WRITTEN FOR THE HOUSES COMPETITION, YEAR 10, ROUND 7

House: Slytherin

Class: Prefect

Category: Standard

Word Count: 1696

Prompts: [Object] Broom; [Weather] Rainbow

Warnings/Disclaimers:

He had been busy. Everyone had been, what with the reconstruction efforts taking up most of every day. No one minded, as the goal was to have Hogwarts ready to welcome students on September 1st, and every single witch and wizard lending their wand to the cause could feel how important it was. They were working for the magical children who had been denied a place the previous year, for the students who should have been protected from the pain and misery of war behind Hogwarts' walls but had found the enemy inside, and for all the future generations of witches and wizards yet to come.

With such a noble purpose spurring on each volunteer, Hogwarts was quickly regaining its shape and being put back to rights. The most pressing issues had been dealt with, and every Order member, professor, and concerned alumnus had had the time and opportunity to go back home and rest for a few days.

Harry hadn't.

It wasn't exactly that he didn't have a home to return to. He didn't, but he'd had to find a way to brush off every Weasley to avoid being invited back to the Burrow or Shell Cottage. Well, every living Weasley. And that was part of the reason he preferred bunking down in one of Hogwarts' many empty rooms between a reconstruction project and the next.

He felt like the weight of the dead may crush him if he stepped out of the precarious bubble he'd created by keeping busy every single moment of every day.

Hermione had tried speaking to him.

Andromeda hadn't. Harry didn't know if there was anything pointed in the way she hadn't looked for him, or if he was just overestimating his importance—The world doesn't revolve around you, Potter—They hadn't interacted a lot but he thought she might have tried to reach out because of Teddy—gods, Teddy—Then again, it wasn't as if he had been up to reaching out, lately, and Andromeda was mourning for her husband, her daughter, and her son-in-law, all the while taking care of a baby.

Harry directed a somewhat more powerful-than-needed spell towards a pile of rubble that jerkily came together and slowly started resembling a flight of stairs.

He didn't want to feel that pain in his chest assaulting him every time he thought about something beyond his next spell, and his current tactic was just not thinking about anything beyond his next spell. It worked. Sometimes.

Another raindrop hit the window a few feet from his head. It was shaping up to be a real thunderstorm, though it wasn't quite there yet.

The shrunken broom he had been lugging around for the past three days was metaphorically burning a hole in his back pocket.

It wasn't that he'd meant to use it—but he hadn't been able to think of another place for it after McGonagall handed it to him. And hadn't that interaction been an absolute mess—in that it left him an absolute mess, at least.

/\

"Potter."

Harry jerked out of the weird headspace he could sometimes fall into when he had nothing to do but swish and flick his wand towards the next broken piece, and the next, and the—

"Yes, profes—I mean, Headmistress?"

Professor McGonagall sent him a look he couldn't decipher.

"It appears the Fiendfyre has finally burnt itself out, and the charms operating the Room of Requirement weren't completely destroyed. When a door was summoned by thinking of anything that may have survived, this was one of the items recovered."

She extended her arms, and Harry almost swallowed his tongue. He had no idea of how he hadn't noticed it before. McGonagall was holding a length of ebony wood, with an ash handle on one side and perfectly smooth birch twigs on the other, and a shining, Goblin-made foot grip between those.

He raised his wide eyes towards McGonagall's face. He caught the slight smirk on her lips before she relaxed in a more neutral expression.

"I believe this belongs to you," she said.

Harry looked back at the broom.

It was—impossibly, unmistakably—his Firebolt.

"But that's impossible," he said—his voice sounding to his ears as if it were coming from far away. He didn't reach for the broom even though his fingers twitched. "My Firebolt's never been anywhere near the Room. And I lost it almost a year ago."

McGonagall's eyes softened.

"It wouldn't be the first time Hogwarts surprises us by giving us exactly what we need, Harry."

\/

Harry tightened his grip on his wand as he thought back on how unhelpful that explanation had been. He'd ended up accepting the broom from McGonagall's hands and stuffing it in his pocket with a shrinking charm. He hadn't even been sure that it would work, most of his mind caught up in the impossibility of his Firebolt popping back up at Hogwarts of all places, and the rest contemplating the fact that McGonagall hadn't only inherited Dumbledore's position, but his penchant for cryptic one-liners.

