Chapter 54:
– Harry –
The Gryffindor common room hadn't changed a single inch.
Same crackling fireplace. Same mismatched armchairs that smelled faintly of old parchment and someone's ancient cat. Same portrait of a knight who kept falling off his horse every time someone laughed too loud. After everything that had happened over the past month, walking through that portrait hole and seeing the exact same wonky chess set sitting half finished on the corner table was the most comforting thing I'd felt in weeks.
I'd claimed my usual spot on the long couch near the fire, Hermione tucked against my left side with a book already cracked open on her lap. Fleur sat to my right with her legs crossed and her posture so effortlessly perfect it made the couch look like a throne. Gabrielle had draped herself over the armrest beside her sister with her chin propped on her hands. Asia sat on the floor near my feet with her knees drawn up, still looking a little shell shocked by the sheer volume of people crammed into the common room. Lilja sat down next to Asia and started chatting with her lightly.
Jasmine and her friends had taken the chairs directly across from us, Lavender whispering something to Parvati that made both of them glance my way and giggle. Ginny was perched on the arm of Fred's chair with one leg bouncing restlessly while the twins traded a flask between them that I was fairly sure didn't contain pumpkin juice. Lyra and Lyna stood behind the couch ready to serve my every whim if I just asked.
Professor McGonagall stood at the center of the room. She'd just wrapped up a welcome back address that managed to be simultaneously warm and no nonsense, the kind of speech that made you feel both reassured and mildly afraid to disappoint her. She formally welcomed Asia, Fleur, and Gabrielle to Gryffindor house, told them the rules, pointed out where things were, and wished everyone a productive term. Standard stuff.
"Professor," Ginny said, hand shooting up even as her mouth was already moving, "what the hell was that weird speech from the ugly pink lady?"
"Language, Miss Weasley," McGonagall said immediately, her lips pressing into a thin line. "And that ugly pink lady's name is Professor Umbridge…"
"Sorry, Professor." Ginny didn't look sorry at all. "What the heck was that speech from the very ugly pink lady?"
McGonagall opened her mouth, probably to scold her again, but then seemed to notice every single student in the room staring at her with the exact same question written across their faces.
Even the portrait knight, who had stopped falling off his horse to listen.
Fair question, honestly. It was a weird speech before the feast ended.
I tried to remember what the toad woman had actually said. The problem was that Fleur had spent the entirety of that speech running her fingernails lightly up and down my inner thigh under the table, tracing slow circles that climbed higher every time I tried to focus on the staff table. By the time the pink cardigan had stopped talking, I'd retained roughly five words. Something about "prohibiting." Something about "traditional values." Something about "Ministry oversight." And then Fleur's fingers had grazed dangerously close to my cock and I'd stopped pretending I was paying attention at all.
What I did remember clearly was the woman herself. Short. Squat. A face like a bullfrog that had been stuffed into a pink handbag. Eyes that swept the Great Hall with the kind of possessive satisfaction usually reserved for people who enjoyed pulling wings off of things. She'd smiled the entire time she spoke, and somehow that made everything she said sound worse.
"The Ministry of Magic," McGonagall began, adjusting her glasses with a deliberate, measured motion that I'd learned to recognize as her version of barely contained fury, "has expressed... concerns regarding the events of last month, as well as the numerous changes to Hogwarts' curriculum and teaching practices." She paused, letting that land. "As a result, Minister Fudge insisted on placing a Ministry representative within the school in an official teaching capacity." Her jaw tightened. "Unfortunately, Dolores Umbridge's qualifications are, shall we say, limited. She is not certified to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts, Transfiguration, Charms, Potions, or indeed any core magical subject."
"So what's she teaching?" Fred asked.
"Muggle Studies," McGonnagall answered.
"The toad is teaching Muggle Studies?" George repeated slowly.
"She is the new Muggle Studies professor, yes." McGonagall's voice was perfectly level. "Given that she has no practical experience with the Muggle world whatsoever, no academic publication history on the subject, and to my knowledge has never so much as operated a light switch, I am certain she will bring a... unique perspective to the role."
She said that last part quieter—almost to herself—but the common room wasn't that big. Half the room heard her clearly. Hermione made a strangled noise that was half laugh, half outrage.
"What about Professor Lupin?" I asked. That was his job after all! Is that why he wasn't at the opening feast? Did he get canned?
The shift in McGonagall's expression was immediate. The irritation drained away, replaced by something heavier. She looked at me over the rim of her glasses, and for a moment I saw genuine sadness in those older eyes. "Professor Lupin," she said carefully, "was... outed from his position due to the fact that people have found out his status as a werewolf…" She said it plainly, but I could tell she was angry about him getting fired. "Current magical law prohibits werewolves from holding teaching positions at accredited institutions. Until that law is changed, Remus Lupin cannot return to Hogwarts in any official capacity." She exhaled through her nose. "His resignation was submitted three weeks ago. Headmaster Dumbledore accepted it under protest."
