Episode One Hundred and Eighteen
A lone figure stood on the sunny hillside, pocked here and there with withering gray headstones. She was wearing dark, subdued robes and thick black boots, which the recent rain had left muddy. Her ginger hair was pulled back into a short ponytail that bobbed to and fro as she moved with a subtle deft ability.
Somewhere under her robes, resting on her left hip, was a wand, the power of which she had broken. It contained a single phoenix tail feather and had once belonged to someone capable of great evil. On her right hip was another wand; this one contained the hair of a unicorn, not something she would have chosen herself. Her curiosity over why the wand had chosen her was something that had faded with the few years that she had owned it, her original wand having been crushed under the trample of death eaters' feet. That wand too had contained unicorn hair, something she had debated about for years.
She knew very well that when she returned to Hogwarts she would again be subject to many inquisitions as to her whereabouts and her motivations. She had suffered for many long weeks under the scrutinizing eyes of the Ministry of Magic.
She was carrying his wand, the wand of the Dark Lord. She had taken it from his snakeskin shell and she had insisted on burying what was left of his body. He may have been the root of all evil, but he was still family and that had to count for something. She was paying her respects now, bowing her head in recognition of their blood ties.
She had tried to answer all of their questions. Harry had asked so many, about being the Heir of Slytherin (which she was, though she was not a parselmouth), the fear she still felt for him (out of some residual part of herself tied to her grandfather), and anything else he could think to utter about Gwen's life and how it had culminated in the death of her grandfather.
Neville had few questions. He seemed, surprisingly to understand Gwen and her actions on that day in the dark room. The day he finally fell. Draco asked no questions, he had enough to worry about from his own father without concentrating on the worries of others. Graves waited for her to tell him on her own terms.
These were the four men who now occupied most her time. The others, her godmother, Snape, even Dumbledore, they left her alone. She had answered their questions on the first day back and she had nothing more to say about it to them or the Ministry or any of the papers. The question and answer session was over, but it didn't stop them from continuing to chase her into corners, their quills ready to write any little thing she happened to slip.
She sighed and leaned down to the earth. She placed a handful of fresh daisies that she had picked from the roadside onto the fresh dirt that still had not grown grass. She knew that this spot would never grow grass; it would be as barren as his life had been and remain so until his snakeskin shell melted into oblivion.
Her eyes would not fill with tears. She could not cry over this. She couldn't even feel connected to this. This was so far away, a thousand miles away. His death, her words, everything was lost in the blue of the sky at the very moment she looked up. The clouds were gathering low on the horizon, simple wisps of white that would not threaten rain. She couldn't feel anything but happy that things had turned out this way.
But she could not feel that she had done the right thing. In her heart she had cursed him. She had removed his power and his strength, the only things that his life remained to stand on. Without power and strength he had no life and when she took them away he was dead.
She looked at her hands, still surging with the power he had placed in her blood. She breathed in the fresh air and thought sadly that he could live no other way. He could not live peacefully while there was power to be had. She just couldn't understand how it had consumed him so. She had felt it, yes, she recognized that as the flame at the base of her spine that sometimes licked higher. Yet she had control over it and time and practice had rendered the flame docile. Perhaps Tom Riddle had never mastered his own demon flame, perhaps he had never had control over the thing that would determine his fate as the Lord Voldemort.
Perhaps Tom Riddle never understood what it was to be human.
Gwen hardly understood herself.
