Chapter 2
AN: Surprise, surprise, next chapter up so unusually soon :) I'm afraid it won't become a habit. Thanks for the reviews. I was glad too that George told Helen off :D Let's see how or whether it worked just yet...
Though I hate to see Giles suffer, I wanted a little to explore him in a situation like this. The only clues in the series were the few scenes around Jenny's death, but that was quite a different spot he was in, as it was clearly Angel's doing. So here I'm not sure he's still convincing as Giles. Let me know what you think. Would he cause a total rumpus, play the "Ripper-card", get drunk and destroy everything around him in a single fit of rage, or rather suffer in silence, burry himself in books and move on as soon as possible?
Sunnydale
Once sure that Giles wasn't in any immediate danger of doing something stupid, like drinking or hiring a hooker – as Xander put it – the four Scoobies said good night and left his apartment. And when Willow and Xander turned in the door to give him one last look, they saw him with furrowed brows, fully concentrating on the book that Cordelia had been reading in just moments ago, and they exchanged relieved smiles – the old Giles seemed to be back, at least for a while.
It was the book that Helen had ordered George to bring to his apartment a few months ago, the book that contained among other things the ritual which she performed in an attempt to rid herself of her magic. It bore the title De potestatibus infernis diu exstinctis habitis and it had been written, or rather translated from Greek into Latin by a monk named Innocentius in 1346, the Greek original has been lost since then. This translation was over 600 years old, yet extremely well preserved. Given that it had belonged to the Council's Library Giles didn't find that surprising – they always took great care of all their books. This one, however, had been among over a hundred of other volumes, that Quentin Travers had secretly and under the pretext of sending them to a workshop for restoration "lent" to the Death Eaters some time before the battle of Hogwarts. After their defeat the books were found by the aurors like Helen searching through Death Eaters' households on behalf of the Ministry.
She left it here, she had probably forgotten about it and Giles was now browsing through the old, handwritten pages. Cordelia's question about Horcruxes reminded him of something, he had heard the word before, but couldn't remember where. It might have been something he had caught during one of the conversations between Helen and her friends, George or Charlie, or maybe during their short stop at the Burrow when they were on their way to Romania to look for the Kalderash and to watch the dragons near Charlie's and Ileana's home... A string of memories began to flow through his mind and put a brief smile on his face before it became painful.
He re-focused on the book in his hands again, looking for the passage that Cordelia must have been looking at. Since the book was in Latin and Giles was sure that wasn't one of Cordelia's well hidden talents, he guessed that she probably must have seen it in a caption or beneath a picture. While he was skimming through it, he noticed that some parts, however, were not in Latin, but in some signs that he couldn't read, but he recognized them from some objects and phials Helen used to have around. He actually wondered what this book had been doing in the Library of the Watcher's Council and, accordingly, whether there was someone among the Watchers who would be able to decipher those wizarding runes.
And then, almost at the end of the thick volume he finally discovered the heading In horcruces hirudinum mutationum ritūs ac modi observandi.
London
While loitering through the foyer of the Ministry of Magic Helen ran into Kingsley.
"Oi!" He said loudly as they bumped into each other. "Oh, Helen! What-," he quickly bent down to collect the papers that fell out of his hands, "... nice to see you! I didn't know you were in town..."
"Hello," she greeted him back, rubbing her arm that got hurt as they crashed. "Yeah, I-ah... I'm actually on my way to Hogwarts... I just forgot where the portkeys are. You know I cannot apparate..."
"Right," he nodded and motioned her to follow him towards a hallway on their far left. "It's over there... I wouldn't have thought you'd want to visit another school while you're on holiday," he joked, "but I'm sure-"
"Actually, it's not a mere social call," she interrupted him.
"Oh no?" He looked at her with raised brows.
"No, I-ah...," she dropped her eyes for a moment, "I returned and-ah... I was thinking of getting back to teaching history of magic..."
Suddenly, Kingsley appeared to be in a hurry. "Really? Well-eh..., here it is," he pointed towards a large cauldron made of bronze that served as a portkey to the village of Hogsmeade. "I'm afraid I must go now. Good luck," He gave her a weird, unconvincing smile that left her baffled for a moment. If she didn't know better, she could have sworn he was hiding something from her. She watched him hurry away, then shook her head, thinking she was being paranoid, and stepped closer to the cauldron to touch it.
She landed in the backyard of the Hogsmeade's Owl Post office and made her way towards the castle. She was impressed that there were as good as no traces, no reminders of the battle that had taken place there three years ago and had turned great parts of the castle into ruins. Well, to be entirely honest some of it had been Helen's doing too. But now all seemed restored and looked very much as the image she had of it from the times before the war. There has been, however, one addition to the Hogwarts grounds that had the express purpose to remind the visitors, the students and the staff of the fight against the dark magic and its cost: it was the cemetery for those perished in the battle, now spreading from the bank of the lake to the border of the Forbidden forest. Helen walked past the graves of some of her friends, Tonks, Lupin, determined not to look to her right, where somewhere at the back, closest to the forest her brother and Severus were lying.
