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notes sorry for the late update, i had the worst week, but i'm back now!! i was sick and then i had an allergy (and my body really didn't like that). also my sleep needs work but like that's not new 💀

this goes into like, heavy grieving and there's mentions of blood, hospitals, and vomit! so pls pls stay safe and take care of urself <3

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Eonni = elder sister in Korean

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"Dad!" is the last word Rosalie screams, panic overtaking her — why, why, why did she do it; she should've found another way to save them all — before she and Hana are thrust outside by the sheer force of the explosion, settled into the ground.

As Rosalie coughs, hands gripping the ground, her childhood home is fully engulfed in the beast she summoned, burning brighter than the sun. Gripping her wand, she murmurs words, her wand pointed to the beast taking over her whole house. It snakes back into her wand, everything burnt and damaged.

Collapsing onto the floor, Rosalie lets out an ear-piercing scream at the ruins in front of her. Blood mixes with tears, dripping into the pavement. She killed him, she killed him, she killed him, she killed him —

The more she lives, the more monstrous she becomes.

"It is better this way," Hana reassures, kneading her hands with Rosalie's hair, but even she's struggling to hold her sobs. "If you had not cast that spell, we would not be alive."

"But every — everything is gone," Rosalie sobs, lifting her head to see the burnt, singed building that once housed her happiest memories (running, screaming happily, being tucked into bed at night, being kissed on the forehead, measuring heights on that blue wall). Thomas and Delilah are forever charred and dead; she'd trade everything just to have her family whole again. "It's all gone ..."

"I know, my dear." Hana kisses the top of Rosalie's head, wiping her tears with a swipe of her thumb. "But we need to go."

"Where?" Rosalie asks desperately, clutching her bleeding shoulder, but her hollowed heart numbs any physical pain. "They're dead and I killed them and —"

"It was not your fault," Hana says with finality, but that doesn't stop Rosalie's muttering to herself. Her mother's voice doesn't waver, but her eyes are hollower than what Delilah's blue ones became.

Bile rises in her burning throat. Rosalie throws up in the street, Hana gently pulling her hair up, rubbing Rosalie's back.

If Rosalie was more careful, if she'd known that Death Eater would come back, she could've saved her, and Delilah would've stared at the fire and cracked some stupid, dramatic joke that would make them laugh, and —

Rosalie lets out another loud sob. The neighbours are out, and today was the perfect day for a Death Eater ambush, but she was too careless to notice. To want her family. To have them escape, run, be fucking alive.

"Why did you kill them?" Rosalie wants to shriek at the sky, at the universe, at fate, at history who seemingly chose her as its pupil, but couldn't even save the people she loved.

By now, her eyes are red-rimmed, blood has pooled on the floor with a mix of salted tears and ashes, and her hair is knotted and stuck to her cheeks. Hell, her family was supposed to be safe at Jia's.

Now, half of them are gone.

Hana lifts Rosalie up, her gentle touch still not calming her. "Rosalie, I'm here, not all is lost. We'll get through this."

"What did we do to deserve their hate?" Rosalie whispers, the grief numbing every part of her body. "Why did they kill —"

She chokes on a sob again, and collapses into a heap on the floor. Her shoulder throbs, but the all-consuming sea of loss drowns her. Rosalie can't find air; her mouth is closed and her lips refuse to pry open.

"We will go to a motel," Hana is saying to herself, voice sounding rough and chapped. Rosalie can barely hear her in her own grief. "I will phone your aunt, letting her know what happened." She pauses, before gasping. "I am an idiot, idiot — Rosalie, put pressure on that wound right now —"

Rosalie's eyes flutter. She sits up, and finally glances at her clothes, all drenched in blood. A sense of tiredness washes over her along with the stinging pain as she attempts to reach her shoulder. "Yeah, that's probably for the best —"

Her eyes flicker closed, and her body thumps to the pavement, red blood spilling from her arm.

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Rosalie floats in and out of consciousness. Voices float into her ear and out the other. All she hears is whispers of her name, almost like a prayer, a mantra. A wish for her to be alive, despite the fact that the entire world is against her.

History is against her. Fate is against her.

The lull of the blackness pulls her in. Rosalie struggles to stay afloat, reach out to the voice, and whisper an "I'm here." She can't find the muscles to force words open, nor could anyone do it for her. But something is on her face, something plasticky, as oxygen heads into her lungs, filling it with air.

"Please stay awake, please, please —" is a voice so familiar, but so far away. It reminds Rosalie of running across a large, open field, where a silhouette is at the end, reaching for her, begging for her to run towards her and not away —

But a void of pain washes over her, and she's forced into the blackness, before she's shoved back up, before being forced down again and back up again and —

She is nothing but ruins.

The blackness is what surrounds the remains of the barely-living girl with her bleeding shoulder and heart. Rosalie barely remembers the voices of doctors as they bandage her up, ask her questions, shine lights into her eyes.

