Categories > Books > Harry Potter > Let's Try That Again, Shall We?
Before the Holidays
11 reviewsDinner on the last day of classes before break. Character-by-character, sort of a recap. Last update for a while, probably.
4Original
The Harry Potter universe is the creation of J.K. Rowling. This is fanfiction. The standard disclaimers apply.
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Chapter 34: Before the Holidays
Tuesday, December 18, 1990.
The Great Hall did not yet have Christmas decorations—only muggles made a whole season out of it. The staff and house elves generally saved their energy and imagination for the actual Christmas Feast—the one held for those who stayed at Hogwarts over the holidays. Nevertheless, it had been snowing in northern Scotland off and on for the past day, and the Headmaster had added to the realism of the enchanted ceiling by making actual snow fall from it; small white flakes glittered in the torchlight, drifting down and disappearing halfway to the floor.
The appearance of the food was waiting on a few words from Dumbledore, who stood up and cleared his throat once most students seemed to have taken their seats.
"If I could have your attention for a moment, I have a few brief announcements before I leave you to your dinner. Tonight we bid goodbye to Professor Burbage, who has been our substitute Muggle Studies professor for this past year and a half while Professor Quirrel was on sabbatical. Professor Quirrel will be returning to teach Muggle Studies in January, but will take over the Defense Against the Dark Arts position starting next fall, replacing Professor Eeles, who unfortunately remains steadfast in his refusal to put up with us for a second year. Seeing as Professor Burbage has taken a two-year job in America, we are currently seeking a Muggle Studies professor for the next academic year and hopefully beyond. Please have any interested candidates apply to me directly.
Now that I have confused you all with our anticipated shuffling of professors, I wish those of you going home to your families tomorrow a pleasant journey, a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. Let's eat!"
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Sybill Trelawney stared off into space, occasionally remembering her food. Eating slowly, if you were really slow, could be a problem at Hogwarts, since the food would eventually disappear from in front of you. Tonight's dinner was a little longer, allowing her more freedom to let her mind wander.
She was increasingly anxious about her correspondence with Lucius Malfoy. After a brief note back to him thanking him for his interest and asking what Divination books he had been looking at, he had responded with the titles of several standard textbooks and a few that Hogwarts didn't have copies of. That should have been exciting, but it all meant writing more letters and risking becoming friendly with the man. It wasn't that she didn't have ideas about how to improve the curriculum—she most certainly did, and could easily find ways to spend whatever money the Board of Governors sent her way. She imagined it would be similar for most of the professors here, under similar circumstances.
Her interactions with Pomona had been nothing but positive, and this, too, was nerve-wracking. Sybill had no idea how to go about building a close professional relationship, assuming that was what Hogwarts instructors were supposed to have. She had no one she could really ask about this; Uncle Acamar had grimaced and told her "Hogwarts is special" and that he had no advice to give.
In any case, her collaboration with Sprout had been wholly successful. The mandrakes were a few inches high now—just big enough for the students to need ear protection when transplanting them to larger pots, which would have to happen soon. They had several flats of candidate mushroom species, too, one of which she had tested already.
While Sybill was genuinely unwilling to let her students take risks she would not take herself, her real reason for needing to test everything personally was that no one else knew what they were looking for.
She had tried the mushroom on tea leaves, and was struck at how easily she could see the patterns; there was a reason this had been standard practice at Hogwarts centuries ago. She had then gone for a walk in the forest down by the lake, watching the flight of birds for the shapes which were the raw information for auguries. If she ever needed to do that for real, she decided, she would take the mushroom before flooing to downtown London, and then go scaring up flocks of pigeons.
London. She looked forward to the break so that she could spend more time away from the wizarding world. The interior of Hogwarts—steeped in memories of the middle ages, torchlit, insular—felt more and more dark, oppressive, and often downright primitive, as the years went by. The wizarding world in general was not much better. Hiding in her tower was of only limited use.
Her experience of the muggle world, beyond her occasional drunken escapism in bars and nightclubs, was mostly limited to her own wanderings around London. She was not muggleborn nor did she wish to be, but she longed for someone to just guide her through the muggle world, so that she could use it as a realistic fall-back to retreat to when the wizarding world got too much for her and she needed to escape.
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Irma Pince actually had a smile on her face at dinner. It was a little unsettling for some of the other staff members, but no one ventured to ask her what she was thinking, and she did not volunteer anything.
The student who had earlier broken into her office had left her a Christmas present. Granted, it, too, had involved a great deal of breaking in, but it was so obviously thoughtful and well-intentioned, and its installation so carefully and unobtrusively executed, that she had to forgive whoever it was. She only hoped they did not take to adding books to the shelves; that could end badly, would lead to copycats, and would be extremely laborious to bring under control.
At 10 AM sharp, this morning, at a time when she was reliably at her desk in the library to assist students with checking out books, a package appeared on an unoccupied area of her desk, no doubt placed ahead of time with some concealment charm timed to end when she would be there to see it. It was round, about an inch high and a foot in diameter. The paper in which it was neatly wrapped had a pattern of holly with berries, on a gold background.
There was a card on top in a green envelope. On the outside, it said "To Madam Pince, Christmas 1990. Open the present first, then read the card!" The present itself was heavy, and turned out to be a stone covered in runes. Unable to work them out for herself, she opened the note.
