Chapter 15 – Some Semblance of Normality

Disclaimer – They don't belong to me.  I don't earn anything from this, etc etc etc.

A/N:- Ok.  Next chapter.  I'm a lot calmer now than I was at the end of the last one.  Let's put all that down to exam stress.  It is that time of year after all.  This is going somewhere.  I have the rest of the story outlined it's just a case of writing something to fit that out line.

Now I have an appeal.  I need a volunteer to be my guinea pig.  Little sis wont do it anymore and I want someone to bounce ideas off of whilst I write and to read chapters for me before I post them to check for silly mistakes and things I haven't spotted.  If you want to volunteer then send me an email at Cazza416@hotmail.com Thanx.

Reviewers:

Only one review this time, I'm hurt!!  Special thanks to Alison though for her review – don't worry. I have no intention of stopping!!

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            Lessons resumed first thing the following morning.  Breakfast was a non event, continuing as normal for most people as if the previous day had never happened. 

For the six students sat next to the head table breakfast was a rushed affair.  After the previous afternoons excitement the six students had sat down together and talked.  They'd been up well into the early hours of the morning and by the time they had gotten to bed Draco felt somewhat more accepted by the group of Gryffindor's and Caz felt more at ease amongst them.  All in all everyone had cheered up somewhat. 

This didn't come without a cost as they had all discovered.  Two hours sleep was definitely not good for you.  All of them were like walking zombies.

At the end of breakfast Dumbledore walked over to them.

"I'm glad to see you all made it to breakfast.  From what I've heard you didn't exactly sleep much last night."  He grinned at them all, remembering the story he had heard over breakfast from four rather groggy professors who obviously didn't remember quite how loud they themselves had been as fifteen year olds.  "I just thought I'd let you know that your first lesson is going to take place in your library.  I have a few things to attend to first so it'll start a little late; I think you've probably got about an hour."

He smiled at the four teens that looked glad at an extra hour they had to wake up before their first class.  Suddenly there was a yell from the far end of the Gryffindor table.

"FRED AND GEORGE WEASLEY!!!!!!!!!"  The whole of the great hall heard.  "CHANGE HER BACK THIS INSTANT"

Dumbledore cast one last glance at the six students before him before walking off towards the site of the disturbance.

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            45 minutes later Harry, Draco, Ron, Hermione, Ginny and Caz sat round a table in their small private library.  None of them knew what their first lesson was to be.  After the fiasco the previous morning they had not received their timetables.  That fact had completely escaped everyone's mind until breakfast that morning when Dumbledore had spoken to them.

            They were all rather nervous however Ginny had to beat the lot of them.  She was trembling like a leaf and looked pale as a sheet.  Ron wasn't quite sure whether this was due to the fact that she was surrounded by fifth years, because she had been promoted by a year and was worried about the classes or because she was sat in between Harry and Draco.  Both of whom he knew she had crushes on.

            He didn't have very long to contemplate that for though as just then the door flew open and a very bedraggled looking Lily and James ran in looking as if they had just run all the way from the other side of the school, which in fact they had.

            They took seats at the table with the six students and James and Lily grinned at them all.

            "Good morning students."  Lily started out with enthusiasm.  "My name is Professor Potter and this," She indicated James, "Is Professor Potter."  A grin spread across her face as she observed the reactions of those sat around the table. James wasn't quite so quiet.  He burst out laughing.

            "You lot should see your faces right about now!"  He exclaimed

            Indeed it was a funny sight.  All six of them looked torn between humour and shock with a little fear thrown in for good measure. 

            Draco recovered the power of speech first.  "You two?!" he asked incredulously.  "Why you?  How come?  I thought Dumbledore was going to be teaching us!"

            "What do you mean Why you?????"  James asked.  "We not good enough for the almighty House of the Phoenix?"

            Draco quickly attempted to rectify his error.  "No that's not what I meant.  We just……" he frowned, unsure of exactly how he was going to talk his way out of this one. 

