Seven Years, Chapter 16.

Beta Reader: Chocolateowl.

Disclaimer: Kinda awkward I can't even claim to make an SIOC lol.


Though she had an unremarkable dinner of Endless Sandwiches and water, Merula dreaded the idea of returning to the Slytherin dorms after the attack.

It… just wasn't what they were supposed to do. Slytherins were supposed to be sneaky, with covers for their plots. The pumpkin juice attack was, for the lack of a better word, sloppy, and a disgrace to the tenets they were supposed to stand for.

Not to mention that it had happened in front of the entire Great Hall.

But the worst part of the night was the fact that she spent what seemed like an eternity waiting in Dumbledore's office, waiting for the Headmaster to arrive.

Part of her wasn't sure what the wait was about, but another, much larger part of her just wanted to sink into a bed and go to sleep early.

Finally, after an eternity of waiting, Merula heard the door behind her crack open and she heard Dumbledore's voice.

"Sweet?" Dumbledore asked as he brought forward a bowl of candy.

Merula shook her head. "I've eaten."

Dumbledore popped one of the candies into his mouth and chewed. "I'm told that there will be a number of punishments for the students involved in the attack."

Merula nodded. That much was obvious. It wasn't as if she had ambushed Longbottom in a dark corridor and made a run for it before he could get off anything to counter her. There was an entire hall of witnesses who saw the attack.

"From what I have been told," Dumbledore continued, a twinkle in his eye. "Several of your fellow students have made it clear they do not condone what has happened."

Of course, Merula thought to herself. There's a right way to ruin someone's day, and it isn't during the Start of Term Feast.

Dumbledore paused for a moment, and Merula noticed a small smile on his face. "Three of your… Housemates have been punished for this act. They will not bother you from now on."

Merula frowned. Three? She understood one of them, but the other two?

"Is that satisfactory to you?"

"I guess," Merula said, suddenly just tired and irritated. Dumbledore had her sit in his office for all this time to tell her… that? "Will that be all?"

Dumbledore paused. "If you are tired indeed, then yes, that will be all."

Merula nodded her thanks as she headed down from the Headmaster's office, but she took a detour to the Frog Choir's room first. She missed her mother, especially the one that didn't have Voldemort's leering face on her.

Her mother was still in the same spot as when she last saw her, and Merula traced a finger over the first photo. Lucius had once mentioned to her that she took after her mother, and with more time on her hands, Merula could see why. The only difference Merula could tell was that her mother had lavender eyes, and wore her uniform much cleaner than Merula did at the moment, though Merula smiled when she looked over to the picture of the year after.

Though her mother still looked as proper and prim as she did before, Aria Snyde wore robes that, on closer inspection, looked worn and somewhat torn, with a clear hole around her knee, and... she had a lock of orange hair?

Merula squinted closer to the photo until her nose bumped into the glass. Wincing as she rubbed her nose, she confirmed that, indeed, her mother had dyed a lock of her hair a shade of bright orange. It was a shade that reminded Merula of carrots, Weasleys, and pumpkin juice, none of which anyone with common sense would like in their hair.

It was then that Merula stepped back, and, much to her dismay, her eyes caught the sight of her mother's third and final photo, clearly uncomfortable sitting between two students Merula suspected were either Mudbloods or Blood Traitors.

The third picture looked vastly different from the first two, and Merula found her mother's sudden shift in demeanor more disturbing than her lock of Weasley-coloured hair in the previous image. Moreso, her eyes had changed colour, going from a pretty lavender to a dark brown that came closer to black. With her mother's sickly pale skin and black robes, it had the effect of scaring Merula, for just the way her mother dressed and looked reminded her of Voldemort in all of the photos she had seen of him.

For the first time, Merula wondered how much she knew her mother. For all she knew, her mother really had blue eyes and blonde hair, given how different she looked in various photographs.

But that was a question for another day, especially when Merula heard steps in the hallway behind her. Though by the time she slipped out of the room, there was nobody there.


To her surprise, Merula could hear shouting even before she finished the steps down to the Slytherin common room, and it wasn't a voice she was expecting, especially at how late it was at night.

"What were you thinking?" The voice of Marcus Flint roared, echoing off the walls. "Eighty points! Eighty!"

Ah, Merula thought to herself with a small amount of disappointment. Flint only cared for the points. Pity.

"We lost last year by ten points!" Flint shouted. "TEN! And now you dunderheads lose us EIGHTY POINTS before classes even start!"

