The Healer | Part 1: The Hogwarts Years

Back to the Lake

George

The next morning, I was still seething. A lifelong Quidditch ban, it couldn't be legal. But she had our broomsticks, so she was capable of enforcing it. Fred and I had gone through every possibility the night before. The broomsticks were ours, surely we'd get them back at the end of term, she had no right to them. She couldn't possibly keep them forever.

I was so angry, I didn't have an appetite for breakfast. I had tossed and turned all night and woken up thinking it had all been a bad dream. But it hadn't been. It was all real.

Hermione had been quick to research just how much power Umbridge had and had come to the conclusion that she couldn't ban us from ever flying or playing Quidditch indefinitely. Just so long as she was at the school. This made me feel better and fuelled Fred and mine's desire to see her gone.

All hopes for the Quidditch Cup were quashed for our final year at Hogwarts. We'd won the last two years we'd actually played Quidditch, it had been cancelled last year for the Triwizard Tournament. I felt silly with everything else going on in the world, Fred and I didn't even want Quidditch to be our career, but the Quidditch Cup was important to me. I'd set my hopes on winning it just one last time.

Quidditch, or flying in general, was my usual form of stress relief. But with that no longer an option, Fred and I had decided to go outside and blow shit up. She couldn't stop us from doing that.

Not if she couldn't see us, anyway.

Lee joined us as we stormed out of the castle, wands drawn and ready to blast anything out of the way that stood still long enough.

It was Sunday, so we hardly encountered anyone at all. And once we'd blown up a couple of boulders and some small trees in a clearing just inside the Forbidden Forest, and then played our own version of Quidditch, which mainly involved launching boulders at each other and smashing them to bits, I felt a bit better.

'Okay, now we seriously have to discuss what we're going to do about that old toad,' Fred grumbled as we walked away from the forest and down the path that led to the lake.

We weren't ready to go back inside. I had been finding the castle stifling lately and even though it was cold outside, I was enjoying the freedom.

'Like what?' Lee asked.

'Dunno, mess up her perfectly ordered little world,' Fred said, shoving his hands in his pockets.

'Sounds simple enough,' Lee replied.

'The trick is to not end up arrested,' I told Lee.

'Arrested?' He repeated with a laugh. 'She can't have you arrested!'

'That'll be coming, mark my words,' I told him grimly.

We'd only just found out the day before that she had been given supreme power over all student punishment. And it was only October. Who knew how much power she'd have by the end of the school year?

'We're of age,' Fred said matter-of-fairly. 'And no form of school punishment has been effective against us so far.'

I grinned, recalling the hours Fred and I had spent weeding the school vegetable gardens, cleaning empty Potions vials and chasing doxies, pixies and vampire bats from the Astronomy Tower.

The joke was on them, those punishments had only broadened our horizons and supplied us with more ingredients to invent things.

'We've just got to try and stay a step ahead of her,' I said. 'We know the castle better than anyone else.'

'Yeah,' said Fred wistfully.

We carried on towards the lake and a large rock came into view near the shore. I remembered seeing Edith sitting on it, staring out into the lake and throwing bits of bread out for the squid last year. I had also seen her with the Kranjc bloke. This was where they had met and I felt my angler bubble to the surface again.