"That's a stupid law," Hermione said flatly, loud enough for the entire room to hear.
"Be that as it may, Miss Granger, I am not in a position to—"
"Master Harry liked that man!" Lyra circled the couch from behind us until she was in front, and spoke up. "This is an outrage for our young master!"
"We should report this to Mistress Selene," Lyna continued, perfectly syncing with her sister. "She can bribe the appropriate officials in the magical government and have the law repealed."
"Or simply purchase the votes directly," Lyra added helpfully. "Mistress Selene has done it before in the under—"
"You can't just bribe a government!" a sixth year boy sputtered from somewhere near the window.
Both maids turned to look at him with the exact same expression. They both had matching looks of pity on their faces that made the young man sputter at them.
"We will do whatever is necessary," they said together.
Forty odd students stared at my twin devil maids in their tiny uniforms, and the maids stared right back with the calm, unblinking confidence of two women who had, in fact, watched their family seize an entire international bank by force and rename it inside of an afternoon.
I glanced down at Lilja, wondering if she would scold them, but Lilja didn't speak up. Lupin was her friend too, in her past life, and I could see she was also upset for how a qualified man was kicked out of his job purely for a disease that wasn't even that big of a deal except one night a month.
Nobody challenged them further.
I caught a flicker of movement from McGonagall and looked over to find something I genuinely wasn't expecting. She was smiling. It was small and quick, gone almost before it formed, but it was there. "Be that as it may," she repeated, more gently this time, "until such changes are made through the proper channels, there is nothing to be done about Professor Lupin's position at present." She straightened, pulling herself back into full Head of House mode. "However. I will offer you all a piece of advice, and I trust you will take it in the spirit it is given."
She looked around the room, making eye contact with as many students as she could.
"Self study," she said pointedly, "can be remarkably effective. A motivated student with access to quality resources can learn a great deal more on their own than they might in a poorly taught classroom. I would encourage any student who finds their Muggle Studies lessons to be... insufficient... to pursue supplementary education independently."
Did McGonagall just tell us to skip the new woman's class? Well, not that I needed the class anyway.
I knew everything there was to know about muggles being raised by them most of my life.
A lot of students were the same and just liked it because it was an easy grade or because Lupin taught the class and was a chill guy—but if he wasn't there anymore, I think a lot of students are just gonna drop it and do self study.
I glanced at Hermione. She glanced back at me.
"You know," I said, leaning back against the couch, "if the goal is actually learning about muggles, we could just do movie nights."
McGonagall raised an eyebrow. "Those old things? They don't even have color or sound do they? I didn't think you kids would enjoy those…"
Holy shit, when was the last time she actually went to a movie theater!?
I wasn't the only one thinking that.
"Professor… Movies have colour now. And sound…" Jasmine spoke up awkwardly across the room. "They have for decades…"
McGonnagall got a lot of pitying looks that had the old witch pursing her lips and muttering "maybe I need to get out of this castle more…"
"Oh, that's a brilliant idea, Harry!" Hermione's face lit up. She twisted on the couch to face the room. "We could set up a proper schedule. Documentaries for history and science, dramas for social structures, comedies for cultural humor patterns. I could put together a curriculum! A real one, with discussion prompts and—"
"Please don't make it homework, Hermione!" Ginny groaned. The other girls nodded in agreement with the red haired witch.
"It won't be homework! It'll be enrichment!" Hermione's eyes were practically sparkling.
"Wait, can we actually do this?" a fourth year girl asked from the corner, looking genuinely excited. "Watch movies instead of going to class? Wow! Our school really is getting more awesome!"
"I'm in," Lavender said immediately. "I've been dying to know what a cinema is."
"My dad used to talk about something called Star Wars," Fred said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. "Apparently lots of people get blown up…"
"Sounds violent," George said. "I'm in!"
Fleur nodded approvingly. "French cinema, of course, is superior to all others."
"That's literally not true," I said with conviction.
Fleur gave me a mock glare of indignation for pointing out the truth of her culture's terrible cinema. "It is literally the truth, mon cœur, and I will not be argued with!"
Asia tugged gently at my pant leg. I looked down at her. She was peering up at me with wide green eyes. "Harry... Can we watch Finding Nemo 2?"
I woke up the next morning to a warm body pressed against me. I opened my eyes.
My mother, Serafall, lay curled against me like she'd been there for hours, which she probably had. Her long black hair fanned across my pillow in twin tails that had come partially undone during the night with dark strands spilling over the white linen.
She was topless. Completely, shamelessly, gloriously topless, her massive tits squished against my side, each one heavy and round enough that even lying down they barely lost their shape. The only thing she had on was a pair of black lacy panties that looked like they'd been specifically chosen to leave as little to the imagination as possible. They rode low on her wide hips, the lace stretched thin across her ass and barely covering the front.
