Potioneer potter

Ch10

"Hey Harry, me, Fred, and George are going to go do a bit of quidditch practice after dinner, y'know, before the game against Slytherin this weekend, fancy joining us?"

As the week and gone on, Ron had become more and more nervous about his first match as Gryffindor keeper in front of such a large crowd, and it didn't help that they were playing against Slytherin, a notoriously violent team.

"I'll have a think about it, I might join you, but I have a couple of things I need to do first so don't wait." Harry responded, thinking of the DA lesson plans he now had to make.

Once they had finished their evening meal, they went separate ways at the doors to the great hall, Harry swiftly running upstairs to the common room, and Ron heading towards the quidditch changing rooms. During the very first DA meeting that he had held, Harry was very unsure of what to expect and had, consequently, improvised a lot of it on the spot. Due to the several years of inconsistent, bad quality, teaching that Hogwarts had provided, there were many students who had large gaps in their knowledge and defence abilities. Harry had realised at that moment, that he would need to do a lot more planning for the couple of meeting occurring before Christmas as well as for the remainder of the year after that. The majority of the first meeting had been spent sounding out the most common gaps, as well as directly discussing what the group wanted to learn, it had originally been advertised primarily, as a way to revise and consolidate the defence against the dark arts course so that each student had the best chance at passing their OWLs or NEWTs in the subject. However, it was also no secret, to those who did not hide from the facts, that Voldemort had risen once again and, if they were to survive, every student in that room would at some point need to fight in the upcoming war, even if it was just to protect their own life, as well as the lives of their family and friends.

All of this ran through Harry's head as he fished out a sheet of parchment from his bag and laid it flat on the desk in front of him. He began his list.

Defensive

Basic shield spell – harder ones later

Dodging

Disarming spell

Patronus (?)

Healing spells (?)

Identifying opponents' spells

Offensive

Basic hexes and jinxes

Curses (?)

Knowledge about unforgivables

Using harmless spells to help in a duel – levitating – like troll

Harry spent a long time trying to think of what to put on the list, he thought that, despite his small improvement in the art over the weeks, wandless magic was perhaps a little too ambitious for some of the students but at the same time something like the patronus charm would be very useful to those who could achieve it with the proper tutoring. Most of what he had written did actually overlap with the course syllabus as well as being a good way to prepare the DA members for duels and, as much as it saddened him, he knew that any death eater opponents would not be going easy on them, even if they were just children. After a while of sitting, trying to think of more techniques he could teach, but to no avail, Harry decided that he would join Ron and the twins after all, and perhaps the break would allow him to have some new ideas.

When Harry went flying, he would almost always have to leave his wand with his other clothes in the changing room and this evening was no different. Simply by walking across to the pitch with his firebolt, he was already shivering from the cold and wishing for a hot drink, but instead, he decided to test his wandless magic skills again. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and focused on the feeling of the cold, before casting a warming charm into his clothes. Although a little patchy, somehow missing one sock but not the other, as well as an intensely hot sleeve, he had mostly succeeded in his spell and was no longer at the harsh mercy of the Scottish winter. Feeling very proud of himself, he mounted his broom and soared off into the air, towards the two red heads who were trying to score against their younger brother. They began a two a side match which, after about 20 minutes became more of a contest of doing very daring dives or loops or barrel rolls or basically anything that they could think of, and Harry genuinely could not be happier. As Harry watched the show that Fred and George were putting on at one point, Ron called out to him, shouting against the winds.