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SIYE Time:1:05 on 29th March 2024
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back to school
By lazyweekendmornings

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Category: Post-DH/PM
Characters:None
Genres: Action/Adventure, Comedy
Warnings: None
Story is Complete
Rating: PG-13
Reviews: 99
Summary: Twenty one years after the war, Harry and Ginny return to Hogwarts as the new Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor and the new Flying Instructor. Much to their children's embarrassment. Shenanigans ensue.
Hitcount: Story Total: 26003; Chapter Total: 974





Author's Notes:
so sorry for the delay! i hope all of you lovely people have been healthy and doing well :)




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What with Scorpius finally being discharged from the hospital, Ginny was so sure that it was going to be a good day. Calm, even. Drama-free.

Clearly, she thinks as she looks at Lily, she had been deluded in that assumption. Lily, who’s looking up at them, shifting her weight from one leg to another.

“Apart from the letter,” Ginny says quietly, “do you have any proof at all, Lils? It’s a serious accusation to make.”

Lily puffs up her chest, standing straight with all the seriousness of an eleven-year-old – Merlin, she’s nearly twelve now. Where has the time gone? Ginny remembers when she first held Lily, when she first looked into her bright brown eyes. It feels like seconds ago, and yet, here she is, trying to solve Dark mysteries on her own. “Are you saying you don’t trust me?” she says, and then, looking right at Harry, “Is this how you treat other Aurors when they tell you their case leads, Dad?”

Harry raises an eyebrow.

“I’m telling you, she’s not innocent,” Lily insists. Her eyes are wide. “I know it’s Anna Selwyn. She’s awful. She and her gang, they always get up to something…”

“ What sort of things do they get up to?” Harry says.

Ginny turns to look at Harry. His eyes are narrowed, behind his glasses, and his jaw is set, and then Ginny cottons on suddenly to what he’s thinking about. She’s arrived at the same conclusion herself.

“Is she the one who was bothering you?” she asks.

Lily’s blush is all the answer she needs. Which means that Anna Selwyn’s the one responsible for upsetting Lily so much the past few weeks. She thinks about Lily, about how she’d been – for once – on the verge of tears when she confided in Ginny about what the Slytherins had told her.

“Why didn’t you say something?” Harry says.

Lily’s jaw is set, stubborn. “I could handle it,” she says. Ginny suddenly thinks about Harry when he was fifteen, how he had refused to tell Dumbledore about Umbridge. Jamie and Al both have their days, but it’s Lily who’s inherited her father’s stubbornness – although Harry would probably say that she inherited it from Ginny herself.

There’s so much Ginny wants to say. The point of what they went through – Voldemort, the Death Eaters, all of it – is that none of their kids had to go through it. And here’s their youngest daughter, accusing a Slytherin daughter of a Death Eater of attacking her other child.

“Lily,” she says quietly.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Lily says. “But that’s not the point. The point is that she did it. I know she did!”

“I’ll talk to her,” Harry says. His voice has gone quieter. Serious. His Auror voice.

“Don’t— ” Lily starts to say, but then the door opens.

They’ve been standing in Harry’s office, adjoining his classroom. Ginny turns to look at the doorway: Danielle and Leah, both of their cheeks suspiciously flushed, are standing there.

“Oh—sorry, Professor Potter. And Coach Potter. Hi, Lily,” Leah says. “We didn’t mean to interrupt. I was sure Jamie would be here.”

“Isn’t he out there, with the others?” Ginny says.

“No, we lost track of him,” Danielle says. “We, er – well, Freddie showed me something from the shop, and I was showing Leah.”

Leah grins.

“And then we couldn’t find them. I thought they’d be here,” Danielle says.

“Yeah, I thought he’d be plotting something here with Freddie,” Leah says.

Ginny raises her eyebrows, and then looks past the girls, into the DADA classroom. She sees Albus and Scorpius. Scorpius is sitting in a chair, and Albus is standing next to him, looking shifty. She walks out and doesn’t have to turn to know Harry’s right next to her. “Hey, Al,” she says. “Any idea where your brother’s gotten off to?”

“Nope,” Albus says quickly. Too quickly. When Ginny looks at him, he’s smiling at her, the very picture of innocence. Scorpius, on the other hand, won’t look them in the eye.

