A/N Please read and review! I'd love to know what people thought of this one, as I feel that portraying whatever happened to the students at Hogwarts during the DH is always difficult.
Title: a tire swing for hannah
Summary: there is an old tire swing at the back of Hannah's garden. She has a couple of scars to show how many times she's fallen off. But they aren't the only scars on her body.
Word count: 614
Triggers/Warnings: death, mentions of past torture, hunger and violence
Genres: Family, Angst
Characters: Hannah A.
FOR HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY
House: Ravenclaw
for assignment 3:
Subject/Task number: Healer Studies/Task #1: Spattergroit: write about someone physically marked by something
for august auction:
Day 10/ Auction 2: [item] tire swing
When Hannah was six years old, just a sweet little girl with ridiculously round cheeks and two adorable blond pigtails, her father had put up a tire swing at the back of the garden. Her father had never had a tire swing when he was younger, as cars and all things mechanical were definitely not part of a young pureblood's upbringing. But when her mother had fondly remembered her own childhood and the beloved swing, her adoring father had hunted down the perfect tire and quickly hung it up on the old tree at the back.
The tire swing had been a great source of delight for Hannah, spending countless hours swinging to and fro. The trick was to gain sufficient momentum to be able to swing for a couple of minutes with your any need of pushing with her legs. And off she would go, flying in the air, whooping with shouts of delight.
Of course, being a clumsy six-year-old, she had also countlessly fallen off the tire swing. And though her father had insisted on adding cushioning charms, her mother had laughed it off.
"Don't worry about about cushioning charms! She's fine without!"
"But what if she falls off?"
"So let her fall off!"
"But what if she hurts herself?"
"Then let her hurt herself!"
"But-"
"Oh, what's the worst that can happen? I fell off countless times, but I'm still alive. I'll let you put that cushioning charm on her toy broom though!"
So there had been some scars (two on her forehead and one the side of her knee) and a broken bone (her arm) and far too many bruises to count (accompanied with a great deal of crying, of course) but they were all fond memories. Hannah's mother had been right to let her play, and she learnt that sometimes you can fall and get hurt, but the most important thing was to keep going no matter what happened.
Now, Hannah was eighteen, no longer that sweet little girl of six. Her round apple cheeks were now hollowed out by hunger and her pigtails were outgrown to a long ponytail with already a few streaks of grey. As she stood in front of the ruins of what had once been her childhood home.
The roof had caved in and one of the walls was crumbling to pieces before her eyes. Black from smoke and fire clung to whatever remained, twisting and curling around the pillars like mocking shadows.
But still, at the back of the garden, there was the faithful tire swing, softly moving to and fro in the light summer breeze of July. Hannah felt that if she scrunched up herself eyes, she could see herself again, all rosy and red, swinging on that tire.
It was a mark of happier times. Of days when the worst scars on her body came from falling off a swing and when there was always the loving arms of her mother or father to come running into if she fell off. Now, the worst scars on her body were those of repeated Cruciatus, and the ones of hunger and fear. There were now far too many to count or name. The mark of the Death Eaters. And the loving arms of her father and mother were no more either. They too had gone up in smoke with the rest of her childhood.
As Hannah turned away from her home, her garden, her swing, her bruised body still suffering physically and emotionally, she remembered. If she fell and got hurt, the most important thing was to keep on going, moving forward. Maybe one day another little girl would play on that tire swing.
