Chapter 8
Another day, another morning waking up to her normal surroundings when absolutely nothing was normal. She almost wished that there were something wrong in her rooms, torn curtains or broken mirrors, anything that would remind her that it was all different now.
She had been through wars before, this wasn’t her first battle, and it wouldn’t even necessarily be considered the worst that she had been through except for the location.
They brought this war to her front door and then barged their way into her home. Every other battle and skirmish that she really recalled had taken place outside the gates of Hogwarts, away from her beloved school. Not now. Now it was right there, the horror of war was right there on the walls of the home she lived in, the place she belonged to. And the combatants weren’t her age, none older than her, as they had been in wars before. She was the oldest person in the fray, the most experienced in battle, one of the best duelists, and one of the longest-surviving veterans of war. The guilt she felt for living was immense.
How was it that she lived when students as young as fifteen were lying elsewhere dead? She had survived more than her fair share, she should not be alive, it was a simple rule of percentages. She had been through so many wars and battles and seen so many other people die at her side, so how did she make it this far? She simply should not be alive.
That was the constant refrain in her thoughts as she finished the basic elements of the first-floor corridor from the grand staircase to the Arithmancy department. Cracks disappeared from flagstones. Broken trophy cases and portrait frames were gathered up and set aside for later. Bloodstains were lifted from places she hadn’t noticed before. Burn marks were carefully scrubbed from the walls. All the while she wondered how it could be that she was still there to repair this place when so many were not and never would be.
Scenes of death replayed in her mind as she repaired the courtyard and the facade of the building with the sun still rising behind her. Putting up pillars and walls, fixing flagstones and pavers, she was simply putting things back where they belonged, back where they had always been. It struck her how she could remember such trivial details of this school and could recall exactly how things should look from different angles and the minor damages that had been there as long as she could remember. Which was a very long time. Three wars worth of time.
She looked out over the landscape she’d been looking out over for decades and decades, nearly a hundred years. She tried to remember what it was like to be fifteen. She wasn’t sure she could reach that far back in time. She knew what fifteen-year-olds were like, to be sure, she’d taught enough of them to know how they behaved, but she couldn’t really recall her own fifteenth year. She’d lived so many years that she couldn’t remember her adolescence clearly, while some of her students never made it past that fifteenth year. They were too young to be dead and she simply should not be alive.
She repaired a large, decorative planter that had been smashed against a wall by a troll, thankfully just missing Luna Lovegood. She thought of how Pomona would have to come back and fix all the greenery that was supposed to be around the school at this time of year. She hoped Pomona would come back. Merlin knows that she wouldn’t blame any of them for not wanting to, she didn’t really want to be there now.
She knew she was going to have to make peace with this living at some point. She knew that she couldn’t live in regret for the rest of her life, even if she did regret having this life at the expense of the children she was supposed to protect.
She held on to hope that after things were set to rights it would be bearable to walk the corridors and classrooms she had loved for so many years. Hoped it would someday be bearable to have survived to be the headmistress of the school where she had been a student. Hoped it would be bearable to have lived when she simply should not be alive.