Star Girl | Cedric Diggory

|*| One Hundred Seventeen |*|

Months bled into each other, and soon the world around Aquila fell into complete and utter hopelessness. The Carrows closed off the hospital wing to students unless they were granted special permission by the headmaster, and student punishment was getting much, much worse. Many students with broken bones and bloody noses attempted to stitch themselves back together with healing spells, only making their injuries more severe.

Notably, the known affiliates of the DA such as Neville and Patrick, who were very vocal about their recruitment, suffered the worst punishments. The Carrows allowed Filch to reinstate his torture methods on troublesome students, cuffing them to the ceiling by their ankles for hours at a time, and detentions soon became a place for seventh years to practice unforgivable curses on the younger students.

Mealtime was now segregated by house, starting with Slytherin and ending with Gryffindor. Cassie was becoming more and more obnoxious and tyrannical with power, and since both Abby and Ethan were denounced as spies, they began running detentions and supervising the corridors during class to make sure no one was milling about without a hall pass from a reputable professor.

Cassie and Aquila were both assigned to sift through the mail and check for codes and outside Order information. Aquila was less trusted in the eyes of Snape, but surprisingly, the Dark Lord was more lenient with her. She was frightened of it being reversed, but it seemed the skeletal wizard saw some underlying evil inside her and decided that she would live another day to serve him. Cassie on the other hand, was the Dark Lord's least favorite, hence she was shifting through mail instead of beating kids up in detention.

Cassie had found a letter addressed to Aquila in the pile, but instead of giving it to the dark haired girl, she read it out loud, silently praying for something incriminating to be written on the page. She was not in luck; it was simply a letter from Nash, asking how she was doing.

"Expecting something different?" Aquila asked after Cassie had crumbled up the letter and tossed it into the rubbish bin.

"I will denounce you as a traitor, Whitman," she said, smoke coming from her ears. "I know you're hiding something."

"I'm not hiding anything except my secret love for whale songs," Aquila said. "But I guess that's out in the open now too."

Cassie slammed her fist on the table. "This isn't a joke, Whitman! This is a war, and I will not allow you to play both sides!"

Aquila had grown tired of Cassie's talking, so she decided to say a lot of things that she probably shouldn't have said. Most of her words were blind assumptions, but because of the silence afterwards, she knew Cassie get their truth.

"Cassiopeia," Aquila began. "I know it must be tough being the stain in your family's Slytherin lineage, what with you being a pathetic Ravenclaw and all, but I'm so fucking done with you taking out your anger on me. I know I don't seem like the most loyal Death Eater here because I'm not trying to kiss the Dark Lord's boney ass, but I am a Slytherin, and I am not playing both sides of this war. Stop creating false claims about me in an attempt to prove your worth to your daddy, because at the end of the day, you're nothing more than a pathetic Ravenclaw trying desperately to make yourself seem important.

"And you will never be important in the eyes of the Dark Lord. You are just another expendable pawn in his game of chess, whereas I have something useful to offer him. Ethan and Abby were denounced on your watch, but the identity of the eagle-my identity-will forever remain classified. You can't even cast a proper killing curse, and I'll bet that's something you wouldn't want Daddy to find out. So, you keep your nose out of my business, or I'll make sure every Death Eater knows how weak and pathetic you are."