It was seven o'clock in the morning, and they were talking.
And talking.
And talking.
And all Tom wanted to do was finish eating and retreat to his classroom.
He was only in the staff room because he'd wanted to replace the study hall schedule with his own newly designed masterpiece - in which Dumbledore was prominently featured - and figured he might as well eat something while he was there.
But Peggy and Whatever-His-First-Name-Was Fogg had joined him at the table before he could escape, and he was now trapped in the worst of all social prisons: small talk. He had considered getting up and leaving, but he was still hoping to build positive (and therefore useful) relationships with the staff. So, he stayed.
"On a tiny screen," Fogg was saying. "Like one of our pictures, but with sound."
"How is that even possible?" Peggy asked in awe.
"No idea."
A month ago, he never would have believed he'd find himself sitting at a table next to a Muggle Studies professor, considering most of his associates would have hunted Muggles for sport if given the chance. Yet there he was, being talked at by a man who insisted that Muggles were "brilliantly innovative" because they had managed to stuff moving pictures into a tiny, ugly box and have them make noise. Poorly.
"And the best part," Fogg went on, "is now they're in color. Really, it's quite impressive."
"Indeed," said Peggy.
"Why?" Tom asked.
Fogg looked confused. "Why what?"
"Why is it impressive?"
"Because it's innovative!"
"Why is it innovative?"
"Er- I suppose because it's never been done before. The point is that we don't give Muggles enough credit for the things they come up with."
Tom nodded. "Yes. Like the atomic bomb. We should definitely give them credit for that."
"The what?"
"Never mind."
"So, Tom!" Peggy said, wisely changing the subject. "How are your classes going?"
"Fine," he said quietly.
"The first year is always the hardest," Fogg explained. "It gets easier."
That wasn't comforting at all.
"What years do you have today?" asked Peggy.
"First, fifth, second-"
"Oh no."
"What?"
Peggy shook her head grimly. "Second years."
"What about them?"
"I've never had to teach below third year, thank god," said Fogg.
"Nor have I," said Peggy, "but I've heard things. Awful things."
That was maddeningly unhelpful. "What 'awful things?'" he asked, wondering how on earth a class of twelve-year-olds could be considered threatening.
"You know how the first years are usually quiet and meek?"
"Yes..." He'd found the first years incredibly easy to teach.
"Well, the second years are the complete opposite."
"Why would the second years be any different from first years?"
"Not only are they further along in puberty, making them moody and vicious, but they also have none of the shy awkwardness that the first years get that keeps them so quiet."
"They're monsters," Fogg added. "Ask Minerva about why animal transfiguration was removed from her second-year lesson plans."
"And if you talk to Beery, never mention the Mandrake-Tentacula Fiasco."
"Well, thank you for that detailed and not at all terrifying explanation," Tom muttered, getting up to leave. He had decided that positive relationships with fellow professors were not worth the pain of having to suffer through small talk.
Their sinister comments bounced around in the back of his mind all through the morning, right up until the minute before his first second-year lesson, but he managed to convince himself there was no reason to be intimidated.
After all, there were very few things that legitimately scared him, given the wide range of horrible activities in which he had partaken before the age of eighteen. And after, for that matter. There was no doubt in his mind that he could handle a class of slightly moody children.
The tension in the room was palpable. They could sense his weakness. Smell the new blood in the air like a pack of wolves. Ravenous, hormonal, pimply wolves.
They were oddly quiet when he arrived, sitting in their seats and staring at him. He could feel their eyes on him as he threw the notes up on the board and set the roster on one of the desks in the first row. He felt strangely cornered.
"Please initial by your name so I know you were here," he said.
They did not move.
"Where's Merrythought?" one of them demanded.
"Professor Merrythought has retired. I teach this class now."
"Who are you?"
"My name is on the board."
"You look too young to be a professor. How old are you?"
"How old I am is no concern of yours."
"When did you graduate?"
It was as if they were challenging him. "As I said, my age is irrelevant."
For the first time, one of them raised a hand. Finally, some respect. "Yes?"
"Sorry, Professor, sir, but if you're so young, are you really qualified to teach-"
"That's enough," he warned, trying to stifle the sound of Peggy's voice in his head.
'Awful things...'
They ignored his command and directed their inquiries to each other instead.
"Isn't there an age requirement for teaching?"
"There has to be."
"Why doesn't he just tell us his age?"
"I think he went to school with my sister. She's a seventh year."
"SILENCE!" he yelled in his best I-will-murder-everyone-you-love voice.
Like a scene from a nightmare, they stopped talking abruptly and turned their heads to stare at him as one collective, twenty-headed monster.
"There's no need to shout, Professor," one of them mumbled from the back.
There was a wave of laughter, and then the chatting returned.
His wand was raised and the incantation for removing tongues was halfway out of his mouth before he realized something. A significant number of his associates always seemed much easier to handle when he directed their energies toward something that suited their interests, like hatred or violence.
What did children find interesting?
He conjured a projector, pulled out the visual aids he'd painstakingly put together, found the most gruesome, disgusting one, and threw it onto the screen.
The image appeared on the blackboard and there was instant silence.
