I think this is the smallest chapter I have ever written for any of my stories, but I wanted to get something out before Christmas
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"Right, the first thing you need to know is that real defence has bugger all to do with knowing exactly the right spell for the situation, but that's not what the school will teach us, and probably not what we will be tested on. So ask yourself this, do you want to know how to defend yourself or do you just want to pass the exam?"
Harry looked up from his notes.
"That's pretty good," said his reflection. "Very insightful."
"Thanks, but it's a load of bollocks," he said, tossing the notes to the side.
He was really starting to regret agreeing to help Hermione's defence study group, despite the fuzzy warm feeling he got when the girls all expressed their appreciation.
For starters he was starting feel way too nervous for something that didn't actually have any sort of meaningful consequence attached to it. It wasn't his responsibility if others didn't pass, even with his help, and he probably stood to lose very little if they didn't.
He did want to help, that was true, but he figured knew his limitations pretty well, and he wasn't really cut out to put the effort into creating a whole year's course with the limited resources they had available. While he realised his view of teachers was quite tainted due to his prior experiences, it didn't stop him from understanding just how much actual work a good teacher needed to do.
Hermione was hell-bent certain that huge long lists of different scenarios and that appropriate responses (taken from the last two hundred years of assigned text books for the course) were the best way to prepare for the exams, but nobody except her and a couple of Ravenclaws were going to be able to memorise even half of the titles let alone the content.
The answer in the current text book for everything was almost always "Call the authorities and wait for them", which Harry did mostly agree with, except for the obvious glaring omission of the fact it might be difficult to get time to alert the appropriate people when a werewolf was trying to chew your face off or an inferi eat your brains.
Harry's default answer usually centred around getting the hell out of there as quickly as possible, but that was also sometimes very limited in its application when supernatural forces were involved, athough most of the creatures in the wizarding world did seem to lack a decent slice of common sense, and that included wizards and witches, making them not even consider legging as a viable option.
The 'right way' could be any of these, but Harry knew that the right way was not necessarily going to be the answer the examiners wanted, and the students had no way of knowing thanks to the particularly inept instructions currently been fostered on them by froggy.
"What's the absolute minimum we need to know and how can we most get the knowledge?" Harry asked himself out loud, falling back on thought patterns he had developed and relied on for most of his life to date.
"Well, we need to be able to cast at least a few of the most useful common spells, like that stun spell and that shield spell, and also the normal way of dealing with some of the most common creatures people encounter, like werewolves, Bowtruckles, and Nargles," answered Luna's voice, which was a bit startling since Harry thought he was alone in his dorm's bathroom.
Still, she was making sense, so rather than over react, Harry relaxed and considered her words.
"Yeah that's all well and good, but doesn't really improve our chances of passing the exam any more than studying last year's text books does," he replied. "If I am going to put effort into this, it has to have a much bigger payout than just that. If only there was some way to be more certain what is going to be in the exam so that we can narrow down what we need to learn."
"Can you use your divination skills to predict what is on the exam?" ask Luna.
Harry laughed. "No, the last time I brought out the Ouija board and asked it something, it caught fire and exploded."
"That may have been because you tried to contact the departed spirit of a dinosaur, or was it when you asked why ghosts all appeared with clothes instead of being naked since their clothes didn't die with them?"
"Both seem like reasonable questions to me," shrugged Harry. "But it was trying to contact my own spirit that made it go off, still don't know why. Got an A for that though, so I am not complaining."
Harry stopped in thought for a moment.
"Usually cheating takes a lot more effort than doing things legitimately," he said thoughtfully, "but I wonder if it might be justified in this case."
"That sounds promising," said Luna.
"Yes it does, but there is something else that is really bothering me; why, no forget why, how are you in my bathroom and just how long have you been in here?"
"You really shouldn't leave your cloak just sitting around in your trunk," answered Luna, her voice seemingly coming from above Harry, now that he focussed on it. "And only a few minutes, this time..."
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"Mr Potter, what do you think you are doing?" snarled Greasy as Harry placed his homework on the snarky professor's desk.
"I think I am handing in my essay on the properties and uses of Moonstone," answered Harry, "but no doubt I am so stupid that I can't even get that right, so maybe you can correct this poor imbecile and tell me what it is I am actually doing?"
"Do you expect me to believe you have suddenly decided this class is worthy enough of your attention to hand in what I believe is only the second paper you have ever presented since first year?"
"No," said Harry gleefully. "I don't expect anything from you professor."
"Deten-"
"Detention, yeah I know," agreed Harry turning to leave the classroom and catch up with his classmates who were all looking at him with varying degrees of suspicion and expectation.
"What?' he asked innocently.
"Don't 'What?' us you git," said J. "We know you have a reason for pretty much everything you do and you know we are not going to stop bugging you until you tell us so let's just cut to the chase and hear it now."
"Cut to the chase?" whispered Sue.
"I'll explain later," answered Han hurriedly to cut off Harry from having a reason to delay by going off on a tangent nobody was interested in but still somehow ended up arguing about.
Harry thought about pretending to be upset or hurt by the accusation, but it was a fair cop.
"The text book isn't great," he said. "So I want Greasy's notes on the correct answer, and the best way to get that is to give him something that he can tear apart. Chances are I will get back about twice as much as I wrote and even though at least half of that will be insults and other abuse, what's left will be a lot more accurate and concise than anything in the text book."
