Stronger for You

Chp. 20 Different shades of Bravery

Author's Note: *jingle music* If you're scared and you know it, clap your hands! O.O Four days left of high school for me. Graduation in ten... I'd rather face a hundred dementors right about now. Anyone with me? It's a strange combination of terror, excitement, terror, happiness, terror, satisfaction, terror, and new beginnings. Oh, and terror. 

I set to doing some editing with the mindset that if I don't go to bed, then my last week of school cannot begin tomorrow. That's a good idea, right? Foolproof, that is. 

Enjoy the new chapter! Tell me your thoughts, questions, etc. Spread the story around, yeah? 

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“Being brave is when you have to do something because you know it is right, but at the same time, you are afraid to do it, because it might hurt or whatever. But you do it anyway.”- Meg Cabot

Chapter Twenty

Draco’s P.o.V.

I creep out of my common room early with Blaise and Theo at my side. Theo, the poor sod, had been sick with Dragon Pox and had just returned last night. He looks better and the markings from the pox were barely visible.

I feel worse today. It was just something in my chest, perhaps a cold, but I couldn’t fathom that because I rarely got sick at all. Hopefully it would go away.

“Bloody hell” Theo whispers as he enters the hall. I frown, irritated by his sudden stop, and push past him, only to freeze myself. That pain in my chest grew tenfold as I took in the Great Hall. It was littered with hundreds of posters, faces of those who had been killed under the Dark Lord’s reign. I spot Diggory’s face, Dumbledore’s, even Sirius Black’s. Blaise pushes me and Theo forward towards our seats and we fall into them numbly.

“There’re so many.” Blaise breathes out, looking horrified. I blink hard, trying to push away the familiar faces of those witches and wizards who had been killed at the manor. Muggles shown on the prophet last year and even… I fist my hair in my hands as I catch her mother and brother’s twinkling eyes, still smiling and waving.

I force myself to look at a random poster on the table to find that all of them included the same phrase. “I had a right to live. Remembrance is such a painful bliss.” Pansy reads aloud as she sits next to Theo, taking his hand and cuddling up close. Her face was thinning due to her worry over Theo and now looked more human than doggish.

“Look at the others.” Crabbe hisses menacingly as he and Goyle waddle past, sitting with their new death eater gang. I roll my eyes, glad to be shod of them. But we do all look to find the other three houses dressed in black, some even performing charms on their colourful clothes to the mourning colour. Within a minute, all three houses, and the teachers who weren’t death eaters, were sitting proudly in black, a solemn air pervading the room.

Needless to say that Snape and the Carrows were gobsmacked.

I unclench my fists and force myself to look. It was true, remembering was painful. I notice the Potters, the Longbottoms, the Abbotts and McKinnons, the Prewetts. Even Mad-Eye Moody.

Wait…where…where is her poster? Why is she not up there? — Why do I even want her to have one? Did I really one to see her face among the dead?

Rage surges through me at the lack of her poster, answering my own question.

“I shall not even be so obtuse as to ask who has done this. You all will have tight alibis and the Phoenix Ghost will take the blame once more.” Snape speaks up at last with a sardonic tone. The hall falls silent as he stands up.