Nonetheless, his takeaway from that conversation had been his old broom—that Sirius gave him—in his pocket and an itch in the back of his mind that he used to get when grounded for too long. He'd thought that a year of camping around the country with no access to a broom until he'd had to jump on one to escape certain death would have cured him of that, but alas.

And now that he thought about it, if the Room of Requirement could summon his broom from all the way across England, why couldn't it have done so when they'd needed the brooms to survive?

He gritted his teeth and pushed away the thought of cursed fire lapping at his heels. The sound of the rain outside helped.

Hell, maybe that was what he'd been unconsciously waiting for—water from the heavens so he could fly in an environment as different from the burning Room as it could be.

He finished connecting the newly repaired stairs to the next floor and thought about climbing them and continuing with the repairs. Then he cursed himself for being an impulsive Gryffindor, and for his brain being damaged, and for flying still feeling like the answer to all his issues even after a fucking war, and he opened the closest window with one hand while taking his broom from his pocket with the other.

He jumped out of the window even before his Firebolt was fully restored to its usual length. Mounting the broom and adjusting midair felt like leaving all his problems behind.

Bloody hell, he'd missed this.

The adrenaline rushed through his veins as the cold surged against his skin. He could see nothing beyond the grey of rain slashing the sky, hear nothing beyond the wind rushing around him. In minutes, he was soaking wet and shivering, but the feeling of relief blooming in his chest hadn't been this all-encompassing even after seeing Voldemort fall.

This was what he'd needed, and he started thinking about something he could offer Professor McGonagall to thank her as he looped around, high up over the Hogwarts grounds.

Harry flew, letting the rain hit his cheeks like tiny needles that drew no blood, and the sense-memory of fire chasing him as the smoke choked him was far from his mind.

Then the rain stopped. It was so sudden that Harry turned on himself as if by looking back he would discover he'd just outflown it a little.

What he saw instead was the sun shining like it'd been personally offended by the rain obscuring its brilliance for a while.

Harry threw up a hand to protect his eyes, mouth twisting in a scowl.

The sunlight reflected off the few, timid raindrops still falling after all strength had seemingly been sucked out of the storm. It made for the most brilliant rainbow Harry had ever seen in his life.

He started shivering harder, as the sun was strong enough to paint the sky but not to warm Harry when his clothes were completely drenched and he was hovering several dozen metres above the ground.

He stared at the rainbow.

It was mocking him.

He had wanted to fly under the rain, to be battered by the wind and half-blind as he threw himself and his Firebolt around, but even the sky seemed intent on making him face what he was running from.

A symbol of hope, really?

Too many had already died, and Harry was breathing hard as he clenched the handle of his broom. It was probably from physical exertion. Mostly, at least. He couldn't be panting as he stared unblinking at a stupid rainbow because thoughts that he didn't want to have were rushing through his head.

So what if they were rebuilding Hogwarts? It would always bear the scars, just as every student who'd shared the castle with the Carrows would. Teddy would grow up without his parents. George had lost his twin. And—And—Names and faces cluttered his brain even as the rainbow shone brightly in front of his eyes, and Harry clenched them tight and took—something, anything—a piece of rubble that had ended up in his pocket and threw it in the rainbow's direction as hard as he could, snarling. It, of course, did absolutely nothing.

Harry was contemplating doing something else dumb—like starting to scream at the sky like any perfectly adjusted teenager would—when noise from far below him surprised him out of his spiralling thoughts.

A crowd had formed in front of the castle, people coming out on the wet grass to make space for the ones still inside, everyone with their heads turned towards the sun and the rainbow shining on them.

Harry couldn't hear or even properly see them from where he was, but he could distinguish Hagrid's distinct shape and maybe McGonagall next to him, and the snippets of sound carried by the wind were cheerful and excited.

Harry's hands trembled on his broom. His breaths were still too fast.

He should let someone talk him into visiting the Burrow, shouldn't he? And he should write to Andromeda if he wanted to… see Teddy, or anything.

Bloody hell.

It was just a rainbow.