AN- this has been my baby for a while now. I hope you like :)
Childhood and Adulthood
She was powerless. Useless. Redundant. What could she do? She was just Lavender Brown: ditzy, silly little Lavender Brown, with a personality that lived up to her boring, average name.
What could she do? These people, they were so strong, so powerful- too powerful. She was only one girl- and she wasn't even very good at magic!
She felt horrible. She should fight- for her school, for her friends, for herself. She was a Gryffindor, for God's sake! True Gryffindors were made for this kind of thing. She shouldn't be sat there, terrified.
She was nothing. If anyone saw her, they would've spat in disgust. Not brave enough to fight, to do what was right, and not a good enough person to help Madam Pomfrey behind the attack lines.
Even Lord Voldemort, in his own twisted way, was a better person than she was right now, she thought.
She stood and walked to the window of the girls' dormitory in which she had lived for the past seven years. When she had first gone to the Room of Requirement and joined the rebellion against the Carrows, she had never expected it to go this far, not really. It had been a game- fight against the nasty teachers, play a few tricks on the Slytherins.
This wasn't a game anymore. This was war.
Lavender wasn't quite ready for war.
She inspected her face in the cold reflective glass. Pale brown eyes and brown, wavy hair. Fair skin. High cheekbones and one pointed chin. Slightly heart-shaped head. It was a face she had often looked into critically, worrying about her looks. Feeling slightly detached from her body, she supposed now that she was pretty. Not a classical, Fleur Delacour kind of beautiful, but a vague, quiet prettiness, all the same.
But what did that matter? She was so weak, so disgusting, that no one would ever want to look onto her ever again.
She focused on her eyes. Large and empty. Brown and boring.
Brown by name, brown by nature.
If she looked closely, she could see a spark of light, maybe, deep in her eyes, where all should have been dead. What was that spark? The remains of the fiery being that had once been, the one that was slipping away now?
The loss of herself felt almost like a close family death. She didn't want to dwell on it; it frightened her. Instead, she cast her gaze down, past the glass.
A battle was raging below. How could she not have noticed? So selfish, she thought. So terrible, so weak.
With a pang, she recognised Colin Creevey in the fight. She knew Colin vaguely from the DA and the Rebellion. He was a nice kid, sweet and strong. He was also too young to be fighting. Hadn't they sent away all those underage?
But she saw now other students who did not reach the seventeen year mark either. It was only right, she supposed. They had earned their right to take part in this moment as much as anyone.
As much as she.
This, if anything, made her decide. She should leave this tower and fight. She should support the effort the students were making, and dammit she would, for the sake of goodness if nothing else.
Something compelled her to stay though, just for a moment, and watch Colin. He was exchanging spells with a woman, dodging her flashes of green light and returning with his own red flashes.
The woman was winning, it was painfully obvious. Her spells were only increasing in speed, and Colin could barely duck fast enough, let alone keep up his own barrage.
He didn't stop fighting, though, not for a second, not until finally, with a deafening gravity that surely shook the earth, a single bolt of green light hit his chest.
He fell to the ground with a jolt- not gracefully, not in slow-motion, but suddenly and gracelessly, his small frame barely making an impact on the cold grass.
The sudden death of Colin resonated through Lavender as if a shot had been taken beside her own ear. Colin was a good person. Surely he could not be… gone?
But it was so. His face was full of his passion, his defiance, already growing cold with the nothingness of death.
The woman, his murderer- Bellatrix Lestrange, Lavender remembered- threw back her head and laughed. Laughed at the loss of and innocent life. Laughed in the face of death, of pain.
It was disgusting.
Lavender dropped onto her knees and threw up, heaving up the contents of her stomach. How could this be? How could it be real? It was too horrible to put into words, far too horrible for her to even feel anything but disdain for her silly weakness anymore.
She felt a sudden, overpowering surge of anger. It rushed through her, filling her with power, with fury. She felt the need to avenge the loss of such a glorious, kind, wonderful life. She had never really even known Colin Creevey. He was just a boy in the year below her, someone to laugh at, the creep with the camera.
Colin Creepy. That was what she had called him once. She gasped at remembering it, and a regretful tear rolled down her cheek, dripping from her nose to the floor in a most unladylike manner.
He had been just a boy. A boy she had made fun at, laughed at, but nonetheless, still a boy. A child.
But war makes adults of children, and Colin Creevey had become a man. In death, however, he was tiny, fragile, almost infantile.
She could not let him have died for nothing. She could not let him down. She felt an overwhelming attachment to this boy who she had only known in the moment of his parting and she could not bear the thought of letting the war be lost and allowing his death to mean nothing, to have made no impact.
She wiped her mouth and stood, tying back that brown, wavy hair. Wand in hand, she made her way down the Tower stairs to join the battle.
Tragedy was raging around her. She felt a stab of pain every time she saw a fallen student- soldier- but she did not stop moving. If she was going to fight, she was going to make her way to the heart of the battle.
As she ran, blending into the background as much as she could in effort to avoid engaging in conflict quite yet, she saw so much pain and horror that it hurt, it hurt deep inside her. But she could not stop- she knew that her friends would be at the heart of the fighting, and selfish as it might sound, she had to make sure they were alive.
Preoccupied as she was, she did not notice a protruding foot, and she tripped, sprawling ungainly on the ground. Throwing herself onto her haunches, she whirled to find her assailant, only to see the offending limb. Swallowing slightly, she forced herself to make her eyes travel up the body- for she realised now that this was what it was.
Fred Weasley.
