Maybe it's a Gryffindor thing, but the DA is irritating lately. They can't all resent themselves this much. To a certain extent Hannah can empathise with them- after all, she still frets about how powerless she is in the face of the real world, and how little she can help the other DA now that she can't do so by volunteering herself up as a martyr.

But at a certain point it's annoying. Sometimes Neville will spiral into disgust with himself for every single person he hadn't saved in the Battle, or every student who'd been hurt over the course of the year, and Hannah has to take a deep breath before she tries to talk him through it.

Of course they hadn't been able to save everyone. Of course that was a shame.

But nobody in the DA gives themself any credit. Neville had taught almost ninety students how to cast a decent Stunning spell, Neville had plotted and directed the missions down to the dungeons, Neville had taken punishments in place of other students. Really, Neville needs to shut up and stop blaming himself for things out of his control.

At the gala, when they'd gotten the Orders of Merlin, she and the others had clustered together- Neville, Ginny, Luna, Anthony, Seamus, Michael. Hannah had rubbed a finger over the smooth edge of the medal, and Michael had read the inscription off his.

"For Defense of Ministry Values." He laughed shortly. "As if the Ministry has values."

The DA is quick to dismiss the Ministry- and Hannah is too, usually- but just then she'd wanted to appreciate it for a moment. Even if she doesn't respect the Ministry quite as much as she maybe should, it's a huge honour.

Sometimes she feels like she's the only one who's a little bit proud of that year. It's easy to focus only on the worst of it. After all, the worst of it had been absolutely awful. Even so, the DA has done a lot more good than any of its members ever acknowledge.

Hasn't it?

"I dunno," says Anthony Goldstein. She ought to be worried about him, staying at the Leaky Cauldron every day until the early morning. She's glad for the company, though. It gets quieter after midnight and he's a good conversationalist. "We did a lot more bad than we acknowledge, too. It's good practice to just ignore both."

"I don't mean that we didn't all come out worse," says Hannah. "I just mean most of the time everyone talks about what we weren't able to do and not what we did."

"Like how I Cruciated nine people?" Anthony counters. "I remember every single one, Hannah. Three of them weren't even third years yet."

Hannah's grateful she'd been Hufflepuff. After a point the Carrows had stopped trying with them and just used Ravenclaws and Slytherins. "I just mean, we were kind of impressive," she says. "We faced down Death Eaters. We escaped when they were hunting us down."

"We had pretty bad odds," admits Anthony, but he's not really agreeing with her.

It drives Hannah mad sometimes.

"You can't tell them what to think about it," yawns Neville. "Everyone had a different perspective on it."

Hannah knows that, but still. "I wish they knew how incredible they are," she says. "I wish they knew how incredible we all were."

"Yeah," says Neville. "Me too."