Written for Lilie Blaze's "One-Word" Challenge at FictionAlleyPark. You can find the thread here (delete the spaces): fictionalleypark .org /forums/ showthread.php? s&threadid 69067


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Dark. Perhaps that was the best word to describe her anymore; she was dark. She had been bright and cheerful and happy, but there was only so much one could take before they caved in, fell into little pieces and never got put back together.

And now she was dark, dark as a moonless night, a starless night. Because her star had fallen.

Her bright distinctive red hair was dyed black, her clothes were all the color of pitch. Her appearance hid her in the background, and once again she was content to stay there.

Anything happy about Ginevra Weasley had long ago faded.

She might have been only twenty-six, and she knew people thought she still had her whole life before her. But her life had died in the Second War. Other people had lost family members, loved ones, but she had lost everything that made up her life.

Her father had died; Ron, Charlie, Bill, Fred, had died fighting, and George had died of injuries a few weeks after the war ended. Hermione was gone; Freya, Ginny's best friend, had disappeared. Molly Weasley had died a year after the war, and then Ginny was the last Weasley left. Harry had defeated Voldemort, but he had died too.

And Draco was gone. Dead, missing, lost, whatever, it didn't matter to Ginevra. He might have helped her get through it all, being the only left in her family, but he wasn't there either.

She had become a creature of the night, preferring the soft darkness over the bright sunlight. The dark knew what it was like, to have lost it all.

As the years passed, Ginevra crept further and further into the shadows. She would never be wholly dark; she would never join the "other" side, she would never mix in the Dark Arts, as tempting as it looked, because that had taken everything from her.

And when she was nearly thirty, life had lost every bit of appeal it had ever had. She wondered how she could ever have thought it was good to be alive, good to feel such pain, pain that never lost its edge? And she wondered why she was stilll alive now, even though the remnants of the Death Eaters were hunting her -- why was she still running?

They would find her, eventually, she knew. And she wondered again, why am I still alive?

She began to think that maybe she still wanted to hold onto life, a little bit. And she did, she wanted to still breathe, no matter who was waiting for her in the realm of the dead.

More years passed, and the Death Eaters did find the last Weasley, and somehow, she never knew how, she fought back, she killed so many of them, so many... And a new hope began to blossom in her heart.

But it never grew past that small little bloom. Because after all that had been done to her, all that she had lived through, all the people she had watched die, Ginny would always be dark.