Facing Backwards

Chapter Six--Confundus

When Harry got back to his rooms, he was exhausted, but some of the misery of the long day seemed to have been blown away by the spring wind. Images remained, however: Sidi's taut, angry face, Ginny, staring up at him at the teachers' table. And Percy, tapping his paper.

Harry spent some time preparing for the next day's classes--he had his first repeat customers, though the first returnees, the Gryffindor third-years, hadn't seen 'The Lecture' yet.

When he finally put down his notes, Harry found that he wasn't sleepy. It was almost eleven, but the thought of drifting over to the very lonely bed in the next room seemed more than Harry could take.

Instead, he pulled out a fresh roll of parchment, and wrote a letter to Remus:

Dear Remus,

I hope you're well, that the break has been recuperative, and that the new treatment is going swimmingly.

Thank you for letting me work with your (mostly) wonderful students. I've survived almost a full first week without either hurting anyone, as the headmaster seems to have feared, or being dumped out the window, as was Professor Flitwick when he first taught. As you and I discussed, I've focused on forcing them to reexamine some basic assumptions, reviewing basic theory.

Believe it or not, a Boggart appeared in the Hufflepuff common room just after you left. It's a young one, too, so I've managed to let both the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff third-years have a crack at it; they've performed wonderfully. You will be amused (but probably not surprised) to learn that Theodore Nott seems to have overtaken Professor Snape as the bogey-man of choice with this third-year class. If it's rematerialized again--it seems quite resilient--I'll let the Slytherins and Ravenclaws have a go tomorrow afternoon.

It's been nice to see all of the old crowd. Nice, but a bit odd. I've had a series of conversations with my old schoolmates that have managed to force me to reassess quite a number of things. Not an easy thing to do at 41. As you no doubt remember.

Being away from my family is terribly difficult.

I had the most amazing conversation today with Theodore Nott. I had no idea he worshipped at your church. It made me realize how little I understood him all of those years ago. And how little I understand now about anything.

I am aware that I'm very tired. How do you do this for a whole year?

I can't wait for your return. I barely got the chance to see you before you left, and--much as I've loved teaching--both your students and I know they are in far better hands under your tutelage.

Take care,

Harry

P.S. Ginny and I had a bit of a misunderstanding. She's in full, red-headed Weasley dudgeon, something I haven't had to endure in quite a while. I remember Ron not talking to me our fourth year; this feels similar, though I'm hoping it won't last anywhere near as long. I don't know why I'm telling you this.

Harry sealed the parchment and wandered off through the quiet halls to the Owlery. He began to reach for Sidi's horned owl, Merlin, but realized that using him would be asking for trouble. So he reached across for one of the school's barn owls, which nipped happily at his finger, tied the note to its leg, and let it go, saying, "Off with you."

As he watched the dark shape fade into the night mist, Harry felt a pang for the owl he hadn't thought about in years: Hedwig. Since her death, Fawkes had been, in theory, his messenger bird. But it seemed presumptuous to use a creature as magical as a phoenix to carry simple daily notes. Besides, even now, even two decades after Fawkes had come into his possession, the immortal red bird still seemed like an extension of Dumbledore. So Harry used his family's owls for all but the most important--or most ceremonial--occasions. Fawkes hadn't suffered the indignity of carrying a message since bearing Sidi's acknowledgment of her acceptance to Hogwarts. Not that the old phoenix ever complained of any indignity, but it didn't seem right.

Harry missed Hedwig, missed her nips, missed her downy white wings mussing his hair. Walking around Hogwarts, he kept expecting her to come winging in through every open window. Another fallen comrade.

As he turned the corner back into the corridor of the Defense classroom, Harry saw a miserable, hunched figure standing beside the door, apparently trying work up the courage to knock.

"Hello, Harry," said Harry, and his godson gave a muffled squeal and a leap that seemed to want to go in three directions at once, with the result that, when he landed, his torso, head and hips were at odds.

"I didn't see you," Harry Weasley said, unnecessarily.

