Professor Potter

It wasn't until Harry reached the base of the stairs leaving the Headmaster's office that he realized, quite belatedly, he never actually asked what he went in there too.

In fairness, it was a bit difficult to think about lesson plans when faced with your resurrected father, now the same age as you, and learned of your own demise. Little things like how to do your new job don't quite live up to that.

He couldn't exactly turn back and ask now, either. Not only would it be awkward, but Dumbledore was quite possibly the busiest man in the Wizarding World at the moment, preparing for a war that the government wouldn't even acknowledge. As Harry thought the conundrum over, the Headmaster's final words came back to him.

"It's never a sin to ask others for help, huh?" Harry mumbled.

He set off, walking down the hall in a completely different direction than the stone gargoyle and the staircase it hid.

O-O-O

Harry stared at the door in front of him. He remembered it perfectly, down to the chips and slivers age had bitten out of the wood. Having such a clear recollection of his Head of House's office entrance didn't say anything good about his disciplinary record as a student.

Harry snorted. As if he needed a reminder of how hectic his school life had been. Shoving down those useless thoughts — he was stalling — he closed his hand into a fist and knocked.

The sound of someone moving came from inside the room, followed by the creak of a chair being relieved of its burden. The door opened, and Harry found himself looking into the severe eyes of an aged Scottish woman.

"Professor Potter?" McGonagall asked. "Was there something you needed?"

Her tone sounded sharp, but Harry didn't take her severe demeanor personally.

"Just call me Harry," he said.

McGonagall's wrinkled lips slanted sideways. "Already given up on that Professor Potter business?"

Harry rubbed the back of his head. "Ah, somewhat? I realized that there were better ways to go about things."

It wasn't a lie, but it also wasn't the whole truth. The reason he ducked out of using his first name the day before had been to separate himself from the Boy Who Lived. Harry Potter had been one of the most famous names in the Wizarding World when he was at Hogwarts, right up there with Albus Dumbledore or Nicholas Flamel. It wasn't the sort of name your coworkers would hear and nod along like it was nothing.

But here, Harry Potter was different. Harry Potter was a baby that never got the chance to grow. Outside of James Potter and those close to him, Harry Potter would be a name just like any other.

McGonagall stood silently, watching him for a long moment.

"What can I help you with?" she finally said.

Harry smiled. He was glad to see that one of the only members of the staff who would notice anything strange about his name was willing not to make a scene. Sometimes, Minerva Mcgonagall's all-business nature was a wonderful relief.

"When we spoke yesterday, briefly, I admitted my… lack of experience, when it came to teaching."

"I recall," said McGonagall.

"I'm trying to fix that," Harry said. "And I know that the only way to do that is to teach. But the more I try to get started, the more stuck I end up. I'm dealing with things I've never given any thought to. There are so many Ministry standards, and different books to choose from, and so many historical events I could be teaching that, well, it's making my head spin, to be honest."

"What is your point here, Harry?"

"I'm asking for help," he said. "I may not know what I'm doing… but this castle is absolutely full of people who do." He lowered his head and shoulders, performing a sort of half-bow. "Please, help me not let my students down."

Harry heard a sharp sniff… followed a moment later by the sound of someone stepping aside.

When he looked up, McGonagall had moved back and turned to the side, allowing him a clear path into her cozy office, with its familiar fireplace and desk.

"Albus has absolutely no respect for the experience and long years of work that go into successful pedagogy," McGonagall declared. "But what he does have is an exceptional eye for, is people. Come inside, Harry. We'll make something of you yet."

O-O-O

"Well, don't you look dutiful."

Harry smiled a tad bashfully at Septima Vector. The Arithmancy Professor's office was exactly what he would've expected. Each stack of papers was organized so precisely that they looked like they might've been pages in a book. Thick textbooks were stacked in ascending order by size. In the corner of the desk, some kind of magical tool Harry didn't recognize whirred quietly. It looked a bit like a stand for a spinning globe, only without the model earth— instead, thin metal circles spun around each other in a spherical shape, inscribed with numbers.

