"you will stay young and I will grow old, forever."
↠ In which Marigold Knight has to face her 7th year at Hogwarts while trying to cope with the death of her best friend, keep up with her classes, manage joining a resistance a...
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Hand in hand with their break from classes, came Spring.
The grounds that rolled on for hills around Hogwarts were growing a deeper shade of green with each passing day and the warmth of the afternoons seemed to seep into the castle walls where the light breezes would come whistling through.
Most days, Marigold would be found lounging near the edge of the lake with her friends - they would laugh and talk and feed themselves off of what they'd gathered from the dining hall. It reminded her of the previous Spring when Cedric used to sit down there with them, daring Marigold to stick her toes into the still freezing water. Some days, she swore when she looked quickly that she could still see his figure lying languidly against the grass between Angelina and Diego.
The twins joined them down there too, Lee was an obvious attachment. Marigold would smile, Cedric would've liked them, she just knew it.
While the days were filled with seemingly warming contentment and the evenings sprawled around the fire in the common room, pouring through textbooks as the seventh years prepared for their upcoming NEWTs - Marigold's chest grew every day tighter with unease.
At dinner, almost nightly, she could feel the hot violating gaze of Umbridge from the staff table at the front of the Hall. Sometimes she'd look up to meet the poisonous blue eyes of her Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher and cold dread would fill her chest. Marigold's copy of the letter Umbridge had written to each of the captains warning them of possible expulsion lay flat against her bedside table and every night she would eye it carefully before slipping into anxious slumber.
Crippling the initial hope that the night of the twins' birthday party would blow over, Dolores had wasted no time in her pursuit for anything to nail the twins with. In the nearly two weeks since that evening at the Quidditch pitch, numerous students from each house were spotted leaving her office at odd hours of the morning and night. With each rumour, Marigold became sure that the next owl that flew over their heads would be a letter of final expulsion for the twins, or Angelina or even herself. Despite it, the letter never came - but with each passing hour the walls of the castle inched ever closer in around them and Marigold knew it was only a matter of time. What Dolores Umbridge wanted, Dolores Umbridge got.
To her deepest confusion - but not surprise - the twins seemed to be the least concerned over the whole matter. Each time Marigold would bring it up to George, he would shrug her off: offering a grunt of nonchalance and a "you shouldn't stress so much, Knight".
Cool evening was beginning to close over Hogwarts on a Tuesday afternoon near the end of their spring recess. The sun had turned a dark orange and the sky was a hue of deepest purple when the group of youths were enjoying the last few moments of lounging beneath a willow by the rim of the lake.
Marigold had her thickest coat swallowing her physique because despite spring's prompt re-entry, a chill still hung in the air at the end of the day. Her eyes lifted from where they were tracing the silhouette of the castle blackened by the shadows of the evening to where Diego tossed down his pile of cards against the grass in defeat.
