XXX
When Harriet tracked down an unusually meandering Ravenclaw after dark, on a weekend in late October, she didn't expect to run into Luna Lovegood.
She also didn't expect Miss Lovegood to not be wearing any shoes.
In a distant way, Harriet had always known that Luna was being bullied by her housemates. The woman hadn't ever seem inclined to consider it 'bullying', and honestly cared very little for how other people thought of her, but that didn't mean that 'borrowing' someone's things and scattering them across the castle wasn't bullying.
When Harriet had first met Luna, in her own time-line, she hadn't really been able to do anything. She'd barely managed to keep afloat in the eyes of public opinion as it was, trying to do more than simply giving Luna a place to be away from her housemates had simply been beyond her. She'd never been able to do anything about the bullying directly, and she doubted that Luna's friendship with Harriet had been enough to stop the bullying from continuing elsewhere.
All in all, Harriet had been far too busy feeling sorry for herself – and suffering from PTSD in the wake of the civil war starting up silently in the background of the school – to spend too much time thinking about people that hadn't been herself. And by the time all of that had settled, they were all long-past school and whatever bullies there might've been there. As a result, whilst she'd always known about Luna's situation, she'd never really... connected the dots, in a way.
Miss Lovegood was twelve years old and wandering the drafty hallways of Hogwarts at night, in late October, without any shoes.
Apparently, she was in fact looking for her shoes, as they'd been what had gone missing this time.
Never anything like homework, or assignments or anything. For all that Ravenclaw wasn't filled to the brim with overambitious students, Filius would've absolutely noticed if one of his Ravenclaws repeatedly failed to turn something in, and he would've come down on the perpetrators with fiery wrath, even with minimal proof.
A loner in Ravenclaw? No big deal. A Ravenclaw who forgot their personal affects in random places around the school? There were plenty of scatterbrained students. A Ravenclaw who, despite Filius' constant attempts to drive home the importance of academical hard work, refused to actually turn in their assignments on time? No, that was a red flag for something going on.
Even if Filius might end up having suspected that Miss Lovegood was being bullied, he couldn't really do anything unless the perpetrators were caught red-handed. And he couldn't catch them red-handed without enough surveillance that he'd end up violating everyone's privacy. So all he could do in that situation was to have a word or two with his Prefects about taking care of the younger years, which would obviously not have any effect if the Prefects were busy with other things, or if they were sympathetic to the bullies.
So the bullies stayed far away from things like homework, and went for personal effects instead.
Unfortunately, much the same rules that bound Filius' hands on the matter, also bound Harriet's. With the added exception that Harriet wasn't able to talk with Prefects or show up in the common room and stumble across them red-handed by accident.
Fortunately however, Harriet could do something else. Which was why she gave the girl a pass to the Restricted Section, and commented absently about a certain book in there which included a great many ways to convince people that it wasn't worth taking things away from a place or individual. And that, should Miss Lovegood be unsure of exactly how to go about setting something like that up, then Harriet was always more than happy to explain some of the intricacies behind the process.
She included that last part mostly as a way to hopefully prevent Luna from laying a full-blooded Aztec curse on her housemates. There was one in particular mentioned in that book which turned the thief into what was basically a living inferi, damned to wander eternally without any satisfaction of flesh, unless they returned what was stolen along their own blood. And that was quite a bit too far in retaliation for stealing someone's shoes. Even if it was too bloody cold to wander around in just your socks.
What actually happened as a result of this interference however was that – when Miss Lovegood appeared on her doorstep a few days later – Harriet was presented with a very different curse than what she'd originally worried might've been an easy way to solve the problem. Instead, the curse that'd caught the girl's eye was one that stole the memories of everyone attempting to reach for the object that it was protecting.
Miss Lovegood's idea went somewhere along the lines of combining that forgetfulness-ward with a notice-me-not spell that was easily overcome by a determined individual. Which meant that someone would have to be actively looking for Miss Lovegood's things in particular, in order to trigger the ward. And, should they be truly determined enough to steal her things, there was a very distinct possibility that they'd probably lose a day or two of time, as their mind was constantly reset into a 'what was I doing'-state whenever they remembered that they were trying to steal her things and reached for them again. Which was hopefully not what would happen, because that amount of exposure to the ward wasn't exactly healthy.
Harriet had considered including a 'walk away'-effect on it as well, but when she'd suggested it to Miss Lovegood, the girl had simply tilted her head for a moment and then continued on with what she'd been doing as if Harriet hadn't said anything.
In some way, that should really worry Harriet, because there was a possibility that someone could end up hurt from that kind of thing. But unless those people were left in that loop for a very long time, it shouldn't be a problem. And considering that Miss Lovegood kept her things in the same dorm that she slept in, the odds of that happening without anyone interrupting it before it got that far was slim to none.
It was actually a pretty logical step to take, if she wanted to make sure that the bullies by caught red-handed. And Harriet could admit to finding a certain appeal in particularly malicious individuals trapping themselves in an endless loop of attempted-theft.
Not to mention that it'd be a good way to make sure that the bullies didn't simply shift their attention to an easier target. So Harriet didn't bring it up again, and with a few explanations from Harriet on the intricacies of the process, Luna spent the afternoon developing her new security-ward for her personal effects.
