New Blood

"I hate him."

Four figures sat slouched at their desks, entirely miserable to a) be forced to share this kind of boring space with one another, and b) to be forced to endure the droning litany of a Shakespearean ghost who wasn't about to let up on his lecture on iambic pentameter anytime soon. Harry Potter sighed and stretched, and rolled his eyes at the ceiling, wondering if there was some way he could make himself disappear up inside of it. Ron was snoring beside him, suffering a nightmare by the sound of it, his fingers frantically tearing at the edges of an unknown book and the words "No..No...Not Strunk and White!.." mumbling from his lips. Hermione was the only person busily scribbling, though it wasn't a homework assignment as one would expect--their schoolbooks had been confiscated. She'd found a piece of parchment and was busily drawing a fairly good rendition of the object of their hate with his head lopped off and blood spurting from the gaping wound. Draco Malfoy, who was sitting beside Harry and was the owner of the abrupt outburst, was busy sneering at the ghost, who by all accounts probably didn't even know they were there.

Harry stopped his concentration on the ceiling and faced Draco. "Stating the obvious isn't going to get us out of detention, is it?" he said. He groaned, and slouched even more in his seat, staring all the while at the transparent 'instructor' before them. "They should have hired this guy," Harry said. "At least he knows what he's doing."

"What is the point of sitting here bored for half an hour?" Draco snapped. He crossed his arms and glared at Harry as if they were about to turn to dust from years of erosion, and it was all bloody well his fault. Harry shrank a little under the glare because, after all, he *did* have a large amount of responsibility for their current situation.

They'd all been warned that the new course added to their already burgeoning workloads was being taught by a Muggle. Harry still had the note he'd received by owl over the summer tucked away in his Potions notebook. Since both things made him cringe it was a good resting place. On standard issue Hogwarts paper, in glittering silvery black ink the announcement had been neatly written:

ATTENTION! ALL HOGWARTS STUDENTS!

It has come to my attention, after perusing the rather sorry state of our most recent spellbooks, that there is a profound lack in the Hogwarts curriculum. It has been a not so well guarded secret among wizards that modern spells have become increasingly difficult to follow, using poorly constructed snippets of poetry, as well as outright plagiarism of Muggle works. There is a very real difference seen between those great old standby spells of yesteryear, their phrases leaping from the page as though visible and alive, and the wilted appearance of their progeny. Alas, most modern spells do not have the old, fiery potency, and as a result suffer not only in their effectiveness, but also in their execution. A poorly written spell is one that limps along, and is often misinterpreted through overly heavy diction.

Thus, the board of directors at Hogwarts has decided that to rectify this problem will not be a matter of magic, but of practicality. We have now added to the school syllabus, a standard, non magic English course, and in keeping with the nature of the course, we welcome one of our few non magic members to the faculty of Hogwarts--Professor Daniel Deschamps. Mr. Deschamps has a great deal of experience in understanding the nuances of the English language, and I have been assured by many that his ideas are nothing short of 'unbelievable'.

He has requested that I quickly note the books all students at Hogwarts shall be needing for this first sojourn into English instruction. They are as follows:

A Clockwork Orange--Anthony Burgess
Serial Killers And Their Kin
A Short History of Remarkable Crimes
Macbeth--William Shakespeare
Psychological Dystopia--A Primer on the After-effects of Law Enforcement Careers--published by Alkie press
The Shining--Stephen King
The Bell Jar--Sylvia Plath
Grammar for 'O' levels--Oxford press

All books will be available in Diagon Alley, although Mr. Deschamps has informed me that bonus marks will be awarded to any student who can make his 'CD player' work, and four coupons for butterbeer will be awarded to any student who can manage to bring in a crate of whiskey. I am not entirely sure what the significance of these things are, but I'm sure they have something to do with the exciting ideas he has for your lessons.

As always, we, and I, wait impatiently for your return to Hogwarts. Carpe Deum!

Albus Dumbledore

If the note hadn't expressed it well enough, the current stale, laboratory type atmosphere of the classroom they were trapped in most certainly did. Every cough echoed plainly off of the stark white walls, until it petered off into absolute silence. This was no doubt an effect of the room being a dungeon dwelling, its oppressive nature further aggravated by the fact that Professor Deschamps shared a connecting door with Severus Snape's Potions room. Harry had been willing to give the benefit of the doubt, however. At first glance, Daniel Deschamps himself was not a wholly unattractive or bad sort of man, as Hermoine had astutely observed.

After getting to know him just a little better, Professor Deschamps seemed as at ease in this uncomfortable, clinical atmosphere as a rat was to a dank, pitch black hole.