Merula sighed and sat down on the cold stairs, plugging fingers into her ears and hoping that Flint would run out of steam soon. She wasn't tired, so Flint's shouting wouldn't affect her sleep in the immediate future, but she could hardly think with his banshee like shrieking, and she doubted Lockhart's solution to defeating banshees would work on Flint.

"And now we're down a Keeper and a Beater!" The muffled voice of Flint still cut through her best attempts to drown them out. "The same year we get the best brooms in the world, you stupid wankers blow it!"

Merula sighed and stopped plugging her ears. Perhaps she could consult a higher level Charms textbook and figure out how to make someone quiet. She had remembered Lucius doing it to an idiotic Hollyhead Harpies fan over the summer, though it was a strange sight to see someone without a mouth.

And then the door behind her swung open. It wasn't loud, but with Flint catching his breath after another screaming tirade, Merula could hear the door clearly, and she turned around to see a tall girl behind her.

"Snyde." The seventh year female prefect, who Merula remembered as Victoria, though she didn't remember the prefect's last name, nodded her head in greeting. "Is Marcus done yet?"

"And you just have to attack Mr. Malfoy's daughter!" Marcus started back up again. "We'll all be dead as dust before he sends us another Knut!"

The prefect groaned and gestured for Merula to follow her, rubbing the bridge of her nose as she stepped by Merula. "Right, I'll go talk to him. Maybe then some of us could get some sleep."

Merula nodded quietly and scooted aside to help her pass, following her down the stairs and into the common room.

"Marcus!" Merula heard the prefect call out. "Keep it down, would you?"

"Vic," Marcus replied. He was no longer shouting, voice clearly hoarse. "Have you seen Sn-"

Merula got her first look at the common room in several months a second later when the prefect stepped aside, showing her the rather horrifying sight of a red-faced Marcus Flint staring back at her, his jaw seemingly unhinged and showing her all of his terrible teeth. And of course, the bastard who drenched her in pumpkin juice, as well as two of his friends.

"Snyde," Flint started, a look of panic on his face, a look Merula didn't think he was able to make. "I… I have a favour to ask."

Merula blinked and took a step back. She wasn't expecting him to call a favour. For the captain of the Quidditch team to ask a second year a favour was just odd.

"The girl's tired," Merula heard the prefect growl as she pounded a finger into Flint's chest. "Make it quick, because I'm also tired."

"Could you not mention any of this to your father?" Flint asked as he came closer, his face pleading, seemingly ready to tear out his hair. "We'll lose the brooms if this comes out."

"The headmaster will likely have informed Lucius already," Victoria replied in a tone that Merula associated with eye rolls and face palms. "Merula, you'll switch beds with me. We're not risking something else happening to you at night, not after what happened in the Great Hall."

"Hey-" Flint continued. "Vic, come on, just hear us out."

Merula exchanged a glance with the older girl, and noticed her shrug before she replied. "Merula, it's up to you."

Merula shook her head. She would at least need the evening to think it over. Impulsive decisions tended to go badly for her.

"Please," Flint sounded frantic. "We'll lose the Quidditch House Cup if Mr. Malfoy finds out. We'll probably lose every one for the next decade. Please, don't let him take the brooms."

Merula wanted to ask Flint a few questions. Namely what in Merlin's beard he meant by brooms, and what it had to do with Lucius.

But Flint was in her face, and Merula suspected she would look like an idiot if she asked an obvious question, so she played along.

"No promises," Merula said, unwilling to look Flint in the eye as she inched closer to the prefect. "I'll think it over."

Flint didn't say anything to that, but his shoulders slumped and he stumbled back into his chair, burying his face in his hands as Victoria walked Merula over to another room she wasn't familiar with.

"The others should be asleep by now," Victoria said as she opened the door, frowning for a moment when she looked in. "Your luggage is already there, but you can unpack in the morning."

A series of giggles came from within the room as the door swung open, and Merula saw the prefect grimace. "Ok, maybe they're not asleep after all."

Merula glanced beyond Victoria's cloak and found that, to her dismay, a dozen sets of eyes were staring back at her.

"Right," Victoria muttered, walking over to a bed in the centre of the room and stopping next to Merula's unpacked suitcase. "Play nice with the kid, we're not losing another hundred points by morning."

Merula grimaced as she sat down on the bed the prefect had just vacated, and she noted with a small amount of annoyance that the other girls in the room, seemingly seventh years, all seemed to be staring at her.

But the prefect had already disappeared, and that left Merula alone in a room full of strangers.

"Right," Merula muttered to herself as she threw herself onto the bed. "I'm going to sleep."

One of the seventh year girls close to her giggled.

"I wish I had a sister," another said.

"You do," a third voice pointed out.

