Lupine Tendencies

“I just don’t get it!” 

Harry could not have hated his lot in life more than he did at that very moment. It was a week after his transformation, but that had absolutely nothing to do with his predicament. After the full moon, he began to think that his time in the Great Hall was no longer going to be a time of agony. With Greengrass talking to him on friendly terms outside of detention, Malfoy sticking by him like always, and Ginevra at the Gryffindor table; he thought that he’d never have to suffer sitting next to annoying extras again. Apparently, his selection of friends wasn’t enough, though, because his current seating arrangement happened to be in front of an enraged member of a Gryffindor trio that needed no introduction. 

“Why does he treat me like he’s better than me!? I’m top of the entire class!”

Harry sighed under his breath. He wouldn’t lie and say that he didn’t understand the frustration, but her steadfast belief that school was all that mattered made her seem almost as close-minded as Malfoy.

“He’s a git, Hermione,'' a certain redhead said while giving Potter a pointed glare. “It’s what gits do.”

“But I don’t understand!” Granger exclaimed, more than a little upset. “Have I not proven myself? Am I truly not good enough at magic for them!?”

Harry looked up from his meal and saw that Granger was not ranting to the trio like he thought she was; she was talking sincerely and directly to himself. Such genuine confusion and frustration was something that he found reasonable, and it was hard to deny such a request for clarity. He was friends with Malfoy despite the boy’s bigotry, and she was asking him to honestly explain to her why .

“... Do you really want to know, Granger?” He asked her with a voice softer than everyone except himself expected.

She looked at him with earnest eyes, “Please.”

Harry nodded and collected himself. Both Weasleys looked distinctly confused, but it was Longbottom’s reaction that interested him the most. The orphan was staring at him with eyes that held not a single ounce of the hatred they normally had. The boy was ocularly begging him to remain quiet, and Harry understood why. Unfortunately, Harry thought she deserved to know the truth more than he wanted to preserve her happiness.

“Have you ever heard of specialty magic?”

Hermione looked shocked that he was actually going to give an explanation and a little scared that there might be a reason why Malfoy looked down on her beyond simple bigotry. 

“No,” she said quietly.

“I’m not surprised,” said Harry. “Unless you have one, you aren’t likely to learn about it until you join a professional field. Students don’t deal with it enough for it to be common knowledge among half-bloods and muggle-borns.”

He took a deep breath and prepared to destroy her entire world.

“Specialty magic is when somebody masters a spell or branch of magic that exceeds what anyone ever has before and anyone in the future likely ever will.”

“I don’t understand.” 

Harry looked around the Great Hall for an example. He was tempted to use himself, but now wasn’t the time to reveal his family magic. Once he confirmed that Greengrass told the truth, he decided to accept small graces when he got them. He would reveal his family magic when the time came, but to prove a point to a muggle-born wasn’t a good enough reason.

“Do you see Professor Flitwick?” he asked her.

Hermione nodded.

“Well, before he began teaching here, he was known as the European Professional Duelling Circuit Champion from 1962 to 1965. Do you know how he held that title for three years straight ?”

“No,” she admitted. 

“The levitation charm,” was his simple and, quite frankly, unbelievable answer.

He could only smile grimly at her disbelieving face.

“There’s no way he became the champion of an entire continent with a first-year charm, Harry.”

“Tell me, Granger, how many things can you levitate at a time?”

“At a time?” was her rational yet so very naive response.

“I thought so… Hermione,” Harry used her first name for the first time ever just to impart his seriousness to her. “Flitwick could skip the ‘swish and flick’, ignore the verbal incantation, and he could still lift every single piece of furniture in this entire hall plus half of the student body. He mastered the spell to the point that he could control a multitude of objects independently of each other. He could make his opponents feel like the entire battlefield was turning against them. He could keep track of every single item and utilize them to their fullest no matter the number. The people who fought him described him as omnipresent. They said it was as if he was everywhere at the same time, unstoppable and immutable.”