That morning he had gathered all the senior year students into this classroom for a 'mass introduction'. The first years were leaving as the seniors piled in, a cross section of weeping, traumatized ten to fourteen year olds and puzzled fifteen to eighteen year olds moving like opposing currents to and from the room. Harry, Ron and Hermione had picked seats near the middle rows. The back of Harry's seat was immediately kicked. He'd turned to see Draco Malfoy sneering down at him, his cronies Crabbe and Goyle at his side. The white setting of the classroom made him even paler than usual. Harry had glared back and asked before Draco could spit out an insult.

"What is it now?"

"You should enjoy this class, Potter," Draco said. His lip curled evilly. "I'm sure all the Mudbloods will get deferential treatment, but then they aren't known for being especially bright are they?" Malfoy let out a laugh, "He could be under an Impervis curse for his entire life and never question it. I'm sure to manage all 'A's"

"That would be a first," Hermione quipped. "The only class you can manage an A in is Potions, and that's only because Snape hates Harry so much."

"I happen to be good at it," Draco said, narrowing grey eyes.

"It's possible," Hermione admitted. "But it's far more likely you're just getting high marks in that class to make Harry look bad." She gave him a level, knowing look. "Emnity can create strange effects."

"I wouldn't be so sure of yourself," Draco said to her. "Maybe the next time you drink a bit of your Muggle tea, it'll have more in it than some scummy dead leaves."

Ron had given Hermione a despairing look of sympathy, and then turned, red faced to Draco Malfoy. "Keep it up, Draco, and I'll give you a curse worth knowing."

"It's amazing," Draco said, looking down at Ron from his position two rows up. "Your transmorgation classes must be going exceptionally well lately. You're looking more like a real carrot every day."

Ron made a move to leap from his seat to throttle the smirk off Draco's face, but both Harry and Hermione held him back.

"He's just an idiot," Hermione said, shaking her head.

"Did you hear that?" Draco said to Crabbe and Goyle. "Even his friends can't deny the truth of what he is!"

"She was talking about you," Harry said, darkly. "Which goes to show how much of a moron *you* are if you can't figure that out."

"It's just so obviously not the case, Potter," Draco said, and smiled nastily at him.

But there had been no more room for trading insults. The class had settled down into a quiet hush that permeated all of existance. Harry, Ron and Hermione, and even Draco, became a part of it, the seconds expanding into minutes, the minutes into clumps of minutes, until they all began to realize they had simply been sitting in their seats quietly for a quarter of an hour, barely even breathing.

Daniel Deschamps was behind his desk, he hadn't yet acknowledged the class. He seemed deeply lost in thought, and had been tapping his chin and frowning. Someone coughed, and he shot them a dirty look, which instantly made the pale boy in the third row shrink in fear. After sixteen minutes had passed, Draco audibly sighed, and Harry chanced a look over his shoulder to see Draco slouched in his seat, his arms crossed as well as his expression. He looked about ready to say something, but Deschamps looked up, and suddenly smiled at a girl in the second row to the left, and said:

"My, my, if it isn't Donna McTeague."

The girl blushed and then looked around at her small gaggle of friends with her for support.

"I...I'm not Donna McTeague," she said, shyly. "I'm Alison Featherworthy."

Deschamps smiled. The expression was odd on his face, like it knew more than it let on, and what it knew wasn't pleasant. Which of course was what was next revealed.

"Oh, no, you wouldn't be Donna," he said. "Donna, unfortunately, is dead. But she looked just like you, right down to the way you wear your hair, it's almost uncanny. Poor girl." He frowned, just a little. "Though, of course...I can't be entirely sure if her brow was the same height as yours, considering the pictures before the murder weren't all that clear, and she had most of her skull shattered by the back of a hammer..."

The young girl was mortified. "M...Murdered?"

"Oh yes," Deschamps said, and was still smiling warmly. "Let it be a lesson to you, Alison Featherworthy." He shook his finger at her meaningfully, "Be very, very wary of jealous boyfriends." Deschamps left his desk and began pacing in front of it, a rather wistful expression on his face. Every now and then he would brush soft brown bangs from his forehead. "I had a hell of a time putting the pieces of bone back together, I can tell you. You'd be amazed at how fragile the human skull is with the right amount of force. Figuring out the trajectory wasn't so bad, though I had to be careful all the extra tissue had been properly boiled off, because it could have affected the outcome, not to mention all those tiny pieces. You see he'd used the nail removing section of the hammer, not the blunt end, and had essentially pried off the back of her..."

The entire class had now descended into the kind of silence one finds when a forest greets a starving panther. Alison Featherworthy looked as though she'd just finished visiting her grave, and she was already laying in it.

So, it was with some surprise, that it was Harry who found his voice, and blurted out: "Bloody hell!"

"You said it," Ron immediately quipped.

