A/N: Howdy, people. I'm back, and with a different plot bunny than last time. It's a little prolouge to, hopefully, something bigger and better than some have tried before. Hopefully I don't crap out! Please, if you want the story to continue, review, tell me what you thought and I'll fix whatever's wrong, I promise!
Harry Potter rolled out of bed the day before the start of the new term, his ancient bones creaking and cracking in protest. Looking up from the floor, he listened as the noise echoed in his bedchamber, right next to his office.
The office once inhabited by the man almost as great as Merlin, Albus Dumbledore.
It hadn't really been a choice, Harry thought, looking back. What else was he going to do, hunt dark wizards the rest of his life? Leave Ginny, Ron, and Hermione forever? Put them back into the mentality they'd been for their entire life?
No, he would never subject them to that misery. Unless the world was threatened again by a dark wizard of Voldemorts caliber, why would he bother? Why put himself and the people he loved in the way?
So instead of becoming one of the world's pet dark wizard hunter and do gooder, he applied to his first home, the place he loved almost as much as his family, and took a job teaching. Defense Against the Dark Arts, of course. It's not like he could have taught Charms, patiently saying "wingardiumleviohsah" to kids who'd been trying for the past half hour.
Things pretty much coasted for twenty years from there, each year as equally fun and memorable as his first, as he taught students how to defend themselves against the darker things. And if the curriculum shifted a little more to practical defense rather than how to defend yourself from pixies, well, McGonagall was certainly using her reading glasses more than she used to, and she might have overlooked the few unorthodox things Harry did in his classes.
Harry ended up being head of Gryffindor house, and on his induction as head of house McGonagall had told him very quietly that if he got any of his students in any sort of trouble and then gave them points for "being brave", she would borrow Mr. Filches shackles and allow all the marriage proposers (male and female) to have their way with him.
DA started up again (as the Defense Association, Harry didn't want to make McGonagall worried he was going to raise an army to fight dark wizards in India or somewhere) and kids who were struggling could get some needed one-on-one time with Harry. Test scores for Hogwarts's DADA O.W.L.'s and N.E.W.T's shot through the roof, and new Aurors with more competence than the average thug on the street lent and edge to the fledgling Ministry, allowing it to grow faster, better and stronger than it once was.
The fact that Harry personally knew half the Aurors and the head of the DMLE was not lost on either the new Prime minister (a man with medium sized dreams and the will to complete them) or the board of Governors.
Hogwarts politics had not disappeared with the deaths of Dumbledore and Snape, and soon after Hogwarts was repaired old rivalries picked up. The head of Slytherin (a blond-haired lithe woman, coming from an obscure lineage close to the Malfoy's, also the potions professor), while not as untouchable and Neanderthalic as her predecessor; was just as biased and used her small political weight like a scalpel to irritate and make Harry's life as miserable as possible.
They had lunch on weekends, and Harry took every chance he could get to practice his enigmatic smile, which he was sure gave the potions mistress nightmares.
Kids came and gone, shaped with the new doctrines Harry and the new head of Slytherin lived by. Graduating Gryffs learned how to be brave (E.g. put toads in the professors cauldrons) and get away with it, and the Slytherin's learned that finesse was Salazar's legacy, not bias.
When Flitwick passed away(quietly, in his bed at Hogwarts at a ripe old age), many tears were shed, and a ceremony attended by hundreds of Hogwarts alumni (some of the most intelligent people in the world) was one of the most beautiful Harry had ever attended. The duelist was replaced by a tall man who always wore dark formal robes, and a thick smog of wizard cigar smoke.
McGonagall's replacement was caught sniffing around Knockturn alley for polyjuice , and rather than bothering turning in his resignation, he just didn't show up the next Monday. Hermione, failing to get all of her S.P.E.W. bills passed (besides one making house-elf beating illegal) applied as transfiguration professor. She regularly appeared at DA meetings, which Harry was sure made McGonagall very nervous.
Harry really couldn't ask for more. He went home every Saturday, spent the weekend with Ginny, and came back to the school smiling. His kids (Ginny had only wanted three, stating she would probably strangle the fourth one on the way out) were all pretty much on their way to success: James was already an Auror on his way up; Al doing things that he could only imagine in the Department of Mysteries. He and Luna went on broom rides over the forest when she wasn't whipping the Gryffindor Quiditch team into decent enough shape to utterly trounce the Sylitherins.
People kept getting older, and soon enough all the teachers were replaced (Herbology replaced by Neville, Hufflepuff house by a man of mammoth size and a capacity to love twice as big). McGonagall appointed Harry as Deputy Headmaster, and he came to realize that he was an adult, one hundred percent.
He felt a few decades older.
Eventually Mcgonagall perished at the gentle hand of old age, unlike most of her generation. She was the last teacher, the oldest, not quite as old as Dumbledore, but Harry was sure she felt like it. Her ceremony was small, but not any worse for it.
Harry became headmaster with very little fuss. Even the new potions mistress didn't bother (she would be the first to know when to pick battles), with Harry having half the Board of Governors in his pocket and a few seats on the Wizengamot.
And there he stayed, supervising the students until the end of his days.
Harry picked himself off the ground and swept a hand through his unruly hair, a little lighter but still messy and rebellious after all these years. He opened the door to his office, sat behind the desk that had remained practically unchanged since Dumbledore, and thought about the first years appearing the next day.
A/N: So yeah, that's it. I'm gonna introducea lotof OC's, and I hope that I don't lose whatever magic the Harry Potter universe has. With every fan fiction comes a lot of artistic licence. I know that, really, of course Harry would become an Auror, and that McGonagall wouldn't be silly enough to let Harry apply for any Hogwarts teaching job, but this is , damnit, and we can post Snape-malfoy pairings and get away with it (even though we shouldn't).
So read, review, tell me what's good and what's not.