Harry sat where he imagined a student would, had they been stopping in to see Professor Vector about something. He found that appropriate, considering he was basically there as a student.

"I try my best," Harry said.

Septima was dressed in shockingly red robes, nearly identical to the ones she wore at the staff meeting where they met. Harry himself wore simple clothes with his trademark coat draped on top. He had a Muggle notepad and pen in his lap, the pen's point out and ready to write. 

"I've got to admit, I can't tell if you're awfully earnest or the cheekiest bugger in this castle," said the pretty witch. "You're awfully good at making innocent expressions. Makes me feel like you're hiding something."

"I'm flattered," Harry said. "But about lesson plans…"

"Oh, fine. I'll save my analysis for later." Septima tilted her head, angling the tall and pointy red hat perched atop it in turn. "What exactly is the problem you've been running into?"

"There've been quite a few, if I'm being honest. But the biggest one is that I can't figure where to begin. I'm trying to make up lessons from scratch, but all I end up doing is staring at a blank paper, or scribbling out what little I get down."

Septima nodded gravely. "You're doing it wrong."

"I had figured out that much, actually."

"No, I mean that you're starting in the complete wrong place. You're trying to figure out how to teach a class before you've decided what you want to teach."

Scribbling down her words, and without looking up, Harry asked, "What does that mean?"

Septima grabbed the top paper off of a nearby stack. She spun it around so Harry could read, although it hardly helped. All he could recognize was an immense amount of numbers, organized in what seemed to be a strict order, albeit one he couldn't make any sense of.

"This is Galzer's Theorem," Septima said. "Are you familiar with it? No, your face says you aren't. That's fine. The simple version is that this equation teaches one how to quantify the magic properties of prime numbers. It's necessary to understanding many of the more advanced techniques in my discipline. I teach it to my fifth years."

"Why that year specifically?" Harry asked.

Septima smiled. "Good line of thinking. I teach it then because it's necessary in order to pursue a N.E.W.T. in my subject. Although it won't appear on their O.W.L.s at the end of the year, it will give them a taste of what the curriculum will be like if they choose to continue, so they can make an informed choice when the time comes. A firm grasp of this theorem sets them up to dive into the new work they'll be required to handle, without having to go back and review what's already been taught."

There was a moment of silence as Harry's pen scratched his notepad, scribbling down the gist of what Septima was saying. A few seconds later, he looked up. "How does this apply to lesson plans?"

Instead of answering immediately, Septima grabbed another paper from a different stack, planting it beside the theorem. This one was written out in words, organized as a succession of bullet points. 

"This is my plan for the first day of class," she said. "My fifth years will be introduced to the theorem, including the history surrounding its creator and discovery. The next time I see them, they will work on practice problems to learn to apply the theorem in their own work. The problems will gradually increase in difficulty. Eventually, they will be given the same level of work to do between classes, to see if they can manage it without my help. Two weeks in will be the first proper test, to see if the lessons have worked, and if I'm happy with the scores that they get, we'll move on. How do you think I came up with this?"

"You started from the end, then worked back," Harry realized.

"Precisely," Septima said. "First, pick what you want to teach. Once you know what your students should be learning, then you can find a way to teach it to them. As long as you keep the results in mind, you won't get stuck like this ever again." She smiled encouragingly. "Remember that, and I know that you'll do just fine, Mr. Muggle."

"That nickname is not sticking," Harry told her flatly.

"We'll see. I've got an entire year to make it happen." She reorganized her papers with a sly smile. "Start with the result and work backwards from there, remember?"

O-O-O

"It's all about presentation, Harry!"

His notebook in hand, Harry stood in Flitwick's office, watching the Charms professor dance across his own desk, waving his wand. The chairs both of them had been sitting in danced through the air, bobbing and bouncing to some silent tune.

Flitwick watched them with nothing but raw admiration in his eyes.

"Charms are wonderful!" he squeaked. "They're fascinating! They're beautiful! I love them to death, and I walk into class every day eager to show new ones to my students!"

"I'm sure that you do," Harry said, recalling his own afternoons spent listening to the excitable part-goblin's lessons.

