The room had no windows, which Dolores Umbridge had decided within the first hour was the single most offensive thing about it. Not the chains binding her wrists to the arms of the chair, though those were bad enough. Not the bare stone walls or the single ever-burning lamp fixed too high on the wall for her to reach even if her hands were free. It was the lack of windows. A witch of her standing, forced to sit in a box with no natural light like some common criminal awaiting sentencing.
She was not a common criminal. She wanted that understood, and she’d said as much to every Auror who’d rotated through the room since they’d brought her here, wherever here was. Nobody had bothered to tell her, which she found almost as offensive as the windows.
“You do realize,” she said now, to the two Aurors currently stationed by the door, “that when this inquiry concludes, and it will conclude in my favor, I intend to remember every single one of you. Every name. Every face. People have long memories in this Ministry, and so do I.”
The Auror nearest the door, a broad-shouldered man with a heavy jaw, didn’t so much as glance at her. His colleague, younger and visibly more uncomfortable with the assignment, shifted his weight but said nothing either. They’d learned, over the course of however many hours it had been, that responding only encouraged her.
“I built half the reforms this Ministry has been living off for the last decade,” Umbridge continued, her voice climbing into that sweet, saccharine note that turned venomous the longer she spoke. “Standards. Order. A proper accounting of who belongs where. And this is my thanks. Locked in a cellar somewhere while that useless, sniveling little man who owes me his entire career pretends he never once asked my advice.”
Neither Auror responded. She sniffed, adjusting herself as much as the chains allowed, and let her eyes drift over them both with open contempt.
“I suppose men like you wouldn’t understand what it takes to actually run something,” she said. “Following orders, standing in doorways, that’s all you’re fit for. Someone has to make the decisions. Someone has to be willing to do what’s necessary, even when lesser people haven’t the stomach for it.” Her lip curled. “Half of the Ministry couldn’t tell parchment from their own backside without someone like me telling them which was which.”
“Ma’am,” the older Auror said, with the flat patience of a man who had said the word many times already that day, “you’re welcome to keep talking. I’m not required to listen.”
Umbridge’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Do you know who I am?”
“I do,” he said. “That’s rather the point of me standing here.”
She opened her mouth to fire back something suitably cutting, but before she could, the door swung open and a third Auror stepped through, tucking her wand into the holster at her hip as she crossed the threshold. She was younger than the other two, with dark hair cropped close and a face that carried the sort of unremarkable pleasantness that made her easy to forget the moment she left a room. Standard Auror robes, the same as the others, the badge at her collar catching the lamplight as she moved.
“Relief’s here,” she said, by way of greeting. “You two can head out.”
The broad-shouldered Auror straightened up. “Verification first.”
The new arrival didn’t so much as blink. She held out her wand arm, and he tapped his own wand against hers, muttering the verification incantation under his breath. A faint pulse of blue light passed between them, confirming what the Ministry’s wards already knew, that she was who her badge said she was, cleared for this posting, no tampering, no imposters. It was standard procedure. It happened at every shift change, every single day, and nobody in the room thought twice about it.
“You’re clear,” he said, and his shoulders eased, the particular fatigue of a man who’d been standing in a windowless room with Dolores Umbridge for the better part of his shift and was very much ready to be somewhere else.
“Anything I need to know?” the new Auror asked, glancing briefly toward the prisoner, who was watching the exchange with the sharp, assessing eyes of someone cataloguing every detail for later use.
“She had her evening meal about two hours ago. Should be due water again within the hour, there’s a jug and cup in the corner there, she’s not permitted anything else without sign-off from a senior officer. Food comes at set times, nothing outside the schedule, don’t let her tell you otherwise, she’ll try.” He said this last part with the weary certainty of experience. “Wand’s in the lockbox down the corridor if you need the reference number, it’s on the board outside.”
“Noted.”
“She’ll talk your ear off if you let her,” he added, lower, though not quite low enough that Umbridge didn’t catch it and bristle. “Best to just let it go past you.”
“I’ll manage.”
The younger Auror who’d said nothing this whole time nodded a farewell to his colleague and followed him out the door, which shut behind them with a heavy, final sound, some kind of ward settling into place with an audible click. And then it was just the two of them. Umbridge, chained to her chair. And the new Auror, standing near the door with her hands loosely clasped in front of her, saying nothing at all.
For a long while, nothing happened. The new Auror didn’t take up a post by the wall the way the others had. She simply stood there, her gaze moving slowly around the room, the ceiling, the corners, the single lamp, as though she were assessing the space itself rather than the prisoner in it. Umbridge, for her part, decided the silence was intolerable within about four minutes, which was roughly her limit for any silence she hadn’t personally imposed on someone else.
