Harry Potter's Coolest Aunt

The Unforgivable Curses

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The next two days passed without great incident unless you counted Neville melting his sixth cauldron in Potions. Professor Snape, who seemed to have attained new levels of patience over the summer, gave Neville detention and helped with further tutoring. "You know why Snape's in such a foul mood, don't you?" said Ron to Harry as they watched Aishi playing chess with Neville in the hangout room

"Yeah," said Harry. "Moody." It was common knowledge that Snape had disliked all of their previous Dark Arts teachers except Percy and shown it - but he seemed strangely wary of displaying overt animosity to Mad-Eye Moody. Indeed, whenever Harry saw the two of them together - at mealtimes or when they passed in the corridors - he had the distinct impression that Snape was avoiding Moody's eye, whether magical or normal. "I reckon Snape's a bit scared of him, you know," Harry said. thoughtfully. "Other than mom,"

The fourth years were looking forward to Moody's first lesson so much that they arrived early on Thursday lunchtime and queued up outside his classroom before the bell had even rung. The only person missing was Hermione, who turned up just in time for the lesson. "Been in the -" "Library." Theo finished her sentence for her.

"C'mon, quick, or we won't get decent seats." They hurried into seven chairs right in front of the teacher's desk, took out their copies of The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection, and waited, unusually quiet. Soon, they heard Moody's distinctive clunking footsteps coming down the corridor, and he entered the room, looking as strange and frightening as ever.

They could just see his clawed, wooden foot protruding from underneath his robes. "You can put those away," he growled, stumping over to his desk and sitting down, "those books. You won't need them." They returned the books to their bags, Ron looking excited.

Moody took out a register, shook his long mane of grizzled gray hair out of his twisted and scarred face, and began to call out names, his normal eye moving steadily down the list while his magical eye swiveled around, fixing upon each student as he or she answered. "Right then," he said, when the last person had declared themselves present, "I've had a letter from Professor Lupin about this class. Seems you've had a pretty thorough grounding in tackling dark creatures - you've covered boggarts, Red Caps, hinkypunks, grindylows, Kappas, and werewolves, is that right?"

There was a general murmur of assent. "But you're behind - very behind - on dealing with curses," said Moody. "So I'm here to bring you up to scratch on what wizards can do to each other. I've got one year to teach you how to deal with Dark -" "What, aren't you staying?" Ron blurted out. Moody's magical eye spun around to stare at Ron; Ron looked extremely apprehensive, but after a moment, Moody smiled - the first time Harry had seen him do so.

The effect was to make his heavily scarred face look more twisted and contorted than ever, but it was nevertheless good to know that he ever did anything as friendly as a smile. Ron looked deeply relieved. "You'll be Arthur Weasley's son, eh?" Moody said. "Your father got me out of a very tight corner a few days ago... Yeah, I'm staying just one year. Special favour to your ex-professor and criminal Dumbledore... One year, and then back to my quiet retirement. I would rather prefer your current deputy headmistress. Very tough woman....make an excellent Auror"

He gave a harsh laugh and then clapped his gnarled hands together. "So - straight into it. Curses. They come in many strengths and forms. Now, according to the Ministry of Magic, I'm supposed to teach you countercurses and leave it at that. I'm not supposed to show you what illegal Dark curses look like until you're in the sixth year. You're not supposed to be old enough to deal with it till then. But Mr. DUMB as a door (the golden group lightly chuckled) is out loose, and I say, the sooner you know what you're up against, the better. How are you supposed to defend yourself against something you've never seen? A wizard who's about to put an illegal curse on you isn't going to tell you what he's about to do. He's not going to do it nice and polite to your face. You need to be prepared. You need to be alert and watchful. You need to put that away, Miss Brown, when I'm talking." Lavender jumped and blushed.