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EIGHT PANSY IS NOT PLEASED
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THE NEXT FEW WEEKS hurtle past; one minute, Holly's walking out of her first Potions lesson of the year, and the next, she's passing wizards and witches in the Ministry of Magic, making her way to an empty fireplace to travel back to school. Her dad always used to say that time speeds up the older you are, and Holly wonders if this has something to do with it. That, and the fact that the start of the school year always bolts past. You're having your first lesson of the year, you blink, and you're rushing back to school so you can still go to Hogsmeade.
Which is exactly what Holly's doing. The Wizengamot trial lasted from nine to eleven that morning — normally they're in the weekdays, but since there's been an influx of terror, the trials are done as quickly as possible, to lock up as many Death Eaters as possible — and now it's ten past eleven. Normally it takes a few minutes to get back to school, so hopefully things will work out and she'll be back for half-eleven, when she told Harry she'd meet him.
So she makes her way through the Ministry of Magic, which is oddly busy for the weekend, thanks to the amount of Death Eaters lurking in the shadows. Holly passes a number of signs warning passers-by of numerous 'dark' creatures: one of them alerts the masses about the dangers of werewolves, plastering a photograph of Fenrir Greyback right in the middle. For a minute she thinks of Professor Lupin, the guy that had been the Defence teacher the year before she started at Hogwarts, and she feels like the poster's incredibly misleading.
There are also pamphlets everywhere, in little stands like you'd see in hotel receptions. It's odd, she thinks, when she forgets the time and stops walking for a minute to take a look. Next to a leaflet advertising some wizarding tourist attraction in St. Ives, there's a leaflet about the most dangerous Death Eaters, dead and alive. So obviously Holly takes one of them, opening the thing and reading it as she walks towards the fireplaces.
She sees the section on her mother, and skims it quickly. Found dead in her cell last Christmas... Joined the Death Eaters at sixteen... Daughter is Holliday Lippincott, known for having close ties with the Boy Who Lived—
Holly stops, frowns, and puts the leaflet in the nearest bin.
This is so stupid, isn't it? A war is going on, but the Ministry — the government — just has to quickly mention that Holly's going out with Harry. She thinks it's ridiculous. It's like those old World War Two propaganda reels quickly switching the topic from how to survive in the fucking Blitz to oh, you guys, I heard that these two are going out! It's laughable... It's also incredibly worrying, because it makes Holly wonder how seriously they're taking a lot of this.