He could see her awe, and it was a feeling everyone who ever watched him duel would share for their entire lives.

“That is what it means to be a specialist. You could train your entire life three times over and never reach the aptitude he did.”

“I understand why that's impressive; it's an amazing feat, but I don’t get why that has anything to do with purebloods. Why would a half-goblin’s achievements mean he is more worthy of respect than me in their eyes?”

“Power,” Harry told her. “Isn’t it always about power? And imagine with me, for a moment, that he took his entire life’s worth of studying the levitation charm and passed it onto his child for him or her to master and expand upon, leaving his progeny to do the same for six generations over.”

The clueless Gryffindor audience could not have been more lost. Granger, though, caught on, and he could tell by the chilling sense of hopelessness in her eyes that she finally understood.

“His family,” Harry sighed. “Would have a grasp on the levitation charm that could never be matched by anyone. If Flitwick himself would take a few lifetimes for someone to match, six generations of people expanding on his expertise would make them a god with the spell. That is Family Magic, and that is why prominent purebloods have so much power. They each are literally deities in their own crafts, essential to the fields they specialize in, warring and competing with each other, using their own family-grown specialties to gain influence and dominate rival families, mixing their magics together and improving upon them with each other. Compared to those monsters of magic, the general populace might as well be playing with toys when they wave their wands. The way Flitwick sees others use the levitation charm is the same way every single pureblood looks at the people using mere imitations of the mastery they hold.”

“So what?” Hermione asked, almost desperate for there to be some sort of answer. “I’m just doomed to always be inferior?”

Harry shook his head lightly. 

“No, just like Flitwick made his own specialty, you could make your own. That would garner you the respect of most purebloods, and then you could pass it on to a successor for them to improve upon. Within time, your family would grow to the prominence that the pureblood families have. You on your own, though, are unlikely to reach a level of skill that can match the sheer amount of expertise they have when it comes to the magic they practice. The only way would be to somehow conquer a family despite their power and master their family magic. That is actually what quite a few people have tried to do. Most of the time, though, that is left for other families that already have the power to compete. The powerful get more powerful, and only a spare few of the general wizarding population ever make it to a level that lets them pose even the smallest of threats. That is why Malfoy sees you as insignificant even though you beat him in classes. He doesn’t care about transfiguration and charms. As long as he is the best in his family’s specialty, then he has something greater than you could ever possess while operating under the curriculum of Hogwarts.”

She looked dejected. It was an understandable thing to feel. She was stacked against insurmountable odds. It wasn’t that she couldn’t make it in his world; it was that she would have to be truly extraordinary to compete with the monopolies of magical knowledge that currently stood at the top. 

“How do you get a specialty?”

Harry gave a small smile. Ever the determined individual, she was planning on trying to conquer the problem instead of submitting like the rest of the muggle-borns usually did. It was valiant, even if it was also most likely futile.

“It's a vague definition. Some get it by pushing the boundaries of spells with high skill-ceilings like Flitwick. Others focus on an obscure branch of magic and develop their own knowledge in the field. The rest invent a spell that others can't figure out how to replicate. It really comes down to if you are creative and skilled enough to find something incapable of being reproduced.”

“Who decides when you have one?”

Harry shrugged, "It just happens. You don’t get a certificate that tells you that you’ve made it. When you get to a point that nobody can think of the spell without connecting it with you, then you have a specialty.”

It was a very mighty wall to climb, and it was a task that most never even attempted to take on. 

“Do all of the pureblood families have one?” She asked eventually with squinted eyes.

“All of the important ones do. It's their family magic that gives them their fortune and the respect of other people’s houses. They aren’t just famous because they have long families; they are famous because they have very long families that dedicated their lives to expanding on a specialty.”

“And you!?” She shot at Longbottom, and Harry watched him cringe. "You're a prominent pureblood. Did you know about this!?"

