2,116"Attention, please," Professor McGonagall said, at the start of their first Transfiguration lesson of 1996.
It wasn't their first lesson of the year, Harry had already had Arithmancy and History of Magic, but it was still the first Transfiguration lesson of the year.
"It is now less than six months until your OWLs," she informed Harry, and by extension the rest of the class. "I know you may already have heard this from a teacher in one of your other classes, but your OWLs are one of the two most important sets of exams in your life."
Seamus put his hand up, and Professor McGonagall called on him.
"So that means we should stress out about it, Miss?" he asked.
"It means, Mr. Finnegan, that you should take your exams seriously," she informed him. "I see more people fail because they do not take their exams seriously than because they take their exams too seriously, and the OWL examiners are not foolish about such things – they can tell if you have learned the material, or have not bothered to do so."
After letting that warning hang in the air for a bit, the teacher continued. "Now, today we will be covering the principle of similarity. If you do not remember that we have already covered this topic, I hope you pay extra attention."
Harry did remember, but he paid extra attention anyway as Professor McGonagall quickly went through the basics again.
It was the idea that Transfiguration spells were easier – both to invent and to successfully perform – when there was some kind of similarity between the starting object and the finishing object. The more types of similarity the better, and they didn't have to be physical ones either.
It seemed that, while they were not going to be doing free Transfiguration or the invention of Transfiguration spells for their OWL practicals, they would be expected to demonstrate a theoretical knowledge of the subject – or, rather, they might be, because that was how OWLs worked. You didn't know what the topic was going to be ahead of time.
Professor McGonagall called on different students to give examples of similarities, some of them from spells they'd done before (like turning a tortoise into a teapot, or a teapot into a tortoise, where the similarities included things like the legs and the hard shell) and some from entirely novel situations (like turning a book into a bat, which Harry thought was a waste of a good book). In Harry's case he had to explain what similarities you might draw upon when turning a badger into a bottle, and the best he could come up with was the shape of the muzzle was sort of like the neck of a bottle.
That was fine, though, because it wasn't one of the ones they'd done before. One similarity was enough to be going on with, though apparently another one would be that a badger was durable and you wanted durability in a bottle.
"Oh, you know how we got tickets to the Quidditch World Cup?" Dean asked, one evening. "Shame we can't do the same to the Euros."
"The Euros?" Ron repeated. "What's that?"
"I think it's football?" Hermione guessed, but Dean blinked before picking up Ron's Muggle Studies textbook.
"Oi," Ron protested half-heartedly, looking down at his half-written description of the history of Muggle lighting.
He was almost up to the light bulb, by the looks of the sketches he'd included.
"Sports," Dean mumbled, flicking through. "Football… there we go."
He examined it, then snorted. "Yeah, should have guessed, they don't bother. Anyway, the Euros are sort of… the football World Cup only happens every four years, and there's a European Cup in the off-years. This time it's in England – and it really could be our year."
"Is that like how every year really could be West Ham's year?" Neville teased.
"Hey, I know we're out of the League Cup, but we won our first game of the FA Cup," Dean countered. "And we're not out of the Premiership yet!"
"Who was that first game against?" Hermione asked, sensibly.
"...well, Southend United, but they're not terrible," Dean said. "But football's coming home! It could be England's year!"
He looked enthusiastic for another few seconds, then visibly deflated and shrugged. "Or not."
"That's an odd mixture of passion and fatalism," Harry observed.
"I think it comes from supporting West Ham," Dean replied. "If you expect them to be plucky but a bit naff, you can't really be disappointed but it's really exciting if things take a turn for the better."
Ron quite ostentatiously took notes, which set off a round of giggles.
A letter turned up on Harry's plate that Monday, courtesy of Hedwig, and in familiar handwriting it asked if Harry had a free evening at some point in the next two weeks.
It went on to add that the writer – who referred to himself only as 'I' – could unfortunately not give Harry the password at that point, since the period of time in question was long enough that there was no one password which applied. However, if Harry did happen to have the free time available, in between teaching people Defence and doing his own work, he could simply send a letter or Patronus to 'I' and request the password for the time he would actually be calling by.
It was at about that point that Harry decided Dumbledore had to have been writing the letter in a silly way deliberately. It was possible that Dumbledore might simply have forgotten to make his identity clear, but when there were sentences like 'I would recommend that in the meantime you do not finalize your Runes project, because it seems to I that I would be able to help' it was a little harder to write it off as an innocent mistake.
As for actually taking up the offer, Harry had to admit that his week was quite busy. There was the Defence Club four out of the seven days of the week – he was doing the Patronus in both the OWL and NEWT level sessions, while his role in the Key Stage 3 sessions was essentially to serve as a target who could criticize your spellcasting – and Wednesday there was Astronomy, while tonight Harry was doing patrolling.
