The girls had squabbled. It had been bloodthirsty, vicious. There were hexes thrown, and someone had lost some hair and blood was drawn. It had taken a bit to prise them apart. Figaro had wisely decided that none of them should be given the job after all, and had turned to perhaps the least-likely candidate: Ambrose.

"Interview Professor Donovan?" Ambrose had exclaimed, jaw slack. If it had been his Creatures professor, he'd have understood without question, but he hadn't anticipated being tasked with a valentine-related interview for a special copy of the paper. He had anticipated he would be sorting through the mountains of poorly constructed cryptic romantic messages to print. Most of them would be directed at the Professor anyway.

That gave him an idea. Once the girls had got over their upset, and stopped glaring at him, a few had suggested some questions, which he had obediently noted just in case.

It was Thursday afternoon before the Valentine weekend and Ambrose's classmates trailed away from transfiguration towards Divination or off to common rooms to take a break or hurry through their herbology homework. He instead headed to the office of the professor with the most pleasing arrangement of facial features in the staff.

"Good afternoon, Sir." Ambrose greeted politely once inside the office. Classrooms were sometimes a reflection on the professors who came and went, but the offices always provided a deeper insight. Ambrose was somewhat intimidated by the titles of books amongst the dark furniture. Professor Donovan was both a pretty face and a bit of a brainbox.

"Thank you for agreeing the interview. I, erm." Ambrose cleared his throat and drew himself taller, trying to find his confidence, "A lot of people on the newspaper team wanted to interview as it happens. But Figaro decided I should come. Can I…" He gestured to the chairs and took a seat as directed.

"As you might have guessed, Sir, the edition is published at the weekend, and has a particular theme. You are, erm," Ambrose's gaze dropped a moment as he considered how to phrase it, "our most often requested interviewee of the Professors." Ambrose drew out his quill and parchment. "Do you uhm, mind if I lean on," he gestured to the edge of the desk. Ambrose wasn't the world's fastest writer, and he hadn't thought that the angle would allow his interview subject to read his notes upside-down.

"Does it surprise you that people want us to interview you, Sir?" He asked as politely as possible, adopting the thoughtful expression that he often wore after Professor Donovan had explained a charm and he didn't quite get it. The expression that suggested explaining it once more in words of one syllable could prevent a serious accident.

"You are one of the most popular teachers here, Sir. Has that surprised you?" Ambrose looked up, quill poised.

Let it never be said Rick didn’t know what a terrible idea this was. But Shona was nothing if not persuasive, and after pointing out that the opportunity to negotiate for all future interviews for the rest of the year (re: only one, or none at all), he’d given in.

Of course, that didn’t make it feel any less ominous. Nor it did it make waiting any less horrible. After giving his word Rick had shoved all thoughts of the interview out of mind until the time came for him to actually have it, but now he was fully realizing the idiocy of his denial; his dread was just as fresh as it’d been the day he agreed, and now his desk bore marks of his agitation. Marks the werewolf casually covered up with paperwork, until he could repair them without making more.

But instead of the likes of Desrosiers, Patil or Morrell darkening his door (in which case Rick was man enough to admit that had that been the case, he would have escaped through the window), someone else peeked into the room: Ambrose.

Shoulders relaxed, showing only a fraction of relief swamping their owner. The kid was as accident-prone as they came, but he was definitely the lesser of several evils. Rick returned the Gryffindor’s greeting with a nod, watching him tentatively make his way forward. Maybe this wouldn’t be as terrible as previously thought–


     “You are, erm, our most often requested interviewee of the Professors.”


Damn it.

Shona’s picture watched Rick with a wide, shit-eating grin. Taking a deep breath, he set the frame face down on the desk, gestured for Ambrose to sit, and summoned up the biggest, sunniest, most charming smile he could muster from his catalogue of fake smiles.

“Well, I can’t say you guys have been subtle.” Despite every attempt at ignorance, Rick was all too aware of how a certain portion of the student body felt about him. It had a lot of names for him; apparently ‘Professor Tight-Pants Square-Jaw’ was a favorite. “It certainly makes classes… interesting. But so long as it isn’t an issue… I try not to pay attention, honestly. I’m a teacher; it wouldn’t be appropriate.”

Short of using a Polyjuice potion (or punching himself in the face—something he’d really prefer not to do; he was pretty sure any failure to deter would outstrip the embarrassment of having a black eye in the first place), there really wasn’t anything he could do about it.

