Chapter Text
Tonight marks the 15th time that Harry has attended the welcome feast at Hogwarts. Five times as a student, and after tonight, 10 times as a member of the Hogwarts teaching staff. His 15th feast, and he knows the way this goes like the back of his hand. The first years will enter, equal parts frightened and excited, and listen to the Sorting Hat sing its song.
It’ll place them, the houses will cheer, their ranks will grow.
There’s hardly room for new students at the tables this year. Attendance has been skyrocketing ever since the war, but it’s reached a fever pitch in the great hall tonight. The number of students has increased at least by half in the couple of decades since Harry walked these halls in his Gryffindor tie, his mind plagued with thoughts much darker than a difficult Potions assignment. But such reminiscing has no place tonight. Not the while the upper years chatter and joke, catching up after their summer holidays. A few wave up at him and he can’t help but smile back.
Returning to Hogwarts has always felt like coming home. His heart swells at the feeling of kinship with each of them as they settle into the warm magic of the castle, and then the doors open, and all eyes shift to the back.
The new class is paraded in, a swarm of nervous energy with Minerva at the helm. He spots Rosie in the crowd and sends her an encouraging smile as he catches her eye. She’ll be Gryffindor, most certainly - he’s yet to meet a Weasley who wasn’t. She smiles back at him, and he has to keep his eyes from shifting to the back of the Hufflepuff table, where he knows a head of cobalt blue hair won’t be sitting (if he’s even still wearing it blue these days...who can keep up with Teddy Lupin and his ever-shifting colors?)
Harry finds himself staging his own internal pep talk, as the sorting moves forward.
So, Teddy graduated. That’s a good thing. A very good thing. He’s in London now, with Ron and George, starting his own career, his own life. Without Harry. So what if Harry can hardly remember teaching here without the boy he’d raised running around the halls? It’s going to be fine. Great, even. Rosie is here. A godson graduated and a goddaughter enrolled. That’s...poetic, certainly? Not to mention the handful of other Weasleys running around - enough of his nieces and nephews that he can hardly keep track anymore.
Hogwarts will not feel lonely. Hogwarts is never lonely.
“GRYFFINDOR!”
Harry’s shaken from his thoughts to applaud enthusiastically, as a head of house should when a new student joins their ranks. It isn’t until the new Gryffindor sits down and turns Harry’s way that he sees the look of terror.
It hits him like a punch to the chest: pale angular features, wide grey eyes, and shocking white-blonde hair. If it wasn’t for the baby fat that lingers in his cheeks, Harry would swear he was looking at Draco Malfoy himself.
It takes another moment or two to sink in. Draco Malfoy’s son has just been sorted into Gryffindor.
*****
The rest of the feast proceeds without further surprise. Rosie does, in fact, join her family’s house, and is welcomed into a seat next to Roxanne.
Minerva keeps her speech short and sweet as usual, announcing Flitwick’s retirement, and introducing Dean Thomas as the new Charms professor stepping into his place. The students react with an appropriate level of applause, neck-craning, and murmuring. Dean smiles good naturedly and reclaims his seat, so they can all eat.
The feast appears and the students’ attention shifts back to their friends, their food, their new housemates. Harry eats a bit mindlessly, ignoring young stares of awe with practiced ease - it does get quite old, you know - and contemplating the idea of his new Gryffindor Malfoy. Scorpio was his name? Scorpion? Likely to be a right little prat, if a first-year Draco was anything to go by.
“He’s quite unlike his father at that age.” Minerva’s voice cuts off his thoughts, as though she’s been sifting through them herself.
“I-”
“Certainly wouldn’t judge the child off hand, no I’d think not.” She responds with a knowing smile. “Curious that he’s ended up in our proud house, however. I find myself all too eager to learn why.” The last bit is whispered, conspiratorial, and Harry can’t help but grin.
It’s been an interesting decade, becoming colleagues, then friends, with the headmistress. Of course, she still sees through Harry like he’s a 3rd year looking for trouble.
“I suppose it’s just a matter of time.” He peels his eyes away from the Gryffindor table and looks to Minerva. “Decent summer?”
She hums thoughtfully, “Quite a busy one...Something I’ve meant to speak with you about, in fact.”
This catches Harry’s attention, and he leans back in his seat to gaze over at her better, a raise of his eyebrow prompting her to continue.
“You’ll know, of course, that Filius served as my Deputy Headmaster for the last 19 years,” she stated, primly dabbing her mouth with her napkin before finally looking over to meet Harry’s eyes, “You’ll also realize that, with his retirement, the post now sits empty.”
It takes a moment to click. What? Harry realizes what she’s implying but is caught too far off guard to jump in and say something, anything. Him? Deputy Headmaster of Hogwarts?
