Friday, September 8, 2017
Harry grit his teeth as the hellions also know as the Weasley spawn finally, finally, filed out of his classroom, jostling and laughing and being generally insufferable. His eldest son was one of the worst of them. Harry shut the door behind them, slumping against it in relief. Thank fuck it was his last class of the day. Although... Harry groaned as he realized that their antics this afternoon guaranteed him yet another sleepless night dealing with the results of their pranks.
For the first time in his life, Harry found himself regretting some of his past escapades, and he whispered a quiet thanks to the professors who had kept him (mostly) safe despite his idiocies. He vowed to send McGonagall – Minerva, difficult as it was to think of her that way – a sinfully expensive gift that Christmas. She'd put up with Harry, his father (not to mention Sirius and Remus, whose memory Harry loved fiercely, while still admitting that being their professor would have been hell), and now his idiot son. He buried his face in his hands, let out a despairing groan, and slid down the door, landing with a quiet thump on the classroom floor, feeling, for the first time in his life, a real empathy for his youngest son. He'd never understood why Al was more comfortable with his books than his siblings and cousins. Now he thought he knew.
One week. He'd been a professor here for one fucking week and he was already ready to give up.
It would have been OK, he thought, if the kids had actually shown any interest in the subject he was trying to teach. But the only thing they seemed to care about was Harry Potter. No, he corrected himself, not even that. Because all that Chosen One shit he'd been at least a little prepared for. And half of Gryffindor knew him as an uncle-of-sorts anyway. No, the only thing on these kids' minds was the legendary feud between Harry Potter and his childhood nemesis and sworn enemy Draco Malfoy.
Harry felt the sudden urge to laugh, but what bubbled out of his throat was a strange half-laugh, half-sob. Draco sodding Malfoy. Would he ever be able to escape the prat? The very idea that it was Draco Malfoy who had been Harry's greatest enemy – not, you know, Voldemort – made him feel strangely empty inside. Because he hadn't thought of Malfoy as an enemy for a very long time. In fact, he admitted bitterly to himself, he wasn't sure he ever really had. He had almost looked forward to their boyhood spats. It was a form of stress relief – an "enemy" he could lash out at, when the real enemy proved out of his reach.
And now Malfoy wasn't talking to him. At all. And that was somehow worse than the verbal and physical sparring. Because he had always been absolutely certain that he mattered to Malfoy. He had felt like the most important thing in Malfoy's world. And now... now he felt like nothing at all.
Harry shook his head and forced himself onto his feet. He wasn't a teenager anymore – he needed to find somewhere a little softer to sit and think. Mope. He scowled, forced out a jagged laugh that felt like it left raw, bloody edges behind. The "great" Harry Potter, sitting on the dusty flagstones and moping over Draco sodding Malfoy. He slashed his wand through the air, with rather more force than was strictly necessary, indulging for a moment in the fantasy that it was his more troublesome students he was pointing it at, and not just the equipment that needed putting to rights.
That done, he turned with a swirl of robes that Snape would have envied, stalking off to the kitchens in search of a bottle of firewhisky. Perhaps he could skip out on dinner, have the house-elves send him a plate. He didn't think he could face Malfoy right now and make polite dinner conversation, when all he wanted was to tackle him to the ground. And if what he wished would follow that tackling was kissing and not punching, well, he just wouldn't share that last bit. With anyone. Ever.
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Armed with a bottle of firewhisky and strict instructions for the house-elves to send him a platter and not let anyone in to bother him – unless someone was dying, he'd added quickly, thinking of some of his son's more ridiculous stunts – Harry threw himself into the comfortable squashy armchair in front of his small fire. He'd nicked it from the common room his second day, and no one seemed to mind that the battered, threadbare chair had suddenly gone missing. The house-elves had replaced it with a new one the next day, anyway. Harry knew he could have asked them to bring him a new one, but he was partial to this one. He'd spent more hours than he cared to count curled up in it, when he was a boy, and it always made him a bit nostalgic, such a visceral reminder of his past. Of the Boy Who Lived - the boy he'd nearly forgotten.
"The worst thing," he muttered, a few glasses in, "is that they don't know what they're asking."
None of those kids had been alive during the war. It wasn't real for them, like it was for him. They didn't have dead that they remembered – just stories. The war was already fading into "history" – and that made him sad and angry all at once, and left him feeling very, very old.
It was just – these stories, and legends, and heroes. And villains, he thought, reminded suddenly of Draco, of his parents, who had supported Voldemort, yes, but who had saved Harry, in the end. Who had found love in a pureblood marriage. Who had quite obviously loved their son. Who had been murdered, after serving their sentence. And Draco...
No. They hadn't been villains. And he knew that he hadn't been – wasn't – a hero. They had been people to him. Real people, with all their foibles, their eccentricities and truths and lies. None of them heroes. Not villains. And he didn't know how to explain it to these kids, who didn't – couldn't – understand because they hadn't been there. They hadn't seen. All they had was stories. And it wasn't good enough. He just wished he knew what he could do to change it.
Because he wanted – needed – to make it real for them. But how to do that without having them live it? And no child should go through that. Bad enough that he'd been forced to. But – still. He had to do something...
He'd tried, though, hadn't he? He'd patiently answered their questions – the same ones, over and over. He'd tried to make them see what it was like. He'd gone in, after that first awful day, armed with lesson plans and demonstrations. He'd tried, Merlin help him, to answer their damn questions. And since it was him, and he never could do anything halfway – except divinations, he thought suddenly, wincing, and muttering a belated apology to Trelawny as he remembered the way he and Ron had blown off her assignments – he had tried to answer them honestly.
He'd torn open the old scars, told those kids the truth, every word sending a stab of pain to his scar, to his gut. And they didn't even fucking listen. Because, he realized, with a clarity that was almost blinding, they already had the answers they wanted to hear – the ones he'd refused to give them – all the half truths and blatant lies they'd grown up hearing and reading. And believing.
They tripped blithely off their innocent tongues, those sugar-coated lies, and crowded out the sharp, jagged truths that Harry tried to give them.
And he'd died a little more each day. He rubbed his eyes tiredly, feeling the weight of his failure pressing down on him. He'd had enough. A week into the job and he'd given up ever getting through to them, determining to let them make up their own answers – they would anyway.
He'd put less and less effort into his lessons – no one was interested in learning anything. They'd all been raised with the comfortable lie that the Dark Arts were all in the past. That they belonged to the pages of Binns' dry history books, and not in their sheltered, candy-coated lives.
None of these kids believed in the Dark Arts – not even his own – and none of them cared to learn how to defend against them. And Harry, who knew that the Dark Arts didn't just disappear with Voldemort – whose name no one would say, even now – that they'd always be there, waiting for the next to Dark Lord to rise from the shadows, didn't know how to tell them this in a way that they would believe.
He'd stopped answering their questions. None of them seemed to notice. He'd started answering with ambiguous grunts that they could take to mean whatever they wanted.
People had begun to whisper, he knew – he'd never really forgotten that feeling, the one where conversation stops awkwardly when you enter a room, and you just know they were talking about you. That it was the staff room, now, and the head table, not the common room or the Gryffindor table didn't change the way it felt. He knew they called him names – curt, churlish, brooding. He didn't care. Mostly.
Harry took another swig from the nearly empty bottle and stared absently into the flames, letting the hissing, crackling, writhing sea of red and gold carry him away.