A/N: This story popped into my head while I was attempting to write a paper for my World Civ. class. This chapter is pretty dark, but don't let it scare you away; I promise the rest of it is much lighter.

When I was a little girl, I had a secret collection of handmade dress up costumes hidden under my bed. Mum made them for me out of old bed sheets and scraps of fabric, and they were my most treasured possession at the time. I swore her to secrecy, of course, because my brothers would have teased me mercilessly if they'd known that my second favorite thing to do was play dress up (climbing trees won out by a hair, but only because I loved to spy on the boys and use their secrets against them later. I was a devious little bugger, but growing up with six brothers will do that to a girl.) My favorite dress by far was the beautiful (or so I thought at the time – looking back, that thing was hideous) wedding dress that was made out of one of mum's old silk robes. As soon as she was finished with it, I raced up to my room and put it on over my dingy shorts and Fred's old t-shirt. I grabbed my favorite stuffed bear, drew a lightening bolt scar on his forehead, and dubbed him Mr. Harry Potter: my groom.

I must have played wedding every day for a month, until finally Ron burst into my room just in time to witness Mr. and Mrs. Harry Potter's first kiss as husband and wife. Needless to say, I never played wedding again and the dress was promptly thrown in the fireplace. That did not mean, however, that I stopped doodling 'Mrs. Harry Potter' on every scrap of spare parchment I could find along with the names of our future children. I was convinced that Harry Potter was my one and only true love. Eventually we would meet, fall in love, marry, and live happily ever after with our four children…in that order.

Fate, however, had different plans for me. Okay, maybe not fate, but you get the point…my life turned out nothing like I thought it would. For starters, I discovered that Harry Potter was not my one and only true love after all. We dated briefly when I was fifteen, but he broke up with me for my protection and went off on some grand adventure with Ron and Hermione. At first I was sure that we would be together again when he returned but as time went on I realized that I might not want a life with Harry Potter after all. Being at Hogwarts during the last year of the war changed me (I guess I should warn you that the next part of my story is not pretty. It's actually downright painful to remember, but it's essential that I tell you because it was both the beginning and the end of my life.) I suppose that watching your friends be tortured and then experiencing it yourself can do that to a person. I don't really like to talk about what happened during that time, but let's just say that no one other than the students present at the time can really understand how bad it really was.

Neville, Luna and I were able to resume Dumbledore's Army at first, but eventually it became too dangerous for everyone involved; the death eaters serving as our teachers were targeting known members with a special kind of malice. Then Luna disappeared. It became harder and harder to remain positive after that, and by the time Christmas rolled around I was emotionally and physically exhausted. I put on a happy face during the holidays. My parents felt immensely guilty that they had been forced to send me to Hogwarts despite their fears that I would be targeted because of my family's blood traitor status, and I didn't want to cause them more pain. It wasn't as if they could do anything if they knew the truth about the goings on at school; the new Minister of Magic (who was known by everyone to be a puppet of Voldemort) had declared attendance to be mandatory. So I smiled and I lied, telling them that it really wasn't so bad. I returned to school just as exhausted as I had been when I left.

My breaking point came in the middle of January. I was walking back to the common room after a particularly excruciating detention with 'Professor' Alectus Carrow when I heard loud sobs coming from an empty classroom. I knew that I couldn't ignore whoever the source was, so I peeked inside. What I found inside was a sight that will forever be burned into my memory.

A first year Hufflepuff was huddled on the floor, shaking with the force of the sobs emitting that were wrenched from his throat. He wasn't bleeding as far as I could tell. I remember thinking that the lack of blood was a good sign. I was wrong.

I approached the boy slowly, explaining in a soothing voice that I wanted to help him. I kneeled in front of him and after a fair amount of gently coaxing he looked up at me through eyes that were wild with panic and horror. I asked what had happened. I thought that maybe he had been forced to watch someone be crucio'd, or that he had been the victim of the curse himself. When he pointed to the other side of the room, I was confused. I hadn't seen anyone else in the room when I entered, but I turned to look where he pointed anyway. I was wholly unprepared for the sight that greeted me.