“So if we were to leave, and find a certain Anna Selwyn, we wouldn’t find him?” Harry says.

Ginny puts the pieces together in a matter of seconds: either Jamie or Al (her bet’s on Al, based on his shifty expression) overheard Leah’s suspicions, and now Freddie and Jamie have gone to confront her. Going by Harry’s question, he’s arrived at the same conclusion as well.

“Anna Selwyn?” Leah repeats. “Has he gone after her?”

Scorpius’s eyes go wide. “Maybe,” he says in a small voice.

“Scorp!” Albus says.

“I only said maybe, I never said—” Scorpius says, but Ginny’s stopped paying attention, because Harry squeezes her hand.

“I’m going to go find them,” he murmurs to her.

Ginny nods. “Alright. I’ll stay with this lot,” she says. Much as she’d love to go with Harry, she knows the kind of havoc two Potter siblings can wreak when unsupervised. The last thing she needs is more chaos.

“I’ll come with you, Professor Potter,” Leah says. “I’d quite like to tell my boyfriend off for being an idiot.”

“You and me both, Leah,” Harry mutters. “Come on, then. Let’s go.”

*

Harry finds Jamie within minutes. It’s not hard: he and Leah start walking towards the Slytherin common room – Leah’s surprised that he knows where it is, but she doesn’t question it – and they find Jamie and Freddie in a passageway, along with a girl who Harry assumes is Anna. She doesn’t take Defence, so this is the first time Harry’s seeing her.

She’s tall, nearly as tall as Freddie, and her hair is a pale blond. She’s got red lipstick on, and she’s holding her wand in between her index and second finger. She’s also got a sneer on her face that instantly reminds Harry of a young Draco Malfoy, and Harry thinks he understands why Lily thought to accuse her. Jamie and Freddie seem to be quite heated up, but she lounges against the wall in an insouciant manner, looking as if she doesn’t have a care in the world.

“You know something, though,” Freddie’s saying, as Harry walks up to them, Leah following him. Freddie trails off, and the three of them turn to look at Harry: Freddie looking surprised, Jamie looking sheepish, and Anna looking more disdainful hhan ever. 

“Oh. Hi, Dad,” Jamie says.

“Funny seeing you here,” Freddie says.

“You idiots,” Leah says. “You absolute, complete idiots. What are you doing going off on your own?”

“Like we’ve never done that before,” Jamie points out.

“But that’s different,” Leah argues. “With everything that’s happened—”

Anna arches an eyebrow. “You sound scared,” she says.

“Maybe I just know what you and your lot are capable of, is all,” Leah says.

“What do you mean, my lot?” Anna says. She sounds angry.

Harry looks at her for a long moment. She looks him dead in the eyes, not looking away even for a moment. She’d be the very picture of defiance if it weren’t for the slight flicker in her eyes. Harry’s looked at scared people long enough to recognise one. He thinks about Dumbledore, talking to Draco on top of the Astronomy tower, and sighs internally.

“Jamie, Freddie. Get back to the Defence classroom,” he says. “Leah, you too.”

“Does that mean I’m free to go back to my common room?” Anna says.

“Of course,” Harry says. “But I’d like to talk to you first. Come with me.”

“Why can’t we come?” Jamie says indignantly. “It’s our friends she’s been getting to! And Freddie and Leah are Prefects, they should get to hear what’s going on, too!”

“Jamie,” Harry says, and looks at him.

Jamie deflates. “We never get to join the fun,” he mutters.

*

The party’s in the Defence classroom, and his office is far from private – as evidenced by Albus and Scorpius overhearing Lily’s talk with him and Ginny – so he leads Anna to a familiar office in the Dungeons. He remembers Occlumency lessons here with Snape, and suppresses a shudder at the thought. The office is less shadowy and miserable than he remembers, though, although it does have a portrait of Severus Snape behind the desk. He waves his wand, and the door closes with a click of the locks.

“What do you want to talk about?” Anna says sullenly.

Harry casts a wordless Imperturbable Charm on the door, ensuring no Extendible Ears will be able to listen in (since he highly doubts that Jamie, Freddie, or Leah are back in the Defence classroom now). “Have a seat,” he says.

