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Lily Evans wanted to change a life.
When she realized how good she was at potions, Lily knew what she wanted to do in life. She had been learning in her classes about how much progress was still to be made in wizard medicine, and Lily was determined to push at least some of the progress.
She had watched her childhood friend, Severus take care of his dying mother. She had watched person after person fall ill in wartime only to die in St. Mungo’s because there wasn’t proper treatment. Most importantly, she had seen not only the justice system, but the healthcare system fail young werewolves like her friend, Remus.
Under Horace Slughorn’s wing, there was nothing she wouldn’t be able to accomplish. Even as difficult as it was for muggleborns to get important jobs in the wizard world, he’d managed to help her get an apprenticeship at St. Mungo’s for after her NEWTs. Once she’d blown away her mentors in the Diagnostics Department, they had written glowing recommendations for her to the Experimental Potions Lab of the hospital.
Her job was almost everything she had hoped for. She had successfully, albeit bittersweetly, found a cure for Dragon Pox, the disease that had taken Fleamont and Euphemia Potter only a couple of years before.
“Harry is not so keen on potions,” Slughorn had said one afternoon. He’d invited Lily to tea one September afternoon. Harry was in his first year at Hogwarts, with Slughorn as his Potions professor. “I think he’d be content to stay in Professor Lupin’s class all day.”
“He does love his uncle,” Lily beamed. She had figured Harry wouldn’t take so quickly to potions, but she knew that he had it in him. It was obvious from the beginning that he would favor Moony’s class.
“I’m afraid I’ve asked you to tea with ulterior motives, my dear,” Slughorn said after some more small talk. “I’m retiring from Hogwarts after this year.”
“You can’t! You’re so suited for it!”
“Oh, believe me, I know,” he chuckled. “I’m just getting rather old for it, don’t you think?”
“You’ll never be too old,” Lily joked back. “Who’s replacing you?”
“No one yet,” he said. “Although, strangely, Dumbledore has allowed me to choose my successor.”
“Any ideas?”
“I think you’d be a rather brilliant Potions Master.” Slughorn looked fully serious. Lily’s jaw dropped.
“You don’t mean—“
“I do mean,” Slughorn cut her off. “You are the first person I thought of to take this position.”
Lily agreed to take a few days to think about it but, ultimately, knew she had already made up her mind. Professor Evans did have a nice ring to it, after all, even if she wished she could be called Professor Potter. She wasn’t totally sure why teachers were made not to use married names.
She didn’t know how to tell Harry. Neither she nor her husbands had any clue how he’d react to his mother being his new Potions professor. All that was certain was that Slughorn’s retirement and her appointment would be announced through an owl to the parents the first of the year.
“As long as you don’t fuss over me in class,” Harry had said when she’d sat down to tell him. “If you can be as cool as Moony, then I don’t care.”
It turned out to be that simple. Since she didn’t go by Potter at Hogwarts, some of the students didn’t even clock that she was Harry’s mother. His second year went by without a hitch. It was a bonus that her best friend was a professor alongside her.
Lily did miss experimental potions, though. Within her first year as a Hogwarts teacher, she started working with Madame Pomfrey on their off time to develop new healing measures. Particularly, she wanted to further the exploration into Werewolf medicine, circa the recent discovery of the Wolfsbane potion.
“Professor!” a first year called to her one day. It was the beginning of her second year teaching, and was really starting to find her stride.
“What is it, Dennis?” she asked. The two of them walked toward the Great Hall together for lunch.
“My brother had Dragon Pox over the summer,” he said. The boy was still slightly out of breath from running to catch up with her. “I was reading about it and I learned that you created the cure for it!”
Lily blushed. “It wasn’t only me, I had a whole team of wizards helping me.”
“I just wanted to say thank you, Professor,” he said with finality. “Your cure saved his life!”
Dennis Creevey ran off to join his friends at the Gryffindor table before Lily could say another word.
—
James Potter wanted to change the world.
James remembered as a child being in total awe of the Aurors. All the stories he’d heard were of valiant teams busting down Death’s door to capture dark wizards. He knew from a very young age that he wanted to do that too. He wanted to save lives.
This didn’t exactly change through his school years. The wizard world was in the midst of a war and, from the moment he picked up a wand, he was eager to fight in it. To protect a world full of people he loved so dearly from the darkest force he had been alive to see.
Most people saw James as reckless. He couldn’t really argue that point, at least for most of his adolescence. Once he wised up, though, and his teachers saw he was growing to his potential, he was a shoe-in for Auror training.
Being an Auror had been different than he had imagined it. Not worse, per se, but definitely not what he’d thought it would be. He didn’t get to leave his desk until five years after he’d left Hogwarts. Once the war was over, there was less of a hustle about things in the Auror office.
James found that his favorite cases were those which took longer. Somehow, the days spent putting together the puzzle made the capture all the more satisfying. He had to admit, though, there was a lot of discrepancy when it came to some of the Dark Lord’s wealthier followers.
He’d spent nearly a week interrogating Lucius Malfoy. A man with such influence being revealed as a Death Eater was major news, after all. Especially when it had been nearly three years since the fall of You-Know-Who. But all through the interviews, Malfoy retained the same flimsy story—that he had been put under the Imperius Curse.
There were tell-tale signs that one had been put under this particular curse. The more Death Eaters the Aurors questioned, however, the more muddied those guidelines had become. No longer were they looking at a succinct rubric for what to look for. Instead, even Mad-Eye Moody was being pushed out of the way for final decisions. James had never before seen so clearly the way the Ministry was controlled by money.
