The Hat did not say HA!, partly because it was one letter short of him name (well, the name the humans called him anyway), and also because he couldn't very well say that to someone he had just lectured on seemliness and so on. HA! was not seemly, though perhaps called for, as he felt her shift from intense anger and slight pyromania to something like guilt and sadness. Well, good. Never mind that her guilt seemed to also involve yelling about people not dying and so on. To each their own. Human beings bent themselves out of shape trying to avoid their emotions, which was really odd, as that was so key to them being human at all. Weird creatures, he thought, not for the first time.

"You don't know what you're asking me, you... You millinery mistake! Or worse - you do, and you don't care, in which case, fuck you very much. A lot of people died and it's shit, yeah. But- well, why bother fighting for an old ruin?" 

"That brief respite from your lack of wit was nice," said the Hat, impressed by her usage and knowledge of the word 'millinery', "if short-lived. It's not an old ruin. It has cracks and dust and debris, like anything that has gone through what it went through. You were there, and you know that kind of thing takes time to recover from, even when you do have the benefit of organs and blood and legs that carry you elsewhere. The school is not dead, or dying. It is simply recovering, gestating. Lying fallow after a war. The fact that I am here at all," he stated, with some pride, "should tell you that." 

He hummed and huffed for a few seconds, and then spoke further. "You think I don't care - well, I'm a Hat, so my capacity is limited... it is a strange prospect for one who is not human, this business of caring. I support however that there is a resonance - it is not unnoticed, and I can see what it is to ask this of you. And yet, you may want to think about why I would ask at all, if there wasn't a real need to, or a real fighting chance."