Does anyone want to see deleted scenes that I never put in the book? Most are from 2016 and really cringe but might be interesting haha
* ° * ° *
There was a new notice put up all around the school on the twenty-first of April. Cyndee and Drew stopped in front of one to read it.
——— BY ORDER OF ———
The Ministry of Magic
Dolores Jane Umbridge (High Inquisitor) has replaced Albus Dumbledore as Head of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Cyndee made a disgusted noise, and Drew nearly threw up. So the stupid pink lady really had taken their real Headmaster's position.
She noticed that Millicent Bulstrode had a badge on, but she wasn't a prefect. Drew frowned and studied it. It had a fancy silver 'I' on it. "What's that?"
Millicent scowled at her. "Wouldn't you like to know, Mudblood." She shouldered past her.
"I would!" Drew shouted after her. "It's why I asked, dimwad!"
Cyndee was frowning. "She used to be pretty nice to you."
"Yeah, and so was Pansy. Umbridge is bringing out their true colours."
It was break time, so they hurried to the Slytherin Dungeon, where they quickly found out what was going on. Malfoy pranced up to her, tapping his badge imperiously. Cyndee let out a faint sigh of annoyance.
"Yes?" Drew asked dully. "You've got another privilege to show off, ferret? More proof that you've never earned anything through talent and hard work?"
He turned up his nose, "Know what this is?"
"I already made my guess. Has it not yet processed?"
He ignored her. "It means I'm part of the Inquisitorial Squad. They're a select group of students who are supportive of the Ministry of Magic, handpicked by Professor Umbridge. I can dock points from Houses."
"Good for you. Is this supposed to affect me in any way? I'm in Slytherin, idiot. Have fun taking points off your own House."
Malfoy seemed to remember this. "Right. Er, well, I'm still prefect, and I'll see to it that you get detention." A nasty sneer spread across his face, "I'll give you and all your friends detention with Filch. Every single day for the rest of the year."
Drew blinked.
He nodded smugly. "The Headmistress is trying to get him permission to use the shackles. Have fun, Mudblood."
She tried not to panic. Her mind did a quick recall of who was currently in the common room. The prefects weren't here to step in. She wondered if the short-term benefits of beating him up outweighed getting expelled.
Wilby had stood up and was coming towards them, but to their surprise, it was Cyndee who stepped forward first. "Are you sure? If you want to keep spouting all this discrimination, we'll just arrange for you to end up trapped and bleeding like in second year. Same people, too. Wouldn't that be nice? Good luck trying to give them detention."
Malfoy's jaw went slack, and he cast a nervous glance at Crabbe and Goyle. Cyndee had hit a nerve. He wasn't afraid of Drew anymore, but he was still scared of the people who'd attacked him. He lowered his voice, "You're lying. You don't — you don't even know who they were. You said you didn't."
She shrugged nonchalantly. "Want to test that?"
The turnip stared at them all. His scornful glare jumped to Blaise, "With a good family like yours, I can't believe you're hanging out with a crowd like this." He stormed off, his lackeys trailing.
Cyndee waited until they'd disappeared into the boy's dormitory, then sank down, looking terrified.
"Thanks, Cyndee, you saved me." Drew hugged her.
Cyndee smiled briefly and got up again. "I'm fine. And you're welcome."
"We really don't know who did it..." Drew mused. "I've always wondered." Malfoy had said it was two fourth or fifth years. Both boys, with dark hair and fair skin. Xavier told her he'd interrogated every single person in Slytherin of the right age and couldn't be sure who it was. Malfoy had refused to report it, and Xavier didn't care enough to continue investigating.
They could still be at Hogwarts for all they knew.
The moment was broken by a loud thump of someone flopping into a sofa.
Drew turned to the sound, seeing that it was Graham. While his sister was willowy, he was barrel-chested and Drew kept mistaking him for a boulder. Only there was no mistaking the fancy 'I' shining on his robes.
After making sure Cyndee really was fine, Drew got closer, and her nose wrinkled with disgust, "Why do you have an Inquisitorial Squad badge on?"
Graham sat up and took the pin off, sticking it in his pocket self-consciously. "She knew I helped the D.A. And she said I couldn't be the Quidditch Captain if I didn't join."
"Oh, so you just joined. What happened to being all righteous?"
He grunted with irritation. "Of course I had to. Quidditch is my life, okay? I want to be there to lead my team. And sure, most of my players are terrible this year. Crabbe and Goyle were the only Beaters who could hit anything at the tryouts. And Malfoy was a jerk and insisted I choose them. Hey, you should've tried out."
