Harry stood on platform 9 ¾ wondering what the following year would bring. More Charms, more Occlumency, hopefully, and hopefully some money from the Room of Requirement. It all sort of depended though, on the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor.
He entered the train and started looking for a compartment. If the new DADA professor was a psychopath like Twix had been, then the year might derail, like the last one had.
All in all, Harry had set his intentions and one of them was staying out of trouble, so no matter what, he wasn't going to get involve-.
"I'm sorry, but can you maybe get out of the way? You're blocking the corridor," someone suddenly said behind him. The boy frowned as he realised that he'd gotten too caught up in his thoughts. He stepped aside, pressing himself against the warmly coloured panelling making up the inside of the train and looked at who had spoken to him. A first-year was the first thing that he noted. She had no colours on her tie, but she was almost as tall as him. He frowned at the fact that this body wasn't growing quite as fast as his last one. Annoying.
"Thank you," the girl said and hurried past him, as if wanting to get away from something, or to somewhere. She had curly black hair and from a look that she threw behind herself, he could see that she had grey eyes.
"You're welcome," Harry muttered, shook his head and entered the compartment that he was standing next to. He re-applied the feather-weight charm on his luggage as he dragged the giant leather trunk inside and heaved it over his head and onto the bars drilled in on top of the seats. He could have used the levitation charm, in hindsight, but despite his magical ability he sometimes still slipped back into a muggle mindset. It was something that he would have to get rid of.
"Heya Harry," a voice suddenly said from the compartment door as it opened and the afore-mentioned boy smiled as he turned his head to behold a Penny standing at his door. The blonde didn't particularly care for niceties or politeness apparently and before he had the time to return the greeting, he was getting full-body glomped.
"Hey Penny, it's been a while, hasn't it?" he asked, being released from the sneeze-inducing labyrinth of blonde hair intermingling with his own red one. An owl hooted from where the girl had left her luggage.
"It was sooo boring at home in comparison to France, you can't believe it. You have to visit me next summer. Or else," she threatened as she cast the levitation charm on her luggage and laboriously magicked it to its place. It wobbled dangerously as it did so, but its destination it did reach. Harry considered helping but wanted to see where the girl stood in terms of her magical abilities outside of Potions. He was impressed by what she'd managed. That trunk was heavy.
"It sucks that it didn't work out this summer, but I'm sure we can manage next, I don't think I'm skipping any more grades," Harry joked.
"You managed, then?"
"Yeah, barely, I'll be in third-year Charms and second-year Arithmancy. I'll keep relying on your help with my potions work though."
"Congratulations," Penny said begrudgingly, some negative emotion in her eyes. Harry remembered the dissatisfaction that had come out when she'd been drunk in France, about his advancement. Now, Penny wasn't really a jealous person, nor was she unable to celebrate the victories of other people. So the likely reason for her saltiness, which she wasn't able to articulate was…
"You're still my best friend you know and we only won't see each other in one class," he said gently and leaned back in his seat. Penny huffed, crossed her arms and looked out of the window.
"We also won't see each other in Arithmancy, when I take it next year."
"Yeah, but in return I'll be able to help you with Arithmancy like you help me with Potions."
"That's true, you can do my homework when I don't feel like it," she said, causing Harry to roll his eyes. He wasn't about to do anyone's homework. Most of the time he barely even had the energy to do his own.
"Who's your new friend?" he asked, instead of pursuing the topic further, and pointed to Penny's left, where a thin metal owl cage with a soft-looking barn owl in it occupied a seat. It hooted when the attention of the room shifted towards it. Penny looked at the owl and smiled.
"That's Perry, you're hard to stay in contact with, you know?" she said accusingly. "I used the leeway my good grades got me to ask for an owl of my own. My parents almost never let me borrow Petrold."
