HOGWARTS GRADUATION [Open to all Hogwarts Students]

[Admin Sora]

MAY 20th 2024

The events of two days ago..... Were tragic. Both the Durmstrang ship and Beauxbaton carriage had exploded on their journey's home. Most of the foreign students and staff had been killed but a few survived, part in thanks due to the Ministry's fast rescue response. The surviving foreigners had all been transferred to St. Mungos to recover while the three Governments tried to piece together what had happened. In the end, a letter was received by the French Ministry from a terrorist group that had been causing them grief for years. These individuals claimed responsibility of both explosions. It seemed the Norwegian Ministry (that Durmstrang belonged to) had received a threat earlier that year to withdraw from the tournament but refused to heed the threat. And this was the outcome..

So, in light of the tragedy, Hogwarts, Durmstrang, and Beauxbaton unanimously declared the school year would end two weeks early and exams would be cancelled.

(If you would like to do a one-shot about your Hogwarts student's reactions to the events, post it here! Do whatever you'd like! This should take place the day your character returns home. They can be packing, on the train, enjoying their last breakfast, whatever you'd like!

P.S. ALL non played students died. That does included dropped characters as well! So the only potential survivors are those played by members that choose to keep their student alive.)

[maxima ruqayyah greyback]

Max had thought for certain that it was a prank. The Durmstrang Ship and the Beauxbatons Carriage had been destroyed. At first, what she had heard was that everyone was killed, that both schools’ students and staff had perished. And then there had been a glimmer of hope—reports that some had survived. There was a chance, a small chance, that Elias was still alive. She had held onto that hope, desperately, until she had the worst confirmed: Elias hadn’t been taken to St. Mungo’s. He was among the dead.

She didn’t want to return home. She couldn’t. She couldn’t think of anywhere in the world that she wanted to be more than Hogwarts, around everyone else who was trying to process the tragedy along with her. Her O.W.L.s were cancelled, and the last rumor she had heard from one of her classmates was that the school would be using their predicted grades to determine what they would have gotten on the exams, had they been able to sit them.

What was supposed to have been an occasion filled with happiness was anything but. She wasn’t sure how many times she had told others, “Write me,” that morning, but she knew that it had been more than she would have under any other circumstances. She needed to know that she wasn’t the only one who felt hollow. Whenever she wasn’t thinking about how she needed to pack her belongings back into her trunk, she was thinking about what Elias’s last moments must have been like. Had he felt pain? Had he suffered? Had it been instantaneous?

He had died—so many people from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang had died. As the list of names was confirmed, she could only recognize a handful, at most. Some she didn’t think she had met, until she realized that she had run into them at some point or another. Chantal Dembélé—hadn’t she been at a GSA meeting? How many others had she walked past over the course of the year without knowing their names? What had they aspired to be once the year was over? None of them had ever gotten their chance, and Max began to feel immensely guilty for ever having wanted to die.

Time. Life. Death. It was all so short—that same message replayed in her head and caused her cheeks to sting from tears that she hadn’t wanted to cry. Jamie. Georgie. Lance. Quinn. Lily. Her mind filled with the names of everyone for whom she cared even a little bit. She didn’t know who to find first to remind them that she cared about them. Just in case something happened on the train—in case something happened at King’s Cross again—she wanted them to know that they had meant something to her. Just in case.

[Irina Rose Krum]

A day that should have been one of the happier ones in Irina’s time at Hogwarts, but instead she was a jumbled up mess. So many things had rushed through her head in the past forty eight hours. Starting with the obvious, her vision that day in the library. She had not thought too much of it because she had just been dozing off, she hadn’t been in a full REM cycle sleep session as was normal for her visions. She had also not actually SEEN anything, she just heard screams and explosions. The day the carriage and ship had left it was pretty normal; she knew Anna was sad to see Oscar go, but she also knew they’d be reuniting just after graduation so it wasn’t a big deal. They had started to filter back into the castle; Irina had lingered on the grounds due to the beautiful weather and wanting to have another go at climbing the tree she and Iggy had discovered last month. She had been able to climb to the top of course, but she was pretty confident she could do it in double time. But as she had started to head towards the other bank of the lake, it became obvious that something was going terribly wrong. People were shouting, screaming, something about the two schools. Irina had run closer to try and hear what was going on. Explosions, dead, injured, missing. Irina hadn’t remembered falling to her knees after realizing what had just happened, but she found herself on all fours, struggling to breathe properly. What she had seen had been a message, a vision, and once again she had been powerless to stop it. She had slammed her palms into the ground angrily; why give her this Clairvoyancy if she had no power to change the future? She was frustratedly resigned. Of course it wasn’t her job to try and change the future, nobody could actually accomplish that. But Irina, who had been cursed with the visions of catastrophes to come, truly wish she could.

As the reports came in, more concrete with every hour, Irina had felt something else; relief. If Daniel and she hadn’t broken up, he wouldn’t have returned to Durmstrang until today. If he hadn’t returned until today, he would have been on the Durmstrang ship when it exploded. If he had been on the ship, he would have likely been killed. There were rumors that some survived due to the Ministry's rescue mission, but nothing and no one was confirmed. All Irina knew for certain was that someone who, despite breaking her heart into a million pieces, she cared about deeply had been safely tucked away at Durmstrang, away from explosions, and away from the thousands of emotions everyone was currently feeling. After thinking about her relief though, Irina had felt guilty. Plenty of people hadn’t been so lucky. She wasn’t even positive Anna’s Oscar had made it through, and she knew the way her friend felt about the boy from Beauxbatons was very close to how she’d felt about Daniel. Anna should have been riding on a high, the Triwizard Champion, in love. Now….well, Irina had no idea what was going through her head. The more she thought about what had happened, the more emotional she got. People she had grown accustomed to seeing in the hallways despite their pale blue or blood red robes were now gone, their lives snuffed out like a candle. Even Emile, who Irina had been at odds with since the minute he stepped out of the carriage, he didn’t deserve to have it all end like this.

So here she was, graduating, moving on to the Cursebreaking program at Gringotts. And all Irina Krum could think about was the tragedy that had befallen them two days prior. She barely registered the speeches, clapped mindlessly when others did, and hugged her family with the emotion of a teaspoon. Somewhere inside, she felt ironic; if Daniel were only here now, he’d feel like a normal person. Irina had been so worn out from all the emotions of the past two days it had dissolved into feeling nothing.

How does one come back from feeling nothing?