Harriet didn't know the details of what had happened after that, but she supposed that it was out of her hands by now.
And really, it'd been so peculiar that several of Filius' Ravenclaws didn't even show up for the Halloween Feast. Someone really ought to be investigating where they'd run off to, shouldn't they?
Harriet was pretty sure that Andromeda saw straight through her, but then Filius was already off to look into it, so Harriet simply hid her smile behind her tea and continued to feign ignorance.
XXX
"Whilst I'm sure that Miss Lovegood did indeed create an adaptation of the ward by herself, I would very much appreciate an explanation." Filius said simply as he sat down.
Harriet could guess that it was simply the fact that Miss Lovegood really wasn't the type to lie. She could bend her words into pretzels in bizarre enough ways that the person listening would assume something completely unrelated to what she was saying, but she didn't really lie.
"I found her wandering the hallways in the middle of the night, without any shoes." Harriet started. "Not like we can really do anything without proof and a perpetrator though, so I gave her a pass to the Restricted Section and mentioned the book."
Filius' eyes narrowed dangerously for a moment, but then he just pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. "And since you didn't want her to use something terrifyingly lethal, you asked her to discuss the content with you, correct?"
Harriet nodded. "From an academical stand-point, her choice in ward to alter, not to mention what she altered it into, was very interesting." She smiled a little bit helplessly. "I tried to make sure that it didn't brute-force the memory-loss, because that can get nasty, and otherwise guided her through making a ward without blowing up the Ravenclaw tower in the process."
Filius paused. "A small ward like that shouldn't have enough power to cause that kind of destruction."
"Well, yes." Harriet blinked. "It's designed like that. But if you get the feedback-loop of a self-sustaining ward wrong, especially in an environment with as high of a concentration of magic as Hogwarts? It'll unravel, and most of those times it just kind of sputters and dies, but sometimes it gets pretty violent."
"How violent?" Filius now appeared thoroughly distracted by academical trivia, and hopefully he'd remain interested enough in the subject – as Harriet tried to explain how much things had to go wrong for a cascade-failure to happen – to let the whole Lovegood-incident drop.
She already knew that things were going to escalate in regards to her book's presence in the Restricted Section. Before this, it might've been an object of interest to anyone who recognized Harriet's name on the cover, or people actually interested in wards and old curses.
Considering how the Restricted Section was indeed rather restricted from casual browsing, and that people with interests in old curses generally were known as being crazy enough that most teachers with any sense would refuse to give them a pass? The book had lived a solitary existence in the Hogwarts library, until Miss Lovegood had touched it.
However, with Miss Lovegood having shown the school that exciting things could be done with wards made even by a second-year? The interest in the subject would explode, and odds were good that they'd manage to find out which book Miss Lovegood had read to do what she'd done.
From there, it was only a matter of time.
Students would read it, and probably experiment with it in ways that Harriet – or anyone sane – wouldn't recommend, before anyone managed to catch them. The incidents from this would inevitably lead to more students wanting to read the book, which would escalate with even more incidents for others to be inspired by.
All in all, Harriet really should've been a lot more careful in considering to give Miss Lovegood that pass than she actually had been.
Still, she didn't regret it. Miss Lovegood had a defense against her bullies, her bullies were too busy being under scrutiny to target anyone else, and Harriet had been allowed to follow through the girl's unique thought-process as they'd worked out an altered ward together.
It'd only been a few months since she'd left Yharnam, and Harriet was already missing the constant unraveling and puzzling with wards that was Curse Breaking. She didn't mind teaching, and she'd absolutely take the position rather than let some loon like Umbridge waltz in and use the position to spread propaganda, but she still missed the more 'hands on' part of her passion.
So, being allowed a moment's reprieve to discuss wards and how they could and would interact with things was a welcome breath of fresh air. The fact that it was with Miss Lovegood, whose understanding of common sense was something so bizarrely warped that Harriet had never quite managed to figure it out, just made it all the more entertaining.
Which she supposed was a good thing. At least Harriet now knew for sure that she had a favorite student. With that in mind, she could compensate for that favoritism to make sure it didn't affect her other students negatively.
A good outcome all around, really.
XXX
True to expectations, Harriet spent the better part of November desperately trying to keep the student population from doing anything suicidally stupid with the very frank and easy-to-understand explanations of her own book.
It'd been written mainly aimed at people who'd already completed their OWLs and had put some thought into becoming Curse Breakers on top of that. But well, Harriet disliked making things more complicated than they ought to be, and it was perfectly possible for a second-year to pull off some of the things she described. In theory, anyway.
There was a big difference between managing to cast the spell, understanding the theory of what it was doing to the ward, and mastering how the spell interacted with the ward.
Wards were notoriously finicky about a great many things, and if you introduced magic to it in a way that the ward managed to recognize as magic? There was a reason that Harriet didn't exactly just waltz into digs and start unraveling wards without carefully puzzling out what the hell they actually did first.
No Curse Breaker did stuff like that and lived for long enough to be any kind of role-model.
Unfortunately, the subtleties between an ability to understand the theory and an ability to actually perform what was necessary, were hopelessly lost on teenagers. Not that Harriet could really point fingers about that. She hadn't figured any of that stuff out until she'd been well into her twenties, let alone when she'd still been in school.