Harry nodded along with her explanation, it hadn't been easy staying in contact with Penny and Cedric during the summer vacation. Penny sent a letter about once a week, and Cedric even less. Although it had been funny seeing the Diggory family owl arrive exhausted on the southern coast of France one day, due to the boy forgetting that his friends were on the continent. The owl had been none too pleased at that and the regularity of the letters had dropped even further after. While Penny and Cedric were Harry's best friends at Hogwarts, he couldn't really say that he was too beat up about the slight drop in communication during the summer. They were still children and he'd never particularly liked texting, something that had translated over into writing letters.
"What kind of grades did you get?" he asked, at which Penny put up a fist and started counting off subjects, finger by finger with furrowed brows as if concentrating intensely.
"I got an O+ in Potions, an O in Herbology and Charms, an EE in Transfiguration, Astronomy and an A in Defence Against the Dark Arts and History of Magic." She said proudly. It was impressive having an O in three main subjects, but the DADA grade was a bit sad. They sort of just hadn't had an instructor for the last two or three weeks there and Twix had never been such a good professor in the first place.
"Are you guys already talking about grades?" a voice suddenly asked from the compartment door as Cedric strolled in, pushing his luggage and carrying an oddly broom-shaped wrapped object. "You know we're not even at Hogwarts yet, right?"
"Not only grades, this nerd advanced a year in Charms and started Arithmancy early," Penny snorted, pointing derisively at Harry, who raised his chin, refusing to be shamed for his academic "achievements." Cedric made googly eyes at him.
"That is bonkers. Completely bonkers," he said and sat down, clutching his broom, but levitating his trunk up just like Penny had. He shuffled the stick in his hands and smiled mischievously.
"What's that broom-shaped object you got there?" Harry asked, knowing that Cedric was unlikely to brag without a prompt. He saw Penny roll her eyes and lean back in fake disinterest as she started twirling her hair around her fingers.
Cedric grinned, before smiling genuinely at Harry. "It's all thanks to you mate. I got an O+ in transfiguration and my parents bought me a new broom. Cleansweep 900. Top of the line unless you got a nimbus," he said proudly, waving his package around dangerously, smacking it against the red and gold motifs on the walls and almost hitting himself in the head.
Harry whistled appreciatively, although he definitely had no idea what having a Cleansweep 900 meant. A bit of an ironic name for a racing broom in fact. If you tried to use one for actual sweeping a quidditch fan was likely to try to murder you. "You're gonna try out for the team?"
"Been practising all summer, ate so many bugs you can't even count." Was Cedric's proud reply.
"Ewwww," Penny moaned and leaned away from the boy, as if trying to get away from him, "that's not something to be proud of.«"
Cedric crossed his arms and turned away from her. "Well, I don't bring up how you smell after you spend the whole day making potions. Quidditch requires sacrifice, I guess you wouldn't get that."
"What is that supposed to mean?" Penny said with narrowed eyes. Harry felt like he should intervene, even if on a purely emotional level he rather felt like getting some popcorn.
He didn't even like popcorn.
"You know, you're," Cedric blustered, pointing, vaguely in Penny's direction, as if that was indicative of anything. The girl crossed her arms.
"I'm a what, Diggory?" she asked, and the offender looked haplessly in Harry's direction.
He shrugged at the wannabe quidditch star. He'd dug his own hole there, although, maybe he should help.
"He's just being an idiot. He probably wants to say that we're not as good at flying as him and aren't aiming for the team. But obviously, even fans can have opinions. Quidditch wouldn't be very fun if no one came out to watch it," Harry intervened, trying to unruffle the feathers. Penny harrumphed and looked away from both of them, as Cedric laughed awkwardly. Harry looked at the boy and violently jerked his head towards the girl in the compartment, 'do something,' he said with his gaze, only for Cedric to be saved by the bell. The bell came in the form of the Weasley twins and Lee Jordan, who entered the compartment as if they owned it.
"Hey guys, how was your summer?" one of them asked, while the other two idiots barely contained their laughter. They were all holding something behind their backs.
