☤ Pseudonym ☤

~Chapter Nineteen~

A/N at the end.

Hagrid was back. He was covered in cuts and bruises. It took us a while to get the cause of them out of him. But he finally told us that Dumbledore had sent him to talk with the giants. Obviously it hadn't been a very successful discussion. 

Hagrid cut himself off midway through a sentence. There was a sudden outbreak of rapping on the door. Hermione gasped; her mug slipped through her fingers and smashed on the floor; Fang yelped. All five of us stared at the window beside the doorway. The shadow of somebody small and squat rippled across the thin curtain.

"It's her!" Ron whispered.

"Get under here!" Harry said quickly, seizing the Invisibility Cloak, he whirled it over us quickly. It barely covered all of us. Huddled together, we backed away into a corner. Fang was barking madly at the door. Hagrid looked thoroughly confused.

"Hagrid, hide our mugs!"

Hagrid seized the mugs and shoved them under the cushion in Fang's basket. Fang was now leaping up at the door; Hagrid pushed him out of the way with his foot and pulled it open.

Professor Umbridge was standing in the doorway wearing her green tweed cloak and a matching hat with earflaps. Lips pursed, she leaned back so as to see Hagrid's face; she barely reached his navel.

"So," she said slowly and loudly, as though speaking to somebody deaf. "You're Hagrid, are you?"

Without waiting for an answer she strolled into the room, her bulging eyes rolling in every direction.

"Get away," she snapped, waving her handbag at Fang, who had bounded up to her and was attempting to lick her face.

"Er - I don' want ter be rude," said Hagrid, staring at her, "but who the ruddy hell are you?"

"My name is Dolores Umbridge."

Her eyes were sweeping the cabin. Twice they stared directly into the corner where we stood.

"Dolores Umbridge?" Hagrid said, sounding thoroughly confused. "I thought you were one o' them Ministry - don' you work with Fudge?"

"I was Senior Undersecretary to the Minister, yes," said Umbridge, now pacing around the cabin, taking in every tiny detail within, from the haversack against the wall to the abandoned travelling cloak. "I am now the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher -"

Umbridge stared pointedly at the broken shards of china on the floor that had been Hermione's mug.

"Oh," said Hagrid, with a most unhelpful glance towards the corner where we stood hidden, "oh, tha' was ... was Fang. He broke a mug. So I had ter use this one instead."

Hagrid pointed to the mug from which he had been drinking, one hand still clamped over the dragon steak pressed to his eye. Umbridge stood facing him now, taking in every detail of his appearance instead of the cabins.

"I heard voices," she said quietly.

"I was talkin' ter Fang," said Hagrid stoutly.

"And was he talking back to you?"

Umbridge continued to interrogate Hagrid for at least ten minutes. Hagrid fumbled for a response each time. 

"You ought to know, too, that as High Inquisitor it is my unfortunate but necessary duty to inspect my fellow teachers. So I daresay we shall meet again soon enough."

She turned sharply and marched back to the door.

"You're inspectin' us?" Hagrid repeated blankly, looking after her.