She remembers when she used to read, about how they cut the middle fingers of Muggle archers off and taunt them with a raised middle finger. She isn't sure when she started thinking of them as Muggles instead of people, but she thought perhaps she was to become one of them again.
She knows what the archers felt like, now.
It's quiet, now, and he touches her cheek and she pretends she doesn't want to bite his fingers out of jealousy. That she doesn't want to shout and scream until she cries that he's so ungrateful, that he doesn't see what he has and what she never will again. He whispers that she's wonderful and brilliant and can do anything, really, there's no difference.
He never did know how to see, and he has never lied well.
She can't read, now, but she won't let them take her books away. He offers, sometimes, saying he'll put them away until she's ready to look again. He's already hidden her wand somewhere. But she likes them to be where she can see, where she can hurt and remind herself that she should be grateful she didn't die.
But she's not grateful, for that would have been easier.
When she dreams it's of exams and parchment and spells, feeling a quill between her fingers but when she looks down the quill's held by ghosts, and it drops and she'll wake up sweating. He reaches out to hold her on those days, and she lies there wishing he wouldn't.
She takes his hand and her thumb is an inch shorter than his.
She thinks perhaps she'll cry, now, but he clutches her hand and she wishes she could feel it with more than ghost fingertips, because they ache and she cries anyway.
She never fired an arrow, not even before she came into this world. And now she never will, and that thought hurts more than anything she actually lost.