The anonymous student had made a set of rune-stone-based silencing charms for the library, controlled from the stone on her desk. She could adjust their strength, use them to buffer or isolate the tables from each other or from the stacks, or drop everything completely. Her favorite feature was what the note called "the Damn You All! option", which placed the entire room into absolute silence. She could hear her own pulse, her breathing, and the vibrations from her larynx, but no sound was left traveling through the air itself.
She had it checked over by Bathsheba and Septima, of course. The professors of Ancient Runes and Arithmancy had carefully inspected each of the component stones high on the walls above the shelves, or sometimes in places on the ceiling itself; concealed by default for aesthetic reasons, they could be made visible for maintenance. The two witches had declared everything to be safe, straightforward, elegant, and effective. "Good show! Very nicely done," Bathsheba had said, before rolling her eyes at the note's request to her specifically: 'If Professor Babbling asks, please tell her that she is a very good teacher but that I wish to remain anonymous. Please tell her not to spend _too_ much time trying to figure out which one of her students I am!'
"I have to say, Irma, it's a very thoughtful present. They must have found noisy students as annoying as you do in order to make this! Either that or they know you well. Perhaps a bit of both. At any rate, it's a very nice gift. Merry Christmas!"
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Nymphadora Tonks was looking forward to Christmas. Mrs. Longbottom and Dumbledore had given permission for them to take Harry on an outing so long as they could find at least two other responsible adults, where "responsible adult" unfortunately also meant "skilled duelist". Tonks was trying to encourage Sirius to talk Remus into joining them; Remus was apparently being difficult. Tonks imagined that meant he was answering Sirius' owls with terse replies to the effect they should find someone else, because he probably felt horribly guilty about Sirius, and probably Harry too, after that article.
So they ought to be able to get Harry alone, or at least away from Mrs. Longbottom, for long enough to explain how the trunk worked. Or at least, what little of it they understood. When Tonks had finally gotten it up to Harry's mail room, having put aside her irritation at Sirius for the moment, she had set the box down on the floor and stared at it, wondering where to start.
"Okay, trunk, or whatever you are. This room, see, or really I don't know if you can see, but anyway this room is full of mail—letters—that were sent to Harry but never delivered to him, because they were intercepted. Sirius and I think it's high time he got this mail, and he needs a place to store it where it will be safe. We're pretty much counting on you to help out with this."
Nothing happened.
"I want to store all these letters inside of you." Merlin, that sounded weird. "So I can give them to Harry."
She was beginning to wonder whether Sirius had been duped into buying a non-magical block of rosewood when it ballooned outward, settling on the form of a cylindrical filing cabinet. It had only one drawer, which had the same copper handle as before; the appearance of the wood did not change either. The drawer then slid out several feet of its own accord—further than the depth of the cabinet itself. 'That's more like it,' Tonks thought. Looking into the back of the drawer, the space receded into darkness which her lumos could not penetrate.
"Okay, I'm going to start with all the junk mail. I used a spell to sort it out. Harry will probably want to read everything else first. Um, here we go . . ."
She remembered Harry's impressed look back in the original timeline, when they had come to fetch him from Privet Drive and she had packed his trunk for him. She wished he could see her now, standing in a swirling cloud of mail, sucking it up from the heaps she had sorted it into and funneling it, tornado-like, into the open drawer.
The mail simply disappeared into the drawer. When she had told it she was done with the junk mail, and was switching to the regular kind plus some packages, it simply retracted the empty drawer and opened it again. She wasn't sure if that was actually a sign it was shifting things around in its pocket dimension or whatever, if that was its way of communicating, or if it just seemed like the stylish thing for a magical filing cabinet to do right then. In any event, the process repeated itself without incident.
"Alright, I think that went well. I have one more set of letters for you." She pulled out the bag of . . . sensitive . . . letters from her robes, and unshrunk them. She had found, by now, about forty letters of that sort, and assumed there were quite a few more left. She had tied these lightly together in three small bundles.
"These letters are important. They are private. Basically they're all from girls who fancy Harry, or I guess, thought they did when they wrote the letters . . . If they fell into the hands of anyone other than Harry, both Harry and the girls who sent them could be very embarrassed, and might get into a lot of trouble.
If you think Harry is being forced to take them out of you, you don't let them out. If you don't trust someone Harry is with, you don't let them out. Once I put these in you, I should only see them if Harry voluntarily shows me, and I don't expect that to happen. If someone other than Harry tries to take them from you, you pull out all of your tricks to stop them. Got that?"
The drawer retracted, and the cabinet shrunk down into a small box, just large enough for the letters, lid open. Tonks gently placed the letters inside, wistful about not seeing them again, but also relieved to be rid of the temptation. The box closed its lid, opened it again to show nothing inside, closed it again, and transformed back into its original wood-block-with-handle shape. "Nice job," she had said, and then wondered whether the box had any sort of feelings. You never knew, with this sort of thing.
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So far it had been a pretty good year for Oliver Wood. The Gryffindor team had won two out of their three matches so far, losing only to Slytherin. Damn their brooms. Just getting a better one for Charlie alone would help, but he knew the Weasleys couldn't spare the money, and he had the good sense not to talk about it except in terms of the whole team. They all felt guilty for having asked McGonagall about any rich alumni, since it was so clear that she, too, wished she could find some, and felt awful about not being as socially sophisticated as Snape. It would be awfully nice, though.