"Did my mother call an ambulance?" is what she asks them, making sure to be quiet due to the room not being private. And after their hesitant responses, she continues with, "What happened?"

Her vision is blurry, as if Rosalie woke up from a dream. A terrible nightmare, she tells herself, where the entire world was against her and where she almost lost her life. Where others lost their existences because of her.

"Mum?" she asks, voice hoarse from the lack of using it. "Where's Dad? And Delilah?"

Hana cries on the spot.

"It was a dream, right?" Rosalie asks. The machine next to her beeps gently, and the throb of pain cuts into her heart. She lets out a shuddering gasp. "Dream. It was a dream. And I fell out of my bed. Delilah and Dad are —" The witch's voice cracks, her resolve fading. "They're getting donuts. And then you're going to chastise me for being stupid and —"

Rosalie catches Hana's look of despair.

"No." She shakes her head, the motion causing a spike of pain that she hides through a bit of her bottom, bruised lip. "They're not — I didn't — no!"

"Rosalie," Hana begins.

"They're not —" She swallows. "Mum, they're not — gone. They're alive. Not ..."

"Child, please," Rosalie's mother says softly, brushing a strand of hair off her daughter's face. "I am very sorry."

Rosalie's stomach sours. "I should've done something else, anything, Mum —"

Hana breathes in sharply. "I have played what happened over and over in my head, Rosalie. Had you not — had you not done what you did, we would all be dead."

"Don't say that word!" Rosalie hisses, trying to remain quiet. But in her panic, everything is blurred. The voice in her head is refusing, hell, she is refusing to believe.

They are her life.

Were, she tells herself. They were your life.

"Alright," Hana tells her daughter. "I will not. Please rest, Rosalie. Your health matters above all —"

"Fire," Rosalie interrupts, her voice raw, eyes widened. "I lit the fire that —"

"It is not your fault," Hana whispers, kissing the top of Rosalie's head. A patient next to Rosalie stares at the sign of affection, before turning around. "In fact, it is ours for ignoring your pleas to hide. We should have listened to you."

"No," Rosalie chokes out, her stomach tumbling. "They're not — it's not —"

"You know it is." Hana's eyes water. "You will be discharged within the next few days. Your aunt visited last night, but I told her we all need to hide."

The silence is nauseating. Delilah would always fill it with a dramatic quip, a funny little joke, even if she was far away. Rosalie lived miles away from her family for years, but with the comfort that she could return to them any time she wanted.

"When I meant hide," Rosalie mutters, just to stop her thoughts from breaking the sound of only beeping machines, "I meant leave. Like, leave for America. But I didn't —" She chokes on another sob mixed with the too much that she's feeling. "It doesn't matter anymore."

"America?" Hana asks, blinking. "That is where — that is where Jae is."

She says the last part softly, as if she's talking to herself, almost as if she's reliving her past just as Rosalie does on cold nights.

"My older brother," Hana clarifies for Rosalie. "Even though I call your aunt Eonni, Jae is only a year apart and would make me call him by his first name, no honorifics. We were close."

"Were?" Rosalie asks hesitantly, her brain begging for a distraction.

"He disapproved of Joon," Hana admits. "And when I told him what we went through, he refused to believe me, refused to help."

"That's terrible," Rosalie breathes. Her heart is clenched, the melancholy blending into something searing. "How could he?"

Hana shakes her head. "It is simply life. People move on."

"He shouldn't have," she tells her mother, voice soft. "It wasn't your fault — you didn't know what Joon would do —"

"My Jang-mi," Hana begins.

Rosalie inhales. "You haven't called me that in years."

"It is your name," her mother says lightly. "I should start calling you that more. It is your heritage. Even if Joon chose it for you, it is yours. Even if Jae left me to my own devices, I found my way. I had other help." She brushes Rosalie's hair off her face. "And you will too. Even if you hate the world now for ruining your life, you will find your way."

Everything hits her once more. Not like a car or a truck, but like a missile pressing into her heart in slow motion, every single never in her body fraying.

"Why did they have to leave?" Rosalie asks, her voice barely a whisper. Something builds in her stomach, like the day of the fire. The very word makes Rosalie's skin crawl. "Why were they taken from us?"

"I don't know," Hana says mournfully, expression almost guarded. She's putting up a shield, Rosalie knows, to let Rosalie grieve without the tears of her mother blending, but it's also shutting her out. It's a double-edged sword.

A sword that she very well ran her father through. Her sister, Rosalie's brain tells her, died before the explosion. As much as Rosalie hates herself for it, she feels better knowing that Delilah's passing wasn't entirely her fault. Then again, if Rosalie had been more careful, more observant, more anything —

"But even without them," Hana is saying, sounding a tired sort of gentle, "we will find our way. They are our heart, but we can rebuild back again. Do not replace them; find something new."