It’s moments like these that he has to remind himself that he’s approaching 40, that he’s come an extraordinarily long way from 17, when responsibilities beyond his years were constantly thrust upon him. Still, he feels a ghost of panic flaring up in his chest.
A grounding hand on his shoulder stops his thoughts in their tracks. “I’m not expecting a decision tonight, Professor. Take plenty of time. I ask only that you consider it, you have quite a bit to offer our school.”
With that, she turns from him to address Madam Pomfrey on her other side, and Harry finishes his dinner in contemplation.
*****
The morning brings the flutter of excitement that always accompanies the first day of classes. Harry enjoys nothing more than teaching his first years their very first Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson - it's one of the very few things that gets him out of bed early enough for tea in his quarters, even before breakfast in the Great Hall.
The morning also brings the flutter of wings as Hermione’s owl swoops in through the window, already open to let the Scottish morning air liven up his quarters. It always takes some time for them to feel lived-in after a summer away.
Staff quarters at Hogwarts, he’s learned, work similarly to the room of requirement, changing based on the needs of the user. They don’t change each time he needs something, but when he first moved in, they adjusted to his tastes and comforts.
The result is a cozy space, stone walls and floors softened by rugs and tapestries, decorated in warm golds, with a few accents of crimson and scarlet - a toned down version of the Gryffindor common room, which lives just at the other end of the corridor. His rooms include a bedroom suite with a spacious four-poster bed and a simple wardrobe, separated by a heavy wooden door from the living space, where an overstuffed sofa and armchair sit by the fire, and a small dining table rests near the window, for times when Harry takes his meals in private.
It’s there on the table that a warm cuppa has appeared as though by...well, magic, and the owl has dropped a letter, before helping itself to the dish of treats at the perch by the window. Harry strokes its head gently as he passes, and settles down at the table to sip his tea and read the letter, penned in handwriting he knows as well as his own.
Harry,
Happy start of term, mate! 10 years - bloody DADA curse is sure broken now, yeah?
Rosie sent us a letter last night before bed, she takes after her mum so much it scares me sometimes… Glad she got Gryffindor, she was right scared about it, even if she wouldn’t say. You’ll look after her, won’t you?
Teddy’s settling in well enough. Bloke’s already asking around about management at the Hogsmeade shop, I think he thinks it’s subtle...like we don’t all know he’s more interested in how close he can get to Victoire while she finishes school. He’s been a great help in the rush before school started, though...ah, sorry in advance for all the Wheezes you’ll have to confiscate this year - let them have a little fun though, yeah?
Hermione and Hugo send their love - we’ll visit Hogsmeade soon!
-Ron
P.S. What’s all this about Malfoy’s kid in Gryffindor? How the hell did that happen?! Good luck mate, you might need it.
Harry smiles, shaking his head at Ron’s sentiments as he takes a sip of tea. He consciously reminds himself of Minerva’s words yesterday, not to judge the Malfoy boy before he meets him.
He pointedly ignores the other part of his conversation with the Headmistress, not prepared to pull that string, and certainly not at this hour. Instead he sets the letter aside and picks up the Marauder’s Map, eyes crinkling as he smiles at the note Teddy spellotaped to the front:
Hold on to this for me, will you? (You’ll get more use of it than I will.)
The Map was a gift for Teddy’s 14th birthday - Harry’s way of helping him learn a little more about his father, to give him a chance to walk Remus’s footsteps. They took the path under the Whomping Willow out to the shack and Harry shared memories of the Marauders he’d known and second-hand stories from their adventures at school.
Perhaps handing something like that off wasn’t the most responsible of Harry’s choices, but he wanted Teddy to experience the best parts of Hogwarts - and what fun is Hogwarts without a little mischief?
For now, it’s back in Harry’s hands, but he’ll return it to Teddy eventually - hopefully the boy will have a child of his own one day and he can pass it along. It’s a part of his family legacy, after all.
Harry stands from the table and moves to his trunk, the same one he bought in Diagon Alley at 11 years old. He never finished unpacking his belongings yesterday before the feast, so now he stoops to pull out his teaching robes, charming the wrinkles out and dressing himself quickly.
His eye is caught by a stack of frames at the top of the open trunk, and with a wistful smile, he removes them, placing them each carefully along the mantle.
Tonks and Remus, haggard but beaming, a bundle of blankets in their arms - the only picture of Teddy with his parents; Ron, Hermione, Rose, and Hugo, sitting around a picnic basket, joy on their faces and shoulders shaking with laughter from a terrible joke Harry told from behind the camera; a Daily Prophet clipping - Ginny’s first article as Quidditch Correspondent; Teddy again, six years old and sitting atop Harry’s shoulders, looking for all the world like Harry’s own, with messy black hair and bright green eyes; The Order of the Phoenix, in 1980 and 1997, framed side by side.
“Hogwarts is never lonely,” he reminds himself, as he turns away and heads to breakfast.