Her heels clacked on the slick tiles of the Entrance Hall. Dolores took a deep breath, feeling an unaccountable wave of anxiety break over her as she shivered outside the main doors, listening to the sounds of boisterous children just past them. It was raining outside, and her hair dripped constantly down her collar, adding to her gloomy mood.
What had Cornelius been thinking? she thought as she wrung out her umbrella and tried to smooth her dampened outfit. The garish pink colour did nothing for her sensibilities, but Cornelius had insisted that children liked pink. That his emissary should wear pink. She herself preferred dark blue, as evidenced by the necklace discreetly hidden underneath her collar. A dark blue sapphire swung gently against her chest, a present from her mum to celebrate getting the job at the Ministry. She'd loved it at first. Who else could say they worked for the Minister?
But as time wore on, her enthusiasm wore off. The backbiting, the sly political intrigue that Umbridge, as a Hufflepuff, had no prior experience in. The way Fudge treated her, like a lackey, like a well-trained show dog. Even this job was merely an extension of that.
She had no idea if Harry Potter was telling the truth. She didn't want to believe him. The thought of You Know Who being back made her want to hide in a closet and possibly wet herself. But she was lying if she didn't at least face the fact that it could be true. It could be possible. No matter what Cornelius said, and that fact also terrified her. She didn't want to disagree with her boss. He held her livelihood in his hands, soft and chubby as they were.
Taking another deep breath, Dolores pushed through the main doors and clacked her way up to the front table, where Dumbledore sat in state. He was resplendent as always in fantastically coloured robes (that honestly made her wonder if the man was colourblind), and she felt dowdy in contrast.
"Hello, Dolores," Albus smiled at her, but the smile didn't reach his eyes. He looked like he'd rather toss her to a group of very hungry lions, and she couldn't help but shiver as she sat down, mustering a greeting for him and her new colleagues. None of them looked impressed with her being here, although one at the end, who was a bit plump and still wore gardening gloves until Minerva McGonagall elbowed her sharply, looked at least a bit kinder. She even managed a smile and small wave at Dolores, which was a wonderful balm for her nerves.
"Hello, Albus," Dolores finally replied, trying to keep her voice as even as possible. "Cornelius would like me to say a few words. May I?" When the Headmaster nodded his assent, she stood up on slightly tottery legs, clanging her spoon against her glass in a meager attempt to keep order. She didn't understand children. Albus finally had to get the Hall's attention and Dolores suddenly found herself the sneering object of scrutiny from the entire student body.
Her message was short but sweet, and she couldn't help but find herself omitting key phrases Cornelius had explicitly told her to use, to "keep them in line" were his scathing words. She felt guilty, but then reminded herself that he wasn't the one up here, having to face a room full of sullen-faced children who looked like they were the worst possible sorts. Her eyes immediately picked out Harry Potter, but he was about as sullen as the rest, conversing with a very bushy-haired girl and a redheaded boy who could only be another Weasley.
Lovely, she thought weakly and sank into her seat. She knew that she should eat, but she couldn't manage more than a mouthful. This was going to be a very long year.
Nothing seemed to go right after that. She wore the stiffly starched pink suits Cornelius had ordered for her, but she hated them. She started discreetly changing the colour of her camisole to dark blue and when that went over all right, the colour of her stockings.
She was the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, as that was the only open position, but the thought terrified her. She was horrid with offensive and defensive spells, and the Dark Arts themselves petrified her so badly, she'd rather hide under her desk. The only thing she could think to do was to assign them busywork, having them read and copy out the chapters, and even that wasn't working very well, because they wanted practical defense. She tried to blame it on the Ministry, but that went over about as well as a lead balloon. In his very first class, Potter ended up on his feet and yelling at her that Voldemort was back, and before she could think about it, she'd given him a week's detention. The anger in his eyes had soothed her for approximately ten seconds before she realised she was getting satisfaction out of hurting a fifteen-year-old, and she wondered how she was turning into a monster.