"She's not as funny as this one." The second voice came back. "And she's Ravenclaw."

Merula buried her head under the nice clean pillow and tried her best to get some sleep.

"Girls!"Victoria's voice snapped from the door. "Let the kid sleep. We all have classes tomorrow morning."

"She needs to take off her shoes first," one of the giggling girls called back.

Merula jerked up and kicked off her boots before she buried her head back under the pillow.

The room was quiet for a few seconds before the door shut, and then it was silent for a few more seconds. Then the pillow on Merula's head suddenly wasn't there anymore, and Merula had to jerk back up again, feeling her cheeks burning from embarrassment as she tried to look around the room for the lost pillow.

"She does look like your sister," one of the seventh year girls three beds down said, sitting on an extra pillow Merula suspected was her own. "Shame there's nobody in the world willing to trade for Ash."

Merula groaned as she looked around the room. "Can I have my pillow back?"

"Twenty questions and we give you your pillow back, deal?"

"You have nineteen now," Merula pointed out, trying her best to end the conversation quickly so she could have some time to plot and scheme.

There were a few laughs at that as Merula took a deep breath, rubbing her eyes, hoping that the bed could swallow her up so she could avoid the rest of the questions, but as usual, she had no luck on that front.

"Is it true you're Draco's sister?"

"Adopted," Merula said through gritted teeth, her mind flashing to the memory of Narcissa in their dining hall. "My dad's in Azkaban, and my mom's dead."

"Oh," someone said as Merula noticed the giggles die. "Nice going, Tiff."

"Shut it A.J."

"Could we talk about something else?" Merula asked after an uncomfortable moment of silence.

"Is it true that Lucius bought the entire Quidditch team new brooms?"

Merula frowned at the question, drawing a blank at what they were asking. "Brooms? What brooms?"

"Nimbus Two Thousand and Ones," one of the other girls said. "One for each member of the team."

Merula blinked as she turned over to her suitcase, fiddling with a zipper before she pulled her broom out. "Like this?"

There was a gasp around the room as Merula held the broom up, and several flashes of light as wands flared with blinding light.

"Holy sh-"

"Tiff!" a voice snapped. "Language!"

"A second year has a brand new Nimbus sitting in her suitcase?" Merula heard one of the other girls say as she examined Merula's broom. "And she isn't even on the team!"

"Not yet," Merula grumbled. "Tryouts aren't due for a few days."

"Your brother's on it," the girl named Tiff said as she grabbed the broom from one of the other girls. "Higgs wasn't happy with it."

"Why weren't Lee and Summers smart enough to talk him out of it?" another girl complained. "Now we're down eighty points and they're the laughingstock of the school."

"Nobody told them about your brother's scheme until the last minute," the girl named A.J shrugged. "Granted, none of them were sorted for cunning."

"You're telling me they dumped the juice on me because of Draco?" Merula hissed, suddenly too angry to even consider sleep. "First I have to babysit Draco so he doesn't fail his classes, now people want to go after me for what he does?"

"Brothers, am I right?"

"A.J's brother got sorted into Gryffindor," one of the girls admiring Merula's broom muttered when Merula glanced over at her, increasingly annoyed at the treatment of her precious broom. "Can't imagine how annoying that is."

"My brother doesn't have the amount of money Malfoy throws around on a daily basis," A.J said, rolling her eyes. "And that's not mentioning how Draco mentions his father every other time I see him."

Merula groaned. "He still mentions Father?"

"Yes," six annoyed voices answered back, with one of the girls continuing. "He mentioned your father four times tonight, though he never mentioned you in particular."

"Just wait until my father hears of this!" one of the other girls cried, in a mimicked voice that was every bit as grating as Draco's own.

Merula wanted to bury her face under her pillow again, just so the room of strangers couldn't see her cheeks flushing red out of embarrassment, but since the pillow was still halfway across the room, she figured she wasn't getting it back unless the senior girls wanted her to.

"I do have a question," Merula said when her broom was finally passed back to her. An idea born of annoyance, anger, and more than a little malice was boiling up inside of her. "How would you deal with annoying idiot brothers?"

There was silence in the room for a moment as Merula glanced around at the faces of the other girls. There were no shortage of wild grins illuminated by lit wands, but one by one Merula noticed they had all turned to the girl named A.J, who wore the widest grin out of all of them.

"Draco's locked in to become our Seeker, isn't he?" A.J. asked when Merula met her eyes.

"Seems like it," someone else said. "That's what Higgs wasn't happy about."

