Chapter Eighteen of 'Kairos Amid the Ruins'- Cold Eyes
Chapter Seventeen.
Chapter One.
Title: Kairos Amid the Ruins (18/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry Potter/Orion Black, Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald, mentions of various canon pairings
Content Notes: Time travel, heavy angst, Harry mentoring Severus, violence, gore, minor character deaths, AU
Rating: R
Summary: Harry’s attempt to time travel and fix the past went badly awry. Time shattered, and the various pieces of the universe clung to each other as best they could. Harry finds himself in 1961, with Albus Dumbledore the Minister for Magic, Gellert Grindelwald his loving husband, Voldemort newly defeated…and Severus Snape being proclaimed the Boy-Who-Lived
Author’s Note: This is going to be a long story, focusing on Harry mentoring Severus as the Boy-Who-Lived, with flashbacks to an alternate World War II. The Harry-Severus mentorship will remain gen. However, the romantic pairings are a prominent part of the story. The word “Kairos” comes from the Greek, meaning a lucky moment, or the right moment, to act.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Eighteen-Cold Eyes
Albus sat back in his seat as the Auror took a step back from him. The Auror tucked his wand, and the scanning spell on the tip of it that he’d used, away. “Sorry about that, Minister.”
“It was necessary.” Albus coughed, and accepted the glass with the conjured water that another Auror held out, although he knew he would probably offend Izzy by doing that. The scanning spells were thorough. They had gone through his brain, emotion by emotion, and teased out the fact that he hadn’t agreed with Gellert, but he had been tempted.
As wrung-out as the experience had made him feel, Albus was grateful that the scanning spells looked for emotions and not memories. Otherwise, they would have learned about Potter the time-traveler.
The Auror who had handed him the water, a young woman with her dark hair bound thickly around her head, looked in Gellert’s direction. He was still undergoing the scanning spell. “I’m not sure that you should stay here alone with him, Minister,” she murmured.
“He wasn’t advocating hurting me.”
“But to put you through such an experience means that he doesn’t care for you.”
Albus smiled, if a little wearily. Many of the people he dealt with on a day-to-day basis had no idea what it was like for him to live with Gellert, and the compromises they made on regularly. “This is the first time that he’s crossed those alarms in the more than a decade since the Wizengamot cast them on me.”
“But what if he does it again?”
“Then the alarms will alert you again.” Albus sat up. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave it there, Auror McDowell.”
The Auror nodded reluctantly, and moved over to confer with the Auror who had just finished scanning Gellert. Gellert sagged on his small stool, exhausted. No one was in a hurry to offer him water, conjured or not.
Albus was glad when Izzy popped in and gave Gellert a glass, glaring impartially at the Aurors. The nearest ones started and stared at her, but then seemed to have decided to ignore her. After all, not many people knew that house-elves could conjure invincible weapons and identify time travelers.
“Is there anything else that you need to do here, Auror Sloan?” Albus asked. He forced his back to straighten, his voice to descend, and his eyes to focus on the highest-ranking Auror present.
“No, I don’t think so.” Kaitlin Sloan gave him a dark-eyed glance, her face quietly unhappy. “If you’re sure that you don’t want someone to stay through the night to monitor the situation, Minister…”
“I’m sure,” Albus said, and winked at her. “As eager as I’m sure some people would be to monitor what my husband and I get up to.”
There were giggles, gasps, or coughs from the Aurors around him, depending on their view of the relationship between him and Gellert. Only Sloan didn’t react. She just nodded and turned around, walking towards the Floo. “As you wish, Minister. I’ll see you in the Wizengamot on Monday.”
Albus had never been so glad that it was Friday and the Wizengamot respected Muggle weekend hours except in the event of an emergency. He nodded to the Aurors genially as they vanished through the fire, and ignored the half-pleading look that Auror McDowell sent him.
When the silence returned, he and Gellert both sat in it. Then Gellert cleared his throat. “You never told me about the alarms in your brain.”
“Just as you never told me that you still wanted so badly to conquer the world. In terms of unpleasant unexpected revelations, I think I have the greater burden.”
