Dean picked himself up off the cold stones -- his cheek sticky with sweat, his chest heaving with the exertion. He was depleted but the battle still waged on around him. It must have been going on for hours but still looked like no side was gaining any ground. He had a sinking feeling it wouldn't be over until one entire side was exterminated.
The walls of the corridor where he was stationed had all but caved in. He could see into several classrooms, now mostly empty of their tables and chairs since everyone had taken to using them as weapons. (Earlier he saw Professor Sinistra blast through the wall to hurl anything within wand's reach at those invading.) There was also a large hole in the outside wall, opening up to the darkening sky. A Death Eater, his face distorted in rage, literally hung from his fingertips at the top of the hole, firing beams of green light into the crowd. He didn’t seem to care who was hit by his spell, aiming wildly.
Crouching behind a gilt frame that must have housed a portrait at one time, Dean tried to catch his breath. This was all too much. Too much after half a year of living off campfire beans and paranoia. Naively, he thought the time at Shell Cottage had healed him, made him stronger. ("Like a phoenix", he remembered Luna saying, softly brushing her fingers through his hair. "We rise from the fire stronger than we started.") But maybe it just made him forget how hard everything was.
He peeked out from behind the frame to survey the battlefield again. The Death Eater was now standing in front of the hole leading outside. There sky was lit with spells being fired from the fight down below. Dean was up on the fourth floor, so even if he took out that Death Eater, he wouldn't be able to escape through the hole. Plus, his side was low in numbers. He saw a few older people he didn't know, a body heaped in the corner that he didn't try to recognize, and Susan Bones with her hair falling out of her ponytail still firing stunning spells at the group at the other end of the hall. She looked how Dean felt -- tired and beaten. But, when Susan looked his way, he also saw the fight still in her. Susan wasn't about to give up while she could still stand and that alone was enough to rejuvenate him.
At least, it gave him the strength to stand up behind the frame he was using for cover and fire a couple stunning spells at the Death Eaters. But he had barely gotten off two spells when suddenly all the fighting stopped. A voice boomed through the castle, hard and sickening. Harry Potter is dead, the voice announced vibrating off the stone around him. Terrified, Dean looked over at Susan but her eyes reflected the feeling back to him. They both knew it was over and the other side had won.
---
The first thing he noticed as he entered the Great Hall was the lack of injuries. There were a few people being treated by Madam Pompfrey, a few more with bloody hands or heads. Lavender was really the worst for the wear, her face and neck puckered with fresh scars -- wounds someone had tried and failed to heal completely. She lay on her back with her eyes closed and looked like she was barely breathing. The scars would fade a little after time, but she would probably be up and moving before the sun rose in a few hours. (Not to say nothing of the mental scars she would be left with, but at least she would be left.)
The Great Hall was filled with the dead. Someone had lined them up in a row by the far wall and many bodies were surrounded with mourning loved ones. There were more dead than alive but more alive than injured and the more Dean thought about it, the worse it seemed.
He grew up watching action movies before he had even heard of Hogwarts and magic. People battled – good versus evil with good usually coming out on top but not without its own causalities. But usually the injured soldiers lay in hospital beds to be nursed back to health for several months. Someone lost a limb or a piece of their nose or almost bled out before they could be stitched back up.
Here, he looked around the room and saw no one that fit that description. The realization hit him suddenly, like a cold punch to the gut. No one tried to disarm, to stun, to maim the enemy at this battle. He recalled the green lights spitting across the battlefield. Everyone aimed to kill.
The thought made him literally sick to his stomach and he rushed back to the door, reaching the entrance-way before stumbling to his knees ready to throw up. But instead he just dry heaved, feeling the need to purge his system but there was nothing there. He felt empty, so he pressed his forehead to the cool, stone floor and tried to breathe.
He couldn't have been kneeling for long before he felt icy fingers touch the back of his neck. He didn't have to look up to know it was Luna.
