The summer after the Chamber of Secrets, after my first year at Hogwarts (if you could call it that, when I hadn't really been there for a good chunk of it), my family went to Egypt. Partly because it had been ages since we had seen Bill, and the money just fell into our hands. Partly because mum wanted to make it up to us for missing family Christmas. Mostly, though, I think they all just wanted to forget what had happened.

It didn't work.

Mum hovered. Dad fretted. Ron fell all over himself trying to make it up to me that he hadn't realized I was possessed all year, and Percy patted himself on the back for being the only one who did notice, even though he hadn't managed to do anything about it. The twins took me aside and asked if there was anything they could do, and I told them that the best thing they could do for me was act like things were normal. It was an enormous relief when they warded Percy into that pyramid. Bill was furious, but it took all the attention off me, for a change.

Bill might have been the most helpful, in a practical way. He tore mum and dad a new collective arsehole for spending the money on a trip to visit him, rather than on getting me a good mind healer, and then spent nearly every night we were in Egypt teaching me enough Occlumency that I could start to work through the mess Riddle (I refuse to call him anything but, at least in my head) made of my mind.

It was Charlie, though, who saved me.

You probably wouldn't think it, to look at him, or to talk to him, but Charlie reads. Sure, he works with dragons for a living, and he was a school-team Quidditch star, and he's stocky and strong-looking, and quick with a laugh and a clap on the back for his mates. But if you ask him why he works with dragons, he'll wax poetic about their beauty and their strength. If you give him half a chance, he'll tell you how flying makes him feel like he's one with the world and the universe. And as for having a pint at the pub like a simple man, he'd say that the difference between a philosopher and a sophist is pretention.

Charlie is the only Weasley who's read Nietzsche.

He's the only one who would – who could – listen to my story, and hear the unspoken fears lurking beneath the surface.

He's the one who found me on a rare, quiet evening, after I had escaped the watchful eyes of the rest of the family, and was standing on the edge of the roof of our hotel, watching Cairo bustle below, wondering if I had it in me to take that last, and very final step.

He quoted what I now know is a very famous aphorism: "If you gaze too long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

I (perhaps unsurprisingly, being both a hormonal pre-teen, and a traumatized child) burst into tears. He had managed, intentionally or not, to put his finger on exactly the thing that was bothering me – the thing that was more likely than any other to lead me to finish the job I started when I was so-desperately trying to get rid of the Diary's influence: I felt tainted by what I had experienced, and no one at all had acknowledged that I might not be able to just get over it – not even Bill.

The abyss had not only stared back at me, it had poured itself into me, possessed me – a monster trying to re-make me in its image – and it had come so close. How could I not be changed?

Charlie held me close and let me cry, and when I could not cry any longer, he told me it was okay. He talked for a very long time about what it meant to be a monster, and what it meant to be touched by evil, and even changed by it. What I remember is: 'It's okay, you'll get through this,' and 'We're all shaped by all our experiences'; 'You have to build the person you want to be,' and 'We'll love you no matter what.'

I heard 'Even if you became the next Dark Lady of Britain, you'd still be my baby sister,' and I loved him for it.

And eventually the sun came up, and the world was still there. I was still me, and the dark stain of Tom Riddle still tainted my mind, but it didn't seem nearly as overwhelming anymore.

I made it through the next day, and the one after that, and in due course they sent me back to school, as though I wasn't still a shattered mess of guilt, held together by obsession and fear and bone deep, Gryffindor pride.

Today is my last day at Hogwarts. I made it; I lived.

There were nights I didn't think I would – more than I like to admit.

This final year was as difficult in its own way – more difficult, in some ways – than that first year, or second, or even sixth, living in occupied territory.

I didn't have a choice, then. It made it easier, I think.

First year I was a child, and I was possessed. A victim in need of rescue from my own stupidity.

Second year I was a broken shell of a girl, in no state to decide anything, clinging to normality as though my life depended on it.

Last year I was a prisoner, and I led the resistance. They needed me. Even if I could have escaped, I would have stayed. I couldn't abandon them.

This year, I had other options.

I could have taken my NEWTs independently, like Luna and Nev. I could have gone to work for George. I could have marched into the Auror offices and demanded that they give me a place along with Ron and Harry – God knows I fought harder that last year than they did, hiding in a fucking tent for nine months while Nev and Luna and I taught shield charms and healed cursed wounds and survived endless rounds of torture.

(Hermione showed me her scars one day, told me about Malfoy Manor. I almost laughed before I showed her the marks from Alecto Carrow's fire whip, and the tremor that still hasn't left my right knee – souvenir of too many bone-breakers and too many healing spells in too short a time.)

Mum would have let me stay home, if I had told her what I had seen in this place, if I told her what I'd suffered here.

I chose to come back.

(I had to see if I could.)

I chose to face down the halls where I was held hostage to ensure my parents' good behavior. I sat at the same table where I was Crucio'd for defending a child and refusing to bow; took lessons in the same classroom I once blew up in protest against the so-called professor's anti-muggleborn propaganda.