Hell, maybe now with Blackburn around…

Rick brightened. “Anyway, interest fades. We have new teachers. We’ve got Blackburn now.” Yeah. Yeah. The guy was some kind of celebrity, right? An actual celebrity– “Before the year’s out you guys will forget all about me.” He leaned back in his chair. Hands clasped over his middle and a new grin slowly taking root, he looked endlessly cheered by the possibility.

"… we've got Blackburn now." Professor Donovan explained, though Ambrose's face was puzzled. He didn't study divination, and wasn't the most observant of the changes of staff unless he heard one of them was worth giving a wide berth to avoid detention. "… before the year's out you guys will forget all about me."

Ambrose leaned forward to write down a few notes and paused, brow furrowed in thought.
"I don't think the girls will forget you, Sir. I heard there's a shrine to you in one of the Hufflepuff dormitories." As if there was nothing unusual about that comment, Ambrose looked down and concentrated on writing down the key points of what the Professor had replied with.

"About Professor Blackburn, sir. Do you bring him up because you think he's more attractive than you? With respect sir, early indications of the poll we're running suggest a landslide victory for you." Ambrose didn't actually know that for sure, he'd just overheard someone else on the team who was entirely pro-Donovan gushing and had misunderstood. It didn't take much.

"That's not a question on my list, actually." Ambrose blushed slightly, "I just didn't understand. My next question is what has been your best moment at Hogwarts since you came to teach here." Get the standard, respectable questions out of the way first, Pepper.

Rick stared down at the top of Ambrose’s head. For one blissful moment, he was in complete and utter denial. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening.

But it was. And it got worse. And worse. A poll?

Rick died a little more inside.

Eyes fell on the only other picture on his desk. “Going home,” he said faintly, while his face did some vague, complicated thing. And then he caught himself. “Don’t write that down.”

He should never have said yes. That was obvious. Leaning forward, Rick dropped an elbow on an armrest and scrubbed his face. The urge to bury his face in both hands was so strong he wanted to pull his own hair with it, but he could wait until Ambrose left. Probably. “Best moment? Uh…”

The thing was, there had been nice moments. His time at Hogwarts hadn’t been completely awful; not all the students were creepy, and aside from the antics of those that were, the other faculty members generally minded their own business. But with the last minute and a half now numbering among one of the most mortifying conversations in his entire life, remembering the nice parts was… difficult. He could have happily gone the rest of his life without knowing there was now actual, printed proof of what teenagers thought of him.

Ambrose was still waiting for an answer, though, and so Rick dragged his hand over his hair and let it hook around his neck—hang there, loose, before letting it drop altogether. “Tutoring,” he finally said, exhaling gustily. “Any time one of you finally understood what you’d come to me for, that was—nice.” He grimaced.

“Going home - don’t write that down.” Ambrose’s quill crossed out the G he’d noted under the question on his parchment and looked up at the Professor properly. Was he trying to tell a joke? That didn’t seem too like Professor Donovan, he could be rather serious. He gave the older wizard some time to think about the answer.

At Professor Donovan’s proper answer, Ambrose scratched his quill laboriously across the page, noting down the answer, nodding. “Yeah, that’s cool, Professor.” He uttered slowly, trying to concentrate on what he was writing. “I do, but I think everyone appreciates that. ‘specially the girls, they’re always on about extra attention.”

As if the Gryffindor hadn’t said anything in the least suggestive, because Pepper was entirely oblivious at what he’d just implied, he ploughed on to the next question, a thoughtful expression furrowing his brow as he read it.

“What did you er, want to be when you were our age, Sir? Did you want to be a Hogwarts Professor?” Ambrose knew that Professor Donovan hadn’t gone to school here, just like his sister, but he didn’t want the whole interview to be about school and things. He just had to get those questions out of the way to get to the … sillier ones.

"I er -“ Ambrose shuffled the papers in his grip, “have a list of possible jobs people suggested - someone in the newspaper team stopped people in the entrance hall the other day to ask what they thought. Erm,” Ambrose’s face flushed, finding the list. The large score against model was the main cause of his flustered expression. Both of the Donovans were good looking, and people said it enough. He just felt awkward pointing it out like that. “Here, have a look. Was it any of those?”