"Great, my parents gave me a broom!" Cedric gloated, at which point Harry decided that he didn't want to be a part of whatever the prank was and slipped behind the Gryffindors when they got distracted by the shiny thing. Boys and sports equipment, a truly deadly combo. He glanced back and saw that the trio were holding dung bombs. Deciding to spare the rest of the train, he flicked his hand from where he was now standing at the dung bombs, sending out a small flicker of fire at each of them, before closing the door. He got to watch as the trio of pranksters and his two friends froze when the iconic sounds of dung bombs going off resounded throughout the room. They all turned to where he was watching them through the glass window of the compartment door, on which Harry decided to graciously apply the sticking charm. It was going to be on their curriculum this year and he felt like helping them prepare a bit in advance by familiarising them with the spell's effect. The moment the screams started he also added a muffliato on top, to not disturb the other passengers. He started walking away, deciding to come back in a bit, after they'd aired out with the window. The whistle of the train blew and they started moving along slowly as Harry began strolling down the compartments in boredom, most everyone else being seated and being too busy catching up with their friends to have to go out and take a break.
It felt nice to stretch his legs and he eventually managed to reach the last compartment where he was planning on catching the last bit of quiet he was going to get for the year,. It was there that he heard some harsh breathing.
The Hogwarts Express had a pretty iconic structure, with compartments being on the right, if one were walking towards the end, with a small square of space next to the exit stairs on every cart. Therefore Harry was able to quickly identify the location that the sound was coming from to be this square, which he quickly brought into his view by propelling himself towards it with his legs. There he found a young woman with black curly hair sitting on the ground with her face between her knees. The hair looked like the girl from earlier, but the body was bigger. Harry hesitated, before deciding to do what any other person in his situation would have likely done as well if it had been him on the floor. He sat down on the vibrating floor opposite of the girl and asked her how she was doing. Well, not how, because the answer was obvious, the question sounded rather like.
"It's rough, innit," he stated, eliciting a small laugh. The woman, a Hufflepuff by her tie, looked up and smiled sadly.
"Such a philosopher, Harry," she said in a voice that he recognized.
"Is everything alright, Tonks?" Harry asked, quick on the uptake. He'd never seen Tonks without brightly coloured hair, and it struck him that she looked far more subdued without it. Perhaps being a metamorphmagus wasn't such a good gift for children to have. It allowed them to fake happiness much too easily. Wet eyes and runny mascara? Tonks could probably have all traces of it gone in a minute.
"Have you ever told you what I want to be after Hogwarts, Harry?«"
"I don't remember the specifics. Would you mind sharing?"
"I've always wanted to be an Auror, my uncle is one and he was integral in ending the last war," Tonks began, before stopping.
"I can't imagine it's a very easy job. It sounds almost like you're a soldier in case of war," Harry prompted. Tonks shook her head in agreement.
"It's a hard job. Thankless. It's where I see myself."
"I think you'd make a great Auror," Harry lied, thinking about the police he'd known in his previous life. If muggle and magical police had anything in common, Tonks' moral values wouldn't really align. This is also what had presumably happened in the books, the reason she'd joined the Order of the Phoenix
"If I ever manage to even qualify for the academy. Alastor Moody, James Potter, Sirius Black. The standards are higher than ever and the amount of Outstandings you need to even get admitted to auror training, which you can still fail…"
Harry listened to Tonks, as she explained to him the requirements in place for being an auror. It seemed like a tough nut to crack, perhaps because James and Sirius had raised the prestige of the department. According to Tonks, almost one in four people in her grade wanted to become Aurors. She wasn't as academically gifted as some of them, and she was afraid that she'd be unable to pursue her dream. Harry assumed she did not wish to take advantage of family connections and might even avoid doing so.
Worrying about grades - he knew that. There had been exams he'd taken in his previous life, of which the failure would have had him expelled from his department. The stress had ended up getting to him several times and he'd been in no better state than Tonks was now, shivering and stuttering on the floor as she was. Not particularly caring for whatever the girl was saying in particular, Harry let himself fall forward and enveloped her in a hug, just as she was about to repeat for the third time how she was going to fail.
He felt her go still in his arms and considered if he was overstepping. He decided to ignore that consideration and stroked the girl's hair.
