Secrets and Masks

11. Lion cub

10th January

"Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times," Dumbledore had once said. "If one only remembers to turn on the light."

Hermione had replayed that speech a thousand times over since the start of the war.

In the beginning, she'd used it as a focal point. The phrase had grounded her. Pulled her from the dark direction her thoughts usually took, and gave her strength. She used it to drag herself through battles, to remind herself that the Order could win this war, that there was light at the end of the tunnel, they just needed to hang on and stay strong.

She'd repeated the phrase when she'd narrowly avoided green curses as shed dragged Charlotte Sheldons corpse through a burning building, when Jason Aldo had died in her arms two years into the war, and each time they burned the body of another fallen soldier.

It was a phrase that Hermione knew well, but even she had to admit that Dumbledore couldn't have envisioned the way things would turn out. She wondered if he would still be as cheerily optimistic about the future if he could have seen how the bodies would pile high in the streets. If he knew how many children would die in the first year. Or how many of his beloved students would turn their backs on one another and murder their friends on the battlefield.

The world had become a much more sinister place since he'd made that speech. There wasn't a lantern strong enough to banish the kind of darkness that had eclipsed the world since his death. Some places weren't meant to shine anymore. The world was tainted now. All the light had been snuffed out, and left nothing but an endless sea of emptiness in its place.

Hermione had found she'd lost the meaning of the phrase over the years. As the war dragged on and the corpses piled higher, shed found it harder and harder to rationalise the words, but now, as she stared out the window and watched Astoria and Blaise wander the gardens together, hand in hand with smiles on their faces, she found herself reminded of them.

Despite everything, despite the war and decay and the state of the world, they had found one another.

Hermione had never believed in soulmates. Always thought the notion of one person being perfectly matched to another was ridiculous - and quite frankly childish. The idea that two souls who were so undeniably suited would somehow eventually find one another - even in the most ridiculous and outlandish of circumstances - had always seemed absurd, even comical...

Maybe it was because the logical part of her brain always relied on evidence and facts to prove a hypothesis, or maybe the war had just made her cynical. Whatever the reason for her stubbornness, she'd never once deterred from her believes on the matter. Not when she'd watched Harry and Ginny take their vows. Not when Luna and Neville had had their first child. Or even when Ron had protested his innocence, and declared it wasn't his fault that hed fallen for Romilda, they were just simply meant to be.

No matter how heart-warming those moments had been, Hermione still didn't believe in soulmates. Those couples were clearly suited for one another, they loved each other deeply and would die to protect their significant other, but were they destined to be together?

No, not to Hermione's way of thinking.

She thought her beliefs on soulmates was immovable, unchangeable - until she saw the way Zabini and Astoria were together.

Their devotion to each other was like nothing Hermione had ever seen. They didn't merely just love one another, that didn't even begin to scratch the surface of how they felt, it almost seemed insulting to refer to them that way. It was as if their significant other was the centre of their entire universe. If Astoria was Zabini's heart, then he was her blood. Both vital to one's survival, but unable to exist without the other. They needed one another.