Gellert twisted his head away. “But you don’t want to do it.”
“I learned better when I was seventeen.” Albus stood. “You told me once that you didn’t understand why I was still in love with you, and that it would have been better if I’d fallen out of it. Is it the same with you, Gellert? Would you be better off if you weren’t in love with me, at least enough to sleep at my side instead of in a prison cell?”
“Leave it, Albus.” Gellert’s voice had an unexpected wash of weariness in it, as deep as the tide. “You’ve made your point. And I made my decisions. I should have known that you would make yourself part of them, too.”
Albus eyed him, then walked towards the bedroom. He did need to sleep, both because of his long day before this, and his weariness with Gellert’s decisions. The thoroughness of the scanning spell the Aurors had performed on his emotions was another reason.
But he found himself lying awake until Gellert came to join him, perhaps a few minutes before midnight. He curled up on his side with a sigh and didn’t reach for Albus.
Albus closed his eyes and breathed nothing.
*
“Welcome, students. I’m Harry Evanson, your new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.”
Harry was getting intense stares from every corner of the NEWT classroom, but he’d expected that. Greyhand had described it as one of the hardest things to get used to. Harry had nodded along in agreement while mustering an internal shrug. After the way he’d been stared at in his former lifetime, the mere pressure of students’ eyes wouldn’t upset him.
The questions that might go along with that did.
The first student raised his hand before the echoes of Harry’s introduction died away. Harry tipped his head in the student’s direction. He had a pale face and thick dark hair that seemed a little familiar, but until he introduced himself, Harry wouldn’t know why.
“Hibernicus Nott,” he said, with a faint sneer. “Why is someone with a Mudblood last name teaching us?”
“I have a Muggleborn cousin here?” Harry made his face and voice both light. “Wonderful! Can you introduce me?”
Nott stared at him. There were a few uncertain titters up and down the rows of desks, as though students wondered whether he was being serious or not. Harry smiled at them, and then faced Nott and narrowed his eyes. Nott drew back in his seat.
“I am not going to tolerate the use of that word in my classroom,” Harry said softly. Even a few years after Voldemort’s defeat at Severus’s hands, he didn’t know as much as he should about politics in this new timeline, but he hadn’t ever thought they would really find him in the middle of Laocoon’s shop. The thing was, he didn’t care. “I am not going to tolerate the implication that someone is a less capable wizard or witch because of their blood status. Is that clear?”
Nott nodded, but a girl spoke up in the far corner. She had pale hair that reminded Harry of a Malfoy’s, but sharp, dark eyes that didn’t seem like one. “But that’s not true. It’s just fact that Mu-Muggleborns are less capable. Nothing against them, but it’s a fact.”
Harry smiled a little. “What’s your name, miss?”
“Jasmine Parkinson.”
“And what areas of magic would you say Muggleborns are less capable in?”
Parkinson frowned. “Well-all of them. That’s the way it works.” She glanced around, but seemed to place more weight on the nodding heads next to her rather than the wary looks of the students who glimpsed the trap Harry was setting up. “Defense especially, though. Anything that relies on casting powerful magic.”
“And that extends to the children of two Muggleborns? To half-bloods who are the children of Muggleborns?”
“Yes, of course it does.” Parkinson inclined her head. “I still intend to respect you, sir. It’s not your fault that you had parents who were inferior. But you’ll have to live with seeing us surpass you. I hope you don’t mind that?”
“All teachers want to see their students surpass them.” Harry smiled at her. “So let’s see where you stand right now. Come up here and duel me.”
There was a long silence that passed through the room like a wind. Harry supposed that none of their Defense professors had ever wanted to duel them on the first day, before even reading the full roster of names.
Parkinson hesitated. “Me, sir?”
“Of course.” Harry nodded to her. “I know from your name that you’re a pure-blood, and you say that anyone descended from a Muggle or Muggleborn is naturally inferior at Defense. That means that you should be better than I am, no matter how long I’ve been doing this or what I’ve lived through.”
“Doesn’t look like you’ve been doing this for very long,” whispered someone at the back of the classroom who thought he was a wit. Harry didn’t bother looking around, but kept his gaze calmly on Parkinson, who stood up slowly.
