The aurors only called up a couple of Percy's classmates, the prefects, and a few random students who Harry assumed had been the ones to stumble upon the note first, and the rest of the Gryffindors were just told to sit around and wait. That said, they were rather proactive in dismissing the students, but they went by age group—first the seventh years, then the sixth… Ron stumbled in around twenty minutes after Professor McGonagall originally showed up, and while he had been tense in the beginning, the longer the boys talked about everything but why they were the only ones in the hall the more he calmed down.

"Oh—and Ron, we didn't know what classes we would have, or how long it'd take for us to get there, so we'll just share my Transfiguration textbook today, ok?" Harry said.

"Yeah. We all paired up. Me and Dean, Josh and Neville... that way we'd have all the textbooks without actually having to carry all the textbooks, you know?" Seamus added.

"Cool." Ron said. He grinned, and grabbed a couple of Harry's to carry when they did leave.

Eventually, though, it was time for class. At least there was no way to get lost—Professor McGonagall had simply ordered them to follow her.

Transfiguration passed about the same as Harry remembered. Admittedly, there was no surprise cat to human transformation to start things off, and the Gryffindors were far quieter than they had any right being, but in general it was exactly as he expected. It was the first day, so almost the entirety of class was a brief explanation of how grading and essays worked followed by mind-numbingly boring theory. Harry did make sure to answer more questions than he had last time, but he never raised his hand when Hermione's was the only one up. He was fairly sure that Prof. McGonagall caught on, but then he was far from the only one who knew answers and didn't raise their hands every time, so she didn't call him out.

After lunch, and a mad dash up to the dorms to dump most of their books and pick up their forgotten cauldrons and dump their unnecessary books, it was time for the class Harry was dreading the most.

Why couldn't potions have been placed later in the week?

The entire way down to the classroom was nerve racking, too. The paintings pointed them in the right direction, which was helpful, but the discussion the boys had was... less so.

"I heard they caught him actually cooking a student alive last year, but Dumbledore covered it up." Joshua said.

"Really?" Seamus gasped.

"My brothers said it was two years ago!" Ron griped. Because, of course, that was the most important part of the rumor.

"Maybe we shouldn't go in there... potions isn't that important, is it?" Neville asked. At some point he'd turned white, and it didn't look like he was going to change colors back any time soon.

"Almost every single job, ever, requires at least an OWL in potions." Ron said.

"A teacher can't be that bad, right?" Dean asked.

"I dunno, I haven't met a single person who's willing to say something nice about him." Harry said.

"He's a professor!" Hermione butted in. While the boys were walking all in one group, the girls were mostly traveling in pairs: Parvati and Lavender were giggling behind them, while Sophie and Fay had dashed ahead at some point. Hermione was the odd one out, and rather than trying to ingratiate herself with one of the girls' pairs, she'd decided to try to insinuate herself with them.

"So?" Harry said. "Teachers can be crap, too. And if every single student, ever, says that he's bigoted, and unfair, and grades to harshly, then maybe there's some truth to that."

"He's a professor!" Hermione repeated. "You should treat him with the authority that job entails."

"I'll treat him politely, of course, but I won't treat him like he's a god." Harry said. "You should have to earn respect; it shouldn't just be handed to you on a silver platter."

"He is the premier potioneer of this country!" Hermione snapped. The rest of the boys had fallen silent by this point, but they were still listening eagerly. Harry chose his words carefully.

"Yeah, and I respect him on that front, right? Like, if he told me that this or that potion should be brewed this or that way I'd defer to him as the authority on the matter. But that doesn't mean he's a great teacher. If you want a muggle world example, then I would rather be taught by someone who actually got a degree in education than someone who has a PhD in mathematics. I mean, of course they'd know a lot about math, but that doesn't mean they're good at conveying the information."

"But-but he's a professor!" Hermione said. The other boys groaned.

"God she's a teacher's pet!" Ron said. He'd apparently reached his snapping point much earlier than he had last time—while he'd generally taken the surprise 'well', it had left him both quieter and meaner, at least temporarily.

"Professors can make mistakes Hermione. Everyone can make mistakes." Harry said, and then they'd arrived at the classroom.

They filed in single file and by the time Snape was shouting out names, one by one, each and every Gryffindor was scribbling furiously into their notebooks (Harry had, at the last minute, warned them to write down everything Snape said "just in case.")

