At the start of term, a Ravenclaw girl dreamed her family's home was on fire. Her dorm mates woke to her screaming in her sleep.
That nightmare came to haunt Minerva, for how better to describe what was happening to Hogwarts than the experience of one's home burning down?
"Her parents went into hiding at the end of the summer," Filius reported to Minerva later that week. "As far as my sources can determine, they're fine - unharmed, I mean, and nothing's actually happened to the house. But I don't blame the poor child for worrying herself sick."
"They don't want her with them?"
Filius tugged delicately at one point of his mustache. "Perhaps they believe she's safer here than on the run." He glanced casually over his shoulder and wrinkled his nose, mirroring Minerva's own sense of spiders skittering up her spine. "I wouldn't want to have to make that choice," he whispered. "I only hope we can provide a modicum of protection and set her mind at ease."
The following week, during a Defence against the Dark Arts demonstration, Filius' hopes were shattered. A fourth-year was held under Cruciatus for ten horrifying seconds, and fellow students had to escort them, barely able to stay on their feet, to the infirmary.
Minerva's fury when she heard scorched through her so hard she might have been suffering a stroke. That same afternoon, after a visit to the sedated child's bedside, she took Filius and Pomona with her to storm the headmaster's office.
They were summarily ousted with the icy rebuke that they were interrupting the report he was drafting, accompanied by a dismissive assurance that he would 'look into' Professor Carrow's reasons for taking such extreme measures.
"Amycus Carrow is not a professor and barely qualifies as an acceptable human being. He doesn't belong on staff," Minerva burst out, the least of the accusations simmering on her tongue.
"Curious," Severus said mildly. When they'd come through the door, he'd assessed them with one piercing, unimpressed glance and returned to what he was working on. "Why was I not informed that you're in charge of staff hires now?" He permitted himself a vague huff, as if humouring her foolishness. "As for Amycus … can any of us truly say who is qualified to teach? My predecessor - well, far be it from me to disparage the previous headmaster's mistakes. Because without him, as you know, I wouldn't be where I am today."
Minerva felt Filius' warning grip on her wrist and allowed him to pull her wand arm down. On the stone wall behind Severus' desk, Dumbledore's portrait slept on, spectacles quivering at the tip of his nose with each faintly whistling breath. Wake up! she wanted to shout. How the devil did he manage to nap through the disintegration of everything Hogwarts stood for?
Severus paused to brush the feathered end of the quill over his lips. "However, since you insist, I'll draft a brief account of the Defence incident for his lordship's review. Pity." He shrugged and continued writing. "If you hadn't barged like this, I would have been able to finish my latest report by concluding there was nothing to report."
"I can give you testimony from several witnesses, and the results of Madame Pomfrey's examination. If you'll permit me, as Deputy Head, I'd like to - "
"One moment," the dry voice cut her off. "I wasn't aware I had a Deputy. Believe me, Professor McGonagall, I would remember if I'd appointed you."
If I Transfigure you into a squawking crow and toss you to the Carrows, you'll bloody well remember, Minerva thought loudly, but his greasy head remained bent over the parchment, unbothered.
"Please, Headmaster," Pomona said with touching earnestness, apparently determined to find the traitor's heart and appeal to it. A waste of generosity, in Minerva's opinion. "That's not the point. The torture of children is the point."
"So you've said." A dangerous edge entered Severus' voice, like a knife clenched between his teeth. "Shall I itemise the details in my report, then? Would it comfort you to know that our Lord takes particular interest in the behaviour of the students here?" He set one page aside and began defacing another with the spikes and jots of his angular script. "I shall, since you seem to think it so important, include the name of the troublemaker disciplined by his hand-chosen appointee Professor Carrow. Rest assured the Dark Lord will weigh the evidence according to his educational principles." Minerva half-expected to see a smear of blood stain the corner of Severus' mouth, so cutting were the words. "It will of course have the added benefit of bringing the student to his attention." His quill hovered; a drop of ink smacked the parchment. "Will that satisfy you?"
Minerva held herself still for three excruciating seconds. Severus re-inked his quill and scribbled another line. In the end, it was Filius who said, "Well, when you put it that way, Headmaster. Please don't trouble yourself."
"The only trouble I'm having is with my staff's tendency to march in with no regard for my privacy. So if that is all," Severus exhaled, "kindly leave me to get on with my work. May I suggest you do not, in future, abuse access to my office or you may find the door locked against you." This time it was as if he'd swallowed the knife, and it was the knife that spoke, honed to slice and flay with every word. "You have little excuse, and I less patience."