Lily raised her eyebrows at him.  "Keep talking Draco, I'd like to hear this."  She grinned as she watched him squirm.

Finally after a couple of minutes of watching Draco's discomfort Caz decided to come to his rescue.  "He means that it's a nice surprise.  We weren't expecting it; we all thought professor Dumbledore was teaching us." 

Draco flashed Caz a grateful smile and she smirked at him.  Lily observed the exchange with interest, smiling inwardly that the two siblings had accepted each other so easily.  She had expected a lot more awkwardness between the two of them and had been very surprised the previous night when Jen had told her about Caz's concerns for Draco.

James looked around.  "Now we've got that sorted, timetables."  He handed each of them a small sheet of paper each, detailing their lessons for each day.  "All the lessons you have with us are here unless we tell you otherwise.  The lessons with Dumbledore you will need to meet here then he'll take you somewhere else.  Any lessons with anyone else will be in their classrooms except with Madame Pomfrey you will be in the hospital wing. Any questions?"

They all sat in silence for a few minutes looking over the questions before the questions started to flood out.  The first one came from Hermione.

"Why do we all have to do all the electives?  Isn't that going to be sort of confusing if we didn't do things last year?"

Lily answered that question.  "Quite simply, No.  That's why you have two of us teaching you most of them.  You've all done care of magical creatures so you can continue that normally.  The others at least one of you has done each but you haven't all done them.  We didn't want any of you to have to give up anything so we worked it this way.  Between James and me we did all of them whilst we were at school so the one of us who did that subject can work with anyone who already studies it and the one who didn't can pick it up whilst teaching the others who haven't been studying it." 

She paused to see if that satisfied Hermione's query.  While Hermione looked satisfied Caz looked less than happy.  "Caz, I know you haven't been covering Care of Magical Creatures so you can either go to those lessons anyway and try to pick it up, or you can just have that lesson off.  It's up to you; you've got until the first lesson to give it some thought."

Harry voiced the next few questions all in one sentence.  "What is Magical Medicine and Healing, why are we learning to apparate when we are underage and what exactly does it mean by survival skills?"  He asked.

James took up the answer.  "First Magical Medicine and Healing is just that.  It's a part of every aurors basic training and everyone is in agreement that, in light of your situations it is a good idea for you lot to learn it now as well."

He continued with the next question.  "Secondly, you are learning to apparate for your own safety.  If you find yourself in danger it will be a lot more pleasant for you if you can apparate out of there before there are any large problems." 

He carried on answering Harry's final question.  "Linked to that is survival skills.  If you find yourself in trouble and you cant escape from it you are going to need to know how to keep the situation in hand.  That is probably going to be the most difficult lesson as one of the things on the syllabus for the year is handling pain." 

Seeing the look of fear on everyone's face he decided to continue with an explanation.  "If you find yourself surrounded by death eaters at some point which you all know is wholly possible, it's inevitable that they will try to hurt you.  If you've been trained to ward off that pain then you are going to last out a whole lot longer and have a much better chance.  People get bored very quickly when they can't get a reaction out of you."

They all sat in silence for a few more moments taking in what they had just been told.  Eventually another question was sounded, this time from Ginny.

"What's advanced self defence?"

"Exactly that."  Answered Lily.  "It's self defence that's just a little more advanced than what you'll all be doing with Jen and Sirius."

Finally Draco asked the final question.  "We don't have to call you 'professor' do we?"  He asked with a grin on his face.

Everyone laughed at this comment and Lily answered with a smile on her face.  "No.  Not if you don't want to.  In front of the rest of the school you should call Jen, Remus, Sirius and Abbi professor but in private and with us two don't bother.  I think you might be pushing it though if you tried calling Snape or Dumbledore by their first names."

Everyone burst into fits of laughter at the thought of the look on Snape's face if they were to try and call him 'Severus' in class.  They sat there for a while longer, talking about nothing in particular before James looked at his watch.

"Blimey.  It's nearly 11 o'clock!  We've been talking for ages; it's probably about time we did some actual work, after all, it's only half an hour until break time and if you don't learn anything today the Dumbledore is likely to sack us!"