"Not interested. Plus, Crabbe slashed my Nimbus last time. Didn't Flint technically kick him off the team?"
Graham hesitated. "I won't let him do anything this time."
"This is not the point. The Inquisitorial Squad is evil. It's filled with prejudice and only exists to make Gryffindors more miserable."
"Believe me, I'm well aware of that, but I'm not planning on doing anything. I'll take off a few points here and there so Umbridge'll lay off me. Maybe from Fred and George. They're always doing something and I bet they wouldn't even care."
"Yeah, fine," she sighed.
She returned to her friends, who had taken over one of the couches. Cyndee was staring at the ceiling, a sign that she was talking to someone and didn't want to be bothered.
Wilby was still reading. She wondered if he was actually heeding what Trelawney had said about finding "him" this year, and that was why he was suddenly so keen to find his father. She wished he'd stop.
Eliza and Isabell were having a whisper-argument in the corner, which in the past would've amused her, but now it just made her sad. They both seemed very distraught, too.
Blaise was fixing his hair like he always was, so that was one person who had stayed the same. He looked at her in his hand mirror. "Angry at the injustice of the world?"
"That and everything else."
Montague stood up, pinning his badge on. "I'm going to go dock five points from a random Gryffindor," he announced to no one in particular.
Adrian Pucey did a bored wave, "Come back in one piece."
* ° * ° *
That night, Isabell appeared in the doorway of their room, face downcast. She appeared to be trembling, but it was hard to tell in the dim lighting.
"What's happened to you?" Drew yawned, in the process of wrapping herself up in blankets and trying not to knock Jinx off in the process.
"Eliza's being impossible," she admitted, voice wavering with emotion.
Drew stared at her, sitting up slightly. "Merlin, I didn't expect you to actually tell me. Pray not go on, I absolutely don't care."
Isabell walked straight to Drew's bedside, her expression tight. "I want to apologize."
Drew laughed harshly. "Oh really? Is that so. I'd love to hear the witty insult at the end of this 'apology'."
Isabell's green eyes were dead serious. "I'm being honest. I really am."
Drew flopped backwards, "No. I don't want to hear some cheap backstory that only fails to justify your behaviour."
"Okay, fine. I'll just say I'm sorry and leave it at that. I'm sorry for not defending you from Umbridge earlier...and for...being horrible in general."
The blonde swallowed but couldn't contain herself, "I still remember what you said to Malfoy last year. You said, 'At first I could dismiss you as immature and stupid'. And then I...I realized that's what I was. And worse, if I continued to be like that...in a time like this, with You-Know-Who back, I'd be on evil's side. I'd be on Voldemort's side."
She choked when she said the name and abruptly burst into sobs. She furiously wiped at her tears, but more kept coming.
Millicent turned over in annoyance, and Cyndee and Drew exchanged a conflicted look.
Isabell's tears sparkled in the lamplight as she gazed at her with pain, "My dad's a Muggle. He's a Muggle, and I've been saying all these terrible things because I was so afraid to get teased about it! It was only supposed to be armour, but it really was a weapon and I am so so sorry. I felt like if I stopped my fall would be even bigger, but that was such a stupid excuse...And he has no idea...I can't believe myself. I can't..."
Drew had no clue what to feel, but she didn't have much time to respond.
"Don't forgive me," she wept. "Please please don't. I know my dad would and if you do too I won't be able to handle it. I just want you to know that you are nothing like what Malfoy says. Or Eliza or Nott or Parkinson or...or me..."
Isabell turned and fled from the dormitory. Her footsteps echoed as far as the common room, and a door slammed.
"She's going to get caught by a prefect," Cyndee remarked, then looked at her slowly. "I don't know what to think. Do you?"
Drew scratched Jinx's head, "No, but it does make me have hope for humanity."
* ° * ° *
Isabell managed to avoid her the entire next day by employing some very strategic walking. Eliza could often be found sitting by herself sulking because she was friendless once again. Even Daphne Greengrass, a fellow pure-blood supremacist who was similar in personality, did not want to speak to her.
In the library, Drew had to call Wilby's name twice before he looked up from the newspapers he'd been pouring over, "Yeah?"
"Can Eliza change?"
He shrugged distractedly, "Anyone can, especially if they have someone to lead them down the right path."
She stared at the black-and-white pictures on the front page, "Then did I make a mistake dropping Eliza so quickly?"
He blinked and shook himself out of his absentmindedness. "No. Absolutely not. She was tearing you apart. After months of friendship, she still couldn't shake the thought that she was supposed to hate who you are. Breaking it off was a good idea; it just didn't work. Maybe now that Isabell's left her too she'll start to see that there's something wrong with her actions."