Minerva didn't notice the door swinging open behind them until a cool draft wafted in from the tower stairs. Dismissing them, the headmaster raised an eyebrow the way another wizard might raise a wand.
Then, abruptly, he looked up. Rather, it seemed sudden, but the timed theatricality implied the opposite. Severus' expression was hardened, sardonic, and Minerva's nape prickled as if she stood outside the entrance to a cave where something feral crouched, watching for signs of weakness. As long as she didn't trespass, she would be allowed to go on her way - this once.
She turned with a swish of her skirts and walked out, Filius and Pomona hard on her heels. They spiralled down the staircase in utter, incendiary silence one clanking step at a time. Above them, the door closed its mouth with a sharp, disdainful snick.
The traumatised fourth-year was released with no lingering physical effects (Poppy made clear the insufficiency of this diagnosis) although subject to recurring bouts of nervous prostration at the mere thought of returning to class.
For two days, nothing terrible happened, and Minerva dared to hope the headmaster had put his fellow Death Eaters on a leash.
Then a Gryffindor boy fell down the stairs and broke a rib. Thank Merlin the staircase had paused in its ponderous swivel or the child might have pitched over into a five-storey drop, banisters or no banisters.
When Minerva hurried to see him between classes, hoping to give brisk comfort and learn the truth of what happened, he wouldn't even meet her eyes.
"I tripped, Professor. That's all."
It was strangely, one might say desperately, belligerent. The cheek turned away from her was bruised, the plastered hands in his lap clinging to each other.
Only a few minutes remained before the start of her next class. Minerva sat down, unsure how to proceed. "Mr. Halliburton - "
"I tripped, all right? No big deal. It won't happen again."
Halliburton had always impressed her as an easygoing lad, hard to ruffle or rile, a peacemaker rather than a people pleaser, cheerfully resilient in mixed company. Those qualities had shrunk inside him now, as if he wanted to extinguish any spark of grace that might call attention to itself. Sitting fragilely upright to avoid jarring his ribcage, he repeated miserably, "I just tripped, that's all."
It wasn't all. They both knew it wasn't.
A few nights later, after curfew, the ghost of a knock reverberated through the wood of Minerva's door. She opened it a sliver to find Poppy Pomfrey standing starched and glowing in her pale matron's robes. With a wary glance up and down the dim hall, Minerva ushered her in.
Once they were in her sitting room under a Muffliato spell, she strode directly to the sideboard.
"Not your best," Poppy said. "Cheap will do. I need it for medicinal reasons. Anything finer would be wasted on me."
Minerva shifted her hand to a different bottle, poured, and waited while Poppy drained her raw mouthful of Scotch. "Another?"
Poppy shook her head, less to decline the offer and more as if throwing off a swarm of harassing thoughts. She paced in front of the ash-strewn hearth, so overcome her voice trembled. "This is - oh, I can't even find words. Awful. Unconscionable. It must be stopped. No further harm must come to these children." She turned, a pink flush of frustration and Scotch temper in her fine-skinned cheeks. "Surely if we all confront Severus together - "
She hadn't been there for the bewildering rout after the Cruciatus incident. Minerva closed her eyes briefly. She felt stretched thin, until even her bun seemed too tight, pulling at the roots of her hair.
"And when he summons the Dark Lord?" she said, sorry to lay in front of Poppy the same obstacles that had slapped the rest of them in the face. "Because he's made it quite clear he won't hesitate."
Poppy blinked, frowned, blinked again, then stared unseeing into her empty glass. "Of course. I must remember who we're dealing with. Merlin's beard, to think he would - well, it doesn't matter what I think." The glass rattled as she set it on the mantel, and she paused to steady it. Her hand clenched into a fist, and she brought it down once, softly, like a silent gavel, then sighed. "Sorry to drink and run, my dear. I must get back."
"But aren't you off shift?"
"Of course not. There's no 'off shift' during a war, you know."
Still suffused with a healer's wrath, she smoothed the front of her clean white apron and on her way out grasped Minerva's hand as if to extract a promise. The corners of her eyes were wet, her lips pinched against obscenities Minerva knew she could spew like the saltiest of sailors. "This can't go on," she said. "Something must be done." She wrung Minerva's hand with the strength of all the expletives she was holding back. "We must do something. There is no one else."