Flitwick jumped into the air, while one of the dancing chairs swept through, picking him up smoothly. The diminutive professor held onto the chair's rim for dear life, as if riding a mechanical bull, giggling the entire time.

"Presentation is the most important part!" he declared. "How are students ever going to love your class, if you don't love it yourself?"

O-O-O

"Remain contained, Harry," McGonagall coached. "The role of the professor is the one of the instructor. You are the firm hand guiding pupils to knowledge. Strive to create an environment that prioritizes learning above all else."

"And if students get bored?" Harry asked.

"You are not here to entertain them. You are here to instruct them. If a bit of boredom is the cost to keep them focused and learning, then so be it. The content of your class should fascinate them, not your own personality."

"So you're saying I shouldn't dance on the table whenever someone gets a correct answer."

McGonagall opened her mouth, but took a moment to answer.

"What works for Professor Flitwick should not, necessarily, be taken as the norm," she said.

Harry scribbled an addition to his notes.

O-O-O

"Could you grab that corner, Dear?"

Harry's notebook was set behind him against the wall of the greenhouse, while the sleeves of his coat were rolled up to his elbows. He listened dutifully, grabbing hold of a wild thrashing root.

Sprout smiled warmly, using his assistance to subdue an unhappy mess of vines, filling its pot with fresh soil until the baby Devil's Snare settled down.

When it seemed safe she stepped back, admiring the work. Harry joined her as he mopped sweat off his brow.

"This is the best way to learn if you ask me," Sprout said. "I don't know how I would ever teach without letting the students get their hands dirty." Her satisfied smile turned to a frown moments later. "Oh dear. You came to me for advice, and I'm afraid I've told you something useless. I haven't the slightest clue how you would do a hands on lesson for Muggle Studies!"

Harry smiled. "It's fine, Pomona. I'll figure something out."

"You're such a good sport," she said. "If you ever need a plant for your desk, just let me know!"

"I'll keep that in mind." Harry caught the Devil Snare they just planted beginning to writhe, its tentacles sliding over each other with an almost moist sound. "Just… Don't make it one of those."

O-O-O

"Field trips!"

Harry winced slightly at the loud voice, but even damage to his eardrums couldn't wipe away his smile. He scratched the neck of the large, floppy-faced dog laying across his feet as he looked at Hagrid. "Field trips? Could you explain that one a bit?"

"Take those kids teh somewhere!" Hagrid boomed. "Nothin' sticks with students like a trip will, I tell yeh. I'd have taken them all over the country by now, but Dumbledore keeps on rejectin' mah best ideas. Imagine the class gettin' ter chase a Leucrotta through the wild, an' tame a wild Hippogriff at its nest! Now tha's the type o' experience none of 'em would forget in a hurry!"

"And Dumbledore turned those down?" Harry asked. "Does he hate fun?"

"Nah, can't be it," Hagrid declared. "Great wizard, Dumbledore, an' an even greater man. Got ter have his reasons. Can't figure 'em out, mind, but he's got ter have 'em."

As someone that went through years of Hagrid's Care of Magical Creatures class, Harry was pretty sure the reason was simply that the Headmaster couldn't afford to lose half his students each year into the bellies of the types of beasts Hagrid took for cute. But he didn't say this out loud.

"What kind of trip would you suggest for me?" Harry asked.

Hagrid's big, bearded face lit up. "Bring 'em ter see one of them agliators."

"Alligators?" Harry asked, cocking his head.

"Is tha' what they call 'em? Big lizards, an' they got all those wonderful teeth. Show 'em some of those!"

"I'll think about it," Harry promised.

He was pretty sure that getting an international Portkey and taking his students across an ocean to look at reptiles was about as likely to get approved as Hagrid's proposed monster-watching outings, but hey, maybe he could take the students to a zoo. That probably wouldn't satisfy Hagrid if he knew the details, but it struck Harry as a kind of compromise.

"Say, Harry," Hagrid said, and the way he leaned forward in his chair made Harry perk up. "You wouldn't happen tah be the brother o' James Potter, would yeh?"

