Chapter 9

— Gilderoy Lockhart —

The plate was empty, cleared away by the house-elf, and Gilderoy sat back in his chair with the last of his pumpkin juice and let the evening catch up with him.

He had done it. He had stood out there in the dark, faced down a flying car barrelling straight at him, and pulled two children out of the wreck without a single scratch on either of them. His heart had been hammering the whole time and his hands had not been quite as steady as he would have liked, but it had worked. Every spell had landed. He had read the situation, made his choices, and come out the other side with both boys safe and the whole castle about to hear of it.

It was not a stolen story. It was not a memory pried out of some braver wizard's skull and dressed up in his own name. It was his, start to finish, and the knowledge of that sat warm and solid in his chest.

He was still turning it over when the screen appeared.

The translucent blue rectangle floated up in front of him, its borders scrolling with the familiar ornate filigree.

[For Rescuing Two Students from Certain Harm]

Gilderoy leaned forward, his pulse quickening. He had not expected another reward so soon, and the sight of it sent a small thrill through him. The screen flickered and scrolled down to the perk.

[The Winds of Winter]

Your body possesses an incredible resilience, enabling you to thrive even in the harshest conditions. Native diseases hold little threat, and you endure brutal winters or food shortages with ease, maintaining strength and clarity where others falter. Sickness rarely takes hold, and starvation becomes a distant worry, as you instinctively ration energy and resources within yourself.

Gilderoy read it through twice.

At first he was not entirely sure what to make of it. He was a professor at a well-stocked castle with a house-elf at his beck and call, hardly likely to starve to death between breakfast and lunch, and the worst winter Hogwarts could throw at him was a draughty corridor and a cold pair of feet.

Then it clicked, and a slow grin spread across his face.

This was a perk for the road. For mountains and marshes and the deep cold of places far from any warm hearth. For the kind of life he had spent twenty years pretending to lead.

He had been thinking about it more and more lately. After Hogwarts, once his year here was finished, he was going to go out into the world and actually do it. Not for the books, not for the front pages or the fan mail or the next award. He would face the banshees and the werewolves and the things that lurked in the dark corners of the map himself, with his own wand and his own two hands, and he would come back able to say, truthfully, that he had done it.

This was not for anyone else. This was for him. To prove, if only to himself, that the man on the covers of those books could be made real.

And a body that did not fear cold or hunger or sickness was exactly what a man needed for that sort of life.

He drained the last of his pumpkin juice and set the glass down, the grin still on his face. There would be time enough for distant adventures later. Tomorrow was his first day of teaching, and he had a great many students to win over.

— Harry Potter —

The Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom was on the third floor, and by the time Harry, Ron, and Hermione arrived after lunch, most of the room had already filled up.

The Gryffindors had claimed the left side, and the Slytherins had taken the right, the two houses eyeing each other across the central aisle with the usual mutual suspicion. Harry led the way to three empty seats near the middle and sat down between his two friends. Up at the front of the room stood a large oak desk with a tall stack of books piled neatly on one corner, but there was no sign of the professor himself.

"I still can't believe he pulled you both out of that car," Hermione whispered, sliding into her seat. She had been saying some version of this since the night before, and her voice still carried a note of awe. "Magic like that, on a moving target, in the dark. Do you have any idea how difficult that would be?"

"You've mentioned it," Ron muttered, dropping into the chair on Harry's other side. He pulled the two halves of his broken wand out of his pocket and scowled at them. The break was clean and total, and no amount of squinting at it seemed to make Ron feel any better. "Still owes me a wand, though. Reckon he'll actually pay up?"

"He said he would," Harry said. He kept his own opinion fairly quiet. He did not really know what to make of Lockhart yet. The man had appeared out of the dark and yanked them both out of a crashing car without so much as raising his voice, which had left Harry with a vague, grudging sense that there might be more to him than the stack of grinning book covers suggested. Beyond that, he was reserving judgment.

Draco Malfoy was lounging in his seat across the aisle, looking thoroughly unimpressed by the whole affair. Likely, Harry thought, because Lockhart had been the one to break up the brawl between his father and Mr Weasley. He caught Harry's eye and smirked but said nothing, which was about as restrained as Malfoy ever got.

The last few students filtered in and found their seats. The chatter rose, then settled, and Harry glanced at the clock. The professor was nowhere to be seen.

Then the door swung shut on its own.

