For Lavender Brown the war had never seemed particularly real. She knew it was of course, she heard the horror stories of the outside world and felt the evidence of the war within Hogwarts itself, but it seemed to her that as long as she kept her head down that maybe she would be left alone.
It all changed once Dean went on the run.
No longer was she able to bury her head and pretend that everything was fine, before the war she had been a normal teenage girl, her head filled with vapid notions and an idealistic future.
Now she was preparing to fight for that future.
She wasn't a particularly clever woman but she most certainly wasn't stupid. She knew that there was a chance she wasn't coming back from this one and what surprised her the most was that she had made peace with this.
She was ready for this.
~o~o~o~
Six months after the hollow victory over the death eaters and Voldemort; she always thought of it as hollow because of the amount of pain that war had caused, Lavender sat alone. She sat in her small flat as she had done for the past few weeks only venturing outside for her work.
The isolation was self inflicted but that didn't make it any easier. All she wanted to do was hide from the world, so she did. She sat in her flat completely covering her small frame with baggy and oversized clothes all to hide the scars that ran the length of body given to her by Greyback.
Her friends kept trying to get her to go out, to see them, anything to distract her from the scars that only she seemed to notice.
She ignored them.
Eventually only two friends remained, Parvarti, who called upon her almost everyday with a smile and the freshest gossip, and strangely Seamus, who visited her sporadically with wild tales and jokes. It took her a while but eventually she began to crave their company, and the human contact that they brought them.
Just thinking about them set her heart aching, and as she reached towards the muggle phone that she was testing out she thought that perhaps it was time to go out with her friends. Time to go out and try to and see past the scars.