When we align; a Neville Longbottom fanfiction

5. Dark omens

That summer passed in the blink of an eye. Cass spent her days hanging around the grounds with her brother, practising potions in the dungeons, and visiting Daphne and Blaise. But there was one thing she spent most of her time on: thinking about Neville Longbottom.

Ever since her first day of summer holidays she had been pondering whether to write him a letter, maybe even inviting him to the Manor when her father was out on business.

She never did, mostly because she had noticed that her father had become tenser as summer was coming to an end. She would catch him muttering by himself, rubbing his left forearm with an intense look on his face. He was also absent most of the time and was particularly insistent on making sure his children were socialising with the right people, which meant three categories, in particular, were off-limits: mud-bloods, blood traitors, and even certain kinds of half-bloods.

Cass wasn't sure if the Longbottoms were considered to be the right kind of people, so she never brought up her friendship with Neville. Not even to her brother, who had assimilated everything their father told him and was still friends with Malfoy.

The Malfoys visited often, Lucius and Arnas mostly talking in a low voice in her father's studio, and Draco excitedly learning from Theo what their tutor had taught him.

They had a new tutor, Mr Grove, a small and bald man with a pointed nose, who had been teaching the children all summer, giving extra attention to Occlumency and the Dark Arts.

Cass wasn't comfortable with it but was eager to learn. Theo, however, was hanging off his words. The truth is that it was in Cass' very nature to dislike anything anyone would force on her, so she grew distant with her father, who seemed to want to make his children loyal servants to the Dark Lord.

"Do you think he's back?" She had asked her brother one night after dinner. They were laying down on the damp grass in the rose garden, stargazing. Theo was silent for a long while. Before Cass could stand up to see if he had fallen asleep, he replied.

"I think it won't be long until he is. Have you seen how Father keeps looking at it?" By 'it', he was referring to their father's tattoo, the Dark Mark, placed on his left forearm. "It's getting more vivid every day, I've seen it."

That night, Cass couldn't sleep. Something was bugging her ever since her trip back home from Hogwarts the previous June. She was talking to Isobel, who had heard a rumour that Hermione Granger had been given a TimeTurner to juggle her classes, and had managed to pass them with flying colours. And yet, Cass, who had the normal amount of schoolwork, almost failed Herbology, hadn't it been for Neville.

She tossed and turned trying to find a reason why the Dark Lord and those loyal to him were so obsessed with blood purity. 'Anyone who isn't pure is inferior.' A voice in her head said. 'Yes, but why?', she replied. 'They are envious, they want to steal our magic. They're bewitching pure-blood wizards, creating bastards, just to take it away from us. And some of our kind are helping them. Look at the Weasleys, so eager to befriend mud-bloods, to waste our magic. Muggles have tried to hunt us for centuries, a pathetic reaction to our superiority. Even they know they're inferior.'

She decided to go downstairs to grab a glass of water. As she passed the formal living room, her eyes fell on a framed picture. The List of Twenty-Eight truly Pure-Blood Families, redacted by her grandfather, who of course had made sure to include his name on it. It displayed families who had managed to keep their blood purity for centuries, and Cass knew most of them. Malfoy, Greengrass, Bulstrode, Parkinson, Black, Weasley, Longbottom. The sacred twenty-eight, they called them, even though she wasn't sure anymore of what was so sacred about them. 'We must remain pure.' The voice in her head was back.