Her deep blue eyes, the same shade as mine, fluttered open. She smiled the moment she saw me looking at her. Not a sleepy smile. Not an innocent smile. The kind of smile that told me she'd been awake for a while already, just enjoying the contact.
"Good morning, Professor Leviathan," I said to her just to see her reaction.
Something rippled through her entire body. Her eyes went half lidded, her lips parted, and her thighs pressed together with an audible shift of the sheets. Her nipples stiffened visibly against my skin, those perfect pink peaks hardening in real time as a full body shiver rolled from her shoulders down to her toes. "Nnnhh..." She sat up, and her breasts bounced with the motion, heavy and round, swaying before settling. She pressed both palms flat against my chest and stared down at me with the kind of expression that belonged in a locked bedroom, not a school dormitory at seven in the morning. "SAY IT AGAIN!"
"Professor Leviathan~"
"Mmm, hahhhh..." She bit her lower lip and rocked her hips once against the mattress. "Harry-kun, you have no idea—no idea what that does to me! Do you know what kind of role play we can do now? Teacher and student. Disciplinary meetings. After hours tutoring. Detention." Her eyes were practically glowing. "I'll make you call me Professor while I—"
"You couldn't even last one night, could you?" I cut her off with a smirk.
Serafall leaned down until her lips hovered just above mine. Her hair fell around us like a curtain. Her breasts pressed warm and soft against my chest, nipples dragging across my skin. She kissed me, slow and deep, her tongue sliding against mine before she pulled back just enough to speak against my mouth. "I didn't just sneak into your bed, Harry-kun," she murmured. "I spent the first half of the night with So-tan. She pretended to be annoyed, but she was the little spoon within thirty seconds." She kissed the corner of my jaw. "Then I came here for the second half. Fair and balanced, like a good mother."
I'm not surprised. Not even a little bit.
"You could've just split the difference and stayed with Sona all night," I told her.
"But then you'd wake up cold and alone. What kind of mother would I be?"
"The kind that's currently grinding her ass on her son in his school dormitory?"
Because she was. At some point during the conversation she'd shifted, rolling her hips so that her panty covered ass settled directly over my cock, which had been hard since approximately the moment I opened my eyes to find a topless Satan in my bed. The thin lace did absolutely nothing to dull the sensation. She pressed down deliberately, dragging the soft curve of her ass along my entire length, and I felt the soft warmth of her pussy even through the fabric.
"Mmmh..." she hummed, rolling her hips in a slow, grinding circle. Her tits swayed with the motion. She licked her lips. "We have some time before classes start, Harry-kun. Why don't we have some fun?" She ground down again, harder this time, and I felt the damp patch forming against the lace where her slit pressed along my shaft. My cock twitched against her and she let out a breathy little moan. "Aahh... you should call someone from your peerage." Another slow grind. Her hands braced on my abs. "Call that girl. Hermione." She looked back over her shoulder at me, and the hunger in her expression was completely unconcealed. "It's about time I started getting a proper taste of my son's harem, don't you think?"
Hermione. In this bed. With my mother…
The mental image hit me like a freight train. I felt heat flood my face and my cock jumped hard enough against Serafall's ass that she let out a delighted little "Oh!" and wiggled against it.
I reached for the nightstand and checked the time.
7:43.
Breakfast started at 8:00. Classes at 9:00.
Fuck…
"We don't have time," I said, and the words physically hurt to say. "I slept in."
Serafall's grinding stopped. She turned to face me fully, straddling my hips with my cock pressed flat against her stomach through the sheets. Her lower lip pushed out into a devastating pout, her brows pinching together, and her eyes went wide and glassy in a way that would've brought lesser men to their knees. "No fair," she whined. "Harry-kuuun..."
"I know."
"Just a quickie? Five minutes. I can do five minutes."
That was a lie and we both knew it…
"Absolutely not. I actually need to get to breakfast on time on my first day back. And it's your first day as a teacher. I'm still not sure how you pulled that one off…" I told her.
"Hehe! That's a secret," she said. "But I'm a professor now. I can write you a note. 'Harry Sitri was late because his mother needed—'"
"I'm getting in the shower," I said, sliding out from under her before my willpower gave out completely. "Alone. Because if you follow me in there, I won't make it to breakfast, lunch, or dinner."
Serafall flopped face first into my pillow with a groan that was entirely too dramatic for a thousand year old devil lord. She kicked her feet against the mattress like a child. "This school has too many rules," she mumbled into the pillow.
I grabbed a towel from the rack, stepped into the bathroom, and shut the door behind me. I turned the water on cold first, letting it hit me square in the chest, and stood there for a full thirty seconds trying to force the image of Hermione and Serafall intertwined on my sheets out of my head.
It didn't work.
I turned the water colder.
