Shifting Perspectives
Back-from-wherever-post 5/8
Summary: All those faces tell her more than they probably want to. A new term begins in Hogwarts – and so many people are missing. OneShot.
Warning: Ummm. Yeah. Prepare for Dumbledore monologue.
Set: At the beginning and during vol7
Disclaimer: Standards apply.
The faces of the students she can see are shadowed.
They have their heads bowed, their shoulders are hunched. Professor Minerva McGonagall stares into the crowd of students of her school, in something resembling the Great Hall they loved but that now is a horribly distorted version of it. Suddenly, the vast expanse of the once so cheerful and warm room is threatening and cold, swallowing her up with its hostility. No clouds paint the ceiling, no thunder can be heard. Not even the night sky shows on the enchanted ceiling and secretly she thinks this is the way the school itself mourns. Mourns the loss of a great man, mourns the loss of a former life, mourns the loss of its purpose. In a school that has lost its heart and its soul, how are children supposed to be taught how to live a good life?
Minerva stares into the crowd and the crowd stares back. But it is a hopeless glance, like empty eyes looking trough dirtied and shattered glass without ever once blinking. No student answers the question that has to be clear in her eyes and after years of teaching she knows that most people try to avoid questions they don't want to hear or don't have an answer to. Students do so exceptionally well. Still, she tries to bore into them. Empty faces stare back, devoid of hope and strength and endurance. Here and there, though, a last flicker of defiance can be seen, underneath the layers of hate and anger and angst. She does not have to look twice to see it, though others probably have to: in Neville Longbottom's round face, for example, and his rigid posture speaks of the pride he has learned to carry from the boy who is is brother in soul, if not in blood. He stands out and Minerva instinctively wants to shield him from the gazes of her fellow colleagues. But the Carrows are gleefully basking in the glory of their newest assignment, probably imagining a thousand different ways to punish the students in front of her. And for once, she is glad the feelings she experiences don't display on her face. Because Minerva McGonagall is a Gryffindor at heart. And, before anything else, she is a woman, and she loves her students.
She knows them.
Neville Longbottom, so brave and strong. And, a bit away, in a crowd of girls, is Ginny Weasley, thin and pretty like a flower not yet in full bloom. But her green eyes hold a cold fire, and everything in her screams of defiance: the way her jaw is set, the way her arms are crossed, the way her lips are thin and bloodless. Minerva sees a few more of such students in the crowd and she prays nobody except for her is able to spy underneath the cloak of hopelessness the masses project: the Creevey brothers, stubborn and small. Seamus Finnigan, somehow looking incomplete without his best friend, and the Patil twins, hovering together despite of their different houses. Lavender Brown. Lisa Penhallow. Cedric Shern. Over there, close to Ginny and yet a bit apart, is Luna Lovegood. She is like a shining beacon in the dark crowd: her blond hair glimmers in the light of the few torches that plunge the Great Hall into a dark, solid mass of threatening shadows. From the corner of her eyes, she can see Severus watch the girl with an expression as unreadable as ancient Egypt's runes for amateurs, and she suppresses the shudder the oblivious girl does not feel. Many people might mistake her obliviousness for blindness but Minerva knows the intelligence hidden behind the girl's stone-grey eyes. Of course that is the reason why she is in Ravenclaw, in first place, but she's brave enough to be a Gryffindor, as well. There are more children, not only in her house but in the other houses, too, and they don't even know their own potential. Don't know it and might never know it – and she prays for it to remain hidden. Because no teacher (no woman, no mother) wishes for her children to learn about their own strengths and weaknesses in a war.
A war.
It might not seem like one yet but Minerva knows quite well what it feels like to be surrounded and with the back against the wall. She knows what it feels like to be in the middle of a war. Those students in front of her have been tracked down, one by one, systematically, have been categorized into lists and into drawers. Have been herded towards the train and forced towards Hogwarts. Never has been attendance compulsory, and never have the rules of enrollment been more cruel. There was no happy, cheerful, expectant air hanging over Platform Nine Three Quarters this year ("additional security measures") and no laughter and banter on the train ("proper behavior expected from our future generation"), no cheerful welcome-back-banquet ("in these challenging times of trial"). And even if Minerva misses the person who held the welcoming speech for the last twenty years more than she misses the speech itself she cannot – will not – accept the newest head of school and the newest speech of welcome.
