Chapter Twenty-Nine: Dragons

"Can anyone tell me who invented the Remembrall?" Cass inquired of the class as she swept in, about a minute late as usual. Several hands went up and she called on Neville.

"Aldous Dumbledore."

"Really? Any relation to our Headmaster?"

"His great-uncle, I think."

"Cool." The class waited expectantly for Cass to begin the lesson on what might be Muggle mnemonic devices, but instead she shuffled through papers and items on her desk for about a minute before noticing their looks. "What? Oh, I was just curious about the Remembrall. Nothing relevant." The werewolf finally found what she was looking for and held it up –a picture of a man in an antique-looking uniform. "See this man? This fellow is widely believed to be the biggest son-of-a-bitch ever to walk the earth. Can anyone who is not either Muggle-born or friends with Hermione tell me who he is?"

Blaise raised her hand and Cass called on her, despite the fact that she was, by now, friends with Hermione. "Miss Zabini, who is this little shit?"

"Adolf Elizabeth Hitler."

For reasons that only a few students understood, the professor had to restrain an absolute storm of mirth.

"Up on your Mel Brooks, I see. Very good." Cass perched on her desk and picked up another picture. "See this guy what looks like a muscular Malfoy? This is a Nazi recruitment poster. Blond hair, blue eyes, looks like a Scandinavian sex god. Anybody know why it's hypocritical bullshit?"

Sometimes the good professor's language was a little rough. She called on Maria. "Yes?"

"Hitler himself didn't look like that."

"Great! Now, can you tell me what Nazis were?"

"The National Socialist Party in Germany."

"Right. And what was their goal?"

"Establish a master race of Aryans and conquer the world."

"Perfect." Cass put the picture down and hopped off the desk. She began to amble calmly around the room as she lectured. "I'd like you all to imagine something for me, so shut your eyes." Everyone complied. "Picture your house. Imagine your family next to it. Moms, dads, overbearing grandmothers, even your siblings and pets. Got it?" Most everyone nodded. "Okay. The nation you live in lost a war. A big war. It ended about the time your dad was born, but your country's still really poor because of it. In fact, your national currency is close to worthless. One Galleon has become worth about an eighth of a Knut, so nobody's rich. Most of the men your grandfather's age are not there. In the war your country lost, they had kids your age fighting toward the end. Okay, everyone got that?"

There were many nods and even a shudder or two.

"Okay. You are dirt poor, because everybody is. The only people who have money, it seems, are the bankers and the people who had outside interests during and after the war. It also happens that goblins don't run the banks. The people who seem to have all the money and power, at least to you, are people called Jews. They aren't any different from you, except that they have a different faith, and some of them look different. But they have money, and you're poor. Okay?"

"Damn Jews," Goyle remarked.

"Remember you said that as I go on, mate," Cass replied calmly. "Alright. Not all the Jews are rich, and not all the rich people are Jews. But they're different and you're miserable. Then one day you turn on the wireless and there's a man saying that the reason why you're eating brown bread and sausage is the Jews. He says it's all their fault and if you'll follow him, he'll make everything better. Everything. What's more, this guy is a really good speaker. Everyone you know seems to think he's a pretty good deal. So you either join his party or wait awhile. Maybe you have a few friends who happen to be Jews and you might doubt him a little bit. Maybe you think he's too harsh, or maybe you think he's nuts. But a lot of people believe him, and before you know it, he's in charge. They call him 'Leader' and millions of people just think he's great. In fact, people don't say hello anymore. They say something that basically means 'Hooray for the Leader' whenever they meet someone. Flags with this symbol go up everywhere. Get a look." Cass held up a swastika flag picture. "Okay?"

"Isn't that an Indian good-luck symbol?" Parvati asked.

"Indian and Tibetan, yeah. This guy sorta swiped it." Cass grinned. "Alright, keep imagining this guy in charge. Every day he announces that your country and your people, your race, is the best in the world. The master race. And the Jews are evil and subhuman, like monkeys. So Jewish people start getting out. People move out like crazy. Just pack up and go, with no word to anyone, because people who like the Leader are beating on them nonstop. Everyone's been to Ollivander's, right? Okay. If Mr. Ollivander was Jewish, there would be graffiti all over his shop. Even him. No matter how respected people were, they were attacked for their faith and race. They even have to wear a big yellow star, like this, to make sure everyone can see that they're Jews. It's like a target mark for the Leader's goons. Sounds kind of unfair, doesn't it?

"But it doesn't stop there. One night in November, the Night of Broken Glass, all the Jews get beat on, all at once. Shop windows are smashed, people are forced to scrub the streets with their toothbrushes, little kids get rocks thrown at them, and some people even get killed. Some of them might even be your friends. After that, people start to disappear even faster, but this time it's not that they moved out. The Leader's troops and his secret police have taken them away. Some of you might hide your Jewish friends or try to help them get out of the country, and if you get caught, you get taken away as well."

