There are so many choices that I've made in my life that I regret. The only thing about regrets is that they cannot change the past. The scars I hold and those that I've inflicted upon others will never fade, no matter how much I cry and pray for them too.
Yet, I cannot keep myself from wondering how things could have been, it is, after all, only human nature. Where would I be if I had dealt with just one or two problems differently than I did?
The past week I have been answered by my dreams in the dark hours of the night, and I wake up aching with the realization of reality. The seconds I now live for are the sparse few in which I do not yet remember the way things are, but am still immersed in the way they should be.
My relatively short life has been filled with foolish actions. Several of them stand out more than others, of course. The evil and perverted memory of a boy who was destined to become the most feared wizard in history, nearly destroyed my soul, if there even is such a thing. Tom Riddle. Shadows of blood underneath my fingernails continue to haunt me sometimes. As raw as fresh scratches coated with droplets of ruby red blood, his marks are still inside me.
And sometimes I wake up wishing for him again. Wishing to confide in him, without the fear of being judged. Wishing for him to come and take my pain away as he did so easily when I was 11.
I am a fool; I never said I wasn't.
But even so, the one thing I regret, above even Tom, was easily the stupidest thing I have ever had the misfortune of doing.
My name is Virginia Amelie Weasley. I am sixteen years old. I am soon to start my sixth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I am a werewolf.
At the end of my first year, Tom left me as a pitiful shell of what I once was. I honestly believed I was nothing, nothing worth saving, nothing worth killing, nothing worth time. Now, with four more years of mistakes and barely passing through life, I realize my error. Back then I was something. It is now, and only now, that dropped down to the level of absolute nothingness.
Wait. I'm wrong again, no big surprise. Now I am not nothing. Now I am a monster. An evil creature that deserves nothing less than death. Nothingness would be almost preferable to the monster I am now. Because now I am a disgrace to everyone I hold dear.
Of course, they'd deny it. They, of course, fully support me. Yet that is not what their eyes tell me when they look upon what I am now. The mixture of pity and fear gnaws at me relentlessly like a thousand gnats to the point where I can barely stand to meet their eyes. My family. My teachers. Harry. Hermione.
Oddly enough, though, they don't push it. They leave me to myself. Maybe they think I will just disappear if they leave me alone. Maybe they see my decent into the darkness that now defines my life and feel no need to stop it. Of course, it matters very little to me either way.
What matters is the one person who can still meet my eyes, and insists upon doing just that. Remus Lupin. He will not leave me alone. He comes by every single day, like clockwork, ever since I cried myself to sleep beside him that terrible day in the hospital wing. I have long since left there, and now confine myself and my activities to a private room in Gryffindor Tower.
Random visitors still enter, usually leaving quickly at the confrontation of the stony silence I have enforced that I refuse to break. But he does not follow by the rules I have established, even if they are only in my mind. Three times a day he brings in my meals. He sits with me until I finish, making sure I eat every last crumb. We don't talk, it would break my imposed muteness. He is, simply, just there.
Soon, he will come, bringing the dinner that I will eat, even if I no longer appreciate the flavours. He will sit across from me and look into my eyes, searching, always searching, for something within their depths. I have no idea what he looks for when he does this, nor do I know if he has even the smallest chance of finding it in me.
Ginny Weasley closed the small coil bound book, setting her plain quill beside it. It had surprised her, when she had begun yet again to express her thoughts with the written word. Bu, only with the brush strokes of familiar letters could she seem to articulate the conflicting emotions warring within her psyche.
Ginny refused to even glance upwards from the cover of her diary as the door to her room creaked open, she already knew who it would be. Remus Lupin, for his part, silently set the tray of food upon the small table, sitting across from it. Ginny rose slowly and joined him, used to the routine her life had taken by now. She began eating in silence, once again a now mundane part of her existence. Her pace was casual, she was in no hurry, nowhere to go, no one to meet.
"You know," Remus told her softly, his voice reaching the jaded young woman easily, "you cannot stay locked in this room forever." The sound of his voice startled the redhead, causing her to jump lightly, the noise not often heard to her lately. Ginny turned her gaze to him sharply.
"And why not?" she asked him in return, her voice hoarse from misuse, "What is out there that I need, or want?"
"Your family is worried about you, Ginny," Remus replied, his voice sharpening slightly with rising ire, "and I think it is do time that you learn that what you want is not what makes the world turn. And that is what you need to understand, the world is still turning, whether you want it to, or not."
"If the world will keep turning no matter what I do, what does it matter if I stay here forever?" Ginny shot back to her fellow werewolf. "What does it matter to you what I do anyway?"
Remus sighed in frustration as he looked upon the girl who had gone so adrift in such a short amount of time. She looked so lost. He was trying desperately to control his anger; she was still dealing, after all.
"It matters because I want you to have chances that I never had. I want to be able to help you go through what I had to go through alone. I don't want to see you destroy yourself because you're to immersed in self-pity to see that you are not alone!" Remus was breathing heavily by the end of his short rant, having just spilled many of his most carefully guarded emotions to an unstable, teenage werewolf.
Feeling he had contributed enough for the night, Remus Lupin rose silently from the small table in the lonely room and walked out the door to the outside world. Ginny Weasley, for her own role, sat perfectly still, and for the first time since the accident that changed her life forever, actually considered following him.
