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Hagrid witnessed it first. The train was almost silent when it rolled up into the station. Usually, it was full of light, life, shouts, and gasps of amazement. Instead, they walked in neat lines off the train, no jostling into one another, no misbuttoned robes. They worked like no students should, like an orderly faction of soldiers.
The first years came to him like they knew where they should be and formed two straight lines. Blank looks on their faces, no awe at his size, no nervous twittering.
“Harry!” Hagrid shouted, giving him a wave. Hoping that the young boy would provide an explanation, comfort.
Harry merely turned his head gave a poor imitation of a grin and turned back to face the back of Hermione’s head.
“They weren’t talking,” Hagrid would say later when the students were in bed and a mass of concerned parents and ministry officials had descended on the school. “There was no laughter.”
“We will remain open,” Dumbledore said in a final voice. “This is unprecedented but we have the duty to teach all those who still wish to learn.”
“Won’t they be drawn to the dark arts?” Sinistra asked.
Remus had never been fond of the woman. He’d known her only briefly in his sixth year and she hadn’t been indulged in the knowledge of his condition. When she’d found out, her response made it clear as to why she’d not been in the know.
“It is now known what the effects of this will be,” Albus admitted. “But as their professors, it is our role to guide them away, show them a better path.”
“But is it safe?” she pressed and Remus was alarmed to hear mumblings from other Professors who didn’t dare be as outright as she.
“For you or for them?” McGonagall shot back.
Sinistra merely glared over at McGonagall but the others stopped.
McGonagall looked not at them but at Dumbledore and hesitation made her voice, usually filled with conviction waiver. “How do we keep them safe?”
Dumbledore did not answer, turning away and facing the window which stared out at the grounds, an expression of deep thought on his face. “By doing the best we can.”
No one asked about Quidditch and it was forgotten until the eve before the first match. McGonagall had always loved quidditch. She knew she went beyond her role at times to encourage the sport but found as much joy in it as her students.
“Mr. Wood,” McGonagall called during class, unsure of how to approach him, unsure of what to do.
In the past six years of knowing him, she could count on one hand she escaped a conversation with him without going into some nuisance of the sport.
“How’s the team coming along?” she asked of him.
He blinked at her, once, twice, and then said blankly. “What team?”
Shock stole the words from her mouth, her chest absent of air. “Gryffindor.”
“Sorry professor,” he told her and turned away without so much of a glint of…of anything in his eye.
“No ones practiced.” Hooch admitted.
She’d taken it as terribly as anyone.
“The brooms just don’t respond to them,” she continued, a far-off look that McGonagall had become intimately familiar with in her students over the past weeks. “Parents keep writing to me, telling me how natural they were on brooms but the brooms scarily go up.”
And so there were no matches, no cheering students in the stands. And Hooch was the first one to leave, to give up on the mess that the ministry had left them.
Whoever had done it hadn’t even the decency to hide their crime. The Hufflepuff prefects found her sitting in the middle of the corridor, clothes ripped, lying in the puddle where she’d been abandoned. The girl, a first-year, with curly hair and perfect teeth, didn’t even cry.
“What happened?” Pomfrey said soothingly.
It wasn’t her first, but thankfully there weren’t many she’d encountered over the years. The protective enchantments, they detected distress, why hadn't they caught her?
“I was walking down the corridor, I felt someone behind me. They took my wand, covered my mouth, and pinned me down. They held my arms to my side and ripped off my underwear. It stung and I asked them to stop. He didn’t.”
She struggled to keep kindness in her expression, comfort.
“Do you know who did this to you? Do you remember anything about them?”
“No,” she said blankly and looked up at the Matron. “Should I have asked his name?”
“She wasn’t in distress.” Madame Pomfrey concluded, again and again, that night and the weeks after.
They tried improving the enchantments. But it was hard to when no one was in distress. The emotions they relied on to tell them when a student was in danger.
A dozen more students were pulled from the school that night. And Madame Pomfrey had a hard time not following.
They were animals to their urges, violent in their need to fulfill their whims. In the account he gave later about the last year Hogwarts was a school open to all, Snape would tell stories of how they put themselves in danger for the sake of danger, how students would depart in the middle of class with indifference to their punishments.
It was impossible to punish them. The house points meant nothing. Detention was merely an event attended. Howlers from parents wouldn’t even cause a blush on a student’s face.