Then came the questions.

All three were in the first-year sections of their textbooks, though the first question he asked—about the draft of living death—was only mentioned briefly, in the forward of Magical Drafts and Potions when describing the potions that were thought to be the most useful to ever be created.

So it was a bit weird that the question that was technically the hardest was asked for, and then Snape eased up.

It was also odd that they were the same exact questions.

But there were odder things that he'd already let slide, so he focused on keeping his head down instead.

The class passed between shouts and orders, but by the end of it Harry's ingredient preparation had been marked excellent, neither Neville nor Seamus had managed to blow anyone up (the latter had, surprisingly, been able to make a small explosion last time, despite the complete lack of heat sources), and Harry's constant glancing at Hermione whenever Snape did something particularly unprofessional had left her face set in a befuddled frown.

All too soon, however, it was time for the class Harry was least looking forward to.

Professor Quirrell was just as he remembered him, just as smelly, just as stuttering, and just as possessed. And the second Harry stepped into the classroom his scar twinged.

Well, Harry wasn't going to let this slide as he had the first time. He raised his hand in the middle of Quirrell's welcome speech, and waved it furiously when the purple robed man tried to ignore the protruding appendage.

"Y-y-yes, M-mr. Potter?" Quirrell asked. Actually, now that Harry thought of it, his stuttering was probably wrong too—Harry had actually been in a class with a boy who had a stutter this time around (Grade 3, but his higher grades had put him in a different class since Year 2), and while Tyler's stuttering had certainly been bad, it had always been the same exact sounds (k, g, and t, as well as the first word of the sentence) that he had trouble with, while Quirrell's stuttering seemed to shift day to day, hour to hour, or even minute to minute. In fact, he distinctly remembered him managing to sound perfectly normal for a couple sentences last time, before abruptly beginning to flub every word.

"My head's really started to hurt. Can I go to the nurse?"

"H-h-how about y-y-you wait t-t-to s-see if it goes away f-first, Mr. Potter?" Professor Quirrell said.

There was no reason to say no, so he nodded reluctantly and let Quirrell finish his speech. The twinge in his scar disappeared—apparently his reaction had scared Riddle off.

This did, however, mean that it would be Harry's first time sitting in, fully aware, on one of Quirrell's lessons. He had (technically) attended basically every single one of them last time, but he'd... let's just say, he'd been a bit too distracted to actually take note of the class. That he'd actually noticed the stutter at all had been because of a poorly thought out idea that it had in fact been the teacher's words which were causing his head to hurt.

All of that meant that this was, really and truly, the first class of Quirrel's that Harry attended and paid attention to. It was... odd, actually. The information was good, if slightly tainted by a bias against non-mage dangers (Quirrel made it a point to say, over and over again, in increasingly roundabout ways, that while witches and wizards could be reasoned with, 'lesser life forms', like animals, were far more dangerous. He never once used the word human, but he did emphasize that the more magical something was, the more it could be reasoned with.)

Still, he made good points about how you should always use your environment, avoid dangerous situations when possible, and how important it was to be aware of day-to-day possible issues, like ghosts and snails (whose trails, surprisingly, could render some runes inert, destroying many enchanted objects and wards.)

Regardless, Harry was still not looking forward to two hours of the class every Monday and Thursday and an additional hour Tuesday until he figured out how to get rid of him.

He wondered who he'd be replaced with once that happened.

The Gryffindors stampeded up the stairs to the dorm the second DADA was over, shoving past each other in an impromptu race which somehow enveloped the first-year girls as well as the boys.

All to start homework.

Something that Harry had already figured out, sometime between Years 2 and 3 at St. Grogory's, was that despite his perfect memory, despite how he'd already built on his accumulated knowledge over years, despite having had to already take some version of every single homework assignment, test, and exam he'd come across this time already, he couldn't just breeze by them.

For one, he hadn't actually done that well the first time around; for another, it wasn't as if he'd wanted to have himself labelled as a child genius. And that didn't even cover how he'd... let's call it 'fudged' many of his answers, and never really gone back and learned it the right way after.

Most of the time, of course, he was able to push through all these problems with minimum difficulty—he may have remembered glancing up as inconspicuously as possible at the tense poster on his Spanish classroom's wall the first time around, but now he had that knowledge as well as a significantly improved work ethic, so he'd managed that just fine.