"What?" he asked, seeing the looks of disappointment on his friends' faces.
"That's pretty boring," answered Ern. "You've done that before with most of the professors I think."
"Yeah, I was hoping for something a bit more imaginative," admitted Sue.
"Everyone's a critic," mumbled Harry as they headed to his next class.
He thought about mentioning the contact poison that could be added to his ink, but he really didn't feel like telling the others about it after their lackluster reactions, and there was very little chance the ever-suspicious Snape would be careless enough to get any of the powerful laxative on his skin in the two hours before it evaporated if Harry had put it in anyway, so he hadn;t gone ahead with it.
Well, not this time, but if Snape got used to him handing in work...
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"The final exam papers are kept in the headmaster's office under some very strong protections. Generations of students have tried to find ways to get them and none have succeeded –"
"That we know of," pointed out J.
"-that we know of," amended Sue.
"Sounds like the effort is definitely much higher than actually trying to pass," said Ern.
They all turned to look at Harry, who just for a change, was not snoozing during their conversation.
"Not necessarily," he said after a moment. "I mean getting them out of the office is basically a lost cause, but what about before they get to the office? Who writes them and decides what questions to ask?"
"It's all done in the Ministry of Magic offices," said Sue. "And breaking into there is no laughing matter. If you are caught you could very well end up in prison. Nobody is that crazy."
"Well, I might know a guy," said Harry smiling in a way so creepy that several ghosts throughout the castle felt a shiver run their incorporeal spines.
"Oooh that was nice," mumbled Peeves as he paused once again mismatching student's socks, making sure to leave the ones with holes in them near the top of the drawer.
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Padfoot crept through the empty offices as silent as a ghost, well actually it was a lot more silent considering how the ghosts he had ,et usually liked to carry on moaning and complaining about everything from how they were never avenged to why their head was still attached. Many scholars spend considerable resources investigating the cause of ghost creation but Sirius was pretty certain it was just because the people they came from were miserable sods who loved whinging so much they just couldn't stop even after they died.
Smoothly, the massive hound slipped from shadow to shadow, barely a blur to all but the most careful observer, of which the Ministry was absolutely barren.
His infiltration into the seat of bureaucratic power had been a thing of beauty involving subtle magic and sublime timing that legendary master thieves would toast as perfection incarnate.
It was really such a pity that he was completely lost.
He had a map, sort of. It had been quite a good map in fact, but he had accidentally chewed it up a bit, which was an acceptable kind of accident to happen if he had been in dog form.
He hadn't been.
At any rate, he was fairly certain he was on the right trail as the obstacles and barriers to his progression kept getting more difficult, which had to mean he was on the right track.
Right?
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"So I heard the most horrible thing," said Hermione rushing over to where Harry was once again trying to levitate food into his mouth wordlessly.
"Slick isn't actually a true blonde?" asked Harry.
"What? No. Why would Malfoy not being blonde be horrible? No – forget it, i don;t want to know and I don't what to know. Umbridge is trying to get the centaurs removed from the forbidden forest."
"Bugger," answered Harry, snatching at a potato that tried to shoot past his head. He missed and it flew away behind him somewhere. "They seemed like a bunch of all right people."
"When did you meet centaurs?" asked Hermione, momentarily thrown off track.
"In first year," said Harry, lining up his next potato. "Had a detention with Slick and some centaurs found us. Scared the willies out of me, but they didn't actually do anything wrong. Tiny talked to me about them after that. I think he felt bad for them and wanted me to like them. Still, not much we can do if Froggy has gotten fixated on them. Keeps her off our backs for a bit I guess, although it would a lot better if she decided to tell the spiders to nick off – I'd pay to see her argue with them face to face."
Hermione knew Harry wasn't really as uncaring as he seemed, but sometimes he needed a bit more motivation in order to make the effort of even expressing his emotions, let alone acting on them.
"Speaking of Hagrid," she said. "How do you think Umbridge is going to react when he starts arguing with her about the centaurs, and she finds out he is not completely human?"
It took a second for Harry's expression to change, then his brow furrowed and he looked almost ready to react angrily.
At that moment, Hermione realised she had done something terrible. She had manipulated Harry without even really thinking about it; pointing him at her problems like he was a weapon – and it was not the first time either. He had never really done anything but be a friend and she was using him. The guilt suddenly crushed her.
"Harry I –" she began to apologise, only to be cut off.
"I think maybe Froggy needs a bit more attention," he said, his voice somehow holding a note of threat Hermione had never heard before. It scared her, deeply, but before she could gather her thoughts he stood up from the table.
"Excuse me," he said. "I have to talk to a few people. Thanks for letting me know about this."
Hermione tried to call out, to say something, but her voice failed her as her thoughts spiralled inwards.
Then a potato hit her in the side of the head.
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The rumour mill of Hogwarts was the equal to any in the world. A whispered secret could travel the halls faster than a wizard Apparating.
"She wasn't kidnapped, she left voluntarily!"
"Why would she do that?"
"Think, have you ever seen a female centaur? Do you know what centaurs do with Human women?"
"That's just a prejudice lies spread by pro-wizard activists! As if Centaurs would want her!"
Either way, nobody saw the missing professor for two weeks, and after professor Dumbledoor walked out of the forest levitating her inert body, she went into the infirmary and did not return.
Rumour was it took three healers two days to get the smile off her face.