Disclaimer: I do not own either Harry Potter or Hetalia. They belong to their respectful owners.
The meeting was held in the staff room. Luckily for France, he walked with Dumbledore, or he would probably never have found it. It was located on the ground floor, and the door was guarded by two stone gargoyles They gave France a questioning look as he passed. The inside of the long staff room was nice, with different brown chairs scattered about. In the middle was a table, where the other teachers at the school were waiting. As they saw Dumbledore and France, they fell quiet.
Dumbledore sat down at the head of the table, while France got to sit between the woman dressed in the hideous pink colour and a woman with eyes hidden behind thick glasses. Not the most exciting place to sit.
"So", Dumbledore started, "welcome back to another school year. As I said at dinner, this year we have Dolores Umbridge and Francis Bonnefoy here as new teachers, again, welcome to Hogwarts". France nodded to the rest of the staff, while Dolores gave a smile that didn't reach her eyes.
"We also have Wilhelmina Grubbly-Plank here as a substitute for Hagrid, who have taken some time off". The mentioned professor nodded, much like France, to the rest of the staff.
"How many NEWT-classes do we have this year?" Dumbledore started and thus the staff meeting began. It was a completely new feeling for France, being at a meeting where people actually paid attention and didn't shout at each other or sleep. Every teacher respected each other, listened and spoke out when they were called upon.
While the transfigurations teacher, Minerva McGonagall from the entrance hall, talked about her NEWT and OWL classes, France noticed a pile of papers in front of him. As he examined them, he discovered that they were lists of all the students taking History of Magic. As a mandatory subject for all students until their sixth year, he wasn't surprised by the numbers. What did surprise him though, was how many students in their sixth and seventh years were taking the subject. It turned out that he had a whole NEWT-class (he later learned that this was the final exam, the "Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test" (very fitting name)) consisting mostly of students from Ravenclaw. Not a surprise, really. He was amazed that there was students in the NEWT-class at all, considering the incredibly boring teaching which the former teacher was infamous for.
FRance looked at his timetable as the herbology teacher, a round woman with a kind face, talked about her plans for the school year. Monday morning he started out with a fifth year class, just for 1½ hour, which he opted to spend talking about what they had to go through during the course of the school year. But following, he had a double lesson with the NEWT-class, and there he could maybe spend half of the time on the curriculum, but he also needed to prepare some actual teaching..
"Francis", France looked up from his papers", what are your plans for the year?"
It was Dumbledore who asked. The rest of the teachers looked at him, while he gathered his thoughts.
"Bon (well), after seeing ze curriculum from last year, I decided to take a different approach. With ze classes from première (first) to quatrième (fourth) I plan to go through ze origin of magic and ze different types of Magic in ze world. Zen with ze older ones, we will look at ze different wars in magic, ze second World War affect on wizards, ze war with Grindelwald and ze war with You-Know-Who".
It wasn't because France didn't want to say Voldemort's name, but after what that woman said at dinner, he had arrived at the conclusion that he probably shouldn't. He could see the displeasing look on her face at the mentioning of the war with Voldemort. If he just waited for a bit…
"Mr. Bonnefoy, are you sure that would be a good idea?"
France knew she would ask (or at least that someone would ask), so he and England had prepared a speech he could use to justify.
"Of course it is, Mademoiselle Umbridge. The war with You-Know-Who 'ave 'ad a big influence on ze wizarding world. Even though he is gone", here France gave Dumbledore a subtle wink, "ze British wizards still fear him. An event like zat, zat means so much now, is certainly important for ze history. So I see no reason why ze students, only ze older of course, should not learn about it".
He had remembered most of what England had told him to say. England had been very insisting that France taught the students about the war with Voldemort, especially because of his return. If there was one thing that France knew for certain, it was that you could (and should) learn from history. If something failed once, you shouldn't try to do it again. Of course, this wasn't always true, not even for he and England, who were practically history itself. Some things had been repeated many times.
But just because the nations couldn't help but repeat themselves, the wizards didn't have to follow! Take his current situation: France had never thought that he would be at a meeting, with other people, were they didn't end up screaming at each other (and where France didn't flirt with someone. However this aspect did not please him). But here they were, doing just that, something which nations had been unable to do for generations (much to Germany's dismay). That could sound a bit exaggerated, but as long as France had been around, he had never experienced a peaceful meeting like this. Not even when it was just the Allies meeting during the war. They had been just five nations (maybe six, something was telling him) and that hadn't even worked.
The speech had worked wonders for most of the teachers, but Dolores still didn't look convinced. As she observed the others, she looked like she reached the same conclusion as France had just arrived at: that she couldn't do much about it at the moment. And besides, Dumbledore had already approved France's curriculum for the year, so he was good to go.