She passed Hagrid's hut and exchanged a few words with him. He was busy planting some weird stuff in his garden and looked at her all flustered when he noticed her gaze stopping at the large bag that was fidgeting in his big arms only too lively. Helen decided she better didn't want to know what exactly that was.
The castle itself was deserted. The students were spending their summer holidays with their families, so that the teachers were the only inhabitants of the vast cold stony walls at this time of year. She took her time and was walking slowly in the direction of the headmistress' office, breathing in the very own smell of the old castle that she used to love in her days. Her steps echoed on the tiles and a couple of the portraits that were having their afternoon nap opened their eyes to see who the visitor was. It wasn't until she reached the hallway where Minerva's office was that she finally met a living soul. Professor Flitwick, the charms master, just descended the stairs leading from the said office, holding a piece a parchment in his hands, when he looked up at the sound of Helen's steps.
She saw him narrow his eyes as he was trying to make out who it was in the poorly lit corridor.
"Filius," she said loudly and smiled at him.
Very slowly his features changed too as he finally seemed to have recognized her and smiled back at her, walking to meet her in the middle of the hallway.
"Helena, what a pleasant surprise," he said, as usually calling her by her proper name, and he truly looked pleased, though very much surprised to see her.
They had never really got warm with each other while she was teaching at Hogwarts before. Professor Flitwick belonged to those colleagues who lived and breathed for their subject. They certainly weren't close friends, but have always respected each other and even exchanged a few professional advices during their shared time there, so that she for her part too could say that she was glad to see him again and was looking forward to become his colleague once more. Minerva had asked her a year ago if she wanted to resume her post as the history master. She had refused then, but now things were different and she was hoping she could come back.
"What brings you here? Are you on holiday?" The little professor Flitwick asked.
"Not exactly," she smiled again. "I wrote to Minerva a few days ago that I'd come. I wanted to talk about coming back."
Professor Flitwick looked at her somewhat confused.
"I-ah... I was on my way to her right now," she added, his expression was making her nervous.
"Coming back?" He asked, clearly astonished. "At what position?"
Now it was her turn to be perplex. Why was he asking the obvious? "Well, history of magic of course. I could sub for a potions master as well for a while, but-ah... I'd rather not use my wand that much... But I thought Horace is still teaching, isn't he?"
Flitwick shifted uncomfortably.
"What?" She asked, sensing something bad was coming.
"I-eh...," he began, not sure how to bring her the news, so he decided to stall, "Minerva isn't here right now. She's on holiday, attending to some family business. She probably didn't get your message. She should be back by the end of the next month."
"Oh," was the only sound Helen made. Well, she would have to come back later.
Professor Flitwick gave a loud, resigned sigh. "I hate to be the one to tell you this, as you obviously don't know yet... I wonder why no one has told you... Well, probably no one really expected you to be back so soon from... wherever it was you have been living."
"Sunnydale," Helen said with a sad smile. Though it wasn't intentional his words hurt. A month ago she herself wouldn't have expected to be back so soon.
"Right. Well, as it happens our staff is fully covered now, it has been since the end of the school year," he said carefully.
Helen looked at him as if she wouldn't understand the language he was talking in.
He raised his brows. "It's been three years," he said in a voice, suggesting that she really couldn't be surprised. "It took long enough. We were glad we could finally replace the Bloody Baron. We had been cutting down the history lessons, but still, someone had to teach it."
Helen had heard that because of the lack of new teachers and also due to the fact that there had been still many other things around the castle itself that needed fixing, Minerva – with a heavy heart – resorted to the school ghosts and asked them to temporarily take over the history classes. She also reduced their amount for the time being, until they would find a suitable replacement.
Helen tried not to look too devastated, when she asked: "So, who is it then? Someone I know?"
Flitwick cleared his throat and kept scrunching the piece of parchment in his hands. "Uhhh... I-eh... dare say you do...," he paused, "... it's Lucius Malfoy."
Helen tilted her head and grinned. "Very funny."
Sunnydale
"Rites to be followed... by transformations of... vampires into horcruxes...," Giles was murmuring slowly as he read and translated the Latin caption in the book for the third time. What followed were several pages with numbered passages, apparently some sort of an instruction, rules and steps that needed to be considered in order to create a horcrux. Whatever that was. There too were parts written in runes that Giles wouldn't be able to understand. Still, be the mere look at the ones in Latin and at the very graphic illustrations that were included into the text Giles got goose bump.
