After

A short while after the sun had risen Minerva went back to work and repaired the wall until she was back on the floor. It was midmorning, as she was sweeping up glass to be restored later that she felt something small hit her in the back, right along the scar that ran from her left shoulder to her right hip. She turned and found Peeves, hanging upside down in midair. She gave him a stern look, pretending she wasn’t glad to see him. 

“I can say I didn’t expect you to be here. Hasn’t this place turned too sad for a poltergeist?” She asked as Peeves, somewhat subdued, which was far from normal, stared at her cross-eyed.

He laughed shortly and flipped the right way up again. He answered in his odd, pitched voice, “Ha! SAD?? A few hundred years of Happy Mischief Making and she thinks that one little kerfuffle with Voldesnore could send me away? Perhaps she hoped.” He blew a raspberry at her and then rained dust down over her head. Minerva was almost amused at him. 

“Perhaps I did,” She answered, though she smiled just barely. “Now go away.” 

He swooped up high and grabbed a candle from midair, smashing it to the floor and laughing in glee. “I did the same thing when they were here! Should have seen their faces!” He swooped through the air again.

Minerva sighed and replaced the candle, reforming the wax and sending it back up above the hall. She put on a stern voice and said, “Yes, Yes, you did your duty well, Peeves. Now don’t make my job any harder than it has to be you Pestiferous Poltergeist.” 

“OOooOOOh, She’s Mc-gonna-yell at me!” The Poltergeist cartwheeled midair and shouted in a mocking voice, “What’s she McGonna do about it?” 

“Remember, I am the headteacher now…” Minerva said, her voice edged with an implicit threat. “I’ll go back to finding some way to get rid of you.” 

“HA! She thinks she can get rid of me?! HA!” Peeves swooped down and dropped a pebble-sized piece of stone on her shoulder. Just enough to irritate, not enough to hurt, because he knows what she’s going to say next. 

“Don’t make me call the Bloody Baron…” She threatened, raising one eyebrow.

Peeves laughed, but not as sincerely as before. “Oooh, little mischief Minnie thinks she’s so big.” He complained, scattering dust on his way out the door. 

She remembered how she and the Poltergeist had once been allies rather than rivals. Peeves had sometimes double-crossed her but was usually helpful when it came to her school-day antics. She almost managed a chuckle when she thought about how she could have given the Weasley twins a run for their money...

The Weasley twins. Her slight smile faded away again. Fred. Oh, why? Why split them up like that? Why take one from the other when they were always a team? 

She tried to turn her attention back to the stonework. She tried ignoring the fact that she was standing across the room from where one twin had clutched the other’s lifeless form, his parents and surviving siblings unable to keep from wailing with grief. She could almost hear Molly screaming. 

She went back to work, with the echo of those screams ringing in her ears. 

Not all scars are physical, some are the sounds and sights scarred in the mind. The way she could still see bodies that had already been collected spread across the floor of the hall. The way she could hear the stone she was repairing being blasted apart and raining down on the hall and everyone in it. The way she could see glass glinting on the floor in front of the window she had already repaired, or where she had already swept it up, where there were no shards left. The way she could hear the screaming and the shouting of mid-battle in the silent hall.

And yet what are scars except for the proof of survival? What are scars except for the remnants of open wounds? 

But perhaps those non-existent sights and sounds were open wounds themselves. Perhaps someday, when all was righted and the candles and torches were lit or the sky was clear and bright with sun or stars she would look at this hall and see the joy first. 

She wound her way through the main corridor toward the kitchens. She was alive, so she had better try and stay that way. You have to eat to live. 

The corridor leading to the kitchens, and the Hufflepuff Common room, was blocked by fallen columns and a few broken suits of armor. Minerva indulged in repairing the metal soldiers who had fought valiantly after she’d animated them. She placed them proudly against the walls she had repaired yesterday on either side of where the columns should stand. Then she raised the columns too, turning the pieces until the patterned carvings matched and settling them on either side of the entrance to the corridor, sealing the broken stone pieces together again. 

As she stepped past the entrance she noted another major problem, the ceiling of the ground floor had given way and offered a clear view up into the first floor above. Right into one of the Arithmancy classrooms. All of the desks and shelves and other furniture and tools had fallen through and broken when they landed in the corridor before her. Now they blocked her path. 

She heaved a sigh and began work on that as well. Vanishing the remnants of chairs and setting aside books along the wall of the corridor to be sorted and repaired or replaced as necessary. She rid the area of non-essential building materials before reconstructing the floor above from where she stood, re-sealing the corridor above her head and enabling her to pass through to the steps that led to where the corridor split toward either Hufflepuff dormitory or the kitchens. There was less damage here, the blockage must have made the corridor impassable early on in the battle. The kitchens were nearly unscathed, though the tapestry had been knocked down from the wall. As she opened the door to the kitchens it struck her so strange that there were still some places within these walls that were physically untouched by the violence that had happened there. It felt as if the whole place had been razed to the ground. It felt as if, by crossing the threshold, Tom Riddle had defiled the entirety of it. And yet it was not so, as the kitchens evidenced. 

Most of the knives were missing, of course, after the house elves had joined the revolt and done their best to bring down Death Eaters by stabbing them in the shins. Minerva had been very proud to call them her colleagues at that moment. She had sent them out of the school though, when all was said and done, they deserved their rest and recovery too. Some had gone to stay in the Three Broomsticks with Madam Rosmerta and were no doubt meticulously cleaning it, others had gone with the Kreacher to 12 Grimmauld Place and were very likely being looked after by Hermione.

She focused on those happier thoughts as she searched around the less-than-organised kitchen in pursuit of tea. If she could only focus on something besides the blood stains that still littered the floors of her beloved school, then she might make it through some kind of meal without being sick.