…
The meeting drew to a close with the report from the potions teacher, a slick man with a crooked nose and (like the rest of the school) a preference for black clothes. However, most of the other teachers didn't follow the black trend. The headmaster, for example, was in a midnight-blue robe with small specks of yellow, like the wizarding robes non-magical people would buy. The woman with the big eyes (whom he had discovered taught divination) was dressed in a mixture of red, orange, yellow and purple. Not that it was pretty by any means, it was quite terrible honestly, but it had colour, something France didn't know he could miss so much - and he hadn't even been at the school for a full day.
Dumbledore rose from his chair at the head of the table and clapped his hands together to get everyone's attention.
"That must be it for tonight, we have all grown tired. The lessons start tomorrow at eight. Head of Houses, remember to hand out the timetables at breakfast. Oh, and most importantly, have a good night's sleep! Mr. Bonnefoy, would you please follow me?"
Before Dumbledore had finished speaking, the other teachers were already on their way out the door. They were obviously tired from the day and wanted to be prepared for tomorrow's rush. France was lucky in that aspect, where a normal adult person ideally needed 7 to 9 hours of sleep, France just needed 5 to 7 hours as a nation. They had never figured out why this was, but in certain situations it was good not to have to sleep that much.
That small detail came in handy now, as he would probably spend a lot of time talking to the headmaster. They were the last to leave the room and headed down one of Hogwarts' many hallways. France eventually lost count of the times they had turned down a new hallway. Eventually, they even went through one of the paintings!. It was a 'still' of a landscape. When France thought of it as a 'still', he meant that it didn't have any people or animals in it. It was just a landscape of what may have been the Scottish highland with wind blowing in the moving paintings didn't surprise France at all as they were common for all wizards. Beauxbatons had lots of them, but mostly only in the great hall. At Hogwarts, they were everywhere. Almost all the walls were covered by paintings, which were looking, pointing and speaking to each other.
They ended up in front of a giant statue, one that even France thought was a bit prosperous. It was a gargoyle which looked much like the ones guarding the staff-room, except this one was a lot bigger and stood in its own little circular room in the wall.
"Ah, here we are," Dumbledore said as he walked towards the gargoyle,"Fizzing Whizbee".
Before France could comment on the wonderful choice of password (who would have guessed that the password to the headmaster's office was the name of a candy!), the gargoyle swung aside to reveal a passage.
The office was beautiful. France had always had a thing for oval rooms, especially the ones decorated in a specific style. He was, however, more into the extravagance of places like Versailles than this "wizarding lair" vibe Dumbledore had going on.
On the walls hung pictures of previous headmasters and mistresses. There were also portraits of others whom France didn't think to have been headmasters, but maybe they hung there as a sort of honourable mentions. Like the magical pictures in France, the images moved around. They were talking to each other and some even visited their neighbours. France couldn't recognise any of the people in the portraits, but that didn't come as a surprise. He hadn't been invested enough in his own magical world to know all the headmasters of Beauxbatons, so of course he didn't know much about England's school.
That reminded him of how it had always amazed him that the British Isles had their own magical school. Beauxbatons took in students not only from France, but also from Spain, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Durmstang managed the entire north, consisting of the Nordic and Baltic countries, with ties all the way down to Bulgaria. So how Hogwarts could manage with only students from England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland had always intrigued him.
"Zat is a magnifique (magnificent) creature!" France exclaimed. He had seen the Phoenix sitting in the middle of the room and couldn't take his eyes of it.
Normally you didn't see Phoenixes as far north as Scotland. Last time France had seen one was probably over a hundred years ago during a visit to Egypt (Egypt… He had always found it a little too sandy).
"Yes, that is Faux, my Phoenix" Dumbledore said as he moved over to the table at the end of the room.
"You are welcome to help yourself to some", Dumbledore continued, gesticulating to a bowl of... black things on the table. "But be careful, they can be a little snappy". France wasn't one to say no to any food he hadn't tried before, so he took one of things he presumed to be some kind of candy. It bit his cheek, so he quickly bit down on it. One thing he would never understand was wizards' fascination with food that was moving and alive with magic. Why in the world would you want to eat something that bites back?
"Here it is" Dumbledore said as he opened a cabinet. Inside were mirrors, framing a little pond. This all had a very mystical aura that France loved. So far, he had seen too few mystical things, especially considering they were currently in a magical hot tub.
"Then let us get started", France said as he let his hair fall and extracted the first memory he thought of.
Ehm, I'm sorry for the long delay… I really don't have a good excuse to why it's so long since last time… One thing you have to understand about me is that I live in a constant writers-block, with moments of motivation. Mostly this motivation appears around Christmas, or when I read enough in the fandoms to get me hooked again.
So, I hoped you enjoyed the chapter! I promise, next time you see me, I will try to actually get a plot in the story (might not be in next chapter, but the one after that). I have no plan about abandoning this, but I will not be a regular uploader. Mostly because I care about what I post, if I don't like it, it will never see the light of day.
Thanks for the follows, favourites and revives!