1165 words by gdocs
mwah i havent written hp in so long here u go
It happens because Blaise doesn't want to go home. He doesn't know what's going to happen when he goes home — will his mother be upset at him fighting on the wrong side for most of the battle? Will she hate him because he's a coward? Will — and he thinks this option might be the worst — she be happy he at least fought on the bad side for most of the fight? Will she be upset he didn't do more to help the Death Eaters win?
Whichever option happens, it makes Blaise's stomach churn when he thinks of returning home, to the big house in the countryside. He had always prefered to stay away during the summer, anyway, and his mother never expressed her missing him. This is no difference.
Instead, Blaise stays. He stays at Hogwarts, and he helps clean up. There's a lot of construction that happened — pillars knocked down, statues destroyed, entire walls broken through. The magic makes reconstructing things easier, but it's still not an easy task. They have around fifty people who remained at Hogwarts — including Harry Potter and his friends, who Blaise does everything to avoid — and cleaning up is still slow going. They deal out tasks every morning, different parts of the school to work on, and at night they let people stay in the dorms.
It pains Blaise whenever he fixes something — was he the one who caused that thing to be broken? — but it's better than facing whatever the world has for him outside of Hogwarts. He's not ready to leave the safety of its walls, not just yet.
He's working on the third floor corridor today, the one where he was forbidden from going to in first year. It makes his heart hurt, to think of simpler times, when all he had to worry about was a three headed dog guarding a trapdoor. He moves a gargoyle with a Wingardium Leviosa and behind it there's a body. It's curled up, on its side, and it doesn't move as Blaise steps forward, moving towards it. His stomach lurches when he realizes that the body might be dead. It's one thing to think about death — he knows that some of his friends had died during the battle, Vincent, Theo — but it's another to actually see a dead body.
Blaise would sooner bite a hole through his tongue than admit it, but he's still young. He still has a certain innocence and naivety. He's already fought in a war. He's already seeing the aftermath through the destruction of Hogwarts.
He doesn't want this.
Brandishing his wand, he moves closer.
"Hello?" he calls to the body, his heart starting to beat fast. There's no answer. He could just walk away now, get someone else's help, but as much as he doesn't want it, there's a part of him that still wants to see it. It'd be awful to see a dead body, but for some reason he can't make himself back down.
Finally reaching the body, Blaise can see it's a girl, with a Hogwarts standard shirt and skirt and blonde, shoulder length hair, covered in dust. With his wand, he pokes the back of the girl. He fully expects the girl to be dead, so he's all the more surprised when she leaps up, brandishing a wand of her own and sticking it under his nose.
Crossing his eyes slightly so he can keep an eye on the wand, he lifts his hands up in a, please-don't-curse-me-to-death-I-may-have-been-in-Slytherin-but-I'm-one-of-the-good-guys-now gesture. He doesn't think his thoughts get through to her, but he sees that, underneath the dust, her house tie is yellow and black. A Hufflepuff. It makes him relax a little — no Hufflepuff would actually curse him.
"I'm going to curse you," the girl says, her voice even and a hint of steel in her eyes. "Your nose will be blown off your body unless you say what you're doing here."
"Um," Blaise says, tensing back up again. Maybe he shouldn't judge based on houses. "I'm Blaise," he says dumbly. He wants to back up, but he also likes having his nose on his face and he's not very eager to get it cursed off.
"Cute name," she deadpans, quirking an eyebrow. She tries to maintain her glare, but with his crossed eyes, Blaise can see her wand hand tremble. Tiredness, maybe. Or fear. Either way, it's a weakness. He can exploit it and get them to switch their positions.
"Thanks, my mom gave it to me," Blaise says, clenching his jaw and gripping his wand. He's fully preparing to knock her wand out of her hand and curse her instead.
And then he realizes that he doesn't want to do that at all.
It'd be so easy to fight her, but Blaise is done fighting. He's so done. He tried to change during the battle, once he realized that the world won't be any better with Voldemort leading. Maybe he should've changed before, but the point is that he tried. If he goes fighting this girl, doesn't that make him just as bad as before?
"I'm helping to clean up Hogwarts," he says, after a couple of moments have passed. Maybe it's something in his voice, or his expression, but the girl lowers her wand.
"Sorry," she breathes out, so soft that Blaise almost doesn't hear it. "I'm just tense. The whole —" She waves a hand and Blaise nods.
There an expression of exhaustion on her face. Not the kind that just makes someone tired, but the kind that touches someone's bones. Blaise gets that. He wonders if he has the same expression on his face — he can certainly relate.
She doesn't look older than him, and Blaise thinks he's seen her around — she's probably in his year, or at most a year younger. It's unfair, Blaise thinks, that they're feeling this exhausted when they're this young.
"Well, it's over now," Blaise says, looking around at the destruction around them.
As he says that, he feels a little bit of weight lifted from him. It's over. The girl nods, and it chips away at a little bit of his heart. He doesn't need to care what's going to happen outside of Hogwarts' walls, because no matter how he's perceived, it won't change the fact that the war is over.
"I'm Susan Bones," the girl says, sticking out one dusty hand. Blaise takes it. "I was just a little bit tired," she says with a shrug.
Blaise can't help it — he lets out a laugh. He doesn't know when the last time he laughed was. Before the whole mess with Voldemort, he's sure. And yet here, standing in the midst of the rubble of Hogwarts with this random Hufflepuff girl, he feels hope. It'll be okay.
And as he shakes her hand, he really feels a sense of solidarity, of friendship, and of finality. It's over.