He began to read the old Latin, he got literally swallowed up by the book, occasionally skipping to other chapters the Horcrux article was referring to, and he only raised his eyes hours later, addressing someone invisible when he exclaimed: "What an unspeakable reading! Why in God's name would-?"
He stopped abruptly, realizing that the other armchair he has been talking at was empty. That the image of Helen curled in it, reading something of her own as he had pictured her before he would raise his look from the book, was only inside of his head. He felt embarrassed for a moment, though he was alone. But he was done with feeling angry with her or more even with himself. He closed the book and put it aside, then walked over to his record player to put on some music before he would return back to re-organizing his library.
Hogwarts
"Well, Minerva is rather pleased with him," professor Flitwick said while Helen was still recovering from the shock that was Lucius Malfoy teaching history of magic.
"Lucius Malfoy? Really?"
Filius Flitwick merely nodded.
"You can't be serious...," she said, still stumped.
"Let's walk," he motioned towards the staircase and they finally moved away from the curious portraits that were perking up their ears to hear more. The summer holidays were always the time of boredom for the residents in the paintings, due to the lack of any scandals: there were no loud arguments in the corridors, no students hiding and making up behind the draperies, no action whatsoever, so that now Helen's arrival and the present discussion seemed to promise at least some excitement and pull them out of their imposed summer lethargy.
"It's a part of the whole rehabilitation project of the Ministry," Flitwick continued in a lower voice as they reached the first floor. "The Azkaban-problem still hasn't been resolved so that they're only keeping there the most-eh... I should say... stubborn cases, with no hope... but others... if possible and if they show themselves willing, are supposed to be-eh... reintegrated into the community..." The tone he was speaking in would give away that he himself wasn't entirely behind this concept.
Helen shook her head in disbelief. "If that's so, why can't he just be... I don't know... cleaning the toilets at the Ministry... or waiting at tables in the Leaky Cauldron?! Have you then asked Rodolphus Lestrange to teach DADA too?!" She burst out angrily.
"No," professor Flitwick replied calmly. "I know it was somewhat of an-eh... unorthodox choice... I believe Poppy even compared it to an appointment of Livilla Veneous as the potions master..."
"Rightly so," Helen grumbled. Livilla Veneous was a notoriously known witch from the 17th century who was a potion mastermind of her time, however she chose to specialize in inventing all sorts of terrible and nasty poisons to get revenge at all men who had ever wronged her in any way. Helen thought that Poppy's analogy was utterly justified.
"Yet," Flitwick continued, "Lucius has got a vast knowledge when it comes to history of magic, he had read all the works that are relevant-"
"Well, I assume he had enough time for that while he was in prison," she murmured sarcastically.
"He has been teaching the last weeks in June – under controlled circumstances, he's been kept an eye at – and Minerva thought he did rather well... We were all a little... sceptical..."
Helen interrupted him: "You don't honestly believe that he had changed so much, that he threw his views and convictions out of the window over night, do you?"
"No," Flitwick said patiently, "but in these circumstances that was secondary. He isn't asked to preach his opinions, but to teach history, and as long as he can do the latter without the former, then-eh... we must accept it."
"But aren't you afraid that he is going to be indoctrinating the students the moment you become more slack, perhaps in a much more subtle way for you to notice? And before you know it your students will be believing that Voldemort was a-a... tragic hero of his time, a misunderstood visionary of a better future..."
They reached the courtyard and stepped out of the castle. Professor Flitwick nodded his head indulgently, he understood her concerns, yet: "There's nothing more I could say to reassure you than what I already did. The instance we'd get a suspicion that he is... as you put it indoctrinating anyone... he'll be dismissed, I assure you."
She sighed and sat down on one of the benches.
Professor Flitwick, now eye to eye with her, asked her amused after a moment of silence: "Were we supposed to wait for years until you'd show up and gracefully decide to resume your post?"
"Hell yes!" She snapped, more out of frustration than out of anger, then sank her head into her hands. "I'm sorry," she said in a low, tired voice.
He sat down next to her. "It's been three years, Helena. You couldn't really have expected that. The provisorium we had, the arrangement with the ghost lasted for so long only because history wasn't considered a major subject around here. If it was Charms, or Transfiguration, it would have been filled much faster. We had to move on." He said in what was supposed to be an encouraging tone, but it made her only feel worse, for it reminded her of what George had said to her earlier: everyone has moved on... we all have moved on with our lives, except for you...
"But, if you want to stay," he continued when he saw her sad face, "I guess you could talk to Minerva, or perhaps to Horace. He's not retiring yet, but I hear him complaining every now and then, maybe he could agree to give away a few of his classes."