It closed with a heavy, echoing thud that made several people jump, and a moment later every torch in the room guttered out at once. The windows darkened as though thick curtains had been drawn across them, and the classroom dropped into total blackness. Someone let out a small yelp. A girl behind Harry gasped. Ron's elbow found Harry's ribs in the dark.

"What's going on?" Ron hissed.

Harry did not answer. He was staring into the darkness, waiting.

Then a voice filled the room.

"Since the very beginning," it said, and it was unmistakably Lockhart's voice, except it came from everywhere at once, deep and resonant and echoing off the stone walls, "the world has never been without darkness."

A single point of red light bloomed in the air at the front of the classroom. It was small, no larger than a fist, and as Harry watched, it stretched and shaped itself into the rough glowing outline of a person. Then another red figure appeared beside it, and another, until a small cluster of them stood suspended in the dark.

"It comes in many forms," the voice continued. "Sometimes it wears the face of a witch or a wizard."

The red figures swelled, growing taller and broader, looming over the room before settling back to their original size.

"And sometimes it wears no human face at all."

More red shapes burst into being around the first cluster, but these were not people. They were creatures, glowing red outlines of things with too many legs, or great hunched bodies, or long coiling shapes that twisted through the air. They came in every size, some small and skittering, others three or four times the height of a man. One of the larger ones was rough and lumpish, dragging a heavy club at its side, and Harry recognised it at once. It was a troll, just like the one that had nearly killed him and Hermione the year before.

Then a new cluster of figures appeared, glowing soft silver. These were people too, ordinary in size, standing in a loose group apart from the red. For a moment the two groups simply hung there in the dark, silver and red, facing one another.

"This darkness has always been with us," Lockhart's voice said. "And so it will always need to be faced."

The red shapes surged forward.

They fell upon the silver figures, and Harry watched as one of the silver people was overtaken and dissolved into nothing, then another, the survivors scattering before the advancing red. It was only light and shadow, Harry knew that, but his stomach still tightened as he watched the silver figures wink out one by one.

Then a single silver figure stepped forward from the rest.

It raised one arm, and a brilliant bar of silver light burst out of it. The light swept across the room and struck the red shapes head-on. The glowing creatures came apart where it touched them, the towering monsters and the skittering things and the looming red wizards all dissolving into drifting motes that faded into the dark, until nothing remained but the single silver figure standing alone.

"That," said the voice, quieter now, "is what this room is for."

The silver figure turned slowly, as though surveying the whole class.

"You are here to learn how to stand against the things that would do you harm. To walk through this world freely, and safely, and unafraid. To defend yourself, and those beside you, when the moment demands it." There was a pause, and the silver figure raised its arm one final time. "That is the Defense Against the Dark Arts. The means to fight back against those who would use such magic against you."

The silver figure flared bright, and then it was gone. Every glowing shape in the room vanished at once, plunging the class back into complete darkness.

For a heartbeat, nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

Then light returned, but not from the torches.

It came from the front of the room, from the man now standing beside the oak desk. Gilderoy Lockhart was glowing. A clean white light poured off him, soft at first and then brighter, filling the classroom and pushing the shadows back into the corners. He stood with his chin lifted and an easy smile on his face, dressed in robes of deep green, his golden hair catching the light he was somehow giving off.

Harry felt a pull to sit up straight and pay attention. It was subtle, a quiet sort of invigoration that settled over him as he looked at the glowing man, and it made him want to do well, to throw himself into whatever came next. He found himself leaning forward over his desk.

He glanced sideways. Hermione was gazing at the front of the room with shining eyes, which was no surprise at all. What did surprise him was Ron. His friend, who had not expected much of anything from the professor, was sitting bolt upright with the broken wand forgotten in his lap, watching Lockhart with open interest.

The torches flickered back to life along the walls. The windows cleared. And as the ordinary light of the classroom returned, the glow around Lockhart faded gently until he was just a man again, and Harry felt like he could breathe again.

"Good afternoon," Lockhart said warmly. "Welcome to Defense Against the Dark Arts."

The silence broke into applause, led by Hermione, though Harry noticed quite a few of the Gryffindors joining in, and most of the Slytherins too.

"Now, for those of you who have somehow not heard of me," Lockhart continued, strolling out from behind his desk with his hands clasped behind his back, "allow me to introduce myself properly. Gilderoy Lockhart, Order of Merlin, Third Class, and Honorary Member of the Dark Force Defense League." He gave a small, modest bow that did not look terribly modest at all. "But titles are dull things. I much prefer to be known for the work itself."

