Betrayal of the Black

twenty-one

SOMETHING WAS WRONG.

They had finished their O.W.L's earlier that week, and they were finally free to worry about things other than exams.

That afternoon, the group was sitting around in the fireplace in the Slytherin common room when the rest of her friends received a summons from Umbridge. They'd all rolled their eyes, muttering about how they were probably going to be forced to remove nifflers from her her office again. They apologised to Celestia, saying they would be back in no more than thirty minutes.

It had been an hour since they left. She had no reason to be worried, but a feeling had settled into her gut. She was beyond paranoid, but she could no longer sit still.

Abandoning the common room, she makes her way towards Proffesor Umbridge's office. Multiple twists and turns through the labyrinth that they call Hogwarts later, she is finally approaching her office. The headmasters office would not allow her to enter, so she is stuck in her original office.

Approaching the room, she hears nothing. Not Umbridge's high-pitched voice, nor Draco cursing the daylights out over a menial task. Only silence, and her heartbeat picking up nervously. Something most certainly was not right.

Gripping her wand so tightly that her knuckles turned white, she found Umbridge's door wide open. What she found was her four friends, plus Crabbe, groaning faintly.

"What the bloody hell happened?" she bursted out.

Crabbe grumbled incoherently, and she recognised the fact that he had been hit with an Impediment Jinx. But it was not him she worried about. Pansy had a large bruise forming on her cheekbone, Blaise was slumped against a chair painfully, Draco was bleeding from his lip, and Theo had a large cut running along his side.

She moved instantly to Theo's side, seeing as he was the worst hurt. Her heart beat rapidly as she stared at the blood drenching his clothes. It reminded her of the wound he had had in her nightmare. Though, this was real. She needed to help him.

"Oh, Merlin, what happened?" she asked again, ripping his shirt open to better expect the wound.

"It looks worse than it is," mumbled Theo. "Just a small cut while I tripped. I swear it's not that bad, darling, stop looking like I'm dying."

She examined the wound, and realising her lack of medical knowledge outside of reading fiction books, did what she had seen many heroines do in books before. She pressed her hand against the wound, feeling the blood slick against her hands.

"Can someone who doesn't look as if they're dying tell me what the fuck happened?" repeated Celestia.

"Umbridge called us up, she'd found Potter and his friends snooping around her office, wanted us to restrain them so she could interrogate him. We followed orders, and everything was going fine, then Potter and Granger left with Umbridge and their friends went berserk," explained Pansy.

"Potter was delirious. Started raving about a Padfoot when Snape came by," grumbled Draco, wiping the blood away from his mouth.

She froze. Theo looked at her oddly, and she kept her gaze trained on his wound despite how gruesome it looked. "Padfoot?"

"Yeah, started yelling that someone had Padfoot. Umbridge thought he was talking to Dumbledore but he made no sense," groaned Blaise from his spot on the chair.

Padfoot. Her father. She had only heard it in passing, between Sirius and Remus. They were nicknames of some sort, mostly used when they had been joking together. Moony and Padfoot, if she remembered correctly.

Someone had Padfoot. Only one person would ever take Sirius, and unless the Ministry had arrested him — which she would have heard about by now — it means that Voldemort has taken her father somewhere.