So that meant it was either Sunday evening or Monday next week. Or Wednesday before Astronomy, but that was usually a time when Harry did homework with his friends because they all had to stay up for Astronomy anyway.
It was surprisingly hard to schedule things now. Harry supposed it was one downside of the Defence Club, though it was definitely overall a good thing – he'd already learned a lot more by teaching than he'd expected.
Harry wasn't entirely sure at this point if Professor Umbridge still had a plan. He wasn't willing to start assuming she didn't, because she was still having them learn (or, at least, read) from the same textbook.
Harry had finished it weeks ago and was quite a long way into rewriting the ideas in much simpler language – which meant that, fairly soon, he'd have to come up with something else to do in Defence Against the Dark Arts class.
Maybe write something else?
Part of Harry was still thinking about that as he reached Dumbledore's office on the fifteenth of January, and he cleared his throat. "Empire."
The gargoyle stepped aside, and Harry climbed what were now becoming familiar stairs into what was now becoming a familiar office.
"Good evening, Harry," Dumbledore said, getting up from behind his desk. "I am most gratified that you have decided to pay me a visit."
"I've never heard of Empire sweets, Professor," Harry admitted. "That's the thing which confused me."
"I believe it is a bar of chocolate, dating from the War," Dumbledore told him. "That is, the War that is meant when Muggles talk about the War. I do not mean to say that it was from the nineteen-seventies."
Harry thought about the British Empire, and said that that made sense.
"Excellent," Dumbledore said. "Now, I fear I should ask you a question. Do you have any idea which subjects you would like to take for your NEWTs?"
"Well, Defence and Charms and Transfiguration are all sort of defaults," Harry replied, thinking about it. "I'm not sure about Care of Magical Creatures, it's interesting but I more am one… though maybe I should just because it's safer for me to deal with a lot of dangerous creatures."
"Take it from me, Harry, to do something because you are good at it is not a good reason by itself," Dumbledore said. "Though to do something because you enjoy it is a fine reason, and indeed I would say it is reason enough even if you happen not to be very good at it. Passion can solve quite a lot of problems."
He smiled. "What about your other classes?"
"Well, most of them are interesting," Harry replied. "I think I could probably learn History of Magic just as well by reading textbooks… and, well, Runes and Arithmancy are the sort of thing that I feel like I could learn a lot from."
Dumbledore nodded.
"I take it from that, then, that you do not find yourself so interested in Potions and Herbology," he said. "Since they do not come to mind so readily. No," he added, as Harry started to protest. "You should not be embarrassed about it, Harry. I find that these kinds of things can be quite useful in discovering what you are truly interested in, when you yourself are not sure."
He walked over to a cupboard, and opened it. It turned out to be full of strange equipment, including a small brick stove and a variety of assorted glass flasks and bottles.
Conjuring a stone slab onto his floor, Dumbledore moved the brick stove out of the cupboard and onto the slab. That was followed by a small folding bench, half a dozen bits of glassware, and then an ingot of metal which Harry had to look at a second time.
Something about it was oddly familiar.
"Professor, what's that?" he asked.
"Ah, this is a marvellous metal which alchemists have sought to make for thousands of years," Dumbledore told him. "The formula to make it was complex indeed, and required soil from certain locations in Greece heated in an intense fire with a crystal of jadeite and reduced by quartz. I will not bore you with all the details, for as it happens this method – while it worked – was terribly slow and tedious."
"Doesn't that mean that's really valuable, then?" Harry said.
"It would have been, were it not for the work of Muggles," Dumbledore told him. "While the alchemical arts are subtle, and while alchemy can do many things that muggles cannot, those of us who pay any attention at all to what the muggle world is doing did notice when they started to produce one of our prized achievements in staggering quantities. What that is, Harry, is an ingot of aluminium."
He withdrew a second ingot from the cupboard, this one much more familiar – iron, if Harry was right – and placed the two of them side by side.
"It occurred to me, Harry, that perhaps I should demonstrate what alchemy is like so that you can decide if you would be interested," he said. "And, in the process, I might be able to help you by producing the base for your Runes project. Does that sound agreeable, do you think?"
Harry said that it certainly did, and won a smile from the Headmaster.
"Very well, then, to begin," Dumbledore said. "You have probably already noticed in much of your magical education that quite a lot about magic depends on who is doing it and why."
"You mean what you want to happen, Professor?" Harry checked. "So you can say the same words and move your wand in the same way and different things happen?"
"Exactly," Dumbledore told him with a smile.
He tapped one of the alembics, which made a ringing sound. "The same is true of alchemy, and that is what makes it quite different from potions. Potions, if I may be so bold, is that part of alchemy which has been tamed, while alchemy is a little more… wild."
That sounded a little dangerous to Harry, and he said so.
"Do not worry, Harry, it will be quite safe," Dumbledore assured him. "What we shall be doing is making an alloy of aluminium and iron, and furthermore we will be making it so that it is highly durable except to one specific method of melting."