And she would've absolutely tried to do it anyway, just because it'd be cool. Not that her friends would've been far behind her, what with Hermione's fanatical obsession with knowing more things, and Ron's inability to talk himself out of getting dragged to the library if they ganged up on him.
Ron would've honestly been the only one of the three of them who would've said a few sensibly hesitant words about experimenting with wards before being overruled, too.
Harriet had a lot of sympathy for the poor sods who'd been trying to keep her alive all those years. Admittedly, they'd been godawful at it and should've probably have ended up on some kind of list in regards to child-endangerment of some degree. But Harriet had definitely not been an innocent victim in how often she'd stumbled across some new exciting way to get herself killed.
The trick to Curse Breaking generally came down to convincing a ward to unravel itself, without doing so explosively. And then making sure that none of the wards connected to that ward, or indirectly neighboring that ward, or any wards that were sympathetically linked through various other potential anchor-points, or that were simply used as support for a ward that linked them together-...
Basically, the trick was to make sure that the unraveling was contained to only the single ward, usually by untangling it from its neighbors, and then making sure that nothing horrifically exploded, and that no other ward reacted quickly enough to realize what was happening and trigger a 'violent defense'-part in retaliation.
Warders tended to be just as knowledgeable about Curse Breaking as most Curse Breakers, and so they always made sure that the 'easy solution' was the wrong option to pick.
It was a bit like telling everyone that fire was the best way to fight inferi, and then expecting the guy raising inferi not to make the inferi either fire-proof or place them in a chamber filled with flammable gases.
If you went to the effort of raising an inferi, it only made sense to look into how people disabled them, and then figure out some way to counteract that. Whether that meant hiding them in sea-water until they were soaked in water to the very bone, or by hiding napalm inside of their lungs, that was entirely up to the inferi-raiser's discretion.
Needless to say, Harriet was very grateful that most of her students were at least sensible enough to use the most basic of the 'identify and stop'-type wards that she'd described for their experiments. It meant that when they inevitably failed to break through it with what should've been a simple spell to confuse it, and instead had it blow up in their faces? Well, even if Harriet didn't manage to catch and stop them in time, a quick visit to Madam Pomfrey was enough to grow their eyebrows back.
That however, didn't stop Pomfrey from glaring at Harriet every time a new student showed up at her doorstep with ward-related injuries.
So the day when Hermione Granger inevitably showed the undeniable signs of the contamination-charm that Harriet had set up around the book? Harriet did the sensible thing and literally gave her detention on the spot.
Hermione was exactly the kind of person who'd jump in the deep end of creating an extremely complex ward, because it'd be very interesting to see how she could alter it. And then, once she'd finally satisfied herself with setting up a near-impenetrable ward, she'd cheerfully decide that it was time to learn how to break through the ward, starting – of course – with the potentially-lethal thing that she'd just created.
And even if Miss Granger broke away from that habit of hers, by having a smidgen of self-preservation in the pursuit of knowledge, and actually set up a basic ward? She'd be going in and out of the Hospital Wing so many times that they might as well set up a revolving door with her name on it.
Miss Granger was nothing if not stubborn to a fault. One failure with a ward would leave her convinced that she'd only missed that one thing that made it blow up, and then she'd convince herself that maybe it'd been another thing this time.
Harriet didn't doubt that the girl would absolutely learn how to do Curse Breaking with that kind of stubborn approach to things. But she'd also quite possibly end up looking like the second coming of Mad-Eye Moody, and that was an explanation that Harriet really didn't want to have with the girl's parents.
Miss Granger was – perhaps understandably – appalled at being given a detention for no reason at all. To the point where she very nearly spontaneously combusted on the spot out of sheer indignation.
Thankfully for Harriet's plans, rather than have the girl start screeching at the top of her lungs that she was innocent of any wrong-doings and that Harriet was deliberately harassing her, Mr Weasley smacked his hand over her mouth, said that she understood, and then dragged her off around a corner.
Left behind in Mr Weasley's sudden retreat, Mr Potter spent a few long moments glaring suspiciously at Harriet, before nodding with stiff politeness and disappearing off after his friends.
She was really going to have to clear that mess up before those three lit her on fire during a quidditch-game.
Harriet was far too fond of quidditch to have it be interrupted like that. Even if it was a pretty neat spell.
XXX
Miss Granger's detention went about as well as Harriet had expected it to.
The girl sat very rigidly in her seat and pretended to be above Harriet's extensive lecture about the safety-precautions of Curse Breaking.
Miss Granger was under the impression that she wasn't anywhere near reckless enough for there to be any reason for someone to lecture her about safety and common sense. She also considered herself amazingly clever, and a book had explained things very easily to her, so obviously it wasn't a complicated process.
This was the kind of shit that'd turned Harriet into a stressed-out wreck after a single year of teaching DADA.
The worst part was that she couldn't even do the old-people-thing and complain about the youth of today, because she was literally complaining about her own generation. Time-travel was horrible.
Then Harriet very carefully walked Miss Granger through a few simpler wards, and a few simpler ways to bypass those wards. Before finally giving up on the idea that Miss Granger could be convinced to only do these kinds of thing under the supervision of someone who actually knew what they were doing.
Instead, Harriet made her follow her down to the lake. It wasn't the best of spots, but for all that the wards of Hogwarts covered both the castle and the grounds surrounding it, the lake was a bit of a dead zone.
