Leo X

A week after Umbridge's "I'm going to destroy the school, mwah ha ha ha!" announcement Leo was setting up for the fifth year Muggle Studies class when the pink toad herself walked in. She looked at Leo with the same face Aphrodite girls had worn whenever he came close to them when he was at camp before the quest to free Hera. It was the look that said "ew, who is this loser?"

"Where is Professor Burbage?"

"She's coming. Is there anything I can do for you, miss?" Umbridge sniffed and sat down in the chair that he had put by the door.

"I assume Professor Burbage received my message detailing the date and time of her inspection?"

"She did." Leo turned away from the pink menace and concentrated on transfiguring the blackboard into a white screen. He concentrated really hard, because he didn't want to set it on fire with the toad in the room.

"Heh hem," Umbridge coughed. Leo ignored her until he had finished transfiguring the board.

"You've had that cough for a long time, professor. Maybe you should have Madam Pomfrey check it out for you."

"I am quite alright, Mister Mason," Umbridge snapped. "Why is Professor Burbage not here now?"

"I'm teaching today, so I had to set up." Umbridge sniffed obviously. "I understand if you'd like to come back when she's teaching," Leo suggested sweetly.

"That will not be necessary, Mister Mason." Umbridge sat with her nose in the air until students began to arrive. They she pounced on them with all the gentleness of a hellhound asking things like, "Who forced you to take this class?" and "Do you believe that Muggle Studies is a waste of time?" Leo and Professor Burbage, who had arrived just before the first group of students, were glad to see that all of the class silently rebuffed Umbridge or gave her such twisty, confusing answers that she couldn't be sure what the answer actually was. That second option was mostly the Ravenclaws.

"All right, kids," Leo said with a grin once he'd taken attendance. "I promised you a fun class, and fun it shall be." He rubbed his hands together and then banished a stack of parchment so that each student had a worksheet in front of them. Ha! He was getting better at this magic stuff. "All you have to do is answer those questions. Completion marks, people!"

A Ravenclaw boy raised his hand. "Yes, Summers?"

"Sir, there's nothing about this in our textbooks." Leo grinned.

"That's because it's not in your textbooks." Deciding not to push his luck with his control of magic, he stuck out his hand and whipped the cloth off the projector with a flourish. "Today we are watching a movie!"

"A what?" were the words most heard after that announcement. There were also a few exclamations of "Brilliant!" and "A what?" Leo forced himself not to face palm.

"A movie. A form of entertainment created by Muggles that is like a play that is recorded and then played back." Several blank faces still looked up at him.

"That isn't in our textbooks, sir," Summers said hesitantly. This time Leo did face palm. For the love of all the gods, why were their textbooks decades out of date?

"Just watch." He ducked behind the desk, grumbling, and tapped at the computer sitting under it. There were a few gasps as the movie was projected on the screen and began playing. The entire setup was running without a hitch, which made Leo happy. It had taken him forever to rig the laptop and projector to work around magic.

Umbridge was wearing a glare that grew more and more frigid as the movie went on. It definitely wasn't anything like a child of the Underworld glare. Hey, she really hated him. That upped the probability of her being descended from Khione.

"I hope I'm not getting you in trouble," Leo whispered to Professor Burbage.

"It'll be fine, Leo," Burbage assured him, taking her eyes off the screen for the first time since the movie had started. "She hates this class anyway, so she can't do any worse than she would have."

Some of the students got so absorbed in the movie that they forgot to work on the questions until the end of the class. The scrawled answers on ink-splotched pages wrecked hell on Leo's dyslexia when he was trying to mark the worksheets later that night.

"Leo, you have the whole weekend to mark." Sapphire leaned over the back of his chair and put her chin on his shoulder. She looked down at the worksheet he was holding his pen over. "Oh, the other classes didn't watch the World War Two documentary?"

"Just the sixth and seventh years. Everyone else watched that old movie your sister likes."

"Cellular?"

"That one." Leo bit his lip and underlined what he was pretty sure was a misspelling of 'cellphone'.

"That's not that old." Even with the British accent Sapphire had nowadays, Leo heard her smiling as she spoke. She kissed him on the cheek and then said, "Come to bed, Fire Boy. It's late."

Leo blinked and rolled his shoulders as she moved away. "It is? I didn't notice." Sapphire laughed.

"That's because you don't have a clock in here." To be fair, the bedroom that Leo was in had come with a clock, but that clock was charmed to yell if the room's occupant was even a second late for anything. So he'd smashed it with a hammer. As you do with yelling clocks.

Without the clock, the walls of the bedroom were empty. No tapestries or portraits that could go tattling to the teachers so they could speak freely. Oh, and Sapphire and Jay could sleep there without anyone knowing.

Jay was already curled up in the middle of the bed. As Leo and Sapphire climbed in on either side of him, he opened one eye and meowed threateningly at Leo. "I'm not stupid, cat." Jay meowed again, less threateningly, and went back to sleep.

"Do you think we'll find that stupid diadem tomorrow?" Sapphire asked quietly. "We have to have covered almost the entire room already." The phrase "find that stupid diadem" was one Sapphire had been saying a lot lately, along with "kill that gods-damned snake". The repetition could bring Leo to only one conclusion: His girlfriend was homesick.

"I'm sure we'll find it," he yawned. "Then we can storm Moldy Face's hideout, kill the snake not scotch it, and be home for Christmas."

"I'm glad someone's optimistic." She yawned. "I'd say Easter if we're lucky, which we're not. And what about the locket?"

"If all else fails, kidnap a house elf?" Sapphire laughed.

"Go to sleep."

"Yes, ma'am."

They were silent for a few moments, then Sapphire asked, "What do you think this summer's going to be like?"

"Very annoying or a whole lot of fun."

"Chiron would never let us get conscripted into the wizards' war, right?"

Leo shook his head. "Never." Chiron valued their lives too much to make them get involved in what was technically a civil war that didn't involve them, though if some demigods left on their own to fight Voldemort he would support their choice. He was like a father that way, the best father in the world, with a horrible taste in music.

"Thank the gods."

"Definitely." Leo yawned again. "Go to sleep, Aimi. We have a lot of work to do tomorrow."