15 November 1998

She shut the door to the room gently in stark contrast to the way she threw it open. The screams and yells and sounds of curses hitting bodies still echoed in her head, but over it, she could hear little things again for the first time since she Apparated to the battlefield. With a start, she realized she could differentiate between the shades of brown in the wood of the floor. She focused on the colors and the sound of Luna's laugh, and her heartbeat slowed and her breathing steadied. She lifted her chin and squared her shoulders as she moved through the corridor on the way to her room. This door she opened slowly and shut quietly, but the spells she cast to ward it were much more intricate than those on the door she left behind.

I need a shower.

She shed her robes and left them on the floor with a carelessness that would have appalled her a year ago and didn't phase her now. She cranked the shower knob as far as it would go and turned away, pressing her forehead against the cool surface of the bathroom mirror. The mirror coughed, perhaps indignantly, but she had never enjoyed a mirror that could speak and had long since hexed the power of words from this one. Drawing back, she examined her reflection and she tried to find evidence on her face to create a time line for the war. Today she saw flecks of dirt and streaks from the rain, empty eyes with dark circles, chapped lips, and she was paler than when she woke up this morning… but there were no horns, no glowing sign that flashed MURDERER!, no missing pieces that reflected what she had lost. The air got heavier as the water got hotter and she turned away from the mirror, welcoming the suffocation of the steam.

She climbed into the shower and hissed as the heat stung her skin to an angry red, and she gritted her teeth but didn't move as the water turned brown before it swirled down the drain. Eight minutes, two hours, the passage of time was irrelevant in her haven of searing water and too much soap and shampoo. The bathroom was quiet, familiar, safe, and the scent of blackberries and vanilla was a balm to heal the rift in her heart. She closed her eyes and let the water flog shoulders that were raw from her scrubbing and still tense from the fight as battles continued to rage in her mind.

I killed a man. No, I killed a Death Eater. He was a Death Eater first, a man second, the same way I am a mudblood first and a woman second. No. He was a man. I will not think like them. He was a man, a human being, he was someone's son, maybe brother, maybe father, maybe a husband or lover. He was a man who decided that his desires, wishes, dreams, and beliefs were important enough to risk his life for. I can respect that. I made that decision too. I decided that my desires, wishes, dreams, and beliefs were important enough for me to risk my life for. I never thought to take my soul into account, though... We never imagined it would be like this.

In a Muggle house, with a non-magical shower, she might have stayed long past the point where hot water fails if only to see how long it would take before she could feel the cold pass through her skin, cool her blood, and settle in her bones. For better or worse though, she was in a magical house, with a magical shower, and water simply didn't run cold.

I killed him. I really killed someone... I had to. It's not okay but Merlin help me, I had to, because I'm only seventeen and I'm not ready to die just yet.

She was startled by the sound of laughter and she flung herself against the side of the shower in a moment of blind terror. The laughter didn't stop and her shoulders shook, and then she realized it was coming from her own lips. She didn't know why she was laughing, but she couldn't stop, and her knees gave way when the colors in her world ran together and lines ceased to separate one object from the next. She kept laughing even as she hit the shower knob and stepped out, and she kept laughing as she fell into a dizzy heap on the floor. She laughed until her chest hurt and she laughed as she cried tears that might have been any combination of grief, anger, shock, guilt, and fear. She didn't know when it started and she didn't know when it ended, but she wiped her eyes and stood, and when she opened the bathroom door, she was calm.

She returned to her room and dressed in plaid pajama pants and a long sleeved shirt before turning her attention to the clothes still strung out across the floor. She Vanished her socks without much consideration; they were old, closer to grey than white and the start of a hole in the heel. Her shirt was relatively unscathed, but the hems of her pants were caked in dead grass and mud and what might have been blood. A quick flick of her wand brought them to few shades lighter than their former glory, but they were clean and dry and she laid down her wand and hung them carefully by hand in her closet, a small gesture of order in a world of bedlam. She bent to retrieve her robes and curled her lip in distaste as the smell of smoke and rain and blood and death hit her nose and she dropped them like they burned her fingers. Reaching for her wand,

"Incendio!"

because right then, at that moment in time, the stains on the fabric were stains on her soul. They wouldn't have come clean, and vanishing them just wasn't enough.