When Hannah Abbott was eighteen years old, she looked in the mirror in the Hufflepuff girls' loo and thought that it was wrong. Her eyes were too hard, her mouth had lost the tiny curve at the corners that used to make her look happy. Her hair was still tied with ribbons.
She looked like a little girl- round face and wide eyes and pigtails. She couldn't feel like a little girl, not then.
She cut off the pigtails when the war was over.
"They were burnt in the Battle," she said to her father, who mourned them. Her mother had loved the pigtails, had tied them for her on the first day she went to the Hogwarts Express. Hannah had felt bad, initially, before remembering that she didn't have to live for her mother or her father or anyone else.
She told Neville the truth- she got tired of looking in the mirror and looking like a little girl. She knew, now that she had a scar cutting over one eyebrow and an edge in her stare, she didn't really look like a little girl. She had seen too much. If anything, the pigtails had just made her look wrong. A girl who was at once young and old, innocent and not.
Round face, wide eyes, pigtails- those were things for little girls. The scars and the edge, those were for the girl she'd become. She couldn't be both, and she couldn't help the face or the eyes, so it was the pigtails that went.
Hannah had worn pigtails for most of her life. They were sensible and neat and cute.
She was never naïve enough to claim that she'd been hardened by the war. If anything, it'd softened her. Made her realise what a gift it is to be human. Transformed the bitterness she hadn't even realised she had into something mournful and desperate, something soft and keen.
Hardened- that was a word for what happened to some of the other DA. The ones who distrusted and doubted and shut themselves off from the world. Hannah had visited some of them, had sat in a chair next to Dennis Creevey and tried to make herself understand him.
"It's not fair," he had said. "The world just sat and watched when people hurt us for no reason. They just let Hogwarts get turned into a prison, they let it get turned into a battlefield."
Hannah had nodded, because it all made sense, but she had thought, privately, that it was a shame that Dennis couldn't see that there was still so much beauty that remained.
«»
When she was fifteen, Hannah had yelled at Ernie to shut up and realise for once in his life that it wasn't about what was right. He'd blinked twice at her, halting his tirade about how unfair everything was, betrayed and hurt and surprised, and she'd had to turn away.
Half of her was sorry for yelling, but the rest was darkly satisfied. Let him be hurt, let him be surprised. Because they all are, because Cedric Diggory had been killed thoughtlessly, tossed aside like a rag, because all the fairness and loyalty and strength hadn't been enough.
It had been the first time she'd thought that people really didn't deserve anything. That people were irreparably bad. After all, wasn't she? Weren't her friends and her parents and everyone else?
It took a few years before she recognised that irreparably bad and inevitably bad are two different things, and that most people are the latter.
When her hair was cut, she felt lighter- maybe because without the hair tugging down by her ears, her head was lighter, but it was almost like a physical relief. She didn't feel anything like the girl who'd been taken out of Herbology to the worst news of her life. She didn't feel anything like the girl who'd mourned Cedric Diggory.
Hannah felt different, so she might as well look different.
"It's new," said Ernie, who had never really thought very much of short hair on girls. "Different."
"That's the point," said Hannah, and she ran a hand through it. It's cut to her chin, neatly bobbed. She had considered getting it spiky on top, but she'd rejected the idea on the grounds that it would give Ernie a veritable heart attack.
"Well, I like it," said Susan, and she stood up and stretched a hand carefully to ruffle at it. "It's grown-up. Cute."
"Is it?" said Hannah, who wasn't sure if she really liked the combination of descriptions. "Thanks."
"Yes, definitely," said Justin, stretched across Hannah's bed shooting lazy sparks at the ceiling. "Very sophisticated. And utilitarian."
That was better, Hannah thought.
Hannah and Susan had been friends long before Hogwarts- her mother had been close to Susan's aunt, and they'd been like cousins growing up. They'd met Justin on the train, and Ernie had joined their little group in November of first year when he'd interrupted their conversation to say that he actually listened to the Auror Erwin radio dramas that Susan was trying to get Justin and Hannah into.
She was lucky, and she knew it- there were other kids, even in her own House, who didn't have the luxury of a close group of friends. She shunned them too, because as a kid she'd been fearful of shaking the boat, of being anything but normal.
It had been seventh year- way too late, she thought- when she approached Luna Lovegood and asked her about her necklace.
"Oh, it's not a charm," said Luna, and she'd touched one of the corks delicately. "Daddy just makes them because he doesn't like to waste. The rest of the bottles were made into a windchime."
"Oh," Hannah had said, tentatively. "That's neat. My mum never was much for crafts, but I always wished she was."