“My family’s specialty is herbology. We've been researching magical plantlife as a specialty for generations. My father wasn't there to teach anything to me, but there were contingencies.”

Hermione looked devastated. Everything made so much more sense, and it was a sort of sense that did not provoke a feeling of hope. Old wizarding families spent inordinate amounts of time improving a specific area of magic and then protected what they found in order to keep their power to themselves. Long lines of pureblood families did infest the wizengamot for a reason, and they did it by making sure that newer wizarding families literally stood no chance.

“So that’s why you’re so good at herbology," she snapped. "And you were going to tell me this when!?”

Neville was about to respond when she turned to Weasley.

“What about you!?”

Ronald Weasley swallowed a mouthful of food before turning to look at his friend, “Well, we do have family magic, but I don’t know it. The head and the heir are the only two who actually learn the magic. It's supposed to help keep it a secret. The head teaches it to the oldest, and when the head steps down, the one with the family magic takes the head and keeps the family in power while the rest of us do what we can to expand the base. Bill is the one that has ours, so I never really paid attention to what it was.”

“Unbelievable!” She exclaimed before getting up and storming out of the hall.

Harry sighed before going back to eating, but one of the Patil sisters decided to talk now that an opening presented itself. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you actually talk about anything without your usual peachy persona before," she said with just a touch of vitriol.

Harry didn’t look back up from his plate. It was hard to be a bastard when someone so obviously driven had to be told their road was never going to lead them where they wanted it to go. It was just his luck to somehow get stuck with the job of breaking it to her. Longbottom was a coward for that shit, but it wasn’t like he didn’t get it. The truth was that muggle-borns were pretty much nonexistent when it came to earning a specialty. There was a lot of studying and a lot of money that went into learning what was needed to master a branch of magic, and muggle-borns usually just didn’t have the pull, power, or cash to make it happen. 

It wasn’t until late afternoon that he ran into Malfoy in the halls. 

“You know, you’re a real dickhead.”

“For what?” Malfoy asked with a raised eyebrow.

“I know someone must have told you about my conversation during lunch.”

“Oh, you mean after I called Granger a mudblood?”

Harry’s eyes shined with malice, and he drove an elbow into Malfoy’s side.

“I know your family is powerful, but you know as well as I that Granger is talented.”

Cringing at the pain, Malfoy rubbed his side and shot a glare at his friend.

“Yes, I do know she's talented, but she challenged me in front of my entire house team. She's gifted at magic, but the fact is that she isn’t anywhere close to a Malfoy, and my family would lose clout if I let some uppity muggle-born maintain the delusion that she has something on my family magic.”

Harry huffed as the two of them started climbing a staircase together. The crowds parted for them like they always did. No one stood in the path of a Malfoy even when he walked with someone seen as a below-average student by the castle as a whole. 

“Then you go to her after the fact and explain the situation instead of leaving it to me, you fucking git!” Harry said with a light shove.

Mafloy shoved him back with a smirk, “And take all of the fun for myself!? Potter, I am nothing if not generous.”

“Yeah, well, the fun isn’t stopping here. I’m pretty sure she's going to start working toward a specialty.”

Malfoy hummed, seemingly giving the possibility serious consideration.

“If I had to pick someone from our year who might be capable of making one eventually, I suppose I’d pick Granger. If that is truly her aspiration, though, I think she might be underestimating just how difficult that task is going to be. There aren't many people talented enough to make a specialty while still in school. Grades and books don't matter if she wants to expand a field of magic by herself.”

“Undoubtedly,” Harry easily conceded, and the two of them came to a stop before the headmaster’s guardian gargoyle.

“Do you have any clue why Dumbledore wants to see you?” 

“Not a single idea,” Harry honestly told his friend. “Maybe he caught wind of what I told Granger, and he wants to talk about it?”

“Doesn’t really seem like the type to get involved with students on a personal basis, does he?” 

“No, he doesn’t,” Harry let out a quiet sigh. “Then again, what do either of us really know about the interests of Dumbledore.”