“You’re new,” Umbridge said.
“Rotation,” the Auror said simply.
“Hm.” Umbridge studied her the way she studied everyone, sorting her instantly into categories that existed nowhere except inside her own head. Blood status, family name, usefulness. “You’ve a very ordinary face for an Auror. I don’t recognize you.”
“Most people don’t,” the Auror said, and there was something in the way she said it, something almost amused, that Umbridge didn’t have the patience to examine.
-Break-
It was another quarter of an hour before the new Auror spoke again, and when she did, her voice was different entirely, cooler and more clipped.
“I read your file,” she said. “Before I came down here.”
“Did you?” Umbridge’s tone made it clear she considered this an obligation rather than a courtesy.
“The Werewolf Regulations. The Muggle-Born Registration proposal that never quite made it to a full vote.” The Auror’s eyes flicked toward her, unreadable. “Quite the body of work, for someone who spent most of her career as an Undersecretary rather than a Minister in her own right.”
“I built that Ministry’s backbone,” Umbridge said sharply. “Someone had to have the courage to say what needed saying. To sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. You’d be surprised how few people in this country had the stomach for it.”
“I’m sure.” A pause. “Must be strange for you. All that work, and now you’re sitting in a cellar while Cornelius Fudge gets to decide how the story gets told.”
Something flickered across Umbridge’s face, quick and ugly. “Cornelius,” she said, “would be nothing without me. Nothing. I built his career for him one policy at a time while he sat behind that desk being charming at dinner parties and letting other people do the actual governing. And the moment things go poorly, the moment there’s the faintest whiff of consequence in the air, he throws me to the wolves like I’m nothing to him. Like I didn’t personally hold that Ministry together through three separate votes of no confidence.”
“That does seem rather ungrateful of him.”
“It’s exactly what I’d expect, if I’m honest,” Umbridge said, warming to the subject in the particular way she always did when given an audience, even an audience of one bored-looking Auror in a windowless room. “Cornelius has never had the spine for difficult decisions. That’s always been the trouble with men like him. They want the results without wanting to be seen doing what’s necessary to get them. I never had that luxury. Somebody had to be willing to look unpleasant in the newspapers so that the actual work got done.”
The Auror was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice had shifted, softened in a way that made Umbridge glance up sharply, suspicious of the change even as some vain, starved part of her leaned toward it.
“For what it’s worth,” the Auror said, “there’s more support for what you were trying to do than you might think. Even now. Even down here.”
Umbridge’s eyes narrowed. “Is that so?”
“You’d be surprised how many people in the Department share your views on certain things. Not loudly, not where it could cost them anything, but privately.” The Auror leaned back against the wall, her arms folding loosely. “The Werewolf proposal, for one. There were people in the ministry who thought it was overdue. Who still think it’s overdue. They just weren’t the ones whose names ended up in the Prophet when it went sideways.”
“Of course they didn’t.” Umbridge’s mouth twisted into something that might, on a kinder face, have passed for a smile. “Cowards, all of them. Happy to nod along in private and vanish the moment there’s any risk to their own position.”
“Some of us aren’t so happy to vanish,” the Auror said.
The silence that followed was different to the earlier one. Umbridge studied the younger woman with new attention, some old, well-worn instinct sliding into place, the one that had let her sort every witch and wizard she’d ever met into camps of useful and useless within moments of meeting them. She was recalculating.
“And what, precisely,” Umbridge said slowly, “does an Auror on cellar duty know about the internal politics of Ministry policy?”
“More than you’d think.” The Auror’s expression didn’t change. “I’ve been in this Department a long time. You hear things. You see how decisions actually get made, who’s really pulling for what behind closed doors. There’s a fair number of us who think what’s happening to you right now is a disgrace. A woman who spent years doing the unpopular work of keeping standards up, thrown to the crowd the second it became politically convenient.” She shook her head slightly. “It’s not right.”
Umbridge said nothing for a long moment, but something in her posture had changed, the rigid, offended dignity softening into something closer to attention. She had spent her entire career starving for exactly this kind of validation and rarely found it in any quantity that satisfied her.
“You understand,” Umbridge said carefully, testing the ground, “that everything happening right now is the result of a deception. That recording was manufactured. Twisted. Taken out of context by people with an agenda against me specifically.”
“I don’t doubt it,” the Auror said.
