CHAPTER TWO: In which Professor Fairforest gives Dumbledore a piece of her mind and discusses the sex lives of vampires.
In case you're wondering, it was, in fact, that Potter kid who had also passed out after encountering the Dementors. Poppy Pomfrey was waiting at the station to see to us. I think she has a kind of sixth sense about these things. Or maybe the new professor just sent an owl. She wanted to keep us in the infirmary overnight, but Lupin insisted that cheer and good company was the best thing for dementor attacks. Harry's friends—the redhead boy and Hermione—had stayed with him, which I thought was very sweet of them, especially considering that he'd nearly led them to their deaths last year. Maybe he was some kind of mini cult leader in the making. Dumbledore definitely made a point of checking in on him.
Once Harry left, I had some choice words for Dumbledore. "You know, when you sent me that nice little owl about how there was an escaped murderer heading for Hogwarts, you might have mentioned that there would be literal, actual demons chasing after him, and that they might come after us! What the hell is going on here?"
Poppy vainly attempted to get me to sit back down on the hospital bed. McGonagall and Lupin stood by, watching. McGonagall looked torn between disapproval at my outburst and disapproval at Dumbledore.
To my surprise, Dumbledore did actually look concerned this time, unlike when I told him off last year for lying to me. "It was a terrible oversight," he said. "Please forgive me. I sent Professor Lupin along to look after Harry in case Sirius Black decided to put in an appearance, but I had no idea the Dementors would be bold enough to board the train."
"With all due respect, sir," I said, "There are hundreds of children on that train. Meaning no disrespect to Professor Lupin—" I looked over at Lupin to let him know that I meant it, and he gave a slight nod, "you sent one professor to protect the entire student body from a murderer and a horde of demons?"
"Two professors," said Dumbledore, looking at me over the top of his half-moon spectacles.
"I don't have magic!" I said, throwing my hands up in the air. "I don't think it would be very hard for those floaty bastards to kill me or anyone dumb enough to believe I could protect them!"
"And yet you did protect them," said Dumbledore, with a smugness that made me want to strangle him.
"Through sheer dumb luck!" I said.
"I understand your concern, Professor Fairforest," he said. "Let us be thankful that no more damage was done. I can assure you that every precaution is being taken to protect the students both from Sirius Black and those trying to capture him."
I was sorely tempted to say "the hell you are!" but restrained myself. I honestly don't think Dumbledore would ever fire me. I'm not even sure he would let me quit. But there was no sense in pushing it. I allowed Poppy to sit me back down on the bed.
"I look forward to seeing you all at the feast," said Dumbledore, and with that he swept out of the room in his long, bejeweled robes.
I kind of expected McGonagall to scold me, but she just shook her head worriedly and said, "I'm glad you're both all right."
I couldn't really tell what Lupin was thinking. He looked like he was putting a lot of effort into keeping a neutral expression and wasn't quite succeeding.
[Narrator: he was thinking that the way she told off Dumbledore was really hot and didn't know what to do with himself.]
I didn't blame him for not speaking up. It's not something you want to do on the first day of your new job.
"What are they, really, the—what did you call them again?"
"Dementors," said Lupin. "They're some of the foulest creatures to walk this earth."
"So I gathered," I said, with a grimace. Remembering it made me feel a little ill.
"Really, Remus," scolded Poppy, "I should think you of all people would know better than to discuss them with someone suffering from an encounter."
"Later, then," he said. Poppy shooed him out the door.
Before I could make my escape, Poppy insisted on putting a flower crown on my head to ward off the dementors—lavender, rose, and jasmine. Which is all very well for a festival or a renaissance faire or a bacchanal, but feels like a little much for a school feast. You would think that after all this time, I would have grown used to looking weird and out of place, but I felt my cheeks burning as I took my place down at the far end of the head table where the bottom-tier professors sit.
To my surprise, Lupin sat down beside me. A smile played around his lips as he looked at the flower crown.
"I feel like Lucy in Dracula," I said, barely resisting the urge to bury my face in my hands in embarrassment. Lord. He was even more attractive than I thought at first.
"He was a wizard, you know," said Lupin. "Stoker, I mean."
"What?" I said, setting down my cup in surprise.
"Yes. Dracula was based on his experiences as a vampire hunter, before hunting vampires was made illegal, of course." He helped himself to the canapes. "The characters are fictional. Sort of."
