It was a cold December morning and Ginny couldn't move past the doorway. She just stood there. The dark shadows of her dreams were still calling to her.
She didn't want to move. She wanted to stay there, in the door. If she didn't move she didn't have to face the world. If she moved, she had to go to class, participate in life.
What she wanted most was to go out on the grounds. She wanted to be out in the wind. She wanted to listen to its whispers. It was kind, it was pleasant. It wasn't like the voices she heard inside, the voices she heard in the stillness. She wanted to stand in the rain. She wanted to listen to the stories it told as it fell. It brought a whole different world around her. It set her free. It protected her from everything else, shielded her.
She wanted to escape to her own world. She wanted to go home, to lie on her own bed in her own room. She wanted to be surrounded by the paper flowers she had pasted to her walls. She wanted to stare up at the ceiling she had painted purple and the cotton candy pink clouds that floated across it.
Eventually, she managed to drag herself downstairs. Halfway through the day she ran into Malfoy in the corridor. Unfortunately, there was no one else around. She braced herself for an attack.
None came. Instead, he just moved to walk past her.
She stepped in front of him. "I don't think so."
"What?" he said, exasperated.
"You have no right to judge me. You say I'm everyone's fool because I live behind a mask as what they want me be and nothing else. You say I've betrayed you because I'm not fighting. You have no right to say I'm out of touch with this rampant chaos of reality. You have no right to say I've given up. I know very well what lies outside of myself, the nightmare I built my world to escape. You haven't been there to hear me screaming just because I'm afraid of the silence. You don't know what lives in my dreams, how I long for sleepless nights. Until you know what I'm fighting, how the hell do you expect to judge my effort?" With that, she shoved past him and went on her way.