Aftermath
Summary: A series of short vignettes examining how a few characters deal with the aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts.
Dennis Creevey sat still against the wall of the Great Hall. His eyes stared blankly at the tiny body on the floor a few feet away.
Weird, he mused, oddly detached. My big brother's supposed to be, well, big.
He hugged his knees to himself, his own tiny body still seeming larger than Colin's, unable to do more than stare. Colin was pale and limp on the floor, and Dennis was certain his big brother had never held still for this long before. Any minute now, Colin would get up and start buzzing around the hall, checking on everyone, helping heal wounds and beaming encouraging smiles every which way as he snapped pictures left and right.
He'd be helping to comfort the living, not lying on the floor, tiny, pale, and unnaturally still, as one of the dead.
Dennis wondered if there was something wrong with him, listening to the grief-wracked sobs from the other families present. He wasn't sad, yet, nor was he happy about winning the fight. He wasn't much of anything, really. It was as though everything inside him had been replaced with a gray mist, or a black void. Surely he should at least be crying.
My brother is dead, he thought to himself, again and again, but nothing surfaced from that sea of numbness inside him. I've lost him. I've lost Colin. My brother is dead.
Dimly, Dennis heard light footsteps approach him from the left. He didn't bother to turn and see who it was. It didn't really matter, after all. It wasn't Colin, because Colin was dead.
Whoever it was sat down beside him silently. He was grateful for that, at least, in a far-off way. He didn't think he could hold much of a conversation at the moment.
Eventually, though, when the person still hadn't said anything or gone away, Dennis turned to look. Sitting there beside him was Luna Lovegood, of all people. She had something in one hand and was just watching him.
Dennis was quiet for another moment before gesturing at Colin's body. "I should be sad. I know that. I am sad, I lost him, but..." He trailed off, not sure how to explain. Luna just nodded serenely.
"It's big, isn't it? That sadness? So big, you can't really feel all of it at once, or it would swallow you whole. Just remember," she said, taking his hand and placing something rectangular in it. "Sometimes, the things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end."
Dennis looked at his hand. In his palm sat Colin's camera, one corner crushed, with film spilling out from the inside, lens still miraculously intact. He took in a long, shaky breath as the numb void inside him cracked. Luna sat beside him, quiet and calm, as Dennis finally started to sob.
George swore briefly to himself when he turned the corner and saw the debris waiting there. It was a week after the battle, and they were still discovering the extent of the damage. Not to mention new hallways – George had definitely never been down this one before, and that was saying something.
What no one ever told you, he thought to himself, was that epic battles of war-ending proportions left quite a bit of clean-up.
Admittedly, though, this was the first day George had joined in the repair efforts. That is to say, repairing the damage from the battle. The row of classrooms on the third floor he'd fixed weren't destroyed in the fighting, per se, so much as they were smashed to pieces in the name of catharsis. Taking out his fury and grief on desks and chairs hadn't actually calmed him down at all, however, and he could still feel the storm lurking just past the edge of thought.
Before, he'd always had someone to face the storm with him. He wasn't ready to weather it alone this time. Hence why he was currently throwing himself into the clean-up efforts.
Unfortunately, he noted, teeth clenched, that plan seemed to be backfiring.
He'd always known McGonagall was a bit of a slave-driver, but he'd never figured her for a sadist as well. After all, why else would she put both him and Percy alone together cleaning up debris on what used to be the third floor? He was as happy as he could be about Percy's last-minute change-of-heart, but really, he'd volunteered for the heavy-lifting specifically so he wouldn't have to think about his brothers.
Specifically, the brother he no longer had.
Shaking his head and forcibly cutting off that train of thought, George entered the next room in the corridor and stopped short. One wall was completely missing, which was to be expected, but the rest of the room was remarkably pristine. In the center of the room, however, stood what had caught his eye so dramatically: an ornate, floor-length mirror.
He stepped closer, examining it carefully. An inscription ran across the top; on first glance, it looked like nonsense, but upon closer inspection, it appeared to be written backwards. "I show not your face, but your heart's desire," George read, eyebrows raised. "Well, let's have a look, then."
He stepped in front of the mirror, but to his disappointment, his plain reflection was the only thing that peered back out at him. Still curious, he walked back to the door and stuck his head into the hall. "Oi, Perce, c'mere for a minute!" he called, before ducking back inside and walking back to the mirror.
His most pompous sibling followed him quickly. "What is it? Did you find something?" said Percy as he entered the room. He blinked at the mirror before stepping closer to peer over his brother's shoulder. "What's this?"
"Some magic mirror, but I think it's broken," replied George, nodding to the inscription. "Supposed to show you what you want, but I don't see anything special. Wanted to know if it worked for you."
Percy blinked again before studying the mirror. "I just see you and me."
George huffed a sigh and shrugged, burying his disappointment with his grief. "Guess that answers that, then. Figures. Let's just finish fixing this wall and move on."
Percy nodded his assent and moved to follow his brother to the broken section when he noticed the reflection didn't follow George across the room. Instead, it slung an arm around Percy's shoulder, grinning. Percy waited a moment, but nothing else changed, so with a shrug of his own, he chalked it up to whatever was broken and turned to help move broken stone back into place.