Placing the two ingots side by side, Dumbledore began setting up the equipment. "Much of the art of alchemy is in making use of similarities, differences, and properties. So we will be giving the aluminium and the iron an affinity to one another by melting them both in the same place, by the same method, at the same time, and enhancing that affinity by the addition of tar and beeswax – which, you see, are both sticky."
He frowned. "Though we should first check to be sure that tar and beeswax do in fact stick to your skin, or otherwise it could have quite the opposite effect."
After some simple – if messy – tests, it turned out that both pine tar and beeswax did indeed stick to Harry's scales. Harry then asked if it was okay to eat the unwanted ingredients in alchemy, and Dumbledore assured him that it was so long as they were indeed unwanted ingredients.
"Some of the things used in alchemy are quite valuable, after all," he explained. "But that does not apply to tar, and it does not apply to beeswax, so I would say you should go ahead."
Harry quickly licked the sticky substances off the backs of his paws, so it wouldn't get on his robes, and Dumbledore chuckled before setting up some of the equipment.
"It happens that pine tar melts at a slightly lower temperature than beeswax does," he said, placing one on each side of the desk. "And aluminium melts at a much lower temperature than iron does, though fortunately there is an alchemical trick we will be using for that so it does not have to concern us today."
"So… does that mean the pine tar gets paired up with the iron, sir?" Harry checked.
"Correct," Dumbledore informed him. "It adds symmetry to the mixture."
He indicated two sets of flasks connected by tubes, which Harry vaguely recognized to be alembics – one flask that went on the fire, a connecting tube, and the receiving flask which in this case was made with a large top closed by a separate cap. "If you would set them up, Harry, that would be wonderful."
Making sure he was doing the correct thing at each stage, mostly by asking if he was, Harry arranged one alembic so that the flask to go on the burner had the beeswax in and the aluminium was in the other one. That one went on the burner, which Dumbledore asked Harry to light with his own flame, and the beeswax slowly melted before some vapours began to ooze up the flask and down into the chamber with the aluminium.
It was only once Harry had set it up and stepped back that he frowned. "Wouldn't the beeswax catch fire instead, Professor?"
"That would be dreadfully ill-mannered of it," Dumbledore informed him, eyes twinkling.
Harry tried not to giggle, and Dumbledore went on to explain. "In fact, the beeswax has had a little pure spring water added – this inhibits combustion, because of course water puts out fire, and encourages the material to boil instead."
While they were waiting, Harry set up the second alembic – in much the same way, except with pine tar and the iron ingot.
He did ask about how it was that the apparatus could tolerate such heavy things as metal ingots, and was informed that Unbreakable glass had been a tremendous boon to the practice of alchemy.
"You see, if we had to keep stopping to replace our glass, we would never get very good at it," he said, before going back to the cupboard and getting out a small bottle with a stopper.
Harry watched as Dumbledore undid the stopper and shook out half a dozen silvery-blue metal grains into a crucible.
"This is called gallium," Dumbledore told him, giving the crucible to Harry to inspect. "It is a metal with a number of remarkable properties. One of them is that it is quite similar to mercury, or quicksilver as we used to call it, in that it melts at a much lower temperature than one can find in just about any other metal – and another, which makes it particularly useful today, is that if you add a little gallium to a lot of aluminium it spreads through the whole structure."
He chuckled. "Of course, it also weakens the structure, but that is one reason why we will be using iron as it does not have the same effect on iron and that will balance it out. Can you think of why it is we will be using gallium, Harry?"
"Well, if it melts easily, that would be why?" Harry guessed. "Alchemy is about properties, so… it's about adding the property of melting easily, so we don't need really high temperatures."
"That is part of it and, indeed, most of it," Dumbledore told him. "The other reason is because we can sensitize the gallium, and by extension the whole work."
With tweezers, he picked three of the grains out and put them into a second crucible. Each crucible then had a sprinkle of coal dust added, and Dumbledore placed them both onto the table.
"If you would melt one of these, Harry," he asked. "With your breath, if you please."
Harry inhaled, then blew a thin stream of flame at the first crucible. The gallium melted, so fast it was shocking to see metal do that, and went from silvery-blue to silvery-white – while the coal dust burned off.
"Very good," Dumbledore pronounced. "Do you know, we used to do this with quicksilver, but gallium is much safer to use and it causes fewer cases of peculiarity among alchemists. The advance of technology is really quite helpful."
At Dumbledore's direction, Harry took the top off the receiving flask and added the crucible full of gallium to the aluminium. The whole of the metal melted over the next ten to fifteen seconds, becoming a gently sloshing mass of liquid aluminium, and they put it to the side before repeating the process with the other half of their ingredients.
"How do we know about which ingredients do what?" Harry asked, as the pine tar bubbled and smoked.