Charlie had been making Fred and George practice not only in the forest, but on the pitch, and with as many as five regulation bludgers at a time. That last one was impressive while it lasted, but had ended with half the team in the hospital wing overnight. Charlie had decreed that the pitch would henceforth be for practicing quidditch as it was actually played, with experimental exercises restricted to practice balls and more secluded locations. That was fine with Oliver, who had admitted that Fred and George had improved under Charlie's training regime, but who was also loathe to reveal any secret advantages if at all possible. Charlie had been less than enthused with Oliver's suggestion to hold practices at night, but there was always next year!
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In a sixth-floor corridor well away from any classrooms, there was dense fog from one end of the hall to the other, and it was raining. Fred and George had expected to get in trouble for it. They had expected Dumbledore or Flitwick to come around and dispel it. They had even gone back to check several times, just to be sure. Nothing—the hall remained as foggy and rainy as they had left it.
The lesson they had learned from this, aside from the charms work, was that an unnoticed prank was not very much fun. Clearly they needed an actual indoor thunderstorm for anyone to notice, but they hadn't worked out how to produce one yet, and Sirius was only dropping hints.
Mr. Padfoot, as they preferred to think of him, had sent them a large envelope full of notes, along with a muggle book about bell towers and change ringing. They had not gone back to exploring off the map yet, waiting until they had accumulated a better arsenal of climbing, falling, and gargoyle-wrangling magic.
They had slowed down somewhat in their attempts to master Dumbledore's exercises, which left them more time for Mr. Padfoot's. Somewhere in there they had classes, sleep, quidditch, and the occasional foray into the Forbidden Forest with Charlie, and precisely once, with Percy, who had come along with them on Charlie's birthday a few days ago. Percy had been reserved and polite, neither fearful of the forest nor particularly interested in it, and, according to Charlie, considerably better than Fred and George about not scaring wildlife. Percy had smiled when told this, but didn't seem to know what else to say, and did not volunteer to join them again.
As to Dumbledore's exercises, the headmaster had called them into his office a few days ago to see how they were doing. They didn't really understand what he had said, but it seemed to amount to "you're doing about as well as can be expected given that you're twelve, and I'll start you on some other exercises when I find the time to get them to you." Fair enough.
They hadn't heard anything from the girls. Presumably they were in their rooms brewing something to make trouble for everyone later. Sirius wouldn't say. They appreciated that life had provided them with brilliant mentors and theoretically worthy, if somewhat manufactured, opponents. They truly did. But they were really looking forward to getting a break from all of it.
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A few weeks ago, the Headmaster had at last paid a visit to Erasmus Eeles, commending him again on his innovative teaching methods, but politely requesting that he actually cover some of the "dark creatures" from the standard curriculum. Dumbledore had pointed out that no other class was set up to cover that material, and that it really was expected that it would be part of the Dark Arts class.
Eeles had simply laughed and told the old wizard "alright, have it your way! I'll figure something out." He got the impression Dumbledore had been looking forward to further sarcastic comments at the expense of British Wizardry, but he was the Headmaster, and it was his school. Eeles made no religion out of not teaching to the test.
The first problem he had come up against was that the existing textbooks were terrible. Oh, certainly, there were enough useful parts that he didn't feel guilty about requiring students to buy them. But there was no year for whose classes he was using more than half the textbook—the rest was total garbage.
Personally, Eeles thought that teaching "monster safety" ought to be Kettleburn's department, but it was painfully obvious that safety was an alien concept to the wizard with one and a half limbs. So Eeles started sketching out what he thought needed to be covered, based partly on the Ministry testing standards and partly on Kettleburn and Hagrid's estimation of what creatures students were likely to actually meet. He initially drew this up as a large chart, grouping creatures by their danger level and the techniques needed to subdue or evade them, and listed within groupings by likelihood of encountering one.
At the bottom of the chart, under "Flee, Avoid, Dangerous" were various dragons, nundus, manticores, and such, with the Hebridean Black and Welsh Green at the top. Off to the side, under "Patronus Charm" were dementors and lethifolds. Diricawls were near the top, under "Tasty". It was not meant to be methodical, just practical.
Eeles had eventually decided it would make a nice poster, which, with the help of a good illustrator and print shop, it eventually did. "Professor Eeles' Guide to Dangerous Magical Creatures, Being a Study Guide for O.W.L.s, N.E.W.T.s, and Short Camping Trips" was a full-color, 3' x 5' print, complete with animated drawings of the various animals, and text that appeared, disappeared, and moved around in response to poking. At the bottom, after the "Dangerous!" section and its enumeration of dragons, he had included a "Very Dangerous!" section consisting of intelligent beings and beasts—goblins, vampires, merfolk, centaurs, and the like. In the middle of that were drawings of Eeles and Kettleburn themselves, waving and holding a mirror between them (the printer was quite proud of getting that to work); beneath them, in elaborate script, was simply the label "WIZARD".
The effect was something like walking into Albus Dumbledore's office and being faced with all of his arcane indicator devices—the nearly 100 illustrations waved, walked around, pawed the air, breathed fire, bared their teeth, or fell asleep, depending on the creature. Wizards, of course, loved that kind of thing, and in fact everyone he had shown it to had been impressed. Admittedly, at this point that was just Hagrid, Kettleburn, and Dumbledore, who had each been delighted with their complimentary copies, but Eeles was confident the venture would be a success. In fact, success was pretty much guaranteed, since Eeles shamelessly declared the Guide to be a required school supply for all students by the time of their return in January.
