Mary Smith and The Three-Headed Dog

18. Fight Club

"I don't know. Hellgates can't be real. If they were, a wizard surely couldn't ever close one. It'd take something like an Elf or Fae magic to accomplish something that extraordinary...why that face? Yes, I said Elf. We don't keep house Elves in our home. Dad says the rest of the wizarding world is wrong. That Elf magic is frightening. Everything that they can do..."

--Angelina Johnson

Chapter 18: Fight Club

DADA classes from then on have been my least favorite class. I was always on edge and always uncomfortable. Every instinct I had always told me that I was in immediate danger every time I got anywhere near Professor Quirrell. I think this is the feeling you get when you know someone doesn't like you. He avoided me in general and there were no more classroom demonstrations like before. It was business as usual.

I never even got in trouble for punching Zacharias. His nose was purple, and he sported two black eyes, but I didn't get called down to the headmaster's office or anything.

It almost seemed like Professor Quirrell wanted to forget the whole thing happened.

I'd like that, but everyone had heard.

There were some benefits. The other Hufflepuff first-years left me to myself. I think they might even be afraid of me a little. That was fine. I was a little afraid of myself after the whole thing.

Cedric wasn't pleased but I was getting more and more used to disappointing him. He sat me down and explained that I was going to notice things change with my magic, physically, over the next few years. It was one of the reasons why every Hufflepuff drank from the fountain. It's supposed to help us realize our greatest potential, among other things. He wouldn't mention what those other things were. But it made sense how I'd been able to reign in my impulse to have a vision in DADA class that day or how I'd stopped myself from having an episode that one time.

What Cedric found especially annoying were my new friends I'd made after punching Mr. Fakey-Mc-Fake-Face. There were three older boys waiting for me outside of my Care of Magical Creatures Class. Two Gryffindors, Nicholas and Kal, and one Ravenclaw, Errol. All three were the sole members of the Wizarding MMA Appreciation Club, or WMAC and they wanted me to join. Apparently, they were big fans of my father's? I wasn't sure what that meant but I mostly just met with them once a week before my after-class lessons in a small room behind the Owl feed storage shack. There were tons of posters of fighters all over the walls.

"MMA fighting is similar to what you might see in the Muggle world," said Kal. He was a muggle-born in his fourth-year. Same as Nicholas. I had never seen an MMA fight in the real world. It looked a little like boxing though. Except the fighter's gloves look different and they kick their feet.

Errol, a large fifth-year boy with an even larger gap-toothed smile, plucked a moving poster of a man swinging at the air. He looked just like- "This is for you," Errol smiled. "It's your father! He was my favorite fighter." I gingerly took the folding paper from him, afraid it would tear. It looked so old.

"This is my...Papa?"

Errol hadn't stopped yammering on. "MMA fighting takes extreme focus and even then, not all wizards can do it. You have to train and meditate regularly to even be considered a decent fighter. You have to be sharp and quick and have a library of spells memorized that you can pull on at a moment's notice. You have to be able to draw on intense emotions and twist them into powerful magic you can focus on certain points of your body. And you have to be of peak physical fitness. It all takes an incredible tole on your body."