Lily just looked at her husband.  "James.  Two questions. Since when have you cared about learning things?  And, blimey?  Where the hell did you get that one from??"

James pointed at Draco.  "Blame him.  I have spent way to much time with him, I'm picking up his speech patterns for God's sakes.   And secondly, I don't care about learning things," he winked at the six kids sat around the table, "Just about keeping my job.  It's nice to be back at Hogwarts, I don't want to have to leave."

Everyone laughed again and Lily rolled her eyes at him.  "Ever the comedian aren't you."  She joked playfully.  "But I suppose you have a point, we should do something useful."

Everyone groaned collectively, all having hoped they could keep this conversation going until break time (excluding Hermione who was looking wistfully at the transfiguration section of the library as if she couldn't wait to get started.)

James decided at that point that he should follow his wife's lead.  "Alright then.  Go get your textbooks and then read the first page of chapter one.  Ginny, there's a pile of fifth year books on your bed for you."

As the six of them headed towards their dorm rooms to collect their books they were having a variety of different thoughts.  Harry, Ron and Draco were all wondering how long they could manage to take to collect one textbook.  Ginny was wondering where her new books had come from, Hermione was trying to work out when she could start exploring the new library and Caz was thinking that maybe being at Hogwarts wasn't going to be all that bad after all.

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            By the time that everyone had gotten back with their books it had been break time, much to Hermione's dismay.  James and Lily had dismissed them and they had gone into the common room to discover that one of the house elves had bought up a tray of cookies and milk for them to snack on.

            After break had come and gone it came time for their first divination.  Neither Draco, Ginny or Caz had done the subject before and Hermione had only taken it for those few months in third year so whilst Lily, who hadn't taken it in school either, worked with them from the textbook James worked with Harry and Ron. 

Really they weren't working at all but sharing divination horror stories.  Harry discovered that he wasn't the only one who seemed to die on a regular basis in divination but James and Sirius had also been known to and for the entire five years he had taken the subject Remus was told about the terrible secret which haunted him.  Apparently Trelawney's predecessor hadn't known about Remus' lycanthropy.

After divination came lunch time.  When they got down to the great hall they noticed that they were receiving looks from half the school, who all seemed to wonder what made the six of them so special compared to everyone else.  They'd gotten these looks ever time they'd been to the great hall since Dumbledore had made the announcement and were getting used to it but still it was weird.

Draco was getting it worst.  The Slytherin's seemed to have taken it as a personal insult that he had suddenly befriended a group of ex-Gryffindor's and were going out of their way whenever he was within hearing distance to make rather loud comments about it.  It seemed as well that Crabbe and Goyle had quickly spread the word about Draco's behaviour in the self defence auditorium that Monday.

However still lunch passed without any great hiccoughs and soon enough the six students found themselves in the defence against the dark arts classroom with Remus and Abbi.

 Jen, Lily, Sirius and James had started out sat in the back of the classroom but after five minutes of attempting to start the lesson, only to be thwarted by one of the four in the back who were insisting on sending comical curses at the two professors in front of the classroom every few seconds.

Eventually Remus and Abbi got fed up of being target practice and threw the other four out of the classroom, but not before they both ended up with bright pink and purple hair and neon yellow robes.

Once the four pranksters had been kicked out and order had once again been restored to the defence classroom the lesson began.

There was a rather full syllabus organised for them for the year with a lot of back up material on hand should they pick things up faster than anticipated.  One thing was for certain.  No one expected them to slack off this year. 

The first thing they were to start with that year was patroni*, this made Harry relax a little, it looked like he would get it easy for a few weeks at least.  Apparently that was just wishful thinking.  Remus allowed for the fact that he could already cast a patronus and decided that he could work on strengthening it and then put in some research into patronus charms.

