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Millicent skipped back to her common room and pressed her hand against the wall behind the suit of armor that hid the common room entry.
"Grim Faced Whelk," she said confidently.
The armor looked at her petulantly.
"No?" Millicent asked, and frowned. Then she remembered the password had been changed yesterday.
"Aldridge Pear," she said, and the armor continued to be impassive.
She racked her brains. "Eldridge Pear?" She asked.
The armor shook its head in the negative.
"Aldridge Apple?" She asked, feeling foolish. She hadn't forgotten the password for the common room, ever. Her memory was very good.
Maybe the person who had passed on the info - was it Flora and Hestia? Yes it was, now she thought about it - maybe they were mistaken. But it didn't seem like the kind of mistake they would make.
In the meantime she tried further combinations, in particular plurals. "Eldridge Apple. Aldridge Pears. Eldridge Pears. Eldridge Apples. Aldridge Apples."
Receiving no response, she moved on to alternate old passwords that she remembered.
"Angus Filch. Boggart Bravery. Charles the Chump..."
She went through the entire alphabet, or at least until she got to "Weasley is our King."
It was only then that she lost her temper.
"This is hopeless," she said with a sigh. She pressed her forehead against the wall, willing it to open to her or waiting for someone else to walk through and give her the password.
She waited for ten minutes. No such luck.
"Oh Millicent," she moaned to herself, "what a stupid fat fool you are."
To her surprise, the armor creaked in response, "close enough," and the wall opened up to her.
To say she was surprised would not capture the amount of rage and despair that Millicent felt.
"I... Oh never mind," she said miserably, and she went inside the room.
She practically ran into Flora and Hestia, who were on their way out.
"We just heard," Flora said, her voice strained.
"We are so sorry," Hestia said, her voice very nearly overlapping Flora's, but not quite. They spoke together as if they had been rehearsing. They probably had been, actually. They didn't look joyful, and they descended upon Millicent like mourning doves, ushering her to a dark corner.
She looked across the room and saw Pansy Parkinson sitting in front of the fire, several other Slytherins sitting around her. All of them were pretending not to stare at Millicent as she entered the room. All of them, that is, except for Pansy, who was smiling brightly at Millicent. Baring her teeth, more like.
"It was unnecessarily mean," Hestia said, sitting in unison with her sister on the loveseat facing away from Pansy's coterie, her free hand fidgeting with the corner of her dress.
Millicent had no other chair than the one immediately facing the brigade of Slytherins who had turned against her. She turned her body to keep her eyes from going back to looking at them, memorizing their faces, like picking at an old scab that she knew was going to bleed after she scratched it.
"We had nothing to do with it," Flora added, though Millicent was only half listening, her heart constricted with rage.
"If our father knew, though, he'd fire you outright," Hestia said.
"He cares a lot about these things," Flora said.
"Unlike him, we like you," Hestia said.
"We want you to stay."
"But we simply can't work with someone who has earned the enmity of the house."
"The point is that we need someone to protect us-"
"-And now you're a liability, not an asset."
"Were it not so, of course it would be different."
Millicent opened her mouth to respond, but found herself at a loss for words. She had been worried about losing her position, yes - but she hadn't anticipated it would come from the two girls directly. They had more gumption than she'd given them credit for.
"Don't cry, Millie," Hestia said. Between the two girls who were barely distinguishable, Hestia was by far the most sentimental.
Millicent frowned. "I'm not going to cry," she said petulantly, squinting in another direction. Notwithstanding the fact that she had, in fact, been about to cry. "And my name isn't Millie. It's Millicent."
"But now we can be friends," Flora said, "however briefly. And friends can call each other nicknames."
Millicent snorted. She'd been their servant. Never their friend. What was this? She was immediately suspicious. "Us. Friends?"
The girls have Millicent symmetrical, prim smiles. "We won't tell da' till he hears about this on his own," Flora said, a scheme rising in her voice.
"Given how busy he keeps, I doubt it will be before next Christmas. Certainly he won't hear of it until well after the end of this term, so you won't suffer financially for it."
Millicent knew when she was being treated as a pawn.