Breakfast was its usual beautiful chaos. Fleur fed me a strawberry across the table while Hermione pretended not to notice. Gabrielle stole half of Ginny's toast and blamed it on a house elf. Asia ate her porridge like someone who still couldn't quite believe the food was real. Lyra and Lyna served tea in their maid outfits and made three first year boys walk into the same pillar.
But eventually the plates cleared, the schedules came out, and reality set in.
School was back.
Fleur kissed me goodbye at the top of the marble staircase, lingering just long enough to make a passing group of sixth year boys trip over each other. She was a seventh year, which meant her class schedule had almost zero overlap with mine. She took it well, which for Fleur meant she only pouted for about four seconds before flipping her silver blonde hair over one shoulder and gliding off toward Advanced Transfiguration like she owned the corridor.
Gabrielle, Lilja, and Asia were all third years. They had their own classes.
Lilja caught my gaze from behind the group and gave me a look that was simultaneously warm, possessive, and vaguely threatening, all wrapped up in those bright green eyes. She mouthed something in Old Norse that I was fairly certain translated to "please don't let anyone try to kill you before lunch." Or possibly "I'll gut anyone who tries."
Asia waved at me with both hands, a tiny, earnest gesture that made Jasmine press her palm over her heart again. Then Lilja herded them all down the corridor and they were gone.
That left me and Hermione walking side by side toward the dungeons, with Jasmine, Lavender, and Parvati falling into step behind us like a chattering escort.
"Soooooooo," Lavender said, stretching the word to about three syllables, "Japan."
I didn't turn around. I didn't need to. I could hear the grin in her voice.
"What about it?" Hermione asked, without looking up from the schedule she was reviewing for the third time.
"A whole month," Parvati said. "A whole month in Japan. With Harry. In a mansion. With a pool."
"And a hot tub," Lavender added. "Jasmine sent us pictures!"
"And those fancy bedrooms." Partavi pointed out.
"So many bedrooms!" Lavender nodded in agreement.
"It was a very productive cultural exchange," Hermione said flatly.
"Oh, I bet something got exchanged…" Lavender teased.
"Lavender!" Jasmine huffed out her friend's name.
"What! I'm just saying, Jasmine got invited and we didn't." Lavender's voice pitched upward into a whine that I suspected she'd been rehearsing since we sat down at breakfast. "We've known Harry just as long! And somehow Jas gets a month in a luxury Japanese mansion with the most eligible wizard in Britain while Parv and I spend all month helping my mum reorganize her potions cupboard."
"My condolences," I said over my shoulder. "And yeah, you girls missed out…"
"See? He's not even denying it was amazing…" Lavender groaned in jealousy.
"It was pretty amazing," Jasmine said quietly, and I could hear the smile in her voice even without looking.
Lavender pounced on that like a shark smelling blood. "So something did happen."
"I didn't say that!" Jasmine realized she had been caught.
Lavender leaned closer. "You're smiling!"
Jasmine turned her head to the side. "I smile all the time!"
"Not like that you don't. Parv, look at her face."
"Oh yeah," Parvati confirmed. "That's a something happened face..."
I smirked. Lavender and Parvati saw it immediately.
"HE'S SMIRKING!" Lavender grabbed Parvati's arm. "HE'S SMIRKING, PARV!"
Jasmine made a strangled noise and speed walked until she was beside me and Hermione, physically inserting herself between us like we were human shields. Hermione patted her on the shoulder without looking up from her schedule. "They'll tire themselves out eventually," Hermione told her.
"WE WILL NOT!" both girls shouted in unison from behind us.
Jasmine's blush wasn't going anywhere. Neither was that memory of her face on the ice boat, glasses fogged, her chest heaving after she pleasured Asia, her hand buried between her thighs while her mother bounced on my...
I cleared my throat and faced forward. Unfortunately, the first class back at Hogwarts was Potions.
Potions itself wasn't the problem. I was good at Potions. Absurdly, unfairly, genetically good at Potions, thanks to the Sitri bloodline's innate mastery over water based magic, which extended to any solution, mixture, or brew that had a liquid water base.
Which was all of them.
I could dump every ingredient into a cauldron simultaneously and my magic would sort them into the correct order, at the correct temperature, with the correct timing.
The problem was that Potions meant Slytherins. Our schedule had us paired with Slytherin for double Potions, which meant two straight hours in the dungeons without Rias, without Sona, without Tsubaki or Akeno. None of my devil allies. Just me, Hermione, the Gryffindor fourth years, and whatever hostility the green and silver side of the room decided to bring today.
Draco's going to be in there. Wonderful.
The other problem walked beside me, and she had very strong opinions about my Potions abilities. "I'm not pairing with you," Hermione said, as if reading my thoughts, which she might have been. She'd gotten unnervingly good at that since becoming my Bishop.
"I didn't ask."
"You were going to."
