Nobody Ever Notices the Small Changes
Some weeks passed, very much like all the weeks before them. Classes continued as normal, and it seemed as if the school had forgotten all about the incident that one fateful night. It was a bit odd that no one ever asked about Mariet-- The Sneak. Then again, did it really matter? As far as Cho was concerned, life had returned to normal- a bit emptier, perhaps, but normal. She was no longer part of the DA, as that little phase of her life was over, but she found comfort in its absence. Things had changed, and Cho among them.
It had been quite some time since she had gotten a good night's sleep, had worn makeup, had cared about her appearance; it had been a long time, a bit too long, really, since Cho had cared about anything at all. The emptiness was, of course, just a side effect of the death of Cedric, of the unresolved feelings, of the unanswered questions, of the unfulfilled possibilities. And yet, ever since the duel with The Sneak, those feelings had begun to fade away, like stones worn smooth by a stream over time. Cedric had been someone in her life once, but he was gone now, and Cho had no excuse to be a vessel for misery anymore. She began to see, for the first time in months, just how much she had let herself waste away.
It wasn't until one morning, several weeks- or was it months- later when Cho looked in the mirror that she began to realize this. It was not so much a look as it was a realization of the passage of time and its associated hardships. The girl in the mirror looked haunted; there were ghosts where her eyes once sparkled with light; there were deep shadows in the hollows of her cheeks, of her eyes, that appeared to dance in the low light of the room. Her hair, formerly smooth and lustrous, appeared to glow eerily in the light of the sun as it filtered through the curtains, as if it possessed a bioluminescence of its own, and Cho grimaced in spite of herself.
She had been awake for hours now, unable to sleep when it was so dreadfully cold here, the kind of cold that even a roaring fire shied away from. She felt a tightening in her throat, a sure signal that tears were soon to come, and swallowed quickly in a futile attempt to bite back them back. When had this happened? She'd known it was bad, that she hadn't weathered the news well, but she had never envisioned this. When had the monsters invaded her body? This girl in the mirror couldn't be- wasn't- Cho. Cho was better than this- she was strong, she was beautiful, she was brilliant. She wasn't this wraith, this girl who looked more like the figment of a nightmare than a real person. A wry smile crossed her face, and when her lips parted, she half expected her teeth to have rotted out by now, judging by the looks of the rest of her body.
She wiped the tears from her face with her sleeve, silently vowing that she would never let this happen again. She would not cry. She would not fall. She would rise, and she would be triumphant over all the heretics who had lobbed metaphorical fruit at her from across the courtyard. She was Cho, and she would not be defeated by the nagging voices in her head. She was Cho, and she was back in business. Eyeliner pen in hand, she dried her eyes and slowly painted her eyelids with black, sealing a deal she hadn't even known she had made.
*
It was in the weak sunlight of an early dawn that Marietta returned to existence. It had been some time, she knew, since she was no longer enveloped by the light of the moon. Yet this was not a day worthy of a storybook opening; the cold bit through her thin robes like so many poisoned daggers, and the dreary grey of the sky bespoke to heartache more than anything else. A bird twittered in a tree across the way, the sudden noise enough to break whatever faint thoughts she had possessed in the previous moment, enough to bring her back to the searing pain from the remains of her forehead.
Marietta limped over to the lake, a bit dazed, more than a little unsure of what had happened. It was all she could do to maintain her balance, and even then it was only luck that prevented her from falling headfirst into the depths. It was agony just to stand, but she wanted something to ease the pain. She would have done just about anything to rid herself of it, but the intensity only seemed to increase. Surely it would have to stop at some point, but she wasn't sure she wanted to find out when that point would be, or what would happen if she reached it. As it was, thinking grew harder with every second that passed.
The trees that had so peacefully lined the shore before now loomed above her menacingly, like dark guardians who sought nothing more than to maim and kill. The sky was closing in on her, the grass and pebbles beneath her feet were turning to embers, and her legs were on fire, and she was burning, and-
A single thought broke through the cacophony of paranoia of a few heartbeats ago, a silent plea for help. She felt something warm begin to trickle into her eyes, and knew that soon her own blood would blind her if she did not act to stop it. It was in this brief moment of clarity that she managed to summon her wand from where it had lain on the ground a few feet away with a strained Accio, and it was in this moment that she more stumbled than twirled into a desperate Apparition with only the vaguest hope that it would take her far away from here. The uncomfortable squeezing sensation so common to such travel felt more like suffocation from the smoke of the flames that had licked at her feet, but through some unspoken promise, through some unknown benevolence, she closed her eyes into blissful black and faded into nothingness as her body disappeared with a wink from the bloody shore by the lake. With no one any the wiser but the forgotten bird in the tree, it was as if Marietta had ceased to exist at Hogwarts, and as the bird flew off, so too did any remaining hope that some force would make things right again.