Dumbledore chuckled. "Well, Harry, quite a lot of that has come from experimentation. The work of an experimental alchemist is attempting to discover the manifold properties of the materials – living and unliving – around us, and then attempting to combine them, and seeing if they work. And, alas, much of what one alchemist discerns may not work for another; my good friend Nicholas Flamel has shown me many things, but not all of them have worked successfully when I have done them."
He spread his hands. "It can be quite frustrating, though it does mean that success is most satisfying."
After a few more minutes, Dumbledore pronounced the iron ready, and Harry melted the other crucible of gallium before adding it to the iron. That metal was affected much more slowly, and Dumbledore said that the addition of the pine tar was helping the gallium to stick to the iron as well as making the iron ready to stick to the aluminium.
Finally, Harry was called upon again to heat both the iron flask and the aluminium flask (which had frozen in the meantime, but a quick jet of flame melted it all again), and the two mixtures were poured together into a single large flask.
Dumbledore examined the result, tilting the flask to make the metal slosh back and forth, then picked up a glass of water from his desk and drew out a thin streamer of liquid into a watery sphere that rested on the tip of his wand.
"Frigidarium," he said, and the sphere froze. "If you would take that, Harry, and drop it into the metal?"
Harry picked it up between the tips of his talons and did as Dumbledore asked. In a moment the whole of the metal froze solid, forming a silvery blob at the base of the flask, and Dumbledore tapped it a few times.
Watching with interest, Harry saw Dumbledore's wand tip glow a brilliant white as he poked at the metal. Nothing else happened, though, and Dumbledore pronounced himself satisfied.
"Fine work, Harry," he said. "I believe we will have to shrink this for you, until you require it, but you will find that it melts easily – but only to your very own fire breath – and, of course, that it is rather harder than steel for less weight."
He smiled brightly. "It seems like a much safer material to work with, don't you think?"
"It does, Professor," Harry agreed. "Thank you, that's very helpful indeed – and it was very interesting, as well!"
"I am glad to have piqued your interest," Dumbledore told him, but Harry was already raising a paw.
"Only, um… wouldn't it have helped you interest more people in alchemy if you'd done the demonstration for more than just me?"
Dumbledore tapped his chin.
"What an excellent idea," he said. "Do forgive me, Harry, sometimes I get so tremendously excited that I forget the most basic things."
January rolled over into February, and the storms that occasionally lashed the castle went from being blizzards to hailstorms and rainstorms.
There was another pair of Quidditch games, and unfortunately for everyone involved the Gryffindor-Hufflepuff game ended up scheduled during some of the foulest weather Harry had ever seen. His wings were pressed into service as umbrellas, everyone who could on both sides cast a Bubble-Head Charm to fend off the hail – with some success – and when Harry first caught sight of the Snitch it was being bombarded with hailstones and visibly bouncing around.
After ten minutes Harry thought everyone just wanted the game to be over. After thirty minutes it seemed like they didn't care which side caught the Snitch, just that they wanted someone to catch it, but in the miserable weather that wasn't exactly turning out easy.
Oddly, it was after about thirty minutes that goals started being scored. Harry thought about it a bit, and decided that maybe it was because at first the Chasers had had trouble aiming in the wind and hail, but once they had got used to it they could use the weather to almost sneak up on the Keepers – Ron included – though even then it didn't work very well.
When Cedric eventually caught the Snitch after more than an hour, making the score for the game as a whole two hundred and fifty for Hufflepuff and a hundred and ninety for Gryffindor, he got a very brief cheer from the whole crowd before everyone headed inside again as fast as possible.
"I really think they should schedule those during the summer," Dean said, casting a drying charm on himself. "That was dreadful."
"Don't Muggle sports games happen in bad weather?" Neville asked. "I'm pretty sure I've heard you talking about how the off season is over the summer."
"Well, yeah, they do," Dean agreed. "But there's so many football games they have to be closely spaced or they won't all fit in the year."
"I feel like we've had this conversation before," Harry said.
"Yeah, probably," Dean nodded. "But still… they haven't rescheduled, have they?"
"Maybe it's because they don't have much choice," Hermione pointed out, sitting down next to them with her robes and shoes dry. "If they had a Quidditch game during the run up to OWLs or NEWTs, it'd be too much of a distraction."
"That is a good point," Harry said. "Did your homework go well?"
Hermione didn't answer straight away, instead looking at her friends. "Do you mind if I ask something strange?"
"Go ahead, that's sort of our thing," Dean told her.
"Do I seem like I'm stressed?" Hermione asked. "I suddenly realized I wouldn't be good at telling."
"Well… not any more than usual," Dean decided to say.
Harry hadn't wanted to reply so quickly, because he wanted to think about the answer a bit more.
Hermione was definitely doing more work than any of the rest of them were, and obviously part of that was that she could use her Time-Turner to make sure she had more time to work, but it didn't seem like she was fraying at the edges or anything like that.