The entire thing cost a mere 15 sickles at Flourish and Blott's, slightly more if shipping and handling were required. So, even after paying the printer and illustrator, and giving the bookstore its margin, he expected to make a tidy profit of several hundred galleons off of Dumbledore's one explicit order to him.
He planned to spend a good four or five class periods going over it, too. This, on a word-per-hour basis, would still make it enormously more useful than any of the required textbooks had been so far.
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Severus Snape had never been keen on writing his own potions textbook.
It wasn't unthinkable—although his students produced an ever-flowing stream of errors breathtaking in both originality and stupidity, there was also no shortage of recurring mistakes with which they managed to annoy him again and again. Perhaps he could write a small pamphlet—101 Things Potion Students Do Wrong—but he recognized his inability to keep snide comments down to a level acceptable for publication. Perhaps, someday, if he found a good editor, he'd consider it.
There was a second problem, too, which was that plenty of good potions textbooks already existed, and much of what he could personally bring to the subject consisted of esoteric, hard-won knowledge which he wished to keep to himself. Attempts to separate his pet peeves from his own little secrets would, unfortunately, result in a lot of border cases. In short, he expected the writing and editing process would become a vicious, emotionally-draining whirlpool of irritation at the world and at himself.
Nevertheless, Severus had been doing a great deal of research into the existing potions curriculum, and even more thinking about how he might like to change it. He had concluded that, although the list of potential beneficial innovations in potions teaching was long, it did not include a return to traditional creature-dissection skills.
His complaint about students being unable to extract their own ingredients was not wrong, exactly, but he also had to admit that nearly all unrestricted ingredients were now available commercially in consistent, pre-processed forms. Very few of his students would wind up exploring in the jungle, seeking out new magical species to cut into pieces and experiment on. If a student really wanted to learn how to extract things themselves, they got an apprenticeship in the relevant area when they graduated. Anything else was purely for hobbyists and obsessive do-it-yourself-ers.
So the advent of standardization meant he had more time to teach other, more interesting material. In Trelawney's classes, going back to the old ways made sense, because the old ways actually worked much better, however much they offended modern sensibilities. There was no analogous justification for any similar, backwards-looking "reform" that restored supposedly "lost" skills to the Potions curriculum. He was self-aware—he knew all his rationalizations for doing it anyway amounted to useless, pureblood-style cringing at the imported middle-class muggle ideals of professionalism that had made standardization possible. Severus Snape prided himself on only getting irritated for good reasons; the world provided those in wondrous abundance, and he had no time for the bad ones.
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Oren Wayland was anxious to get home, so he could spend most of his vacation in the library. It had been, overall, a nice few months, but he actually did have things he wanted to get done—things somewhat more adventurous than a new silence system for the library—and it was seriously frustrating that everything useful here was in the Restricted Section, assuming Hogwarts had it at all.
His sister would probably bug him the whole time, but that was okay. Maybe he could even rope her into helping without giving himself away somehow.
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For Albus Dumbledore, the good and bad of the past six months had been, more or less, a wash. His anonymous, but so far extremely credible, ex-Death Eater had given him so much to worry about that he had broken his vow to deal with new information promptly. However loyal his supporters might be, he needed them to also be reliable and competent.
Hagrid, who not only believed in the near-mythical basilisk, but had resented it for decades, was only too happy to be asked to keep roosters around, "just in case." Dumbledore didn't really think Voldemort, if he returned, would bother with the basilisk when powerful curses would do. But the headmaster would look very stupid indeed if that happened and he hadn't take some precautions, especially if it got out that he had been forewarned. The basilisk was a well-understood, if deadly, adversary, and Dumbledore suspected that fussing with the school wards would be pointless against Salazar's pet, so really there was not a lot of useful work to be done about it. The problem of the basilisk, in this respect, stood in stark contrast to the several dozen other major problems Dumbledore faced right now.
If the letter writer had made good on his threat to tip off other wizards, no one had said anything about it. It was unclear how an ex-Death Eater thought they knew who Dumbledore's closest friends were, but there wasn't anything to be done about it now.
On the other hand, the capture of Peter Pettigrew and release of Sirius Black was an unequivocal victory for the light. And, he now admitted, so was the transfer of Harry Potter away from the Dursleys, inconvenient threats of Ministry investigations aside. Perhaps best of all, if all their advice proved useful, the letter writer was giving him the opportunity to go on the offensive, preparing against a return of the Dark Lord. Yes, Dumbledore thought, as he picked at his potato, most of his problems were the sort he very much wanted to have.
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Author's notes:
If this were a novel, I'd put "END OF PART I" here.
I now have long lists of things to write which are marked "(done)" and posted. Going forward will feel like a second narrative chunk, from my perspective, and I want to get it sorted out and going in the right direction before posting any of it. From a reader's point of view, you probably won't see the next chapter for a while, and then I will post about a month of story-time all at once.
In the meantime it would be nice to see this thing accumulate more ratings and reviews. I have not yet had the nerve to show this to anyone who actually knows me, so for now, the reviews are all the feedback I've got! And I really do appreciate them.
Authors can see a per-chapter hit count for their stories, updated once a day. So I can tell that at least 70 people will read a new chapter within 24 hours of posting it (either that or someone or something is refreshing it over and over; I choose to believe I have some readers).
I am especially interested in getting reviews from people who read the whole thing from start to finish in one go. I am not too proud to suggest you recommend this story to your friends, if only so that I can get feedback from readers who aren't getting it fed to them chapter-by-chapter.