"It's too much," he whispered, his lips almost touching the floor. He wished the ground would swallow him up so no one would know he was crying. (He hadn't lost anyone here, he didn't think. His family was safe away from the battle so what did he have to cry about?)
"No," Luna told him and he felt her crouch down next to his head. Her cold, tiny fingers trailed from his neck to his chin and she gently pushed it up so she could look at him. Dean was embarrassed. He was supposed to be brave, after all, but he felt like everything had fallen apart. He didn't even know if he had a family to go home to. "It's a lot," she continued, her voice still airy, still hopeful, still exactly like Luna had sounded before she was kidnapped (and manipulated and tortured but never broken, Dean realized for the first time). "It's a lot but it's not too much." Dean saw that her eyes were red-rimmed, too.
---
The castle was eerily quiet after the long battle. The Great Hall behind them was full of hushed sobs but no small talk, no chatter. So different than the days he spent there as a child. (Even last year he was a child, more concerned with sports and how to get out of doing homework than anything that really mattered, than the life and death situation happening around him.) Now he felt like an old man, tired down to his bones. Even when he was sleeping on the ground with only a goblin for company, Dean still had energy. Now, as he sat on the last step of the staircase across from the Great Hall entrance, he wished he could sleep.
Luna slipped her pale fingers between Dean's like she was sliding on a glove. Almost unconsciously, he squeezed her hand, wondering what she was thinking, why they were doing this. It was comforting -- to have someone, to hold someone when so many others around them didn't have that opportunity. He didn't have the strength to survey the dead like Luna had earlier. But he didn't need to because she whispered the names to him. She knew every one, even the Death Eaters whose bodies Hagrid lined up outside the castle. "Tonks," she said, her lips close to his ear, her voice so soft he had to strain to hear it. "Lupin, Fred, Professor Snape, Yaxley, Lord Voldemort." Her voice almost tripped over the last name but Dean smiled and squeezed her hand again, encouraging her to go on. This was cathartic for her, he knew. When they sat together on the wet beach near Shell Cottage, she would whisper names of those they lost. (He remembered the first time she leaned her body into his and croaked out the words, "Dumbledore, Moody, Dobby, my mom." She was trying to control the feeling of loss that threatened to swallow her up. "Just because something doesn't make sense," he told her, his voice thick and his lips right next to her ear. "Doesn't mean it has to control you.")
---
The sun was setting again. The battle lasted a day at least (Dean remembered watching the sun set as Harry's body was carried out of the forest) and the aftermath was another. Two days that felt like a lifetime. Two days that settled heavy on his shoulders, heavy on his heart.
Dean was standing on the front steps of the castle, looking out over the burnt and broken stone path. Bodies were piled in the courtyard just hours earlier -- Death Eaters that no one mourned over -- but now all that remained were the scorch marks and overturned stones. Not a single drop of blood marred the ground. A dragon could have landed by these steps and spit at the door for all the destruction he saw. You couldn't tell a dozen people died here. (A dozen, Dean wants to laugh at that thought. Who will count the dead today? More than a dozen, he's sure, just by the line in the Great Hall. But what about those who lost their life on the way to battle? How many causalities will historians find when they look at the Second Wizarding War?)
As he stood there, surveying the scene and lost in thought, a row of brooms danced out the door past him. Professor Flitwick followed, his wand swinging back and forth like a conductor's baton. The brooms continued out to the stone patio, their tips sliding across the uneven surface. It was like the ghosts were cleaning up after themselves, but of course Dean knew that ghosts could be seen and that no one who died here today tethered themselves in such a way. ("A cowardly thing," Sir Nicholas told him once. "To leave a shadow of yourself on earth, unable to move on to the beyond. Death is the final adventure and one I'll never experience.")
---
"Time to go," Neville said, clapping him on the shoulder. It was an odd gesture but Neville had grown a lot over the last year. He wasn't the same boy Dean remembered from sixth year. More proof that everyone was affected by the war, not just the Muggleborns.
"Go where?" Dean asked, looking over at his friend as the rising sun filtered through the Common Room windows.