"What's in it for you?" she asked, no further from tears than she had been. "Why even bother with me?"
Everyone knows I'm a fat pathetic fool, she thought to herself, and she wondered how her housemates had found the perfect criticism of her to drive a final wedge between them. It was almost as if someone had gotten into her brain, poked around for the most sensitive spot, and then made a copy to use as a weapon.
The girls looked at each other. They hadn't been prepared to answer this. It fell to Flora to answer, given she was more of the practical decision maker between the two.
"Because we know this war isn't going to favor the ways of old Slytherin," Flora said carefully. "And the reasons for this humiliation of yours are because of old Slytherin."
"We will be, together, a new Slytherin," Hestia added. "But it isn't our time yet. We have to wait until the old is vulnerable and then strike. Not before. So you see," she said, beaming, "we have a plan."
Oh, third years and their plans. Millicent was well aware of the schemes that the younger students could get themselves into. She remembered many misadventures of her own, many plots, many attempts to do great things. Well, perhaps trying to catch the Giant squid for a fry-up wasn't nearly as ambitious a goal as changing the entirety of an ingrained wizard culture, but still!
Nonetheless it was a pacifying thing, to hear the twins waxing poetic about a better world.
"So pray tell me," Millicent said, leaning back in her chair and placing one hand on her expansive belly. "What would this new order of Slytherin look like? Truffles at breakfast? Freedom to roam the halls at night? A fair chance to win the quidditch cup?"
The girls paused looked at each other and frowned.
"We hadn't gotten that far," confessed Hestia. "Mostly what we care about is protecting people like us."
"Like us?" Millicent asked, and snorted. "What do you take me for, exactly?" She was genuinely curious what the twins thought they had in common with her.
"A lesbian?" The girls said in chorus, and then clapped their hands over their mouths, embarrassed at being so loud. Then, with a whisper, they asked, "A lesbian?"
"Well, I guess I am," Millicent said, frowning. "But then... Are you saying that you two...also..."
An awful realization hit her. "But you're sisters?" she asked faintly, denying the impossible.
"You're wrong on two counts," said Flora, and said with a straightforward flourish, "First, we are a sister and a brother."
With that said, Flora's wand traced a circle on each of Hestia's breasts, and they suddenly flattened. Hestia Simultaneously cast her own charms over herself, and she suddenly was a good six inches taller, a hundred pounds heavier (all muscle), and had a grisly beard.
"Don't I look fabulous?" asked Hestia, his voice still feminine and dainty, "I can't wait until I graduate and can get my modifications. This is just the healer's mock-up."
"Father will have a fit, but we won't care by then. He's giving us our inheritances to do with as we please upon our graduation," added Flora.
"What's the other count I was wrong, out of curiosity?" Millicent asked. She felt a little bit shocked by the twin's revelation. A few years ago, she might have shunned them. But now… clearly the twins were doing this as a way of demonstrating their fidelity. It was an interesting concept, to be given leverage over the unique couple in such a manner.
Then again, she knew they had plans for her, and they were going to do quite a bit to make sure she was in their corner when the time came for them to act.
But that was fair, as long as there was reciprocity.
The twins, in response to her question, looked at each other with long and sober glances. Then, in an intense whisper, they added, "We're gay, too, of course."
Millicent restrained herself in time to keep from asking the obvious questions about Hestia's gender identity and attractions, and stopped herself in time. It was none of her business asking how a man could engage in gay sex without organic male parts. If Millicent knew anything about bodies and sex, she could guess the question would be a painful one.
The twins then stood. "We've got to go," Hestia said, the charm dispelling abruptly. "No need for it to look as if we're scheming."
"We're terminating our contract, understand?" Flora said loudly, so others could hear, standing and grasping Hestia's hand. "So go, Millicent. Go back to Gryffindor, if that's where you want to be. We don't care."
Hestia was tearing up a little bit, and Flora offered her sweater sleeve for Hestia to dab his eyes.
Millicent responded by running up to her room. She had to at least get Hermione's books.
It was only once she had packed her trunk and dragged it out of the common room that she slipped into a dark corridor and began to sob uncontrollably behind the safety of a silencing charm.
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