To Delaney: Thank you so much! I do feel a bit pressured by all the criticism sometimes.

To Catcat: As you will see in this chapter, Remus Lupin is going to be the DADA professor.

To JarvisAI: Thank you.

To blackclaw: Okay.

To Aphrodite child: Good. Though you might have to wait a little longer.

To Terriermon3908: ...

To Anomaly: Thank you. They probably will have another meeting, since problems will very soon be arising...

To HowlingRain: The idea of Draco being a son of Athena isn't really an original story, actually, but I don't think anyone else has done it like this. Anyway, you're right, grey eyes and blonde hair and all.


Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter nor Percy Jackson & the Olympians


—Nyroc Lasky—

I checked my coin. 'Be careful at DADA' it said. Luna had sent us that message, then Draco had come over to the Gryffindor table to make sure we got it. I wondered what was going to happen that he was willing to risk breaking slightly out of character for?

I got my answer later, at the dreaded class itself. Personally, no one had much expectations for this class. Our past two teachers had been generally boring.

Our teacher was supposed to be Remus Lupin… James Potter's second best friend.

I took a seat near the front, as usual. Almost everyone else liked sitting at the back.

Lupin came in wearing an extremely shabby set of wizard's robes that had been darned in several places. He looked ill and exhausted. Though quite young, his light brown hair was flecked with gray. Obviously, he had enough stress without having to deal with the lot of us as well.

"You can put away those books, class. You'll only be needing your wands today." he told us, setting the stack of books in his arms on the desk.

We were all surprised and excited. This would have to be the first practical DADA lesson we'd ever had! (unless you count that time back in second year when Lockhart abandoned us with a cageful of blue pixies)

I was trying to remember what James had said about Remus Lupin when Nico suddenly tapped me on the shoulder and I realized that the whole class was following Lupin out the classroom.

Lupin led us into the staff room. There wasn't anyone else inside, but the storage cupboard gave a sudden wobble, banging off the wall. I jumped backward in alarm because that's just what Neville does.

"Nothing to worry about," said Lupin calmly. "There's a boggart in there."

Really? A boggart? Cool! What's a boggart?

Most people seemed to feel that this was something to worry about. A lot of us began backing away. So much for Gryffindor courage.

"Boggarts like dark, enclosed spaces," said Lupin. "Cupboards, drawers, the gap beneath beds — I've even met one that had lodged itself in a grandfather clock. This one moved in yesterday afternoon, and I asked the headmaster if the staff would leave it to give my third years some practice."

In my mind, I was beginning to imagine a dark fluffy ball-ish hamster thing.

"So, the first question we must ask ourselves is, what is a boggart?"

Hermione put up her hand.

"It's a shape-shifter," she said. "It can take the shape of whatever it thinks will frighten us most."

"Couldn't have put it better myself," said Professor Lupin, and Hermione glowed.

Oh, okay, yeah. So how is it going to know what we're most frightened of, anyway?

"So the boggart sitting in the darkness within has not yet assumed a form. He does not yet know what will frighten the person on the other side of the door. Nobody knows what a boggart looks like when he is alone, but when I let him out, he will immediately become whatever each of us most fears."

Wait, what?!

"This means," said Professor Lupin, choosing to ignore my/Neville's small splutter of terror, "that we have a huge advantage over the boggart before we begin. Have you spotted it, Harry?"

Next to Harry, Nico looked downright terrified. My expression mirrored his, and it wasn't just cos I was Neville at the time. I didn't even know what either of our biggest fears were, but it probably wouldn't be a good thing for the wizards to find out.

"Er — because there are so many of us, it won't know what shape it should be?" Harry answered through my thoughts.

"Precisely," said Professor Lupin, and Hermione (who had practically been jumping up and down) put her hand down, looking a little disappointed. "It's always best to have company when you're dealing with a boggart. He becomes confused. Which should he become, a headless corpse or a flesh-eating slug? I once saw a boggart make that very mistake — tried to frighten two people at once and turned himself into half a slug. Not remotely frightening."

"The charm that repels a boggart is simple, yet it requires force of mind. You see, the thing that really finishes a boggart is laughter. What you need to do is force it to assume a shape that you find amusing."

"We will practice the charm without wands first. After me, please... Riddikulus!"

"Ridiculous!" was what we all vaguely said together. Well, we were trying to imitate the spell, but that's what it sounded like to me.