After a brief introduction to the patronus charm Remus asked Harry to demonstrate for the others.  Ron and Hermione had of course already seen it but none the less were shocked when instead of the silver stag that usually came forth, both a stag and a phoenix made of silver mist with golden streaks shot out of Harry's wand and circled the room a few times before slowly starting to disappear.

The eight occupants of the room sat in a stunned silence.  It was Remus who finally broke it.

"I'm guessing you found an even happier memory then Harry?"  He asked humorously.  "It doesn't surprise me.   Well done though, that's one of the best I've seen."

Harry beamed at him.  Remus was certainly right; he did have a very happy memory.  Quite a number of them in fact.  Finding out his parents were alive, finding out Sirius had been declared innocent, learning he never had to return to the Dursley's, all of these just gave more and more added power to his patronus.  It amazed him.

Throughout the rest of the class Harry sat scanning textbooks which talked about the patronus whilst Ron, Draco, Hermione, Ginny and Caz all tried to cast patroni.  By the end of the lesson all of them were getting silver mist but nothing was taking shape.  Still they were all happy that they were doing well.

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            After defence against the dark arts was over the six of them, accompanied by Remus and Abbi headed down towards the self defence auditorium.  As they walked in to the auditorium laughter filled their ears.  It was then that Remus and Abbi realised that they were still interesting colours.  Remus glared at the four adults in the room. 

            "Will you four never grow up?"  He asked, humour hidden in his voice.

            "I dunno Moony, how about we think about it and get back to you.  After all we have a lot of lost time to make up for."  Said Sirius, mischief evident in his tone.

            Behind the six students Harry heard Abbi mumble, "That's what I was afraid of."  She said, more to herself than to anyone else in the room.

            Harry's face cracked into a grin at that however he didn't have anymore time to think about it as it seemed that Jen and Sirius were both eager to start the lesson.

            James, Lily, Abbi and Remus took seats at the back of the room.  This time there was a lack of flying spells and this meant that it was safe to try and learn something.

            Sirius and Jen started by explaining that the first thing they were learning was going to be shield spells, much like the rest of the school only they were going to be slightly more advanced.

            The class went well, all of them picked up the easier shields quickly and by the end of their first lesson they were well into some of the advanced shield spells.  Harry and Caz were by far finding it the easiest as they had already started on shield spells in the extra lessons they had been having over the summer.

            As soon as the class had started it was over and they all headed down to the great hall for dinner, once again ignoring the looks and comments aimed at them by others.

            One thing that hadn't gone unnoticed was the lack of hostility from the Gryffindor's.  In particular from the fifth year Gryffindor's.  They seemed to be the only ones making an effort to still be nice to the six of them. Even with Draco they seemed to be making an effort not to taunt him as they had done in previous years. 

After dinner a quick conversation had taken place between the six Phoenix House members and the remaining 5th year Gryffindor boys.  In that conversation Dean, Seamus and Neville had quickly accepted Draco to be 'nice' but had literally had only 2 minutes to talk to their friends before six rather hyperactive and mischievous professors made their presence known by turning the robes of the group of students Slytherin green.

Draco was the only one who didn't really react to that, merely shrugged his shoulders and continued with what he was saying.  The rest of the group however, didn't react quite so well.

Whilst the six marauders stood there in fits of laughter Harry and Caz, having been nominated by everyone else for the job on the grounds that it was their family, tried desperately to persuade them to change them back. 

"Please, don't make us stay like this!"  Begged Harry.  "Do you know how mean that would be?!  Imagine the humiliation!"

"If you won't change us back then at least let those three go with some dignity."  Haggled Caz, "We have all night to convince you how nasty this is, they have to go back up to Gryffindor tower!"

Eventually it was Remus who gave in.  "Alright."  He said, "I'll let them go, but you lot don't get away with it that easily.  Do the colours pink, purple and yellow mean anything to you?" 

"But that wasn't us Moony, it was them!"  Whined Caz pointing at her mother, uncle and godparents behind him.

"Oh I know."  Said Remus, a predatory gleam in his eyes.