The reflection just rolled his eyes, the way he had when his brothers (and very rarely, his twin) were being particularly thick and tugged on both of his very real, very attached ears.
Neville studied the two marble obelisks in front of him, dirt smeared across his hands. Though the majority of the repairs had been completed in the last few weeks, the more mundane tasks had been rather neglected. When he'd heard of the plans to hold a memorial service out by the new monuments constructed near the lake, Neville had volunteered to touch the area up a bit beforehand.
He'd finished the first without fanfare, stepping back to survey the white tombstone and its new surrounding flowerbeds. "Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore (1881 – 1997)" gleamed in carved gold script across the front, a standing tribute to one of Hogwarts' finest fallen heroes. Sad as the loss was, though, Neville couldn't help but be grateful at how relatively simple it had been. Dumbledore had been great, wise, and a leader for the light, if somewhat manipulative and maddeningly cryptic, to hear Harry talk.
The other tombstone was far more controversial to Neville, and confronting that conflict was what had mainly brought him out here today. Weeks had passed, but he still found himself struggling with his feelings towards some of the deaths. The subject was too complicated to broach with his friends, and he couldn't exactly seek closure from his family like they all had, since most of them were in St. Mungo's, but when he'd thought of all the one-sided conversations he'd had with his parents, he decided that having a conversation with a gravestone wasn't so different.
Now that he was here, though, any planned speech he'd had promptly left his mind, leaving him not quite sure what to say. With a sigh, he settled down in the grass, white marble of the second tombstone at his back, and started to talk.
"Harry says you were a great man, you know," Neville began, gazing sightlessly out across the lake. "From what I hear, I can't disagree with him. It takes a certain kind of bravery to lie straight to You-Kno—to Voldemort's face for years. I get why he's suddenly your biggest fan now, kind of. You find out the man you hated for years had been protecting you the whole time, had loved your mother, had maybe started to care about you too...that tends to change your perspective, I suppose." He paused a moment, considering his words. "It's just, it was only his mother you loved, wasn't it? I'm not the one you protected. I'm not important, not really, not like Harry, but he did tell me about the prophecy. It could have been me. Thank Merlin it wasn't, really, but it might have been. I could have been the one he came after, seventeen years ago, and you wouldn't have done a thing." Neville huffed a slight laugh. "You'd have probably been grateful he left Harry's mum alone, honestly.
"But it wasn't me or my parents Voldemort came after. That was later, after he was gone. I lost my family when Bellatrix got it in her head that they'd know what had happened, that them being high in the Order, or maybe also being a match for the prophecy, that something about them meant they'd know how to bring him back. Harry said you were the one who brought him the prophecy to begin with." Here, Neville hesitated, biting his lip before the words tripped over themselves leaving his mouth. "Maybe it was that damn prophecy that meant Bellatrix came after us. Maybe you gave Voldemort the target that put my parents in the hospital permanently before I ever really got to know them. Maybe that's your fault, too."
Neville drew a shaky breath, wiping at his eyes resolutely before continuing.
"I don't know. But what I do know is that I hated you too. I was a kid, we were all kids, and you made it very clear that you hated us way back before we'd ever done anything. But unlike Harry, we weren't important, so it didn't matter. None of us mattered, because we weren't Lily's.
"I'm really glad Professor Lupin understood. When that boggart jumped out of the wardrobe looking like you, he could have laughed, but he didn't. You'd been awful to me, and he as good as told me it was okay to be scared, that being afraid of an adult, a professor who was supposed to teach and protect, who tormented kids, was okay." He snorted. "I killed a snake, with part of Voldemort's soul inside it and everything, and I'm still afraid of you, a bit. But then, the snake was what killed you, in the end, so in a way, I'm the one who avenged you. I still don't know how I feel about that.
"We'd wondered, this last year, when you'd do things like keep the Carrows from torturing the younger kids or sent us to the Forbidden Forest as 'punishment'. But you'd killed Dumbledore, and after six years of brutality, it was easy to assume his trust in you was his own fatal mistake. You'd made it easy. Maybe that was part of your act too, I don't know. I'm not sure if that would be better or worse, really."
Neville plucked at the grass idly, twirling the blades between his fingers. "You were a great man. Harry's right about that. But you weren't a good one, not really. Brave, cunning, deliberate, but good? If you'd really been good, I could have said all this before you were dead, maybe. At the very least, fighting back this year wouldn't have been nearly so satisfying." He let his head fall back and thump against the marble, still playing with the grass.
When the dust had settled and the rebuilding began, Neville had been somewhat bemused by Hermione's stubborn insistence that everyone go and see some Muggles called "psychologists". Wizard therapy was a bit different, but the idea of professionals to help with the emotional aftermath of war was a good one.
'Does hating a hero make me a bad person?' Neville had asked one of them. He hadn't elaborated, but he hadn't needed to.
'I'd expect it's more complicated than that,' the mind-healer had replied.
The late afternoon sun shone down on the stone as Neville stood up, lighting up the golden "Severus Tobias Snape (1960 – 1998)" inscribed against the marble. He paused a moment more, wishing desperately that the healer hadn't been quite so right.