It was just as well that Ambrose was so clearly preoccupied with just getting the answers down. If Rick detected even a hint of guile, of anything less than innocence, he would have ended the interview right then and there without hesitation. The humiliation was almost more than he could bear. It was very nearly more than he could bear. But as it was, he didn’t, and so it wasn’t. Ambrose, astoundingly, appeared to be… if not completely naive to the awkward nature of the questions he was asking, then at least unaware of the impact telling Rick everything else had.

Not that any amount of awareness could adequately describe Rick’s expression, because Rick’s expression was indescribable. But at least it would have made the questions – and everything else – stop.

The next question almost came as a relief, a breather from the situation. Of course, that didn’t last long.

Did he want to know? Rick was sure he didn’t. Yet he found himself accepting the sheet anyway, with a dazed sort of dread more often found in dreams. Model, his eyes read. Bouncer. Sailor…

Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t all bad. Some of them didn’t come as a surprise, since they were everything he had heard before, but a few of them earned a snort of almost-amusement—for how true they actually had been, at some point in his life.  If only they knew.  It was enough to help him find his voice.

“Some of them, yeah,” he said, smiling faintly. “But don’t we all wish we were something else at some point?” And then, glancing down at the list again, looked back up at Ambrose and really smiled. It was, to a more observant eye, rather frightening, boding well for absolutely no one. “Hey, is it alright if I keep this?” He was already folding it in half, then quarters.

“Er,” Ambrose replied, unsure and not anticipating Professor Donovan would want to keep the list. “Yeah, I guess, it’s just a copy…” The Gryffindor noted the Professor looked rather pleased as he folded it up, which in itself was a bit unusual.

“So um, Professor, there’s a theme for this edition of the paper, which you might, um, have guessed.” Ambrose shuffled his backside in the chair the other side of the desk, and pushed his mousy brown hair back away from his forehead. “So we have some, er, themed questions for you. These are meant to be quick fire questions, which means you can give quite short answers to these, if you er, want.”

Something told Ambrose, even with his minimal wit, that Professor Donovan was likely to give some very brief answers to the list that he’d been given. He straightened the parchment list of questions, spaced out so there was enough room to write the answer beside in his uneven handwriting

“Ready?” He asked, the Professor, more out of self-trepidation than care that the Professor was actually ready. Glancing up from the parchment he gave a nervous smile. “Ok, well. here we go.”

“If you could do anything at all for one day, what would it be?”

“Erm, who is your least favourite colleague?”

“And er, your most favourite?”

Ambrose wriggled uncomfortably at seeing the next, his voice shaking ever so slightly as he rushed the question.
“What was your first kiss like?”

“Er..uhm, favourite dinner…”

“Favouritebrandofunderwear.” He blushed profusely at this and avoided Professor Donovan’s stare. He hoped he would get out of the room alive.

“Favourite student? Or erm, year?” Ambrose breathed a sigh of relief at the almost normal question, but they were not finished yet.

A theme. Rick bit his tongue. It wasn’t Ambrose’s idea, he reminded himself. “Ready.”


     “If you could do anything at all for one day, what would it be?”


Leave you guys in an active volcano. And then he thought of Leon. “Stay home.” Naked. Because of reasons. But he did not say this, also because of reasons.


     “Erm, who is your least favourite colleague?”


Storm. Definitely Storm. He always looked like he thought Rick actually enjoyed the attention, which – no. Ha ha ha. No he did not. “No comment.”


     “And er, your most favourite?”


Rick shifted in his seat and scratched his cheek. Since Shona was his sister, she didn’t count. Which left– “Maiko.”


     “What was your first kiss like?”


Jesus Christ. “Good.”


     “Er..uhm, favourite dinner…”


“Steak.”


     “Favouritebrandofunderwear.”


Rick stared. And stared. And stared, before deciding to put them both out of their misery. “The kind that fits,” he finally said, as neutrally as he could.


     “Favourite student? Or erm, year?”


A smile; that was easy. “First year.” Second year had Linus, fifth year were horrible little shits who had an Incident at least once a week, and seventh was just horrible for reasons he preferred not to actively think about. Unless, of course, someone was talking to him, because of them. Asking questions. Taking notes.

Rick’s eye twitched. He took a breath. “Anything else?”

“Er…” Ambrose shuffled his papers nervously, a bit slow to note the answers down in his handwriting. There were some more but they were the tamer ones he’d come up with. Some of the questions the girls had put down on his list he couldn’t even pronounce or figure out how the Professor would answer.