"Good, now, take a moment to think about what your greatest fear is and how to make it funny."

Here was the hard part. What the heck was my greatest fear? Being a son of Thanatos, not much scares me.

My mind began to wander. No wonder Luna and Draco had found this so troubling. They probably had way worse fears than me, actually getting to see the rest of the world and all.

I glanced around me. Most people were whispering and nodding to themselves. A little away from me, Harry looked a bit at loss. I caught eye contact with Nico and shrugged. His body language plainly answered with 'Help me!'

"Ready, everybody?" Lupin asked.

I was far from ready, but people around me were already nodding and rolling up their sleeves.

"Right then, when I call your name please step forward and be ready." said Lupin. "Parvati, you first."

Parvati took a deep breath and stepped dramatically in front of the cupboard.

"I'm ready." she announced, holding out her wand like a sword.

Lupin shot a burst of magic at the cupboard, and a thing burst out. Before I could register what it looked like, it had suddenly turned into a linen-wrapped mummy (ha ha ha ha ha, who looked at a linen-wrapped dead body and said, 'I'm going to name this thing after my mom'?)

Parvati took a few hesitant steps back before straightening again and yelling, "Riddikulus!"

Some linen from the mummy's feet suddenly became unraveled, and it tripped and fell.

"Good!" said Lupin. "Dean, forward!"

The boggart turned into a severed hand creeping along the floor, then it turned into a giant spider for Ron, then a banshee, then a floating bloody eyeball, then a McDonalds clown (yeah, I don't get that either). I kept dreading when Lupin would call me up, because I'll probably just stare in shock at whatever I saw before actually being able to do anything to it. And with my luck, it'll be something that makes me instinctively whip out my swords in front of the whole class.

"Alright, Nico!" Lupin called after Lavender.

Nico hesitated for a second before running up. I watched carefully, wanting to see what his biggest fear was.

The boggart jerked again and turned into… me.

Heads whipped round to stare at me, then quickly turned back when the boggart-me began talking.

"You're useless." it said flippantly. "Paranoid, clueless, pathetic, why would we ever be friends with you? We don't even really need you."

Nico stared, unmoving at it. None of us could see his expression, but I was horrified. Partly because that tone of voice was not new to me, I did actually say things like that sometimes. Maybe not to him, but it wasn't anything impossible.

Nico managed to say a shaky 'Riddikulus!" but all that happened was that the boggart changed again, and this time it was… Draco.

"You're always messing things up!" it yelled. "We were fine until you came along! You do nothing but create problems! You're not even very good at using your powers!"

I winced. Draco had said things like that too, once to me back in first year and then again yesterday when Nico overheard us.

Nico tried to point his wand at it. The boggart shifted into the form of… Ron.

I swiveled my head round to look at him for a second before boggart-Ron began speaking as well.

"I knew we could never be friends from the beginning." it taunted. "I knew there was something odd about you. I knew you were hiding something, and I was right."

It twitched and became Hermione, then commenced in saying, "You lied to me! You lied to all of us! I can't believe I ever liked you! You're such a traitor!"

The boggart no longer waited for Nico to do something to change again, this time into Luna. And what she said, was probably the most painful.

"You can just leave Hogwarts right now. You're not doing any good here. You know you don't belong here, you don't belong anywhere except hell."

At this point, I figured, 'what the hell, my cover's pretty much blown anyway.'

Pushing forward, I ploughed into Nico so that I was blocking him from the boggart.

Of course, that meant that it changed into MY greatest fear. Something completely unexpected.

The boggart shifted into another person. Oh gods, I recognized her. From the one time I visited Camp Half-Blood. Rachel Elizabeth Dare.

Her flaming red hair seemed to be floating again, and her eyes glowed brighter than Harry's while tendrils of green smoke curled around her.

She started to speak, and it was just as I remembered it. Her voice echoed, as though three people were speaking at once.

"Children of magic and children of quest,
United they fight, abroad they will clash,
The band of five the truth will unveil,
The five broken souls trust will thus heal,
The ages-old rift a battle shall mend,
And those out victorious succeed till the end."

"Riddikulus!" I cried, getting over my shock of that prophecy being my greatest fear. And I could understand Nico's boggart now— getting abandoned by all of us.

The boggart disintegrated, and I found myself sitting on the floor in the middle of a roomful of nosy thirteen-year-old Gryffindor wizards who had just witnessed our biggest screw-up in our two-and-a-bit years as undercovers.