"Tell me everything," I said, leaning forward a little too enthusiastically. "Is he Seward? Or Jonathan?"
"Jonathan," he said, grinning.
"Damn it," I said. "I wrote a whole paper on how he was like Seward. But the hands-on aspect does make more sense." I scooped some dirigible-plum jelly onto my goat-cheese crackers. "So was Mina real too?"
"Oh, very real," he said. "Still living, actually. I did an internship under her in Transylvania."
"Get out of here," I said.
"Wizards live quite a long time, you know. At least…some of them do." He stared off into the Great Hall. He started, as if coming back to himself, and said, "It took her some time to come around to working with the vampires instead of hunting them."
"Why the change? Are they not as dangerous as in the book?"
"Oh they're dangerous," said Lupin, who was now on his fifth pumpkin pasty. "Many of them would have no qualms about killing humans, if left to their own devices. But they need the protection of the wizarding world, and most are willing to restrain themselves to have that protection. It's an uneasy balance. The law was put in place because, as I'm sure you know, there are wizards who tend to want to kill anything that's different from them."
"I see," I said.
"Besides," he added, "Not all of them are…bad. Most of them didn't get to choose whether or not they were bitten. They didn't want to be—to be monsters." There was a strange catch in his voice that made me turn to him, something in his voice that made my heart ache.
I wanted to ask more, to comfort him, to say something, but I felt paralyzed by barely knowing him. I searched desperately for something to say, almost certain that only trite, useless things would turn up.
And then, miraculously, as if I'd stumbled over it in the dark, I found what to say, even if the words felt thick and awkward in my mouth. "I'm sure it made a difference," I said. "Having someone who understood."
He smiled just the tiniest bit, like a sliver of sunshine on a very Scottish day. I couldn't tell if what I said had actually helped, or if he was just British-ing his way through it. "I hope so," he said.
We were silent for a moment, watching the gleeful chaos of the Great Hall. Hagrid had been placed by McGonagall for the announcement that he would be teaching Care of Magical Creatures this year. In light of recent events, Snape had chosen to sit on the far opposite end of the table, beside Professor Flitwick, who did not look thrilled about this arrangement.
"So how do you become a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher?" I said, taking a slice of shepherd's pie. "Do you have to go to school for it, or is it more practical training, like being a policeman?"
"It's not quite like getting a degree," he said. "It's more that you have to meet certain requirements, and then you get your certification to teach. So you have to intern for six months, and pass two exams—one on theory and one on practice. How you acquire that knowledge is a bit more flexible. Hogwarts gave me a good start, of course. The traditional route is to study under a few good professors who specialize in different areas. I gained a fair bit of…hands on experience during the war, and I've had to travel about a great deal for one reason or another, and learned about whatever Dark creatures or practices were in each place. There's no shortage of ways to get practical experience. But I also read as much about it as I can." He paused. "That was probably more than you wanted to know."
"No," I said. "This whole wizarding world thing is still pretty new to me. You see—I didn't know about the wizarding world at all before I started teaching here. I've been trying to learn as much as I can but there's still so much I don't know."
He raised both eyebrows. "How long have you been here?"
"About a year now," I said.
"And you didn't know anything about magic before that?"
"Nothing," I said. "Dumbledore conned me into taking the job. I was supposed to be an English teacher. Not that I'm complaining. I love it here. Even though it's batshit crazy. It feels like…the world is so much bigger and more alive now."
He nodded. "That's how I felt when I first came here."
"You were a student?" I asked.
His eyes twinkled. "Oh yes." He looked out at the crowd of students with a strange smile on his face.
I tried to imagine the imposing, scarred figure before me as a fresh-faced kid with chubby cheeks, or tall and awkwardly gangling. It was one of those moments when you realize how old you are, at least compared to how old you have been.
"It must be strange, being back as a teacher," I said.
"It is," he said, laughing. "I can't help but feel I've pulled some colossal prank, and at any moment McGonagall is going to tell me off."
"Were you a troublemaker?" I asked.
"Oh yes," he said. "We gave her a terrible time. My friends and I." He glanced over at her. "She seems to have forgiven me."
"What did you do?" I asked.
He laughed. "What didn't we do is more like it. Set off fireworks in the headmaster's office, snuck into the Slytherin common room and turned everything red and gold, charmed all the blackboards so they would only write curse words, rode a hippogriff through the great hall."
