Prompts: Bright, shadow, meticulous
)O(
Lucius suspected that Alice Longbottom saw him as something of a project. He was fixable, and it was her intention – so he thought – to drag him out of the shadowed recesses where he hid from morality and transform him into a glowing example of human goodness.
She was bright and shining and full of joie de vivre even in these most miserable of times. That was not to say that she was an optimistic creature, no – Alice was pragmatic, realistic, not overly given to idealism. But as many times as she came face-to-face with wizards far darker than Lucius, and acts far more sinister than any he could ever have imagined himself committing, she maintained a philosophy espousing the innate goodness of humanity. Certainly it was true that many a wizard did not act in manners that suggested any sort of goodness, but Alice maintained, no matter how many times she encountered evil, that it was the exception, not the rule, and, moreover, that proper attention and meticulous care could exorcise it from a person's soul.
Her firmness on this matter was slightly amusing, slightly tragic, for though Alice was very well-acquainted with evil, she had never been as close to it as Lucius had, never called someone who was taken by darkness a friend, never felt stirrings of it within herself. Lucius did not try to dissuade her from her philosophy, but neither did he give himself over to her ideas about treatment, for he knew better than to suspect that she held some miraculous cure for troublesome ethics.
)O(
Fin