"Old Ghosts"
by Christine Anderson
aka Lilly Malfoy

She doesn't speak of them much, or even think of them very often these days, but there are times when the ghosts of her childhood come back to her.

She remembers the fear and suspicion with which they had looked at her all through her youth, and the way that suspicion had turned to certainty with the arrival of her Hogwarts letter. Their suspicions had been confirmed, then. She was different and strange as she had always been, but the day the letter came, they learned just how much of a misfit Penelope truly was.

The echoes of "witch" had followed her for so many years, in wake of the strange power she seemed to have, to make unusual things happen, in wake of the things she insisted she had seen, which none of her relatives ever could. They had never been whispers, these accusations they had made; they had never bothered to whisper. They had wanted her to know exactly what they thought of her, exactly where she fit.

She remembers her mother's prayers and the blows that had fallen upon her, blows struck by her own kin, now and again, but more often by the priests her mother dragged her before. They had meant, they said, to drive the devil from her, to lift the curse she was held under.

They had not understood, or had not wanted to understand, that the magic was a part of her, that it was in a sense who she was. She could no more set it aside than she could cut off her right arm. In her youth that had seemed to be the only thing that might have made them happy, but in the end she did not know if even that would have been enough. She would still be, with or without her magic, strange Penny who saw perhaps too clearly and spoke too much of truth, outcast child of parents who had wanted something quite different for their first offspring.

Since Penelope came of age she has seen her family only rarely, and she knows that it is best this way. She doesn't need them, and they don't want her; their lives are worlds apart now, and likely to stay that way. She is far, far better off without them- she knows that.

And yet, sometimes... Sometimes she wants them to understand, to truly understand, what they have done, and that it is wrong. She wants them to understand that they should have loved her and protected her and cared for her, instead of being indifferent to her at best, abusive at worst. She wants them to be sorry, to beg for her forgiveness.

She's not sure she has it within her to grant it.

She wants, sometimes, too, for them to need her or those like her- for them to need her and those like her, witches and wizards, Aurors and others who are her family now. She would like them to need her help desperately, and have to come crawling to beg her for it. She'd like them to know that they are not in any way deserving of her help- and to grant it anyway, if the need is desperate enough.

She'd like them to make some attempt at amends, though the wound is so deep and was made so long ago that there can be no healing of it now. She would like to hear them plead with her to come back to them- and to answer their pleas with silence.

She'd like them to reach for her, the way that she had once reached for them- and she would like to turn away, to deny them as they had denied her all those years ago.

She will save them from the darkness of her world, if it comes to that, as she would save anyone. But she, who has been a stranger to them all the days of her life, will never go back to them.

And she wants them to know that. She wants them to want her back, and to know that she is lost to them. And that they have only themselves to blame.