"What is that?" one of them asked.
"If you stay quiet, I will tell you."
They did.
"This," he explained, "is the result of a poorly executed fire-breathing hex."
An enthralled-looking girl raised her hand. "Are those his organs?" she asked.
"Yes, and muscle tissue."
"Oooh."
More hands went into the air. He pointed at a boy near the front.
"How did he get like that?"
"Chapter seven of your book has a delightfully detailed description of the incorrect casting." The sound of shuffling filled the room as almost every student rushed to take out his or her text, and after a few moments he continued. "Hexes normally cause a moderate amount of damage, but poorly cast hexes can be much more dangerous."
And so the lesson began.
The only things that kept them interested and engaged were gory, disgusting details, and he had plenty of those. It seemed to work, though some of their questions were a bit worrying.
"Can you cast hexes incorrectly on purpose, sir?"
"Well, it would be more prudent to utilize a hex that produces the desired effect by its nature, rather than trying to get a specific result out of a mistake."
"Sir, how do you make the fire go inside someone's body?"
"In this case, the goal was to give the caster the ability to wield fire like a weapon. Instead, the fire was conjured inside the target, causing internal combustion and disembowelment."
There was a quiet, unassuming little thought in the back of his head that perhaps he was making a massive mistake by teaching second years about the ins and outs of hex theory. But he was too proud of his own success over having gained control of the class to listen to it.
In the afternoon he turned his attention to preparing for his first advanced class. This was what he had really been looking forward to. Finally, he would be able to utilize his most rigorous lesson plan and engage with minds that were undoubtedly as fascinated by the subject as he was.
He should have known to lower his expectations.
By the time the bell sounded, only about half the class had shown up.
"Where are the Gryffindors?" was his first question.
"In their dorms, sir," said the single Hufflepuff. "They had a party last night and... and this morning."
"Wait here," he told them, and left the classroom. Filled with a strong sense of purpose, he walked all the way across the castle and did not stop until he was outside of the Gryffindor common room, which, he realized with vague annoyance, was much closer to his flat than he had thought it was. It was a wonder he didn't hear any sign of a party the previous night.
"Password?" said the portrait.
"Sal- salutiferous," he mumbled, wishing the blanket teachers' password was easier to remember.
The portrait swung open and he walked in to find Gryffindors scattered everywhere. There was no other way to describe them. It was as if they were confetti, thrown here and there, curled into balls on sofas and lying face down on the bare stone floor, drooling. One child was wedged into the narrow window above the stairs. The air reeked of alcohol.
He cast a spell that filled the common room with the loudest, most tinny, ear-murdering sound in existence.
Most of them woke with a start. A few of them screamed. The boy in the window fell to the floor.
"Gryffindors," he said in his most threatening voice, "if you are not in your appropriate classrooms in five minutes you will receive a lifetime of detention."
He left the common room feeling relatively satisfied.
Several minutes later, with a full sixth-year class in front of him, Tom began what was sure to be a fascinating lesson on prejudicial spells and rituals, one of his personal areas of expertise.
And while he taught, the severely hungover Gryffindors stared at him from the corner of the room with looks of absolute loathing.
"I don't want to talk about it," Minerva stated, walking faster so that he had to make an effort to keep up with her.
"It can't be that bad. I didn't find my second year students to be nearly as difficult as Peggy made them out to be." A slight falsehood.
"I'm still not talking about it, Tom."
Now he had to know. "I just don't understand what twelve-year-olds could possibly have done that was so horrible-"
She stopped in the middle of the corridor and turned to face him. "Every time I clean my classroom," she muttered, "I still find feathers. That is all I will say on the matter."
Before Tom could interrogate her further, there was a loud explosion somewhere ahead of them, followed by a series of screams.
They turned the corner to find a scene out of Dante's Inferno. The entire corridor was on fire and children were running out into the courtyard to escape.
In the middle of the chaos, trapped by a wall of flames, two small second year boys were furiously launching balls of fire at each other like they were playing some kind of extreme form of tennis.
Minerva was beside herself. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" she screamed.
"Sorry, Professor," yelled one of the boys. "The fire was supposed to go inside him, not outside."
"What the bloody- HOW IS THAT BETTER?"
Tom turned away quickly and attempted to extinguish the blaze, making a mental note that younger children apparently had the tendency to take things quite literally.
Minerva gave the boys centuries of detentions and removed a significant number of points from Ravenclaw and Slytherin before sending them on their way.
She shook her head at the state of the corridor and then turned to Tom. "What on earth would possess them?"
"No idea," he said.
The Great Hall was looking particularly grand and impressive that evening, its enchanted ceiling bathing the room in the orange and pink colors of sunset as the light from the floating candles reflected off of the many goblets and plates lining the tables, causing them to glitter like gold.
Which was unfortunate because no one was paying any attention to it.
Dinner had been loudly and violently interrupted by a series of explosions from the Ravenclaw table, followed by a nauseating variety of smells. Several teachers rushed over to inspect the commotion, and an attempt was made to wake Grayson, Ravenclaw's Head of House, who had fallen asleep in his chair before dinner had even begun.