Thank you all! I will return to posting eventually. In the meantime I'll still be obsessively checking hits, ratings, and reviews. :)
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Chapter 34: Before the Holidays
Tuesday, December 18, 1990.
The Great Hall did not yet have Christmas decorations—only muggles made a whole season out of it. The staff and house elves generally saved their energy and imagination for the actual Christmas Feast—the one held for those who stayed at Hogwarts over the holidays. Nevertheless, it had been snowing in northern Scotland off and on for the past day, and the Headmaster had added to the realism of the enchanted ceiling by making actual snow fall from it; small white flakes glittered in the torchlight, drifting down and disappearing halfway to the floor.
The appearance of the food was waiting on a few words from Dumbledore, who stood up and cleared his throat once most students seemed to have taken their seats.
"If I could have your attention for a moment, I have a few brief announcements before I leave you to your dinner. Tonight we bid goodbye to Professor Burbage, who has been our substitute Muggle Studies professor for this past year and a half while Professor Quirrel was on sabbatical. Professor Quirrel will be returning to teach Muggle Studies in January, but will take over the Defense Against the Dark Arts position starting next fall, replacing Professor Eeles, who unfortunately remains steadfast in his refusal to put up with us for a second year. Seeing as Professor Burbage has taken a two-year job in America, we are currently seeking a Muggle Studies professor for the next academic year and hopefully beyond. Please have any interested candidates apply to me directly.
Now that I have confused you all with our anticipated shuffling of professors, I wish those of you going home to your families tomorrow a pleasant journey, a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. Let's eat!"
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Sybill Trelawney stared off into space, occasionally remembering her food. Eating slowly, if you were really slow, could be a problem at Hogwarts, since the food would eventually disappear from in front of you. Tonight's dinner was a little longer, allowing her more freedom to let her mind wander.
She was increasingly anxious about her correspondence with Lucius Malfoy. After a brief note back to him thanking him for his interest and asking what Divination books he had been looking at, he had responded with the titles of several standard textbooks and a few that Hogwarts didn't have copies of. That should have been exciting, but it all meant writing more letters and risking becoming friendly with the man. It wasn't that she didn't have ideas about how to improve the curriculum—she most certainly did, and could easily find ways to spend whatever money the Board of Governors sent her way. She imagined it would be similar for most of the professors here, under similar circumstances.
Her interactions with Pomona had been nothing but positive, and this, too, was nerve-wracking. Sybill had no idea how to go about building a close professional relationship, assuming that was what Hogwarts instructors were supposed to have. She had no one she could really ask about this; Uncle Acamar had grimaced and told her "Hogwarts is special" and that he had no advice to give.
In any case, her collaboration with Sprout had been wholly successful. The mandrakes were a few inches high now—just big enough for the students to need ear protection when transplanting them to larger pots, which would have to happen soon. They had several flats of candidate mushroom species, too, one of which she had tested already.
While Sybill was genuinely unwilling to let her students take risks she would not take herself, her real reason for needing to test everything personally was that no one else knew what they were looking for.
She had tried the mushroom on tea leaves, and was struck at how easily she could see the patterns; there was a reason this had been standard practice at Hogwarts centuries ago. She had then gone for a walk in the forest down by the lake, watching the flight of birds for the shapes which were the raw information for auguries. If she ever needed to do that for real, she decided, she would take the mushroom before flooing to downtown London, and then go scaring up flocks of pigeons.
London. She looked forward to the break so that she could spend more time away from the wizarding world. The interior of Hogwarts—steeped in memories of the middle ages, torchlit, insular—felt more and more dark, oppressive, and often downright primitive, as the years went by. The wizarding world in general was not much better. Hiding in her tower was of only limited use.
Her experience of the muggle world, beyond her occasional drunken escapism in bars and nightclubs, was mostly limited to her own wanderings around London. She was not muggleborn nor did she wish to be, but she longed for someone to just guide her through the muggle world, so that she could use it as a realistic fall-back to retreat to when the wizarding world got too much for her and she needed to escape.
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Irma Pince actually had a smile on her face at dinner. It was a little unsettling for some of the other staff members, but no one ventured to ask her what she was thinking, and she did not volunteer anything.
The student who had earlier broken into her office had left her a Christmas present. Granted, it, too, had involved a great deal of breaking in, but it was so obviously thoughtful and well-intentioned, and its installation so carefully and unobtrusively executed, that she had to forgive whoever it was. She only hoped they did not take to adding books to the shelves; that could end badly, would lead to copycats, and would be extremely laborious to bring under control.
At 10 AM sharp, this morning, at a time when she was reliably at her desk in the library to assist students with checking out books, a package appeared on an unoccupied area of her desk, no doubt placed ahead of time with some concealment charm timed to end when she would be there to see it. It was round, about an inch high and a foot in diameter. The paper in which it was neatly wrapped had a pattern of holly with berries, on a gold background.
There was a card on top in a green envelope. On the outside, it said "To Madam Pince, Christmas 1990. Open the present first, then read the card!" The present itself was heavy, and turned out to be a stone covered in runes. Unable to work them out for herself, she opened the note.
The anonymous student had made a set of rune-stone-based silencing charms for the library, controlled from the stone on her desk. She could adjust their strength, use them to buffer or isolate the tables from each other or from the stacks, or drop everything completely. Her favorite feature was what the note called "the Damn You All! option", which placed the entire room into absolute silence. She could hear her own pulse, her breathing, and the vibrations from her larynx, but no sound was left traveling through the air itself.