"I wasn't."
"You always try. And the answer is always no." She tucked her schedule into her bag with a crisp, practiced motion. "Your bloodline lets you cheat, Harry. You don't measure. You don't time. You don't stir. You dump everything into the cauldron like you're making a salad and somehow produce a perfect potion in under ten seconds."
"That's not cheating…" I mumbled. But I could see where she was coming from. My bishop Hermione was incredibly prideful when it came to her work or assignments and that's something I loved about her. "Fine," I said. "I'll pair with someone else."
"Thank you."
"Jasmine, you want to be my Potions partner?" I spoke up to the girl between us to snap her out of her blushing haze.
Jasmine, who had been walking in traumatized silence while Lavender and Parvati continued their interrogation from behind, looked up at me like a deer in wandlight. "I — what?"
"Potions partner. You and me."
Lavender immediately leaned between us. "If she says no, I volunteer."
"I didn't say no!" Jasmine pushed Lavender's face away with her palm. "Yes. Fine. Sure. Potions partner. That's fine. That's totally fine!"
I spotted Ron Weasley a few rows over as I slid onto the bench beside Jasmine. He was setting up his cauldron with the slow movements of someone still relearning how to exist without a parasitic wizard puppeting his brain.
I gave him a nod. He caught it, nodded back, and returned to unpacking his ingredients.
Good. He looks better. More present. The rat is dead. Lilja made sure of that in a Shanghai tunnel, and whatever she did to him before the end, she never told me the details. I never asked.
I let my gaze drift across the room while Jasmine organized our workspace with the kind of meticulous care that told me she actually took this class seriously. The Slytherin side was already settled in, and the hostility hit me like a wall of cold air.
Draco and his posse sat at the back table. All of them were glaring at me.
Honestly, how were they still here? In any functioning institution, the lot of them would have been expelled three times over. And he doesn't have daddy's money to bribe the board of governors anymore either to manipulate his grades. My grandmother owns the whole board now… Plus our bank seized all of his daddy's money for good measure.
I pulled my eyes away and found the Slytherins that I was actually looking for. Two tables to my left, near the middle of the room. Daphne Greengrass sat with her spine perfectly straight, her blonde hair pulled into a neat braid, her hands folded on the desk in front of her. Tracey Davis was beside her, pretending to read a textbook. Both of them were doing an admirable job of looking at absolutely anything in the room that wasn't me.
Still. It's been a whole month later. They'd been avoiding my eyes since before I left for Japan, and whatever had caused it clearly hadn't resolved itself during the break. The last time we'd spoken properly was before the Fallen Angel attack. Daphne had fought on my team during the Rating Game. Tracey had joked about demanding a date as compensation. Then something happened, and they both went cold overnight.
Daphne's quill shifted in her hands. She knew I was looking at her.
I'm going to have to deal with this. Whatever this is, the silent treatment has gone on long enough. If they won't come to me, I'll send someone they can't ignore. Lyra and Lyna are very good at making people talk.
I filed the task away and turned back to my own table just as the dungeon door slammed open hard enough to rattle the glass jars on the shelves.
Severus Snape swept into the room in a billow of black robes, looking exactly the same as he had a month ago. Same greasy curtain of dark hair. Same permanent sneer etched into his sallow face. Same energy of a man who had been personally offended by the concept of joy at some point in his youth and never recovered.
"Welcome back," he muttered, the words carrying all the warmth of a funeral announcement. He didn't look at any of us as he strode to the front of the room and turned sharply, robes flaring. "I trust no one has forgotten what they learned before the... interruption." He said "interruption" like he was describing a mild scheduling inconvenience rather than an invasion by a hundred Fallen Angels that killed six students and a Triwizard champion. "I will not be reteaching material to dunderheads who couldn't be bothered to study during the closure." His black eyes swept the room like searchlights. "An attack on the school is not an excuse for intellectual decay. If you spent the past month doing nothing, that is your failure, and you will suffer the consequences in your marks. Am I understood?"
"Yes, Professor Snape," the room mumbled in ragged unison.
"Barely." He flicked his wand and instructions scrawled themselves across the blackboard in his sharp, angular handwriting. "Wit-Sharpening Potion. Page three hundred and twelve. You have the full period. Begin."
The room erupted into the clatter of cauldrons, the rustle of textbook pages, and the quiet dread of thirty students trying to remember if they had actually studied during the break.
Jasmine had our textbook open before Snape finished speaking. She scanned the ingredients list, compared it to what we had laid out, and started dicing scarab beetles with quick, practiced strokes. She was good at this. Methodical. Precise. Her knife work was clean, her measurements exact, and she had that focused little crease between her eyebrows that appeared whenever she was genuinely concentrating.
I watched her work for about thirty seconds.
Then I picked up the armadillo bile, the ginger root, and the remaining scarab beetles, dumped all of them into the cauldron at once, pressed my palm flat against the iron rim, and pushed.
