AN: Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted something. This is a little ficlet that has been on my mind for awhile- I hope you like it! And to any readers who also read my POTC story In One Moment, it's currently being revised. I'm hoping to have it edited and another chapter posted by Christmas or early January at the latest. Thank you for your patience!

Disclaimer: No, I don't own Harry Potter. Nice try though.

Devotion

I know well what lies beyond my sleeping refugee
The nightmare I built my own world to escape
In my field of paper flowers
And candy clouds of lullaby
I lie inside myself for hours
And watch my purple sky fly over me
Evanescence, Imaginary

Leaving hurt more than anything else.

He didn't want to leave her there, in the small white room. Her hair stood out brilliantly, the only color in the room. Except each time he leaves, her hair turns dull. He can't stand to see her like that.

She talks to them, those who are gone. She plays pretend, not seeing Remus when he comes. In her mind, she's six years old, playing tea with her mom and building tents out of sheets with her brother. Her world is still untouched by darkness, evil a far away concept that only really exists in fairy tales. Some days she's eleven, scared and alone at Hogwarts, entranced by the faded memory of a sixteen year old boy. She struggles against what the boy wants, becomes lost and blind to his expectations. She cries out for peace, for someone to see that she's in trouble. She finds refugee in her memories of before everything went wrong.

Sometimes she's twelve, and that's when she remembers him. She practices her defenses dutifully, recites the different Dark Creatures and what dangers they pose. She talks to him, or rather her memory of him. When she asks questions on homework that has long since been collected, he solemnly gives her the answer. She thanks him, and gives him the sweet innocent smile of a young girl. He racks his mind, tries to remember what he had taught her, what advice he may have given her. He tries to remember conversations they had had that year. The year they met.

Other days she's fourteen, and spending time playing checkers with a lonely man who is a prisoner in his own home. She walks around her room with a duster, cleaning and organizing her small space. She laughs at jokes he can't hear, and wonders what goes on behind the closed doors of Order meetings. She tries to be nice to a house elf that betrayed them, and then hurries to help her mother cook large meals. She whoops and dances with her brothers at small victories. She frets over a boy who will never live past his eighteenth birthday. So much had come to pass.

She rarely is any older than fifteen. Fifteen for her is the safe age, when things were still easy. He finds that she prefers to stay young, to be without care. She still likes to dance, and sings nonsense songs from childhood. She hates silence, hates its presence that tries to force her into the present. It is a presence that pressures the careful mental barriers she has created.

On the rare, extremely rare times when she goes past fifteen years, she's terrified. She stays hunched in the corner of her tiny room, head buried in her knees and rocking herself slowly. If disturbed, she clings to the intruder, crying out for her family. She promises to do anything, if they will just give her to her mother. She cries for her brother who went astray, and searches wild-eyed for any Death Eaters. Black hooded robes or white masks will send her into hysterics for hours.

But mostly, mostly she is twenty years old, staring blankly at the wall across from her single bed. She sits an empty shell, her eyes glazed in eternal pain. Since she was seventeen she's been in this state. He found her this way, after the entire world had changed, staring. In her lap a boy's head lay, with a faint scar on his forehead. She held the hand of a red-haired boy whose body was strewn across the other boy. It had taken him three hours to move her away, and when he was done he realized her face was not stained with tears. And when he looked in her eyes, he flinched at the raw pain in them.

For three years she has stayed in the same room, with the same outfit on. She has changed very little, except her hair, which was once as brilliant as a rising sun, is now a dull copper. She's fading away, letting her grip on reality go. And he can only sit by her side and watch it happen. He's the only one left. He comes every day, and sits for hours.

The mediwitches know him by name, and work around him when they make their rounds. They watch him read to her, talk to her, trying to pretend she'll respond. They watch, and sorrow crosses their faces, because she never answers. She never knows he's there. They know her story, as they know so many others, and they shake their heads sadly that a girl with such a bright future had ended up in their care.

He loves her, they know. They have seen so many patients, and they've seen their families. Some patients have families, others friends or lovers. Some have nobody left. When they first come in, visitors come in a steady stream. But as time goes on, the number of visitors dwindles, their visits less frequent. Finally the visitors come only on Christmas, their time brief and hurried. Some stop coming at all. He's different. Every day, at nine o'clock sharp, he walks into their floor, greets them at the station and goes into her room. He stays until visiting hours are over at three. He kisses her once on the forehead, smoothes her hair back, and leaves.

He knows all their names. Every day he asks after their health; if they have families, he asks how the children are doing, if their husbands had found jobs. On holidays he brings small trinkets for everybody; perfume for the women, ties for the men, toys for the children, and colorful pictures for the patients. Every Monday morning her brings doughnuts from Muggle London and flowers to brighten the front desk. They thank him, and in turn inquire about his doings. "Same as usual," is his daily reply.

The few days a month when he's pale and drawn, they tell him not to worry, to stay home and rest. They know what he is, everybody does, and they know how hard it is for him to come to their ward. But he always comes, despite their protests. He tells them he can't leave her alone. "She counts on me to come. I can't disappoint her." So eventually they stop asking him, and each month he trods slowly in pain, fatigue etched more firmly into his face.

She still wears his ring. A small, modest gold ring he had given her a week before everything happened. It stays on her still white hand, gleaming and whispering of promises given long ago. He doesn't like to look at it, to remember that he may never be able to give her the cottage with a dog and children running around outside. Children...the part of his promise he tucks away in a dark corner of his mind, along with their fairy tale ending. Now his promise is to get her out of the little white room, away from the box her mind has built against reality. His simple wish now is for her to recognize him, not a hallucination of his past self.

As he sits in her white room, holding her hand and pretending that she'll come back to him, he sometimes allows his mind to wander to his dreams. After all, it is his dreams that keep him alive, that keep him moving long after others give up. He dreams his dreams of waking up with her by his side, of walking outside with her, of eating his meals with her and simply sharing his life with her. But when he starts to teeter dangerously on losing himself in those dreams, he pulls himself back. That's how he lost her, but he refuses to lose himself. So many others already have. He can tell who has, and who has not, when he ventures outside the ward, outside her realm of existence. He can tell by the glazed looks in their eyes, the false smiles pasted on their faces. But he knows their pain, as they know his. Everybody's eyes are haunted, the past still stored within them. Nobody escaped the war's harsh blows.

When she breaks her silence, either with songs, conversations with the dead, or screaming fits, he still stays. He tries to reason with her, tries to get her to calm down, or to sit down, or to just talk to him, to acknowledge he's present. But she never does. She's so cleverly trapped in her own mind and memories that she can't, or won't, break loose. She can't reach back out to him and reassure him that she's well and happy. He waits for her, and as the wait stretches longer she shows no signs of change. It's on the days when she cries, and he holds her in his arms, that the mediwitches assigned to her feel the most heart-wrenching pain. For when she cries out for her family, silent tears fall down his face. But he never loses his patience, never raises his voice to her. He simply holds her until she falls asleep, or becomes catatonic, then places her carefully on the bed and resumes his vigil by her side.

Everyday feels like it will be different. Everyday he wakes thinking that that day will be the day he'll walk into his lover's room, and she will look up at him and run into his arms. It's what he thinks of when he lies in his small bed, willing himself to get up. It's what he has to think, to believe. But then everyday is the same. Everyday he walks into her room, in his shabby robes and graying hair, and she looks exactly as she did the afternoon before. And he lets a slight shiver of disappointment pass through him, and then he sits down, takes her hand, and tells her another story. He waits for her laugh, for her smile, for anything. But it doesn't come.

Leaving hurt more than anything else.