After the war

Cassiopeia

There was no blood on the wall.

Cassie sighed in relief. Someone must have cleaned it after... She continued walking.

Hogwarts was the same. They'd cleaned up the mess and fixed everything. It looked exactly the same. Yet something was different. Were the stones cleaner? Maybe the hallway was bigger? Or was it the windows?

She stopped at the Astronomy tower. It hurt to see the place. In fact, it hurt to walk around anywhere in Hogwarts. 

She realised that maybe it wasn't the building itself. Maybe she was the one who changed. The feelings were different too. What was once a place of joy was now the place where friends had died. Anywhere she went was a place where someone died. Constant reminders of losses.

Oh look, that's where Anne and Sarah B died, falling down to their death.

They shouldn't have been there in the first place. Cassie should have convinced them that it wasn't worth it. But they went anyway because Anne was stubborn and Sarah wouldn't have let her go alone. Was family truly worth that much? Was she wrong?

That's the hallway where Liliana fought the Death Eaters even though she was too young.

They were wrong. All of them. All Slytherins were not evil. Cassie would know. Because if evil meant to side with Voldemort, then it wasn't their fault, was it? Everyone had forgotten and most of them had stereotyped. Again.

There's the table that Henry laid as he bled.

It was clean. The mess gone as if it had never happened. But she knew it did. Mary had seen it. Cassie trusted her. She wasn't supposed to be out there either. 

The wall that fell down and suffocated the three 12-year old Hufflepuffs.

It was fixed. Like everything else in the castle. The things were all fixed. Perhaps not the people inside it. The families broken. Their places empty. The friend groups not knowing what to do.

That's the corner Michael tried to save those first year Ravenclaws.

Because he wouldn't let them go. Because people were missing and he decided that he was able to help. They were too young to go out and save people. That's what everyone said.

Cassie kept on going through the memories, each one hitting her as she continued her journey through the building.

Was this grieving? Or was it anger? She never was an expert on emotions. 

There's the place that her father died, fighting for the wrong side.

She couldn't break down. Not now. Not when the rest were depending on her. Not when she had her pride to think about. She kept those overflowing feelings bottled up in a jar inside the deepest darkest parts of her mind. 

Rule 1: Don't break down.

Rule 2: She wasn't important. 

Rule 3: Try your best.

She stopped thinking about the deaths.