"Ok," A.J. replied, her grin even wider now as she beckoned Merula to get closer. Her voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper as Merula crossed the distance between their beds. "Tell Flint…"

The idea sunk into Merula slowly, but once it did she couldn't help but join the other girl in grinning. She could almost see Draco exploding in rage. The sight alone would be worth it.


At the advice of the 7th years, Merula waited for Marcus Flint to come to her, to place the ball in her court. No point losing initiative by letting Draco know in advance what she was planning. The seventh years had explained themselves in the context of an ambush, with as little time as possible given to the other side.

The first class in the morning was Defense Against the Dark Arts, which Merula liked, even if she found the idea of being in DADA classroom uncomfortable after Quirrell tried to kill her, Potter, and to a lesser extent, Granger.

But still, Merula was comforted by the fact that she had learned all that was relevant from Lockhart's books, however difficult they were to read through. It meant, just as the previous year, DADA should have been all but a free period for her to work on her… other projects.

Unfortunately, the moment she saw Lockhart step from his silly little staircase she suspected that she would be unable to get anything of value done in his class, and by his third sentence his grating, arrogant voice made her want to tear her hair out and melt her brain into pudding.

How was a man so incompetent that he only had a idiot's magazine's best smile award to boast about? Even Lucius had better qualifications than that. How terrible must the other candidates have been for Lockhart to get the job?

And his sense of humour, if it could be called that, resulted in more than a few heads bashing into desks around the room. More than a few people wanted to make brain pudding, it seemed.

Merula was tempted to join them, given the amount of confused looks she got when she looked around the room. It was a strange day that she was on the same page as Draco, both the idiots she couldn't tell apart, and Blaise, all of whom were staring at the idiot who was somehow their professor.

And yet Pansy and most of the girls in the classroom wore excited grins on their faces, as if they were meeting Mr. Maple, a reigning world champion of Quidditch, not a writer of children's fiction.

And then Lockhart passed out a quiz, a short one, and one Merula had no interest in answering, for the first five questions consisted of idiotic trivia and opinion questions, and the rest of the double sided sheet had even worse.

When Lockhart's back was turned, having reached close to the back of the class, Merula glanced over to Draco, and found that her adoptive brother had the same baffled look on his face, the look changing to a grimace as he met her eyes.

It felt strange to have her confusion confirmed by her idiot brother. For a second, even Merula was willing to let the grudge slip and indulge in mutual confusion with half of their class.

By the time Merula stumbled out of the class after the legion of baffled and confused boys, her head hurt, and her opinion of Lockhard had soured. Whereas before she had seen him she saw him as a pompous idiot who wrote children's fiction, now she was almost certain that Lockhart was something even worse, perhaps part Veela, given the fact that the other girls in the class had stayed behind to hassle him with meaningless questions.

It wasn't until Merula had stepped outside of the classroom that she could organize her thoughts into a list of things she hated about Lockhart. For one, he had begun grading the quiz right before their eyes, occasionally complaining to the class how little they knew of his favourite colour and even less about his ambitions regarding hair care products. Though for some strange reason, several of the other girls gained Slytherin a few points for answering the questions correctly. Somehow, it sank Merula's opinion of them even lower than she thought possible.

Fortunately, the class ended without further incident after that, though Merula was surprised and concerned to see the Head Boy march through the door with a team of other prefects to confiscate some sort of cage under a red cloth.

"What was that about?" Merula heard Draco complain out loud when the gaggle of Slytherin boys reached a safe distance away from the DADA classroom. "What kind of idiot lets Cornish Pixies out in a classroom?"

Merula had an answer for her brother that she figured they could both agree with, but with the source of their confusion out of the way, she was inching closer to the usual relationship she had with him, with significantly less agreement than during the abnormality that was Lockhart's class.

It was then that Merula noticed her father's personal owl flying above them, with a letter in its beak. It was a bit of an odd sight, particularly given that,while Narcissa had sent Draco sweets on a daily basis in their first year, anything from Lucius usually came early in the morning, as Merula knew he sent his letters before he went to bed.

What was more surprising was that the owl was flying right to her. The letter would have landed perfectly at her feet, if not for Draco, who had strode forward and plucked the letter from the air before Merula could reach it. It mattered not; she doubted the letter was for her anyways.

Merula sighed as her stomach grumbled. She rubbed the bridge of her nose as she turned to the Great Hall. Perhaps she could find her roommates and actually have someone to talk to over lunch.

"Hey Snyde," Blaise called from behind her when she turned to leave. "The letter's for you."

Merula turned around to look at Blaise and the rest of the Slytherin boys, most of whom had remained around the doorway to the Defense Against Dark Arts classroom.