She had it checked over by Bathsheba and Septima, of course. The professors of Ancient Runes and Arithmancy had carefully inspected each of the component stones high on the walls above the shelves, or sometimes in places on the ceiling itself; concealed by default for aesthetic reasons, they could be made visible for maintenance. The two witches had declared everything to be safe, straightforward, elegant, and effective. "Good show! Very nicely done," Bathsheba had said, before rolling her eyes at the note's request to her specifically: 'If Professor Babbling asks, please tell her that she is a very good teacher but that I wish to remain anonymous. Please tell her not to spend _too_ much time trying to figure out which one of her students I am!'
"I have to say, Irma, it's a very thoughtful present. They must have found noisy students as annoying as you do in order to make this! Either that or they know you well. Perhaps a bit of both. At any rate, it's a very nice gift. Merry Christmas!"
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Nymphadora Tonks was looking forward to Christmas. Mrs. Longbottom and Dumbledore had given permission for them to take Harry on an outing so long as they could find at least two other responsible adults, where "responsible adult" unfortunately also meant "skilled duelist". Tonks was trying to encourage Sirius to talk Remus into joining them; Remus was apparently being difficult. Tonks imagined that meant he was answering Sirius' owls with terse replies to the effect they should find someone else, because he probably felt horribly guilty about Sirius, and probably Harry too, after that article.
So they ought to be able to get Harry alone, or at least away from Mrs. Longbottom, for long enough to explain how the trunk worked. Or at least, what little of it they understood. When Tonks had finally gotten it up to Harry's mail room, having put aside her irritation at Sirius for the moment, she had set the box down on the floor and stared at it, wondering where to start.
"Okay, trunk, or whatever you are. This room, see, or really I don't know if you can see, but anyway this room is full of mail—letters—that were sent to Harry but never delivered to him, because they were intercepted. Sirius and I think it's high time he got this mail, and he needs a place to store it where it will be safe. We're pretty much counting on you to help out with this."
Nothing happened.
"I want to store all these letters inside of you." Merlin, that sounded weird. "So I can give them to Harry."
She was beginning to wonder whether Sirius had been duped into buying a non-magical block of rosewood when it ballooned outward, settling on the form of a cylindrical filing cabinet. It had only one drawer, which had the same copper handle as before; the appearance of the wood did not change either. The drawer then slid out several feet of its own accord—further than the depth of the cabinet itself. 'That's more like it,' Tonks thought. Looking into the back of the drawer, the space receded into darkness which her lumos could not penetrate.
"Okay, I'm going to start with all the junk mail. I used a spell to sort it out. Harry will probably want to read everything else first. Um, here we go . . ."
She remembered Harry's impressed look back in the original timeline, when they had come to fetch him from Privet Drive and she had packed his trunk for him. She wished he could see her now, standing in a swirling cloud of mail, sucking it up from the heaps she had sorted it into and funneling it, tornado-like, into the open drawer.
The mail simply disappeared into the drawer. When she had told it she was done with the junk mail, and was switching to the regular kind plus some packages, it simply retracted the empty drawer and opened it again. She wasn't sure if that was actually a sign it was shifting things around in its pocket dimension or whatever, if that was its way of communicating, or if it just seemed like the stylish thing for a magical filing cabinet to do right then. In any event, the process repeated itself without incident.
"Alright, I think that went well. I have one more set of letters for you." She pulled out the bag of . . . sensitive . . . letters from her robes, and unshrunk them. She had found, by now, about forty letters of that sort, and assumed there were quite a few more left. She had tied these lightly together in three small bundles.
"These letters are important. They are private. Basically they're all from girls who fancy Harry, or I guess, thought they did when they wrote the letters . . . If they fell into the hands of anyone other than Harry, both Harry and the girls who sent them could be very embarrassed, and might get into a lot of trouble.
If you think Harry is being forced to take them out of you, you don't let them out. If you don't trust someone Harry is with, you don't let them out. Once I put these in you, I should only see them if Harry voluntarily shows me, and I don't expect that to happen. If someone other than Harry tries to take them from you, you pull out all of your tricks to stop them. Got that?"
The drawer retracted, and the cabinet shrunk down into a small box, just large enough for the letters, lid open. Tonks gently placed the letters inside, wistful about not seeing them again, but also relieved to be rid of the temptation. The box closed its lid, opened it again to show nothing inside, closed it again, and transformed back into its original wood-block-with-handle shape. "Nice job," she had said, and then wondered whether the box had any sort of feelings. You never knew, with this sort of thing.
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So far it had been a pretty good year for Oliver Wood. The Gryffindor team had won two out of their three matches so far, losing only to Slytherin. Damn their brooms. Just getting a better one for Charlie alone would help, but he knew the Weasleys couldn't spare the money, and he had the good sense not to talk about it except in terms of the whole team. They all felt guilty for having asked McGonagall about any rich alumni, since it was so clear that she, too, wished she could find some, and felt awful about not being as socially sophisticated as Snape. It would be awfully nice, though.
Charlie had been making Fred and George practice not only in the forest, but on the pitch, and with as many as five regulation bludgers at a time. That last one was impressive while it lasted, but had ended with half the team in the hospital wing overnight. Charlie had decreed that the pitch would henceforth be for practicing quidditch as it was actually played, with experimental exercises restricted to practice balls and more secluded locations. That was fine with Oliver, who had admitted that Fred and George had improved under Charlie's training regime, but who was also loathe to reveal any secret advantages if at all possible. Charlie had been less than enthused with Oliver's suggestion to hold practices at night, but there was always next year!