“Uhm, ok,” Ambrose began again, "Strangest thing you’ve given a detention for?” He glanced up, well aware that Professor Donovan loved to dock points and issue detentions for the smallest infractions.  He probably issued more than Professor Storm did.

“Favourite thing you’ve confiscated,” he ventured.

“If you gave up teaching today, what would you do for a job?” Perhaps a lovely thought for their Charms teacher.

“Have you ever got married?” Ambrose asked as innocently as he could, “Oh, and the girls put ‘would you ever get married’ as a follow up.” He shrugged. It seemed a sensible enough follow up.

“What house do you think you’d be in?” Ambrose asked, after a pause to scribble down answers. “We did a straw poll, and well, most people said Slytherin. Someone put you down as Hufflepuff, well, I think they did, they didn’t spell it right, with o’s not a u.” He looked puzzled.

“And last one, Sir: have you ever been arrested?” Ambrose squinted at the notes, reading something that had been added since he’d last looked at them, “‘since you are rather arresting’ er… what..?” His cheeks flushed. “I didn’t write that bit Sir, look,” he turned round the piece of paper with the scrawled answers below to prove it wasn’t him, feeling very embarrassed.

     “Strangest thing you’ve given a detention for?”


“…When Linus Hughes snuck a bunch of his… frogs… into my office. He had dressed them up.” They had been everywhere. Everywhere. One them had even knocked over Leon’s picture; Rick had found it resting on top of it—as well as a single pellet innocuously resting beside it as well. Picture!Leon had been avoiding as much of it as he could.

Suffice to say Rick hadn’t reacted well.


     “Favourite thing you’ve confiscated.”


That was easy. “Issues of Witch Weekly,” he smirked, looking more comfortable again. “It’s complete garbage, of course, but always good for a laugh.” Especially when a friend was featured in it. As much as Rick hated his own privacy violated, he was always up for a bit of schadenfreude.


     “If you gave up teaching today, what would you do for a job?”


This next answer took a bit more thought. “Go back into freelancing, maybe.” Before he had started his own business, Rick had done a variety of jobs, from bartending to security, to even dancing. Freelancing still had its idiots, but at least he would be his own boss. “Or open up an autoshop.” Cars were fascinating, even if he preferred motorcycles himself.


     “Have you ever got married? Oh, and the girls put ‘would you ever get married’ as a follow up.”


“No, never been married,” he sighed, finally giving in to the urge to pinch the bit between his eyes. Then, he added, because apparently his masochistic streak ran deeper than he realized, “but yes, I would.”


     “What house do you think you’d be in?”


Rick made a face. He didn’t think much of the school’s tradition for dividing the students by personality – he was almost positive that it was the main cause as to why one house was more annoying than the rest of them combined, but– “Ravenclaw,” he said, looking sour about it. Ravenclaw had Connor and Juni (who were not only the absolute worst of their house, but their entire year) and Sasha, whose entire existence grated on every one of Rick’s last nerve. Ugh, Sasha; if there was anyone Rick had wanted to throw overboard during the trip even more than Connor Todd, it was Sasha. “If I didn’t have a choice. Otherwise, I’d choose Hufflepuff.”


     “And last one, Sir: have you ever been arrested? ‘Since you are rather arresting’ er… what..?” A flush. “I didn’t write that bit Sir, look.”


The werewolf held up a hand as if that would fend off the youth, grimacing. No, he didn’t want to look. Christ. “I believe you.” Really.

The kid was still waiting for an actual answer, though, and so Rick sighed again. To answer truthfully, or not… Oh, what the hell. It wasn’t as though his dignity was still waiting to be dragged through hot coals, or anything. “Not in this country,” he said, fingers drumming on an armrest. The even stare he leveled Ambrose said that that could change very, very quickly. “Are we done?”

“Yes Sir.” Ambrose confirmed. He sounded distracted because he was still copying down his notes. “Yes, er. Thank you Professor for um, tolerating.” The Gryffindor looked up and realised he was expected to vanish the moment he confirmed. “Oh, oh right. Yes. I… Good afternoon Professor.” Ambrose scrambled up all his papers, the quill trailing over the end of his interview notes as he did.
He hoped Professor Donovan liked the interview when it was published.

Though, optimistic as Ambrose was, there was no saving these answers once they were in the hands of the girls on the newspaper team. When Ambrose saw it printed, he only hoped Professor Donovan realised Ambrose was not behind the unflattering photo nor the crafty editing. But anyone who had ever marked one of Ambrose’s essays would be able to figure that.

End