He began to pace slowly along the front of the room, and his voice took on the comfortable rhythm of a man who enjoyed telling stories.

"I have spent the better part of my life facing the very things you saw in that little demonstration. I have driven a banshee out of Bandon when half the village had given up hope. I have spent a long and unpleasant night reasoning with a coven of vampires in the mountains of Romania, and I am pleased to report that I left with all of my blood exactly where it belonged." A ripple of laughter went through the room. "I have walked away from encounters that would have finished a lesser wizard, and I am still here, still smiling, and now standing in front of all of you."

He stopped pacing and turned to face the class.

"I tell you this not to boast," he said, in the tone of a man who was absolutely boasting, "but so that you understand. Everything I will teach you in this room, I have done myself. Out there. When it mattered. This is not theory pulled from a dusty book. This is the real thing."

He flicked his wand, and the tall stack of books on the corner of his desk rose into the air. The pile separated into individual copies that drifted out across the classroom, one settling neatly onto the desk in front of each student. Harry's landed in front of him with a soft thump. It was a thick, handsome volume, and the title on the cover read Gilderoy Lockhart's Guide to Prodigious Sorcery.

"My own work," Lockhart said, and he winked. "Written specifically for this course. First editions, every one of them, so do take care of them."

Hermione had already opened hers and was turning the pages with reverence. Beside Harry, Ron picked his up and weighed it in his hands.

"Now then," Lockhart said, the warmth still on his face. "Let us begin. Today we will not be casting anything. Today, we are going to talk about what you are actually up against."

He gave his wand a lazy flick, and a piece of chalk rose from the ledge of the blackboard and began to write on its own, the words appearing in neat lines as Harry watched. Cornish Pixies. Gnomes. Doxies. Red Caps. Hinkypunks. Grindylows. The list went on, a catalogue of creatures Harry had heard of only in passing, if at all.

"Over the course of this year," Lockhart said, "we will work our way through these, one by one. You will learn what each of them is, how it behaves, how it hunts, and most importantly, how to defend yourself against it. The dark creatures will be our main concern, because they are what most of you are likely to encounter. But the principles of defense are the same whether you are facing a beast or a wizard who means you harm, and we will cover that too, where it is useful."

He tapped the first word on the board.

"We will start with the Pixie, since they are pests, easy enough for any competent wizard to deal with. If you all pay attention and learn the spell to handle them, I might even bring a few into class for you to subdue yourselves."

A murmur of excitement ran through the room. Lockhart let it settle, then looked out over the class.

"Now. Can anyone tell me where one is most likely to come across a Cornish Pixie?"

Hermione's hand shot into the air at once. Lockhart smiled and gestured for her to answer, and Harry settled back in his chair, his book open in front of him, listening more closely than he had expected to.

— Gilderoy Lockhart —

Phew. Thank Merlin that had worked once more.

The last of the second years filed out of the room in a cluster of excited chatter, and as the door swung shut behind them, Gilderoy let his shoulders drop and allowed himself a slow breath. He had done the same routine for the first years that morning, and they had been just as taken with it, a sea of small faces staring up at the glowing shapes with their mouths open. He had been refining the whole performance over the past week, adjusting it slightly for each year group, tightening the timing of the light constructs and the rhythm of the speech until it landed exactly the way he wanted.

He felt a familiar warmth in his chest, the genuine pride he had been rediscovering ever since the textbook. He had watched their faces all through the lesson, the wide-eyed wonder of the first years, the intrigued looks of the second years, the way they leaned forward when he mentioned bringing pixies into class. They wanted more. They were already looking forward to the next lesson, and that, more than anything, told him he had done something right.

Gilderoy would not pretend it had been easy. The light show alone had cost him hours of practice, and the lesson plans had eaten up most of his evenings for a week. But the stares, the attention, the quiet satisfaction of knowing he had earned every bit of it himself, all of that made the work worth it.

There was still the problem, of course.

Every time he stood in front of a class and spoke about the things he had done, the banshee in Bandon, the vampires in the mountains, all of it, he felt a small, unwelcome pang somewhere behind his ribs. The stories were not his. They belonged to the witches and wizards whose memories he had taken, the ones who had actually faced those horrors and earned those victories, and who now remembered nothing of it. He had been feeling that pang for a while now, and it was not going away. If anything, it was getting sharper, because hadn’t he taken away this feeling of accomplishment that he was feeling now, away from them?

