Your Fault
Dead.
That was the only word she understood on the letter from the owl. Dead.
She pushed back from the table and fled the Great Hall.
Dead.
They were gone.
She could wrap her head around that, understand that. But it still didn't seem real, it seemed strangely distant, like something she had read in a book a long time ago. Much like magic had once seemed…she looked at her hand, at her hand that was wrapped so tightly around it that she couldn't feel her fingers.
The real world had seemed like that for a long time now.
Referring to it that way didn't even make sense, because this world was real too. Obviously, or she wouldn't be here, wouldn't be where she was now.
Trying to run away from the news she'd received.
Her parents couldn't be dead, she was too young, there was too much that she still had to do, to say. She'd figured that eventually, when He was defeated and she graduated she would have time for them again.
It couldn't be too late!
And yet it seemed to be.
She reached her room, and the packet of letters that she'd never answered, only half-read, always figuring that there would be more time, another letter, another phone call. When was the last time she'd seen them?
Over the summer sometime…maybe for two weeks, just a little bit of time, not much. There'd been other exciting things going on, and she hadn't worried. She belonged to a different world now, and she had figured that they understood.
And if they didn't, she would have time later to make them understand.
But now she wouldn't, because they were dead.
Damn Hogwarts!
She would have been there, been able to help, to stop it, to see them, she could have done something, but she couldn't because she was here!
Who cared about the war between good and evil because she hadn't been where she was supposed to be!
And damn him!
Why was he so important that he couldn't function on his own, that he couldn't do the studying or the homework so that she always had to know the answers? Maybe if he tried, she could have been there.
Or maybe if he hadn't been around, she would have written, would have spent summers with them. But she hadn't, and it was all his fault.
And he would pay.
Because if she could do nothing else, she could avenge her parents death.
And so he would pay.