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In a sixth-floor corridor well away from any classrooms, there was dense fog from one end of the hall to the other, and it was raining. Fred and George had expected to get in trouble for it. They had expected Dumbledore or Flitwick to come around and dispel it. They had even gone back to check several times, just to be sure. Nothing—the hall remained as foggy and rainy as they had left it.
The lesson they had learned from this, aside from the charms work, was that an unnoticed prank was not very much fun. Clearly they needed an actual indoor thunderstorm for anyone to notice, but they hadn't worked out how to produce one yet, and Sirius was only dropping hints.
Mr. Padfoot, as they preferred to think of him, had sent them a large envelope full of notes, along with a muggle book about bell towers and change ringing. They had not gone back to exploring off the map yet, waiting until they had accumulated a better arsenal of climbing, falling, and gargoyle-wrangling magic.
They had slowed down somewhat in their attempts to master Dumbledore's exercises, which left them more time for Mr. Padfoot's. Somewhere in there they had classes, sleep, quidditch, and the occasional foray into the Forbidden Forest with Charlie, and precisely once, with Percy, who had come along with them on Charlie's birthday a few days ago. Percy had been reserved and polite, neither fearful of the forest nor particularly interested in it, and, according to Charlie, considerably better than Fred and George about not scaring wildlife. Percy had smiled when told this, but didn't seem to know what else to say, and did not volunteer to join them again.
As to Dumbledore's exercises, the headmaster had called them into his office a few days ago to see how they were doing. They didn't really understand what he had said, but it seemed to amount to "you're doing about as well as can be expected given that you're twelve, and I'll start you on some other exercises when I find the time to get them to you." Fair enough.
They hadn't heard anything from the girls. Presumably they were in their rooms brewing something to make trouble for everyone later. Sirius wouldn't say. They appreciated that life had provided them with brilliant mentors and theoretically worthy, if somewhat manufactured, opponents. They truly did. But they were really looking forward to getting a break from all of it.
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A few weeks ago, the Headmaster had at last paid a visit to Erasmus Eeles, commending him again on his innovative teaching methods, but politely requesting that he actually cover some of the "dark creatures" from the standard curriculum. Dumbledore had pointed out that no other class was set up to cover that material, and that it really was expected that it would be part of the Dark Arts class.
Eeles had simply laughed and told the old wizard "alright, have it your way! I'll figure something out." He got the impression Dumbledore had been looking forward to further sarcastic comments at the expense of British Wizardry, but he was the Headmaster, and it was his school. Eeles made no religion out of not teaching to the test.
The first problem he had come up against was that the existing textbooks were terrible. Oh, certainly, there were enough useful parts that he didn't feel guilty about requiring students to buy them. But there was no year for whose classes he was using more than half the textbook—the rest was total garbage.
Personally, Eeles thought that teaching "monster safety" ought to be Kettleburn's department, but it was painfully obvious that safety was an alien concept to the wizard with one and a half limbs. So Eeles started sketching out what he thought needed to be covered, based partly on the Ministry testing standards and partly on Kettleburn and Hagrid's estimation of what creatures students were likely to actually meet. He initially drew this up as a large chart, grouping creatures by their danger level and the techniques needed to subdue or evade them, and listed within groupings by likelihood of encountering one.
At the bottom of the chart, under "Flee, Avoid, Dangerous" were various dragons, nundus, manticores, and such, with the Hebridean Black and Welsh Green at the top. Off to the side, under "Patronus Charm" were dementors and lethifolds. Diricawls were near the top, under "Tasty". It was not meant to be methodical, just practical.
Eeles had eventually decided it would make a nice poster, which, with the help of a good illustrator and print shop, it eventually did. "Professor Eeles' Guide to Dangerous Magical Creatures, Being a Study Guide for O.W.L.s, N.E.W.T.s, and Short Camping Trips" was a full-color, 3' x 5' print, complete with animated drawings of the various animals, and text that appeared, disappeared, and moved around in response to poking. At the bottom, after the "Dangerous!" section and its enumeration of dragons, he had included a "Very Dangerous!" section consisting of intelligent beings and beasts—goblins, vampires, merfolk, centaurs, and the like. In the middle of that were drawings of Eeles and Kettleburn themselves, waving and holding a mirror between them (the printer was quite proud of getting that to work); beneath them, in elaborate script, was simply the label "WIZARD".
The effect was something like walking into Albus Dumbledore's office and being faced with all of his arcane indicator devices—the nearly 100 illustrations waved, walked around, pawed the air, breathed fire, bared their teeth, or fell asleep, depending on the creature. Wizards, of course, loved that kind of thing, and in fact everyone he had shown it to had been impressed. Admittedly, at this point that was just Hagrid, Kettleburn, and Dumbledore, who had each been delighted with their complimentary copies, but Eeles was confident the venture would be a success. In fact, success was pretty much guaranteed, since Eeles shamelessly declared the Guide to be a required school supply for all students by the time of their return in January.
The entire thing cost a mere 15 sickles at Flourish and Blott's, slightly more if shipping and handling were required. So, even after paying the printer and illustrator, and giving the bookstore its margin, he expected to make a tidy profit of several hundred galleons off of Dumbledore's one explicit order to him.