But now that he was in Hogwarts?

Schools, Harry figured, were mostly exactly the same no matter where you went. Yeah, the quality of teaching differed, and how long was spent actually in the building could vary quite a bit. But generally it was all the same idea—you go somewhere, listen to someone tell you what you should know, and prove that you picked up at least some of it at a later date.

Hogwarts mostly followed this model, except for one small difference.

They didn't only test you, quiz you, grade you on just what you learned in the classroom. They also tested you on what you learned on your own.

The first day's homework, for instance, consisted of three different, reasonably short, papers: a foot each on the first chapter of the Transfiguration book and the Defense book and a foot and a half describing everything you could possibly learn about the "aroma potion", which was well known two reasons: having a startlingly large number of techniques, and being amazingly difficult to accidently explode halfway through.

Given that, it had always been used as the first potion taught at Hogwarts. Which made sense and everything, except have you ever tried to write 18 inches on seven different techniques which were only ever loosely described in the physical textbook?

The first time around Harry had only used the textbook and one library book about techniques. He'd gotten a poor. It had taken him two months to realize that no teacher would grade above acceptable for any paper with less than three sources; Snape would only ever give an exceptional or above for something with at least five.

Harry decided to aim for six, this time around. Joshua had pulled out four library books and went to study with his brother, while Sean, Dean, and Neville were sharing four between them. Ron was only using his textbook, but a few furtive looks and passed notes ensured that all the boys knew to pass on a few simplified notes from their own books for Ron to stuff into his essay the following day—the next class wasn't until Thursday, so they could wait a bit.

The information, once he'd started to actually read it instead of just guess about the official definitions and descriptions from personal experience, wasn't actually all that bad. There were, as it turned out, reasons to julienne something instead of chiffonading it. Even mixing techniques could change the potion—stirring closer to the edge of the cauldron, as it turned out, was ideal when the majority of the cauldron should be made into a mixture. Stirring nearer to the middle was done when the ingredients were supposed to maintain some of their base integrity.

Whether or not something was stirred clockwise mattered too—the general idea was that because the earth spun counterclockwise, spinning opposite that direction had a slightly different effect on how the magic reacted to the speed than stirring widdershins. There wasn't much evidence to support this, but he supposed a possible reason was better than none at all.

But it was still so boring!

Harry had always liked danger, casting spells and thinking on the fly. Sitting in the library, reading paragraph after paragraph until they all blending together into hieroglyphics? Not his idea of a fun time.

Harry glanced up from his seat, looking two tables back and one table over. Each was built for about six people to sit comfortably at a time. That table only held one: Hermione. She'd used the extra space to her advantage, admittedly, with over a dozen books stacked and opened and propping up other books. From what he could tell from this distance most of them weren't even immediately related to any of their homework's topics either. Harry knew that she'd gotten an acceptable on her first potions, and an EE on the rest. She hadn't taken that well.

He shifted. He wanted so badly to call her over, ask if she wanted to join their review session, but he knew that'd be a bad idea. The other boys were nice, sure, but they hadn't really learned tact yet, and Hermione wasn't exactly any better at eleven.

Why couldn't he think of how to fix that? In a way which didn't involve a troll?

Dinner was a raucous affair. The whole story about Pettigrew—or at least what the students thought was the whole story—had come out. Well, except for his name, which was still an unknown, at least in Hogwarts.

But the students thought they knew enough. They knew the rat was a man, they knew that both Percy and Ron had slept with him in their bed, they knew that all of the Weasleys had brought the rat into their home, that all of Gryffindor had brought the rat into their life.

So... raucous. Which was the nice way of saying hell, right?

Fuck.

Maybe he should have spent longer planning out how to expose Pettigrew.

He probably should have done something to make sure no one would pay off someone to make sure the truth wouldn't see the light of day too.

Actually...

A half-formed plan, formed more from the noise in the Great Hall than any finite details, began to stir in his mind, and he climbed over the dining table's bench, slipping out of the Great Hall and up the first set of stairs he came across.

Five minutes later found him in the Owlery, sending off the most alert barn owl he could find. The easy, smart thing would be to send him off immediately to deal with the Pettigrew issue. But Harry, for all of his years, all of his advantages, would never be a genius. He was too sentimental for that.

And he refused to tackle Pettigrew, to tackle Quirrell, to tackle any other daunting issue without Hedwig by his side.