The professor wasted no time in frivolity, addressing the point of having Amelia present almost immediately after she arrived. She briefly revisited the purpose of the detention – although she had already outlined it clearly in her first correspondence – and then moved on to what Amelia couldn’t help but interpret as a threat. It was a meaningless one, as far as Amelia was concerned, because she had no intention of giving any professor a reason to doubt that she had done her job correctly. If Xemnas – so that was his name – failed to clean the trophies well enough, Amelia would have made him redo it or have done the rest of it for him, not as a favor to him but to make sure she didn’t feel any backlash from it. She didn’t need Professor Bittel’s warning to do her job, but Amelia wasn’t about to stick her neck out in front of the blond woman by challenging her.
Nodding once to indicate that she had heard and understood, Amelia watched the professor demand Xemnas’ wand from him. The boy was understandably hesitant to hand over his wand, because to witches and wizards, giving up a wand was roughly equivalent to giving up an arm. What Caelani said next was not altogether helpful either, even though it was directed at Amelia rather than the quaking Gryffindor.
The Cruciatus Curse? Amelia thought, though revealing none of this on her facial features, which remained fixed in their usual, attentive but detached places. Certainly whatever he did to warrant trophy cleaning hardly calls for an unforgivable curse…
“Yes, I would be capable of performing the curse,” Amelia answered the professor. Her answer was not untruthful; she could perform the curse, but she had almost no intention of doing so. Using the curse would please Caelani and some of the other professors, but it would ostracize her with others. She wasn’t willing to risk her own reputation to make sure Xemnas learned his lesson, but the professor didn’t need to know that.
Obviously freaked out, the Gryffindor boy was lashing out at Professor Bittel, clearly unaware of how one should behave in these situations. Amelia could easily have had the same visceral reaction to the female professor’s suggestion, but it wouldn’t have done any good. Besides, she was not actually opposed to using the unforgivable curses under certain circumstances, but overseeing detention was certainly not one of those situations.
When the boy passed his wand to Amelia – supposedly to keep it away from the professor – Amelia was unprepared, and it took her a few seconds of indecision to take the wand from him. She did not hesitate, however, to pass the wand immediately to Professor Bittel, whose hand was still outstretched toward Xemnas.
“There,” Amelia said with a tone of finality, placing the thicker wand in Caelani’s open palm, “I think I can take it from here.”
“Well, get to it,” Amelia said brusquely as she turned toward Xemnas, trusting that the professor would leave quickly as she likely had a lot of other things to attend to or she wouldn’t have asked Amelia to do this in the first place, “I hardly think these trophies are going to get any cleaner with you standing here gawking.”