Check first chapter for summary, disclaimer, and other warnings.

Chapter 30 – Princes
posted June 18th, 2020

Wotcher, dear Diary,

I still wonder if I'll ever have a stable relationship with Charlie, as we both are stuck in jobs we like. He now manages a whole species of dragons, a job with responsibilities and people to manage.

And for myself, I'm climbing the Auror ranks quickly. Especially as my mentor, Madam Bones, has now an even higher post – after the problems with Fudge, the man was ousted at the following election, and when my boss saw that the runners-up were cut in the same cloth, she took upon herself to offer an alternative.

And she's now Minister for Magic.

Me? Despite being young, I have the position of Senior Auror. That allows me to participate in the Academy, on the teaching side. Some think that I'm a bit hard on the recruits, but I know I'm not.

Since we dumped the Potion requirement, more people flocked to us. Especially muggleborns. And I remembered why there were mainly purebloods before: because they needed the Potion NEWT, they depended on Snape. And Snape seldom accepted people other than Slytherin in his higher classes. And as Slytherin were mostly purebloods…

I made the error of discussing this with John, at Christmas break, and he returned to school quite angry. He told me afterwards that he confronted Dumbledore, only for the Headmaster to dismiss his sayings as a teenager's temper tantrum.

He then went for Snape, who was teaching Defense at that moment, and the man offered him a duel… which my brother lost.

Let it be said that Snape isn't teaching the Dark Arts for the fun only: he had a mastery in them after all. And he interrupted each and every spell of John's before they even left his wand. Even those he found in an abandoned potion book.

Snape became enraged when John started to use these spells, and yelled that he stole them, and he forbade him to use "his" spells again. And ended the duel with two dark spells: one to blind his opponent, and the other to break his bones.

Even if John could still see with his old magic-vision, and even if he could still walk because the bone-breaker had targeted his prosthetic legs, he was enraged as well: these two spells came at him after he lost his wand.

Thus, thinking that the fight wasn't over, he jumped at his opponent, and punched him hard. He forgot that he had others cards up his sleeves, and reacted like a muggle – and he told me afterwards that it felt good to feel the man's nose break under his assault.

Predictably, Snape reacted badly, and John was levitated and magically dragged by the ear up to the Headmaster's office to be expelled.

But not quite. Because, in the same way Dumbledore wouldn't expel Snape, he wouldn't expel Harry Potter either.

But the foul teacher gave him an ultimatum: Harry would leave, or he would. Dumbledore hummed and hawed, and Snape went to cast a vow on it.

But he wasn't the irreplaceable Potion Master, now. Slughorn had taken over his old class (and tried several times to recruit John in his circle of "friends").

And Dumbledore still thought that Voldemort was up and about. But as the dark lord he thought alive hadn't summoned Snape at all, he could only reach the conclusion that he didn't have any more use of the man.

Bye-bye Snivellus.

That's what Sirius said when he crossed the man at the school's entrance. Since Snape had made a magical vow, he couldn't renege, and Dumbledore pushed his shame even further, involuntarily (or not, you never know, with him), by recruiting his old school nemesis to take his spot.

John was ecstatic, of course.

McGonagall less so. Because Padfoot made his entrance memorable, with fireworks and a loud vocal message saying that, after getting rid of the half-blood Prince (whose identity had been disclosed by Snape during his duel), they recovered the Prince of Pranks.

It was too bad that she surrounded herself with a privacy ward before yelling at Dumbledore for hours: with how Dumbledore seemed properly chastised, I'm sure John and the other students (and professors, too) could have learned a bad word or ten.

For the remainder of the year, the Prince of Pranks alternated between said pranks and a very serious course load. John, being in his penultimate year (listen to me big mouth and those big words), got to read Sun Tsu's and Machiavelli's books.

The Art of War, for the first.

And, for the second, guess what? It's the Prince.

To be continued in next chapter: Queens…