"It's going to be alright," he said as he tightened his hold. In his perhaps misogynistic opinion, women generally weren't very interested in solutions to their problems, but rather emotional support. They generally already knew what they needed to do, whereas men lost themselves in solutions to replace the complexity of their emotional state with something they actually understood.
"You can't say that," Tonks protested weakly, to which Harry shook his head.
"Tonks, you're going to do great and if academics aren't your strong suit, then you'll just have to excel in another direction. Academies don't look at grades only, you know," he said, after a minute, considering her sufficiently calm.
"But it's too late to become a prefect," she said and Harry got an idea, a diabolical idea, a great idea.
"When we come to Hogwarts, Tonks, fight me," he said as he released the metamorphmagus from the hug and looked her seriously in the eyes. Hers held mostly confusion while his brimmed with conviction.
"What, why?"
"What do aurors look for? Combat potential. Fight me and let's see where you stand. There's a duelling championship for people under 17 and if you do well enough they won't be able to not take you," he explained and some understanding appeared in a pair of now golden eyes, haloed by bright red hair, similar to his own.
He left out the fact that she'd find it very hard to not get accepted, considering her shape-shifting ability. Unfair, but reality.
Tonks, for her part, looked convinced but was looking at him doubtfully. "You're in your second year."
Harry shook his head. "How about we find out what that actually means?" he taunted.
"You know what, challenge accepted," she said as she stood up, dusted herself off and offered him a hand up. Harry took up it and they shared a meaningful look in that abandoned square of the Hogwarts Express, as the tracks chugged along, the train whistled and the English countryside passed them by in a blur, as seen through the window on the door. Harry felt like he'd made a friend, but considering how flaky teenage girls were, he would settle with a duelling partner.
-/-
When Harry entered the great hall, having gone with the rest of the student body, excluding the first-years, the first thing that he looked for was any changes to the staff table. Other than Vector winking at him, the first time he'd seen her after her little prank, there were two things that he noted down as he sat down with the Puffs. Firstly, Quirrell was gone. This was the year that he had taken the sabbatical in the books and had returned with Voldemort stuck to the back of his head. Replacing him was a bubbly woman, whom he assumed to be his replacement for the position of muggle studies professor. She didn't look like she could hurt a fly. Of course, she could have also been the DADA professor, because quite frankly, most of those people hadn't really fit the role either. He didn't think so, however, because, between Flitwick and Hagrid, there was an empty seat. He glared at it as the sorting commenced, knowing that he wouldn't get his answer until it was over. He needed to know the identity of the DADA professor, to see if there were going to be more problems this year. He turned to the first years and glared at them too, trying to make the whole thing go by faster. It didn't work, he looked at the hat, who, at this point, could be considered a friend and tried to communicate with his eyes.
"Slytherin!" It shouted, after having taken a minute to determine that. Harry started tapping his foot against the stone floor of the hall and ignored Cedric's and Penny's conversation even harder than he had been doing before. They were just talking about some werewolf attack in London. Appropriately horrific to draw a child's attention.
Why was there an empty space at the table?
"Harley, Black." McGonagall read from the parchment which held the student names, looking as pinched as ever. Murmurs erupted in the hall, more than they had for any student previously. They gained Harry's attention as the black-haired girl that he'd seen in the corridor slowly walked up to the hat. The others were discussing Neville Longbottom in relation to the girl, which made sense since their fathers were presumably still best friends. But this wasn't necessarily something that was supposed to be public knowledge, right? Having a well-known parent didn't mean that the child would gain any of that recognition. He turned to his friends, who'd fallen silent and were watching the sorting too closely than putting on a hat really merited.
"Who's she?" Harry asked. "People seem to know her."
