Life of Loneliness for the Innocent
Those were the last words that I would hear for at least three years, maybe even five. I gave up counting the days, weeks and months a long time ago. I'm here for a life time, so there's no need to count. And I ran out of room.
I get a special 'gift' at Christmas and my Birthday anyway. Some sort of cruel joke, an extra special ration for that day. A pudding of some sort usually. Sometimes a card from the guards that watch me. They don't know me. They don't talk to me. They're not allowed to, so says my scripture of punishment.
My time in isolation has been spent decently at least. A fragment of a desert island is where I am.
I have a two room hut at the top of a cliff, set behind a line of trees. A small fresh water lagoon outside, with a tiny waterfall that just about suffices for rinsing my self when I wash. I can climb down the cliff to my own 'private' beach. A chest set into the rocks provides me with my rationed supplies. It sometimes takes me a couple of journeys up and down the rock face to store my food appropriately in the hut. I sometimes swim in the sea or lie in the sand when I'm bored.
When it's too hot I have a siesta in my hut, meaning I drink water and fruit juice and sleep. Sometimes I write. I completed a book recently, A Modern History of Hogwarts, the previous publication being about two hundred years out of date. I included everything that I discovered about the place, a time line of changes brought about by each headmaster since 1900, reactions of Hogwarts students and staff to the wars since then. My book has been published under a pseudonym, Mirage Greenhorn, an anagram of my own name.
But, today, somebody did speak to me. That somebody was Draco Malfoy. Of all people, did you really expect that? Draco Malfoy, paying to speak to me!
To say that I was shocked is an understatement. He was my enemy for years. We only talked once, and that was in the minutes before my trial, when he wished me luck, an easy sentence. But I got life. A life of isolation.
Until I was sixteen, I had been known as Mudblood Know-It-All Granger. That changed though. That all changed when Harry Potter betrayed me in the worst of ways. That all changed when Ronald Weasley betrayed me in the worst of ways. That all changed when Ginerva Weasely betrayed me. That all changed the day that I was attacked...