for Shira Lansys' Word Count Drabble Challenge on HPFC. wordcount: 221, prompt: "home"
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No matter where she went, she always came back.
Home was always waiting for her, comfortingly, when her feet led her back to the door. It had been here, gardens wild, after she ran away to find giants at six; it had wrapped her up in memories of love when she walked back barefoot and tearstained from her mother's funeral at nine; her father had waited in the door smiling when she returned from Hogwarts every summer.
She had tamed the wild gardens when she was ten, happy to be useful, and learned to cook from her father in that kitchen. She painted the walls slowly over school breaks, between vacations, and listened to her father's friends spin out secrets beside the press. Over and over she had watched her father grieve, drift away and come back.
The cycles of her life were wrapped up here, in this ancient stone tower. Home.
But they'd taken that away from her. The Death Eaters stole a year of her life and her father's sanity and now she just wanted to go back, to the only home she'd ever known, and she couldn't because they destroyed that, too.
It almost overwhelmed her, the first time she saw the ruins they had made.
But she never let them break her before. She won't start now.
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