"Well, that was a fun trip," Henry said cheerfully as he put his gloves away into a container by his desk. Marveling at the ring on his finger, he rubbed it a few times, thinking of his new wife.

Entirely unexpectedly, she showed up in the field trip, and then dragged him around for a few days before ending up at a wedding reception.

Henry liked that about her.

He had to get Professor Babbling to cover for him, though, as the wedding ended up going over his planned itinerary, but he didn't really mind.

He picked up some papers, skimmed through them, and sighed, before picking up a pen. "Still have to mark papers," he grumbled, and spent ten minutes doing exactly that.

Before getting bored again and spending far too much time staring at his ring.

There was a knock on his door, and Henry started, jumping from his chair almost literally. Unusually, Dolores Umbridge stumbled into the room, and Henry could smell the faint smells of intoxication wafting from her body.

"Dolores?" Henry blinked. This was highly irregular.

"Henry," Umbridge muttered, stumbling into a desk. "Henry."

"Yes, that's my name," Henry snarked, but went up to her anyway. "Are you drunk?"

"Got anything stronger than Firewhiskey?" Umbridge retorted, before sighing and slamming her head onto the desk. "The hell am I doing here, Greengrass?"

"I don't know, why are you here?" Henry said, shifting awkwardly. "This is my office."

Umbridge burped and sighed. "I hate kids. How'd I get Cornelius to talk me into this...?"

Henry stared blankly at her for a few seconds. "...You hate kids."

"Mm." Umbridge took a swig of her Firewhiskey, burping flames.

"You're teaching. In a school. And you hate kids."

"'S not really teaching," Umbridge said. "Jus'...teachin' them how not to be an army."

Henry blinked. "...you are aware that Dumbledore isn't actually making an army, right?"

Umbridge scowled, then slammed her hands on the desk, furious. "And how do you know?!"

Henry sighed, rubbing his forehead. "...Albus is old, Dolores. Even if he were running to become Minister, he'd be dead within the decade. What would be the point of raising an army for very little gain?"

Umbridge frowned deeper, and Henry sighed again, rolling his head around his neck and cringing at the pop that it gave. Finally she spoke. "...what?"

Henry just blinked. "Dumbledore's going to be dead within the decade; he's far too old to become Minister, regardless, and even if he was, his term would last, what, five years?" Henry shrugged. "Hardly an amount of time that needs to be rushed, I'd say. Also, like I told my father: they're school-children. Hardly good enough to fight full-fledged Aurors."

Umbridge blinked and then, quite literally, broke down in front of Henry, tears cascading off of her face as she bawled her eyes out and crumpled to the floor, knocking the Firewhiskey to the ground. Henry hastily activated the silencing runes he had planted in the room. "All of this was for NOTHING?!"

Henry shrugged. "Pretty much, yeah."

Umbridge was at that odd stage between anger and despair that Henry was intimately familiar with, including the incoherent nonsense that she vented, so he sat down and leaned back in his chair, waiting for the storm to pass.

There were knocks at the door that Henry was more than willing to ignore (a quick glance at his clock showed that it was time for his next class), but Henry waited for Umbridge to at least pass the conflicting stage. Indeed, half a minute later, Umbridge stopped ranting and raving and instead went deathly quiet.

"Dolores," Henry asked gently. "I have a class now, so if you would be so kind as to depart? I'll talk with you later, I promise. Do try not to kill anyone on the way out," he added as an afterthought.

Umbridge just sat there, and Henry sighed, before physically pushing her chair to the corner and writing privacy runes around the corner and on the desk. The space around Umbridge folded and bent, and suddenly Henry felt like she wasn't even there, even though he logically understood that she was.

Henry released the silencing runes and unlocked the door, greeting them as he walked back towards his desk. "Good morning, class." The students flooded in, some responding to Henry's greeting with a nod, or a "good morning, Professor," some just flat out ignoring him. Henry couldn't blame them, particularly, as they were the ones that went on the field trip.

"I see that some of you are half-dead," Henry chuckled, amid a round of scattered laughter. "Did you enjoy the trip?" The dead-looking students nodded but still kept silent, heads already meeting their desks. Henry chuckled again (he, himself, was far too tired to laugh, let alone how the children must feel), and turned towards the board. "I believe we were on reticulating arrays? Surely, Babbling discussed something about the topic."

A fourth-year Hufflepuff raised his hand. Henry called on him. "Um...we were still doing Berg's theorems."

Henry blinked. "Really?" A quick shuffle of his notes later, he found the section they were supposed to be on. "Huh. Well, alright. What did Babbling go over?"

"It was mostly just vocabulary and effects of the runes in certain positions on the two-dimensional rune matrix," a Ravenclaw responded after Henry called on her.

Henry raised his hands to the sky. "Why." The class giggled at this. "Well, okay, that is important stuff, but, well, whatever. Which one are we on...? Ah, his fifteenth." He wrote down a nice, large 15 on the board. "Okay. So, Berg's fourteenth theorem says that crossing two ley lines is impossible. On that same vein, Berg's fifteenth theorem says that crossing two polar runes is also impossible, for the exact same principles. You don't know what polar runes are, yet, that's fine, so we can safely skip that, although you should still probably write it down." Henry wrote it out on the board - 'It is impossible to cross two polar runes directly.' - and continued.

