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Draco did not think that he’d experience a closing Hogwarts feast as shocking as his first year ever again. It had been the only year that he’d truly cared about house points after all. The following years had been harder on the student body, between the heir of Slytherin targeting Muggleborns, the dementors sucking the joy out of everyone, and the spectacle of the tri-wizard tournament, no one cared about house points. And as terrible as Diggory’s death was, it was not truly a shock. Hogwarts was not a safe place and it never had been.
But the announcement that the Dark Lord was responsible for Diggory’s death weeks after the fact was jarring. It was also plainly discourteous.
The fact that the student body was being sent home early was down right panic inducing.
Draco did not think it was an intentional sleight which of course made it the worst kind of slight–a thoughtless one. The administration had not bothered to concern themselves with students like him just like they had not bothered to concern themselves with the whole of Slytherin house in his first year on numerous occasions and notably when they’d all been sent down through the halls in the dungeon not 30 seconds after Quirrel had announced that he’d seen a troll there.
Of course, these administrative oversights cropped up for other portions of the student body as well, but Draco did not spend time worrying about the rest of the school the way he worried about himself. It was not his job after all. Whereas it was Dumbledore’s, and Draco could not help the bitterness that the old mugglelover was not doing it.
That is, he was heading home shortly with the barest notice to face his parents and conceivably the Dark Lord himself, and there was no time to think, or panic, or run away.
Well. Maybe that was for the best.
But somehow Draco doubted that Dumbledore had thought to himself “yes. Better send those children of Death Eaters that Potter mentioned back home right away. That will be the safest for them.”
It’s not like the Dark Lord has a reputation for getting his way through coercion and threatening families. Of course not.