Harry Potter - Fanfiction

Year 5 - O.W.L.s

The story of Fred and George's flight to freedom is retold so often over the next few days that I am sure it will become the stuff of Hogwarts legends. In the immediate aftermath of their departure there is a great wave of talk about copying them, so much so that I frequently hear students saying things like, "honestly, some days I just feel like jumping on my broom and leaving this place," or else, "one more lesson like that and I might just do a Weasley."

The twins would be so proud, I cannot wait to tell them of this.

Fred and George have made sure that nobody is likely to forget them very soon. For one thing, they have left no instructions on how to remove the swamp that now filled the corridor on the fifth floor of the east wing. Umbridge and Filch have been observed trying different means of removing it but without success. Eventually the area is roped off and Filch, gnashing his teeth furiously, is given the task of punting students across it to their classrooms.

I'm sure that teachers like McGonagall or Flitwick can remove the swamp in an instant, but just as the case of Fred and George's Wildfire Whiz-Bangs, they seem to prefer to watch Umbridge struggle.

Then there are the two large broom-shaped holes in Umbridge's office door, through which Fred and George's Cleansweeps had smashed to re-join their masters. Filch has fitted a new door and removes Harry's Firebolt to the dungeons where, it is rumoured, Umbridge has set an armed security troll to guard it.

However, her troubles are far from over.

Inspired by Fred and George's example, a great number of students are now vying for the newly vacant positions of Troublemakers-in-Chief. In spite of the new door, somebody, that being Lee and me, manage to slip a hairy-snouted niffler into Umbridge's office, which promptly tears the place apart in its search for shiny objects, leaps on Umbridge on her re-entrance and tries to gnaw the rings off her stubby fingers.

Dungbombs and Stinkpellets are dropped by others so frequently in the corridors that it becomes the new fashion for us students to perform Bubble-Head Charms on ourselves before leaving lessons, which ensure us a supply of fresh clean air, even though it gives us all a peculiar appearance of wearing upside-down goldfish bowls on our heads.

Filch prowls the corridors with a horsewhip in his hands, desperate to catch miscreants, but the problem is that there are now so many of them that he does not know which way to turn. The Inquisitorial Squad are attempting to help him, but odd things keep happening to its members.

Meanwhile it becomes clear just how many Skiving Snackboxes we had managed to sell before Fred and George left Hogwarts. Umbridge only has to enter her classroom for the students from other Houses to faint, vomit, develop dangerous fevers, or else sprout blood from both nostrils. Shrieking with rage and frustration she attempts to trace the mysterious symptoms to their source, but the students tell her stubbornly they are suffering "Umbridge-itis".

After putting four successive classes in detention and failing to discover their secret she is forced to give-up and allow the bleeding, swooning, sweating, and vomiting students to leave her classes in droves.

But not even the users of the Snackboxes can compete with that master of chaos, Peeves, who seems to have taken Fred's parting words deeply to heart. Cackling madly, he soars through the school, upending tables, bursting out of blackboards, and toppling statues and vases. Twice he shuts Mrs. Norris inside suits of armour, from which she is rescued, yowling loudly, by the furious caretaker.

He smashes lanterns and snuffs out candles, juggles burning torches over the heads of screaming students, causes neatly stacked piles of parchment to topple into fires or out windows, floods the second floor when he pulls off all the taps in the bathrooms, drops a bag of tarantulas in the middle of the Great Hall during breakfast and, whenever he fancies a break, spends hours at a time floating along after Umbridge and blowing loud raspberries every time she speaks.