Instauration: renewal; restoration; renovation; repair.
June 24, 1998
It wasn't the same. It would never be again. This lesson she had learned many times over in the last weeks. The last years, really. It was something, Ginny supposed, all children must learn as they grow up, regardless of the circumstances. But somehow, standing amid the wreckage of stone and marble in a once-familiar corridor of her once-familiar school, the message seemed to take on a wholly unnecessary drama.
Or maybe it was necessary, Ginny thought, closing her eyes. But she could still feel the devastation. There was a warm breeze that should never have found its way so far into the cool stone labyrinth, a sunny glow that didn't belong in dim stone passages lined with a handful of narrow windows. Perhaps it had to come to this, to Hogwarts itself being shook to its very foundations, the beginning of it all, to finally be pulled up by the roots.
Ginny listened to the silence. In other, distant parts of the castle she knew professors and students were hard at work. But here it was peaceful. If you kept your eyes closed. This was a bearable silence. At home it was no longer a circus of noise and people, but the quiet was unnatural there. And at home things looked exactly as they always had, but of course they never could be again.
She took a slow breath and opened her eyes. And even though seeing the destruction laid out before her sent an ache throbbing in herchest, there was something good about seeing it all instead of just feeling it everywhere she went.
Dust swirled in the flood of sunlight streaming through cracks and gaps in the walls. Ginny ran a hand lightly along the jagged chunks of stone, feeling the grit beneath her fingertips. Then she pulled her wand from her pocket and waved it over the scattered shards, muttering "Repairo." A few pieces flew back together seamlessly.
Baby steps.
She repeated the process again and again, and each time a few more fell into place. Down in the entrance hall, Professors McGonagall and Flitwick stood back to back, raising new stones for the crumbled walls, chasing the rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and citrines that had spilled from the cracked hourglasses to fill the cracks in the floor, to glitter like the tears and bloodshed of battle until the walls came crashing down again. Strings of students, eleven to seventeen, lined corridors, rummaging through debris to salvage paintings and statues. On a section of new wall on the third floor, Dean Thomas sat back and examined the image he had sketched with the ashes of a burned-out classroom.
It wasn't the same, of course. How could it be? But there was a sound reassurance in seeing the world putting itself back together.
A/N: Want to know what Dean sketched? That stayed on the wall long after the memory of the war had faded with its generation? I imagine something like this: a coin flipping in the sky as dawn breaks, one side stamped with the letters DA, the other a soaring phoenix (it flips in the picture, like all good wizarding art) all of this inside a lightning bolt :D
Okay, Ginny-centric for WritersNeverDie who asked for some post-war, pre-children Ginny. It's very post-war and very pre-children, so I hope that's okay! Thank you all for your reviews and character suggestions! I love hearing what you think about characters and I'll try to work through your requests as best I can! Love you all!