"Yes," said Harry. "Bit late for a tutorial, isn't it? It's past nine long ago. Shouldn't you be in your dormitory?" Harry fully expected that to elicit a mischievous grin, but was astonished to see the young man's eyes filling with tears. "Harry? What is it? Can I help?"

Harry Weasley looked up at Harry, then up at the ceiling, the tears dribbling back along his earlobes. "Squid..." he sobbed. And then, without another word, he sprinted down the corridor in the direction of the Gryffindor tower.

Squid?

Had the boy gotten involved in some prank out on the lake?

Harry began sprinting towards the stairs down to the entry hall, and then stopped himself. No. This had to have something to do with the mess he had created between the Weasley boy and his daughter.

Harry shook his head and wandered back to his rooms.

Before going to sleep, however, he contacted Professor Armstrong via the Floo. "I hope I haven't called too late," Harry said.

"Not at all," said the balding Astronomy professor, who was wearing what looked like a pair of winter cloaks. "I'm getting ready to head up to the tower for some observations with the first-years, poor dears. What can I do for you?"

"Well, would you mind, as Gryffindor House Head, just peaking in to the dormitories to see if Harry Weasley and my daughter are there? I have this terrible feeling they might be... out of bounds." Harry felt terrible asking, but knew it would be far worse if he decided to trek over to the Gryffindor tower himself.

Armstrong smiled. "It wouldn't be the first time, Mr. Potter. Professor Potter. It's no problem at all. I have to gather up a few of the Gryffindor first-years anyway. If you don't hear from me, they're safe in the dorms."

"Thanks," Harry said, and pulled his head out of the fireplace. He was sure the two of them were fine, but settled himself back in to the couch to wait, just in case.

* * *

Harry dreamed that night, vividly but fragmentedly. Looming figures screamed down at him: Hermione, Sidi, Ginny, Snape, Aunt Petunia. Scrolls of parchment were dancing on desktops. In the corner, a couple was snogging and giggling. At first it was his mother and Sirius. Then Ron and Nott. Then Percy and Hermione.

He woke with a start, a foul cloud still fogging his head.

Thin sunlight streamed in through the tall slit window. The Sneakoscope on the table was purring mildly. A gentle murmur wafted up from the classroom.

With a rush of panic, Harry ran through the office and flung open the door down to the classroom.

The students were just wandering in.

Ginny was seated, once again, immediately behind Sidi. Both looked up at him with identical expressions, first of surprise, and then of barely veiled frigidity. "I assumed that it would be all right if I opened the door," Ginny called up the stairs.

"Yes, of course," Harry said, attempting internally to stuff his heart back down into his chest. He scanned the classroom--yes, there was Harry Weasley, still in a funk, stuffed as far down as his chair would allow, but breathing and present, thankfully. Stepping down the stairs Harry tried to calm himself. Were all of the answer scrolls in the positions where he had memorized them? Yes. He had double-checked them before sending the owl to Remus. He had triple-checked.

Feeling and breath returned to him as strode behind his desk. "Good morning, everyone..."

"Good morning, Professor," sneered a cold, sharp voice from the doorway. The headmaster strode into the room. "So nice of you to join us."

"Ah!" said Harry, jumping slightly. "Professor Snape! Well, well... I could, uh, certainly say the same to you. Come in, come in."

Severus Snape glided across the room and sat at the back of Ginny and Sidi's row.

"Well," Harry said, trying to regain his composure yet again, trying not to listen to his nervous, empty stomach turning beneath his robes. "Good morning. When we met on--what, Monday?"

A couple of heads nodded happily. Sidi's and Ginny's barely moved.

"Yes, well, it doesn't seem like that long, ha." No one else laughed. "Well, on Monday, when we went down to the Hufflepuff common room and faced the Boggart, you may have noticed that it took me more than one try to open the cupboard. And you may have wondered why someone who Professor Lupin went on about would be such a, uh, pathetic excuse for a wizard." They stared up at him. Professor Snape seemed to be chasing a small piece of lint around his thumb with his index finger.

In front of the headmaster, Sidi and Ginny sat back in their chairs, their expressions matching masks of skepticism.