"Where are they taken to?" Millicent Bulstrode asked, a little awed. Cass looked at her, an expression of stern sadness on her face.

"Concentration camps." The class looked at their professor, some confusedly, some with a knowing and serious look, and some with mute horror. "They were big open camps, surrounded by barbed wire and sometimes walls. People slept on shelves there, and ate nothing but soup and bread, if that. When they arrived, everything they owned was taken away from them. They were given striped uniforms to wear, none of which fit because the Leader's soldiers liked them to look funny, and their heads were shaved."

Lavender Brown let out an involuntary squeak, appalled. Cass turned on her.

"Oh, that's not the worst of it. Everyone had a number tattooed on their arm, right there." Cass poked Lavender's wrist. Every so often, the soldiers would shoot a few people, just for target practice. Everyone had to work hard, all day, with only this to eat." The professor took a dented metal bowl of thin cabbage soup and a little chunk of bread from her desk cabinet. "I know it's close to lunch. Anyone here hungry? How about you, Goyle?" She took the bowl and bread and placed them before the boy. "Try it."

"No spoons?"

"Never any spoons, unless you could sneak them in. Try it."

Tentatively, Goyle nibbled at the bread. It was the slowest anyone had ever seen him eat.

"There's mold on this!"

"Almost always. Try the soup."

Goyle complied, lifting the bowl like a cup. A second later, he spat it out.

"Was it really-?"

"Yes, if not much worse. There was one serving like that a day, and everyone had to use their same food bowl to go to the bathroom in."

Goyle looked about to vomit and Cass passed him a paper bag.

"Every so often, people would be taken into buildings, twins especially, or people with differences. Sometimes it was left-handed people, or people with glasses, though all the glasses were taken away when they arrived. A doctor named Josef Mengele did experiments on them, with no anaesthetic or even safety measures. He injected dye into children's eyes, castrated men, sterilized women with x-ray machines, and even amputated limbs. Sometimes he would remove vital organs, just to see how long a person could survive. Sometimes he starved people and gave them nothing but salt water. When he was done with a person or a child –he liked children best- he would take them to big buildings with locking doors. Inside were what looked like showerheads. The guards would also pick people from the camp, if they looked weak, or caused trouble, or even just looked the wrong way at them. Everyone went in naked, with bars of soap, as if it were a shower. It wasn't."

The professor turned her back on the class and took out a stack of pictures, which she handed to Blaise to pass around. They were of starved people, mass graves, the gas chambers, the gates of Auschwitz, and several worse things. There was one of prisoners lying on what genuinely looked like storage shelves, looking out at the camera with gaunt eyes. There was also a well-dressed doctor in a military uniform with spotless white gloves. The caption below read simply 'Mengele.'

"Over six million Jews were killed during what is now called the Holocaust," Cass recited numbly. "There were also many more Gypsies, Poles, political prisoners, ministers, priests, homosexuals, the elderly, the terminally ill, the deaf, the mentally deficient, the blind, and even ordinary citizens who just happened to disagree with the regime, who suffered the same fate. The leader was Adolf Hitler, the time was the nineteen-forties, and the countries were Europe. Your continent, only fifty-odd years ago."

There was a long silence. Noone knew what to make of this. A few people had known about it before, but the faces of those who hadn't made it all the more petrifying. Class was nearly over, but noone could relax. Finally Cass perched on her desk again and waited for the pictures to come back to her. She looked at one and frowned.

"It's awful, isn't it? There are people who say it never happened, you know. There are people called neo-Nazis who think it would be fine and good to do it again, but to every other minority as well. Anyone here agree with that?"

The class, as one, showed that they did not.

"Okay, I've depressed you all enough. Class is almost over, so I'm going to let you out." Cass smiled in her absent way and put the pictures back on her desk. As she walked back into her office, she suddenly called over her shoulder. "Just one thing. Instead of Jews, imagine it happening to Muggle-borns."

********************************************************

Draco met Cass outside her classroom door after dinner.

"You think You-Know-Who would-?"

"I know he would."

"What are you going to do?"

"Fight him."

"I mean, how?" Cass looked at the blond boy as if he were mad.

"By any means possible, of course. I will send in spies, I will plant bugs and traps, I will sabotage. I will reprogram, I will defame, I will whistle-blow and expose. I will wound and kill, though I'd much rather merely wound. We are at war as of twenty-odd years ago, and I'll be damned if I'll not use every shred of my being to take the dark side down."