"Me?" Merula asked as she snatched the letter from Draco's hand, frowning when she saw that, indeed, her name was indeed written across the letter, though it was obviously hasty and unlike Lucius's usually clean style. "What does Father want with me?"

Draco grinned. "Maybe he wants to disown you."

A memory of a drunk Narcissa flashed to mind and Merula growled as she spun around, tearing open the letter with a single rage fuelled slash.

To her surprise, she found three pieces of paper inside, one with hurried handwriting that she still recognized as her father's, and two more that she recognized as typed on Ministry of Magic stationary.

"Ohh," one of the other boys said. "Ministry papers."

Merula ignored them and stormed off, breaking into a run once she reached the end of the hallway. The papers, whatever they were, were meant for her and her alone. And that meant she had to escape the idiot crowd.

While Merula would have usually run for the library, she found herself trying for an alternative avenue down to the Slytherin dorm where she figured the dorms would be deserted.

To her relief, the common room was in fact, empty. The tables usually occupied by Wizarding Chess players were bare for the first time in Merula's memory.

But that wouldn't do, Merula realized. Someone, particularly Draco or one of his group, could walk in on her. Thus, the list of options was cut down to the temporary wing she had been assigned to/.

The room itself was brighter than it had been the previous night, for obvious reasons. There were a few lights scattered about the room that allowed Merula to see that the beds had been cleaned, no doubt a result of good House-Elf discipline, unlike what she got at home with Dobby.

However, Merula had to mentally relive the last night to find her bed, given that her suitcase was tucked away under one of the many identical beds.

It was on her third try that Merula found her suitcase under a bed, and by then her stomach was already complaining over missing lunch, but Merula ignored it. She had to know why Lucius was sending a letter so late.

It was when she opened the first folded sheet of Ministry stationary that Merula felt her jaw drop.

To the legal guardian of Miss Merula Snyde. This is a notification of forfeitures of the Selwyn Estate under the Muggle Protection Act of 1992. As your ward, Miss Merula Snyde, is the only legal heir to the Selwyn Estate, we are obligated to notify you, as her legal guardian, of these seizures.

Merula glanced down the long list that followed, and almost incinerated the paper in a rage. She didn't even know her mother's family had such things, and now she would never know, with the Ministry having stolen them from her.

Merula flipped over to the other Ministry document and glanced over the sheet. It was shorter than the first, having only a few lines of text, but one that had saddened Merula more than the far longer list from her mother's side. This second list contained more than a hundred books, three times the amount seized from her mother's estate.

For the first time in a long while, Merula felt a black, oily rage that blinded her and brought her breathing down to ragged growls. She remembered the library in the house when she was a little girl, with books big and small, in all colours of the rainbow arranged on neat shelves. Her father had promised her that he would read them to her when she was old enough, but he was gone now, and if the Ministry's letter was correct, so were the books.

She sniffled, wiping her eyes quickly before she moved onto the third letter. She would have time later to dwell on it, but not now. There were other, more important things to prepare for.

But before she left the room, Merula looked over to the letter Lucius had sent. It was short, consisting of a few lines of half-scribbled text on paper with what looked like a tea stain covering the second half of the sheet.

Merula, the letter started. I have received this notice from the Ministry of Magic, no thanks to Weasley's Muggle Protection Act.

Merula narrowed her eyes at the name, the second half of the letter forgotten as rage bubbled in her chest. It was Arthur Weasley who wrote the act? A man with no family honour was dictating the affairs of Wizarding Britain's oldest family? Had the Ministry of Magic gone insane?

That changed things, Merula decided. She was going to get back at one of the Weasleys this year, especially given what Ronald Weasley had done the year prior.

No, Merula changed her mind a second later. She was going to get Ronald Weasley this week. Not year, not month. This very week.

And as she glanced down at the second half of the letter, she managed a faint smile, because there was going to be more revenge down the road. A lot more of it before the year was out.

While searching your family estate, we have discovered a will previously not disclosed to the Ministry. I have sent it to my lawyers and will keep you informed of its contents, but a preliminary analysis indicates that you will be able to withdraw a small amount of Galleons each month.


AN: Alright! Chapter complete!

Responding to comments (yay): On Merula's murder-shoes. According to the concept art that I've seen, Merula wears what appears to be Doc Martens 1460 combats boots. As someone who has worn these in the past, they are very resilient shoes with the downside of being rather painful to break into, hence the initial pain Merula felt at the end of year 1, but this pain goes away once the shoes are fully broken into. As I'm an author, and torturing characters is pretty much lesson 101 in fanfiction school, expect more suffering on Merula's part in the years to come on this subject.