What was I trying to say? Harry thought, as he involuntarily checked the clock. Only two minutes had passed. His stiff neck began to sweat, and he could feel the slept-in shirt and robes sticking to the small of his back.

A tall Sikh boy in the front row coughed.

"Sorry," Harry sputtered, feeling that perhaps he had never woken up and his was still enmeshed in that horrible, dreary sequence of anxiety dreams. He looked around. Students were beginning to fidget. "Well, uh, sorry. I'm sure you have a lot of questions--I didn't really get the chance to answer any last Monday. Monday?"

Directly in front of him, Circe Taylor nodded, looking seriously concerned.

"So, Monday, yes. So, questions." Harry looked around. The class stared back at him. "Anyone?"

The students looked around, each clearly waiting for someone else to come up with a question. Snape's eyes never left his thumb. And Ginny was staring at the ceiling.

The Sikh boy tentatively raised his hand.

Harry almost leapt forward and kissed him. "YES!" he exploded.

"Uh, Professor," the boy said, Alan Singh, that was his name, he was a friend of Harry Weasley's, "Do you mind my asking about your Boggart?"

Harry had no idea what he was talking about. This definitely wasn't on one of the scrolls. "My Boggart?"

"Yes, sir. Why are you afraid of Siria?"

"Siria?" Hermione, long-toothed still, weeping. "Ah! Yes. Siria. I mean, no, that wasn't Siria. That was Hermione. My wife. When she was... eleven. The Minister for Magic, when she was. Eleven. And it's very complex, you see. I'm not really afraid of my wife being eleven, I'm just worried, and what I'm worried about, uh, makes me feel like my wife at eleven, uh, crying, does that make any sense at all?" Harry asked, feeling his voice creeping higher and higher as he tried to come to the end of a sentence.

Alan shrugged. He still looked worried that Harry might jump on him.

"Any others? Questions?"

A prim witch with her hair in three extremely precise plaits raised her hand. "Professor? Eleanora Ap Rhys, Professor. I was wondering if you could tell us how many OWLs and NEWTs your wife earned. I went to look it up in the library, but there wasn't any information." The girl looked extremely disappointed that the library had let her down so terribly.

"OWLs and NEWTs?" Three days and no one had asked a question that Harry hadn't anticipated and written down on one of his hidden scrolls. Now they were asking about Boggarts and Hermione's OWLs. "I, uh, can't say that I remember terribly well. She did well, I know... But you should ask her. She's coming up on Tuesday." Harry saw Snape's eyes snap up towards him. Damn. He wasn't supposed to say that. "Uh, but keep that a secret, no one's supposed to know." Inwardly, Harry flinched again. He knew that the best way to ensure that a piece of information was disseminated as broadly as possibly around Hogwarts was to tell the students that it was confidential.

Ginny's gaze continued to be drawn towards the gothic ceiling of the Dark Arts classroom. Harry could see a small scorch mark left by one of the pixies that Professor Lockhart had loosed in the room all those years ago. Perhaps he should have done pixies today. Couldn't have been worse.

"Any other, uh..."

Circe raised her hand, and Harry would have gone to hug her too had Alan Singh not been sitting directly beside her, still looking nervous.

"Miss Taylor?"

"Yes, Professor. I was reading last night in one of the biographies of Professor Longbottom and the rest of you, and it mentioned that you had scar on your head that you'd gotten when Tom Riddle killed your parents. I've noticed you, um, don't have any scar..."

"Ah!" Harry cried, ecstatic to have gotten a question that would get his lesson plan started at last. "Excellent question! Five points to Gryffindor! For, uh, reading."

Professor Snape's eyebrows disappeared into his hair.

"Well, yes. So." Harry checked to see who was sitting in the appropriate seat. Right side, third from the front. Sidi. Oh, great. "Well, I'm not going to answer that. That is," he said, as the students' faces twisted in confusion, "Sidi... my daughter... Miss Potter is going to answer it."

Sidi made a show of sighing and looking out the window, and then started to speak.

"But, Miss Potter, I know you know the answer to that question, but I'd like you to present my answer." She stared at him dubiously, the unasked What the hell are you on about, now, Daddy? clear on her face. "Please look under your desk. You should find a scroll--got it? Good. Now, if you would, please read the scroll."