"This is *not* part of a standard English curriculum," Hermione pointed out.

"Stupid Mudblood!" Draco shouted.

Deschamps' eyes shot to Draco, and Harry looked back at his enemy. In this stark white setting he was pale enough to look as though he was in a morgue. Harry doubted detailed descriptions of Muggle murders was something Draco was familiar with, not with the way he was looking so positively sick. Dark blue eyes with a hint of steel honed in on each of them like a hawk to mice and without one whisper of hesitation Deschamps said: "You four! Detention! Three o'clock!"

And now, here they were, bored out of their minds, and waiting for three thirty to finally arrive, where Harry and Draco would go into their Potions class through the adjoining door, and Hermione and Ron would be late for their classes on the top floors of Hogwarts. Ron was still twitching in his sleep, his leg kicking the leg of his chair as if he was running. "No..no...Deschamps..grammar...hammer...NO!!"

He awoke in a dead sweat, nearly leaping out of his seat in horror. Hermione's hand made him settle back down into it, and Ron furtively searched the room for the dreaded English teacher, and was more than relieved to see a ghost at the lectern instead.

Hermione studied the picture she had drawn, Draco begrudgingly agreeing with its rather violent sentiment. Hermione sighed, and carefully folded the picture into a precise square. "I lost my study break in the reference section of the library for this," she said, bitter. "It took me two days to book that half an hour in the Time Management And Travel department, and there's not even any way I can double up the hours, I'm already taking a Transmigration class at the same time as my Arithmacy quiz."

Draco slouched and kicked the back of her chair, and she shot him an evil look over her shoulder. "That's the spirit," he said, "but save it for that Mudblood the next time he comes into this room."

"Where the hell *is* he?" Ron wondered aloud. He looked fearfully up at the roof of the stark white classroom, no doubt musing that Deschamps was like an evil presence that could simply be a part of the air.

"The last I saw of him, he went through the Potions door," Harry said.

They all looked in the direction of the adjoining classroom door with matched expressions of dread.

"You don't think he'd...Do something to Snape, do you?" Ron asked, hopeful.

"If wishes were horses, I'd have a corral," Harry replied.

Draco absently kicked at Hermione's chair again, taking some pleasure in the angry expression he was given again. "My father will be hearing about this, make no mistake. He'll be livid when he finds out a Muggle is teaching at Hogwarts. It makes it all the more obvious," Draco said.

"Makes what obvious?" Harry asked.

Draco made a distinctive 'tch' sound, and shook his head at Harry's apparent stupidity. "That Dumbledore's gone stark raving mad, of course."

Harry opened his mouth as if to protest, but he couldn't quite articulate a good argument. The decision to hire Daniel Deschamps was a tad odd, even for the eccentric headmaster of Hogwarts. Though, upon further reflection, when he thought about it, perhaps Deschamps didn't seem odd to Dumbledore *because* of his strangely morbid personality. Hagrid's Monsters class was filled with 'harmless' creatures that would just as soon rip their heads off as be studied, Snape wasn't averse to a nearly deadly poisoning once in a while to get his point across, and Trelawny was an obvious charlatan whose 'expertise' was only thinly tolerated by everyone.

Perhaps a Muggle with rather sociopathic tendencies fit in a lot better than any of them realized.

"Are you sure he's got no magic?" Ron asked Hermione, doubt in every furrow of his freckled brow. "I've never experienced a half an hour this long!" He cast another glance at the adjoining door, fearful of it opening and at the same time curious.

"What would someone like that Muggle talk with Snape about?" Draco wondered aloud. "He's been in there twenty minutes."

"Ten minutes more," Ron yawned. "What an eternity!"

"Maybe he's demonstrating some carpentry techniques," Hermione said.

Deschamps' gruesome descriptions were still very clear in their minds. Both Harry and Draco shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Harry didn't have to use a mind reading spell to understand that Draco was thinking the same thing he was, and wasn't any more eager than Harry to find out if their Potions professor was laying in a puddle of mortal blood on the floor of their classroom.

The ghost at the lectern coughed, pages rustling in his transparent grip.

"...as we can see, the use of the semi colon in Strunk & White's example is a fascinating study in..."

"Nine more minutes," Ron breathed as he stared, wide eyed, at the connecting door. "Nine minutes..."

***

Snape's most coveted peace and quiet was a treasure of Hogwarts that he greedily took at every opportunity. Rarely did he mix with the other teachers of the school, and this arrangement had suited him fine for the years he had taught here. He could have spent the remainder of his days in this classroom, and in his potions office quite happily never interacting with another soul, save for a bitter remark here and there. He had long since learned that people were not of much use to him, nor to each other if he thought on it. Everyone wanted their own angle in every relationship, and since Severus Snape had seen some of the darker aspects of human 'friendship' when he played spy against He Who Must Not Be Named, well, there was no wonder why he avoided company.