The liquid in the cauldron shivered, swirled, turned itself exactly three times clockwise without a ladle touching it, shifted from murky brown to a flawless crystal clear, and settled into a gentle simmer with a faint, clean scent of peppermint.
Total elapsed time—about four seconds.
Jasmine stared at the perfect potion. Then at her neatly diced beetles that were no longer needed. Then at me. "I hate you," she said.
"You love me…" I muttered reflexively and then realized what I just implied.
Her blush came back with a vengeance and she jabbed her knife into the cutting board. She couldn't even formulate a proper response.
Snape materialized behind us like a particularly unpleasant shadow. He peered into the cauldron, his hooked nose practically hovering over the surface. The potion was perfect. We both knew it was perfect. He knew that I knew that he knew it was perfect.
His lip curled. "Adequate," he said, and swept away.
High praise from the man who once described my existence as "an affront to the noble art of brewing."
I glanced across the room to where Hermione was carefully measuring armadillo bile with a glass pipette, her brow furrowed in concentration, utterly refusing to look in my direction. She already knew our potion was done. She could probably feel my smugness through the Bishop bond. She was choosing to ignore it on principle.
The rest of the period passed without any incidents. Well, Neville melted his cauldron on schedule but he always did that. It was fairly normal so far for the first day back.
The DADA classroom had been completely transformed since Narcissa took over. Gone were the moving portraits of Lockhart that used to wink at anyone who walked past. Gone were the garish purple drapes and the cabinet of suspiciously autographed memorabilia. In their place, Narcissa had installed enchanted training dummies along the far wall, a dueling platform raised six inches off the stone floor in the center of the room, and a collection of cursed artifacts sealed behind warded glass cases that lined the windows.
Tonks was already at the front, perched on the edge of Narcissa's desk with her legs swinging, her hair cycling through shades of electric blue as she chatted with a cluster of Hufflepuff students. She spotted me the instant I walked in, and her hair flashed pink before she caught herself and forced it back to blue. I gave her a grin that I knew would make it worse. It did. The pink crept back in at her roots.
Still so easy to fluster.
The Hufflepuffs were already filling their side of the room. Susan Bones waved at me. Hannah Abbott smiled politely. And there, right at the center of the second row, sat the Gremory heiress herself.
My fiance Rias Gremory looked up from a textbook she definitely hadn't been reading and gave me a smile that was warm and genuine and just slightly possessive. She'd left the top two buttons of her school blouse undone, which on anyone else might have looked casual. On Rias, with those proportions, it looked like a declaration of intent. The fabric strained across her chest with every breath, the white cotton pulled taut over breasts so large and round that the gap between her buttons gave flashes of her black bra underneath.
She'd saved the seat to her right for me. The seat to her left was occupied by someone I should have expected but somehow never got used to.
Akeno Himejima sat with her legs crossed, her dark ponytail draped over one shoulder, and an expression on her face that could only be described as anticipatory. Her violet eyes locked onto me the moment I cleared the doorway, and her lips curved into the kind of smile that promised absolutely nothing appropriate for a school setting.
"Harry," Rias said, patting the empty chair beside her. "Over here."
I dropped into the seat. My bag hit the floor. And before I could even pull out a quill, Akeno's hand was on my thigh.
"Mmm, welcome back, Harry-kun," Akeno murmured, her breath warm against the side of my neck. Her chest pressed against my arm, soft and heavy, her tits squishing into my bicep through the thin cotton of her blouse. I could feel the lace edge of her bra through both layers of fabric. "We didn't get to spend much time together at all in Japan. It was so sad for me, but now that we're back at school we can change that."
"Akeno…" Rias said with a slight growl.
"I kept thinking about you." Akeno's fingers drifted two inches higher on my thigh. Her lips grazed my earlobe. "All alone in my room. In my bed. Thinking about all the things we haven't done yet..."
"Akeno!" Rias muttered louder this time.
"Ufufu, did you know I sleep naked, Harry-kun? I toss and turn so much. The sheets get all tangled around my body, and I get so hot, and I just—"
"Akeno Himejima, remove your hand from his leg or I will remove it at the wrist!"
Akeno pulled back exactly one inch, her smile not dimming even slightly. She tilted her head toward her King with wide, innocent eyes that fooled absolutely nobody. "Ara ara, Buchou, I was just welcoming him. It's polite to welcome someone back, isn't it?"
"You were trying to give him a handjob in Defense Against the Dark Arts." Rias pinched the bridge of her nose. "Harry," Rias said, turning to me with the long suffering composure of someone who had been dealing with Akeno's antics for years, "I apologize for my Queen."
"I'm not sorry," Akeno said brightly.
"She has no boundaries."
