AN: The rewrite of GotB is going a bit slow, but I am now on winter break, so that should help. The writing of SitD is also slowing a bit, but the next chapter should still be done and uploaded next week. So enjoy this one shot.
All But Dead.
Voldemort was dead.
The thought ran through Harry's mind over and over again.
Voldemort was dead. His followers were dead or captured. After a year of darkness, the Wizarding World was safe; the Death Eater's reign of terror was over.
Despite that, Harry felt no joy. He couldn't, not with what was lost.
As he walked through the ruined halls of Hogwarts, Harry almost couldn't take it. He had spoken with Kingsley, in the first two hours after the battle, nearly two hundred corpses had been found (not including Death Eaters), nearly forty being current students. Harry had thrown up after hearing that. He had never truly thought about what would happen with the final battleground being Hogwarts. He had imagined that they would have time to evacuate the lower years, but there hadn't been. Tom had arrived after mere minutes, and wards had been put up to prevent travel, floo, apparation, and portkey.
And so here he was, aimlessly wandering the dungeons. He needed time alone, time to think. But he couldn't, not without seeing the lifeless face of so many of his (now) former classmates. Colin had been the worst. Harry couldn't pair the image of his dead body (with a large hole in his stomach) with the bubbly boy who adored his camera.
Harry was not the only one struggling, despite the large victory over Voldemort, there was an air of depression over the Hogwarts grounds. People were scrounging for answers, and more importantly, hope. But there was little.
Approaching the Slytherin and Hufflepuff hallway, the last of Harry's hope left him. Underneath a large pile of rubble, was a distinctly feminine hand, clutching a wand. Harry let loose a shuddering breath, he should've expected this. There was a reason he was down here, no one else had been yet.
Gripping the Elder Wand, he cast a (very dim) patronus, which raced off to find Kingsley, he was going to need help to move the rubble.
He was right, even with the Elder Wand, it took him and four other people nearly three hours to move the rubble and extract the bodies. There were three, the first Harry identified within seconds. The wand (and hand) belonged to Daphne Greengrass, a Slytherin girl of his own year. She died using her body to shield the two Hufflepuff girls she had found in the hallway during the battle. Upon further investigation, they found them to be first years. Fortunately (a word Harry found difficult to use given the events of the day), one of them proved to be alive, if only barely. She was a blonde girl, called Molly Everett. Looking at her was difficult, she was so small, and looked so broken. Despite the efforts of Daphne, Molly had still had several hundred pounds of stone above her. Had she been a muggle or squib, she would be dead.
Harry found a lot of things difficult in the last few hours, thinking, talking (especially to Ron and Hermione), and now looking at the Hufflepuff girl who was all but dead. He supposed those words could apply to a lot of people right about now, all but dead. Harry certainly didn't feel too well, given his many misadventures over the past several days. He knew it would be a long time until he was okay, if that ever happened. No one could be completely normal after surviving a war, certainly not one as bloody and emotional as the one he had fought. And certainly not after all he had lossed. But right now, he needed a sense of normalcy. And walking around the ruins of Hogwarts alone certainly wouldn't help his mental state.
He had a long road ahead of him, getting started down it was probably his best bet.