She gave a cry of pain and horror at the sight of his pale face, cold and empty now, but even so with a slight smile around the lips. His eyes were wide with the brutal shock of his sudden death. Tears falling freely now, she reached out a trembling hand and closed his eyes. Then he could merely be asleep, ready to jump up, laughing, his red hair shining.
Another loss. Another vibrant, wonderful existence lost, gone from this earth, taken- stolen by Voldemort and his Death Eaters.
She gave a moan of utter despair and agony. What was wrong with this world? Why did people- good people- have to be taken away so cruelly? Like Colin, she hadn't even known Fred well at all, but she found that everyone was comrades in such an open, delicate moment as death.
Pushing herself to her feet once more, she gazed down at his prone form for a moment before turning and moving on, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She felt a renewed sense of anger, of a mindless, furious passion for her cause.
People like Fred and Colin were her cause.
Running again now, faster, she cast the best spells she could as fast as she could, trying to aide all she came by while reaching her destination. Often, her spells were returned with other, most potent ones, but she just kept moving, moving, moving, refusing to stop.
She reached the Hall. The main battle seemed to be happening there, for she could barely breathe, the scent of death, fear and fury making the air thick.
Standing not far apart, in direct combat with three Death Eaters she did not recognise, Lavender saw Dean, Parvati and Seamus. Without a word, she slipped in beside them and joined their battle.
The sudden addition of extra assistance allowed Parvati an opening to hit the tallest Death Eater with her famous body-bind curse. The momentary distraction of their comrade's demise permitted Dean and Seamus to stun the remaining two, and, in the brief lapse that followed, Lavender's three friends turned to her, merely looking for a moment.
Then, one after another and Seamus last, they nodded at her. She knew they knew why she had not joined them before now, but the nod told her that they forgave her. She offered them a weary little smile in return, before spinning instinctively and engaging in combat with another Death Eater.
Battle was furious, relentless, and it clawed away part of her soul, she thought, but she did it, and how she fought. She fought to prevent any more deaths like Colin Creevey or Fred Weasley's. She could not let that happen. She would rather die, she realised, fighting at her friends' sides for freedom, for love and truth, than live in a world where people laughed at the death of children.
That was what made her a Gryffindor, and that was what made her a better person than Lord Voldemort. She was not afraid any more (not much). Not to die, not to fight- she could and she would do it. She couldn't not.
It felt like forever, that she fought, but it couldn't have been more than a few minutes between her arrival and seeing Seamus battling a dark figure just at the top of the stairs. He was obviously losing, his reactions slowing down as he ducked flashes of green light.
Emotions heightened by the energy running through her, she saw Colin's last moments streak through her mind, saw him trying and failing to duck the blows, saw him falling to the floor…
That would not happen to Seamus.
She wasn't a strong warrior. It was only passion that kept her alive for the moments that she fought, and it was with passion that she pushed Seamus out of the way of a glowing violet curse, taking the brunt of the spell herself, powerless to stop it with magic.
Helplessly, her body flopped down the stairs, hitting the ground with a feeble thud. She felt herself trodden on a few times, not able to conjure the energy to move out of the way. She felt hands on her shoulders, saw a face swim into view. She heard Seamus' yells as he saw her, crying out, begging her not to die.
With weak hands she pushed him away and back into the fray. He needed to fight or he would die, she knew, and she was in no position to shield him once more. She saw Dean and Parvati still fighting, and she knew they would stay strong for as long as possible. She could die quietly now; it would not matter.
Such a long way she had come in a matter of minutes. From weak to strong to dying she had travelled- a full transformation. She had been changed by war; hardened. She had grown into adulthood.
Changed for the better, she hoped, although she mourned the loss of the innocence she and Dean, Parvati and Seamus had once known. It was not the kind of thing that could be regained or replaced. She was a different person.
But did that really matter now? She was struck with a sudden burst of fear. She didn't want to die. She didn't want to leave. Death wasn't something she had really ever considered before now, but now it was coming for her, and she was scared. She trembled as a single tear rolled down her cheek. She wanted to live. She wanted to see her family again; her mother, her father. She wanted to leave school and get a job and marry a nice boy. She wanted to live happily ever after.
Dying wasn't part of that.
She had been willing to give her life mere seconds ago. She would have happily died, she had thought. She had been stupid. Death was sudden and terrifying. She shook with another bout of tears and bit her lip. She was weak after all, she realised. Weak and horrible. She should be proud to die.
Suddenly, pain shot through her as she felt something sharp sink into her back. She tried to thrash, to get rid of it, but she couldn't manage more than a mere stirring, her legs pushing against the offending creature. A bang rang through her ears and the monster was flung away, taking with it a little of her flesh in its teeth as it went with a sickeningly painful jolt.
She waited for the pain to recommence, sure that this must be her retribution, her penance.
Nothing came. Yet agony still ached through her, and she felt blood pouring from her side, falling from her with a terrible kind of drawing sensation. Surely she had suffered enough? Something had to stop it, take it away. It hurt, and she hated it. Pain was all the world was.
She thought she must die, now, finally. She could not live any longer. It didn't seem possible. The void was waiting, and she had to fall into it.
She slipped into unconsciousness, unaware when, five minutes later, she was dragged from the scene with strong hands and her wound was stoppered by a crude bandage that was all the desperation of the moment could provide.
Seamus touched her sweaty face and felt her heart beating under his fingertips. He dived back into the battle with a sudden jerk of the head, pushing her from his mind and focused on the immediate problems. He had never been brave enough, but that had to be put aside for the moment.
War is about fighting and loving and never giving in. War is terrible. War hurts. War is a horrible, horrible word.
War is what makes men out of children, haters out of lovers. War is bad.
Giving in is worse.
AN- thank you to the ever-wonderful Jo - Joelle8 - for betaing! :)