"That's a shame," Luna had replied, and shrugged and looked Hannah in the eyes. Her gaze was bright, but almost unnervingly so. There was a thread of sorrow in the look, something Hannah had never noticed before. "My mum always loved it, she thought creativity was the most important thing to have."
"Yeah," Hannah had said, suddenly remembering that Luna, too, had lost her mother.
«»
Susan had gone on the run, and Justin had gone to America. Hannah would ask, sometimes, what had happened.
Susan hated to discuss it, and Hannah understood. It had been on the run that Susan had spun and Apparated to save herself, then waited for three days before accepting that her mother wasn't coming to get her. It had been on the run that Susan had lost the last member of her family to the two Wizarding Wars, and Hannah, who had never known loss until her mother, had never quite understood exactly how much of Susan's life had been shaped by it.
Justin was always more willing to talk about being on the run, because really, nothing had happened. He'd attended a private school. He'd kept his magic secret. He'd been very, very safe.
Hannah, for years afterwards, could never really decide if she resented him for it or not. Sure, sure he hasn't suffered like the rest of the DA, but she knew she shouldn't blame him. He didn't choose to be Muggleborn, after all, and he didn't choose to be born rich as all hell. He was just lucky, and try as she might, she could never hate him for it.
She knew how Ernie's year was, because she spent it with him- watched as he paced around and fretted over whoever was at detention, watched him fuss at his hair and his fraying sleeves, watched him cry when he'd come back to the Great Hall during the Battle and seen the scale of their losses. She'd held his hand in both of her own and told him they did not have time to grieve.
And Ernie had seen her year- watched her cry into her hands because she still felt like a little girl and what chance could she possibly have of doing anything brave or good or right?
She had still worn her hair in pigtails then.
She didn't properly grieve until long after the Battle, when the majority of the DA is recovering and out of hospital. It had hit her, watching the line of students going into the school, that they had lost so many, so many.
She'd kept tabs on everyone in her House. She knew the names of everyone in the DA. The crowd was bigger than it might have been, because the Muggleborns came back and the kids who had been taken to Azkaban came back. But Hannah had known how many kids there were in the DA- almost ninety- and with forty-eight dead, they'd been devastated in the Battle.
She cried on the train, with her face in her hands. Then she cried watching the blur of the countryside out the window and she cried in the carriages when she realised that those things had to be thestrals and of course she could see them of course she's seen too many children die.
"Don't be afraid," said Luna, when she saw Hannah shiver. "They're very gentle."
"I'm not scared," said Hannah. And, the weird thing was, she wasn't.
Susan spent more and more time in the library, that year. Ernie spent his time in the Common Room because he got nervous when someone couldn't be found. Justin threw himself into his studies.
Hannah, for her part, spent more and more time outside, in the gardens and greenhouses that Neville loved. It was easier to get her hands dirty, to feel like she was putting something in the world. She cried once when one of her Venomous Tentacula plants died.
She had thought, maybe, that she'd have stopped crying after the war. That she'd cried herself out over it, the way Ginny and Neville had. But she'd always been prone to crying, and why should that be any different because everything else was?
«»
When Hannah had graduated from Hogwarts, she went around looking for a job. Neville hadn't even redone his last year, but gone straight into the Aurors instead. A number of the DA had.
She ended up as the dishwasher for the Leaky Cauldron. It was boring work, boring and rather disgusting, but it was work, and so she scrubbed at trays and rinsed beer glasses and told herself it was something at least.
It wasn't not as though she was the only member of the DA who'd always wanted a career, before everything had happened. She knew a few of them- cashiers and waiters and janitors, when once they'd wanted to Charm broomsticks or hunt trolls or be Potioneers. She'd entertained notions of being a Healer once, but after too many nights staying up and trying to help the students who came in after detentions, she thought that it'd be an unbearable job.
How can you bear to watch people hurt, knowing you can't always help them?
"You're overthinking it," said Neville, when she told him. "It's a starting job. It's just a different kind."
"Do you think I'm throwing my future away?" she asked. Her father had said as much, when she'd told him.
"No," he said. "You're biding your time. You'll get better jobs."
"Maybe," said Hannah.
She'd been working for eight months when she became a waitress, which was definitely a better job. No scrubbing, no rinsing, and she could make so much money off of stag parties that stared at her tits. She knew Neville didn't think it was classy (though, really, Neville never thought anything was) but if tips relied on neckline, she'd take what she got.
"You look so different," said Justin, when she got him a cup of tea once. Justin had never been much for drinking. "So grown up."
"It's my chest," she replied, in a mock whisper, and he'd sputtered and choked on his tea.
