Watching Umbridge suddenly rise to her feet while Dumbledore was still speaking, Harry turned with a baffled expression. "What is she doing? The headmaster hasn't finished yet!"
"Isn't it obvious?" Hermione rolled her eyes with a edge of irritation in her voice. "She's about to give a speech."
"You're joking—!"
Ginny, seated on Harry's other side, snapped her eyes wide open, her bright red hair was swaying with the motion. Her face was full of disbelief. "No new teacher has ever interrupted Professor Dumbledore before."
Ginny's sentiment spoke for the vast majority of the Great Hall.
Up at the staff table, Professor McGonagall pressed her lips into a tight, rigid line, her glasses were throwing back cold light, her displeasure at Umbridge's behaviour plain for anyone to see.
Professor Sprout raised an eyebrow, lacing her hands on the table, her normally warm gaze was sharpened by a new wariness. Professor Snape's eyes were lowered, the shadow of his robes were obscuring most of his face and yet the revulsion churning in those dark irises looked ready to spill over entirely.
Professor Flitwick flashed a startled expression, then exchanged a quick glance with Dumbledore.
Dumbledore sat down almost immediately. Together with Flitwick, he turned his full attention to Professor Umbridge, both of them appearing utterly eager to hear what she had to say.
The students throughout the Hall traded glances with one another, their eyes a tangle of surprise, resignation, and the subtler thrill of watching a spectacle unfold.
It was fair to say that this woman from the Ministry of Magic had singlehandedly succeeded in drawing the gaze of every teacher and student in the school directly onto herself.
"First of all, I must thank the headmaster for that warm welcome—"
The magical motes drifting across the Great Hall's enchanted ceiling cast their light down onto Umbridge's round, pudgy face, making her saccharine smile even more insufferable to look at.
Had she been even remotely pleasant to look at, perhaps that girlish voice might have carried some charm. But her figure was crammed into an ill-fitting pink cardigan, and paired with that bewildering taste in clothing and the affected, baby-soft voice she was forcing, the effect was merely grating.
Several students seated near the long tables wrinkled their noses and quietly turned their heads away.
'Absolutely insufferable.'
"Secondly, I must say how wonderful it is to be back at Hogwarts! Especially when I see all your bright, cheerful little faces gazing up at me, it's simply marvellous!"
As she spoke, Umbridge lifted her chin and swept her gaze across the students, clearly savouring the sensation of being watched.
"Is she serious?" Ron was the first to mutter in protest, his impatience getting the better of him. "She's talking to us like we're three-year-olds!"
As a matter of fact, not a single face around them looked cheerful in the slightest. Even Neville couldn't help nodding along in agreement, the round-faced boy having no more desire than anyone else to be spoken to like a small child.
"And I am most eager to get to know each and every one of you. I believe, we are going to be very good friends!"
Umbridge clasped both hands to her chest, her smile was growing sweeter still, and even gave a small, girlish sway.
This time, the reaction across the Hall was considerably louder.
Students exchanged knowing looks with their neighbours, some suppressing laughter, others not bothering to hide their gleeful smirks at all.
Friends? Who in their right mind would want to be friends with her?
"I'd be her friend as long as she never makes me wear that cardigan."
At the Gryffindor table, newly appointed prefect Parvati nudged her best friend Lavender with an elbow and murmured under her breath, her eyes raking over Umbridge with disdain.
Lavender immediately caught her meaning. The two girls covered their mouths in unison, their shoulders were trembling with stifled laughter.
Harry and Ron glanced at each other. For once, they found the pair's giggling rather easy to stomach.
"Hem, hem."
Having dispensed with the pleasantries, Professor Umbridge cleared her throat again though this time, when she spoke, the affected simper had been deliberately dropped. Her tone flattened out entirely.
Yet this newly earnest voice only made her words sound all the drier, like a prepared speech being read aloud from a script, the pauses themselves stilted and mechanical:
"The Ministry of Magic has always regarded the education of young witches and wizards as of vital importance. The rare gifts with which you were born may go undeveloped and unrealised if they are not nurtured with proper, attentive guidance.