Harry knew she'd worked out a complicated schedule for herself, though he didn't know any of the details of that complicated schedule.
"Hasn't Ron got back yet?" she asked. "I wanted to go over that Runes work for Friday."
"He's still in the shower, I think," Harry said. "There was that time he fell off his broom and went Nutkin so he didn't hit the ground hard, but he still got really covered in mud – and even Ginny isn't back yet."
"Even Fred and George, you mean," Dean corrected.
Harry thought about the relative amount of work the various Weasleys would put into keeping clean, and conceded the point.
"How are you supposed to know if you're overworked?" Neville asked.
"You end up sort of feeling like…" Harry began, then paused. "You don't feel like you have no free time, that would be too easy to notice. You feel like you have to ration things closely, and if something runs over you feel sort of angry because it's spoiled your schedule?"
He shrugged a wing. "That's what it felt like for me, when it happened."
February also brought Valentine's Day, which in 1996 fell right in the middle of the week. That made it a bit difficult for romantic couples to do anything special with the day, and there was a sort of unspoken process where about sixty percent of those who did anything did something on the weekend before Valentine's Day itself and about sixty percent did something on the weekend after.
(Harry estimated that about twenty percent of the people who did something did something both weekends. Based off what he had overheard that was usually the result of an inability to schedule a table at Madam Puddifoot's, which was apparently something romantic.)
Personally, and Harry was quite aware he might not be normal, he much preferred the idea of little things, like going for a walk or having dinner somewhere you liked the food. It seemed more sensible to him to just have a nice day out with someone you liked – though he did have to admit that maybe it was more special if you were doing a special 'romantic' sort of thing on (or near) a romantic day with your boyfriend or girlfriend, a bit like how watching live television was somehow more meaningful than watching recorded television even if it was exactly the same bit of TV.
Really, romance seemed terribly complicated. At least people he knew seemed to enjoy it – Harry saw Cedric and Cho coming out of Madam Puddifoot's, and either Cedric had enjoyed it just as much as Cho had or he was really good at looking like he had.
Then there were Su and Sally, who Harry took a photo of on top of Meade Hill at their request. There wasn't really another way to get a good aerial photo like that, not without someone on a broom, and while Harry could have got his broom from Gryffindor Tower if the photo hadn't turned out well (possibly with a summoning charm) the first one that came out was one that both girls liked so there was no need.
As it happened, Harry also saw Hermione and Ron spending the afternoon together. In their case, though, Ron had made a little squirrel-sized hang-glider thing out of paper and Hermione was either running very fast to get Ron up to takeoff speed or just whipping her tail around with Nutkin clinging to the end until he couldn't any more.
There was probably a pun in there about flights of fancy, but Harry abandoned the attempt to make it after a few that didn't sound quite right.
"One of the reasons why we practice defence spells is so that we can cast them more easily," Cedric said, looking around at the fourth- and fifth-years in the Defence Club.
He paused. "That probably sounded really simplistic."
"Well spotted," Draco drawled.
"It's true, though," Cedric went on. "People find it easier to do things they're used to doing automatically. If you don't believe me, try actually thinking about when to breathe and you'll see how much of your concentration it takes up."
That led to a short pause full of loud breaths of air, and then Ginny groaned.
"Did you have to say that?" she asked.
"It did get the point across," Cedric told her, shrugging. "Anyway. The Patronus is a really good example of that, actually, because it's much harder to cast when you're struggling with a Lethifold or in the presence of a Dementor, but if you're so used to casting it that it doesn't take all that much concentration you're in a great situation."
He looked over at Harry. "You can get that good at the spell, right? You've been casting it longer than I have."
"I think so," Harry replied, taking his wand out. "Expecto Patronum."
Ruth emerged from his wand in a blur of silvery light, and Harry watched him for a bit before returning his attention to Cedric.
"That was a lot easier than it started out as," he reported.
"Well, there we go," Cedric said. "I think it'd be a good idea to practice some more, then – and if anyone's still having trouble, we can help them out?"
That sounded like a good idea to Harry, and everyone spread out before getting their wands ready as well.
A bit like the Animagus transformation, it was interesting to think about what someone's Patronus actually said about them as a person.
From what he'd read, Harry knew that it was one of those weird things where sometimes it said a lot and sometimes it was just an animal the person liked. You could also get a situation where the animal changed, which wasn't like the Animagus transformation at all, though it was common (as far as you could say that for something rare) for a witch or wizard who'd achieved the Animagus transformation to end up with the same animal as their Patronus – even if it had been something else entirely before that had happened.
With that in mind, some of them weren't surprising at all. Neville had a shimmering white big cat which you could almost call a panther if the word panther didn't imply that it was supposed to not be pure white in colour (an interesting philosophical point), while Dean had a whitebird and Ron had a squirrel.
"Wish I could float like he does," Ron muttered, watching his Patronus drifting in circles.