"The sixteenth theorem..." A nice, large 16. "This one is important - the magical overload effect - if enough magic is pushed through a circuit, it can and very often will break, as you well know. The overload effect is actually a very systematic effect, in that if any magical runic array is overloaded, it will reliably generate a specific sequence of leakage - but that sequence is dependent on the runic array in question." He wrote down on the board, 'It is known that any two arrays of exact properties will fail in the exact same way.' He then elaborated, "What this means is, say I had a standard protection rune embedded in this desk here. Mr. Corner, what would happen if I overloaded this?"

"It would explode," the Ravenclaw answered, bored, and the class snickered.

Henry shrugged. "Well, yes, but go into more detail."

"It would explode violently," the Ravenclaw answered again.

"Ah, no," Henry said, "the explosion isn't particularly more or less violent than a normal overload, but it does explode with yellow sparks everywhere, and what exactly happens is that these two parts of the array," he pointed to the top and bottom of the array, which had little nubs at the end, "would overload pretty spectacularly, causing the entire array to fall apart. With Berg's sixteenth theorem, we can actually mitigate this effect by placing suppressor runes around it, around these areas specifically, and it would nullify the entire overload sequence. Of course, then the suppressor runes themselves could be overloaded, but it's more difficult to overload a rune whose entire purpose is to prevent overload."

"Artemis?" his father called through the mirror on his desk; his voice was controlled but with an audible note of urgency. Henry blinked at the voice, and the class stilled. "It's an emergency: please get back to the Greengrass Garden immediately."

As soon as his voice died down, Henry ran out of the classroom, putting his suit jacket on as he ran.

"ALBUS!" the Squib Professor called as he entered the hallway towards his office. He tapped the gargoyle statue on the head with a rune, and it moved aside easily; Henry sprinted up the stairs. "ALBUS, I NEED YOUR FLOO!"

The Headmaster looked up from the paperwork on his desk and smiled pleasantly. "Ah, Hen-"

"NO TIME," Henry shouted, and grabbed Dumbledore's robe, to his shock. "Protect my sisters with your life," he stressed, before grabbing the Floo and throwing it violently into the fireplace. "GREENGRASS GARDEN!"

Dumbledore blinked, then looked around his office. "Fawkes? I need you." The familiar call of the phoenix made him smile.

Henry exited the Floo, quickly analyzed the situation, then went into his pockets, grabbing paper barrier runes and throwing them down haphazardly, activating them as he ran around the burning building. He swore as a piece of flaming rubble came crashing down in front of him, but jumped over it gamely and went on his way. He opened the door to his father's study, but didn't find him there, so he ran to the master bedroom instead.

He found people with dark cloaks and shimmering masks standing outside of the door; he punched the closest one with an explosion array in his hand, and that one fell backwards onto the others, where they all exploded violently. Henry placed another explosion rune on the doorway, clenching his free hand around some more paper arrays, and the instant it exploded, he jumped in.

The people with masks noticed the explosions and pointed their wands at the doorway, but Henry was faster: he placed runes directly onto the two robed men in front of him and ran quickly into the middle of the room, barely assessing his mother's fallen form and his father hovering over her as he flew into action. The two men he placed runes on suddenly seized, and Henry flung two special knives into the wall in front of him; the instant they were embedded into the wall, lightning shot out from the seal, electrocuting all of the foreign wizards, and reached the knives across the room.

"Dad, what's going on?" Henry quickly asked, looking around to see if he missed anything.

"Your mother," Henry's father struggled to say. "A stray curse -" here they both had to duck to dodge a curse. Henry flung a knife directly towards the man that fired the curse, and it pierced through his forehead like butter, killing him instantly. "She was hit, earlier, and I tried to stabilize her -"

The other door exploded, at the same time as the window, and Henry bit down a curse, throwing protection runes here and there, the pieces of paper being flung around like knives. Throwing a stack of papers on the ground, he picked up his mother from his father's arms, and placed her on the resulting cloud, saying "Get to Hogwarts. Quickly."

The cloud flew away at a surprisingly quick speed, his mother lying on it all the while. His father hesitated, and Henry took advantage of his hesitation, driving a sharp fist to the back of his neck, where he fell unconscious.

Carrying the limp body, he sprinted back towards the Floo, cloud trailing him all the while, before a well-aimed curse hit him in the back and he fell, both of them collapsing.

Henry dimly noticed a burst of flame from the fireplace, before all turned black.

Notebook

January 15 (one day before the events of this chapter)

Doesn't something in the air feel off to you...? Well, you're a book, I don't think you'd understand.

Anyway, today was boring to the point where I hope something exciting happens tomorrow. Nothing eventful happened today, except maybe grading papers, but even if I think it's surprising how quickly they're advancing through the curriculum, it's still nothing too special. Maybe I'm just used to geniuses.

Well, tomorrow's another day.

Henry