"'NO!' shrieked Hermione, and with a deafening blast from her wand, Fenrir Greyback was thrown backward from the feebly stirring body of Lavender Brown."
It seemed unfair that the last thing she should hear was Hermione's voice.
Maybe it was petty to focus on that, when she was currently a patchwork quilt of bruises and cuts and hemorrhaging blood from her jugular. But still, the irony of being saved by her was more than a little annoying, and it wasn't like she had anything else to think about. She wasn't exactly going to spring to her feet and keep fighting, was she?
Her last year of Hogwarts, holding down the fort while the Golden Trio went off to fight You-Know-Who, had been a strange one to say the least. There was an unspoken agreement that everyone who opposed the dark lord's increasing invasion of their school was just stalling, maintaining stability until the real heroes could come back and vanquish evil once and for all. They were just killing time until then.
In other words, they were cannon fodder.
But at the same time it had been the most empowering experience of her life—and no one would ever know about it. She had been tortured, beaten, and forced into hiding in order to protect her fellow students, and she had helped Ginny and Neville organize revolts, rebellions, and communications with the outside world. She didn't have much to offer, but she offered it all the same, and did good and worthwhile things that had nothing to do with being beautiful or even special. She was just herself.
Maybe she was disposable. Even her life was expendable, she was quickly—and painfully—learning. No sunset rides for her, no The One, no grand victory party with champagne and confetti. It was a pretty shitty destiny, all things considered. If a book had ended this way, she would've been very unsatisfied.
But "disposable" wasn't the same thing as "worthless."
And Lavender Brown, it turned out, was worth quite a lot.