title: Still/Life
author: Sirikit
rating: K
summary: A series of small likenesses. Hufflepuff gen (Susan, Ernie, Zacharias, Hannah, Justin, not necessarily in that order).
a/n: These are basically sketches that I've been doing to try to
figure out the characters. Figured I could corral some together into
something resembling a fic. Lyrics from The Knife.
We share our mothers' health
It is what we've been dealt?
What's in it for me?
Fine; then I'll agree
III. Zacharias.
The first thing that Zacharias does after the war is stop talking to everyone.
He doesn't visit and he returns all owls unopened; he avoids all familiar places and all proper functions. Zacharias doesn't mean to do it like this, but that is how it happens anyway. He ran, after all; he ran and clambered away and did not fight. (Later he tells himself it wasn't cowardice but rather self-preservation, which has a better sound.) But even in his head he can't bring himself to shake Ernie's hand or to look Hannah in the eye. He doesn't think about Justin and he doesn't think about Susan, especially not Susan. In his nightmares she speaks for all his friends and the generosity in her voice is awful, irrevocable; it reaches past the remnants of his bravado and leaves him anchorless.
He wants to be righteous again, to be himself again as he was before: a Hufflepuff, a pureblood, a loyal friend, a hard worker, a good son. But this is after, and now Zacharias is just another eighteen-year-old boy who survived the war, already a proven coward.