Malfoy made a face as Harry said the password to the gargoyle, “You’re damn right about that. The old man is an enigma. Good luck, I guess. Tell me how it goes later.”

Harry personally thought that Albus wouldn’t be so complicated if people understood his archetype. The real problem was that everyone grossly mischaracterized the “leader of the light”. The very existence of such an epithet proved his point. If people thought about him as an omnipotent leader who only cared about classical utilitarianism and defeating the dark, then they were doomed to never understand anything about him or his actions. The truth, Harry knew, was that he was nothing more or less than a man who wanted to teach children about magic. He was a kind professor at heart, and a man who lived through a great many trageties and made a great many mistakes along the way. The fact that he was so important in the government, more powerful than 99.5% of the wizarding population, and fought two infamous dark wizards was more circumstantial than anything else. If he was thought of as a normal teacher who happened to have the world thrust upon his shoulders, then everything suddenly became so much clearer. Harry privately suspected that people were really so confused by Albus Dumbledore because they were unable to comprehend how a man so much more powerful than themselves could yearn for absolutely none of it. 

“Sure thing, Malfoy. I’ll see you in a bit," was what he decided to say because there was no way in hell he'd ever try to explain such a concept to someone like Malfoy.

Harry wasted no more time climbing the staircase once the statue moved aside. Walking into the ever-familiar office of Albus Dumbledore, he allowed himself to settle in the fluffy chair that sat in front of the headmaster’s desk. The man was waiting for him on the other side, writing some things down on a piece of parchment, so Harry spent his time looking at all of the magical trinkets Dumbeldore had around his office. He had no earthly idea what almost all of them did, but he found them fascinating despite his lack of understanding. He never was one for magical objects. Even though his family was rather fond of runes, they focused more on the human application of them than the material. They left enchantment to Macnair and his family. 

“Hello, Harry, Thank you for coming to my office.”

“It wasn’t a problem, sir. I had nothing better to do.”

Albus placed his quill gently to the side and smiled at his prize student. 

“Ah, I see, and that brings us to the point of this meeting.”

“What do you mean, sir?” Harry asked, looking deep into his headmaster’s eyes warily. 

It was difficult for him to discern exactly what it was about them that put him on edge at first. Albus Dumbledore’s eyes always twinkled; it was his signature feature aside from his flowing beard. That was what everyone thought, anyway. Anyone who saw the man seriously duel, however, knew that they had a tendency to gleam much like his pupil’s… Kind of like they were right no-

Harry just barely managed to put his feet on the edge of Dumbledore’s desk and flip his chair backward before a curse flew straight into his chest. Falling quickly to the ground, the back of his wooden chair smacked against the stone, and he watched the beam of deadly light pass over him from his position on the floor. With his heart pounding in his chest, he saw the headmaster’s desk twist and morph into the form of a professionally dressed fencer with an extremely sharp, wooden sword. The transformed table’s sword whistled through the air as it flourished its weapon. Harry’s wand shot into his hand with a mechanical *chink* , and he modified an overpowered depulso to send him skidding across the headmaster's floor to avoid the sword which jammed itself into the chair he once peacefully sat in. 

Lifting his legs over the left side of his head as he slid away from Dumbledore's soldier, he let his back’s friction against the stone floor guide him through a backward roll to get to his feet. He was going to stand up and cast while letting his momentum skid to a stop, but he lifted his head to see the headmaster’s wand sparking with barely contained energy. Harry felt the power emanating from his mentor, and he knew that the headmaster was not going to hold back with his attack. If he did nothing, he could very well die.

His body transformed with the fear of his own demise. Claws grew on his fingers and broke from the tips of his shoes, and he urgently pushed all four of his clawed appendages against the ground. Sparks flew from the stone flooring due to his sharp nails dragging across it. Using the extra leverage, he just barely managed to fling himself to the side, avoiding the column of fire that almost fried him alive. He was so close to the flames that he could feel the heat singing some of the hair on the side of his arm, but he ignored it in favor of responding to whatever attack came next as soon as all four of his limbs were in contact with the ground once again.

