FicWad

The Harry Potter universe is the creation of J.K. Rowling. This is fanfiction. The standard disclaimers apply.


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Chapter 22: Defense Class


Wednesday, October 24th.


Oren decided that it was once again safe to return to the Room of Hidden Things, after staying away from it for the beginning of the school year so as to remain undetected by other time travelers. For now, he honestly wasn't interested in finding out who they were, just in avoiding them.

He decided he couldn't count on the room not being destroyed a second time, and that it would be sad if he failed to comb through it and preserve anything worth saving. "Worth saving", unfortunately, seemed like a much less helpful concept once he was actually standing there again, taking in the magnitude of the task he had set for himself.

Draco, in the past timeline, said he had practically lived in here for a year. The fact that Draco hadn't used that time to really examine every item in here was the kind of thing that drove Oren up the wall. What is the point, he thought, of claiming to care about preserving blood purity if you lose the cultural heritage that presumably makes it work preserving in the first place? Oren had been raised to believe that pureblood values included an ethos of conservatorship—their families were, of necessity, the long-term memory of wizarding society, responsible for looking after things that younger families and muggleborns would not know about or appreciate yet.

There was unfortunately no one else Oren trusted to help him sort through this room, and he wasn't sure if he was feeling excited, intimidated, or both. Here furniture and boxes had been stacked in gigantic, poorly-balanced piles, which he would have to excavate one broken chair at a time. It was like many rooms in his family's house. Those, at least, he knew through experience were fundamentally manageable, at least if you were determined enough to sift through them methodically. The Room of Hidden Things appeared to be similar, just on a grander scale and all in one place, which made it a spectacular fire hazard.

Oren soon realized that the room contained hundreds of boxes, baskets, crates, and trunks filled with papers, and that these would probably take most of his time. He decided to go through those slowly, in between examining other items, in order to preserve his sanity. Unfortunately the papers probably represented most of the historical, and possibly also the magical, value in the room. He wished he could make it someone else's problem, but his sister wouldn't get here until his sixth year, and there was no "Hogwarts Antiquities Department" that would care about them, either. Maybe his father could suggest some pureblood Ravenclaw who would understand the situation.

As to books, of which there were many, Oren planned to gather them up and take them back to his room, leaving behind only recent copies of common textbooks which had no interesting notes in them. His trunk had a lot of room in its various compartments, and even if there hadn't been plenty of containers in the Room of Hidden Things that he could appropriate, he could always bring more empty luggage from home.

A large amount of the room was taken up by ordinary furniture, much of it broken. Oren thought this made it more of a "room of things nobody had any place better to put" than a "room of hidden things", but the latter name was definitely shorter. With the exception of the broken vanishing cabinet Draco had spent so long on, all of the chairs, dressers, tables, and desks that Oren investigated turned out to be non-magical. Of course, some were nice specimens of early wizarding woodwork, and Oren knew how to restore them, but he didn't actually have a place to put any of them either.

The same was true for the enormous piles of clothing—some of it was quite old and in good shape, but it was of historic, not magical interest. There were also a surprising number of female undergarments. Oren theorized that anything left behind in other instances of the Room of Requirement would eventually wind up here.

By the end of the evening, as he trudged back to his room (bearing a few shrunken, lightened containers of books), he wondered if his efforts would be better spent on fireproofing than on ad-hoc archival.


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Later that night, Oren lay in bed with the lights out, failing to get to sleep. His thoughts wandered to his Defense against the Dark Arts class. Tomorrow it was to be held outdoors, on the hill overlooking the lake. Speculation had ranged from the weather forecast being nice to practical exercises with real lake creatures. Practical exercises were usually a good bet; the last outdoor class had involved long distance target practice.

This year's Defense professor was a large, energetic man by the name of Erasmus Eeles. Professor Eeles was the sort of man who liked to get up before dawn for a nice walk around the lake, even when it was raining, and who couldn't understand why anyone else wouldn't want to do the same. He wore a pointed leather hat which, in its youth, the Sorting Hat must have resembled, and had never been seen in shoes other than dragonhide boots. Given his other proclivities, these last tended to be muddy, much to Filch's private consternation.

