A/N: JK owns the Potterverse, I just enjoy getting to play in her sandbox once in a while.
waldeinsamkeit - (n.) the feeling of being alone in the woods [german]
The memories came at her from all sides, just as her attackers had during the battle. Looks of horror, looks of shame, a very loud and public rejection from her former best friend. Every day, Lavender Brown was haunted by what she had become. The doctors said she had been lucky to survive the attack, but these days, she didn't feel so lucky. She felt like an outcast.
When she was first released from St. Mungo's, she was hailed as a survivor. Of all those bitten at Hogwarts, she was the first to be allowed to leave the hospital. Another made his way out a few months later, but he couldn't handle the stigma of being a were and left the country. The rest either would never leave their private wing, or had perished during the battle.
Lavender had tried to pick her life back up where it had left off, and for a while she was able to convince herself that everything was just fine. While not given the royal treatment that some of her former classmates enjoyed (or had thrust upon them, as the case may be), she did receive a few moments of preference and benefits from being on the winning side and having the scars to prove it. She even managed to squeeze in a couple of dates with men, though none of them lasted more than a night. All in all, about the same as before.
Then came her first post-release transformation. She had managed to acquire some Wolfsbane, but she had been given a smaller than normal dosage, as the St. Mungo's potions master had been tied up with all of the injured after the battle. The potion had helped somewhat, but before the end of the night the wolf had fully taken over, and when Lavender awoke in the morning, she had a scratch down her right arm that she couldn't explain. Moreover, it didn't heal much as the days passed, leaving her with a thin scar. The next transformation (her first without Wolfsbane) was much worse, and before the end of the week she had left her job, unable to face the stares of the Witch Weekly staff.
Two months later, Parvati confronted her in Diagon Alley and ended their friendship with a slap across the face after a long diatribe about how she would no longer associate with "a downtrodden, wasteful, potentially dangerous thing." She saw a few looks of pity from the passersby, but most refused to meet her eyes at all. Lavender went home in tears that night, and found that she didn't care in the slightest that the wolf shredded the sari Parvati had gifted her for Christmas in their fifth year the following week.
Now, she sat in this featureless room, with sterile white padding on each wall. She knew there was a door to the outside somewhere hidden in amongst the pads, but she didn't really want to find it. She just wanted the memories to stop. She just wanted to be whole again. She just wanted to go back to the way things were.
No matter what the voices said, she wasn't crazy.