She missed work to go to the anniversary meeting. It was termed a "reunion party" by the Daily Prophet, but they don't have enough fun for it to be a party. It's the remaining DA, gathered in Augusta Longbottom's sitting room with a few of the Battle ghosts, and they sit and drink mugs of chocolate and talk wistfully about what's next for them.
Some of them would graduate that year; some wanted to join the Aurors, and Hannah had wanted to cry more. She thought, selfishly, that it'd have been so much easier if everyone had been done with fighting after the war. If everyone had decided they were going to stay safe.
But the DA went into the Aurors, it got hooked on drugs, it got risky and dangerous jobs, and she wondered if they were ever going to really be safe.
The next day, Tom told her he wanted to teach her how to tend the bar.
«»
"You're back," said Dennis, as she closed the door behind her. "It's been forever."
"Oh," said Hannah, and she sat on the couch next to him. "What's that you've got?"
Dennis glanced down at the shoebox in his lap and shrugged. "It was Colin's," he said. "Pictures," and he held out one of the photographs. She took it and examined it carefully. It was a bit blurry, but it was unmistakably Luna and Ginny at the front of one of their DA meetings, beaming at each other.
"What are you going to do with them?" she asked.
"I don't know," said Dennis. "Keep them, probably. Might duplicate a few. Give them out."
She took the next one he held out. It was of him with Jimmy Peakes, more clearly defined than the first had been. But Dennis wasn't so thin and angry in this photo. Jimmy wasn't dead. They were sitting together, watching something from off the frame intently. Unlike the first one, this one had been developed to move- she watched as Jimmy and Dennis elbowed each other in the sides until they both started laughing.
"I remember that," mumbled Dennis. "It was when Neville was going on about responsibilities."
Hannah nodded.
Dennis was still angry. Still thinner than he should have been and somehow sharp, despite the young face. But he duplicated a picture for her, of her and Luna sitting together in the Room of Requirement. It didn't move, but Hannah rather liked it that way.
She had one hand perched lightly on Luna's arm. They were sitting sprawled into each other, Luna's head tilted back and beaming.
"Really, Hannah," said Megan Jones one day, after Hannah had cried to her and Susan for an hour about all the kids who weren't getting better. "You can't live for the DA, okay?"
Hannah wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. "What do you-"
"I mean you aren't responsible for them anymore," said Meg, and she reached across the table and took her hand. "It's over."
"It's not," Hannah protested.
"It is," said Megan. "You can't make them heal. You can't make them talk or get help or recover."
"I can try," said Hannah.
"You can," agreed Megan. "But you need to know when you can't help."
Hannah looked down at her tea. "I already couldn't do enough, Meg."
Susan sat next to Hannah and put a hand on Hannah's shoulder. "You did more than either of us."
"You guys didn't have a choice," said Hannah, and glanced at Susan. Susan had lost most of her family to the wars, then she'd gone on the run and lost the last of it. Megan had been kidnapped from her bed over Easter break, because her mother was in the Order.
"We didn't," said Megan. "But you did, and you chose to do everything you could-"
"But it wasn't enough!" Hannah snapped, frustrated at their inability to understand. "Don't you see that these kids are still a mess over everything that happened-"
"Hannah, I work with the Aurors," said Meg. "We aren't coping at all over there."
«»
When Hannah was twenty-four, Tom the barkeep sat her down and told her he planned to retire by the end of the year. He was, he said, either going to sell it or pass it down to her.
"Why me?" she asked, surprised. She'd worked there for seven years now; she's bartended and cleaned and on occasion cooked. And waited tables. But she had no experience running a business.
"Because you are a damn fast learner," said Tom.
During the summer, Neville came to visit her on the job, sat with a beer glass at the end of the bar. When she passed him, she stopped and leaned on the bar and they would talk.
"I'm an assistant professor now," he said. "You know, not a teacher's aide."
"I'm proud of you," said Hannah. "Were the Aurors-"
"No," said Neville. "I think I'd rather teach."
"You could teach Defense," said Hannah. The curse on the position had been lifted after the Battle, but they still didn't have a permanent professor. It had rotated between a few ex-Aurors for the last seven years, but then the Aurors had retired.
"Maybe," said Neville. "But I think I'd rather not. I've already done that."
Hannah laughed. "Like how I didn't want to go into Healing," she said.
"Probably," said Neville, with a half smile. Hannah glanced over her shoulder.
"I have to get back to work," she said.
"I'll," started Neville.
"I'm off at six, could we go get something to eat?" she interrupted, on impulse, and he grinned wide.
"I'd love to!"