After fifteen years in the Auror’s office—okay, including his two years of training—James was ready for a change. His department was nowhere near conducive to change, and it was taking its toll on him. He was too young to retire officially, though, he could certainly afford to retire if he so pleased. He just knew he wouldn’t be satisfied doing nothing. He had to figure out a new job path, but he didn’t know what else he’d want to do.
“I think Flitwick is retiring after next year,” Lily confided one afternoon. It was fall of 1993, and Regulus and James had come to Lily’s office for tea on a Saturday she’d be supervising detention. The three of them sat around her desk in her dungeon classroom while two first years scrubbed cauldrons on the other end of the room. “No one’s said anything specific. I think Dumbledore’s waiting to find a replacement first.”
James perked up at this. Regulus recognized the glint in his eyes immediately.
“You’re thinking of applying?” he asked with a smirk. James nodded.
“I think it would be good to settle down,” James said nonchalantly.
“You say this like you are about six hundred years old,” Lily joked. “J, you are 33 years old.”
“I know that,” James said, laughing as well. “I think I’d be a good Charms teacher, that was my best subject in school.”
“There’s no question that you’d be an excellent teacher,” Regulus said, with Lily nodding vigorously beside him. “But you’re truly done with the Auror’s office?”
“You’d know, better than anyone, my frustration, Reg,” James said. Regulus was a very prolific Ministry Activist, having started several departments related to Child Welfare. “This office is still wrapped around the fingers of Malfoy and the likes. They’re letting me out in the field less and less. The longer I work there the more I hate it. I am ready to cut ties any day now. I can’t keep waiting for an opportunity to save the world.”
Regulus and Lily expressed their sympathy and agreement.
“You should set up a meeting with Dumbledore, then,” Lily said. Before waiting for a response, she got up and walked through to her connected office. With a handful of floo powder thrown into the fireplace, she called for Dumbledore. “James is here and was wondering if you are free for a chat.”
“Send him to me,” said Dumbledore’s head through the fireplace a moment later. James didn’t waste any time in hurrying through the green flames to the Headmaster’s office. It was a fairly quick interview. Since Flitwick’s retirement plans had not yet been publicized, James was the only person to have applied for the job so far.
Harry rolled his eyes that Christmas Break when his parents broke the news over dinner.
“First Mum. Now Dad. Surely Papa will be next,” Harry said. “Who becomes teachers after that? Marlene? Wormtail? Padfoot?”
—
Regulus Black wanted to change the system.
He’d grown up in an awful home to parents who shouldn’t have been parents. As he got older, he was shocked at how little the provisions were in the Ministry for children in need, particularly those in abusive homes. Regulus attributed most of it to the fact that people in the wizard world generally kept to their own families about that sort of thing.
He just wanted to make sure that he was working for a world he’d be proud for his son to grow up in. His brother, Sirius, sat on the Wizengamot once that their parents had passed, but he’d only lasted about a month before abdicating his title to Regulus.
“You’ll do a far better job than I ever would,” Sirius had said when they signed the papers.
When he had successfully started the Department of Child Protection, Regulus as overjoyed. He’d gotten to oversee the hiring process, as well as train all of the leadership for the department. Writing the bylaws was tedious work, but necessary for something as important as this. His logical next step was to train Hogwarts teachers to be DCP certified so they would know what signs to look for to pick out troubled or abused children.
It was the summer of 1996 that Regulus was placed in Hogwarts to do a summer-long training program with all of the professors. All was going well until Dumbledore fell into a coma with unknown cause. Nothing Madame Pomfrey or Lily did seemed to make him any better or closer to waking, so things were looking grim for the upcoming school year.
“He’ll have to be transferred to St. Mungo’s,” McGonagall said to Regulus on a late July afternoon. “I’ll have to step in as Interim Headmistress in the meantime. Which leads me to a very important question. Are you willing to take my place and teach Transfiguration? Just until Albus recovers.”
“What if he doesn’t recover?” Regulus asked.
“Then you are welcome to keep the position if it suits you,” Minerva began. “Or we can search for a permanent replacement. Either way, we will likely need someone for this term.”
The decision was difficult for Regulus. He’d wanted nothing else than to help reform the system that had so neglected him. Now that he had created the Department necessary, he had lots of administrative work ahead of him. Taking on the Transfiguration position would certainly help him further implement Child Protection Laws in Hogwarts, even though he’d be swimming in paperwork the whole year.
“You really are all Hogwarts teachers now?” Harry asked incredulously, as he sat facing his three parents in the study once again. “If you wanted to spend more time together, you could have just said so.”
“Alas, you won’t be on my roster this year, Mr. Quidditch Star,” Regulus teased back. Aspiring and scouted quidditch players were not required to take Transfiguration at the NEWT level.
Regulus had been right, he was practically drowning in all of the work he’d signed himself up for that year. Between grading homework, evaluating other teachers, and making it to and from Wizengamot sessions, he was working himself to near-death.
When the end of term came around, it arrived with unfortunate news from St. Mungo’s. Dumbledore’s funeral was higher in attendance than the Quidditch World Cup.
“You’re sure you don’t want the position permanently?” McGonagall asked him as he packed his things from her former office.
“I can’t stay burning the candle at both ends,” Regulus said with a soft smile. “I do so appreciate the offer, though.”
Regulus was more than happy to support his partners as they taught until old age, but he couldn’t see himself abandoning his passion. There was still so much yet to do.