It helped that – since water was constantly removed and replaced, due to evaporation and the like – magic became a lot less saturated in the presence of big reservoirs of water. This having been known even during the founding of Hogwarts, the Founders had done the sensible thing and made sure that the wards were comfortably distant from the lake.
Which made it the only spot within Hogwarts ground where the odds of a minor cascade-failure transforming into a cascade-failure big enough to vaporize all of Hogwarts in an instant was basically nonexistent.
After that, Harriet demonstrated a slightly different and more complex ward, and then had Miss Granger try to break through it with some of the methods she'd learnt from the book.
Needless to say, not having any real 'feel' of how the magic interacted or resonated, Miss Granger was woefully under-equipped for disassembling the ward in question, despite its seemingly simplistic nature.
And so, for the first time in what was likely well over a century, a cascade-failure was triggered on Hogwarts's grounds.
Which promptly woke up literally the entire castle, because it was about as subtle as a few stacks of dynamite.
So, obviously, lots of people showed up to complain about it.
Pomona yelled at Harriet for worrying everyone, and then hurried back inside to calm down the students who wouldn't know what had happened. Sirius carried a mostly shell-shocked Miss Granger back to her dorm – after first making sure that she was uninjured – an expression on his face that promised further discussion when he returned.
Sybill made a brief appearance to rant about how thunderous explosions were a sign that someone would end up dead before the end of the day, before disappearing back into the castle. Hagrid poked his head out of his cabin, and then disappeared into the Forest, likely to make sure that they hadn't spooked too many animals.
Andromeda and Filius seemed about equally unimpressed, which was vaguely terrifying, because Harriet hadn't actually seen Andromeda make that face since Teddy turned eight and the birthday-party got a bit out of hand.
Snape basically appeared in the doorway, sneered in a way that was actually visible even at that kind of distance, and then swooped away to stew in his continued outrage by his lonesome.
And from the way Minerva's hands were twitching, she was either trying to keep herself from strangling Harriet on the spot, or she was considering going for her wand.
Which... was fair enough, Harriet supposed.
It wasn't quite up against curfew yet, but it wasn't all that far away from it – trying to first educate Miss Granger into submission had taken its time – and she'd set off a cascade-failure within Hogwarts's wards.
Not actually in an area that even remotely brushed up against the wards, or that was surrounded by magic that led to those wards, but very much still within the wards of the land.
Yes, she'd made sure that it was as small-scale as it could possibly be, and she'd taken various precautions to 'dampen' the risk of it expanding further, and to keep any shock-wave from causing undue damage to anything inside of the lake.
But there was a reason that cascade-failures were the kind of things that Curse Breakers told horror-stories to each other about.
Harriet could still very distinctly remember going down into the valley in order to fetch some supplies, and nearly being knocked off her feet when the mountain-top she'd just been on vanished without a trace. She could vaguely recall the aftermath of trying to explain what little she'd seen about what had happened to the magical government, and she was aware that they'd ended up explaining it away as a volcano-eruption, but the memory was hazy from the stunned horror of it all.
That image of a mountain without a mountain-top would likely haunt her for the rest of her life.
So yes, she wholeheartedly understood why Minerva and the rest might have some serious issues with Harriet playing around with cascade-failures in a place filled with people. On the other hand, Miss Granger was exactly the kind of person who'd be trying to do everything by herself, until she couldn't.
And if Harriet had to traumatize that girl a little bit, in order to convince her to not experiment with wards without supervision, in a place where she could kill off hundreds of innocents in the blink of an eye?
She didn't like it, but she'd made harsher sacrifices for the greater good than that.
XXX
In the aftermath of what became known as the 'Granger incident' – though the main instigator had been Harriet herself, technically – Harriet came to an unfortunate realization. Or rather, she came to a realization that had some unfortunate implications.
Harriet had originally decided to set up the warning-system on the dorms as a way to hopefully catch Harry Potter after dark, where nobody would be the wiser if she exorcised his scar and pretended as if she hadn't done anything at all.
Unfortunately, for that idea to work, she would need to actually knock out and temporarily kidnap one of her students.
Harriet had done a lot of things she weren't proud of over the years. But ambushing and magically attacking one of her own students, even if it was done with their best interest at heart? No, that was definitely crossing a line that Harriet didn't even want to come close to touching.
So she needed to actually tell Mr Potter what she was doing and why. Which meant that she'd need him to agree with her. Which meant that she needed to come off as wholeheartedly trustworthy in regards to the safety of her students. Which meant that she probably needed to give him time to think about it, and probably contact his parents for advice.
In other words, if she went after the horcrux in Harry's scar, she'd very much run the risk of becoming 'the one who vanquished Voldemort' in the eyes of the public. Even if Mr Potter didn't blab, his parents might, and even if they only told someone trustworthy – like Dumbledore and his Order – Harriet had about as much faith in the Order's ability to keep secrets as she had that a sieve suspended over the Daily Prophet printing-press would be enough to keep the manure they called reporting off its pages.
As in, if Harriet wanted to help Mr Potter with his scar, then any attempt she made to remain out of the public eye in regards to Dark Lords was doomed to failure. And even if it wasn't, she'd definitely be put under the wary gaze of Dumbledore's constantly twinkling eyes.