He planned to spend a good four or five class periods going over it, too. This, on a word-per-hour basis, would still make it enormously more useful than any of the required textbooks had been so far.
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Severus Snape had never been keen on writing his own potions textbook.
It wasn't unthinkable—although his students produced an ever-flowing stream of errors breathtaking in both originality and stupidity, there was also no shortage of recurring mistakes with which they managed to annoy him again and again. Perhaps he could write a small pamphlet—101 Things Potion Students Do Wrong—but he recognized his inability to keep snide comments down to a level acceptable for publication. Perhaps, someday, if he found a good editor, he'd consider it.
There was a second problem, too, which was that plenty of good potions textbooks already existed, and much of what he could personally bring to the subject consisted of esoteric, hard-won knowledge which he wished to keep to himself. Attempts to separate his pet peeves from his own little secrets would, unfortunately, result in a lot of border cases. In short, he expected the writing and editing process would become a vicious, emotionally-draining whirlpool of irritation at the world and at himself.
Nevertheless, Severus had been doing a great deal of research into the existing potions curriculum, and even more thinking about how he might like to change it. He had concluded that, although the list of potential beneficial innovations in potions teaching was long, it did not include a return to traditional creature-dissection skills.
His complaint about students being unable to extract their own ingredients was not wrong, exactly, but he also had to admit that nearly all unrestricted ingredients were now available commercially in consistent, pre-processed forms. Very few of his students would wind up exploring in the jungle, seeking out new magical species to cut into pieces and experiment on. If a student really wanted to learn how to extract things themselves, they got an apprenticeship in the relevant area when they graduated. Anything else was purely for hobbyists and obsessive do-it-yourself-ers.
So the advent of standardization meant he had more time to teach other, more interesting material. In Trelawney's classes, going back to the old ways made sense, because the old ways actually worked much better, however much they offended modern sensibilities. There was no analogous justification for any similar, backwards-looking "reform" that restored supposedly "lost" skills to the Potions curriculum. He was self-aware—he knew all his rationalizations for doing it anyway amounted to useless, pureblood-style cringing at the imported middle-class muggle ideals of professionalism that had made standardization possible. Severus Snape prided himself on only getting irritated for good reasons; the world provided those in wondrous abundance, and he had no time for the bad ones.
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Oren Wayland was anxious to get home, so he could spend most of his vacation in the library. It had been, overall, a nice few months, but he actually did have things he wanted to get done—things somewhat more adventurous than a new silence system for the library—and it was seriously frustrating that everything useful here was in the Restricted Section, assuming Hogwarts had it at all.
His sister would probably bug him the whole time, but that was okay. Maybe he could even rope her into helping without giving himself away somehow.
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For Albus Dumbledore, the good and bad of the past six months had been, more or less, a wash. His anonymous, but so far extremely credible, ex-Death Eater had given him so much to worry about that he had broken his vow to deal with new information promptly. However loyal his supporters might be, he needed them to also be reliable and competent.
Hagrid, who not only believed in the near-mythical basilisk, but had resented it for decades, was only too happy to be asked to keep roosters around, "just in case." Dumbledore didn't really think Voldemort, if he returned, would bother with the basilisk when powerful curses would do. But the headmaster would look very stupid indeed if that happened and he hadn't take some precautions, especially if it got out that he had been forewarned. The basilisk was a well-understood, if deadly, adversary, and Dumbledore suspected that fussing with the school wards would be pointless against Salazar's pet, so really there was not a lot of useful work to be done about it. The problem of the basilisk, in this respect, stood in stark contrast to the several dozen other major problems Dumbledore faced right now.
If the letter writer had made good on his threat to tip off other wizards, no one had said anything about it. It was unclear how an ex-Death Eater thought they knew who Dumbledore's closest friends were, but there wasn't anything to be done about it now.
On the other hand, the capture of Peter Pettigrew and release of Sirius Black was an unequivocal victory for the light. And, he now admitted, so was the transfer of Harry Potter away from the Dursleys, inconvenient threats of Ministry investigations aside. Perhaps best of all, if all their advice proved useful, the letter writer was giving him the opportunity to go on the offensive, preparing against a return of the Dark Lord. Yes, Dumbledore thought, as he picked at his potato, most of his problems were the sort he very much wanted to have.
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Author's notes:
If this were a novel, I'd put "END OF PART I" here.
I now have long lists of things to write which are marked "(done)" and posted. Going forward will feel like a second narrative chunk, from my perspective, and I want to get it sorted out and going in the right direction before posting any of it. From a reader's point of view, you probably won't see the next chapter for a while, and then I will post about a month of story-time all at once.
In the meantime it would be nice to see this thing accumulate more ratings and reviews. I have not yet had the nerve to show this to anyone who actually knows me, so for now, the reviews are all the feedback I've got! And I really do appreciate them.
Authors can see a per-chapter hit count for their stories, updated once a day. So I can tell that at least 70 people will read a new chapter within 24 hours of posting it (either that or someone or something is refreshing it over and over; I choose to believe I have some readers).
I am especially interested in getting reviews from people who read the whole thing from start to finish in one go. I am not too proud to suggest you recommend this story to your friends, if only so that I can get feedback from readers who aren't getting it fed to them chapter-by-chapter.
Thank you all! I will return to posting eventually. In the meantime I'll still be obsessively checking hits, ratings, and reviews. :)
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