"She's the daughter of a famous Auror. Also, she's friends with the boy who lived, I've seen them in the papers together. She's always standing in front of him. It's like they're brother and sister, they say," Penny whispered to him, not taking her eyes off the girl in question. Harry digested the information he'd just been given. With the importance that Neville had in modern history if he hadn't been removed from the wizarding world as Harry had been, then he would have attracted some paparazzi, wouldn't he? And thus, by association, the people around him would gain unwanted attention as well, which explained the whispering. If Harley Black was Neville Longbottom's best friend, then she probably didn't have much of a reason to like reporters. He threw the girl a pitying gaze and discerned that she was wearing a blank mask of a face but underneath that. her closed eyes looked sad and she was biting her lip. As the hat opened its mouth Harry realised that the girl looked like she was about to cry.
"Hufflepuff!" The hat shouted eventually, the girl seemingly having fought an internal battle with Harry's Occlumency teacher. The girl stood up shakily amidst the applause of the great hall and walked to the table of badgers, before freezing for a moment. She was the first student sorted into the house, and there wasn't an obvious space for her to sit. Harry moved to the right of the bench from where his group was sitting, opening up a spot in between them. He gave Harley a pitying look and she sat down next to him.
He hadn't been the only one who'd opened a spot so he wondered why she'd picked that one.
Penny clapped the girl on the back and welcomed her and an older boy from the other end of the table leaned and tugged at Harley's hair to get her attention.
"Does the boy who lived really get personal tutoring from Dumbledore? Could you get me an autograph?" he asked and while Harley shrank back and tried to get the boy's hand untangled from her curls, Harry's fist shot forward and socked the boy clear in the nose. A cone of silence swept around the circle of students who had witnessed the event and Harry thought that he heard a shocked,
"Mr Evans!" From the staff table.
Harry, for his part, glared at the boy who'd tried to harass the first-year sitting next to him instead of greeting her into the house and hissed at him. "If your curiosity is stronger than your respect for other people's privacy, then maybe you should switch tables. Your bloody nose would go great with green and silver."
The brown-haired NPC clutched at his nose at hearing his words and looked at the red that came off with a pale face. Before he got the chance to get angry and try to retaliate, his hair twisted upwards unnaturally, right before Harry's did the same thing. It felt like someone was pulling it. They both grimaced and looked to the right, where a furious-looking prefect was starting bloody murder with them. The young man, which is what the black-haired student was at this point, mimed locking his mouth shut, before dragging a thumb across his neck and pointing at both of them. Harry dispelled the jinx on his hair, with a wand, instead of what he'd been practising over the summer, rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to the sorting, ignoring the skittish people that now surrounded him.
"Bloody fuck, Harry." He heard Cedric murmur from his left, while Penny reached behind Harley's back and gave him a concerned squeeze on the shoulder. Harry shook his head, trying to communicate that he was right, while he glared at the hat, wishing for it to go faster. It seemed to glance in his direction, an analysis of a leathery facial expression that he'd only managed to achieve after several weeks of training, before apparently going slower, as if to taunt him.
Harry closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths and decided to meditate to skip forward to the end of this debacle.
-/-
"As for the professorship of the Defence Against the Dark Arts position, I am happy to welcome to our midst, James Potter, who has decided to take a sabbatical from his work as an auror to educate young minds," Dumbledore announced and started clapping, to the enthusiastic confusion of everyone. The seat at the staff table was still empty, after all. That's when the man's invisibility spell dropped and it became apparent that their new professor had been in his seat all along. The great hall erupted in deafening cheers, causing Harry to wince. He looked around the pandemonium that had erupted and saw that at the Hufflepuff table, only he and Harley remained unamused, their faces being mirrored by many of the Slytherins. The cheering continued and McGonagall stood up to start sending bangs of sound into the air with her wand while shouting something unintelligible. Jame-, no, Professor Potter waved cheekily, countering the attempts of his colleague, to her obvious displeasure, as she turned to him and started chewing him out. If Snape had been present he likely would have spontaneously combusted in a fit of sheer disgust.
Considering how much drama having Potter as their DADA professor would likely bring, going by the initial reaction, Harry sincerely hoped the man would at least be a good enough teacher to make up for that.
He just wanted a quiet, normal year, with no near-death experiences, thank you very much.