“Cornelius panicked, as he always does, and rather than defend the people who’d been loyal to him for years, he threw me directly under the cart to save his own skin. It’s disgraceful. I’ve done nothing that wasn’t in the Ministry’s own interest.”
“For what it’s worth,” the Auror said, “I believe you.”
-Break-
They talked for a while after that. Or rather, Umbridge talked, and the Auror listened, occasionally offering a comment here and there.
“The thing is,” the Auror said eventually, glancing once toward the door, “I didn’t ask for this posting by accident.”
Umbridge went very still. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I requested it.” The Auror’s voice dropped lower. “There are people, Dolores, who don’t think what’s happening to you is right. Who think the Ministry owes you rather more than a cellar and a locked door. I’m one of them.”
“You’re going to have to be considerably more specific than that,” Umbridge said, though the sharpness in her tone had gone weak, hopeful despite itself.
“I can get you out of here.”
Silence.
Umbridge’s eyes searched the Auror’s face for the trick, for the joke, for whatever cruelty was surely hiding underneath an offer that generous, because in her experience nothing was ever handed to her without a hook buried somewhere inside it.
“And why,” Umbridge said slowly, “would you risk your position, your career, everything, for me?”
“Because someone should,” the Auror said simply. “Because what’s happening to you is wrong, and because I think, when the dust settles and people calm down enough to think clearly again, they’ll see that too. But you won’t get the chance to make that case from inside a cell, will you? You’ll get processed. Tried. Made an example of, while Fudge stands up in front of cameras and pins his own failures on you because it’s easier than admitting he made them himself.”
Umbridge’s jaw tightened. “That miserable, spineless little man.”
“I can get you out,” the Auror said again. “Tonight. But you’ll need to trust me, and I understand that’s not a small thing to ask of someone in your position.”
“Suspicious of you, you mean,” Umbridge said, her eyes narrowing again, some last vestige of caution flickering behind them even now. “Forgive me if I don’t leap at the first friendly face that wanders into my cell with a convenient offer of rescue. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to trust me on words alone,” the Auror said, and reached into her robes.
Umbridge tensed, but what emerged wasn’t a threat. It was a small brass key, old-fashioned and slightly tarnished with runes etched all over it, which the Auror used to unlock the runic chains binding Umbridge’s wrists to the chair. The metal fell away with a soft clatter, and Umbridge rubbed at the raw skin beneath, flexing her fingers slowly, testing that this was real and not some cruel prelude to further humiliation.
Then the Auror walked out of the cell for a few minutes, returned with something in her hand, and held it out.
Umbridge’s wand.
For a moment she simply stared at it, and something in her face cracked open, just slightly, the mask of composed dignity she’d been wearing for hours giving way to something rawer underneath. She took the wand with both hands like it was something sacred, running her thumb along its length, and when she looked back up at the Auror, whatever suspicion had lingered in her expression had thinned considerably.
“Why?” Umbridge said again, quieter this time.
“Because you deserve better than this,” the Auror said. “And because there are more of us than you know.”
-Break-
“Where exactly are we?” Umbridge asked a bit later, once she’d had a chance to stand, to pace the small room now that the chains no longer held her, working the stiffness out of limbs that had been locked in one position for the better part of a day.
“A secure holding facility outside London. Ministry-owned, technically, though it’s the sort of place most people don’t know exists.” The Auror had settled into an easy, watchful stance near the door, keeping half an eye on the corridor beyond it. “There are wards on every exit and two more Aurors posted at the main gate. Getting you past those without triggering an alert is going to take patience. You understand that, don’t you? We can’t simply walk out the front door.”
“Naturally.” Umbridge waved a dismissive hand, though the eagerness underneath the gesture was plain enough. “I’ve never been one to rush a plan. Precision is what separates competent people from fools who get caught.”
“Good. Because if we move too early, or if anyone downstairs notices the chains are off before we’re ready, this becomes considerably more difficult for both of us. I need you patient. Can you do that?”
“I can be patient,” Umbridge said, though the way her eyes kept darting toward the door suggested patience was not, in fact, a virtue she possessed in any great quantity. “How long?”
“Not long. A matter of hours, not days. There’s a shift change at the gate later tonight that gives us our best window. Until then, we wait, and we don’t do anything to draw attention.” The Auror tilted her head slightly. “I know that’s difficult, given everything. But we’ve got this far. It would be a shame to ruin it now out of impatience.”
Umbridge exhaled through her nose, visibly restraining herself, and lowered herself back into the chair, this time by choice rather than under duress. “Fine,” she said. “Hours. I can manage hours. And afterward? Once we’re out?”
