The last Defence Against the Dark Arts class before the NEWTs began the way every other class that year had begun, with Professor Bertram Selwyn sweeping through the door as though he expected applause for arriving at all. He was a narrow man with a permanently raised chin, the sort of wizard who had clearly decided somewhere in his youth that dignity could substitute for competence, and he carried his battered copy of Theoretical Foundations of Defensive Magic Year 7 against his chest.
Gilderoy watched him cross to the front of the room and set the book down and he felt Amelia shift beside him, her shoulder brushing his, a silent and familiar warning that she was already losing patience before the man had said a single word.
The room was smaller than it should have been for a combined Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff seventh-year class, with desks pushed close enough that Pandora's knee kept finding Gilderoy's under the table while she leaned toward Xenophilius to whisper something to him, and Xenophilius nodded along with his usual placid interest.
Adrian sat a row back with his arms folded, while Bathsheda had her quill out and ready before Selwyn had even opened his mouth. From the concentrated look on her face as she focused entirely on the parchment and book in front of her instead of on Selwyn, it looked as though she was doing something else.
Studying runes probably, Gilderoy guessed.
"Today," Selwyn announced, in the reedy, self-important voice he reserved for anything he considered profound, "we shall be examining the theoretical foundations of defensive magic."
He opened the book with a flourish that suggested he believed the class had been waiting all year for precisely this moment. Then he began to read — not teach, read — in long unbroken paragraphs about the historical classification of shielding charms and the philosophical distinction between active and passive defence.
Gilderoy let his eyes drift across the room. The United members absorbed it the way Amelia had, with a controlled, simmering frustration that showed itself only in small things — a tightened jaw here, a tapping quill there, one or two students who'd simply given up and gone to sleep.
It was, by his count, the sixtieth class of the year in which they hadn't drawn a wand. Selwyn didn't believe in practical demonstration. He believed, loudly and often, that theory built character and that wandwork was a crutch for students who hadn't properly absorbed the principles.
Alex was first to raise his hand for anything, put his up now, and kept it up through a full minute of Selwyn pointedly ignoring him before the professor finally sighed and gestured for him to speak.
"Sir," Alex said, and there was an edge under his usual mildness that made half the room turn to look at him properly, "this is the last class before the NEWTs. We haven't done a single practical exercise all year. Not one shield charm, not one defensive spell, nothing. What are we meant to do for the practical exam?"
A ripple went through the desks, quiet agreement passed hand to hand like a note, and Gilderoy saw Bathsheda's quill finally still against the parchment.
Selwyn's expression did not so much change as settle, the way a pond settles after something unpleasant has sunk beneath the surface. "The practical component," he said, with the air of a man explaining something obvious to a particularly slow child, "is a formality, Mr. Summers. Examiners care far more for a candidate's grasp of theory than for how prettily he waves his wand. Focus your revision on the written paper. That is what matters."
"That's not what the NEWT syllabus says," Alex pressed, and now there was open murmuring rippling through the desks behind him, students who had said nothing all year suddenly finding the nerve to nod along, though none of them quite dared say so out loud.
"Sit down, Mr. Summers," Selwyn said, "and open your books to page two hundred and twelve," and he turned back to the text as though the matter were closed, which it plainly was not, not to anyone in the room but him.
He droned on for another quarter of an hour, and it was somewhere in the middle of that quarter hour that the injustice Gilderoy had been quietly cataloguing all year sharpened into something harder to ignore.
Selwyn posed a question about the theoretical limits of the Muggle-Repelling Charm. Helena Marchbanks gave a precise and correctly reasoned answer, exactly the sort her grandmother would have marked full for, but Selwyn merely nodded and moved on without comment, as though she'd said nothing worth remarking on at all.
Moments later he asked another question to Silas Smith, who offered an answer that was vague, half-remembered, and largely wrong. Selwyn beamed at him as though he had produced something worthy of publication and called it "exactly the sort of instinctive grasp one hopes to see in a boy of good family."
It was the last ten minutes that broke the room open. Selwyn had wandered, as he sometimes did, from the safety of theory into commentary, musing aloud about how fortunate the students were to study in such peaceful times, all things considered, and how the war being fought beyond the castle walls was, in his estimation, "a matter for the Aurors, not for students." He closed the book on his finger and looked out over the class with the satisfied expression of a man delivering a comforting truth.
