A narrative filler written for a post-war Harry Potter roleplay, under the pretense that Lavender could have survived, and under the plot that a remedial year was offered for returning students.
—
When she first regained consciousness long enough to retain anything, there had been nothing but a searing pain pulsing throughout her head, dripping down her neck and along her right shoulder like molten lava, curving along the edge of her breast and sweeping along her ribs. There were other pains, of course, but she felt all of the other nerve endings sputtering out, her mind and body focusing on the feeling of a trillion cells scrambling, buzzing through the air, ramming into each other, into her, and trying to settle but being unable to.
She couldn't think, couldn't think beyond the pain that made her want to scream, or her total inability to move so much as a muscle. She couldn't even flutter her eyelids like the damsels in her dime novels, awakening from unconsciousness to be met by romantic conclusions to their daring sagas.
There was noise, too. It seemed to take so much effort simply to focus her mind long enough on the outside world, but she could hear it. So much noise, so unfamiliar— it was very busy, and very loud. There was clanking, a sudden influx of magical signatures surrounding her, and without warning, she was out again.
The next time she regained consciousness, the pain was only somewhat dimmed, but this time, she could move. Not that she wanted to, after she tried. Even to bemoan her pain hurt too much! There was scuffling, and the contact of skin on skin. Where normally she would demand to put all of her effort into finding out who it was, she was uncharacteristically dispassionate. She did, however, attempt to open her eyes, but was met only with unforgiving cloth and equally unyielding skin to the right of her nose. A heavy feeling of terror swept into the roiling waters of her gut, and she felt the need to puke. Instead, she retreated once again into the unfeeling darkness.
It was several weeks before she could move, and several more before she responded positively to stimulation. Later, she would learn that the mediwizards had told her parents to give up. She didn't know how she felt about them refusing.
The first time she tried to talk, her throat was raw and dry, rubbing against itself like abrasive sheets of sandpaper. She'd motioned vaguely to her throat, and immediately there were ice chips nudging against her lips. She let herself be fed small bits of frozen water, blind to the indignity of it. When she could finally croak something out, she said in a tiny voice "tell me," a hundred times less demanding than she'd intended. And they told her.
She had to be told several times, however, for it to sink it. Reminded. Sometimes she forgot there was a world beyond the darkness, beyond the throbbing of her flesh, the feeling of curses and dark magic coursing through her now tainted veins.
She had fallen, in the war, by the hands of the infamous Fenrir Greyback. He'd ripping and gnawed at her face, her shoulder, and down… Later, when she knew by the quiet and the stillness of the air that it was night and she was alone, she would run her hands carefully across her body, cataloguing the bandages and the bumpy flesh beneath them. She'd nudged the cotton away from a wound along her left hip— rips, holes in the skin where his claws had pinned her down. For some reason, the feeling of that, the numbness of the flesh still somehow only somewhat healed but the sputtering agony lying beneath, was what finally drove her to tears. They were not the tears of heart-wrenching sorrow, or of loss, or of a flaming self-loathing— not yet. Instead, it was simply the sorrow of feeling so intimately violated. The creature had never touched lower, of course— not on her— but he had entered her body, had claimed it, had tainted it with the seeds of his lycanthropy. Lavender no longer belonged to herself, but rather to the lunar cycle, to the painful shift into a creature of death. Though yet undefined, her sadness in that moment was perhaps the most potent she'd ever felt it in her life.
The mediwizards had kept her alive, but only barely, and with far more effort than they surely had to spare. After all, she was not the only victim of this war. At the turn of the moon, they would inundate her system with Wolfsbane potion, seclude her in an emergency stabilization chamber, and monitor her as she changed. They would heal where they could, numb where they could, but it was hard to keep together the fragile body of a girl who'd been torn like a ragdoll, then continuously ripped apart month after month. Eventually, though, she'd reached a state where her body was healthy enough to sustain itself but for the constant medication. She again had a semblance of agency over her own existence.
The cursed nature of her wounds made them difficult to heal, but with much spellwork and even more potions, they were well on the way. There was still the problem of her left eye, which had been torn down the middle. (Really, there were three defined claw marks dragging down her skin, and a chunk of flesh simply ripped away along her temple. It only got worse the farther down it went.) The way they'd had to heal the area had allowed her eye to merge with the flesh around it, and no amount of magic would save her from the tragedy of her own face. She couldn't even be granted the use of a fake eyeball, as the socket was painfully, woefully filled. Any attempt to remove the ruined optic would surely kill her; the curse was too strong.