“Afterward, you disappear somewhere safe while the people I’m working with start making the case publicly that you were treated unjustly. That the recording was manipulated. That Fudge threw you to the wolves to save his own skin rather than defend a loyal servant of the Ministry.” The Auror’s tone was even, reasonable, exactly the sort of thing Umbridge desperately wanted to hear after a day spent chained to a chair in a windowless room. “It won’t happen overnight. But it will happen.”
Umbridge nodded slowly, something almost like relief settling into the lines of her face. “You understand,” she said, “that everything I did, I did for the good of that Ministry. The order. The standards. Someone had to be willing to make the unpopular decisions.”
“I understand,” the Auror said. “We all do.”
-Break-
An hour or so later, Umbridge’s stomach announced itself loudly enough that even she couldn’t ignore it, and she said as much, though not with much enthusiasm.
“You should eat something,” the Auror agreed, and left the room briefly, returning a few minutes later with a covered tray, which she set down on the small table near the chair. Beneath the cover sat a simple meal, bread, some kind of stew, a cup of water, nothing extravagant, but Umbridge hadn’t eaten properly in what felt like a very long time and the smell of it made her mouth water despite herself.
“Eat properly,” the Auror said, settling back against the wall. “You’ll need your strength for later. Getting out of here isn’t going to be as simple as walking through a door, whatever your instincts might be telling you right now.”
Umbridge hesitated for the briefest moment, some old, deeply buried caution flaring up one last time, and then dismissed it. She was tired. She was hungry. She’d spent the better part of a day chained to a chair being spoken to like a criminal by men who owed their entire careers to policies she’d written, and now, finally, someone had walked into that cellar and treated her like she mattered. Like her decisions had been correct all along. It was, in its own quiet way, exactly what she’d been waiting to hear for longer than she probably would have admitted, and her guard, worn thin by exhaustion and flattery in equal measure, gave way entirely.
She ate.
She missed, in the process, the small, private smile that crossed the Auror’s face as she watched, the kind of smile that had absolutely nothing to do with sympathy.
When Umbridge had finished, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand in a gesture that would have horrified her at any other point in her career, the Auror reached into her robes once more and withdrew two folds of shimmering, near-invisible fabric, which she laid carefully over her arm.
“Invisibility cloaks,” Umbridge said, her eyes widening slightly.
“Ministry stock, requisitioned for exactly this sort of thing. We’ll move once the gate shift changes. From here to the perimeter, then out through the eastern boundary where the wards run thinnest.” The Auror held one of the cloaks out toward her. “Are you ready?”
Umbridge looked at the cloak for a long moment, and something shifted behind her eyes, something that had nothing to do with gratitude or relief and everything to do with the familiar pleasure of a plan falling into place. A slow, wicked smile spread across her face, the kind she hadn’t allowed herself in days, not since the recording had ended her career and put her in chains.
“Oh, I’ve never been more ready,” she said as she reached for the cloak.
-Break-
The steps of the Ministry of Magic had not seen a crowd this size in living memory.
They packed the plaza in front of the visitors’ entrance and spilled backward down the surrounding streets, witches and wizards standing shoulder to shoulder with Daily Prophet reporters and their scribbling quills, camera flashes popping intermittently against the grey evening sky. Aurors lined the perimeter in a loose barrier, their wands visible but lowered and their faces schooled into the careful neutrality that came with crowd duty on a night nobody was entirely sure how the crowd would behave. Somewhere near the front, a temporary platform had been erected, made of plain wood and holding a single podium.
Cornelius Fudge stood behind it, his wand pressed lightly against his throat for the Sonorus charm, and for a long moment he simply looked out at the sea of faces in front of him and said nothing at all.
The crowd, for its part, had gone quiet, people waiting to see whether the man in front of them would confirm what they already knew or attempt, one more time, to talk his way around it. Nobody shouted. Not yet. There would be time for that.
Fudge cleared his throat.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said, and his magically amplified voice carried the tremor in it out across the whole square, impossible to disguise no matter how carefully he’d rehearsed. “I have a statement to make, and I intend to make it in full, without qualification, because the people of this country deserve nothing less from their Minister.”
A murmur ran through the crowd, low and skeptical.
“Thirteen years ago, Sirius Black was sent to Azkaban for the murder of twelve Muggles and the wizard Peter Pettigrew,” Fudge said. “He never received a trial. I want to be entirely clear about that, because for years this Ministry allowed the public to believe otherwise, and that was wrong. There was no trial. There was no hearing. There was a mob, and a man who happened to be standing in the middle of it, and a Ministry too eager to be seen doing something to ask whether it was doing the right thing.”