Admittedly, the man had lost a lot of clout when he'd been fired from his position as Headmaster, but Harriet sincerely doubted that that had in any way stopped his tendency to scheme.
Harriet had had an... awkward and very complicated relationship with the Albus Dumbledore of her own time-line. He'd been a grandfather-figure she'd desperately needed, and he'd given a lot of good advice that she still kept close to her heart. He'd also been a manipulative bastard, raising her for the sake of a suicide-attack on Voldemort, with so many goddamn layers mixed into it all that Harriet really couldn't tell how deeply his plans ran and how much had been pure luck and coincidence that the man had played off as being perfectly within his calculations.
He'd been a complicated man, Dumbledore. And though Harriet had mourned his passing bitterly, she'd also at times been very tempted to dig up his grave just so she could punch him in his rotting face.
Considering all of that, she really didn't want to end up under the man's scrutiny. Perhaps he would manage to figure out where she came from and how she was related to the prophecy with the Boy-Who-Lived, perhaps he wouldn't. Either way, it sounded like it would definitely be a bad time to be Harriet Azalea.
Still, she couldn't in good conscience leave Mr Potter's scar alone.
She needed to exorcise the scar, but in order to do that, she needed to have a heart-to-heart with Mr Potter somewhere where nobody would risk interrupting them. Hopefully, also somewhere where nobody would wonder exactly what she'd been talking to him about, if Mr Potter came back to his friends looking like he had a noose tied around his neck.
In other words, the plan to ambush him after dark was still her best chance. She just needed to ambush him with a conversation, rather than stunning-spells.
After that, she needed to impress on his overly dramatic head that she could very much fix the scar, and that he was free to take the details of the ritual to his mother. She was even willing to accept that the boy's parents were informed of who'd told him about it, but that if they reached out to professionals of either Curse Breaking or exorcism or soul-magic in general, that they keep her name out of it, and play it off as something that Mr and Mrs Potter had discovered on their own.
In other words, she needed to tell young Mr Potter about his scar being a horcrux, reassure him that it was entirely possible to get it out of his head without killing him, slip him a piece of paper with the full extent of the ritual, and then tell him to go talk to his parents about it with the caveat that they not spread her name around.
She was really grateful that she'd actually planned that out beforehand, because it meant that she could mostly ignore the way the boy's face drained of color when she pointed out that the Dark magic surrounding his scar was something a little bit more than curse-residue.
Ignore it and focus on what mattered. Reassurance and an appeal to go talk it over with his parents so that they could decide whether she was full of crap or not. Then she patted him on the shoulder and aimed him back towards the Gryffindor dorms.
Why, it barely took her five minutes to completely shift the boy's world-view and send him spiraling off into making exactly the kind of expression a kid who'd just lost a lot of House-points might wear upon their return to their classmates.
Boom, perfect cover.
Maybe there really was something to this 'planning ahead' crap?
XXX
Honestly, she'd actually ended up missing Snape's final inevitable breakdown entirely.
She'd been in the middle of reading through Mr Malfoy's newest essay on why Harriet didn't understand anything at all about history. This time, rather than tell her that pureblood society was something that someone not of the Ancient and Noble families could ever understand, he'd gone the route of instead proclaiming that women couldn't comprehend the importance of what the men of history had achieved.
Harriet was sincerely tempted to mail a copy of the essay straight to Mrs Malfoy and let the woman sort out her son's apparent burgeoning misogyny. Harriet was very curious whether or not it would result in the woman actually lowering herself to using a howler.
Then again, she wasn't sure whether or not it would be against the rules to share a student's essays like that, whether those rules be legal or cultural. She'd probably have to talk with Filius about it before deciding on anything, but it was definitely an entertaining image.
By the time she'd made it out of her classroom and down to the Great Hall to catch the tail-end of dinner, the whole thing had already finished.
The basics of it was that the twins had pulled another prank, this time with Snape as the target. Harriet had wondered what they'd been up to yesterday when she'd given them detention for wandering around after dark, after the usual half-hour chase through tunnels that was them trying to use the Marauder's Map to dodge her. As a result of the prank, Snape had been colored bright pink for a few moments until he'd figured out how to reverse it, having gone through a veritable rainbow before succeeding at it.
He'd been able to guess that it was the Weasley-twins that'd been responsible, and had perfectly sensibly giving them detention for a week. It wasn't like Snape wasn't allowed to give students detentions, he just needed to have a good reason, and this was definitely that.
Unfortunately for Snape, things didn't stop there.
With his temper already up in flames, he'd started taking points from everyone who'd laughed and jeered at him whilst he'd been trying to reverse the spell-work. Which escalated into him giving detentions and yelling out point-losses to completely uninvolved individuals who'd stumbled onto the scene after he'd already turned back to normal.
Snape might've been able to save himself if he'd settled for giving detentions to the students who laughed, since they were technically mocking a Professor. But going after even complete innocents, just because his temper was already running high?
No, Minerva had gotten called to the scene and had more-or-less thrown the man bodily out of the school, with his belongings packed up in a trunk and dumped by the house-elves next to him mere moments later.
It'd been quite the impressive spectacle, and Harriet was a bit upset that she'd missed it.
