An American At Hogwarts: Book Three

Chapter Sixty-Eight

A/N: This one's dedicated to -wintxrwidow for all the lovely comments on your reread! I've been struggling with motivation for this story for a hot second, but reading all your lovely comments helped me fall in love with it again :)

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I focused on taking deep breaths all the way back up to Gryffindor Tower. Every time my brain started coming at me again, reminding me of how shitty it felt to see the mermaids leave, or the twins, or Dumbledore, I cut it off. I shouted STOP in my head loud enough that the other thoughts couldn't compete, and when that didn't work, I shouted it out loud in the middle of the corridor and forced my brain onto a different track. It got me weird looks in the corridor, and it only worked about half the time, but I knew it'd get better the longer I worked at it. I was fighting back, this time against myself, and I wasn't going to lose.

Umbridge had almost won. She hadn't even had to do that much work, since other factors had mostly done it for her. Being stuck in this castle, being unable to do anything meaningful to help stop the problems increasing in number every single day, losing the twins, all of it had gotten so massively overwhelmingly frustrating and upsetting that I'd almost let it all drag me under. But the only way to truly lose was to give up, and neither of those words was in my vocabulary as a Stark.

I'd been down for a minute, and frankly, I think most people would've been after the shitstorm I'd been dealing with after everything started with the DA getting caught. But now I was going to force myself back up, whatever it took. That pink piece of shit was not going to get the last word, she was not going to break me like she'd managed to do with half of the school.

I marched through the portrait hole, still not feeling amazing but decidedly feeling better. The despair had been replaced with anger, and I was going to use that for as long as I could.

I scanned the room and spotted Lee huddled up with Angelina and Alicia, the three of them talking in hushed whispers in our usual corner of the room. I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders, then called out.

"Jordan!"

Lee startled, then whirled around to face me, his eyebrows furrowed.

"Lex? What's going on, are you alright?"

"Not really. But come on, I need your help. We've got a pink menace to send running and screaming from this castle."

Lee grinned, his expression mirrored by our other two friends. He stood and crossed the room to me, looking me up and down like he wasn't sure whether to be concerned about me or not.

"I'm in, for sure. But... do you want to talk first, about anything? We've been pretty worried about you these last few days."

I sighed. "I know. Honestly, I've been doing absolutely terrible. But something today made me realize that not everything has been a complete failure, and that I'm not willing to just lie down and let that awful monster win in our school. What's the point of sticking around for the last few months if I just let her get away with this, right?"

"I'm glad to hear it, Lex," said Lee with a smile. "Can I ask what the thing was that brought you out of your funk?"

"Nope," I said with a grin. "I was kind of sworn to secrecy, and I think telling people would torpedo all progress I've made in this specific area."

"...Okay. Fair enough, I suppose. So what do you want to do?"

"Well, the Monarchs of Mischief are down two members. I figured we oughta make up for that by going all-out on pranking warfare."