As Professor McGonagall used the Imperius Curse to control that Death Eater, Kyle happened to be drawn to Fawkes's perch across from him and turned around.
What a beautiful perch. It was clearly made of the finest rowan wood, with loops of golden lines wrapped around it, perhaps for grip, perhaps merely for decoration. But Kyle was certain that it was real gold... Dumbledore really was rich.
Still, he probably had no use for it now, right? Even his phoenix had run off into Kyle's suitcase. There was no point leaving the perch here. Maybe Kyle could take the trouble of dealing with it for him, so it would not keep taking up Professor McGonagall's space.
Thinking this, Kyle ignored the voices of the surrounding portraits.
Minerva McGonagall using the Imperius Curse... he must have misheard. Or perhaps Headmaster Armando Dippet had drunk too much counterfeit liquor and was babbling nonsense.
He remembered that the Fat Lady's good friend, Violet, loved drinking and brewing alcohol. There was always a barrel of liquor in her portrait. The two of them occasionally got roaring drunk in the middle of the night, making life miserable for any Gryffindor students out after curfew.
Sometimes they had merely gone to the kitchens for a midnight snack, only to return and find the Fat Lady sprawled there unconscious, impossible to wake no matter how they called to her.
If the Fat Lady did not wake up, they could not enter the common room. They could only clutch the food they had brought from the kitchens and shiver outside the common room entrance.
If they were lucky, the Fat Lady would wake up groggily after an hour or two, letting those outside come in. But most of the time, they had to squat outside until dawn, at