The caretaker was terrified of Eeles, which was probably for the best. The Defense professor, 6'3" and muscular, had on occasion cheerfully greeted Filch with a slap to the back, and would not have understood why he couldn't just walk on the floor the way it was obviously designed for. Eeles was young for a Hogwarts staff member—probably in his thirties—but wore a beard which made him look somewhat older. Dumbledore had apparently brought the man in from New Zealand, having temporarily exhausted the pool of British candidates foolhardy enough to take the post. Eeles was not an idiot—he had a one year contract and no intention of signing up for a second year. Quirrel, currently on sabbatical, was already signed on for the following year, giving Dumbledore a welcome reprieve from the usual last-minute recruiting process.

Armed with his own idiosyncratic ideas about the Defense curriculum and a total lack of concern about being rehired, Eeles took full advantage of the autonomy that Hogwarts generally gave to its faculty. On the first day of class he had informed the students that his country had no equivalent of O.W.L.s or N.E.W.T.s, that he didn't know what was on them anyway, and that he'd be damned if he was going to teach to any standardized tests. "You can prepare for that on your own time," he told them, "I'm here to teach you Defense, not how to make the examiners happy."

The first day of Eeles' class had irritated Oren the last time around, and over the years he had actually thought about what he wished he had spoken up and said. Well, now was his chance.

The Professor continued on, much as Oren remembered: "Note that I just said 'Defense', not 'Defense against the Dark Arts'. I'll explain why in a bit. How many of you have read the preface to your textbook already? Three? That's about what I expected. No, don't go read it now, I'm not going to have you even look in those books for the first few weeks, so put them away. Good.

Now, take out a piece of paper, if you aren't already set to take notes. Okay? I want you all to write down, as best as you are able, the definition of 'Dark Arts'. You have two minutes. Go." He then cast a timing spell that made a glowing hourglass appear on his desk. When the illusory sand finished trickling through it, it gave a metallic 'Ding!' and vanished.

"Right then. I'm going to go around the rooms, and you will tell me your names, so I can learn them, and then read what you've got. You there, in the front—why don't you go ahead."

What followed was a mess. A few words and phrases turned up over and over—'evil', 'hurt people', 'intention', and such—but the answers were all over the place. Eeles surprised Oren by looking pleased and laughing at his version: "A catch-all term applied to politically disfavored magical practices, items, and creatures to the extent that those can be portrayed as threats to wizards or wizarding society; alternatively, the Dark Arts are whatever we say they are."

When everyone was done, Eeles stood in front of his desk and smiled. "Well, you all made my point even better than I'd hoped, which is that nobody really agrees on what the Dark Arts are. Personally, if I had to pick one for myself, I'd have to go with something close to Mr. Wayland's valiant attempt to dodge the question. I especially liked that he mentioned creatures, because sticking those into the curriculum is one of those weird Britishisms that you'd never see back in my country.

Actually, I'm being too polite. I think you're all nuts. This book—your first year, Ministry-approved textbook, here? Spends two pages on, for instance, vampire bats, and a whole seven on iguanas. Vampire bats? Iguanas? How the hell are iguanas a Dark Art? It doesn't even make any sense. And it doesn't get better—if you look at your upper-level textbooks, it's just a parade of various animals, 99% of which most of you will never see.

So no, I have no idea what the Dark Arts are, precisely. For our purposes, we are going to just say that this is a class about how to avoid getting hurt by the magic of hostile human wizards, plus anything else I feel like throwing in, or that the Headmaster says I have to teach you. Can you all live with that? Great.

Right then. Now, I made fun of you all for not agreeing on a definition of the Dark Arts, but we can still benefit from looking at what wizards widely agree is harmful magic. In this country you have selected three spells that you have named 'unforgivable curses', and if you catch anyone using them, you throw them away in your prison—what is it Alka-, no, Aza-, no, Azkaban? okay, you throw them into Azkaban for life. These spells, respectively, take life, take away free will, and cause pain.

It ought to be straightforward enough why the killing curse is objectionable—we don't want people going around killing each other, that's an ancient prohibition. Moving on, though, the imperius curse . . . Mr. Wayland, I see that if I don't let you talk you will probably explode. What is it?"