He only just got his wand hand off of the floor from his crouched position to raise a shield against the two curses that smashed against it with the force of cannonballs. His eyes widened with genuine panic as he watched a solid stake of conjured wood shoot straight through his spell shield due to its solid state. Rolling to the side was the only reason he got away from it unpierced, and he popped to his feet just in time to banish a twirling knife that threatened to jam itself into his chest. 

He had no time to analyze his surroundings to any great extent, but he knew what to look for, and he managed to count at least three pieces of furniture that Albus somehow found the time to transfigure into soldiers of some kind during his spell chain. Fighting Albus could only be described as one word: suffocating . His spells never stopped. He was so fast and so vicious that he could keep constant pressure on his opponents while still managing to fit in a few transfigurations so he could use his self-made specialty known to the magical community as “micro-managing”. 

Micro-managing was a broad section of magic that dealt with controlling things such as magical constructs. Skills like that were utilized when directing conjurations such as animals, transfigurations, or animated objects. Fillius used a diluted form of “micro-management” when he utilized his levitation charms to control a slew of different objects simultaneously, but there was a reason why his specialty was “levitation” while Albus’s was the entire art of micro-management. Filius only had to choose the object’s direction, and he generally fought solely with the levitation charm. Albus had to individually command and control everything he animated, transfigured, or summoned all while casting combat magic at the level of a master-duelist. 

Harry was personally capable of controlling a single transfigured soldier, and he could not cast while concentrating on it. Albus, however, seemingly had no trouble commanding upward of ten or more. Harry was going to get smothered. If he let Albus continue his attack, he was going to get overrun by transfigured enemies soon enough. He needed space. He couldn’t breathe, spells were bombarding him, and he just watched the man turn a book into a living, breathing boar. Things were turning ever more in Albus's favor with every spell they threw. 

He’d never felt better.

The diamond on his palm glowed with power, and his glove exploded into thin air. Placing his hand on the ground, he allowed his body to hum with power and released his rune on the room. He knew the limits of his destruction rune. It could only take mass from what he liked to call an object’s “collective”. Essentially, if he touched an object, whatever his mind saw as part of the "object" was something he could destroy. If he touched a table, he could dematerialize the entire table. Extending that to the plate sitting on the table, however, would not be possible as it was not a part of the "collective" table. Unfortunately, that meant he could not turn Dumbledore to dust by touching the floor he stood on. What he could do, though, was take from literally everything else beneath him. 

Like a ripple in a pond, a solid four inches of floor disappeared in a circle starting from Harry's hand and extending to each corner of the room. Lifting his hand from the floor, he smirked at a stumbling Dumbledore's cautiously watching eyes. On the back of the same hand that held his diamond tattoo was a similarly styled, black circle with a white dot in the middle. It symbolized unity and wholeness, and it glowed as he closed his hand into a fist.

The floor was turned into a spike-covered hellscape.

Every molecule of stone he just erased from existence reformed in exactly the shape, manner, and place he wanted them to. The only limit was that it had to be reformed within a certain distance from himself or the place where it disappeared from. He took from the entire floor, so he could make the matter reform anywhere on the floor he desired. 

The runes on his left hand were not merely some kind of method of transfiguration or transformation; it was the Potter rune scheme for matter reorganization. The diamond on his palm, which he used against Greengrass's ice, erased matter, and the circle on the back of his hand brought it together however he pleased as soon as he closed his hand into a fist. It gave anyone in his family with the runic scheme seamless control over matter so long as they could touch the diamond rune to the object in question. Harry’s personal requirement of closing his fist to begin the reorganization worked as a kind of sacrifice. Forcing himself to add that extra step allowed him to expand upon the uses of the rune scheme and turn an impressive bit of runic magic into a truly terrifying tool capable of attack, defense, and utility at the same time. 