Hermione's one was the surprise among the Animagi, because it was an otter rather than a dinosaur. It was probably something to do with how her Animagus form was a special case, if Harry had to guess, though it could also have to do with how otters were sort of amphibious and lived both on land and in water.
She'd already refused Harry's suggestion to call it Skipper, which was a pity.
"Anyone still need help?" Harry asked, looking around for people who were casting in frustration. A few caught his eye immediately, and after seeing who was going where – Cedric was going to Terry Boot trailed by his should-have-known-it-would-be-a badger, for example – Harry elected to approach Draco.
"Expecto Patronum!" Draco said, waving his wand with an irritated scowl.
There was a little flicker of white mist, but nothing more than that.
"At first it helps if you're calm," Harry advised. "But the memory has to be a good choice as well. I think…"
"You think what?" Draco asked.
"I think it has something to do with how it's a spell all about positive feelings?" Harry said, sort of thinking out loud.
He paced back and forth a bit. "If you're happy because you won a game of Quidditch, that's good, but if you're happy because you beat someone else? It might not be."
"That sounds infuriating," Draco grumbled.
He looked at Harry. "At least tell me the wand movement and pronunciation and so on are correct?"
"Let's see them again?" Harry requested.
Draco duly did the wand movements and said the incantation, and Harry considered for a moment before pronouncing them to be correct.
Despite having the idea, he didn't pronounce 'them to be correct', because while that was quite a Dumbledore idea he thought maybe Draco wouldn't appreciate the humour.
"You could try thinking about a time you enjoyed yourself with your parents?" he suggested, guessing that that was one of the things that people did with parents, and Draco sighed. Then he raised his wand, closed his eyes, and tried again.
This time, instead of a waft of white mist, there was a rush of silvery light. It jumped out of the tip of the wand, fell to land on an invisible surface at least two feet above the floor, and Harry tried to work out what it was.
It looked like a lizard – maybe an iguana, or something like that – with a thick tail and sprawling legs. Then it spread a frill ruff, silently hissing, and Harry suddenly remembered where he'd read about it before.
"I think that's a frill-necked dragon," he said. "I read about them in a Muggle science book when I was trying to find out about… well… dragons."
"That's what Muggles call a dragon?" Draco asked.
He looked at it, then at Harry, then glanced out the window. Nora unaccountably failed to conveniently fly past, but Draco looked back down at his Patronus. "...not as big as I was expecting."
"It's bigger than Ruth is," Harry pointed out. "I'm not sure why it does the ruff thing, though. Maybe it's like a peacock."
"...hm," Draco mused. "That might make sense. Father has an excellent collection of peacocks."
He waved his wand, dismissing the Patronus, then tried again. This time the lizard appeared straight off, and Draco looked very pleased with himself.
"I used the memory of getting my Patronus working," he explained.
"Nice one," Harry complimented.
Being proud of getting a spell right was just the sort of thing that could fuel a Patronus, and on top of that it reminded you that you could cast the Patronus.
The only other person who finally got their Patronus going that day was Tanisis, whose silvery mist (which probably would have been quite good at fending off a Dementor, if only for a moment) blossomed suddenly into a broad-winged eagle.
"I used… well, my memory of when I first got my wand," Tanisis said, as her Patronus vanished again.
"Any idea why it was an eagle?" Dean asked. "I kind of like trying to work this stuff out now."
"I am looking forward to being able to fly," Tanisis admitted.
"You mean on a broom?" asked Mary Plassey, one of the other Ravenclaws in the same year as the sphinx.
She looked baffled. "Can't you… already do that?"
"No, it's some of the magic that sphinxes learn," Luna informed her helpfully. "It's something that doesn't go into most reference books because it's cultural and sphinxes are still classified as beasts – I think it's part of a conspiracy to make sure there are no intelligent politicians – but once she's an adult Tanisis will be able to learn a spell which gives her wings."
"...that sounds kind of cool, actually," admitted Harper from Slytherin.
"It's one of the reasons why the Muggle depictions of sphinxes are so mixed up," Hermione informed them. "Muggles didn't know what was going on so they sort of confused things."
"That sounds like them," Blaise said.
Harry felt quite pleased with how the Defence Club had been going, really. It might have taken a long time to teach people the Patronus but they were getting the hang of it, now, and that was probably going to mean a lot of people did well on their Defence and Charms OWLS – and NEWTs, for that matter, because of all the sixth- and seventh-years who'd learned it.
It wasn't the only lesson Harry could say was going well, either, because to be honest everything seemed to be going along nicely as they moved into March. Arithmancy was a bit of a pain, but it was more remembering how to apply the maths than the maths itself, while in Runes Ron said he'd finished the control system for his rocket and Harry himself was most of the way through working out what size of sword to make. And Harry felt fairly confident about most of the rest of his classes, though he did have to worry a bit about the places in Care of Magical Creatures where he might know more about dragons than the examiners did.