And the sex, all over the school all of the time. Snape knew it happened, he’d been a student once and the mere nature of packing hundreds of teenagers into tight quarters with little supervision and all those hormones meant that it happened and happened often. But in the past when he’d pull back tapestries or “wander” into empty classrooms the students would pull apart, blushing furiously. The girls, more often than not, would cry out of shame. Now, they continued on as if they’d never been interrupted.
“Have you no decency?” he’d hissed the first time he’d happened upon two Ravenclaw sixth years going at it in a secluded corner of the lake.
They hadn’t stopped and he’d resorted to blasting them apart with his wand. They’d merely blinked at him and the boy, who’d always been so frightened of Snape he’d never so much as raised a hand in class, answered, “And why should we?”
There was always one or two every year that no one wanted to work with. Usually, the child merely needed some hygiene assistance, or to learn to speak gentler.
But he’d slipped almost completely under the sneakoscope.
There’d been rumors of course, Sprout had always been careful to keep an eye out for him and Hagrid had tried taking the young boy under his wing after he’d been suspected. But, he’d always been so meek. It seemed impossible that he’d really been involved when a whole nest of pixies had been found with their limbs torn apart. He always made good grades, kept to himself. Was perfectly polite. Most of the time, Sprout merely felt bad for him.
Then there was that business when his younger brother was found dead. Horrible, mangled. It took him nearly a term to return for his grief. No magical involvement of course. It rather looked like a predator had taken him, lured the child into the woods, and….
Dumbledore had asked them all to keep an eye out when he’d returned. Sprout had merely thought that it was for his grief, to ensure that he was able to continue with his education after such a terrible loss.
After their students had been delivered sans souls, Sprout had been too distressed to notice that he hadn’t changed at all. No longer did students avoid him, he fit in as perfectly as the rest.
It was a missing batch of growing potion that prompted it. The simple question she knew would lead nowhere. “Have you seen them?”
And to her alarm, he composed his face into a smile. She had to admit that her heart soared when it did, seeing that smile, “No professor.”
And he’d gone on his merry way, blending back effortlessly into his classmates.
There was hope. She thought. There was potential for their students, it was something strange, sure but after teaching to empty faces for so long…
Dumbledore had not shared in her joy. He’d taken in her story, asking pointed, clarifying questions without a hint of hope on his face and then rushed from his office.
The boy broke down under questioning. He showed no remorse for what he’d done but confessed to many things, so many more than Sprout had even imagined him doing. The pixies, yes, but also fires
“His soul was split in two,” Lupin explained to her as she broke down sobbing in his office after. He’d been kind enough to steer her away from the conversations that were to come about punishment. “When the dementors attacked, they took his soul, but not all of it.”
She didn’t finish the term. Whereat first she’d been committed to ensuring their students got the education they deserved, knowing what was possible made it impossible for her to even look at them. In shame, she scribbled her note of resignation and fled the school in the night.
“Will we even be able to stay open another year?” Flitwick braved as they met the week before the winter holiday. He felt ashamed asking, he’d committed himself to stay again and again but felt he was reaching the end of his tether. Yet he felt no accusing eyes as he voiced the question he suspected they’d all been asking themselves.
The room was already half-full just as their classrooms were. Dwindled down one by one as parents heard the horrors they were unable to prevent.
“We will stay open for as long as we can,” Dumbledore replied, his voice firm.
“What of next year?” Flitwick went on, “Will we subject a new class of students to this horror? And what of those who graduate? They won’t be able to get their NEWTS, they won’t be able to lead stable lives. How can we release them into the wild?
“What do you propose then? Azkaban? They’re people.” Came McGonagall’s reprimanding voice.
Silence fell upon them. They weren’t used to infighting like this. Flitwick had always prided himself on their ability to come together. Questions tumbled around his mind, horrible questions yet he wasn’t alone for it was Madame Pomfrey who voiced them.
“And what makes a person? The ability to think, to feel? They can’t do any of that.”
“They can think.” McGonagall shot back.
“And from what we’ve seen they think terrible things.”
And so came the end of their time at Hogwarts. Not by fire or magic, just a terrible mistake, letting prison guards patrol students. A measure to protect turned rancid. It would be a dozen years before laughter again filled the halls. Parents too frightened to think it safe to send their hearts and souls off unprotected. A horror.
Dumbledore had known better.
If only Remus Lupin hadn’t missed the train.