The ancient arts unique to the magical world must be passed down from generation to generation, or they will be lost. The treasure trove of knowledge accumulated by our forebears must be protected, enriched, and refined by those fortunate enough to enter that most noble of callings, the profession of teaching—"
Here Professor Umbridge paused, and with a slight bow, offered a pleasant smile to the teachers seated around her.
Not one of them returned it.
Professor McGonagall's eyebrows knitted sharply together, deep lines pressing into her forehead.
Professor Snape was drawing something idly on a piece of parchment, utterly indifferent to the overture. When Umbridge gave two more delicate little "hems" and readied herself to continue, McGonagall even turned sideways to exchange a glance with Professor Sprout beside her.
That glance held parts mockery, parts disapproval, parts boredom, and part cold contempt.
"Every headmaster and headmistress of Hogwarts has brought something new to the weighty task of running this historic school, and that is as it should be, for without progress there will be stagnation and decay.
And yet, progress for the sake of progress must be discouraged. Our tried and tested traditions often require no tinkering. A balance must be struck between the old and the new, between the permanent and the fleeting, between tradition and innovation—"
Umbridge's voice grew more and more monotonous as she went on until it resembled nothing so much as Professor Binns droning through a History of Magic lesson, its lack of inflection inducing a creeping, irresistible drowsiness.
It had to be said: a speech this devoid of substance was nearly impossible to follow with any sincerity.
When Dumbledore had spoken, the Great Hall had been so hushed that a falling pin could have been heard.
Now, however, patience had long since worn through. Murmured conversations multiplied, whispers weaving in and out of suppressed laughter.
The once-still Hall grew noisy by degrees, bustling like a lively market.
The Gryffindor side was, naturally, the most conspicuous. The Weasley twins had their heads together with Lee Jordan, all three of them were pulling faces and mouthing things at one another, filled by bouts of stifled sniggering.
Ron had produced the remainder of his syrup tart from earlier; he was now tearing it into small pieces with great care and shuttling them into his mouth at speed.
Ginny, meanwhile, had her head tilted to the side, her gaze was resting on Harry as he looked about the Hall. Her eyes held a warmth so quiet it could easily go unnoticed. As for Umbridge's speech, it had long since been demoted to background noise.
Hermione, by contrast, was taking in every word with complete attention though judging by her expression, not one of them was to her liking.
She raised an eyebrow and turned to ask, "Sherlock, what do you make of this?"
"Stank tales, full of foolish talk."
Hermione let out a startled laugh. Strangely enough, she didn't find Sherlock's comment jarring in the least as though she'd somehow known all along that was precisely what he'd say.
Across the table, Ron still had his mouth full of tart. "What did you say, Sherlock?" he asked, the words coming out blurred and half-formed. He'd only caught the tail end, but the fact that it had made Hermione laugh that brightly was reason enough to ask.
"I said she's spouting nonsense—talking complete rubbish." Sherlock repeated himself without ceremony, his grey eyes were sliding toward Umbridge on the dais with the air of someone regarding something wholly beneath notice.
Over at the Ravenclaw table, Luna Lovegood had produced her copy of The Quibbler once more.
Several seats away, Cho Chang was talking to Lucy and Alicia, and every so often all three girls' eyes drifted toward the Gryffindor table. When Lucy and Alicia said something, Cho Chang's face went crimson.
At the Slytherin table, Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle were seated in the centre of their bench, their own glances straying toward Gryffindor from time to time.
Crabbe and Goyle's fathers had been confirmed as Death Eaters and sent to Azkaban yet thanks to Dumbledore's policy of not punishing families for their members' crimes, the two of them had been permitted to return to Hogwarts.
This, of course, had made them the subject of considerable scrutiny across the school. Then there was the matter of their leader: ever since Draco Malfoy had spoken privately with Sherlock near the end of last term, he had been distinctly… different.
So, this year, all three of them were keeping an unusually low profile even after Malfoy had been appointed Slytherin prefect not long before. Girl prefect Pansy Parkinson gazed across at Malfoy with adoration, as though she could stare at him indefinitely.
Over at the Hufflepuff table, the most prominent presence was the towering Ernie Macmillan. He had once, in a misguided moment, believed Harry to be the Heir of Slytherin and had led a campaign to isolate him but the instant that misunderstanding was cleared up, he'd apologised with such honest directness that it rather suited Hufflepuff's reputation for sincerity.