"Boundaries are for people who aren't honest about what they want." Akeno leaned forward on her elbows, which pressed her breasts together in a way that the school blouse was absolutely not designed to accommodate. The top button gave up entirely, popping open with an audible snap, and a truly indecent amount of cleavage spilled into view. Creamy, pale skin pressed tight between the remaining buttons, the dark lace of her bra doing nothing to contain the soft, heavy curves that threatened to overflow it. She looked directly at me and licked her lower lip. "How naughty do you think we can get before your Bishop gives us detention? Detention with Professor Black sounds fun, actually. I wonder if she's strict… She has dommy mommy energy."
I opened my mouth to respond, but Rias beat me to it. She reached across my chest, grabbed Akeno's tie, and yanked her forward until their faces were inches apart.
"Behave," Rias said. "Or I'll tell Harry what you said in your sleep last night..."
Akeno's composure cracked. The seductive confidence flickered, replaced by something I had never seen on her face before. Genuine, unfiltered panic. "You wouldn't dare!"
"Try me!"
They stared at each other for a three second eternity while I sat between them trying to figure out what could possibly make Akeno Himejima, the woman who openly discussed bondage at the breakfast table, blush like a schoolgirl.
What the hell did she say in her sleep?
Akeno retreated to her side of the desk with an elegant huff, crossing her arms beneath her chest in a way that lifted her tits even higher, and turned her face toward the window. "Rias is a bully," she said to no one in particular.
"Rias is your King," Rias corrected. She smoothed her hair, re-buttoned her blouse with a practiced tug, and turned to me with a pleasant smile as though the last ninety seconds hadn't happened. "How was Potions?"
We chatted for a bit longer before the classroom door opened and Narcissa Black entered.
Narcissa and Tonks had clearly spent every spare hour of the closure planning this curriculum, and it showed.
With a series of precise wand movements, Narcissa had pushed the desks to the perimeter of the room, clearing the central dueling platform into an open demonstration space. Tonks stood at the center of it now, bouncing on the balls of her feet, her Auror training bleeding through every movement despite the fact that she technically wasn't one anymore.
Beside her, an enchanted training dummy lurched to life.
It didn't just stand there like the practice dummies in most classrooms. This one moved. Narcissa had clearly invested serious magic into its construction. It hunched forward with an unnervingly fluid gait, its wooden limbs bending at angles that shouldn't have been possible for something carved from oak. Its painted face had been charmed into a snarling grimace, complete with elongated fangs. Every few seconds it would twitch its head to the side with a sharp, jerking motion that made the front row flinch.
"Vampires," Tonks announced, pacing a wide circle around the dummy while keeping it in her peripheral vision at all times. Good habit. "Not the romantic ones from those terrible muggle novels your mums read. Real ones. Fast. Strong. Supernaturally aware of their surroundings. And above all else, smart enough to wait until you've made a mistake before they move." She held up a wooden stake in her right hand. It was roughly ten inches long, sharpened to a vicious point, and carved with a simple reinforcement rune along the shaft. "In an ideal scenario, you've got your wand. Incendio to the face, Diffindo to the neck, Bombarda to the chest cavity. Vampires are tough, but they're not immune to having their organs liquefied." She twirled the stake between her fingers. "But this class isn't about ideal scenarios. Professor Black and I are going to teach you what to do when everything has already gone wrong." She tossed her wand to Narcissa, who caught it without looking. "You're wandless. You're alone. You're cornered." Tonks crouched slightly, the stake held low at her hip in a reverse grip. "What do you do?"
The dummy attacked.
It lunged with a speed that made half the class gasp, wooden claws raking through the air where Tonks's throat had been a quarter second earlier. She was already moving, sidestepping with a pivot that redirected the dummy's momentum past her. Her free hand caught the back of its neck and she used its own speed to slam it face first into the dueling platform.
It recovered instantly, spinning on the ground and sweeping at her ankles. Tonks jumped, came down on its outstretched arm with her boot, and drove the stake straight through the center of its chest in one brutal downward thrust.
The dummy screamed. The dummy went rigid and toppled sideways with a hollow thud.
Those were some good effects they invested into that demonstration… I'm proud of them.
The Hufflepuffs clapped enthusiastically. On the Gryffindor side, Jasmine was leaning forward with the kind of focused intensity she usually reserved for exam prep, and Lavender was whispering to Parvati while miming a stabbing motion with her own quill.
Hermione's hand was already in the air of course. "Professor Tonks, what's the optimal angle of entry for the stake? Is it perpendicular to the sternum, or should it be angled upward to account for the ribcage?"
That's my girl. Always thinking about geometry during a vampire demonstration.
Tonks grinned and pulled the stake free with a wet squelch that the enchantment provided for maximum educational impact. "Great question. Angle upward, always. About thirty degrees. You're punching through the bottom of the ribcage and driving into the heart from below. Going straight in, you'll hit bone every time and a vampire won't give you a second shot." She held the stake up, demonstrating the grip and angle for the whole room.
