Emotion prompt: Hopeless
Characters: Charity Burbage
Summary: 'You should have known it was a hopeless endeavor' — The life of Charity Burbage.
You should have known it was a hopeless endeavor when you first stepped into the school, the second time in your life after graduating from that very place.
But of course, how could you, when you were young and naïve, believing that you had the power to change the wizarding world's outlook for muggles? When your own education had been in a time just after You Know Who's downfall, when the crises and prejudices of the War were at their lowest? How could you, when the headmaster was so kind and gentle, and you were so eager to serve under him?
So you did not know. And with bright hopes and plans you stepped into the old halls of the school, and sketched lesson plans, resolving to show the magical folk just how equal to them the muggles were.
The classes at first were not bad, and you ignored the jokes made about your spectacles and your quick manner of speaking, as well as the continued disinterest of the few students who took your subject in the first place. But you should have known that it was only the prelude.
They were against you and your teachings. You could hear them mutter amongst themselves and cast scornful glances at you when you tried to tell them that muggles weren't so much different from them. And while you tried to believe that you were unaffected by that, you could feel your dreams shattering, the plans falling apart, the promises made to yourself and Professor Dumbledore fading from existence, your hopes leaving you, little by little.
You burnt your fingers from cursed notes left in the class by students who weren't even in your class; you stammered to answer the merciless onslaught of counterarguments that your words faced. You even shivered at times, reading the papers which wrote of the incessant torture and deaths of muggles and muggleborns alike. And inside, with a sinking feeling, you knew that you could be a prime target too, someday.
But the real shattering of your dwindling hopes occurred the day you heard of the fall of the best headmaster Hogwarts had ever seen. When you heard that Death Eaters had made their way into this sanctuary, the supposedly safest place in all Britain. You were a junior teacher, and nobody cared to inform you much. You did not mind. This information was much more than you had wanted. Because it made you feel that nothing was safe anymore.
So it shouldn't have come as a surprise when they took you. When they bound you and tortured you till you fainted, and then hung you upside down for the entertainment of cold-blooded men and women. But what came as the biggest shock was seeing your colleague, whom you had respected, even loved, sitting below you, staring at you with feelingless black eyes. It was then, as you begged and sobbed for help, clinging to your last hope, that it left you — the little white bird that had promised to stay with humanity when Pandora's curious fingers paved the way for all evils to spread into the world, and it should have been evident to you then that your life, too, would forsake you soon. For what good was a person who had lost all hope? You were alone, forever unaided in your attempts in life.
You should have known it was a hopeless endeavor when you heard yourself cry and the others laugh.
You should have known it was a hopeless endeavor when you saw him raise his wand.
You should have known it was a hopeless endeavor when you saw death rush at you in a flash of green.
What, after all, was there to hope for in the first place?