The Weasley-twins got another week's worth of detentions in the aftermath, mainly because Minerva caught them celebrating Snape being thrown out. They might've had good reason to celebrate, but Minerva clearly hadn't been very successful in trying to find a new Potions Professor, and didn't appreciate that her attempts to stall for time had been foiled by their newest prank.
It was... maybe a bit hypocritical? To demand that Snape have a good and sensible reason for giving out punishments, and then giving two students a full extra week of detentions because their prank had inadvertently given her a headache.
The twins didn't seem to mind, and nobody else were really going to bother bringing it up. Minerva had been running herself ragged trying to keep up with all of her duties, even if she seemed to be doing well with the general paperwork. It all came down to the bunch of extra-duties of things like keeping an eye on Snape, keeping an eye on Filch – after a few disturbingly honest-sounding comments from the man about how they should bring back flogging as a disciplinary measure – keeping an eye on Sirius to make sure that he didn't somehow run Gryffindor into the ground as the new Head of House, dealing with the remaining political fallout of Dumbledore being fired, and various complaints from 'traditionalist' purebloods who very much didn't approve of Harriet changing the History-curriculum.
Harriet had offered to deal with the complaints about her teaching-methods on her own, but Minerva had nixed it after Harriet reluctantly admitted that she'd probably resort to breaking-and-entering and some really obscure ancient curses.
Apparently, undoing people's ability to speak in any recognizable language – until St Mungos managed to actually hire someone capable of breaking the curse – for their own inability to proclaim that their accomplishments were without parallel, was frowned upon.
Which was kind of unfair, because Harriet had made sure to tone down Babel's curse enough that it only limited itself to the idiots actually spewing the garbage, instead of targeting literally everyone in the country at once. It was a massive improvement, but Minerva wouldn't hear it, and had sent Harriet to talk 'ethics' with Filius in the aftermath.
It wasn't that Harriet didn't understand that she couldn't curse everyone who disagreed with her, but rather that the idea of allowing another Binns to take up the position of History Professor was very much the kind of thing that could motivate Harriet into setting up a few 'accidents' for the instigators to stumble across. Permanent accidents.
Filius listened to that for barely five minutes, before telling her to go talk to Pomona instead, because she was giving him ideas and he didn't appreciate the temptation.
By the time Harriet ended up drinking tea with Andromeda and explaining about why several of their colleagues had made her wander around the castle talking about ethics, her own initial feelings of horrible vengeance against anyone attempting to reinvent Binns had mostly faded. Which was probably a good thing, because Andromeda just raised an eyebrow at her, and then told her that ethics only mattered if you got caught.
Which... definitely sounded like the kind of thing she'd expect from the woman who in one time-line had taught Harriet how to change diapers by blackmailing her into it.
Regardless, by the time the winter-exams rolled around, Snape was gone, and Poppy Pomfrey was briefly shanghaied into grading the Potions exam. She was very vocal about refusing to actually become the Potions Professor however, and so Minerva's frantic search continued.
XXX
"Whilst her son still studies here?" Andromeda raised an eyebrow at Minerva, sounding highly skeptical.
"To hell with tradition, it's an emergency, and she could do it!" Minerva argued.
Andromeda didn't lower her eyebrow. "Despite being 'Mrs Potter' she's still a muggleborn, Minerva."
Pomona bristled in the background. "What has that got to do with anything?"
Andromeda let her face slip back into a more neutral expression. "The Board of Governors might be willing to let it slide, considering that it's an emergency. But for a muggleborn? They'd make our dear Headmistress pay through the nose for it."
"But the Headmistress is the one responsible for hiring new teachers!" Pomona frowned at her.
Harriet very deliberately didn't make a noise, having long since learned to stay the hell out of anything with even the vaguest inkling of being a political discussion. The last time Hermione had managed to catch her in one of those, Harriet had ended up punching a Wizengamot-member in the face.
She'd had to go through all of the wards on their summer manor in order to do so too, and had only really gotten off from legal measures on the technicality of nobody being entirely sure if there was anyone around who actually could arrest her.
Ron had spent the next three months cracking up whenever he saw her, and Hermione had hesitantly admitted that in hindsight perhaps she shouldn't be trying to get Harriet to actively participate in the political process. Didn't stop her from complaining endlessly, but at least she didn't expect Harriet to do anything about it, so that was something of a 'win' at least.
"Politics." Sirius agreed from his own chair, sounding very much like it was the swear-word that it ought to be classified as.
The Board might not be able to stop Minerva from hiring whoever she pleased, but they could definitely express their displeasure by making her work a lot harder in a lot of other ways.
"Maybe talk to the schools on the continent? See if they know anyone who might classify?" Harriet suggested, hoping to steer the conversation away from the unpleasant game of political compromises.
Much like Binns had scared off students from History, Snape had done his very best to scare students away from Potions. Or perhaps he'd done it accidentally, Harriet couldn't actually tell if the man just simply enjoyed being a sack of hateful pus, or if he was trying to accomplish anything with it as well.
Either way, finding a Potions Master capable of becoming a teacher from after Snape had taken over teaching Potions at Hogwarts? There weren't any. And of the ones who'd been around before Snape had appeared? Either they were retirement-age, or happily employed with very good job-security, or were about as bad as Snape had been with children, or they'd been killed during the war, or they'd left for the continent.