"We've met," Harry said. "But I don't think so. Just a coincidence, as far as I'm aware."

"But yeh got the eyes of… And the name of…" He shook his head, which had the side effect of making his beard look like a wool blanket flapping in the wind. "Ne'ermind me. I'm ramblin' about useless things, tha's all. Did yeh need anythin' else?"

Harry glanced down at his notes. 

"Field trips… Alligators… Nope. I think I've got it."

O-O-O'

Harry was certain that if he saw himself in a mirror right now, his smile would look awfully forced, despite every effort on his part to make it natural. Some things were just asking the impossible.

Still, a fake smile was better than none at all. So he made sure it stayed in place as he treaded a flight of dark stone stairs, feeling the castle air grow cold around him. He loved every part of Hogwarts. He just loved the dungeons a little bit less.

He found the man he was looking for exactly where he expected to. While every other professor had been busy in their offices, preparing for the ways they wanted to teach, Severus Snape was in his laboratory.

He had some kind of murky greenish potion in front of him. Whatever it was bubbled slightly, smelling to Harry like the bottoms of well-used rubber boots. He hoped that whatever it was was a failure, because he didn't want to imagine anyone actually choosing to drink what he saw in front of him.

Severus Snape was scowling before he stepped inside, dashing a stick of chalk against a dark chalkboard in quick, violent strokes.

"Can I help you?" the man asked sourly.

"I'm hoping so," Harry admitted. "I've been meeting the rest of the faculty. I had a few questions—"

Snape spun around, gripping his chalk like a wand he was ready to spit a curse out of.

"I get quite enough of those once the students" — and he said students as if the word were a slur — "have descended to shatter my peace. For what reason should I put up with more now?"

"You don't have to, but I thought I would ask anyway," Harry said. "I've never taught before. The staff have been helping get me up to speed, giving me tips and things like that."

"And you thought I could magically dispel your inadequacy," Snape finished. "Optimistic. If it were so easy, do you truly think so many useless individuals would be running about?"

"I won't take much of your time," Harry promised. "I'd be happy with a single bit of advice."

The man was as impossible to be kind to as ever. Harry would rather not be here himself. But he still remembered, when the war reached its worst, how important Snape's actions had been to his survival. Whether it was all because of Snape's life debt, or even if it was some indirect revenge against Voldemort for the death of Harry's mother, it didn't change what the man had done. It bought Snape a chance with Harry— he came down here to extend a single olive branch. If the man refused to take it, that wouldn't be Harry's problem.

Yet as he pictured the man's lifeless body, sprawled on the floor of a remote shack, Harry felt a tingling inside his head, as if someone was feather-dusting the back of his eyes.

Legilimency. This fool was attempting to penetrate his mind, without consent or warning, when he came here asking a favor. 

A surge of anger twisted Harry's mind. Snape was the one who taught him to clear his head, pushing down fiery emotions like fear or rage, as the best way to counter Legilimency. In time, Harry had found a method he liked more.

He conjured a memory he thought of recently— Snape's body, left for dead on a shack floor. But he didn't merely summon it. Harry focused on the image, imbuing it with new detail. Snape's wounds multiplied. Paintings formed on the walls. Dust was added, along with cobwebs. All the small pieces that memories leave out, Harry filled in with his imagination, until it was less of a memory and more of a scene. When Snape looked upon it, it was as if he was staring at his own true corpse, rendered in front of him as realistically as real life.

The man's sneer turned into a scowl. He jerked back out of Harry's mind, looking at him suddenly in a whole new way.

"A no would have sufficed," Harry said coldly.

He turned, leaving the room and the dungeons soon after. A mistake, that was what that had been. He chose for one moment to believe in Snape's character, and the results were worse than he could've predicted.

The man saw nothing important. All he learned was that Harry was a skilled Occlumens. And if he invaded the minds of others so easily, that was something he would've learned eventually anyway, whenever he finally chose to try and breach Harry's head the way he just had.

Unable to resist, Harry snapped open his notebook, adding one quick note to summarize his trip to the dungeons.

Fuck Snape.

O-O-O

"I heard you had been making the rounds. Am I the last one?"

