Harry Potter - Fanfiction

Year 4 - The Unforgivable Curses

Tuesday passes by without great incident, unless you count Neville, a clumsy Gryffindor boy, melting his sixth cauldron in Potions. Professor Snape, who seems to have attained new levels of vindictiveness over the summer, gives Neville detention.

It is common knowledge that Snape really wants the Dark Arts job, and he has now failed to get it for the fourth year running; although I think with good reason, we wouldn't want to lose our best Potions master after the year is over due to some stupid curse on the job.

Snape has disliked all of our previous Dark Arts teachers and showed it, but he seems strangely wary of displaying overt animosity to Mad-Eye Moody. Indeed, whenever the two are seen together – at mealtimes or when they pass in the corridors – it seems as though Snape is avoiding Moody's eye, whether magical or normal, although yet again given the man's appearance I want to as well.

Most of the Slytherin's drag themselves forcibly, as do I, to Moody's first lesson with us on Wednesday morning; purely because he put most of their parents in Azkaban. But I had an entirely different grudge with him, and I do not stand for what he does as a teacher so I can just imagine what his classes are going to be like.

We walk into his class, Tracey and I take two seats in the back, along with Draco, Crabbe, and Goyle. We all take out our copies of The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection and wait unusually quiet.

Soon we hear Moody's distinctive clunking footsteps coming down the corridor and he enters the room, looking as strange and frightening as ever. We can see his claw, wooden foot protruding from underneath his robes.

"You can put those away," he growls, stumping over to his desk and sitting down, "those books. You won't need them."

We return the books to our bags, still remaining eerily silent.

Moody, paying no attention to the building tension in the room, takes out a register, shakes his long mane of grizzled grey hair out of his twisted and scarred face and begins to call out names. His normal eye moving steadily down the list while his magical eye swivels around, fixing upon each student as he or she answers.

"Right then," he says, when the last person has 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, Kappa's and werewolves, is that right?"

There is a general murmur of assent.

"But you're behind... Very behind... On dealing with curses," says Moody. "So, I'm here to bring you up to scratch on what wizards can do to each other." He adds in a slight murmur, but still audible, "which I'm sure most of you know due to your parents."

"I've got one year to teach you how to deal with Dark Arts, as this is a special favor to Dumbledore... One year and then back to my quiet retirement." He gives a harsh laugh, and then claps 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 counter curses and leave it at that. I'm not supposed to show you what illegal Dark curses look like until you're in sixth year. You're not supposed to be old enough to deal with it till then. But Professor Dumbledore's got a higher opinion of your nerves, he reckons you can cope, and I say, the sooner you know what you're up against, the better. How are you supposed to defend yourselves against something you've never seen?"

"Well luckily most of us in this classroom will never be on the receiving end of that," Pansy pipes up as she glares over at me, proudly in her seat.

"Don't interrupt me Miss Parkinson, otherwise you can remove yourself from my class because it doesn't mean that you are a Pureblood that you will never be on the receiving end of it." Pansy now sinks lower into her chair as Moody continues, "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."