet, but she's beginning to find out.

Lavender looks in the mirror and sees a girl who could never be pretty enough for her own desires or smart or brave or focussed enough for anybody else's. Whenever she's felt unusually good about herself she'd see a girl who tries her hardest to follow her heart, a girl who believes there's a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow. She'd see a girl who is noticed and liked; the life of the party.

She doesn't see that girl anymore.

Maybe when she squints or remembers, she'll catch a glimpse. But that girl is slipping away, slowly being concealed under this new mask of unfamiliarity. Like the way that the fogs of uncertainty and grief have fallen over everything she's ever known, this new Lavender is creeping over the person she once was. This Lavender's a mere shadow, a shimmer of a reflection, a hollow shell.

Scratches and bruises cover her skin but she doesn't seem them as badges of honour or anything of the type. They're reminders of times she could have done better, could have been better, but wasn't. Reminders of rebellions that failed and punishments she deserved.

Looking in the mirror she sees a face that's ghostly and bare without make-up, a mouth that's forgotten how to smile and eyes that are panicked and wide, heavy with all that they've seen and red from the tears that started falling and then never stopped. With a twist of her lips that isn't quite a smile she thinks how the exterior finally matches the interior; she looks as pathetic as she's always felt. It's easier to focus on this self-hatred than to dwell on the fears that nevertheless steal her sleep and her sanity.

She sees many things when she looks at herself, but she doesn't see a warrior, no matter who they're all meant to be. However, when the time comes she will fight, because there's still a part of her that believes in happy endings, and sitting around waiting isn't going to get her one.

Sometimes Lavender think she knows.

Lavender thought she knew pain many times in her life. She thought she knew pain when she was thirteen-years-old and her pet rabbit died. But that wasn't pain. She thought she knew pain when boy after boy took her for what they wanted and abandoned her again, feeling tarnished and unwanted and alone. But that wasn't pain. Over and over again, she thought she knew pain. But she didn't know. She couldn't have known.

Lavender was seventeen-years-old when she found out what pain was.

Pain was the cruico curse, ripping apart your insides and putting them back together again, the same but different, shaken, never to feel truly like yours again. Pain was knowing there was no escape because you didn't know the answers they sought and you were really just a piece in their game; tiny, insignificant, hopeless yet capable of such feeling. Then pain was seeing innocent child after innocent child subjected to the same cruelty that you were and knowing what they were feeling and feeling it too yourself, all over again, and not being able to escape because this harshness and this suffering, it's your life now.

That was the beginning of her affair with pain.

The Battle of Hogwarts came and with it brought horror and misery, death and destruction. And these are but empty words; the most distant insight. You're not breathing the smell and feeling the fear and seeing the carnage and experiencing the pain and the loss. Lavender was there when the great school became hell on earth. She lived that nightmare.

Lavender was seventeen-years-old when she discovered there were two kinds of death.

The first death follows the moment in time when your breath is sucked from your lungs and your heart beats once more and then never again and you're gone from this world. There is that death and that death is okay because it comes to everyone eventually. Lavender could accept that death, even embrace it. But the other death should never have to be experienced, not by anyone.

The second death tears a path of devastation, rips you apart from the inside. It's as irreversible as the first death only it extends your suffering. Lavender could have gotten through the battle physically unharmed but she'd still be utterly ruined, because the second death is watching the people you have grown up with and love more than anything else in the world die right before your eyes. It's the feelings you repressed when you became that shallow, self-obsessed girl that they all expected you to be finally breaking through. There was only so long that you could pretend you didn't need anyone. And now they'll never know how much you needed them. How much you loved them. It's this death that shakes you up and rips you apart and it's a wonder that there's anything left of Lavender at all because she's been taken apart so many times.

She'd wish to take their places only that would be burdening them with the second death and that's what being brave is; taking the worst upon your own shoulders to save others from the weight. Being brave is keeping on living, not giving up when there's nothing easier to do or nothing you want more.

But Lavender almost gets her selfish wish. As if her mind and her spirit haven't been entirely ruined, as if she hasn't already suffered enough, her body and her future is torn apart under the claws and teeth of the foulest of the beasts; Greyback.

This time she spares not a thought for what she looks like. Conscious thought is merely a foreign concept as she's engulfed by the anguish of suffering.

Lavender knows what pain is.

If she wasn't so numb, catching a glimpse of her reflection in the silver of her medallion and not even recognising what was staring back at her would hurt.

Lavender knows the world is an ugly place. She knows she fits right in.

Scars never heal. That's another thing Lavender knows. They can fade and sometimes you run to the mirror and you're beautiful again and your best friends are smiling beside you but you wake up. You always wake up. Lavender knows that scars never heal, and not just because of the ones that mar every inch of her body, but because it's so many years and later and yet she still wakes up in the middle of the night, the red of bloodshed staining her eyelids as she screams names that can no longer answer her desperate calls.

Lavender knows. She wishes she didn't, but she does.