"New," Rosalie says, testing the word on her tongue, despite the fact that her heart is wasting away. "We could've had new if the Death Eaters didn't kill them —"

(And if she didn't kill them, because Rosalie might as well have said the Killing Curse herself, with her lack of observation —)

She starts laughing, a bitter laugh that seems to chill Hana. Rosalie is feeling too much, but too little. Every single detail of that night is flooding back, pulling away when Rosalie attempts to shut the details out of her mind.

"Ros — Jang-mi," Hana corrects herself. "Please don't go down this route —"

"I hate them," Rosalie whispers, voice coiled in spite as images of fire and blue eyes flash through her mind. "I hate them, I hate them, I hate them."

(I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, Rosalie's brain tells herself.)

"Jang-mi," Hana tries again.

"I hope he burned," Rosalie whispers, letting heat crackle on her skin, letting her guilt twist her sadness into rage. "I hope my face was the last thing he saw."

"Please, child," Hana interrupts, swallowing. Her eyes dart from Rosalie to the machine she's plugged into, and then back to her daughter, who's festering in her own fire. "Hate is poison. It consumes —"

"I hope that Death Eater's flesh seared off him and he died a painful, painful death." Rosalie continues to rant, feeling her boiling blood inside her. "If Dad died on impact, I hope he struggled for breath, before a beam crushed his body."

(She hopes he's just as crushed as she is, if not even more.)

Hana's eyes widen. "Jang-mi!"

For what he did, for what he hates, Rosalie hopes everyone like him will die, die, die, never to come back again. And she knows deep down, her mother wants the same. She's just been through the same thing with Joon, with Thomas, Rosalie, and Delilah to keep her grounded, away from such thoughts.

Rosalie does not have enough to hold her back.

"Sorry," Rosalie says, even though they both know she's not. In fact, she's only growing more angry. "He deserves it, though —"

The tubes strapped to Rosalie's skin begin to shake. She winces, and her mother's coarse touch calms her down, at least temporarily, even though her eyes are wide.

Rosalie means what she said.

"What the hell," a patient next to her whispers. "Did your tubes just —"

"No," Rosalie says quickly.

A snort sounds from next to her. "Uh huh."

Before Rosalie can defend herself, a doctor enters, saving her from answering.

"Visiting time is over," the doctor tells Rosalie's mother, who then gives a quick kiss to Rosalie's head. "Come back tomorrow."

"I will," Hana promises. "I love you."

"I love you too," Rosalie returns, letting a smile spread onto her face.

The moment Hana disappears with the doctor, she lets her smile drop. Rosalie slumps onto the bed, the only thing keeping her from destroying everything in the room being the burning hate she feels for that one Death Eater, his face burned in her mind.

I hope you died painfully, she tells him in her head. At least justice was served, even if all Rosalie feels is an aching pain all around her body, because all history and Fate has done for her is fuck her up.

Why? Rosalie thinks, staring at the white ceiling. She wipes a tear from the corner of her eye, feeling drained as her shoulder throbs. Why wasn't I the one who died?

Then they could be happy without the freak populating the house — no, Rosalie tells herself. She helped her family. The attack would've happened to matter what, because they don't give a shit about muggles, or people in general. Rosalie isn't even a defining factor.

And she needs to help more. Glancing at her bandaged arm, she thinks of Fenrir Greyback, wondering what it would be like to hurt him back. Staring at the blank wall in front of her, she thinks about all the families that he killed, all the families the group has destroyed for their mission of "removing filthy blood".

Rosalie and her family were dealt a bad hand in life, and they lived the consequences.

When she was young, Rosalie remembered Joon and his rare smiles, picking her up and kissing her head and telling her stories of the house she would one day own. Now, the house and his company are sold, and the money resides in Rosalie's inheritance. Now, Joon is in a grave, rotting because of what he became.

Rosalie wonders when Delilah and Thomas's funeral is. Their graves will be etched with the same as everyone else's, and then the world will forget them and keep spinning, as if losing a family is normal. As if this grief is normal.

As if Rosalie's supposed to move on, too.

She can't, not when Delilah wove flowers into her hair, not when Delilah cuddled with Rosalie during a thunderstorm, not when Delilah spun Rosalie around and played with makeup together. Not when Thomas told Rosalie that this family was his life, not when Thomas took Rosalie back in despite all she said, not when Thomas became the father Rosalie needed.

They were hers, she was theirs, and now neither is true, because they're gone.

Rosalie closes her eyes, letting the dreamless void of black take her in for a night. Tomorrow, she'll wake. Maybe in a few days, she'll bury the dead with her mother, if their bodies even remain. And after many tomorrows, she'll still sit at their grave, wondering, waiting, watching.

Their ghosts will sit with her forever.