Zacharias Smith hadn't been in the DA in October of 1997, but he remembers walking into the Great Hall and looking at the wall behind the staff table and almost laughing. At the time he'd thought it was just as stupidly brave as he'd have expected of Harry Potter's idiot Gryffindor friends.
"Look at that," he had said to Ernie. "It's so stupid. Do they think it'll help matters?"
"Stupid, yes," replied Ernie, and he smiled uncomfortably and looked sideways at Hannah. That was when Zacharias realized that, no, it wasn't just the idiot Gryffindor friends. It was all of Dumbledore's Army, all of it. He wondered why Ernie and Hannah hadn't told him it was restarting.
He knew why.
He hadn't fought in the Battle; he'd gotten the hell out of Hogwarts and then he'd gotten the hell out of Hogsmeade, too. He'd spent a whole year watching his classmates ritually tortured and that was by teachers. He had no illusions that it'd be any better in a fair fight.
He rather doubted, anyway, that it would be a fair fight. The Death Eaters- there were at least a hundred of them, all of them trained to use Dark Magic, all of them willing to kill- versus a hasty army of teenagers and fugitives? There was no chance for the DA.
And Zacharias, for all the Hufflepuff loyalty and goodness he's supposed to have, wasn't quite brave enough to stare down death like that.
So he'd run.
He knows the DA must think pretty poorly of him- he can't blame them. He thinks just as poorly of them. Bleeding idiots, the lot of them. Marching off into a battle they'd had no chance at winning- and in the end it'd paid off only because Harry fucking Potter had marched into the fray and saved the fucking world. It was so typical.
When he reads the papers these days he avoids the mentions of the DA. They make something sour twist in his gut. You could have been a hero, it tells him, but you weren't, and nobody was surprised. You could have been someone and instead, you ran away.
Shut up, he tells it, but it persists, nagging and bitter. He should probably see a therapist but he'd rather be gutted.
So he drinks, and lines the empty bottles on the windowsill and around the kitchen like they're trophies. Maybe they are. Trophies for everything he hadn't managed to be, that year. Trophies that attest grandly to his own misery, to his own failure to be the hero he pretends he never wanted to be.
On the anniversary of the Battle, when the DA's reunion photo is blazoned across the front page of the Daily Prophet, he doesn't even bother with the rest of the paper, just chucks it in the bin.