After several months, she could finally sit up and open her one eye. It had been strange, being denied half of her field of vision. She'd had poor eyesight to begin with (her vanity had never permitted her to resort to glasses), and now that one eye could not balance out the other, it was near impossible to see her surroundings clearly. However, after a while, both her eyesight and depth perception (which had been decimated) compensated for the loss.
Once she'd reached this stage of her rehabilitation, her personality had finally begun to leak back into her, and it was then that her turmoil truly began.
Lavender Brown never pretended not to be shallow. She knew she wasn't the prettiest of girls— not by a long shot— but she did know that her looks gained her a certain measure of privilege. Pretty girls did not have to work hard to make friends. If you presented yourself with just the right air of idiocy, the other pretty girls didn't feel threatened. In a world of pureblood families, learning how to play the social game was an asset, and while hers was neither rich nor powerful, there was generally a systematic tradition of socialization that most adhered to. It was like living in the old storybooks that her mother would read her to sleep with.
You could imagine the blow to her sense of self, then, when she'd first looked into the mirror at the festering, red rips dragging across her body. She was hideous. What semblance of beauty she had once possessed had been destroyed. Overcome with emotion, she'd cried hot, angry tears that trailed in rivulets down her right cheek, beads collecting along the few tear ducts left undamaged in her other eye. It was resentment, was anger, was hatred for her attacker and for her own body. It was fear for her future, for the knowledge that she would never be treated the same again. Where the others could hide their scars from the war, she was marked indefinitely. Who would give a job to a deformed werewolf? Who would show any sympathy to a young girl-turned-monster? She remembered the state of the one DADA professor who'd been outted as a werewolf and forced to resign. With no Dumbledores in the world to show her mercy, there was no hope for her. Now, she was worth more dead than alive.
It was with a sardonic humor that she recalled her young adoration for animals. She'd always been fascinated with the concept of turning into one, whether magical or otherwise, and as a toddler she would pretend to be any manner of creature. At one point, she remembered confiding in Parvati this wish. The irony was not lost on her, and it weighed heavy on her heart.
Eventually, her caretakers found out about her suicidal ideation. She'd gone walking down the hall, simply because she could, and she'd run into another patient. It was a little girl, no more than six, and by the look of terror on her face and mindless sobbing, Lavender need not be told that the poor thing was a victim of war. She could sympathize— if she'd seen her family killed, she would be horrified by a walking corpse, too. Nevertheless, she'd fled back to her room, tearing at herself and screaming. A nurse had to hold her down, several others sedating her and trying to discern what kind of psychological damaged had finally burst forth from behind the curtain of her shock. She'd told them, half in yells and half in calm detachment. Since then, she hadn't been allowed any privacy, and someone came to talk to her every Wednesday afternoon. Lavender was given the distinct impression that no progress would be made.
Somewhere along the way, her body had adjusted to its losses and her wounds had healed, leaving nasty raised scars in their wake. There was no longer a constant pain, but rather a throbbing pressure beneath the shot nerve endings. Someone had told her that it was all in her head, in her assertion that darkness had laid waste to her body and taken root, thrumming menacingly beneath the surface. She'd had no reason to disagree.
Lavender spent her long nights and days in the white-washed hospital room thinking of all the embarrassing things in her short life, of all the things that she regretted. It was an inevitability that her mind would begin to ruminate on her overbearing infatuation with Ron Weasley, her sort previous relationships, and the not-quite-a-thing she'd had, for a time, with Seamus Finnigan. Ron made her head and heart ache in unison, the others were dim memories of shallow attraction, and nothing had come from Seamus except a good friend.
Friends.
Why had nobody come to see her?
She began reading the papers.
When the subject of school had been broached, Lavender laughed. What use did someone like her have with school anymore? Besides, who would welcome a werewolf back? She was a menace. She could not be trusted. Her counsellor had argued that they could find a way, if she was willing to try. Instead of answering, she'd spent a week thinking about her friends at Hogwarts. Were they okay? If they weren't, was at least some of their distress on her behalf? (She knew it was terrible, but she wasn't used to not having someone by her side at all times. She missed frivolity. She missed Parvati.) Without thinking about why, she wrote two letters. One was to her best friend, and the other to Seamus. They were the only two with whom she'd been connected during the war, and the only two she felt comfortable confiding in. The letters were nearly the same, but expecting several different reactions (many of which she knew were ridiculous), she restlessly awaited replies. She knew that term had already begun— was already nearing Christmas break— but for some reason, she'd clung to the idea of returning. Not out of hope— that ship was long gone. No, if anything, it was with the knowledge that she could properly say goodbye to her friends before she plucked up the courage to end her own burdensome life.
Regardless, Lavender felt it was all nothing more than a foolhardy dream. She could never be accepted back. Not now