It was a girl, or at least it had been. I recognized her as another first year Hufflepuff and I quickly surmised that she must have been a friend of the boy. One of the Carrows' favorite methods of punishment was to make students watch their friends be tortured. But this…this went beyond torture. Her skirt laid beside her on the floor, torn clean in two. Her knickers were missing, and her shirt was ripped open. There were hand shaped bruises on her throat and hips. Dried blood caked her inner thighs.

It didn't take a genius to figure out what had transpired inside that classroom.

That wasn't the end of the damage that had been done to her. The sick bastard who had done this had also taken a knife to the girl's chest and stomach, carving the words 'MUDBLOOD WHORE' onto her pale skin. Her eyes stared at the wall, unseeing. I assumed that she had been strangled.

I remember sinking to the floor then, beside the boy. His sobs had turned in wails, and were mixed with what I later realized were my own. I don't know how long we sat like that. Hours, probably. I couldn't move. All I could do was stare at the poor child who had been murdered because of her blood. Why had the boy been forced to watch? I never found out. I heard later that he had thrown himself off of the Astronomy Tower.

I didn't tell anyone what I had seen. There wasn't any point – there was noting I or anyone else could do, and it would have only made them even more afraid.

Something inside me changed after that night. I wasn't the same girl who had kissed Harry Potter in her room and wished for a life with him, and I certainly wasn't the same girl who had dated him the year before. I was numb.

Sometime in March I stumbled upon Draco Malfoy coming out of Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. His eyes were suspiciously red, and his eye was black. I couldn't stop myself from asking what had happened. For the first time since I had known him, he didn't insult me. He didn't do anything but stare at me with the same vacant expression that I had seen so many times. It stared back at me every time I looked in the mirror. Somehow I knew that he was just a numb and empty as I was.

After what seemed like an eternity of staring at each other, he turned on his heel and strode towards the dungeons. I returned to the Tower but my thoughts remained with him.

I didn't understand why he would share my despair. He was one of them; he had the mark on his arm to prove it. He had tried to kill Dumbledore, and it was he who let the death eaters into the castle the year before. It had never occurred to me before that he might be just as much a victim of the war as the rest of us were. He was just a kid, barely seventeen. He'd probably been forced into this life. It didn't excuse his behavior, but it certainly explained it.

We formed a strange sort of relationship after that day. Sometimes we would stumble upon one another sitting alone in a classroom or in the Astronomy Tower. We didn't speak. We didn't even know each other, really; it was just that we shared the same sense of despair and loneliness.

A month into our strange companionship, he kissed me. It wasn't gentle or romantic; it was needy and desperate, stemming from a sheer desperation to feel something. I kissed back. Thirty minutes later our bodies were naked and tangled up on the classroom floor. Why did I do it? I honestly don't know. I suppose that I was just as desperate to feel as he was. It didn't make sense then, and it doesn't make sense now. But somehow, our trysts made me feel human again. It didn't matter that we were on opposite sides of the war. It didn't matter that we hated one another, that we had never had a real conversation. We weren't in love. It wasn't about that.

We still didn't talk, but our meetings continued until I left for the Easter holidays and didn't return.

Being home with my family was good for me. I didn't – and still haven't, and won't ever – tell them about what I had seen. But I slowly began to regain some of my old self because of their laughter. Things were tense because we constantly waiting for the news of someone's death, but we were together and that was enough. By the time May rolled around I had learned to laugh again.

The final battle came unexpectedly. Honestly, I don't remember most of it. Fred died. I dueled with Bellatrix alongside Hermione and Luna. Mum stepped in and finished her off. Harry died, and then somehow he was alive again. Voldemort died.

I suppose that we should have celebrated the death of our enemy, but it seemed wrong somehow. So many people had died. Colin, my sweet friend who was naïve and innocent; Tonks and Lupin left behind a new baby and what would have been a happy life; Lavender Brown had been mauled by Greyback; the list of dead seemed endless. So instead of celebrating, we grieved.