With that he turned around and quick as a flash the four, aforementioned professors were all in robes of Slytherin green and silver and wearing rather large signs on their backs which flashed various phrases all declaring how wonderful Slytherin house really was.  Following that he restored the three Gryffindor's to their previous states and left with a swoosh of his robes.

Dean, Seamus and Neville retreated soon after as James, Lily, Jen and Sirius stood there speechless whilst the others all laughed their heads off at them.  All too soon the four of them came to their senses and made a break to get to their room before anyone could see them.

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            30 minutes later everyone was back in the 'Marauder's Maison'.  While Remus and Abbi stood laughing everybody else was busy trying to plead their cases as to why they should have their clothing changed back.

            Eventually after 10 minutes of begging James had a sudden realisation.  He turned to Sirius.

            "Hey, Siri?"

            "Yes Jamie?"  Sirius replied, automatically reverting back to the names they always used as kids when they were up to no good.

            "Do you remember when we were in sixth year and Remy decided that he was going to give us both long blonde pig-tails?"  He asked in a sing song voice that told Remus he was in trouble.  "And then he decided to go one further and transfigure our entire wardrobes into dresses so that was all we had to wear for a week?"

            "I believe I do Jamie.  Would you be suggesting what I thing you are suggesting?  Because if you are then I believe that it would be a very good idea.  I also believe it would be best for the sweet and innocent children to DUCK!"

            No sooner had Sirius completed his sentence than James, Remus and Sirius all sent hexes flying at each other.  Within seconds a full scale magical prank war had broken out amongst the twelve inhabitants of the room.  Curses, hexes, charms and other spells were flying everywhere, changing the colour, size and appearance of anything that got in the way. 

            The laughter of the inhabitants of the room could be heard from half way down the corridor outside as they shrieked whilst dodging various spells.  Within 5 minutes they were all thoroughly worn out and collapsed onto the various sofas and armchairs around the room all breathing heavily and grinning from ear to ear.

            Lily looked around the room.  "Game over."  She declared.  "Finite Incantatem."

            With that said everyone in the room returned to their former appearances.  Everyone, that was, except Remus. 

            Remus sat there completely oblivious to his new green afro or the pink love heart with 'RL 4 SS' written inside it which was floating above his head.

            As everyone else in the room began to notice the one spell which hadn't been undone the snickering  started.  Remus sat wondering what was going on before he finally caught sight of his reflection in a nearby mirror.

            "POTTER!  BLACK!" he yelled. 

            James and Sirius looked at him and burst into fresh waves of laughter before James muttered the counter curse and Remus returned to his former appearance.  He looked at his friends with mock anger, scowled and muttered his thanks for the removal of the curse.

            After that little episode was over they all sat round engaging in conversation about nothing and everything, much like they had done the previous day.

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            The following morning dawned bright and breezy, just as any autumn day should and found everyone sat in the great hall at breakfast, rather more awake than they had been the previous morning.

            A flurry of movement overhead announced the arrival of the post and owls circled around the hall dropping letters and parcels into the laps of students and teachers alike. 

            Hermione was rather surprised to find a letter dropped into her own lap.  She was even more surprised when she got into the envelope and found another envelope inside it.  This envelope however, was addressed and stamped in the muggle way which made her curious as her parents were the only ones who ever wrote to her at school and they had bought an owl back in the summer after her first year just so they could keep in touch with their daughter whilst she was at school.

            She opened the envelope full of curiosity, wondering who could be sending her mail in the muggle way that would know where to send it and also wondering how the muggle post office would have known what to do with it.

            As she read the letter her face fell.  Slowly the expression of disappointment turned to one of worry and finally to one of pure anger.  Without a word to anyone she got up, still clutching the letter in her hand, and fled the Great Hall.

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* patronuses? patronae?  What IS the plural of patronus????????

A/N:  One more chapter down and things are heating up.  What's with Hermione?  What exactly do these new subjects entail? And why am I having such bad writers block lately??  Could it have something to do with the fact that I was watching the 'Eurovision Song Contest' as I tried to write this chapter??  Find out in the next chapter.