ficlet, n. a fanfiction of the length roughly 100-2500 words. longer than a drabble (100 words), but still short.
A series of ficlets based on one-word prompts, to get into the habit of writing more. Tags added as time goes on, eventual warnings will be added in the notes to each chapter. The goal is one chapter a week, but don't hold me to that. (Also, please excuse any americanisms; I am not british, so please either point it out or ignore it. If pointed out i'll do my best to correct it.) Crossposted to AO3.
viridity, n. naive innocence
Minerva can't stop staring, or feeling a painful burning in her chest.
As the doors of the Great Hall open and the first years walk in, looking around the room and clinging together in a mixture of fear and amazement, she can't help but mirror their emotions. Her heartstrings pull bitterly as the last few straggle in, and one little girl in the front points at the enchanted ceiling with a smile.
They're so small.
Of course they're small, they're eleven years old, just like the first years always are. She knows this, of course she does, she's spent the last decades of her life teaching them, and until this year showing them in to the Hall.
But they stand there- here, they stand here, in the middle of the Great Hall, in the same place the dead were placed out on the floor just months ago, in the same room where the monster who had murdered countless innocents had fallen to the floor in a boneless heap, in the same school where entire corridors had been blown apart and made unnavigable, and they're so small and unaware of where they are, of who they are. Some, she knows, know exactly where they are - too many; a single child knowing of the horrors that took place where they stand is a child too many, and yet, so shortly after the Battle, it is inevitable. Either they have lost someone, or someone they know have lost someone, or someone they know was here, here on that day when over 50 people died in a school.
Minerva stands up and clears her throat, a silence falls through the Great Hall, and as the girl in the front of the crowd of first years pulls down her hand to pay attention, she vows to never let that happen in her school again.