Sidi opened the scroll, and her dubiousness shifted into frank incomprehension. She held up the parchment, as if to say, "What the hell is this?"

"Out loud, Miss Potter, please," Harry said, trying to keep smiling.

Siria shrugged, took the scroll in both hands and read. "Since time immemorial, students have been responding to professors' calls for questions by asking, 'What is the meaning of life?' And since time immemorial, professors have been telling their students not to be cheeky.

"I, however, am going to answer that question for you...."

"WAIT!" Harry said. He strode up the side row to Sidi and snatched the scroll from her hand. On the outside top right-hand corner, it was marked 2d--second row from the left, fourth seat. He reached under the seat of the boy immediately in front of Sidi. 1b.

Slowly, he walked back to the front of the classroom and plucked a scroll out from behind a copy of The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection. It read 3a. They had all been rearranged. Who? Young Harry? Sidi? Snape? Harry looked around to find all of the students staring bemusedly at him. The headmaster had returned to his thumb. Ginny looked as if she were trying to chew a hole through the side of her mouth.

"Well," said Harry shortly, "serves me right for trying to be clever. Someone's out-clevered me and rearranged all of the scrolls. So, first, let me answer Miss Taylor's question, and then I will try to tell you the point of this entire muck-up...."

* * *

The class had turned out well enough. Harry had managed to get his feet back beneath him and had salvaged a certain amount of his lesson plan, if not his dignity. As the students shuffled out, Siria looked as if the entire experience had been designed to humiliate her. She had walked out without sparing her father a sideways glance.

"Very interesting lesson, professor," drawled Snape.

"As I said, sir, it serves me right for trying to be clever." It was all Harry could do simply to meet the headmaster's black gaze.

"Hmm," Snape sneered, and swooped out of the room.

Harry could feel Ginny standing beside him, but didn't turn.

"Harry, I'm so sorry."

"It's all right," he said more calmly than he actually felt. "I didn't want to be a teacher anyway." She gave a dejected grunt. "What I want to know, Professor Longbottom, is why?"

"Harry!" she said, and touched his shoulder. He still did not move. "It was a lark, I promise. Just a way to get you back a bit for, for Monday night, and maybe get us talking..."

"Ah." Beneath all the beauty and gentleness, she was, after all, Fred and George's sister.

"I didn't expect the lesson to begin so..."

Silence. "So abominably. No, I suppose not. I was up late trying to make sure your nephew and goddaughter weren't killed down by the lake."

"Oh." Ginny looked up at him.

The anger and hurt in Harry's chest was bubbling, but it was already easing enough for him to be able to speak. "What I want to know is why Monday was my fault?"

Ginny sighed and pursed her lips. "I don't know. I'll think about it." She pierced him with a black gaze. "Why is it my fault that you overslept?"

Harry gave a grunt. "I don't know. I'll think about it." He felt the steam leaking out from inside him, leaving only the disappointment.

"I've got to get to my next class. They'll be transforming each other into ferrets and bouncing each other off the walls," Ginny muttered after a brief silence, and she left.

Mutedly, Harry put all of the scrolls back in place. He had two classes left to spring what was left of his great Lecture.

* * *

Harry had another training session with Circe Taylor that night; she was preparing for the Cup-deciding match with Hufflepuff that Saturday, and was hungry to help her team. Percy had made no appearance at all in his conversation with Hermione, Albie, and Minnie. Oddly, this left him even more deflated, which was somewhat of an accomplishment.

The feeling of dry melancholy was alleviated somewhat by the Quidditch session. Harry let Circe use his Firebolt; she needed to feel what it was like to fly a real broom, and she exploded into the sky like a newly-fledged dragon. When they landed, he offered the broom to her. Not just to use for the match--to keep. Flabbergasted, Circe tried to demur, but Harry insisted. He didn't foresee ever having the need to ride it again. If he did, however, he said he was sure Circe would lend it back.

At that, she had smiled, and cantered away, bearing her new broom back up to the castle like a trophy.

Harry meandered back up to the school more slowly, thinking of Sirius.