This is all Rurouni Star's fault. She had to go and write this bloody story, Lost and Found, and of course she had to make it so brilliant that my poor, befuddled brain had to write something to perhaps please her and the fanfiction gods. I came out with this. Heaven help us all.

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Sanctorium
Chapter One
In Which It Begins

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She was empty.

She thought, slowly, as she stood at the window with her feet curled into the soft-and-furry slippers that she'd got for her fourteenth birthday, that she couldn't remember when it had started. It was an odd thing to think, twenty-one-years-and-two-months later -- or was it twenty-and-three? -- but there it was, and she could no more escape it than she could escape the wandering feeling of decrepit that crept up her spine in the witching hours before dawn.

Was it so wrong to blame herself?

She didn't know.

It was the anniversary. Nothing was out there, on the sopping streets of the village. It was a storm, a thunderstorm, loud enough to raise the dead. Her fingers brushed over the glass windowpanes, feeling the cold sink through the window and through her bones. She stood with her hand to the window and her other hand wrapped around a coffee mug, gazing with glazed eyes at the improbability of the village streets, soaked through, little patters of raindrops beating on the asphalt of the perfect twirling streets of her village.

The house had been small and a bargain, just on the edge of a hill on the end of the town. It was made out of stone and was really just a cottage, and she paid for it in full on the first day and cleaned her house with the last of her energy. She had gone to the one place that they would not turn over to find her. Little Hangleton was quiet enough. It suited her needs. And she cleaned for the rich people that groomed themselves with perfume and stayed in huge mansions all to themselves, scrubbing floors and cleaning dishes, exhausted herself, and slept like the dead at night. This was what she had wanted.

But as always...

Be careful what you wish for?

Come to me, said a voice, just beyond the windowpanes of her bedroom, Come to me.

"Leave me alone," she said, and went to make herself some porridge.

The door was sticky as she pulled it open. She would have to fix that. Her fingers went through her hair -- her hair, the long tangled and red thing that wouldn't fix itself no matter how hard she tried to make it -- and she poured the milk, absently and shakily. Her kitchen was quiet and small and wooden. There were plants everywhere. She was covered in a thin yellow light that poured in through the kitchen window and bathed her in doubt.

This is you, pouring your milk. This you, stirring the spoon in the bowl. This you, trying not to die. This is you, pretending not to cry into your porridge.

"Pathetic," she murmured into her spoon. "You're pathetic."

Cooking was still one more thing that she did for the familiarity, if nothing else. She was terrible at it and she knew, but it was something to do in the morning when the only thought in her head was that she'd looked so much like her mother when she'd peered at herself in the mirror. Half-eaten porridge that couldn't go down her throat was no exception.

But it wasn't so bad.

She swiped at her face with the sleeve of her maid's uniform, the black fabric chafing at her wrists, and shivered in the early morning light, avoiding locking a gaze with the calendar that hung from the eaves of her kitchen ceiling along with the occasional herb and vegetable. Her employers would be angry if she was late.

Monotony had become routine. She hadn't ventured into her attic for two years. She hadn't ran from the rats in the pet shop window that she walked by to get to her destination. Her routine hadn't changed. She hadn't changed. She'd changed all she could to get as far as her soul would let her.

Her eyes strayed to the calendar anyway.

It was -- it had been -- June.

She could still remember it like a half-forgotten dream; it was the feeling of her socks entrenched in mud. It was the feeling of falling and sobbing into the bitter tasting ground that was soaked with the blood of the corpses littered around her mud-soaked feet. It was the feeling of screaming after him not to leave her, and the feeling of someone's long-and-bony fingers feeling her forehead in vain.

She'd awoken to find the war won.

She still wondered when she'd died.

Had it been when she'd stumbled through the June rain that washed the blood from her skinned knees to find Hermione sobbing into Neville's shoulder -- Neville, who's forehead was painted with the ghost of a scar -- and Remus Lupin standing solitary and pale and white, human and not human, staring down at the visage of --

-- Of --

No.