After a short pause of thinking Helen got up abruptly. "Alright, thank you very much, Filius. I will do that once Minerva is back. End of the month, right?"
He merely nodded, a little bewildered by the sudden change of her air.
"Good. I'll be off then."
"Well – where are you going?"
"Not sure yet. I heard Switzerland is nice at this time of year," she said brightly, gave him a hand, said good bye for now and left.
Sunnydale
The re-organizing and indexing of the books in his apartment took Giles several days and was surprisingly recreational and even rewarding: he had found a handful of volumes he thought were lost, and even some he hadn't known he possessed.
Yet after he was done with it, he again faced the emptiness and the feeling of lacking a purpose. The calls with tips about Buffy's possible whereabouts were getting more and more rare, and there were still almost two weeks to bridge until the start of the new school year.
He decided to clean and polish all of his weapons, asking himself at the same time just how much use he would have for them now that Buffy was gone. He wondered whether he and the Scoobies would now have more work at their hands with no slayer or whether it would get too boring for the vampires and the demons too, now they didn't have to worry about getting slain every time they crawled out, and would perhaps leave because of the lack of the adrenalin... But he knew that was a naïve and wishful thinking (plus adrenalin was probably something vampires didn't have anyway). If anything, the demons were probably throwing a huge party, a "requiem for the slayer" or something equally distasteful, wishing her dead wherever she was, and it wouldn't be too long before they'd become cheeky and go all rompish, making the streets and cemeteries uneasy again.
But right now all seemed calm in Sunnydale, Xander, Willow, Cordelia and Oz volunteered – some of them at least – to go on patrol every other night and Giles didn't object, only asked them to be careful. He continued his readings in the old medieval book. There was a lot he did not understand, many words, many subjects were referring to things from the wizarding world he had no way of knowing about. What was puzzling him though was the strong connection the texts were implying between the earth magick as he knew it and the "other" one, the magic of the wizards like Helen, who had wands. He had always thought that those two kinds were not to be mixed, that they in fact couldn't work alongside each other, that the possession of the one would automatically exclude any possible gifts of the other. And yet everything in this book would suggest otherwise.
Somewhere in the Swiss Alps
Upon her return to London Helen thought that she couldn't possibly spend another week in her apartment and that she could just as well go on another trekking trip to kill the time before she would be able to talk to Professor McGonagall. So a few days later she found herself in Graubünden in Switzerland, getting set up for the Via Valtellina, a 80 miles long trekking tour through the valleys of the Alps. To avoid the masses of the tourists on their holiday she occasionally left the marked path and went on her own, relying on her sense of direction that would always lead her the right way. One day though it almost looked as if she got lost and she was wandering for hours, pretty sure that she must have deviated from the marked path a great deal, when in the evening at long last she came across a small mountain hut called Zum Zauberlehrling. A huge wooden pointy hat hung over the letter Z and the last g was adorned by something that was probably supposed to be depicting a magic wand and sparkles, but whoever made it, clearly had a very wild imagination. Too long, too crooked, too... multicoloured. Helen smirked, muggles, and shook her head amused. And God, what a lame name."Sorcerer's apprentice"? George would love this.
As she approached the house, she saw a few guests sitting outside at the wooden tables, drinking mostly beer from large beer mugs. Some clearly were locals, others seemed to be tourists, passing by just like her. She sat down at a free bench and took off her rucksack with a tired moan. She was exhausted and yet pleased with herself – the wandering was helping a lot not to think of anything else, as she had to concentrate entirely on the road ahead, on every step in the unknown terrain, on every rock she would set her foot on – all that was demanding her focus just enough to forget anything else, George, Hogwarts, Giles... And now here, in the middle of nowhere, with the sky coloured breathtakingly by the sun setting somewhere behind the mountains and the hills that were surrounding her, it almost felt like there was nothing else to think of. She decided she'd have a beer too and would ask the waiter if they had a free bed inside for the night. She was just wondering whether someone would come out at all to take an order or whether she had to go in, when an old man with long grey hair and grey beard stepped out of the house, carrying a tray with filled mugs, and walked towards one of the groups. Helen narrowed her eyes, it was getting dark very fast between the high peaks, she wasn't sure he had noticed her, so she waved her hand at him right after he had served his other guests. He gave a short nod acknowledging that he saw her, put the tray on a free table and was walking towards her. There was a slight toddle in his walk that reminded Helen of someone...
AN: Thank you for reading. Lucius Malfoy teaching history – yeah, I know, pretty bad, but I just couldn't think of anyone else :)
Soon George will get some back-up and won't be the only one telling Helen off. Who the other person is, that you should see in the next update ;)
Pls. leave a comment, critics, any thought on this one is welcome.