Trying to recruit a foreigner as their new Potions Professor was probably going to go over about as well as recruiting Lily Potter, as far as the Board was concerned. And there was definitely a language-barrier, not to mention whatever cultural practices might end up being included in the mess of it all.
But, considering how many people had simply run away from the British Isles during Voldemort's rise to power, there was a good chance that a few of the magical schools might know of a British Potions Master who'd be capable of working as a teacher.
"Already tried." Minerva slumped back in her chair. "The few who might be suitable would demand a hell of a lot more than we'd be capable of offering. And even the ones we don't want would've demanded a longer time to prepare for the position than what we have available."
"Grab Lily anyway and take the hit from the Board?" Sirius suggested, looking vaguely dubious.
Everyone knew how hard Minerva was already working. Trying to imagine what the Board might try to pour onto her plate in petty retaliation for an old tradition being discarded? It didn't sound like it would end well.
But what other options did they have?
XXX
Miss Granger's essay-writing had improved substantially.
Her essays had always been highly informative in their own ways, but they'd finally reached the point where they could be considered as a to-the-point analysis of historical events. Which was a massive step in the right direction, considering how disjointedly rambling and shock-full of trivia that they'd used to be.
Before, Harriet could've honestly said that Miss Granger had read the course-material to the fullest. Now, Harriet could say that she'd actually absorbed and sifted through the course-material for the arguments that would allow her to make her point in the best manner possible.
Another few years more of practice, and Miss Granger would easily be the best essay-writer in school, unless something unexpected happen.
Miss Lovegood had made a very compelling argument about the Rotfang Conspiracy having existed since the early seventeen-hundreds, and Harriet had made a copy of it as a keepsake. Though she wasn't a believer of it – and she wasn't entirely sure if Miss Lovegood was either, or if she just enjoyed messing with people – Harriet couldn't deny that some of the girl's logic and chosen events were lining up rather well with both reality and the ideas behind the conspiracy.
It was utterly delightful, and Harriet told the girl as much, though she was unfortunately forced to mark it down slightly on behalf of a few rather insubstantial pieces of evidence, as well as some of the circular logic in her assuming that the Ministry couldn't actually be corrupt and incompetent enough to have been doing some of the 'signs' of the conspiracy for centuries.
Harriet had met several politicians in her lifetime, and they absolutely could be incompetent and corrupt enough to keep doing the same stupid things for centuries, no extra conspiracy-theory required.
The youngest Mr Weasley scraped by, as was his usual habit, though there were some clear hints that – even if he'd been thinking on his feet and likely flying by the seat of his pants – he definitely understood how events could've spiraled in certain directions. A very good grasp of analysis and empathetic thought, but clearly lacking in the coherent factual information he would've had if he'd actually read what he ought to.
The twin Messrs Weasleys both had a rather disappointingly one-track mind, in that they tended to focus on interesting inventions through the ages. It wasn't too bad, and they could usually bend it either towards what had caused those inventions to develop, or what those developing technologies had done to change society in their wake. Good things to be aware of for two burgeoning inventors, but perhaps not the supposed full extent of the actual curriculum.
Miss Weasley had done some good work with quidditch being the main focus, which Harriet was willing to let slide considering that she was only in her second year. She did make a note that perhaps Miss Weasley ought to avoid focusing so heavily on sports in historical context for future essays, at least until she graduated and could write her own book on it, since the curriculum of the class was supposed to be rather a lot wider in scope than that.
Mr Malfoy had finally grasped onto some of the bare-bones of lying through statistics, and Harriet wasn't sure if she was proud or disgusted by it. She did however leave a note praising him for making use of muggle-technology in order to prove a point about how muggles were useless. Beyond that, she marked him down for the usage of 'mudblood' in his text, and went off to complain to Andromeda about the horrendous state of Slytherin of today.
Mr Crabbe and Mr Goyle had literally copied each other's texts, and it was-... She didn't know which one had actually written the 'original', but either way it was about as godawful as she could imagine any text to be. Had it been spelling-errors she might've traced it down to dyslexia, but it was just-... really badly written. It might still be dyslexia, just displaying itself in how they were so focused on trying to write that they couldn't concentrate on thinking about what they were writing, but Merlin's soggy underpants.
She gave them both extra homework, and told them to talk to her before leaving for Christmas. Silently resigning herself to dig up a brief lecture on dyslexia, and then grill the both of them into figuring out if they actually had a learning-disorder, or if they were simply inbred idiots who considered racism to be a charming character-trait.
It could really go either way.
And those were basically the highlights of her History-exam, which had mostly consisted of asking them to write an essay about certain moments in history. And Harriet was still amazed that Mr Malfoy had managed to spin that into racism, but there had been a few laws pushed through the Wizengamot about muggle-hunting during the set time-frame, so he wasn't violating that at least.
It was definitely a bit creepy to think about why a thirteen-year-old might have reason to know about a law against muggle-hunting back in the sixteen-hundreds – let alone be able to accurately date it – but at least it didn't contradict the assignment outright.
Thankfully, Andromeda was going to be taking over as the new Head of House for Slytherin, so if anyone needed to contact Mr Malfoy's parents over his conduct and classwork, it wouldn't have to be Harriet. Which she was grateful for, because Harriet had never been all that good with polite correspondence, and sending Mrs Malfoy a howler about at least keeping their appallingly rampant racism behind closed door – so that they could at least pretend to be 'civilized folk' – was probably not socially acceptable.
