Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, his friends and enemies, and his world.
Chapter 11: Millicent and Neville
In the war Millicent lost a lot of things.
She lost her family, as the definition of the word would make it. Her father, her mother, her older brother, her grandmothers, her aunts and uncles. Some of them she lost to death, the others to the prison. And she knew that there was no chance of them returning from either of those — everyone had been judged by the Wizengamot as the law had it, and found guilty; everyone was sentenced for life of imprisonment, because their crimes were heavy, and there was no pretence of guilt in them; and then there was also the fact that if any of them would be freed for exemplary behaviour, then it would definitely be a sign of approaching apocalypse.
She had lost her husband. Well, truth be told, they had not been quite married, yet, but the plans had been made long before Millicent's birth; even long before the birth of Millard, her older brother. The arrangement had been made at the time when her father Mr. Bulstrode had become the patriarch of their line with the death of his father, just around the same time that the same had happened in the Nott family.
And as Mr. Bulstrode and Mr. Nott were business associates, as they preferred to be called, and as it was clear that every respected wizard family first gave birth to a son, and then to a daughter, it was quickly arranged that Nott's son would marry Bulstrode's daughter, and the other way round. Millicent had been lucky — she and Theodore were the same age; her brother had been only seventeen years older than Miss Nott. But now they were dead, all of them.
Along with the people Millicent had lost her beliefs, her views on life. All her childhood she had been thought to follow unwaveringly every order from the patriarch of the 'line', and that meant the eldest living man in the male line. (It was also quite usual in the pureblood society that at the age when the sons of the families began to understand that the only thing between them and the total command over their mothers and sisters and money was their father, strange accidents would befall on the fathers, killing them or just leaving them incapable of anything but lying and babbling.)
It wasn't her family dying that shattered Millicent's belief in the rightness of their society, it was the day when Lucius Malfoy, whose wife everyone still believed to give birth to a daughter in the near years only because he was richer and more arrogant than the average pureblood, found out that he was the leak in the Dark Lord's ranks, he was the one giving information to the Order. Though the member of the Order he gave the information to was his son and he didn't know about the shift in his ideals, Millicent saw that if in that family it was possible to fight against the upbringing and one's parents, then it was possible in every other line, too.
And the war ended with her side's loss, and she was left standing; alone, naked, and broken.
And then came all the things she found due to the war.
"Milla, you're doing it again," Neville said, and Millicent raised her eyes from the photo album, knowing and not caring that her cheeks were stained with tears. Her belief in her family had been scattered, but she still cared for her old friends, even though they had been with her in another life.
"I know," she smiled at the concerned face above her, and the gentle thumbs that were brushing away her tears. "And I know that this world is better to live in, but I respect traditions, and I like routine."
"I know you do," Neville answered slowly, and sat down in the other armchair, facing her.
Neville had been one of the most important things she had found after the war, or maybe it had been Neville who had found her. But they had been living together for more than a year now, and he had been the key to her discovering the other things one needed for a life — emotions, friendships, purpose.
Milla chanced another peek at the album. Looking back at her was the picture of her and Daphne and Pansy from Hogwarts from their last year — they were each sitting on a tall pile of books, all the books they had had to buy for the schooling. Daphne's pile was the highest, she had taken the most additional classes of the three of them. Now looking at the picture she wondered whether Hermione would fit into the confines of the photo at all if she had been next to them there.
She closed the album with a bang, trying not to think that Daphne and Pansy were no more. Instead she looked back at Neville and tried to smile. "I like what we have now."
"I like it, too," he said, and sighed. "But even more I'd like it to change."
"Change?" Milla studied him carefully as he rose from the armchair and walked around the coffee table to her.
"Yes, change," he said, kneeling down on the floor next to where she was sitting, and leaning his chin on the arm of the chair. He looked up at her with some strange but strong emotion in his eyes, and Millicent looked back. She wasn't thinking, she wasn't wondering; she knew that if he wanted her to know, then he would tell.
"Millicent," he said after a while of just looking at each other, "would you accept my mother's ring to symbolise your agreement to enter the matrimony with me?" And he produced the band — two golden wines, intertwined, a ruby set in the middle.
Millicent couldn't help but chuckle.
"The sentence was so strange I could barely understand what you said," she smiled. "But yes, of course I will accept it to 'symbolise my agreement to enter the matrimony with you'."
He slid the ring to her finger, and both faces lit up with the emotion that Neville had never thought he would feel, and Millicent hadn't even known existed.
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Next chapter: Bellatrix and Alastor.