"How did we end up here?"
She looks at you with wide brown eyes that hold an eerie stillness, like the sea on a gentle day. She smiles, a small, wistful smile, the only kind she seems capable of anymore. "How did we end up where?"
"Here," you answer, gesturing around you at the makeshift tents and the empty field, the grass still red if you look at it close enough. "When did things take this turn?"
Her eyes follow yours, then drop to her hands, which are pulling at loose threads in the thin sheet on the rickety cot that she is seated on. "Thing have been heading this way forever. Things just got worse as time passed. But we're lucky, really."
"Lucky?" you ask incredulously, your voice bitter. "How in hell are we lucky?"
"He's gone, isn't he? We won."
"If you look at from the view of a soldier, we were victorious. But in reality, we lost so much more than we gained. Look around you, kiddo, look at all the faces that are missing, all the children whose bodies have been burned."
"They died defending what they believed in. They would have wanted it that way. Besides, life is temporary. They understood that."
"'Life is temporary'?! How can you be so cavalier about this? You lost your family, your best friends, your fiancé!"
Her hands still for a moment, a shadow passes over her face, and for a moment she looks like she might cry. She takes a deep, ragged breath. "They died for a noble cause. He found the right side, in the end, and died defending me. Do I wish it had been me? Yes, God, yes. Sometimes I want to take it into my own hands. But life and death is beyond human control, and it's all an endless cycle anyway. For every life ended another begins. That's one thing that keeps me going."
You look at her in awe. How can someone so young be so old?
"I wish I could think that way. But I will never forgive the other side."
"Of course you won't forgive them. And neither will I. No one is asking you to forgive, Remus. Just to accept things for what they are, and that we cannot change them now. And they wouldn't want us to spend our lives grieving."
"Perhaps you're right, Ginny, perhaps you're right."