Chapter 145: The First First of Many

Having the power to travel through time at your fingertips but needing to wait to use it was perhaps one of the most frustrating experiences Harry had ever had in his relatively long life.

Any other day, he would have simply used it and started studying, but today was the only day when his classes really conflicted. He’d decided to keep arithmancy to justify even receiving the time-turner, and today was the day when he would, at the same time, be attending sixth-year arithmancy and fourth-year Ancient Runes. 

The two classes would find places after lunch, which meant that he would first attend arithmancy while he was still fresh for the day, as it was the harder class, before using the time-turner five hours after lunch to also attend Ancient Runes. Then he would take a two-hour nap, as suggested, in the Room of Requirement, before studying there until the five-hour window ran out.

But first, he would still have to attend Herbology and History of Magic.

Harry impatiently sat his way through breakfast and both classes.

In Herbology, they started with the Chinese Chomping Cabbage, a magical plant with rather sharp teeth, which Harry managed to wrangle into its new pot with a hefty dose of telekinesis and bravery.

History of Magic was obviously a self-study class, and Harry flipped through his notes on the animagus transformation, which would be one of his priorities this year, alongside the Book of Eibon, which he needed to convince Dumbledore to help him create a pensieve.

At lunch, his friends noticed that he was nervous, meaning he had to control himself more lest he raise the suspicions of others too much.

“Mate, you’ve been tapping your feet on the ground the whole day, are you alright?” Cedric asked with a worried frown.

“Are you perchance worried about arithmancy?” Penny asked. “But you nailed the O.W.L., I’m sure you’ll be fine even at N.E.W.T level.” She tried to reassure him before her eyes drifted off, confusedly. “Although Jennie told me that she has Ancient Runes now, don't you also have…”

“I have explosive diarrhoea,” Harry blurted out a bit too loudly. 

Half the Hufflepuff table turned towards him with worried and disgusted looks. Neville even dropped his cutlery while Harley ran red in the face and started laughing into her fist.

Harry promptly stood up and left for the bathroom. He needed an alibi. Maybe he would avoid lunch on the days where he had the conflicting schedule.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Harry hid out in an abandoned classroom next to the arithmancy classroom on the fourth floor for the next hour. He passed the time by transfiguring the chairs in the room into a facsimile of his own body before once again turning that body into different animals.

Inorganic to human to organic was quite difficult, however, and by the time he needed to head out for arithmancy, he was already breathing heavily.

“That excited for numbers, Evans?” One of the Ravenclaw sixth years he shared the class with said when he saw his red face.

“Just finished banging your mum, fucking hike to even get to that snatch mate,” Harry snapped right back, his nerves on a tightrope of anticipated time-travel.

The Ravenclaw, Michael, looked at him with a blank face before the crassness of the reply registered, and he instinctively went for his wand. Then he froze, seemed to reconsider the action and glared at him instead. “Just don’t shit yourself, no need to make it all about you. Although I guess the papers would have a field day. I can already imagine the title. Prodigy stinks up school.”

Harry looked at Michael reproachfully. “Really, a poop joke?” he asked, before huffing and rolling his eyes. “Grow up.”

A pair of Gryffindors also waiting in front of the classroom laughed while the Ravenclaws who’d collected themselves behind Michael glared at Harry.

“Try me,” Harry bit out, looking at the four Ravenclaws, the most represented house in sixth-year arithmancy. Two girls, two guys. “I can match all of you at once, be it in wit, duelling or the bedroom.”

The two girls threw him disgusted looks while Michael sputtered. 

“You’re disgusting, Evans,” the other male Ravenclaw said before shaking his head and stepping away, taking his housemates with him. They remained amongst themselves for the next quarter hour while throwing disgusted looks in Harry’s direction every few minutes.

“Don’t mind them,” Jim, a sixth-year Gryffindor, said as he came up to Harry and adjusted his ivory-rimmed glasses. The brown-haired boy leaned in with a twinkle in his eyes and whispered in Harry’s ear. “I heard that half of Ravenclaw got their bottoms spanked by their daddies when it came out that it was two Hufflepuffs leading the rankings at Hogwarts.”

The door to the arithmancy classroom suddenly opened, revealing a well-rested Professor Vector already standing at a rather full blackboard in front of the classroom.

The sixth-year students, all eight of them, shuffled inside. The one Slytherin girl taking the class gently tapped Harry on the shoulder as she passed him by. “Good job on humbling Habsburg,” she told him somewhat kindly. “Heard he’s going to be a permanent resident at an asylum for the next few years. Asshole groped me at the New Year's gala in Paris last year. I’d say the trash has found its way into the bin.”

“Good,” Harry replied blithely. “Then you owe me one,” he said as he took his seat.

The red-haired girl laughed and winked at him. “I wouldn’t mind,” she said with a small smile before Professor Vector quietened the classroom with a series of rather intimidating coughs.

Everyone shut up.

“Eight students, more than usual,” Vector commented as she let her blue eyes sweep the classroom. “Only lost half of you. Enjoy, from now on, you all get a desk for yourself. You’ll need it, distractions might just prove fatal…” she paused ominously, “to your grades.” She laughed before pointing to the blackboard. “We have a lot to work on this year. Primarily, the fundamentals of all the complex topics into which we’ll dive deeper next year. I’m not a sadist. If you follow along well, now your seventh year might just be easier than this one.”