He was now one of the few students in the entire Hall still looking in Umbridge's direction, though his expression was glassy and unfocused, his eyes on her were without any real awareness.
Clearly, he was doing no more than maintaining the appearance of attentiveness so as not to disgrace the brand-new prefect badge gleaming on his chest by candlelight.
Professor Umbridge seemed entirely oblivious to the restlessness and chatter all around her, continuing to hold forth at her own measured pace. Her voice rose and fell through the din of the Hall like a tireless fly buzzing endlessly beside one's ear.
"—for while some of the changes have been for the better, others, in due course, will come to be seen—"
"Enough!"
A thunderous roar erupted without warning, rattling the candleflames in their sconces.
"How long do you intend to keep rambling on?!"
The shout crashed down like a stone into boiling water, and instantly every whispered conversation, every absent-minded chew, every smothered yawn fell silent at once.
Silence poured through the Great Hall like cold water flooding a room.
Hundreds of eyes stunned, disbelieving, and more than a few bright with long-awaited relief all swung as one toward the source of the sound at the staff table.
Mad-Eye Moody had risen to his feet.
His broad, powerful body leaned slightly forward, his magical eye were spinning wildly in its socket, blazing with dangerous light as it locked onto the rigid figure of Umbridge. Every scar and groove in that ravaged face was etched with naked fury and absolute, blistering impatience.
Karkaroff sat beside him, staring up in naked shock, it was plain he hadn't for a moment imagined that Mad-Eye Moody would do something like this in a public setting.
The false smile on Umbridge's face had frozen entirely, like a coat of cheap icing. The hands she'd been holding clasped to her chest, nails painted pink, lifted in that deliberately charming pose went rigid now, suddenly grotesque and faintly ridiculous.
The flush drained from her round cheeks, leaving them a flat, papery white.
Those protruding, toad-like eyes of hers filled with shock, and a flustered, wounded outrage at being so publicly affronted. Clearly, she had never once anticipated that anyone and certainly not a colleague would dare cut off a senior Ministry official in such a setting, with such naked contempt.
"M-Moody, Professor Moody?!"
Umbridge's shrill voice cracked with shock and fury, the syrupy affectation stripped away entirely, leaving nothing but a thin, trembling squeak. "How dare you—"
"How dare I?!"
Moody roared back, his voice like a thunderclap, rolling over her feeble protest without breaking stride.
"Dare to cut off your endless, bloated, utterly worthless stream of bureaucratic hot air, Umbridge?!"
He thrust out a thick, scarred finger, pointing it without ceremony at Umbridge's ashen face, while his magical eye swept over the silent students.
"Open your eyes and look around you! This is not your office, where you sit droning over a stack of papers about balance and tradition and progress! This is Hogwarts! Not a few months ago, a student stood in this very school and witnessed the Dark Lord's return with their own eyes!"
Moody's voice dropped then, losing none of its force only now it carried a weight that pressed down on every chest in the Hall.
"Voldemort is back. The wizarding world is on the edge of war, Albus just announced as much. And here you stand, squandering everyone's time! What we need right now is practical Defence training that works. We need to prepare these students for the storm that's coming. Not this—"
he cut the air with his hand, "—not your fatuous speeches and your hollow rhetoric!"
Over at the Gryffindor table, the group all turned to look at Sherlock.
Not long before this, Sherlock had used those exact words nonsense, complete rubbish to describe Professor Umbridge. And now Mad-Eye Moody, in his own thunderous fashion, had arrived at precisely the same conclusion.
Quite.
For all that both of them had emerged from the Ministry, a hack bureaucrat like Umbridge was in no way comparable to Moody a man forged by real war and real bloodshed.
She was a quail. His sheer presence had pinned her completely; she couldn't produce a single word. That earlier "how dare you" now rang as nothing short of pathetic.
"Now, sit down! Close your mouth!" Moody brought his hand down in a sharp, decisive sweep, as if he were clearing the very air of the cloying, saccharine falseness Umbridge had been spreading through it.
"Let something worthwhile continue! These children need to eat and rest and then prepare for tomorrow. A tomorrow where they might actually learn something."
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