Severus Snape.
Albus trusted him. Albus believed in him.
Minerva is not perfect. Therefore, she cannot understand what made him put his faith into a man who never displayed any inclination to betray Voldemort. For the same reason, she will never understand what compelled Albus to let Snape that close to Harry Potter. But, on the other hand, she trusted Albus with more than her life, and therefore she believes there is a reason for all of this happening. And Harry is not here. It is the straw she clings to: as long as he is on the run, he is safe. Whether Albus planned for it or not does not matter. Harry is safe, and that is all that matters.
So no.
She won't ever be able to forgive Severus, as much as she fervently hopes this is only one of Albus' neat, ongoing little games he had planned all along. He had to be prepared for just a case like this one. He had to. It is not possible that he didn't foresee this. Though he has not foreseen other things in their lives, and those displays of humanity in his perfect façade scare her more than anything else. They make her angry, even years and years later.
What he should have foreseen is this:
Severus Snape, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore's murderer, coldly eyeing the rows and rows of students standing (standing!) in front of the high table in the former Great Hall. Downcast heads, hunched shoulders, pictures of defeat. And yet, single sparks of resistance. And: a gleeful mass of green-and-silver, blinding scales, blood-red tongues. Snakes everywhere. Slytherin, winner of all. Short, cold sentences, snapped words, unveiled threats. Every word uttered by their Head of House makes the Slytherin students stand taller, straighten in glee. Every word makes Ravenclaws, Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors sink deeper into both despair and defiance. Minerva can see it clearly. The spark lights only few. But those are the ones who will burn brightest and hottest and shortest and fear creeps into her heart once again. She wants to run, grab them, disapparate – vanish from the place that has come to be her home for the last twenty years, that means so much more to her because the students that are here have become her children. Terror grabs her and holds on to her, drowns her because she knows that, at the same time, she will never be able to protect them all. And it is the only fear she has, because death is nothing to fear. Not with him waiting for her.
...
When she was young, they said, she was beautiful.
Tall and strong and unyielding, like a tall, strong tree, unbending to conventions and public opinion and true to her own, complex, personal codex. Cold, maybe, but mysterious and unattainable at the same time. And perhaps she chose him because he was her exact opposite: warm and friendly and compromising and easy-going. Perhaps, he thinks, but reasons aren't really the point here. Fact is she chose him, on a rainy night somewhere in the forests of Hogwarts, and even if she never belonged to him (unattainable to the last) and even if he broke every single one of his promises (not unreliable but changed, challenged and broken) there is no woman he ever looked at twice except for her.
Every line in her face is beautiful, every single one of her silver strands in her once-dark hair, even the still-warning, still-piercing, ever-wary look in her eyes. He has hurt her terribly (one summer isn't long but the memories last half the century that has passed since then) and she has never spoken about it again. But she has followed him to Hogwarts, and again, she became his colleague, his friend and confidante. He never told her everything and he sees the hurt on her face, the anger and resignation. And the deep, deep care for every single one of her students standing there, for all the members of the Order and, greatest and strongest, for the one person that matters most in this war. Her face may be blank but Albus Dumbledore knows her and it makes his heart ache and his lips twist into a smile.
She still is beautiful.
...
The more her children hang their heads, the more Minerva McGonagall straightens her back.
She feels tired and old but she refuses to yield, refuses to accept what she knows will only last as long as Harry Potter needs to do whatever Albus has left him to do. Not for a second does she believe that he is only on the run to protect himself. At the same time she wishes it were like that, wishes there were no need for him to put himself into danger, to give up his own safety for the safety of the wizarding world. Fervently, she aches to be able to protect him – in any way, whatever way possible. Every day she wishes for it. She would gladly give up her own life for his protection.
One of the most satisfying things Minerva McGonagall does in her life is when she puts herself between Harry and Severus the day her boy returns to Hogwarts.