So, it was with suspicious surprise that he met Daniel Deschamps, who had wandered into his empty potions classroom, and then into his office, curious dark navy eyes inspecting the contents of his larger bottled creatures.

"Ah, it all ends badly for us, doesn't it? We're alive and then...We're not," Daniel Deschamps said to a bottle of eyes.

"What do you want?" Snape asked.

One of the jarred creatures on his upper shelf was looking down at Daniel intently. It squished its huge, segmented eyes against the glass to get a better view, and Daniel caught its gaze. The two creatures stared at each other a long moment, and to Snape's horror Daniel even reached up and tapped the side of the glass with his fingernail.

"Stop that!" Snape shouted. "That's a horn crested pickled centinewt! They are extremely rare and highly delicate, so unless you know how to dig your way into the bottom of a Corspemarsh and can get past its poisonous nettle lined burrow to get another one, I suggest you stop teasing it!"

The horn crested centinewt actually looked more curious than upset, but Daniel let his hand fall away to his side. He held it out, instead, to Snape, as a gesture of greeting.

"I'm.."

"Daniel Deschamps, the Muggle teacher. I'm fully aware of you," Snape said. He did not shake Daniel's hand, but instead sat down at his desk. He made a show of moving some papers about on the surface of it, as though he was doing something of great import--although truth be told, he had been looking forward to his daily half hour of solitude to do nothing at all. "What do you want?" he asked again, not looking up.

"Coffee," Deschamps said.

"Two floors up," Snape answered.

His unwanted 'guest' shrugged, and then nervously scratched the back of his head. "I don't think I'll make it back in time for the next class if it's that far up. I'll settle for a tea, then." He looked around Snape's office hopefully. "You got any?"

"I don't have anything," Snape shot back.

"You're not a very personable sort of bloke, are you?"

"How very perceptive of you. Close the door on your way out."

Daniel looked thoroughly exasperated. He sighed, and put his hands in the pockets of his Muggle pants, and shrugged his shoulders again. "It's a been a horrible, long day," he said, clearly to himself since Snape had rebuffed his company. "One moment worse than the next, and I half wonder if that protective custody order wasn't more worthwhile a choice after all. I've done nothing but offend people all day, I can't blame you for being so against me. I suppose you got wind of that argument I had with that Haggis fellow?"

Haggis?

"You mean Hagrid," Snape clarified, now slightly curious.

"Yes. He got into a terrible fit when I told him about how I'd eaten alligator when I did a brief visit to New Orleans," Daniel said. "I don't know why he got into such a state, we'd merely been talking about dragons before that, and he was wondering what kind of Muggle ones there were, and those were the closest cousins that I could think of. I haven't done well by that Treloony woman either, I suspect. She took one look at me and acted as though she'd just seen me gutted."

"She thinks that of everybody," Snape replied.

"Ah," Daniel said, and smiled warmly. "I knew a woman like that once. Trouble was, she was the one who did the gutting." He shook his head. "Cor...terrible mess that was."

An uncomfortable silence followed those words as Snape tried to decipher just what it was Daniel was talking about. Though the light in his dungeon office was dim, he could still get a good look at this new addition to the Hogwarts staff. He hadn't made any attempt to meet him beforehand, and if McGonagall's overheard exclamation of "Horrid man!" earlier that day was any indication of his personality, he'd made the right choice. Still, he looked harmless enough. Large, dark navy eyes that had a lazy understanding within them, dark brown hair that was unkempt and yet had a certain degree of style to it.

Such stupidity! What was he looking at his hair and eyes for?

Snape allowed the silence that had descended between them to solidify, and become an impenetrable wall. The less he had to do with this new Hogwarts acquisition the better.

"I suppose I should go in an make them suffer," Deschamps sighed. "Honestly, I don't think I'm a very good teacher already. Every time I look at his weasly little face I just can't help but be disgusted by him. I knew a lot of his sort when I was working at Scotland Yard, and God help me it pisses me off to have this attitude, but it's so ingrained I can't get rid of it, you know?"

Snape was mildly curious. "Disgusted by who?" he asked.

Daniel Deschamps crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the door connecting Snape's classroom to his. "That damn kid, and I'm sure he used a racial slur on me. What's his name...Harry Potter, I think."

Snape's small, black eyes widened. He looked on Daniel with a renewed interest.

"Sorry to have bothered you," Daniel said, and was about to leave.

"Wait."

He stopped. Snape kept his eyes on him and waved a hand in the direction of one of his middle shelves.

"Tea," he said. "In that carafe."