Cornelius himself had given her a special sort of quill for the unruliest of troublemakers. Potter had been the unspoken word that lay between them. But as she looked into Harry Potter's angry, semi-defeated face, she couldn't do it. She couldn't give a child a Blood Quill. So instead, she handed him a regular quill and the injunction to write 500 lines of "I must not disrupt the class." It might leave him mad, it might make him grumble and rant at his friends, but it wouldn't leave bloodied lines carved into the back of his hand, and for Dolores, that was more than enough. He would never know what he was missing, but she knew, and it was enough. Merlin, it had to be enough.
The year progressed. Cornelius sent her more and more decrees that she reluctantly nailed up on the wall. Inexperienced as she was with school matters, she knew this was no way to run a school. But how could she go against her employer? The other teachers glared at her all the time now. Even the nice one, Pomona Sprout, had taken to staring at the floor until Dolores went past, her shoulders stiff with resentment. Albus patted her on the shoulder and said "there, there," but she knew the words were empty. She wanted to confide in someone, anyone, but the words stuck in her throat. She was too shy, too nervous, to so much as mention the fact that actually? She hated being High Inquisitor. That she wanted nothing more than to be at home with her feet propped up, having a cup of tea, and not wearing another blasted pink thing for the rest of her natural life.
Potter practically spent every moment he was not in class, meals, or asleep in detention with her. She was running out of ideas for lines. Finally, she resorted to switching his detention to Professor Snape, who kept him disemboweling foul things or skinning unpleasant-smelling things until curfew. Rotten detentions, the lot of them, and yet she could still proudly say that her Blood Quill remained in the very back of her desk, unused.
By the time winter break rolled around, Dolores was exhausted, run ragged, and was ready to skin her boss alive for all the trouble he'd caused her. He'd forced her to fire Professor Trelawney, a dim, bespectacled fraud to be sure, but then again, what Divination professor wasn't? Besides, her bloody replacement was a centaur. And if there was one magical species Dolores was afraid of, it was centaurs. She'd taken to giving the corridor where his classroom lay a very wide birth and trying to skip meals as much as possible. Her garishly pink suits began to hang on her, but she took them in with magic herself, feverishly afraid that Cornelius would know somehow and do something. Replace her. Fire her. And then where would she go? Hogwarts didn't have a home for her, of that she was certain.
When she discovered Harry Potter was leading his own Defense instruction, her first response was actually pride. Her second was fear. What else had been going on, right under her nose? What else had she missed? She was afraid, and her fear led her to snap at them, to place them all in detention (although still! She dared not use the Blood Quill. Not even on that impudent-faced Potter boy, who stared at her with gimlet eyes, and made her feel sick). She did not tell her boss. He would...take over. Force Albus out of office. Arrest the lot of them. His methods were not practical, and despite herself, she found herself keeping silent. She couldn't tell him.
But then what else was she to do? When she found the Potter brat in her office, head in the Floo, anger sparked through her veins, erasing doubt, erasing anxiety. How dare he! After all she'd done for him? She forgot for a moment that of course, he hadn't the faintest what she'd done for him, and to her eternal shame, the word "Crucio" lingered on her lips before dying an abortive death in her throat. She'd nearly dropped her wand in horror. She'd almost used one of the Unforgivables. On a student! A fifteen-year-old student, staring up at her with wide, frightened eyes, because if no one else had caught what she'd nearly said, he certainly had. And she whispered an apology in his ear as she jerked him upright, but she knew it was too little too late.
She left the whole lot in Dumbledore's office, not trusting herself to speak. Her own office was trashed, but she returned there, anyway, sinking into her chair and staring around at the pink-swathed destruction. She hated pink. Hated the Ministry. What had Cornelius turned her into? What had she turned herself into? Dolores had to face the facts. For most of the school year, Fudge hadn't been here. He had given her orders, mailed her decrees, given her still more drab pink outfits until she wanted to smash his spectacles into his face. But he hadn't forced her. She'd forced herself, and the thought was appalling.
For a moment, tears filled her eyes, distorting her vision into a watery pink nightmare. Then she firmly blinked them away. She may have made her mistakes, but perhaps at least some of them could be rectified. Pulling out her wand, she waved it in a complicated spiral, turning her outfit into dark blue and white, and clearing away the pink mess and cat plates Fudge had bestowed upon her.
She could start right here.