The spiked floor demolished the legs of Albus’s soldiers and killed the boar that his mentor created from the book. Albus managed to push his magic into the stones directly around him to stop them from conforming to his pupil’s intent, but he was still impressed. Harry made a very good move, and even he could not deny the boy from taking his “turn”. Banishing his wand into his holster, Harry pumped power to his flame rune and allowed it to create a spiral of fire that covered at least half of the room.

Albus Dumbledore smiled at his pupil's attack. It was always a pleasure to watch how far his student had come. Still, it would be a long, long time before his student was ready to get the better of him. Swishing his wand to the side before pulling it toward the floor and then directing it at his transfigurations, Albus used three spells in rapid-fire succession. The first sent the firestorm careening into the wall, the second transformed the floor back to its previous state, and the third repaired the bottom half of his wrecked soldiers. 

Harry stopped his firestorm the second he realized that Albus managed to redirect it, and he cursed when he was suddenly bombarded by all of those statues he thought he disposed of. Harry leapt back with all of his might to give himself space, and he decided to use a rune that he wanted to test for the longest time. On the pad of his left pointer finger was a very tiny tattoo depicting a sword. It hurt like a motherfucker considering how tiny it was, but by the gods was it worth it. He couldn’t help but chuckle when he made a finger gun with his left hand and “pulled” the metaphorical trigger. His hand actually popped up with the recoil of an actual pistol when the rune activated, but that only served as proof that his little project worked. Childlike glee and destructive pleasure burned within him when he watched a hole burst through the shield of the stone soldier in front of him. The hole was about the circumference of his fist, and his dark chuckle turned into a full-blown, excited laugh when he realized that it also burst a hole through the soldier’s stone head even after going through the shield. 

Albus grinned proudly as he watched Harry bring his thumb down another four times to demolish the other two soldiers he sent on the charge. He could see so much of James in the boy, and it was never shown more than when his pupil formulated a new bit of magic. Albus personally helped his charge create that rune over summer break, and he couldn’t help but be astounded by the childlike wonder and creativity that Harry applied to his spell creation. Albus considered himself unhealthily addicted when it came to exploring magic, but he would have never considered the process to be particularly fun before he started working with Harry. How could he not hop on board when his student approached him about an idea to turn his hand into a finger gun by tying a piercing curse to his pointer finger with a rune? It was so absurd and yet so obviously genius that he simply had to help. Watching the boy turn his soldiers to debris like it was some sort of game while he vibrated at the sheer badassery that came with shooting piercing curses from his fingers only made Albus enjoy the process more. 

Albus twirled his wand and forced the floor to flow toward Harry in the form of a wave. The boy jumped over five feet in the air to avoid the approaching floor, and he watched the boy shoot three piercing curses at him before he landed. Feeling the desire to do something “badass” to match his pupil’s showing of new magic, Albus condensed a protego to the size of his off-hand which allowed him to “catch” the “bullets” from thin air. Albus smiled cockily and possibly even almost boyishly at his pupil’s astonished expression.

Watching his student attempt and fail to close his mouth turned his smile into a chuckle which soon turned into mirth-filled laughter. He would be lying if he said that he didn’t miss this just as much as Harry did. Rarely did he ever feel more confident that he was doing the right thing than when he was messing around with magic alongside his student. Albus began laughing so heartily that he was forced to clutch his stomach, and watching his normally composed headmaster laugh made Harry start laughing too. The two kept going for at least a minute until they calmed down. 

“There is no way in hell you aren’t teaching me to catch a fucking spell, Albus.”

Albus chuckled even more at the comment and wiped his tearing eyes. 

“Yes, well, I wouldn’t recommend doing it in a duel, but it was very satisfying.”

Harry swished his wand and repaired the chair he shattered and took a seat while Albus did the same. A genuine smile was on his face the entire time.

“Could you imagine Severus’s face if I caught one of his curses?”