Maybe you could appeal, or something? Harry sort of remembered hearing about that for GCSEs, but perhaps it wasn't the same for OWLs.
And then there was Astronomy.
"Harry got me some magazines," Ron explained, lighting up his wand and putting the magazine on the crenelation of a tower. "This is really cool."
"Is it from that Muggle space probe?" Terry Boot asked.
"No, this is something else," Ron replied. "It's that Muggle space telescope that's in orbit."
Everyone looked closer, Harry included, and Professor Sinistra gasped.
"Merlin, those are some wonderful pictures of galaxies," she said. "They're as good as you could get through a fine telescope."
She paused, and when she spoke next she sounded a little puzzled. "Shouldn't there be more stars, though?"
"When they did this they actually pointed it somewhere there weren't any stars," Ron replied.
"Is that actually possible?" Ernie said.
He looked up at the cold night sky. "I can see stars in every direction. A lot of them are a bit faint, but in telescopes there's always more."
"No, I mean they aimed it a bit north of Megrez and Alioth, in Ursa Major," Ron explained.
He turned the page to point at a picture of the constellation. "It's a really small area about… an arc minute across?"
"All those are in one little spot?" Gregory asked.
Ron nodded.
"...Muggles are cleverer than I thought," the big Slytherin said. "To point it at the right little spot."
"No, that's what it's like in every direction," Ron told him. "Or they think it is. Every tiny patch of sky is just stuffed full of distant galaxies – they think some of them are more than ten billion light years away."
Everyone was quiet for a bit after that, until Professor Sinistra told them that they should be focusing on Comet Hyakutake and Comet Hale-Bopp. They'd been observing the approach of Hale-Bopp since the start of the year, but the much newer Hyakutake was getting bright enough to notice and it already had a colour – and it was still a few days from going right past Earth.
Apparently if there was bad weather on the 25th of March everyone was invited up to the Astronomy Tower to see it at the absolute brightest it was going to be.
The following Monday morning, half Harry's concentration was on what it would be like to see such a bright comet. It made it a bit hard to focus on History of Magic, and in Potions, though Professor Snape's comments made it easier to focus so Harry was able to avoid making any actual mistakes with his Erumpet Potion. (Which was good, because an exploding potion was even more distracting than a comet.)
When Defence Against the Dark Arts came around, though, Harry had been expecting that he wouldn't really need to concentrate at all. He'd read the textbook three times by now, and while it hadn't necessarily got more boring (or interesting) on subsequent readings it had given Harry his little side project of re-writing the book to be… well, mostly 'a lot shorter'. It did mean getting rid of the mathematical arguments, but they didn't cover all the situations anyway.
"Good morning, class," Professor Umbridge said, as she arrived into the classroom.
"Good morning, Professor Umbridge," Harry replied, along with everybody else.
There wasn't anything wrong with being polite.
"Today we'll be studying from a new book," Professor Umbridge went on, and Harry's ears perked up with such force that he nearly knocked his own glasses off. They sort of bounced dangerously for a moment, and Harry adjusted them with a paw so they stayed on.
A few hands had already gone up while Harry was doing that, and Professor Umbridge called upon Sally-Anne. "Miss Perks."
"Is this a book we were supposed to get at the start of the year, Professor?" she asked.
"It isn't," Professor Umbridge replied. "Mr. Potter, come up here and collect up enough books from the cupboard for one for each person in the class."
Mystified, Harry did as instructed. The cupboard she directed him to was full of more than two hundred books, all of them the same, and all of them entitled Dark and Dangerous Creatures by someone called Regulus Marius.
As soon as he'd got the books needed, Umbridge told him to pass them out as well. She added that there should be one each, and Harry sort of wondered if maybe the only teaching she'd done before had been for preschool wizards.
If wizards had preschool.
With the books all passed out, Harry returned to his desk and opened Dark and Dangerous Creatures to see what was in there.
The book had an alphabetical chapter list and included Beasts, Beings and Spirits, but oddly enough it seemed to include most things that were magical and some things that weren't. The list included Dragons, for one, and Acromantula for another, and Hags were listed – but so were Kitsune, and Three Headed Dogs, and Goblins.
House Elves were not included, but Muggles were, and Harry had no idea what that was about. It wasn't as if he thought Professor Umbridge was going to have picked a book he'd like, since she really didn't seem to like anyone when you got down to it, but once you understood what Mr. Slinkhard had been doing his book had at least made sense.
Hermione had already put up her hand, and Professor Umbridge simply ignored her. "Today we will be reading from the chapter starting on page forty-seven," she instructed. "Turn to page forty-seven."
Harry duly did so, turning the pages to page forty-seven, and found that it was the chapter on Dragons.
"Mr. Weasley, please read out the chapter," Professor Umbridge added.