"Professor Eeles, uh, I don't think that's right, about the killing curse. Um, I've seen it used twice." Gasps came from the class. "The first time, my father used it on a mouse he caught in the kitchen. It was in a jar and running around and scared. He couldn't just let it go outside, because it would just try to get back in, and they carry diseases and chew things. And the thing about the killing curse is it's humane in that situation. Most other curses would blow the mouse to smithereens, and it would be messy and not painless. My father called in my sister and me, and talked to us about it, and let us see the mouse, and explained that the curse is dangerous, and that you treat it like any other dangerous thing that we have in our daily lives. You know not to jump in front of a moving train, you know not to mess around with the killing curse. I think the reason it bothers people is that it's instantaneous and irreversible—when an auror blows somebody's limbs off and
they bleed to death in agony over half an hour or something, it doesn't bother people as much. Anyway he made us stand on the far side of the room, and cast the curse, and then we took the mouse out and threw it in the woods where something might eat it.

And then the second time I saw it cast was on a bird—it was little, I think a robin—that had been hit by a muggle car. And it was flapping around and really badly hurt—it wasn't going to live, and there was nothing that we could do for it, but it would have been in pain for hours if it were just left there.

It's only illegal to use the unforgivables on humans. But lots of wizards are so scared of the curse, they think it's actually evil, so they won't use it even when they should. I've seen the gamekeeper here—Hagrid?—shooting squirrels with a crossbow, the grey ones from America he doesn't want getting into the forest—and, I don't want to describe it too much, but they don't die right away. They are very obviously in pain. That's what the killing curse is for.

And, sometimes you need the curse because nothing else will work and otherwise you'll die. My aunt used the killing curse on a werewolf once. She was 82, and she wasn't a powerful witch or some auror or something, and she wasn't healthy enough to apparate—it was about to lunge, she had time to get off one spell, and she did that, and lived to tell me about it. And if that werewolf had been a human, there's some legal idea about symmetrical force, where they would have thrown my aunt into Azkaban for doing that even though she would have otherwise died, because the law is written for powerful wizards and not little old ladies who don't have choices—"

Eeles interrupted. "Mr. Wayland, I think that's enough for now, please calm down. I probably should have cut you off sooner, I'm sorry. Today is actually my first experience teaching.

Sooo, Mr. Wayland has given us an alternative view of the killing curse, and I think he had some valid points. I wonder . . . how many of you have a family member who you know has used the killing curse on an animal?" He counted hands. The class was held with the Gryffindors. Many, but not all, of the hands in the air came from students wearing green and silver. "That's about a third of the class. And how many of you have actually seen it used? Reeally. That's about a fifth. And of that last group, how many of you come from families that are considered pureblood?" No hands went down; again, most were Slytherins.

"Fascinating." He looked thoughtful for a few seconds. "I might regret this, but would I be correct in thinking, Mr. Wayland, that had I let you continue, you would have gone on to talk in a similarly impassioned way about how I was wrong about the imperius curse?" Oren nodded. "Do you think you could do that?" Oren nodded again, and then realized he was expected to say something.

"The first time I saw it, my mother used it on a wren that had gotten into the house and wouldn't fly out any of the windows we had opened for it. It was really little, and something that stunned it might have killed it, and with something like a hover charm, it might have hurt itself struggling. The imperius was the only safe way my mother knew to get it back outside. And since then I've seen my parents use it a lot of times to get the neighbors' cat out of the yard—"

"That'll do." Eeles cut him off, having learned from his earlier experience. "I'm guessing the shows of hands would be about the same. I'm going to go over the traditional attitude toward the imperius in a moment, but first I need to satisfy my curiosity. Mr. Wayland, what about the cruciatus?"

"There is no good reason for causing pain to another living being."

It took a moment for Eeles to realize that was all Oren was going to say. "I guess that doesn't really need elaboration, does it. Thank you, Mr. Wayland." Oren had kept his mouth shut for the rest of that class period. Between self-consciousness, the emotionally draining topics, and the struggle to pass for eleven, he was done.

Oren had worried about getting off on the wrong foot with Professor Eeles, but it turned out not to have made much difference one way or the other, beyond ensuring that the professor always remembered his name. He hadn't heard anything at all from the Gryffindors after class—he liked to imagine they were too stunned to say anything, and not just preoccupied with quidditch or something. He had gotten a "nice comment, there" from Erwin, but overall the Slytherins seemed to have taken it in stride. Oren assumed he did an adequate job of expressing the pureblood position. If anyone took issue with his response about the cruciatus, they didn't have the nerve to say it to his face.


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Thursday, October 25, 1990


The next morning, as Oren walked out of the castle to the assigned meeting place for the Defense class, he could see Professor Eeles positioning an odd device on the edge of the hill. It was just below knee-height for Oren, and other than a rope with a handle for pulling on, he couldn't make out what it might do. He could see similar devices spaced around the hill in increments of a hundred feet or more. The class, curious to see what today would involve, wasted no time gathering to hear Eeles' explanation.