Narcissa stepped forward, repairing the dummy with a casual wave of her wand. It reassembled itself, the hole in its chest knitting shut, the red eyes flickering back to life. It swiveled its head toward Tonks and hissed.
"I like this class," Akeno murmured. "The stabbing might be turning me on a little bit though..."
Rias leaned past me to scold her queen once again. "Please don't make it weird."
"Ara. Everything I do is weird, Buchou. You should know this by now..."
I would tell Narcissa and Tonks what a great job they were doing with this class later. Way better than Lockheart of course, but I did have to admit some of his teaching failures were so funny I could always find entertainment in his lectures.
But, of course, I preferred watching my beautiful competent peerage members more.
And that made me wonder how my final class of the day was going to go after lunch. It was going to be the new course, the one taught by my mum and Behemoth about the wider world of magic. That class would have the Gryffindors paired with the Ravenclaws which I'm sure Serafall planned on purpose…
– Umbitch –
Dolores Jane Umbridge sat at the desk of her assigned classroom on the fourth floor, her stubby fingers wrapped around a teacup painted with kittens, and contemplated violence.
Three classes in a row on the first day! Empty! Three consecutive, scheduled, Ministry-approved classes on the official Hogwarts timetable, and not a single student had walked through that door.
The first class of the morning, she had assumed it was a scheduling error. These things happened. Hogwarts had just reopened after a month-long closure, and the administration was clearly in disarray under that senile old fool Dumbledore. She had waited the full hour, sipping her tea, reviewing her lesson plans, and then marched to the deputy headmistress's office to demand a corrected roster.
McGonagall had looked at her over those ridiculous spectacles, confirmed that the schedule was correct, and suggested with a smile so thin it could have sliced parchment that perhaps the students were simply "exercising their academic discretion."
Academic discretion. That sanctimonious Scottish hag had the nerve to sit there and tell me that students were choosing not to attend my class.
And after everything she had prepared! She had set out pamphlets. Written the lesson title on the chalkboard in her best calligraphy: "Why Muggles Are Inferior: A Ministry-Approved Overview of Non-Magical Limitations." She had even conjured a vase of pink carnations on the corner of the desk to make the room more inviting.
Nobody came again!
She waited forty-five minutes. The pamphlets sat untouched in their neat little stacks. At one point, a first-year boy opened the door, looked at her, looked at the empty room, said "Oh, this is the one we're not supposed to go to," and left.
The one we're not supposed to go to!? Someone instructed the entire student body to boycott my class!?
The classroom was silent except for the distant sound of laughter echoing from somewhere down the corridor. Young voices. Happy voices. Students who were clearly not in her classroom because they were clearly somewhere else having a wonderful fucking time.
I am a Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic. I have held that position for eleven years. I have drafted more legislation than half the Wizengamot combined. I personally authored the Werewolf Employment Restrictions, the Centaur Territorial Reclassification Act, and the Muggle-Born Registration Initiative that Fudge was too spineless to push through committee. I am one of the most powerful women in magical Britain.
And I am sitting in an empty classroom being ignored by children.
Dolores set the teacup down with a sharp click that echoed off the stone walls. Her squat fingers curled into fists on the desk.
Muggle Studies. They gave me Muggle Studies!
The humiliation of it burned like acid in her throat. She had been promised Defense Against the Dark Arts. Fudge had looked her in the eye and promised her the position. It was supposed to be her foothold, her way into the school's power structure, the first step toward bringing this crumbling institution under proper Ministry control.
Then she'd arrived and discovered that the Defense position was already filled by Narcissa Black. Narcissa bloody Black, née Malfoy, the woman who had been married to one of the Dark Lord's most prominent supporters for two decades and somehow walked away from it smelling like roses. A woman who, if the gossip was to be believed, was now romantically involved with a student half her age!
That should have been a scandal. That should have gotten her sacked on the spot. Instead, Dumbledore gave her a classroom, a teaching assistant, and what appeared to be complete immunity from consequences.
And they gave me Muggle Studies.
Muggle Studies!
As if I would know the first thing about those filthy, magic-less, knuckle-dragging animals. As if I would want to.
The very idea of devoting an entire academic subject to studying the habits of creatures barely more sophisticated than livestock made her skin crawl.
But it was the only open position. And that was only because she and her allies got that filthy mutt sacked from his job.
She stood abruptly, the chair scraping against stone with a sound like nails on a chalkboard. She crossed the room to the window. Down in the courtyard below, she could see students. Dozens of them. Sitting on the grass, laughing, chatting, some of them reading books, others practicing spellwork in small groups. None of them had anywhere to be, apparently. None of them had a class they should be attending right now.
They think they can ignore me. They think I'm a joke!? Hmph! I'll find some way to get back at them for this if it's the last thing I do!
XXX