ALOHOMORA | CEDRIC DIGGORY

33〝thirty-three〞

CEDRIC HAD BARELY KNOWN MUCH else when Ellis shouted at him. Thoughts dashed through his brain, this way and that. He quickly marshaled them: First, he was quite certain, with fifteen years' experience living in the magical world, that there was no such thing as a jinx that was a person—it was a spell, albeit not the good kind. This brought him to his second point, which was something he learnt in History of Magic (he never thought the day would come that he would find anything from that class to be useful): People who perceived others as jinxes tended to be Muggles, in which case, "others" usually took the form of witches or wizards.

Bathilda Bagshot had written all about how non-magic folk feared "individuals with unnatural powers" and deemed them as "unlucky"; how they sought to stamp out such "unnaturalness" by various methods that were not only futile (witch burning, for example) but often indiscriminate—leading to many of their own deaths; how this peaked during medieval times but, due to their dogged mentality that anyone "different" posed a threat, was likely to endure into the modern era even with the enactment of the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy.

Professor Burbage also mentioned this several times during Muggle Studies:

Although present day witches and wizards have minimal contact with Muggle communities, the prejudices held against them have not diminished proportionately as interactions have. Evidence is embedded in Muggle literature, where sorcerers and sorceresses are regularly depicted as wicked and doers of evil and rarely applauded for their special abilities.

This seemed like a plausible explanation to Cedric.

"Is it because of your magic?" he said tentatively.

Still breathing heavily from her flash of fury, Ellis shot him a sideways look—but it was hardly the glare he anticipated. (Indeed, her still sitting there amazed him plenty; Cedric reckoned she would have taken flight by now.) Her heterochromic eyes glinted with surprise, then he observed the fight trickle from them as she lowered her gaze and drew her knees to her chest.

"I wish I didn't have it."

"You don't like being a witch?"

"No," she said simply, staring into the fire. "I couldn't have done it if not for magic."

"Done what?"

"A terrible thing."

Quietly, Cedric let out a sigh. The Slytherin always seemed to have a way of thinking the worst of things. Convinced this wasn't going to be an exception, he attempted to console her.

"Hey, I'm sure it's not that bad—"

"Stop telling me not to be negative," she snapped. "It's not a matter of being optimistic. What I did was bad and wrong and there's no excuse for what I've done!"

"Fine, what have you done that you claim is so 'bad'?" challenged Cedric.

He was going prove to her that she wasn't this second-rate person her tinted eyes saw; to make her recognize what he did: She was just another girl whose differences did not have to define her, even if it was the last thing he did.

"I killed someone," she informed her cushion.

"I'm sorry?" said Cedric, blinking.

"You heard me," was all she replied.

Caught off guard, he gaped at her. He didn't know what to think; he was absolutely floored. And then it hit him with the force of a Bludger: He realized—but of course!—he didn't believe it for a second. Although, he couldn't properly word it for some time. Meanwhile, a strange temper was threatening to rise within him.