“I know. I know.” If anything, the two were a prime example of that statement. “It’s just harder that way.” That, in all truth, was the core of it. Susan had long resigned herself to the fact that, no matter how resilient and optimistic she could act, there was no hope for her living an easy life, but she wished nothing else for the girl next to her - Hannah still had a shot, she believed.
The wall she was about to paint was a part of her daily life so often it had simply blurred in the background as the setting of many hours throughout the years. It was so damn close to the Hufflepuff table that she was certain at least a few of the photographs filling up scrapbooks under her bed (and in her closet at home, a now empty house) featured it. She’d leaned against it a few times while chatting with people. Certainly felt it cold on her back at least once while kissing some girl while the Great Hall was mostly empty. Hogwarts and all of its walls were a part of her life, so taken for granted that they simply blurred as the background, and now it no longer had that privilege. Susan held back before almost reminding the other girl how the two and Justin had a photograph by that wall, fourth year perhaps, likely near Christmas because she distinctively remembered the shiny decorations on it, but then she was silent. Perhaps she wanted to spare Hannah of the notion that their home was corrupted beyond repair, a true battleground. Perhaps she simply didn’t want to say it out loud and feel those same tears fall down her cheeks. Perhaps she believed Hannah already had recalled that anyway. She’d make sure to write it in her diary later and spare them the words, and the time - after all, they were doing something beyond dangerous and risked being caught at any time.
With that, Susan let go of her friend’s hand and instead grabbed another brush from the paint can and, letter by letter, each bold and large, wrote one name. SOPHIE BONES. By her side was Hannah, with the same intense energy, writing another just as painful name. Not far from them others wrote. AMELIA BONES - another name, and for a moment Susan considered how many others with the same on-the-nose surname could fit in there. OLIVER BONES. The father the same vile creatures took away from her before she could even remember his face. FRANCIS BONES. COLLEEN BONES. The pillars of her once great family, the loving greatparents who never got to meet her. EDGAR BONES. Her uncle, a soldier for the rebellion, a martyr. HELENA BONES. DAHLIA BONES. OSCAR BONES. MARTIN BONES. With him was his wife and their three children. In the end, she decided to keep only the two latest injustices, but in her mind, every wall dripped in paint, with the name of her family in it. “They’d be proud of us, I reckon.” The words came as but a whisper, and her eyes were still stuck on the wall. “She’d be proud of you,” Susan spoke with a sad smile on her lips. “There’ll be a storm in here tomorrow. Kinda makes you miss little Umbridge.”
Hannah shrugged a little. She found comfort in sadness -- a fact that scared her sometimes, that worried her -- and didn’t find it hard to indulge in her misery. ( Maybe that was the issue, that she was so comfortable with being depressed and upset, that she could hardly imagine feeling light ever again. ) “I don’t know. I can’t just be angry.” If she were to get rid of her sadness, and just be angry, she was quite sure that she’d explode.
She watched Susan for a moment, watched how the bristles of her brush pushed against the wall. And then she dipped into her paint herself, and wrote her mother’s name in cursive, her handwriting looped and round and not harsh at all. But her mother hadn’t been either --- she had been both an artist and art, a beauty in not only appearance, but action, too. Drops of red fell on the floor and Hannah looked at them and thought of them as blood for a moment. She didn’t clean it. Her mind flashed back to second year, when words had been painted with blood on the walls, too, with much more threatening messages. Those days, the castle had felt a bit foreign too, with an invisible evil taking Justin and others away from them. It was worse now. Now the walls were covered in the names of dead or missing friends and family, painted by those left behind. The evil at Hogwarts was all too visible and it took the shape of their headmaster and two of their teachers. Justin wasn’t lying in the Hospital Wing, nor was Hermione Granger. Hannah finished painting her mother’s name and looked at it, staring at it before letting her eyes fall on Sophie and Amelia Bones, too.
For a moment, she wondered how she was still standing. It felt like something was crumbling inside of her, even if she felt empowered, too. Susan said that those three women would be proud of them and Hannah didn’t doubt it. She nodded, took her hand again, squeezed it. “I think so, too. And your family ---” She knew that there were more names that Susan could have painted, that the options were endless just like her grief was and she wished she could take some of it and carry it for her. Her heart was large enough, she figured, and if it wasn’t, she’d let it shatter into a million pieces for Susan. For her she would. “I know that they’re proud of you, wherever they are.” Hannah noticed that she’d stopped crying, that her throat felt a little less tight, that she was feeling more anger than she had before. “Let them rage. They won’t be able to get these off,” she said, letting go of Susan’s hand so she could put down her bucket of paint and grab her wand. “If we do our work well.” A dry chuckle left her lips then, and she shook her head. “I can’t believe that Umbridge isn’t the worst teacher we’ve ever had. I --- it’s rather startling, really.”
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
origamiaround
izzy806
jbbartram-illu
blakekathryn