She got up after a minute, and dropped her dishes into the sink with a loud crack. "You're making it harder for yourself," she murmured.

She'd told Lupin, on the day that she'd left her mother's house. She'd told him that it would take too much time for them all to mourn. That she knew Hermione wouldn't be back for a while. That she won't be herself again. She'd told him that, and knew that she had been talking about herself. And Lupin had rubbed her shoulders in the way only he could, and Remus had told her that she had done enough. That she should go and live. Go and live, he'd said. I'm fine here.

Oh, but I'm not.

There was a loud tap from behind her back. It didn't surprise her -- she had long since stopped to be surprised -- but she tampered over to the window, where a bedraggled and soaking owl hooted annoyingly at her in the light June rain. "Thank you," she said, and gave the indignant bird its change. "...Would you like something too...? ...This weather..."

The owl ruffled its light brown feathers and gave her a look that made her giggle with strained nerves. It pecked her finger gently and approvingly -- public owls were not nearly as nice as this usually -- and dropped its load on her table, narrowly missing her vase filled with wilted daisies. It hooted once, and left, flapping itself further into the red-gold sun that was hidden by rows of dark gray clouds. She watched it go.

"...Lord knows..." Her fingers tried to smooth her sleeves absently. "...I tried, really."

Twenty years.

What was that? A number. It meant nothing.

"She will be dead, soon."

She. Will. Be. Dead. Soon.

She stared at the mail on her kitchen table, her hands sifting through the paper in the strange and piercing yellowish light that could only come from the middle of a thunderstorm. Her hands found The Prophet, and she shifted onto a wooden chair. She didn't know why she bothered anymore. She didn't need it. She didn't want it. But if only. If only, my fair lady. If only to... hear. Something. If she could understand what she was looking for -- if she could explain to herself what she was looking for…

Her breath hitched. "Looking for their names, are we?"

Pull apart the sheets. Don't stare at the headline, don't, it'll make things worse. Look only at the back, with the coupons and the gifts and the Christmas-in-July headings when it's only June, and you know it too well. Don't stare at the three W's. Don't stare at the pictures of the castle on the fifth page from the back.

She'd waited. She'd thrown her textbooks in her attic and sat primly at the same desk for a year, trying to forget; and when it had all come crashing down, she hadn't complained, and she hadn't cried when she'd left. So now she was left here, surrounded by a thunder storm in the middle of her house in the middle of nowhere, staring at a newspaper with so-many-memories. She didn't want to remember. She didn't have to.

Did you think it could be over so quickly, love?

"Damn," she finally ground out, and threw the sheets out the window, and waited for the satisfying ripping noise, that came only to be accompanied by a rare sort of breaking apart in her chest that knocked on the doors of where-were-you. "Damn you."

After twenty years, when things were supposed to be going right, when she was supposed to be satisfied and settled down with not a thought about death in her head, when things were supposed to be doing wonderfully and she was happy. But she was. Not. Happy.

"Neville, where are they? Neville -- Hermione -- Hermione -- Hermione -- this wasn't supposed to happen, Hermione, this wasn't supposed to happen -- they're dead, dead, dead, dead. I'm going to die too, Neville. I'm going to die too --"

Oh. The letter. On the table.

It was written in bold emerald green ink on crinkled yellow parchment, and she stared at it in the half-hour before dawn. She stared at it in the yellowed light of a thunder storm, her hands reaching toward it and stumbling, and her mind faltered. She panicked, but it picked up bits and pieces. "…Got the letter … so proud…"

Oh. Oh. Oh.

And as she grabbed it with a ferocity that she didn't know she even had anymore and opened it, her shaking fingers lingering slightly over the looping handwriting, she knew that it was the end of the beginning, and that she was being thrown into the middle.

"Oh."

She collapsed into her wooden kitchen chair with the letter in her hand, on the anniversary of the beginning's beginning, and smiled.