Roy's Rage
Yet another Slytherin had trouble falling asleep that night, namely Roy. After leaving the first-years dormitory, he decided not to join the other older students in the common room, where they were now enjoying a mug of butterbeer to end the evening. Instead, he went straight to bed.
He was determined to leave the day behind, but whenever he closed his eyes, Scorpius Malfoy's trembling voice was in his ear:
"Is it true that this will be reported to the Ministry?"
Roy tossed and turned.
This is what it's come to, even boys of eleven years are afraid of messing up their lives by saying anything that doesn't suit this woman. This is what it's come to, a thousand years of autonomy that Hogwarts has always been so proud of, being eliminated with the stroke of a feather because the Minister thinks it's her job to educate other people's children. This decree will not remain the only one, that wouldn't make any sense. First, she breaks the children's backbones – the logical first step. Then she will offer them a corset on which they will be dependent for life. And what for? To fight Death Eaters?
Roy snorted.
A government facing real enemies wouldn't break flies on the wheel. It would save its energy. A Ministry bullying children is up to much more, and, above all, to something completely different.
Again he turned.
Hogwarts is the place where virtually all of Britain's wizards and witches are educated. If the Ministry is interfering at Hogwarts, it means: They want them to be educated unlike before, they are expected to think unlike their ancestors. What has always been true has no longer to be true. But what has always been true is exactly what has kept the wizarding world alive for a thousand years. Hermie's wonderful list is definitely going to get longer and longer, and the decree explicitly declares it not to be complete and exhaustive. Everything you might construe as 'discriminatory' is actually banned already now, even if it is not on the list. It is just a matter of time and malevolent imagination to judge anything and everything as discriminatory. No one will dare to say what they think any more, even if it's perfectly true, because some Ministry officer will find a spin to make it look 'discriminatory' and 'hate speech'. So they all will rather keep silent. Why does she want to silence people? On Hermie's list are almost exclusively expressions against Muggles and Muggle-born wizards. Why do they have to be protected by a veritable re-education programme? Why this effort?
Roy sat up.
Because we are to have much more to do with them than before. In her first year as Minister, Hermie has given many hints, and they all amount to the same thing as this decree: The wizarding world is to be merged with the Muggle world. That is: It is to be destroyed.
Roy had no problem believing the Minister was able to act this way. Like her, he came from the Muggle world, but unlike her, he didn't come from a wealthy home and a sheltering family. Where he came from, parents didn't drive their daughters to piano lessons in the afternoon and didn't pay obscenely expensive studies of their children. He came from the desolation and violence of the poor quarters. To him, Hogwarts had been the rescue from a life that he might otherwise have spent mostly in prison. She, in contrast, would have had just as brilliant a career with the Muggles as she did in the wizarding world.
She doesn't need the wizarding world. She doesn't lose anything if it perishes. On the contrary, then she is at the top of Muggle World, where she comes from, and which always will remain her real home. She will have tea with the Queen. She doesn't love the wizarding world; she's just abusing it. And because the wizards do not want to be as she wants them to, sh's attacking the weakest point of their world: their kids!
Roy felt tears of rage fill his eyes. He, whose family consisted of his mother alone, had found his fatherland in the wizarding world, his home in Hogwarts, his family in the Slytherins. He considered them, and especially the younger, his brothers and sisters, and they felt he did, despite his harsh attitude. That's why he was a Prefect. Never, never would he allow anyone to assault his Slytherins, least of all that monster minister, that traitress, that ... that – in his impotent rage he clenched both fists and spat it into the darkness – "that Mudblood!"