"Home." Neville looked at him quizzically. "Where else?"
Where else, Dean thought, looking around the room at those remaining. They sent the dead and their families home. Where possible, parents came to collect their children. Even some Professors had left the castle, though no one was sure where they could be headed. Dean spent the night in the Gryffindor Common Room, looking for some kind of comfort from his old home. He didn't find it there.
The dormitories were much smaller than he remembered. Neville explained that the rooms just vanished, like Hogwarts knew half the Gryffindor class wasn't returning. The sad and tired atmosphere from the Great Hall was carried up to the towers. Those that stayed the third night were ones that really had no one else to go.
Ron and Ginny left on the first night with their family. A professor escorted Dennis with this brother's body back to his family. Lavender's mother picked her up, still scarred and crying but on her feet. Pavarti and her sister had a huge argument with their father in the middle of the Great Hall that ended with both girls leaving with him.
Now it was him and Neville, Harry staring endlessly into the fire, Hermione flipping pages in a book, and Angelina sitting on the windowsill looking out the window. The great house of Gryffindor was reduced to these five children, every one of them lost and broken.
"I didn't tell my mum, you know," Dean finally says. "I just told her I was going to school like normal. Packed my trunk up and she let me off at the train station." He sighed. "I told her I was too old to have her waving to me on the platform. None of my friends' parents came. I said bye at the car door and she drove away."
For all she knew, Dean was safe and sound at school. He wondered if she wrote to him. He wondered if she had sent a Christmas gift. He hadn't sent her a single letter. His mother was smart, she probably figured something was up.
"She's going to be pretty mad."
Neville looked at his feet and shifted his weight back and forth. "She'll be happ you're safe and home. Don't worry too much about it."
His stomach sunk. Here he was complaining about getting in trouble when Neville had a much different set of problems. And both of them kind of had it easy compared to some of the others.
("Don't compare your pain to someone else's," he remembered Luna's voice again. "Everyone hurts differently. Yours isn't any less valid because you still have a mother.")
"I have to go," Dean said suddenly, literally running for the portrait exit before Neville could respond.
He flew through the castle. The halls were empty and quiet, causing his footsteps to echo around him. He didn't know where to find her but he figured she wouldn't be up in Ravenclaw Tower. His first stop was the Great Hall. It was mostly empty except for professors. He scanned the room but didn't see her so he had to stop and think about where to actually find her.
"Mr. Thomas," he heard from the room behind him. Professor Sprout looked weary but smiled at him. "Can I help you with something?"
"Um, I was just looking for Luna. Have you seen her?"
"Oh dear, I think she was headed home this morning but you may find her by the lake."
Dean thanked the professor and started running again. He was nearly out of the breath by the time he reached the lake edge. The sun was finally out, brightening up the whole campus. The light shone off the lake, making it had to see Luna standing there.
She was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, having discarded her dirty robes from the battle. Her hair was tied back into a ponytail at the nape of her neck and she was rocking back and forth from her heels to her toes.
"Hey!" Dean called, probably louder than was necessary. She turned back to look at him and smiled the brightest smile he had seen in a year.
"Dean," she said and took a step towards him. It was like she was standing out here waiting for him. (Knowing Luna, that was completely possible. She always knew him better than he knew himself.)
"I heard you were headed home."
"Oh in a bit," she confessed. "Daddy doesn't want to come pick me up so I have to travel into Hogsmeade to Apparate home. Are you going home soon?"
Dean shrugged. "I guess I was going to take the next train into London and call my mum from there. She's probably worried."
"Probably," Luna nodded. It was like they were having a totally normal conversation between classes or something.
"I wanted to ask you something," he finally found the courage to say. She just cocked her head to the side and waited. "Um, do you think I could see you this summer? I mean maybe we could go to the beach or something?"
"I would like that."
They both didn't say anything for a minute.
Luna spoke first. "You can kiss me now, Dean. If you want."
He couldn't help but smile at that. He closed the gap between them, laced his fingers through hers, and finally kissed her.