"All here? Great! I've got a treat for you today. This thing here is called a trap launcher, and the easiest way to explain it is to show you." Eeles pulled out his wand, and took the pull-rope in his off-hand. When he yanked on it, the launcher sent an orange disc flying out in an arcing path over the lake. "Reducto!" he shouted, and the blue spell went flying, connecting a few seconds later with the disc, which shattered. The pieces flew off in all directions, vanishing before hitting the ground.

"Now, as some of you might have figured out, this is a muggle device that I modified a bit. It's designed to fire targets like the one you just saw—called clay pigeons—and muggles use it for target practice with their guns. I've made a few tweaks, the main ones being that it never runs out of ammunition, and the targets or their shards vanish before hitting anything. So, no hitting bystanders, no clean-up. Anyway, I have a bunch of these spaced around the castle, and I'm going to have you pair off and try to hit the targets with the knock-back hex I taught you.

Before we do that, I'll warn you that hitting these things is harder for a wizard than a muggle. Can anyone work out why?"

Various hands went up; Eeles tended to call on students at random, or by picking whoever talked the least. "The muggle guns are more accurate?"

"I don't think so. I confess I don't know for sure, but my guess is that it's just a matter of practice for wizard and muggle alike. I had something else in mind."

"Because it's moving?"

"Well, it's moving for the muggles, too. Why would a moving target be harder for a wizard?"

"Because it takes a while for the spell to hit it?"

"You mean, compared to a gun? And why does that make it harder?"

"You have to aim at where it's going?"

"Right. Muggles have to do that too, actually, but it's only a tiny correction compared to what I just did. Wizards tend to learn to use magic, either for fighting or anything else, at close quarters. Usually this makes sense—the further away, the easier it is for the target to see the spell coming and dodge.

The point of the last outdoor class, besides having fun, was to show that wizards can still hit things at long distances. Similarly, the ostensible point of today's lesson is that I want you to become more aware of the speed at which spells travel. So long as you stay safe and aim for the targets, feel free to use any other spells you know. You'll find that the speed depends on the spell and the caster, and maybe on the wand. Yes?"

"Is there a way to make spells travel faster?"

"Not that I know of, although it might happen as you get older or with practice. Normally, with spells that are fired off, once you cast it, it's on its way and you can't affect it. Okay?"

Eeles pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket. "I've assigned you partners already, since I think your house system is weird and I don't want to encourage rivalries." He then called off pairs, pointing each in one direction or the other. Oren was put with a painfully shy Gryffindor girl; their entire conversation for the class consisted of "want to go first?", "sure", repeated instances of "go ahead" or "pull!", and "your turn."


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Partway through dinner that day, at the faculty table, Dumbledore turned to Eeles. "So Erasmus, I see you used your class as an excuse to shoot skeet all day."

"Absolutely! It was great fun. Some of the kids even admitted it was fun, too."

"How did it go?"

"Really well, I think. If I hadn't turned the lesson into a game, it would've been a lot harder to get them to actually think about how spells work."

"I see you didn't award any house points for it."

"Nah. Do you think I should? We could have a tournament later in the year."

"Oh, that's entirely up to you. We give faculty a lot of freedom here. I must, admit, though, that I'm looking forward to your pedagogical justification for teaching them to fish."

"What? Oh, no, I'm not planning that. I was never really into fishing."

"Ah. Perhaps bowling or golf, then."


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Author's notes:

I've worked back to a comfortable buffer again. I ate into it most of the way in order to post Chapter 21 on 1/25. After posting this, I have the next 13k words done, so I'll probably post chapter 23 pretty soon, too. I really appreciate ratings and reviews, btw, because they let me know people are reading this. Otherwise I'm never sure Ficwad's hit counter isn't me and one other person refreshing the page over and over.

It seems like any fanfic author writing in the year before the book start is obligated to take a stab at the "who preceded Quirrel?" question. I thought it was past time I did, too. Actually, I don't think I've read anything else that starts when this story does (no don't give me distracting examples!).

Finally, remember that none of the characters are actually the voice of the author, nor should you assume they are particularly sane. I probably worry about that too much -- maybe I should just put that disclaimer at the beginning or something.