"Um… okay?" Ron said. "Uh… dragons are powerful and dangerous creatures."
He glanced over at Harry. "That's right, at least-"
"No commentary, Mr. Weasley," Professor Umbridge said sweetly. "I do hope you can read!"
Hermione's hand was waving back and forth a little now.
Ron went on. "They are reptilian and covered with scaled – with scales that make them highly resistant to magic, and it has long been recognized that they are so wild that they must be kept under control for the good of the magical community."
Someone sniggered. Harry thought it was Anthony, but he wasn't sure.
"Silence in class, please," Professor Umbridge said.
There was a long pause.
"Mr. Weasley, I distinctly remember asking you to read out this chapter," she chided. "Do you have problems with your memory?"
"You said silence in class, Miss," Ron explained, which led to a few more giggles.
Umbridge frowned. "That is not funny, Mr. Weasley. Twenty points from Gryffindor, unless you'd rather have a detention?"
Ron didn't answer, but turned the page. "When fighting a dragon – hang on, it just went straight into how to-"
"No commentary," Professor Umbridge repeated. "Since you can't follow such a simple rule, I'll give the job to someone who can read… Mr. Longbottom, continue from where Mr. Weasley left off."
"When fighting a dragon that has escaped a reserve, it is important to make sure you target the eyes, and to work with other wizards," Neville read. "This is so that you can stun the dragon and have it taken back to the reserve."
More hands were going up now, and Neville kept going. "Dragons cannot read – what!?"
"Mr. Longbottom?" Professor Umbridge asked, sweetly.
"That's just wrong!" Neville said. "Not only does Harry read more than anyone else I know except Hermione, but Nora is learning to read – I've seen her – and she's only about four, so that's normal for humans anyway!"
"Twenty points from Gryffindor, Mr. Longbottom," Umbridge told him. "I asked you to read the book, not comment on it."
She turned her attention to Anthony. "Mr. Goldstein, perhaps you will do better."
By the end of the lesson, Harry was fairly sure that the author of the textbook had very little idea what they were talking about.
Some of the bits in the chapter were just ignorant in the usual wizards-about-dragons way, like when the author said that dragons were dumb beasts – which was mostly true at the moment, but which clearly wasn't true for Nora or indeed for Gary, Ollie or Sally. But then there were the other bits which were wrong in a different way, like talking about how all dragons were greedy and obsessed with treasure.
Harry had never met a dragon that was greedy and obsessed with treasure, and that was because he was the only one he knew who had that sort of interest in treasure and he couldn't really meet himself. And the other dragons who lived at Hogwarts had things they liked, but those were just normal possessions rather than anything else.
By the bit where the book was talking about how dragons were irritable and quick to anger, a lot of people were finding it hard not to just break out laughing. Harry actually thought that was some of the better advice in the book, because non-smart dragons were – well – animals and needed to be treated like animals rather than unnecessarily antagonizing them by mistake, but it seemed like everyone else found it very funny… and then the next bit contradicted it completely by saying that dragons were sneaky and prone to infiltrate wizarding society so they could do as much damage as possible, which would be flat-out impossible for any dragon apart from one of the ones at Hogwarts at the moment and so it made it sound like the author knew about Harry, Nora and the others after all.
Finally there was a bit about how the magic that dragons had was graceless and relied solely on brute force, quite unlike the "skilled spellcasting" of wizards.
Harry didn't find that convincing either. He had no idea yet if dragons like Nora could actually cast wizarding magic in a wizarding way, but he didn't think anyone else could possibly know either, and if the author knew about Harry and meant Harry then that didn't really seem fair. He wasn't as good as some of his classmates, or other wizards he knew – like Dumbledore – but Harry was quite sure that he was at least a little above average if his marks were anything to go by.
Professor Umbridge didn't seem pleased with the reception the book had had, and she'd given out point deductions for the entire lesson every time she had to change who was reading the book. By the end of the reading session only Harry and Hermione hadn't had a go, and when she told them to write down how the book was correct in every particular Hermione stood up.
"This book is ridiculous," she said, without preamble. "It says that dragons have to be controlled, but in the section on goblins-"
"Sit down, Miss Granger," Professor Umbridge told her, but Hermione kept talking.
"-that they are evil because they capture and enslave dragons. And in the section on Muggles-"
"Detention," Professor Umbridge snapped. "I would have thought a prefect would know not to interrupt a teacher!"
Everyone who hadn't been in that Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson was confused at dinner about why the House Point hourglasses for Gryffindor and Ravenclaw had suddenly lost so many points, and Harry and everyone else spent about half their time explaining what had happened.
Then the other half of the time was spent pointing out the places in their textbooks where it really did say those things, and there was very little time left for actually eating.
Maybe there was something in the idea of comets bringing unusual situations after all.
AN:
The sad thing is that it's a bit of a toss-up whether this or Lockhart's books were the most useless DADA textbooks they've worked from.