Anna sits down on the other side of the desk. Instead of sitting behind the desk, Harry perches on the end of it, and looks at her.

“What?” Anna says again.

Harry’s been in interrogation rooms before. More often than he can count. He was present when Selwyn himself – who he assumes is Anna’s father – was interrogated. This isn’t an Auror interrogation, though. This is him, talking to a student as a Defence professor. So he’s not sure how to play this.

He decides to wait it out. He leans against the desk, and says, “Want a cup of tea?”

“What, so you can poison me or spike it with Veritaserum?” Anna says.

“So, no tea, then?” Harry says wryly. “I have no reason to poison you.”

Anna doesn’t say anything. And then: “Not even if you knew who my uncle is?”

Harry had been assuming that it was her father, but he supposes that makes sense: Selwyn, as far as he knows, is still in prison. “I know who your uncle is,” Harry says. “Voldemort used his wand to try and attack me, and then I assume he tortured him when it didn’t work.”

Anna flinches. “He’s in Azkaban,” she says. “Still. Life sentence.”

“Well, he used enough Unforgivables to fill up a novel,” Harry says. “And he worked for Voldemort. Plenty of evidence against him.”

“Which you would know about. You testified against him, my dad says,” Anna says. “Says you personally ensured he got sent to prison.”

“Yeah?&rdqu o; Harry says mildly. “What else does your dad say?”

“He says that the world would be better without any Potters in it,” Anna says.

Harry thinks about Ginny telling him that Lily was upset about a group of older Slytherins, a group who told her the world would be better if she hadn’t been born. “Something you were happy to repeat to Lily,” he says.

Anna examines her fingernails. “Wasn’t just me who said that,” she says.

Which isn’t a denial. Harry decides to try a different tactic. “So,” he says, “do you parrot everything your dad says, or just that?”

That gets to Anna, enough to get her to look up at him. “I don’t parrot everything he says!” she says. “It’s true. You did send my uncle to prison!”

“I didn’t. The Ministry did. But even if I did. Do you wish I hadn’t?” Harry says. “Do you wish they were all still out, murdering Muggles and Muggleborns and whoever disagrees with them?”

Anna flushes. “I never said that,” she mumbles.

“So you don’t agree with the Death Eaters?” Harry says. “You’re old enough to think for yourself, you know.”

Anna doesn’t say anything. And then it all bursts out of her, all at once. “I know most of them are full of shit. The blood purity thing… it’s bullshit. And I know most of them did terrible things,” she says. She’s talking faster than usual now.

Harry arches an eyebrow at her. “Right. They did,” he agrees. “Worse things than you can imagine, probably.”

“But all of them, they’re my friends. My family,” Anna says.

“I know,” Harry says, and leaves it at that. 

“I know why you’re talking to me,” Anna says, after a moment. “You think I did it. That I attacked Potter and Granger-Weasley and Scorpius.”

Scorpius, Harry notes, doesn’t seem to go by his last name when it comes to Anna. “Did you?” he says.

“No,” Anna says.

“But you know who did,” Harry says. It’s not a question, but Anna doesn’t deny it. “They attacked Scorpius,” he says quietly. “You must know him. His dad knew yours, at any rate.”

Anna flinches, and then does her best to cover it up. “I’ve met him once or twice,” she says.

“He spent two weeks in the Hospital Wing,” Harry says. “Could’ve been longer, if I didn’t get to him in time. And if I got to him too late…” he leaves it hanging for a moment. “Are those the friends you want, the kind of people who would do that?”

“Some people would say I’m just as bad as them,” Anna says. “Worse, even. Your daughter’d probably say that.”

“Maybe,&rdquo ; Harry says. “But you’re an adult now. You get to decide if you want to be better, or not.”

“Do I have a choice?” Anna says bitterly.

Harry thinks about who this office used to belong to. He looks her in the eye and says, “You always do.”

Anna looks down at her lap and then finally says, quietly, “It’s not just them.”

“What do you mean?” Harry says.

“It’s not just my… my friends. It’s their parents. My parents, too. All of them,” Anna says. “They’re all after you, Professor Potter. They’re after all the Potters.”

 

& nbsp;

 

Reviews 99
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