"And yet they still let you teach here," I said, grinning, and thinking about how scandalized my prim high school self would have been at such behavior. Or maybe I would have found it thrilling.
He shrugged. "Well, from what I hear, the job is cursed."
"Well, you are a defense against the dark arts professor," I said. "Maybe you'll find a way to break it."
"Maybe," he said. "What about you?" he asked, serving me a slice of treacle tart.
"Oh, I was depressingly well-behaved," I said. "Model student and all that. I don't think I even thought of getting into trouble on purpose. I didn't…have many friends, really. Not till I was older. Sometimes I wish—not that I had gotten in more trouble, necessarily, but…" I trailed off, not really sure how to finish the sentence, or what it was that I wanted. "Like…maybe I missed something, and I didn't even know I was missing it. I suppose that sounds silly." I was embarrassed that I had said so much to someone I didn't know—at least, not yet.
But when I looked at him, he looked as if he understood what I meant. "No," he said earnestly. "It doesn't sound silly at all."
I felt a strange ache in my chest as he said it. As if this small act of understanding was almost more than I could bear.
We were both quiet for a while after that.
Eventually, my mind wandered around to other things—my lesson plans for the next day, the somewhat belated safety meeting we were having about Sirius Black tomorrow morning (in all honesty it probably could have been an email) and back around to wondering about my dinner companion and our earlier conversation, and then I got into a rabbit trail over the implications of Bram Stoker's wizarding career. Which is how I ended up saying, without much preamble, "So it isn't a metaphor for sex, then. The vampires, I mean."
"Oh it's definitely a metaphor for sex," he said with a wicked grin.
Professor McGonagall gave us a disapproving look.
Up till that point, I'd been thinking about sex in the abstract—it's one of those ever-present aspects of academic discussion, so you get a little too comfortable bringing it up in everyday conversation. But as he turned to give me a conspiratorial look, something in his body language suddenly made me very aware of it on a more…practical level. I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and found myself staring at his large, graceful hands as he brushed his long hair out of his eyes. I could imagine him holding my face in those hands with an unsettling clarity.
Get a grip, Ophelia. You're at the school banquet, for crying out loud. I'm not even sure we're on a first name basis with this guy yet.
I cast about desperately for an appropriate change of subject from the sex lives of vampires or the nonexistent sex life of yours truly. "So, uh, did you ever meet any werewolves?"
Lupin choked on his drink.
Once he'd recovered enough to speak, he said, in a strangled voice, "Ehm, uh, no, not really—that is to say, a few, here and there—why do you ask?"
I shrugged. "People say there's werewolves in the Forbidden Forest."
"Ehm. There were some. A long time ago," he said. "So, I hear you've started a muggle library."
"Yeah," I said.
"I've read some muggle books, but not as many as I'd like," he said. "Do you have any recommendations?"
We fell into an animated conversation on books. Despite his disclaimer, he was clearly very well read.
Damn, what a man, I thought.
Last year, it hadn't really bothered me that men were a bit scarce around here. I was way too busy trying to get my feet under me, what with teaching and processing the existence of magic and all. There was Gilderoy Lockhart, who wasn't bad looking, but his massive ego and extreme incompetence kind of negated the attractiveness factor. I will confess that there was part of me that wanted to have a fling with him just to see what it would be like, but he was just so spectacularly incompetent. He did ask me out, but I think he mostly wanted material for his next book, Musings with Muggles.
There was also Snape. In the abstract, I could see Snape being attractive to the right sort of person (or maybe the wrong person) under the right circumstances (if you were sufficiently desperate). But in the current circumstances he was a horrible child-abusing little bitch and I certainly wasn't the one to fix that. As far as Hogsmeade went, the options were A) local farmer or B) maybe seducing a priest. There were some even more dubious options, like C) the castle ghosts or D) centaurs. Supposedly there were also werewolves in the Forbidden Forest. While a sexy Scottish farmer sounded appealing in the abstract, I was not really farm-wife material. The priest thing was obviously off the table for ethical reasons. People also made jokes about how hot the centaurs were but that seemed more than a little problematic from a number of angles. In short, I wasn't really sure how much of my reaction to Lupin was "oh wow a real live man who might be a viable dating option."
On the other hand, as he talked happily about his love of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, I got the feeling that even if there had been more hot men in Hogsmeade than in all of Fifi LaFolle's books put together, there was still something about this one.