Funny? Absolutely. But probably the kind of thing that convinced Minerva to take shots of whiskey whilst glaring at her from behind a mountain of paperwork again.
That'd been a really awkward three hours.
XXX
Harriet had been keeping herself busy.
First, there'd been Yharnam and writing out her books, then there'd been Binns, then she'd needed to work on a lesson-plan, then she'd needed to deal with her students, then she'd been thinking and worrying about the whole Voldemort-issue.
It'd been nearly a full year since she landed herself in this world.
It was Christmas Day. Most of the students had packed up and left for the winter holiday, and several teachers had followed them out.
It was perhaps quieter than what was normal for Hogwarts, but that wasn't necessarily saying much. In comparison to the amount of students, Hogwarts was at times hauntingly large, and for all that its thick stone walls didn't do much to keep out the cold, they did a much better job at muffling whatever was happening behind them.
But Christmas Day was one of the few times of the year where Harriet inevitably found herself in Britain for long enough to spend the day with her godson. And that was even before she'd switched careers into Curse Breaking, at which point-... Well, digs didn't exactly run away, so if you needed to take a few days off from work?
For all that her schedule had become even more prone to leaving for places unknown at the drop of a hat, she'd become near-impeccable about making time for Teddy around holidays and other big events.
So now she was sitting in Hogwarts, in her somewhat cozy bedroom, staring at the foot of her bed.
Usually, she started Christmas Day by having Teddy bother her into waking up. Though he'd somewhat thankfully grown too old to be gleefully jumping up and down in her bed, yelling about presents, before finally resorting to brute force to push Harriet out of bed when she loudly proclaimed that she was planning on sleeping until New Years.
She kind of missed those days of childishness, now that Teddy was old enough that he was sneaky enough to simply bring in a bucket of water with him. He hadn't managed to empty it over her yet, but then he hadn't really been trying. He was a sweet kid, even if he'd inherited some of his grandmother's sense of humor.
By now, Harriet's and Teddy's confrontation over Harriet waking up for Christmas Day was a time-honored tradition, and Harriet was endlessly fond of it.
The foot of her bed was empty.
Normally, there'd be half-a-dozen presents scattered all across it. Books from Hermione, interesting junk from Ron, a sweater from Molly, some kind of rock from Ginny – who petulantly refused to acknowledge that geology and archeology were different fields of research – something hastily-wrapped and probably-dangerous from Hagrid, a polite card from Percy, something obscure and also-possibly-dangerous from Bill and Fleur, supposed evidence of conspiracies from Luna, something thoughtfully useful from Andromeda, and whatever bizarre thing had caught Teddy's eye for that year.
It wasn't so bad, not receiving gifts. For all that she'd arrived in this world with not even the clothes on her back, she had enough money by now to buy herself most anything she needed, and for all that it wouldn't be surprising to do it herself, she wouldn't even have minded if the lot of them had sent her boxes upon boxes of socks.
No, the problem was that-...
It was easy to forget things in day-to-day life. She spent a lot of time away from her friends and family, and for all that some of her students shared the names of her friends, they were very different people. Certainly, they reminded her of them constantly, but she'd met plenty of people on her travels that reminded her of her friends. It was easy to ignore it, especially when she kept herself busy with work.
Logically, she'd even expected it. It wasn't like she'd gone out to buy presents for Teddy, after all. For all that they were separated, Teddy was still alive and so were all of her friends. The one who'd died was Harriet, though the technicalities of that might be up for debate.
Was it possible to mourn someone who wasn't even hurt? Because this feeling was very similar to those days she'd spent staring at the ceiling on Privet Drive, remembering Sirius's surprised face as he slipped and fell through the Veil.
It was so ridiculous to think that accidentally stranding herself in a different world and time-line should be as bad as mourning the death of a loved one.
But Christmas was when they all gathered back together.
And the emptiness of her bedroom was heartbreaking in a way that she couldn't describe.
XXX
A/n: A bunch of toxically entitled people responded to my last author note by trying to explain to me that criticism is the only way for authors to improve.
Which is bullshit, because nobody is going to become a better writer because someone gave them a bit of "helpful advice" in a review, they become better writers by continuing to write. And unsolicited criticism is a quick and easy way to convince an author that it's too much of a bother to continue writing, which means that it's absolutely useless for its intended purpose.
And besides that, fanfiction-authors aren't writing for the sake of "perfecting their art", they're writing for the sake of telling a story. If you don't like that story, or the way that it's being told, fine, close the tab and go about your business. But don't complain before leaving, because that kind of shit is how we lose authors.
(It should also be noted that reviews that are condensed into the phrase "update soon" should probably be rewritten as "great work", in order to actually encourage an author to continue working, instead of convincing them that you're treating them like a fic-dispenser that can never create enough for you.)
(I don't really care, since I only really publish complete fics or explicitly discontinued ones, and a lot of others can grit their teeth and bear it, but it's kind of a dick-move, nonetheless. And it's generally a big reason for why unfinished or clearly abandoned fics are oftentimes outright removed, or why some authors leave the site entirely.)
Basically, what I'm trying to say is "treat people with respect", because the alternative is a toxic cesspool of entitlement that no sane author would ever want to touch.