I could feel their eyes as I walked out of the Great Hall with my other housemates. I could feel their hate, their anger, and the sense of betrayal.
It was the last one that made me want to turn around and fight with them.
A Slytherin knows loyalty, breaths loyalty, needs loyalty. I've always felt a small kinship with Hufflepuff's students, for they know and love loyalty as well.
But not like us.
No, they show their loyalty differently. They smile and help and point towards the path of goodness.
We, we bleed and steal and lie and cheat for those we are loyal to. We are the snakes that hiss when you come to near, the python squeezing the life from every threat.
Perhaps we give our loyalty to the wrong things, such as choosing the Dark Lord over the Boy Who Lived, choosing power. But it is always a choice we have thought through, in the end. To break loyalty is painful, to have to choose between two is the worst. Thus, we always choose slowly and rarely.
Perhaps it makes us seem cold. But how could we be so loose with what costs so dear?
The other students want us to choose the school; they want to cash in the loyalty for this fight. Do not be mistaken, this is our school. This has become our home.
But the Gryffindors did not think. They asked us to choose a building, an institution, over people.
Over my childhood neighbors who made me cookies. Over the parents of my childhood friends. Over the lady who tutored me in basically everything. Over the friends of my parents who came over every week to reminisce about the past and joke about the future. Over housemates I'd watched graduate. Over my own family.
They did not understand, those who asked us to stay. They did not understand for they stood with, not against their families.
They understood, those in green who stayed behind. Those few wore the faces of broken hearts or hearts about to break. Their faces would remain as stone even as they broke inside. It is not a pretty thing, breaking loyalty. I do not envy them, and would not wish to be them when they end up face to face with a soul they know well.
As I follow the way out of Hogwarts, as I leave the fight, leave a claim on loyalty, my face is stone.
The veneer is solid, smooth like glass and un-fractured.
My heart is breaking.