Somewhere in the crowd, someone let out a bitter laugh.
“As of this morning,” Fudge continued, his hand tightening visibly on the edge of the podium, “I have signed an order reopening the case of Sirius Black in full. The Kiss on Sight order issued against him has been formally rescinded, effective immediately. He will be afforded a proper trial before the Wizengamot, with all evidence considered, including the testimony that has already been made public regarding Peter Pettigrew’s survival and involvement in the events of that night. If he is found innocent, as the evidence strongly suggests he will be, this Ministry will issue a full and public acknowledgment of that fact, and it will do everything within its power to make amends for thirteen years of injustice.”
The crowd did not cheer. It didn’t boo, either, not yet. It simply watched, hundreds of faces waiting to see what came next, because they’d all learned by now that Cornelius Fudge rarely gave anything away for free.
“I want to also address, directly, the matter of Bartemius Crouch Senior’s death,” Fudge said, and here his voice wavered slightly before he steadied it. “Statements were made, by this office, suggesting Sirius Black’s possible involvement. Those statements were speculative, made without sufficient evidence, and in hindsight, entirely unfair to a man who had already been denied justice once by this Ministry. I retract them fully, and I apologize for the harm they caused.”
Somewhere near the back, someone started to clap, tentative and alone, before falling silent again when nobody joined in.
Fudge took a breath, visibly steeling himself for what came next, and when he continued, his tone had hardened.
“I want to be honest with all of you about something else,” he said. “The recording that surfaced two days ago, the one many of you have heard by now, was the product of a serious breach of trust within my own office. I did not authorize the falsification of any Ministry document. I want that understood clearly. Whatever was suggested in that conversation, whatever was proposed to me, I never agreed to it, and I never would have. The suggestion to alter trial records came from Dolores Umbridge, my former Undersecretary, not from me.”
The crowd stirred at that, a low ripple of noise moving through the square.
“I brought Dolores Umbridge into this Ministry,” Fudge went on, his voice climbing now, gathering the momentum of a man who had found, at last, somewhere else to point the finger. “I trusted her. I gave her influence, position, my confidence, and she repaid that trust by leaking a private conversation to embarrass me publicly and by attempting, repeatedly, to convince me to take actions that would have constituted serious crimes against the integrity of this Ministry. I did not forge anything. I did not authorize the destruction of any record. Those were her suggestions, made to me, and I rejected them, and the fact that this recording has been selectively used to suggest otherwise is, frankly, a further injustice on top of everything else this office has allowed to happen.”
“Convenient timing, that,” someone shouted from the crowd, and this time the ripple of agreement was audible, several voices rising in support.
Fudge pressed on regardless, his knuckles white on the edge of the podium. “Effective as of this morning, Dolores Umbridge has been removed from her position within the Ministry of Magic, permanently. She is currently in custody pending a full criminal inquiry into her conduct, including her role in the mishandling of Sirius Black’s case and her attempts to influence this office toward falsifying official records. She will face the appropriate charges under the law, and I intend to see that she receives no special treatment whatsoever in that process.”
“What about YOUR treatment, Minister?” a voice called out, sharp and unimpressed, and a few scattered laughs followed it.
Fudge’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t respond to that directly. Instead, he pressed his hand briefly against his chest, an oddly theatrical gesture for a man who otherwise looked like he wanted to be anywhere else on earth.
“I brought that woman into this Ministry personally,” he said, and something in his voice cracked, just slightly, whether real or performed no one in the crowd could quite tell. “I trusted her judgment. I valued her counsel. And she betrayed that trust in the most fundamental way possible, for her own advancement, at the expense of an innocent man’s freedom and this Ministry’s integrity. I won’t pretend that doesn’t sting. It does. Deeply.”
The reaction to that was muted at best, a handful of sympathetic murmurs quickly drowned out by a much larger current of open skepticism. Somewhere near the front, someone had already started up a low, rhythmic chant, more of Umbridge’s toad likeness bobbing overhead on charmed signs.
“UMBRIDGE OUT! UMBRIDGE OUT!”
It spread fast, the way these things always did, one voice becoming a dozen becoming a hundred, and beneath it, quieter but unmistakably present, a second chant began to weave through the crowd, aimed squarely at the man still standing behind the podium.
“FUDGE TOO! FUDGE TOO!”