Harry and I didn't speak. I think he was giving me time to grieve in peace, and I appreciated his silence more than he knew. I wasn't ready to face him quite yet. I saw Malfoy once, briefly. He was sitting in the Great Hall with his parents. The three of them looked uncomfortable and out of place. I found out later that Kingsley and my father had questioned them a few days after the battle. Lucius was sent to Azkaban for life. Narcissa was fined and Draco barely escaped the same fate as his father. I think they felt sorry for him. Anyone could see that he was terrified of his fate. He was a coward, but he wasn't evil. He was just a boy who had been forced into a situation beyond his control, or so he thought. He and his mother disappeared not too long after that. I heard that they had decided to live abroad for a while.

The time came to bury our dead, and I was sick with grief over my brother and friends. I vomited every day without fail. My despair was so great that I couldn't stand the smell of food, and I was mentally and physically exhausted all the time.

That's what I thought at the time, anyway.

It wasn't until the beginning of June that I realized I was pregnant.

I know what you're thinking: how in the world had it taken me three months to realize that a baby was growing inside me? Again, I really don't know. I guess I was just…preoccupied. Can you really blame me?

I told Hermione first. She was sharing my room, and it wasn't as though I could hide it forever. I was beginning to show. Her first reaction was shock. Then came the anger, and then finally the tears. We cried together for what seemed like forever.

My parents were next, and then Harry and my brothers. They were understandably upset. I couldn't blame them; I had messed up royally and I knew it. They barely spoke to me for a month, but mum made sure that I saw a healer and took good care of myself. Eventually things returned to some semblance of normal. Mum caved in to her budding excitement about her first grandchild, and Dad had already decided to accept the situation and move on. George were next, followed by Charlie, then Percy, then Bill. Ron was the last, and I understood why. I had, after all, broken his best mate's heart. That was the worst part, I think. Even though I wasn't in love with Harry, I still loved him. We had come to an unspoken agreement before he left that we would pick up where we left off upon his return.

I had crushed any possibility of rekindling our romance by becoming pregnant by another man, whose identity I refused to tell.

Eventually Ron came around, but Harry still behaves stiffly around me to this day.

By the time my seventh month of pregnancy was upon us, my family had stopped pestering me about the baby's father. I was (and still am) stubborn in my refusal to identify him.

The situation wasn't ideal. I was pregnant by a man who I did not love. He was gone, living in another country with his mother. I don't know if I would have told him even if he had been in England; I didn't have any misconceptions about what kind of person he was or what kind of relationship we had.

So there I was, barely seventeen and seven months pregnant by a near stranger and definite enemy.

I should have been devastated.

I wasn't.

Because somewhere between the startling realization that I was pregnant and the beginning of my third trimester I had fallen in love with the little (as I lovingly called it) bean inside me and I was excited to meet him or her. It didn't make sense. I should have been crushed that my life was about to be, according to Hermione, ruined. I would probably never become a professional Quidditch player like I had dreamed. I wouldn't have a fairytale wedding. Hell, I didn't even have a home of my own.

But I had my bean, and somehow that was enough.

The rest of my family seemed to agree. Losing Fred had been devastating to all of us, especially George. This new life that was growing inside of me gave us something to look forward to, something to help ease the ache that had been present since the moment of Fred's last breath. Like I said, it didn't make sense. I guess you can chalk it up to insanity by way of grief, but by the time my little one made his arrival we were all buzzing with anticipation.

She was the most perfect thing I had ever laid eyes on. I had always heard that a mother's love was instantaneous and irrevocable, but the second I heard her cry I knew that I would never be the same. In that moment my whole world became wrapped around the tiny, wriggling bundle wrapped in my arms.

I named her Eleanora, which means shining light. The white blonde hair that dusted her head and her pale skin made the name even more appropriate. Mum and Dad were in love with her from the start, and everyone else fell right along with them.

By the time I brought her home, I knew that everything would be okay. Being a mum somehow soothed my worn and weary soul, healing parts of me that I feared were broken forever. I could finally see past the darkness that had become my constant companion.

I had found my light at last.

A/N: Well, there it is! Make sure you leave a review and let me know what you think!