“I mean-I meant that we would be better than you eventually, sir. Not right now.”
“But people who are half-bloods and the children of Muggleborns can’t cast powerful magic. Therefore, even if I have a little more skill than you right now, I won’t have more strength. I can’t hurt you no matter what.”
Harry perhaps would have felt this was a little cruel with a younger student, but Parkinson was either an adult now or less than a year away from being an adult. And she was the one who had decided to voice her ridiculous beliefs.
He would have let her off the hook if she’d backed down. But she couldn’t. She nodded after a second, drew her wand, and tossed her long blonde hair over her shoulder as she stalked up to the front of the classroom.
“To what point of the duel, sir?” she asked, facing him.
“Oh, until one of us takes the other’s wand,” Harry said, and gave her the kind of bright, empty smile that made some of the smarter ones shuffle their chairs back.
Parkinson wasn’t that smart. She nodded, seeming more confident now. She snapped her wand at him. “Expelliarmus!”
Her form was good, Harry thought, but he barely felt a tug of power behind the spell, and the Elder Wand didn’t move in his hand at all. That was about what he had expected. Someone who thought that she was already better than her opponent wouldn’t put forth that much strength.
Harry gestured lazily, the Elder Wand low at his side, and said, “Expelliarmus.” Parkinson’s wand came sailing towards him. Harry caught it and met her gaze. Her eyes were wide and still.
“How?” she whispered.
“I’m strong as well as skilled,” Harry said, and tossed her wand back to her. The Elder Wand buzzed in protest, but it didn’t get a vote.
“You said you weren’t,” she muttered.
Harry was glad to see that the gamble he had taken had paid off, and she wasn’t humiliated. He would have worked past it if she had been, of course. She couldn’t be allowed to go on believing what she did. “I never said outright that I was. I said that based on your beliefs, I shouldn’t be strong. And I said that I couldn’t hurt you no matter what.” Harry smiled at Parkinson, wondering if she was some sort of great-aunt to the Pansy he had known. Or the older sister or the replacement, for all he knew. This timeline had changed too much to be sure. “I swore oaths not to hurt a student.”
“What will that mean if we come after you in a duel, sir?” asked the tall girl with the look of a Malfoy.
“I’ll defend myself, but use nothing on you that can’t be eased with a simple spell and a trip to the hospital wing. You are?” Harry tilted his head at her, noting the way she sat up a little straighter. And the “sir.” That hadn’t been there before.
“Gaea Malfoy, sir.”
Harry nodded, and said, “Thank you, Miss Malfoy. At any rate, you should consider something, Miss Parkinson. And everyone else in the class who believes that blood status determines power,” he added over his shoulder. “Does it? Or are you hanging onto that because it would make it easier to justify your superiority complexes?”
“I don’t have a superiority complex!”
That was Nott again, with his arms folded. Harry leveled him with a calm gaze. “So you think you have something to learn from professors? Even the ones, like me, who aren’t pure-bloods? Or do you think you could come up here and beat me in a duel?”
Nott settled further back in his chair with his arms still folded. “It’s not fair,” he said. “A duel against a professor. You have more knowledge and skill and strength than we do.”
Harry smiled, which made Nott blink at him. “Then I suppose that your words are true and you don’t have a superiority complex, Mr. Nott,” he said. “You do acknowledge that someone could be better than you at something.”
“Blood matters,” Parkinson interrupted in a quiet, compelling voice. “It means that you can trust the people who have the right kind to speak the truth and be honorable.”
Harry grinned at her. “You’re still angry about losing the duel.”
Parkinson opened her mouth and then closed it. “I object to your tone, sir,” she said, when she finally managed to get the anger she must be struggling against under control.
Harry shrugged. “I used the literal reference to your own words to trick you and make you think you had more of a chance against me than you had. That’s why you’re saying that you can’t trust people like me to tell the truth. But I read the papers, and if I’m not mistaken, the speech that your father gave in the Wiengamot last month did the same thing. He seemed to promise greater protection for Muggleborn children who did accidental magic, but he was really only giving people what they wanted to hear. Then his votes did the true speaking for him. Would you consider him dishonorable?”