He set his wand down on the desk and rubbed his temples. He would have to do something about it. Find some way to make it right, even if it was something small. He owed them that much.

But he knew himself too well to pretend he would ever go further than that. He would never stand up and confess what he had done. He was not ready for Azkaban, and some quiet part of him suspected he never would be, even if he deserved every cold day of it. That was simply who he was. The question was not whether he would admit the truth. The question was how a man like him could begin to balance the scales without throwing himself off them entirely.

He sighed and shook his head. He did not have an answer yet, and the third years would be arriving any minute now.

Gilderoy straightened his robes, smoothed his hair, and turned to face the door.

The third years came and went much like the years before them, and by the time the last of them had filed out, the light beyond the windows had turned low and gold. Gilderoy made his way back to his chambers with an ache in his feet and the settled warmth of a day's work done well.

He sank into the armchair beside the hearth and let his head fall back against the cushion. It had gone better than he could have hoped. Every class had leaned in, every face had lit up at the light show, and not one of them had walked out looking bored. He had spent a week building that lesson, and it had paid off in full, three times over.

He was halfway to dozing when the blue screen flickered into being above him.

[For Captivating Your Students]

Gilderoy sat up at once, suddenly wide awake. Two rewards in as many days. Whatever else this System was, it was certainly generous.

[Teleporter]

Every jump cost American taxpayers 5 million dollars! Just kidding, not your version. What you have here jumper is a teleporter system, or more accurately a portal opener system. By clicking a button on a handheld remote and thinking, the portal can open anywhere in the world, allowing you to step through at your leisure.

Gilderoy frowned at the description. He had no idea why the American taxpayers were mentioned, nor why anything, let alone apparition would cost five million dollars, nor what a "jumper" had to do with any of it. The System had an odd way of phrasing things. Still, a portal. Anywhere in the world. He could step from his chambers to a street in Cairo or a clifftop in Norway with the press of a button.

As the thought crossed his mind, a weight settled into his right hand. He looked down to find a small black device sitting in his palm, flat and rectangular, with a single raised button on its face. A handheld remote, exactly as the screen had promised.

He turned it over, curious. There was only one way to find out if it worked.

He pictured his classroom, the empty rows of desks, the blackboard, the oak desk at the front. He held the image firmly in his mind and pressed the button.

The air a few feet in front of him tore open. A circle of rippling light hung above the floor, and through it Gilderoy could see his own classroom, dark and empty in the evening gloom. He rose from the armchair, stepped through, and his room was gone. 

For a moment he simply stood there. Before realising what he’d just done.

The wards.

Hogwarts was wrapped in some of the oldest and strongest protective magic in Britain, and you could not Apparate within its walls. Every student was told as much when they were taught to apparate, and every witch and wizard knew it as plain fact. By every rule of magic Gilderoy understood, what he had just done should have been impossible.

And yet here he stood, in a room he had not walked to, on the other side of a castle the portal had paid no mind at all. It had opened without the faintest resistance, as though the wards were not there.

Gilderoy looked down at the small black remote with a new and considerable respect. A way to step anywhere in the world, past any ward, in the space of a single breath. He closed his fingers around it, already turning over the possibilities, but he’d mess with this more later, for now he pressed the button once more to take himself back to bed. He’d had an exhausting day after all.

AN: Well, that's it for this chapter folks. I hope you all enjoyed it. I wanted to write Gilderoy's first class to be something a bit special, and this is what I thought up. If it wasn't clear, he used the Brightest Star Perk from the first chapter. Though, for some reason, I'm getting the feeling that I am ripping off some other fic that I read a long time ago. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. I honestly don't know. I just knew that I had to make him aurafarm. If there are any mistakes, I apologize for that because I had to write this chapter in the middle of my exams. I've got an exam on Tuesday that I've not even opened the syllabus for, so we'll see how that goes

Now, on to next week. Next week, you are likely to either get Fang Over Fang, which is a Kiba SI with the Celestial Dojo at the end of the Sasuke Retrieval Arc, or you can get the next chapter of In Naruto With An Achievement System. I am not sure which one is going to come, but both are going to come either way this month.

That's it, folks. Thank you for your continued patronage. If you enjoyed this chapter, please leave a like and comment your thoughts, it really does help out a lot!