Jim groaned.

“No complaining,” Vector said with a scowl. “You barely scraped that EE to get into the class, and I know for a fact your family will have your hide if you graduate unfit to do the accounting of the family business.”

Jimothy jokingly saluted. “I’ll be on my best behaviour, professor.”

Vector looked him up and down before nodding. “Good.” That was all she said before turning to the rest of the class. “Open your books on page 7. I won’t sugarcoat this: only one of you is doing just two N.E.W.T. classes this year. I’d suggest you forget about having a life until you graduate.”

The lesson commenced.

Harry noted that the class had become somewhat more intimate now that there were only eight students in it. It reminded him more of a seminar at university than a class at school. 

He liked it more, actually. Probably it wasn’t that bad to be a teacher at Hogwarts if you taught one of the elective classes. How many hours could that possibly be? Two double sessions per week per grade, all houses together. That was 3 hours per grade per week, so 15 hours in the classroom. Perhaps 10 additional hours of preparing lesson plans, exams and correcting essays. 25 hours a week with a long summer vacation. That was basically a part-time job. Harry sighed. Some people just had it too good.

“Do you have enough time to daydream?” the professor said from behind him. “Then you have enough time to work, get to it.”

“Yes, professor,” Harry said with a sigh and started on the assigned task.

Well, there was one part about university that he hadn’t missed, and that was that some of the subjects were actually challenging.

-/-

Arithmancy had been a grind, and as the manual had suggested, Harry had returned to the Hufflepuff dorms to study for a bit before trying to take a two-hour nap to counteract the fact that his day was going to be 5 hours longer.

Unfortunately, while the study session had been productive and he’d managed to finish all the homework he’d received that day, the nap was simply not coming.

He found himself simply laying in the empty dorms while staring at the wooden ceiling of his four-poster bedframe. 

“They should invent a spell that puts people to sleep,” Harry eventually concluded after fifteen minutes. “In fact, they should invent a spell that lets you catch up on all your needed sleep in a minute. Screw five additional hours per day, that would give you eight.”

He paused in his thinking. Did he really trust wizards and their inventions with his relatively fragile neurochemistry?

Well, it wouldn’t hurt to see what was available.

After spending two hours in the library searching in vain, Harry finally absconded to a supply closet close to the ancient runes classroom that he’d checked on previously and locked himself in.

“Alright,” Harry said to himself. “Today’s the day!” 

He lit up a small light with his left hand while fumbling out the time-turner with the other. “One turn, two turns, three turns, four turns, five turns, haha”, he counted out loud just to be extra careful.

Five seconds after he’d finished turning, the world around him blurred.

To his magical senses, it seemed as if a city-sized assortment of fireworks had exploded under his feet, literally lighting up his world. To his eyes, everything blurred together.

To everything else.

He was still standing in a supply closet like a muppet.

He got out and went to the window overlooking the grounds.

Everything was… bright.

“The sun,” he realised. “It’s at its zenith again.” The pleasant September rays were trickling through the window and tickling his nose.

He sneezed.

Then he laughed.

Then he kept laughing.

An idle tempus confirmed that he’d travelled five hours back in time.

“This is ridiculous,” he concluded.

Attending one additional elective would only take five hours per week. The naps would take another 14.

That meant that the other 16 hours were his to do with as he wanted. He’d just done what every grifter dreamed of.

He’d unlocked the 9-day workweek. 

“I am going to make trillions,” Harry realised breathlessly.

Then he turned around and went to Ancient Runes class. Like an idiot, because that was just the price he had to pay.

-/-

Two hours later, Harry was in the room of requirement finishing his plan for the first semester of the school year.

His biggest focus was going to be on the animagus transformation and on the book of Eibon.

He was almost there in terms of self-transfiguration skills; he could feel it. If the marauders could complete their transformations in their fifth year, then he could do it in his fourth.

The book of Eibon is more complicated, but he wanted that pensieve. He’d created the endlessly expanded notebook and was starting to integrate the copy spell into an enchantment. Done by the end of the year, probably.

He hadn’t met with Snape yet, but he was sure the man wouldn’t want to meet more than once a week.

That just left duelling with the golden trio and…

Duelling with Flitwick…

The quill Harry had been using to sort his thoughts paused in mid-air, a big droplet of ink gathering at the tip before falling and making a big splotch on his parchment.

Would there still be duelling with Flitwick?

Harry’s duelling adventure had ended rather abruptly, and the two hadn’t talked since.

He needed to go clear the air.

He’d be attending Charms class regardless of anything. There was literally no way of avoiding it.

As for duelling, well.

Perhaps Snape would be able to tell him if it was still necessary to continue on that path.

If Harry had finally attained the strength he’d sought, or if he was still woefully inadequate to face the dangers of the world.

As always, only time would tell.

-/-

This quick update isn't actually because of the thing, but because of another thing.

I hold monthly polls on P/- atreon about which story should get an extra chapter. Harry Evans won :)

Also, I increased the amount of chapters that are in advance. Tier 1 (free trial) is now 10 chapters in advance, tier 2 is 21 and tier 3 is all (currently 39)