I walked through the hallway where Fred died every day. There's no mark, no stain to show where he lay.

(There's no marker, either, out on the grounds, where I used the Mercy Spell on my ex-roommate, Janine, and no stain on the stairs where I killed my first man, nameless and faceless, with a piercing hex in the back. There's no sign in the Great Hall of the bodies laid out at the end of the fight, but that doesn't mean I don't know they were there.)

I cried myself to sleep in the same bed I had the year before, and five years before that, doubting my sanity as much as I did on finding rooster feathers in my pockets.

(Surely, it was madness to return.)

I woke up, shaking and sweating with fear, trying to convince myself that winning the war hadn't all been a dream, that HE was really, truly gone.

(Surely, it was madness to believe it was over.)

I still haven't quite managed that, really.

There is a taint that lingers, you see, in the back of my mind.

I survived my first year, but I was changed for the experience.

I was broken by a wizard, by the wizard more hated, feared, and reviled throughout Britain than any other, and I put myself back together, better, stronger than before. But colder, too. The soul of a soulless monster did, after all, live in me, if only briefly.

He named himself a thief who steals from Death, but Death was not the only one he robbed. He stole my innocence and my trust (and my heart). He stole my sense of safety, and the carefree happiness I had once had.

I think I took more, in the end. Calculation, ruthlessness, and charm; glib wit and cunning manipulation; ambition, drive, and confidence. I learned from him: raised morale with the same skills he used to charm secrets out of schoolteachers; built a resistance with the same methods he used to gather followers; stood against him with the same stubbornness that fueled his rise to power.

I embraced his coldness, in the end: stole the emptiness from the abyss and used it as he would have used me. I turned it back on him to survive his war, and now I cannot seem to let it go.

I can't seem to let him go.

(Much as I hate him, I used him; I need him.)

I cry silently in my bed every night. By morning I walk with my head held high, smiling his smile and letting everyone think me untouchable – immune to the sorrow that plagues us all, and the memories that echo in the stones of these walls. I was their phoenix, after all: unconquerable.

It would hardly do to break the illusion now.

The adults of Magical Britain may laud the Golden Trio for bringing an end to the war, but the children of Hogwarts look to me, their haunted eyes reflecting my second-year self, begging for an example of how to move on.

Professor McGonagall is starting a new tradition this year: The Head Boy and Head Girl are to make a speech, at the end of the farewell feast.

I've read Greg's. It's good. It talks about a bright future and the triumph of good and light over darkness and evil. It talks about an end to bigotry and intolerance, about a generation of children growing up and changing the world. It talks about hope. A new era of peace.

It's a speech for all the muggleborns like him who had to run for their lives last year; a speech for those who have a chance, now, at acceptance.

Mine's a speech for all of us who couldn't run. For the children who fought, who stood up for themselves and suffered for their pride and their principles. For the good little hostages who looked the other way, who kept their heads down and their noses clean and pretended not to know anything about anything, ever. For the ones who bear their families' guilt, and the ones who chose to do terrible things rather than have terrible things done to them.

It's a speech for the children who share my nightmares, who wake up not believing that the war is done, and see bodies laid out under conjured sheets in the Great Hall, and everyone who lost someone they loved. It's for the survivors who were brave enough to return and face their fears, and the gist of it is this:

There is no good or evil, only experience, and how you choose to use it.

(The only thing Riddle gave me freely, his mocking lesson on the cruel ways of the world, I've stolen now by making it my own.)

Charlie's still the only Weasley who's read Nietzsche, but I know just as well what it means when idiots say that what does not kill us makes us stronger.

They quote it blithely, as though adversity itself strips away weakness, as though we and our people are somehow better than we were, simply because we have survived the trials of war.

Rubbish.

We are no stronger now than we were before our parents and their parents started killing each other at the word of a madman. We're tired and scarred. Broken. Scared. We are a nation divided, more so now than five years ago or twenty-five. The war solved nothing, and I stand at the head of a generation of child-veterans, our collective innocence lost in a struggle we were born into. Disillusioned.

That doesn't mean there's no truth in it, the quote.

Survival alone does not ensure change, for better or worse, but as Luna once told me, destruction clears the way for new beginnings, and those hold all the potential in the world.

We hold all the potential in the world, the survivors.

I'm so proud of everyone who came back this year.

You see, there's a world of difference between surviving and living.

Living is looking around at the aftermath of war and choosing to make a fresh start. It's choosing to take a long, hard look at history to ensure we will never repeat our parents' mistakes. And it's choosing to try to face down our demons and come to terms with our ghosts and our memories, instead of letting them rule our lives.

We're survivors, yes, but not only that.

In coming back, we chose to live.

What didn't kill us may make us stronger, but only if we so choose, and this is the first step.

[Most of the seventh- and 'eighth-years,' who are technically adults and have quite frankly had enough of Hogwarts, chose to take their NEWTs independently. Ginny was made Head Girl over Hermione because Ginny was at Hogwarts, leading the resistance, while Hermione was hiding in a tent. The Head Boy is an unknown Ravenclaw muggleborn from Ginny's year.]