Parkinson clutched her wand and didn’t answer. Harry turned and surveyed the rest of the class, who at least were watching him in fascination. “What about the rest of you? Do you think anyone who descends from Muggles or Muggleborns is a liar and dishonorable?”
There was shuffling. That was a little more intentional than just asking if they believed themselves superior to people like that, Harry thought. Some of them could agree mindlessly with the other question, but not this one.
“Does it really matter, though?” Gaea Malfoy asked a minute later. She was leaning forwards with an elbow on the desk, frowning at him. “I mean…most of us aren’t going to be in a position to get beaten by a Muggleborn or a half-blood in a duel once we get out of Hogwarts, sir. Not all of us are going to be Aurors.”
“I should bloody well hope not,” Harry said fervently, remembering how he had been Auror-trained and yet had still made a mess of the timeline.
They stared at him, apparently puzzled by his disparaging a career that was fairly prestigious in this wizarding world. Harry coughed and faced Malfoy. “And anyway, you’re using a distraction technique from my question. I asked whether you consider Muggles and Muggleborns and half-bloods dishonorable and liars. Not whether you think they can all defeat you in duels.”
Malfoy’s smile was quick and unexpected. Harry thought she seemed like someone who appreciated other people’s cleverness, which made her different from almost all her family he’d met before. “Very quick, sir.”
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re quick.” Malfoy settled back in her chair, folding her arms. “But I mean to judge people on an individual basis. Not say that one group is all good or honorable or dishonorable or weak without knowing them.”
“Ah,” Harry said happily. “That means that you would speak up when someone else is saying that Muggleborns are weak and you would defend them, right? And say that they shouldn’t be judged by their blood?”
“Um,” said Malfoy.
“If you wouldn’t, then you’re not there yet,” Harry said. “You’re judging pure-bloods as individuals, but not the rest of the humans in the wizarding world.” He glanced around, and motioned Parkinson to sit down. She did, a fierce blush on her cheeks.
Harry collected their stares and said quietly, “That’s one of the worst ways to try and separate people out, you know. To say that whatever group you favor deserves to all be judged as individuals, and there are good people and bad people among them. But some other group…oh, you can dismiss them. You can say that they’re all weak or liars or lazy or just naturally born to be content with less than you have, and it’s true because it is. You claim you don’t need to spend time getting to know them because you already know what they’re like. You let stereotypes take the place of thought. You think of your group as the default and everyone else as radiating out from that default, not the default. To be judged.”
“But we don’t have time to get to know everyone,” Parkinson protested.
“Then you should admit that’s true for pure-bloods, too,” Harry said. “The groups just aren’t that separate. If you’re going to be thoughtful and nuanced and delicate and considerate when it comes to pure-bloods, you should be the same for everyone.”
“It’ll take a lot of time,” Nott muttered.
“Why, Mr. Nott,” Harry said, his eyebrows lifting. “Is that laziness I hear? Fear of work? I’m afraid that won’t stand you in good stead in my class.”
Nott flushed and stared at him. “No, of course not, sir.”
“Good.” Harry nodded and turned to face the students again. “One goal of this class is to teach you to use your judgment carefully. Not hear someone’s last name and dismiss them, the way that many of you did when you heard mine.”
That got a few more blushes, but mostly interested looks. And some gleaming eyes that Harry suspected would result in challenges sooner or later. Especially from Parkinson, who might want to pay him back for embarrassing her.
Well, that’s fine, Harry thought, his stomach burning with determination. If they can see me as an individual, it’s a first step towards seeing Muggleborns and half-bloods as people.
He would push and shove as hard as he could to get them to give the people they despised that chance. In that way, he would try to make things better before Severus, Sirius, and Regulus arrived at the school. Severus, a half-blood with notoriety hanging over his head, and Sirius and Regulus, who would be expected to act in a certain way by the pure-blood crowd and who certainly wouldn’t be taking that road.
I want this timeline to be better than the other one.
Chapter Nineteen.