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Willow never really got to be a girl. She was always a weapon, a saint, a sacrifice━something ready to be sent off to war beside her brother should the person who robbed her of her childhood to begin with returned. She was a lamb to slaughter, a knife in an armory, a notch in someone's belt, but never a girl. She was a god, a saint, the patreon saint of the women who died for their daughters━for the daughters who outlived their mothers━and something to be worshipped at an altar, adorned with sacrifices and prayers and hopes, gifts and donations, full of half-truths and bitter lies underneath a guise of protection.
But there has always been this carnal desire to have what she never got. Love, lust, pride, happiness. She wants more than she can swallow and bites off more than she can chew. It's a byproduct of being treated like a dog for most of her life, and a god for the rest of it. She's greedy, she's hungry, she's a girl and not all the same. It's a greed that many have but never fully understand. (Her brother won't, but he loves her no matter what; Harry's good like that, because he knows how to see beneath the surface.)
She is especially not a girl now, more of a pariah, and not a paragon of strength. She runs and hides and tries to find a way to win a war that will never end. Hope is as much as she can have right now, but even she knows it's fruitless; you cannot win the wars that were never able to be won to begin with.
Willow is not brave, but she is cutting. She's always been more Slytherin than Gryffindor, a girl adorned in red and gold with blood that bled green and silver. Her tongue is silver and lies spin like gold from her lips because she's always been good at pretending, and despite all that she stands for, sometimes she wonders if she's nothing better than the man who tried to kill her. Harry has him in his head, in his heart, but Willow feels him embedded somewhere in her soul. Voldemort may not have died and had a piece of his soul intertwined with Harry's, but he found a way to slither himself into Willow as well, even despite having no mark on her.
(She sat screaming in the next room over because the prophecy spoke of a boy born at the end of July, not a set of twins. Maybe if she and Harry had shared a crib, she would have been able to protect him better, or maybe she would have died instead of their mother. She'd never truly get to know what a mother's touch felt like.)
Voldemort sees himself as God to Willow and Harry's sainthood. He wants the riches and the power and the glory, but he doesn't want to work to get himself to being worshipped; Harry and Willow are still revered as gods, though, and maybe that's what sends the final nail in the coffin.