"You are all perfectly safe within these walls," he said. "All this talk of war and defence that seems to have taken hold this year, all this eagerness for practical training, I confess I find it rather unnecessary. Unnecessary paranoia, that's what it is, and paranoia is no substitute for a properly educated mind."
Amelia was on her feet before he'd finished the sentence. She didn't shout. Instead her eyes carried a silent fury, and that, Gilderoy thought, was the intimidating part of it — she stood the way she did before a duel, feet set, and her voice carried through the room without needing to rise at all.
"Precautions should be taken seriously," she said, "or people die, Professor. My parents took enough precautions, and yet they're dead. A dozen students had to fight for their lives in Hogsmeade this winter, in case that slipped your notice. We were attacked in the street. Families across Britain have been murdered in their homes. And you stand there telling us we're perfectly safe, and that the only thing that matters is whether we can recite the theoretical limits of different shield charms on a piece of parchment."
The class had gone utterly silent. It wasn't the frightened silence of students watching a professor be defied — it was closer to held breath, the silence of people finally hearing something said aloud that they'd all been carrying separately all year.
"She's right," Alex said, standing as well. Beside him, Pandora watched the others rise and stood herself, determined.
"Maybe you think paranoia is unnecessary," she said, "but the Death Eaters certainly don't care whether you have paranoia or not, and I'd rather know how to cast a Shield Charm than study what shields are meant for and when, thank you."
Xenophilius nodded along at her side as though she'd said something entirely reasonable, which, Gilderoy reflected, she rather had.
Adrian was on his feet next, arms still folded but his voice hard as flint. "We asked you months ago for practical lessons, sir. You told us there wasn't time. There was always time for you to read us another chapter."
Bathsheda spoke without standing. "The NEWT practical accounts for fifty percent of the final grade in this subject, Professor."
Around them, a handful of students who had said nothing all year shifted uneasily in their seats, glancing between Selwyn and the United members still standing. Of course, they didn't know these were United members already well versed in DADA and duelling, and that all they wanted was to call Selwyn out.
Selwyn's face had gone red, blotched across the cheekbones. "Sit down," he said, and this time his voice did crack upward, thin and furious. "Sit down, all of you, this instant, or I shall begin taking points."
"Take them, then," Amelia said, still standing, still perfectly level. "Take fifty from Ravenclaw if it makes you feel better, Professor, but it won't put a wand back in our hands, and it won't undo the fact that half this class couldn't cast shield charms other than protego to save their lives, because you never taught us."
"Ten points from Hufflepuff for insolence," Selwyn snapped, and then, when nobody sat, when nobody so much as flinched, "Also. Detention, Miss Bones, for the remainder of the week—"
Gilderoy rose. "She's right that it's not paranoia, sir," he said. "The Dark Lord doesn't discriminate by blood the way you seem to think he might. Ask the Veylin family how safe pureblood lineage kept them, if you can find anyone left of them to ask. And leaving the war entirely aside, sir, we're seventh years. Soon we sit an examination that will decide what we're permitted to do with the rest of our lives."
The silence that followed was total. Selwyn's mouth opened and closed once, twice, and no sound emerged. Something in his composure gave way. Seven months of pompous certainty drained out of his face, and what was left was just a rattled, aging man who had been told, in front of his own class, exactly what he'd failed to do.
"Fifty points," Selwyn managed at last, though his voice had lost all its earlier conviction, "from Ravenclaw. And detention. This class is dismissed."
Nobody moved for a moment.
"OUT!" Selwyn shouted. Then chairs began scraping back all at once, parchment and quills swept into bags with a great deal more noise than was strictly necessary.
Adrian and Bathsheda wore something close to triumph as they filed toward the door, trading glances that said the words had needed saying for a long time and someone had finally said them. Others filed out more quietly. Helena was among them, her notes already tucked away, her expression giving nothing at all. Silas shouldered past without a backward glance, unbothered by what had happened.
Gilderoy and Amelia moved out of the classroom without sparing a glance at Selwyn.
"He wasted an entire year of teaching," Amelia said as her frustration against Selwyn came out in her voice.
"Yes, he did. I cannot imagine people who are not part of United because how will they even pass the practical exam?"
___
Thank you for reading and supporting the story❤️
Please drop your stones.
📖 Advanced Chapters on Patreon- Patreon readers are getting the equivalent of 11+ advanced chapters!
https://patreon.com/A_Peverel