When Hannah had been fifteen, a Prefect and totally willing to break the school rules to save her OWLs, she'd said to Ernie that she really couldn't imagine having a boyfriend. She was too young, maybe, or too naïve or too emotional, and she had been too disgusted with herself at the time to imagine anyone ever loving her. She had pinched her waist and stared into the mirror with frustration and compared it to what her roommates had looked like. Sally-Anne boyish, long and lean. Susan petite and Megan curvy and Sophie athletic. Why would anyone want her?
When she was twenty seven, she thought to herself that maybe she was good enough for Neville.
Since quitting the Aurors, he had lost the muscles and the hardness he had gotten from the DA and the years with the Aurors, but Hannah didn't mind. Instead she pressed her hand into his chest and closed her eyes and kissed him and thought that it was a beautiful thing, to still be soft.
He proposed to her in her room over the Leaky, and she had clapped her hands over her mouth and cried.
Neville was still kneeling carefully (his knee, after the Battle, was never quite the same.) He raised his eyebrows, and she could see the anxiety then, tucked into the way he set his shoulders and looked up at her.
"Yes, yes yes," she said, still crying, and he climbed back up labouriously and she wrapped her arms around him and took a deep breath and cried.
She fretted for a month over finding a dress that fit and that didn't show the ugly scarring on her forearms from when she'd been grazed in the battle.
"Let it show," Susan suggested finally, when Hannah threw her hands in the air and cried that she hadn't ever wanted to get married with any sleeves at all because she knew how hot she would get if she was nervous and covered in fabric. "They're just scars. Everyone in the crowd has seen them."
"But I don't want to be so ugly," Hannah said, and she brandished her arm at Susan. "It's my wedding."
"Everyone in the DA has scars," replied Susan, and she took Hannah's hand and looked at the scars. "They're not ugly."
"They are," Hannah said, pulling her arm back to look at the way they twisted and knotted, the misshapen skin and the odd colour.
"You have them for a reason," Susan said gently. "Because you were brave enough to go into that Battle."
"I wasn't-" Hannah protested, but Susan sighed.
"Hannah, shut up."
Hannah's dress had no sleeves; the neckline was higher than she had wanted it, but Neville's grandmother was very old-fashioned and Hannah was willing to compromise.
They showed the scars, but at the end of the day with one hand on Neville's face and his arms around her, Hannah felt beautiful anyway.
«»
"Madam Pomfrey's retiring," said Neville, one afternoon in the Cauldron. Hannah, more focused on going through their bills, nodded slowly.
"Why?"
"Because she fancied she wanted to wrangle dragons instead," said Neville. Hannah glanced up at him and gave him a look.
"Ha, ha, ha. Who do they have to replace her?"
"We don't know," said Neville. "But they're looking for someone young with a knack for Healing spells and a way with kids."
"I don't know, Neville," said Hannah, and glanced upwards at him. "I'm not a Healer."
"You were the best thing that we had, that year," he replied, and sat down at their little table and put his hand over hers. "Look, Madam Pomfrey specifically asked about any of the DA, because we were tough under pressure and knew what to do. Michael even said he'd ask Terry-"
"Bad idea," said Hannah, who knew Terry too well.
"Yeah, exactly," said Neville.
When Hannah was thirty-six, she got a new job and a new home and it didn't matter that it was basically her old job and old home too. Madam Pomfrey taught her what spells can be used for what mistakes and what potions to get, and Hannah sat in Poppy's office and wondered aloud whether anything would be as bad as some of the things she'd seen that year. Michael Corner with the skin shredded off one arm lying in a pool of blood, Neville with a gash split over his eyebrow from hitting his head on the floor, Ernie with a broken wrist, Seamus with broken ribs, Megan's bed empty and a small bloodstain on the pillow-
Once, it would have made Hannah cry to be back in the castle. She remembered too well how many people had been hurt there. But she took a deep breath and told herself that everything would be fine and she asked about potion dosages and curse scars.
It was almost twenty years ago that she'd stared at the mirror and hated it, hated the pigtails and the wide eyes and the round face and how stupidly young she looked when she didn't feel young at all. Hannah, her second day interning as the matron, caught a look of herself in the mirror and thought that now the reverse is true- that the war aged her too much. Her scars, her hair- she doesn't look thirty-six. She could be years older.
But she shrugged at her reflection and tucked her hair behind her ears and rolled up her sleeves and told herself it wasn't like it mattered anyway.
And maybe one day. when Hannah's hair is gray and thin and her face is lined and, she hopes, still kind, a little girl will come in with hair in two pigtails, tied with ribbons, and Hannah will smile at her and say, before she leaves, that she's capable of anything, pigtails or not.