AN: Merry Christmas, friends.
It took some arranging between Harry and the administration at Hogwarts to set him up as a member of staff. There wasn't just the terms of his employment to consider; he wasn't prepared to live in the school and both Apparition and Floo were still risky activities while he couldn't use his legs. A daily Portkey was arranged to take him straight into the small antechamber off the Great Hall where Hagrid would meet him.
Then there was the issue that the Defence classroom was on the third floor. Trying to navigate the staircases with hundreds of children rushing to their classes would be an utter fucking nightmare, so he was going to use his Firebolt as his main method of transportation around the school, although he'd wear the splints too and keep his crutches in the classroom. Charlie bought another pair to keep at home.
Timetables were impossible to organise and he didn't want to have anything to do with homework at all if he could help it, which he couldn't, so he had to get his head around that concept rather quickly. Professor Grey had fairly strict guidelines on the grades she would accept for prospective NEWT students - Harry threw all of that out of the window and declared that anyone who wanted to learn was welcome in his class.
Because of the way he worked, most of the curriculum he changed was to make it more practical, less book based. As far as he was concerned, if kids wanted to learn the best way to do so was to actually get them doing the stuff. In other words, he was making his classes as obnoxiously opposite to the ideals of Delores Umbridge as he possibly could. Academic support was to be provided by a Miss Lowenstein, a young teacher who was still doing her training. She had been well briefed by both Professor Grey and Headmistress McGonagall that Harry would need guidance on the regulatory points that the Ministry tested on during OWL and NEWT examinations.
And then something strange happened.
Amongst all the planning and packing and swearing and searching for bits of information and arranging for robe fittings and good natured arguments with McGonagall and headache inducing forms, he started to look forward to it.
His first class was a group of Gryffindor and Slytherin third years.
Harry leaned back against his desk and contemplated the fact that he was the same age as these children when he first met Remus Lupin. Then he forced that thought from his mind.
"Good morning," he said with a bemused smile. A few students returned his greeting – the rest stared, open mouthed, as many had done since Headmistress McGonagall had introduced him to the assembled school at dinner the night before.
"My name is Harry Potter. I'm twenty eight years old, and since I left school I've worked as an Auror until I was involved an accident about a year ago which means I can't walk unaided."
They continued to stare.
One girl, a Slytherin, sat in the front row, raised her hand.
"Professor Potter?"
Harry winced. "Yes?"
"How long will you be teaching here?"
"I'm covering this class until Professor Grey has had her baby," he said. "And please don't call me 'professor'."
The same girl raised her hand again. "Then what should we call you, sir?"
He hadn't thought about this.
"I haven't earned the right to be a professor," he said, thinking aloud as this group of thirteen year olds regarded him with growing suspicion. "I'm not like some of your other teachers who have been doing this for longer than you've been alive. I earned the right to be 'Auror Potter' for a long time, but I'm not an Auror any more. And calling me 'Mr Potter' always makes me think I'm in trouble."
The Slytherin girl blinked wide brown eyes and broke into a smile.
"I think… I think you better call me Harry."
He did, of course, get in trouble for that. Got called to the headmistress's office, in fact, which caused him no end of amusement and got him in trouble with his husband at home. Which in turn caused even more amusement.
Harry was accused by other teachers, the ones who had previously taught him, of treating the DADA class as an unofficial extension of the DA. Which he was.
He was even using some of Hermione's old DA lesson plans that she'd dug out for him.
As the weeks wore on he got used to the questions, the ones about the war, and about Voldemort, and about evil in general. These were, after all, children who had been almost too young to really understand what had been going on in those dark few months before Voldemort's downfall. They were children who would never grow up with fear of a name. Not if Harry Potter had anything to say about it, anyway.
He took each question as a chance to teach something, be it Expelliarmus or the various uses of Dittany or how to identify a Dark object. Every genuine enquiry was met with a measured, knowledgeable response and Harry openly admitted he was merely desperate to live up to the standard that Remus had set.
The way his class schedule was set meant that he taught for three and a half days a week, spent free periods marking homework and was always home in time to sit down and eat dinner with his husband. On Friday afternoons he still went to the Ministry to bug his friends and they now had a fairly regular routine of going to the pub for a quiet one before Hermione had to go and collect Hugo. Her pregnancy was starting to show, now.
On Thursdays, after dinner, Harry helped a group of fourth and fifth years set up a Defence Homework group, then promptly abandoned them to run it themselves. The three in charge (and why was it always three in charge, he wondered?) – Heather, Bert and Clara were some of his best students. Friday mornings frequently meant the three of them trudging up to his office to give him a progress report on who had been on the receiving end of a hex the night before. He was insanely proud of them.
With an unsettling sense of something that might have been routine, the months clunked on.