Whatever the Ravenclaws had done was causing part of their table to melt into some sort of gooey substance and drip onto the floor, which then also melted and dripped into the kitchens beneath them. And the hole seemed to be getting wider.
While Dumbledore evacuated the Hall, Tom joined the other teachers, who were standing around the newly made chasm, wearing faces of annoyance and exasperation. No one seemed particularly out of sorts, however. Apparently this sort of thing was common.
Eventually Slughorn showed up, scooped a sample of the offending goo into a vial, and investigated it while everyone awaited his verdict.
"What is it?" Ilania asked him.
But he did not answer. Instead, he sighed, shook his head, and then yelled "CORNELIA!"
His Potions understudy had been sitting at the end of the teachers' table and appearing mysteriously uninterested in the chaos. When she heard her name, she came over to them, her face blank.
"Is something wrong?" she asked innocently, as if there were not a massive hole in front of them, burning itself toward the center of the earth.
"Cornelia," Slughorn said, an unfamiliar note of anger in his voice, "when I asked you to dispose of those disgusting, illegal transmogrified heads because they were extremely dangerous and volatile and should never be used under any circumstances, did you, in fact, dispose of them?"
"No."
"What did you do with them?"
She shrugged. "I was assisting some of your seventh years with brewing and they were missing a few key items. I taught them how to test ingredients to see if they could serve as replacements. I guess they decided to practice on their own."
"So you let them use shrunken heads?" he asked her in disbelief. "To replace what?"
"Water."
There was a collective groan from the teachers.
She glared at them all in defiance. "What? Don't blame me!" she countered. "Blame him! He sold them to me!"
She was pointing at Tom.
"I- what?" he stuttered.
"Last week. You basically forced me to buy them!"
Every face turned to look at him.
"Tom," said Ilania, "did you sell Cornelia shrunken heads?"
"Of course he didn't," Slughorn answered for him. "Don't be preposterous." But he threw Tom the briefest of concerned looks.
Beery seemed confused. "Was this some kind of... underground trade or something?"
"No, they were in that shop," said Cornelia. "The one he works in."
"What shop?"
Tom stood there like an idiot, unsure of what to do. "I didn't- I only sold you what you asked for," he said.
At that moment, the hole expanded, taking a significant portion of Ravenclaw's table with it, and everyone turned their attention toward attempting to abate it.
After the chaos died down Tom looked for Cornelia in order to confront her, but she had conveniently disappeared.
The level of exhaustion he had reached by the end of the day was downright unhealthy, and the only thing he wanted to do after he'd returned to his flat was go to bed.
Which was why, when the sounds of music, cheering, and general rowdiness filled his ears just as he was about to fall asleep, brutally murdering the entirety of Gryffindor House seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
He approached Gryffindor's portrait for the second time that day, muttered the ridiculous password, and stormed into their cushy, childish, obnoxiously red common room.
It looked as if every single Gryffindor was there, drinking and carrying on, most of them underage. A group of older students stood near the fire, lobbing fireworks into the flames and laughing like idiots, while a number of children danced on tables to the beat of loud music emanating from some unknown source.
"What's going on here?" he shouted.
"Nothing, Professor," several of them said in unison, not bothering to hide their drinks. "Just celebrating the start of term."
Tom knocked a Butterbeer bottle out of one of their hands. "Turn that music off," he demanded.
The cacophony of noises stopped abruptly.
"If I hear one more sound tonight," he continued, "I will make sure that every single one of you is expelled."
He made it back to the third-floor corridor thinking he ought to be rather proud of himself for not leaving Gryffindor Tower a bloody, smoldering ruin (clearly, he was a paragon of self-control). Instead, he had decided he would wait until the morning and inform Dumbledore of his House's barbaric behavior.
But when he tried to enter his quarters, the door seemed to be stuck. He put some force behind it and managed to push it open enough for him to squeeze in.
He swore. Loudly.
The entire flat, from the walls to the floor to the lampshades, had been painted in red and gold. The living room was filled with plush, mismatched chairs, undoubtedly taken from the Gryffindor common room, and the enchanted image of a massive lion was pacing back and forth from window to window, growling at him with two-dimensional hunger in its eyes.
Running through a list of particularly nasty curses in his head, he returned to the Gryffindor common room and barked the password at its ridiculous portrait for the third time.
"Quite rude," the Fat Lady said before swinging open.
The room was empty and silent. All evidence of a party had been removed. The place looked immaculate.
The next day Tom confronted Dumbledore in the early hours of the morning, showing up at his office and demanding that he do something about the complete and utter disrespect and disobedience shown by his House.
"The individuals responsible must be found and punished as soon as possible," he raged.
"I will look into the matter," Dumbledore assured him.
"Now?"
"As soon as I have the time to do so."
That was not good enough. "I really think you ought to prioritize this issue a bit higher. Sir," he added hastily.
Dumbledore sighed. "I am afraid I'm unable to do that, Tom."
"Why not?"
"I have a frightfully and unexpectedly busy schedule this week."
"What? Why?"
"Well, I seem to have landed myself with an unusual amount of study halls."