I WILL be finishing the Christmas challenge, it just may take me an extra week or four. My mind has been wandering in other directions...any way to extend the holidays and put off my silly final papers!
Lavender cries when she realizes she is no longer innocent enough to touch a unicorn, and Charlie can do nothing to comfort her.
She asked him to bring her back here, to the Forbidden Forest, and he thinks she meant to say goodbye. They're leaving for Greece tomorrow morning (Lavender's had quite enough of the rain and rebuilding; she's given enough of herself to this and she's tired of it all) and though neither of them says it, they both know they will be married when next they step on British soil (she's eighteen years old, he's twenty-six, her mother would be in fits if she had lived through the war), with all that entails. She came to say goodbye to something she must leave behind. She came to say goodbye to the unicorns.
They will not come near her. They shy nervously, backing away from her hand. Gleaming white in the light from the full moon, they nicker anxiously and turn bright, innocent eyes on this girl in confusion, for they know her but she is wrong. She is not like the other girls who turn away from them, the girls who grow up and trade their innocence for something new and just as precious; she is tainted. Though her infection is not deep enough for the moon to change her, there is a wolf that prowls in her shadow, there are scars marring her skin, and she is no longer a friend to them.
They run from the clearing, back into the ever-darkening wood.
She cries on Charlie's shoulder, there in the clearing of the Forbidden Forest, mourning the unicorns, mourning that innocence that was ripped from her, the goodbye taken from her hands. He can feel the raised scars down her back, even through her shirt, and he is furious that he can do nothing except whisper in her ear that unicorns are stupid and his dragons are much better, he'll show her.
When they go to leave, Lavender's small, scarred hand tucked into his larger one, she manages to smile through the tears still sluicing down her face. "Stuff the unicorns," she manages, using her free hand to swipe at the last of her tears. "Show me dragons, Charlie."