"Eliza told me her parents didn't want her to hang out with me. That was all it took. But she was raised to hate me, wasn't she? At what point does it stop being her parents' fault but her own?"
"I don't know," he responded slowly. "I do think there's definitely something wrong with her family life if her sister is messed up too."
Drew put her head on the table. "Maybe we should give her the benefit of the doubt."
He didn't even have to say anything; she could tell he disagreed. "Look, I'm pretty forgiving. I think she can change; she's still young after all. But you're acting like she never hurt you, which is strange because you get really mad over people who haven't hurt you."
Drew sighed. "I'm over it."
He put the Daily Prophet down. "Drew, I know you well. I can...I can tell that you liked her way more than a friend. That's okay, obviously. She was the one who really introduced you to the world of magic, the one who had all the answers and could tell you everything you wanted to know. I guess there she had a huge advantage over me."
"I guess," she muttered, finally admitting it to herself.
Wilby had gone back to reading, which left Drew alone in her thoughts. Isabell's apology had surprised her a lot, and she couldn't help wishing that Eliza would do the same.
But she didn't.
* ° * ° *
Drew had Isabell on her mind for the last two days, so she didn't remember that Graham had gone missing until he'd been found.
It was also a lot more serious than anyone had thought. She and Blaise peeked into the Hospital Wing. Madam Pomfrey was feeding spoonfuls of bright blue liquid to Montague. His friends Adrian and Kushal sat worriedly next to him.
Malfoy had found him lodged inside a toilet. When Jack heard about it, he'd been wracked with guilt because he and Serena had scoured the entire castle looking for him when he didn't show up to class the first day, and Jack hadn't checked all the bathroom stalls.
A lot of the older Slytherins seemed mad at him about it too, but Jack had always been unpopular with them. The reason seemed to stem from how he was friends with a Gryffindor, though there was probably more than that.
"He seems fine," Drew observed nervously. "I don't know why Jackson's freaking out and blaming himself. Gracelyn never needs to know."
"He is not fine," Blaise glared. "Do you see how blank and confused he is? Jack suspects he tried to Apparate and Splinched part of his brain."
Her mouth dropped open. "That can happen?"
He nodded grimly. "Yes. Montague's body is so large it must've been the only part of himself he considered when trying to Apparate unlicensed. And since we don't know where he Disapparated from, we can't retrieve whatever he Splinched."
"Is Madam Pomfrey regrowing his brain now?"
"If Jack's right, then I guess so, but I imagine it's a difficult process. Nothing compared to bones."
They left the Hospital Wing and went down the stairs to the dungeons. Two first years ran up, chasing after a brown screech owl. Blaise abruptly stopped, and Drew looked up at him, "What? It's just an owl."
"I asked if you wanted to see Montague so I could tell you something."
She turned around fully, sensing his serious tone. "Okay. What?"
"I'm worried about our friends. They've been acting really off."
Drew rested her arms on the railing, staring at the paintings. "Agreed. Cyndee's getting stressed, and Wilby's getting, well, obsessed."
"Yesterday I saw him hounding Nott with questions. Really turned the tables, and it freaked him out. He didn't learn anything though."
"I told him to stop," she muttered, "that it's no use targeting one Death Eater when they're all bad. And he's not listening to me. What do we do?"
"Do what we should have done ages ago. Tell his mother. Yeah, I know she'll be worried sick, but if he's not listening to you, she's the only one left."
Drew knew he was right, but she was discouraged that nothing she did had convinced him to abandon his revenge. "Alright, we'll tell her. What did you want to say about Cyndee?"
"Original isn't coming out as often."
'Original' was what they called pre-disaster Cyndee. The one who would crack teasing jokes and give devilish smiles. 'Second' was the one Drew first met. The traumatized one stuck at the moment the disaster happened. 'Third' was the one they'd met once on the train. Post-disaster Cyndee.
Blaise said that different personalities usually had different names, but since they were all different parts of Cyndee (except Louis and some others) that made it hard to keep track sometimes.
Blaise nodded. "Second stopped coming out for a while and now she's here all the time. She's the one that takes on the weight of any trauma or fear, so her being out again tells me Original's trying to shield herself."
"But she's back most of the day," Drew pointed out. "Do you know what's causing her to switch?"
"The Room of Requirement," he replied promptly. "She's really weird about being there. It could be someone in the S.A. or something else in the room that reminds her of Tristan."
"Morfinus? They're always on edge with each other. We can't have her keep reverting to Second. Both of them need training, and Original isn't there for half the lessons."
Blaise looked mournful, "I know. I'll try to get her to come back and face whatever it is herself."