Draco had the sudden realizion that his teacher had repeated this as a mantra for a long time. The force of her will and her absolute belief in the wrongness of Voldemort finally tipped the scale.

"I'm not sure if you can beat him," he said quietly. "But I want to help you try."

Cass looked at her student and almost-friend sternly, blue-gray eyes mirroring his in color and degree of seriousness.

"Then go speak to Dumbledore." It was not a brush-off or insult and Draco knew it. "I'm not the one to offer allegiance to."

"But are you the one to apologize and confess to?" Cass' expression softened.

"Confess maybe. I can keep a secret, but you've done no wrong to me." She grinned in her wry way. "It's a bit like knights an' ladies here, isn't it? 'Get thee to Dumbledore,' 'confess thy sins…' I feel a little bit like a crusader priest."

"You a priest?" It was Hermione, coming around the corner with a sarcastic smile.

"More like one of those nuns in 'The Sound of Music,' maybe." Cass smiled thoughtfully. "Or not. A dirty mind is a terrible thing to waste. Going down to see Sevvy for lunch, are you?" Hermione went red and Draco frowned.

"What is with Professor Snape and you anyway?"

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Draco! Been a member of the team thirty seconds and already into innuendo and politics." Cass rolled her eyes and grinned in a faintly Lockhart way. "I like that, actually. Reminds me of me." The professor took out her wand and began to twirl it idly. "Hermione and Sevvy have a very good working relationship. They're the only two people who've read the whole goddamn library."

"So we have lots to fight about," Hermione agreed.

"Hard to find a good argument. I might also ask, Dragon-boy, what is up with you and Blaise Zabini anyway?"

"She's always been my friend. Since she and Flint broke up, we've been kind of tricking everyone into thinking we're together. Keeps Parkinson away from me and Goyle away from her."

"How very Slytherinish." Hermione showed Draco the book she had, 'Potions to Analyze,' volume four. "Read this yet?"

"A little, yeah. Going to cook up something to test blood with tonight?"

"Have to for my project. Want to come be a guinea pig?"

"Sure."

"I already promised to bleed for her as well," Cass explained. "But you've got to have two people. Vampires!"

**************************************************************

Bill watched the dimming sunlight play on Maria's hands as she gestured. She was telling him how the transfiguration lesson that day had gone, an amusing anecdote, but he kept getting distracted by how wonderful she looked. There was a light in her eyes that hadn't been there when she'd first walked into his life, and her little half-smile seemed genuine. She wasn't remarkably dressed, although the plunging necklines and faintly slutty lines had given way to a, elegantly demure skirt that reached almost to her calves and swirled whenever she turned quickly. She looked a little like a librarian from the ankles up, with plain stockings and school shoes beneath the skirt. Her makeup was softer, too, just a dusting of gray above the eyes and some light lipgloss. It was like she was a different girl altogether from the suicidal and jaded creature she had been before.

"Why didn't she think to leash the iguana before turning it into a cat?"

"I don't know. But it looked fairly strange running away half-changed."

"Think Mrs. Norris will fancy it?"

"If it was a boy iguana to start, maybe. She'd have to be pretty desperate." Maria's smile was still slow to appear and a little shy, but lovely. Without thinking, Bill closed the distance between them with a kiss. Moments later, Maria looked at him, startled but not displeased.

"I'm surprised that you've never been told before how beautiful you are," the redhaired man whispered. "I wish I could stop time here and be next to you always."

"I would stop time to stay with you." Maria stroked the side of Bill's face with a gentle hand, almost sadly. "There's a war coming, and every day we see the preparations more and more. If it isn't Dumbledore honoring the dead, it's Professor Tyler forcing us to think."

"Force you to think?"

"It's just that the fears and worries that we all have, she takes them and makes us all fear them at the same time. She showed us something so horrible and true that we couldn't hide that it scared us, and when we all saw that everyone around us was scared, we were petrified. Then as if it's not bad enough, she throws the real twist in. It's one thing to suspect You-Know-Who and your parents are wrong when you're all alone. It's quite another to see the proof together with all the other Death Eaters' kids. I heard Millicent crying today after her class."

"You don't like what she's doing to you all?"

"I think it's the most brilliant thing any teacher's ever done to the Slytherins. It's only horrible having to be the target of it." Maria sighed. "I hate living in this time, so much that I hate living."

"Will you stay with me, then?" Bill asked gently, kissing her cheek.

"If I can…" Maria sighed and smiled. "I will."

Minutes of kisses, caresses and whispered words later, Maria got the buttons of Bill's shirt undone. Hers had been loose to start, and the hugs between the two had nearly finished what wrongly-sewn buttonholes had begun. They paused, undershirt and bra, black jeans and skirt the only barriers.

"I can't help wanting to-"

"I'm not afraid."

**************************************************