Harry lowered his copy of the Daily Prophet, open to the paper's very last pages. He dispelled the ball of light he had been reading by, plunging the room into the dark, lit only by the stars and the full moon filtering in from the many windows.

"I hope you didn't wait long," said Aurora Sinistra, her hand still resting on the telescope she had spent the last thirty-five minutes looking through. "Once I get started, I'm afraid I don't notice much else."

"It's fine," Harry assured her. "I came prepared to wait."

Sinistra glanced at the Daily Prophet hanging from his hands, noting that he was near the back of the issue. "Most only read the front page before setting it down. I don't remember the last time I saw someone reading cover-to-cover."

"Ah… I didn't exactly either," Harry admitted. "This was the only article I was interested in."

The topic had been of mild interest, describing the recent and public breakup between Quidditch star Gwenog Jones and her most recent boyfriend. Harry had been more interested in the author. He remembered Penelope Clearwater vaguely, as an ex-girlfriend of Percy Weasley, and after finding her article positioned as the least important one in the entire paper, he made a mental note to remember that name for later.

"So am I the last one?" Aurora asked.

"I think so. It's hard to get a hold of someone that sleeps from noon to midnight."

"How else am I supposed to see the stars?"

Harry held his hands up defensively, letting the Prophet issue flop down along his forearm. "I'm not complaining. Just didn't want to hurt your feelings."

Sinistra smiled, her pearly teeth standing out in the room's dim light. She waved him closer and Harry listened, rolling up the Prophet under his arm as he approached.

This was the same room she taught Harry Astronomy classes in. It was also the room where Albus Dumbledore died. Harry made an effort to focus on the here and now, looking at his beautiful coworker instead of picturing visions of the past.

"I imagine you've heard a lot of things by now," Aurora told him. "I'm not certain how much I can add."

"Anything helps," Harry told her. "If you repeat what someone else said, I won't hold it against you. I'll just be forced to consider you the second worst teacher on the staff."

"Harsh," said Aurora. "Who would be worse than me?"

"Snape."

She shrugged, looking a bit like she wanted to disagree but not knowing how to. "Severus can be abrasive."

And he tried reading my mind. "Don't worry about that. I was serious the first time. Just tell me how you like to teach."

Aurora pondered it. She propped her elbow on her knee, and placed her chin atop her closed fist. She was dressed in very comfortable robes that Harry thought might have been pajamas, as if she came straight here after waking up, not even wasting the time it took to dress herself. Looking at her up this close, Harry couldn't help but acknowledge the reason she was famous among male Hogwarts students. Like Rosmerta, Sinistra had become more than a handful of boys' first crushes.

"I think," Aurora said, "that you've probably heard enough advice by now about how others teach. Instead, I think you should think about how you will."

Harry pulled his notebook from his pocket, flicking through pages covered with dutiful notes, confirming her assertion.

"How do I figure out what kind of teacher I should be?" he asked.

"You do it," Aurora said. "Try your best each day, every time you have students with you. That's all there is to it. As long as you keep doing it — and more importantly, as long as you keep trying — you'll improve. That's the only way."

"I was hoping you'd have a shortcut that would get me there instantly," Harry joked.

Aurora laughed. It sounded different from the Septima's cackles. Aurora's laugh was velvety smooth.

"If I had one of those, I would've used it ages ago," she said. "I know professors who would bankrupt themselves if you were selling something like that!"

Harry snapped his notebook shut. He rose, placing both the small book and his newspaper into different pockets on his jacket.

"Practice, practice, and more practice," he said. "Thank you. I'll keep it in mind."

"This kind of advice doesn't come free," Aurora said as he started to walk away. 

Harry turned back, raising his eyebrows, only to find her smiling.

"If your classes go well, you're contractually obligated to celebrate it here, over wine," Sinistra said. "I'll even show you my favorite stars."

"I'll be here even if a dozen trolls are blocking my path," Harry swore.

Sinistra nodded, informing him that was the proper response. By the time Harry reached the door, her eye was already pressed back against her telescope, back to studying the night sky she loved so dearly…