Fudge’s expression flickered, something tight and unhappy passing across it, but he kept his chin up, kept his voice level as he raised a hand for quiet that the crowd only partially granted him.
“I understand the anger,” he said, once the noise had thinned enough to be heard over. “I understand it, and I won’t stand here and tell you it isn’t justified. Mistakes were made. Serious ones. And I intend to spend whatever time I have left in this office correcting them, starting with Sirius Black’s case and ending with a full accounting of everything Dolores Umbridge did while she held a position of trust in this government.”
He paused, glancing down briefly at the parchment in front of him, though it was clear from the way his eyes barely moved across it that he wasn’t really reading anymore.
“Thank you,” he said. “That concludes my statement.”
-Break-
Somewhere near the middle of the crowd, invisible beneath a cloak that shimmered faintly if the light caught it exactly wrong, Dolores Umbridge listened to every word of it, and with each sentence her rage climbed a little higher.
She listened to him retract the Kiss on Sight order, and thought of thirteen years of her own careful work toward exactly that kind of policy, undone with a single stroke of his cowardly quill. She listened to him apologize for the statements about Crouch, statements she’d helped craft, worded with her own careful attention, and heard him call them unfair as though she hadn’t spent hours making sure they landed exactly the way they had. And then she listened to him say her name, over and over, dragging it through the mud in front of the wizarding world while carefully, methodically scrubbing his own fingerprints off everything he could.
The suggestion to alter trial records came from Dolores Umbridge, not from me.
She will face the appropriate charges under the law.
I brought that woman into this Ministry personally, and she betrayed that trust.
Something hot and ugly was building behind her ribs, climbing with every word, every flinch of sympathetic laughter from the crowd around her, every chant of her own name twisted into an insult by people who had cheered for her policies not so very long ago when it was politically convenient to do so. She’d spent her whole life being the one willing to do the unpleasant, necessary work while men like Cornelius Fudge collected the credit and abandoned her the moment it cost them anything. She had thought, sitting in that cellar with a wand back in her hand and a plan for freedom laid out in front of her, that she understood exactly how furious she was.
She had been wrong. This was worse. This was watching him stand in front of the entire wizarding world and use her as a shield, use her name as the entire explanation for his own thirteen years of cowardice, and something in her simply broke, whatever thin thread of caution had survived the cellar and the chains and the long hours of patient waiting finally, completely, snapping.
She was moving before she’d fully decided to move, shrugging the cloak from her shoulders as she went, some part of her mind still functioning well enough to be dimly aware that this was not the plan, that this was not patient, that this was exactly the kind of impulsive, uncontrolled outburst she’d have condemned in anyone else. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t feel anything except the rage, hot and total, pushing her forward through the crowd, past startled witches and wizards who stumbled aside as a woman in prison-grey robes suddenly appeared among them out of nowhere.
Behind her, unnoticed in the commotion, the Auror who had walked her out of that cellar caught the falling cloak out of the air and folded it neatly into her own pocket.
“YOU,” Umbridge screamed, shoving through the last row of stunned onlookers and breaking clean through the barrier the Aurors had established between the crowd and the platform, her wand already coming up. “YOU SPINELESS, USELESS, COWARDLY LITTLE MAN!”
Fudge whirled toward the sound of her voice, his face draining of color the instant he registered who was standing there.
“Dolores—“ he started and got no further.
“AVADA KEDAVRA!”
The jet of sickly green light streaked toward the podium, toward Fudge, who had half a second to register the likelihood of his own death arriving before Kingsley Shacklebolt, standing at his shoulder as part of his security detail, slammed into him bodily and drove them both to the ground.
The curse sailed over where Fudge’s chest had been a moment earlier and struck the ornamental stone archway behind the platform instead, which exploded outward in a shower of pulverized rock, chunks of masonry raining down across the empty stage.
And then the stunners came.
They came from every direction at once, more than a dozen Aurors reacting in the same half-second, their wands already trained on the source of the curse, and Dolores Umbridge took the full concentrated force of every single one of them at close range.
A single stunner was, under ordinary circumstances, enough to drop a grown wizard cleanly and safely. Over a dozen of them, striking simultaneously, at that range, with no distribution of the impact across a crowd or a shield to absorb any of it, was something else entirely.
The concussive force lifted her off her feet and drove her backward into the stone steps hard enough that the sound carried over even the screaming of the crowd, and by the time the first Aurors reached her, it was already clear there was nothing left to do.
Dolores Umbridge was dead before she hit the ground.
TBC.