“I will have to make sure that I am there for it when you have practiced,” Albus said lightly.

The man repared the entire room with one flick of his wand, and both of them sat down on opposite sides of the desk like they were before their impromptu duel began.

“... Why did you stop teaching me, sir?” Harry eventually asked.

Dumbledore sighed and leveled with his pupil. “I was under the naïve notion that you would end up happier as a student than you were as whatever Severus and I made you into.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Why, you did, Harry,” Dumbledore declared with a twinkle in his eyes. “When Severus told me just how much our lack of contact as teacher and student was affecting you, I had no choice but to admit that I made a mistake.”

“I’m sorry I mucked up your plans, professor,” Harry said.

It was rare for him to display any real remorse, but Harry knew how important Dumbledore’s plans were. If he could’ve just shut his mouth and played his part, it had a high chance of success; most of Dumbledore's plans did.

“Nonsense!” Dumbledore exclaimed. “It is I who should apologize to you. I knew how much you valued our sessions, and I sacrificed it for my plan. I should know better than anyone that plans sometimes need to take a back seat when it comes to living the life you want to have.”

“So what are we going to do?” Harry asked.

“I imagine that, between Severus and I, we could come up with at least a day or two a week for us to train you like we normally would over the school year.”

Harry’s smile was blinding.

“Do I still have to take those stupid classes?” he asked with just a little bit of bite to his voice.

Dumbledore smiled kindly, "You truly despise a classroom setting that much?”

Harry threw his hands up in the air with a frustrated groan. “I have never been so fucking bored in my life, and all of my classmates look at me like I’m disabled or something! Do you know how embarrassing it is to not even be able to cast a first-year transfiguration, professor!?”

“Actually, Harry, I’m not sure I do,” Albus said with a hint of smugness in his voice. “I am a teacher at heart. Even at my prime, I still saw value in the tiny things.”

Harry didn’t look anywhere near as amused as his mentor. It took a moment, but Albus eventually chose to be merciful.

“I still wish for you to attend your classes, but, if it is so horrible for you, I will tell your professors to give you something more your speed that you can learn about in class and accomplish in private.”

Harry nodded happily. That was something he could do. His talent in runes was something that would eventually come out and would’ve come out if Greengrass didn’t decide to keep it to herself, be he could deal with the stares and the condescension so long as he knew that he was learning more. If the teachers gave him something more challenging to learn about in class, then he could deal with pretending as though he were nothing more than a second-year.

Despite his positive feelings about what was to come, he still felt bad for the trouble he was causing now that his mood was more regulated. “You’re really willing to do all of this for me?”

Dumbledore stroked his beard with a small smirk. “Who said that I would be unwilling to let those who feel unchallenged reach their full potential? It's hardly my fault that none of them have made the request yet.”

Harry couldn’t help but feel a little silly. Of course, a school would let students go ahead if they were truly beyond the subject matter of their year. Most students just never asked because they assumed the same as Harry, and the school never brought it up because they didn’t want students moving forward into dangerous magical territory if they weren’t confident enough in their skills to broach the subject.

“Are you sure this won’t interfere with your plans, sir?” 

Harry truly didn’t want to ruin anything if he could avoid it.

“It will not change our plans in any grand way, only our day to day lives. So long as you keep our private lessons to yourself and your more advanced assignments discrete, I see no reason why a few concessions can't be made for the sake of making your time here more enjoyable.

“Thank you, sir,” he eventually said. 

“It is no problem, my boy. I will have Severus give you the schedule for our visits, and we will continue from there.”

Harry started to stand up from his chair, but he just had to look back and ask one more thing before he started his departure. “Could you show me how you caught my curses?”

Albus’s eyes twinkled brighter than ever. “Of course, my boy. You see, it isn’t a complex spell but an advanced application of the shield charm.”

Harry quickly took his seat back, and, almost immediately, things slipped back to the way they used to be. He couldn't have been happier.