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The staff room is untouched, and it’s almost like travelling back in time to step inside it: where there is ruin and debris on one side of the door, on the other there is no sign of anything amiss save the fire gone cold in the grate. They trickle in one by one, though the force of habit means they are all assembled by half nine at the latest, Sybil arriving last with her hair a mess and her eyes slightly unfocused behind her glasses.
They have no more excuse to delay, now.
There is a long moment where no one knows who should begin, and finally Minerva summons a blank piece of parchment, ink, a quill and a small desk before speaking.
“I am aware that some of us, especially as Heads of House, have a larger obligation to console survivors than others; if anyone feels their time is better spent on that, then people come before the castle. Leave at any time. However, we do need to draw up a plan for how to restore the castle. I do not know if it will be possible to open again in September; if we can’t, we should decide if alternate arrangements should or could be made.”
Everyone nods. “If we split up, we can do a survey of the damage,” Filius says.
They divide up the school and the grounds, though they are assigned in pairs, never alone; there is no guarantee that no Death Eaters remain, and even if there had been, the last year has made them cautious. Minerva does not miss the way Filius suggests she pair up with Poppy, but allows it; at least he is not suggesting she sit out and rest.
It seems pointless to plan further when they do not know the extent of the necessary repairs, so they agree to meet back at lunch and assess whether they need more time. Lunch is a simple one of bread and cold meats left over from the last school dinner — many of the house elves are busy mourning the ones who were lost in the battle, and no one wants to disturb them.
It takes far longer than anyone would have guessed to note down all the damage. Indeed, they probably do not yet have a complete record, and will have to hope there are complete records somewhere of exactly how many suits of armour are meant to be in the corridors, how many rugs, how many statues. Some parts, like the staff room, are completely untouched, but they are few and far between. Some are completely destroyed and leave a gaping pit of despair in the stomachs of those who write it down. How can they possibly restore this in time for the new school year?
At last, when they have all returned, even more subdued than before, Minerva tells them all to go to bed early. There is no point working themselves to the bone yet, and the exhaustion is weighing on her more than she would like to admit.
Work on the castle is stalled in the coming days by funerals — an endless procession of funerals, from a wake to the next burial, over and over. Minerva does not cry at all of them, but her heart aches at what Voldemort has snatched away from them all, and the students she will never see graduate.
She forces herself to look down at the too-small casket as she throws a shovelful of dirt onto the coffin of Colin Creevey before handing the shovel to the next person in line.
When she is not attending funerals, she immerses herself in books to find out what spells will be required to rebuild the castle. Some of the books are so old she would guess they hadn’t been opened since the last fortification of Hogwarts, an incident she cannot find any information on but happened in 1908. Poppy watches her take potions every day, narrow-eyed until Minerva has swallowed every drop, and she feels strength return to her bit by bit.
The load-bearing structures of the castle come first, hastily reinforced during that first survey and properly repaired in the following month. From there, the masonry in the Entrance Hall and the staircases. As time grinds ever closer to the new school year it becomes clear that they will not be able to deliver a school exactly as it was before everything — before the Year of Death Eaters, or the Reign of Snape, or whatever the historians would call it — and focus on clearing away debris and making sure everything has walls and floors and nothing leaks.
The only place they concentrate on the decorations is the common rooms. The Heads of House all agree that they are the most essential part of the castle for making the students feel a sense of normality, a sense of home and belonging, so they painstakingly restore each common room to their best approximation of how it was. For the Slytherin Common Room, this means removing all pro-Voldemort decoration and graffiti. For the other common rooms, there is new furniture to purchase, new carpet to be laid, new wall hangings to be commissioned. Minerva does not ask if anyone else is nauseated by the evidence of a battle inside the place that is meant to be the students’ home away from home, the scorch marks marring the Gryffindor noticeboard and the broken Ravenclaw display cabinets.
When Pomona opens the secret doorway in the Hufflepuff Common Room that functioned during that awful year as a saferoom, she weeps openly at the teddy bear abandoned on the floor. There is no name tag to identify its owner, but Pomona picks it up gently and puts it pride of place above the fireplace so it can’t be missed upon everyone’s return.
For they will return. The castle may not be exactly as it was, and there will have to be more work done — there are entire corridors that have been sectioned off as out-of-bounds because they haven’t been able to fix them yet — but Minerva McGonagall stands in the Entrance Hall and admires the new crop of First Years (bigger than the last few, now that no one is too afraid to send their child out of sight). She is usually stern as she explains the Sorting, but this time she allows herself a smile.
What had seemed so impossible had been accomplished. They have a school again, and soon it will be filled with the chatter and laughter of children, and the bright-eyed youngsters before her hadn’t witnessed the terror of the year before. They never will.
They have won.