With Poppy gone, Minerva eased the tension in her skull by uncoiling her hair and brushing it out for a hundred strokes. Then she changed into her nightdress and lay in the dark for over an hour chasing useless solutions through wearying cycles of dead ends, her fear for Harry a cold stone in her gut. And not just Harry. Halliburton's averted face, his lowered eyes, kept coming back to her. She should have put an arm around him. It won't happen again. Those should have been her words. Her reassurance.
It would have been a lie.
She sank at last into a sleep no more refreshing than being drugged. Her anger hunted her into the dark.
Near morning, Minerva woke with a twitch and a snarl, pushing herself out of the depths even before her eyes fully focussed. The underwater grey of paling dawn cooled but didn't soothe the consequences of her dream. She was to have no peace, apparently. Even in sleep, she must wrestle with the horrors she wished to escape.
The morning would be another test of temper. Minerva armoured herself in knitted plaid and woven wool, not merely efficiently, but fiercely, the iambic of her heart aligning itself with the hard beat of her conscience.
There was no one else.
And it was only September, the fourth faculty meeting of the new term, under the new headmaster, with the new, grotesque additions to staff. Albus was dead, entombed, his murderer appointed in his place through an act of criminal hubris.
It was no longer possible to deny this was happening.
The first to arrive, she found the door locked and heard the muffled overlap of men's voices beyond, dulled by the thick wood. Should she knock? She shouldn't have to ask for admittance, not here. Out of sorts, she flicked a spell that struck the door three sharp blows. Inside, the sounds stopped, and a few seconds later the door creaked open like an invitation to a haunted house. Minerva sailed in and took her seat at the long table that had usurped all the comfortable chairs in the staff lounge, a regimental rejection of the once-relaxing informal atmosphere.
With the barest of nods and the sunken eyelids of a man who'd been working all night, the headmaster swept a mess of overlapping, curling parchment into a disorderly pile. He was alone, of course. Minerva glanced around at the paintings on the walls. No one there, either.
A soft tap, and the sheaf of papers vanished. A single scroll remained, rolling gently to the table's edge. Severus smoothed it out and started scribbling in silence. Minerva waited, refusing to look at him, the intensity of her dream still potent in her veins.
Her colleagues gathered at the appointed time, creased with sleep and pinched with cold. She could almost see their collective breaths hanging in the chill air. The Carrows arrived several minutes late, dashing Minerva's hopes that they would skip the meeting altogether. The headmaster called them to order, consulted his parchment, and led them through the agenda. A chair creaked now and then. But there was no response to any of the proposed items, no sound except the Carrows sniggering and whispering together, a new, unbearable disruption.
"Professor Flitwick." Slinking out of a gap in the silence, the traitor's voice glided down the table, and teachers on both sides subtly recoiled. "Word has it you continue giving lessons in frivolous magic. Should this rumour persist, it may be necessary for me to drop in on one of your classes and experience your methods for myself." The voice, already quiet, sank even lower, fangs in flesh. "Consider how much we will both be spared if I'm not forced to correct you in public."
"I'm using the same coursework I always have," Filius said reasonably. Where did he find the pluck to address such infuriating accusations without sounding either rebellious or meek? Minerva couldn't have stomached it. "I've never had complaints before."
"When a mistake is brought to your attention, Professor, do you believe it wise or sufficient to make excuses?" Merlin's teeth, that Severus of all people had the gall to use that line! "How fortunate I'm the one catching you in this error and not the Dark Lord."
The barely veiled threat filtered over the room like black snow. After allowing them a moment to absorb the chill, Severus said, "From now on, restrict your materials to the curriculum as issued. Cheering Charms are an utter waste of the students' time."
Once, the teacher's lounge had provided a comforting refuge. Supervising excitable little powder kegs possessed of more hormones than magic and more magic than sense put one in dire need of asylum from the chaotic hallways. Even during the last few years, when Harry's presence had attracted bizarre outbreaks of escalating danger, Minerva had relied without question on the camaraderie of her colleagues. She'd swapped anecdotes about adolescent troublemakers and assignment headaches, shared collective wisdom, and sometimes roared with laughter at the antics or ignorance of dunderheaded students. She'd felt equal to handling the more disturbing situations because her friends had been there with her.
The professor who'd popularised the term 'dunderhead' (not that Minerva approved of calling students such things to their faces) presided over them now in the position of ultimate authority. Whether more ultimate than Albus, Minerva couldn't say, as his authority stemmed from something unnatural lurking behind the scenes.
Seated between a tight-lipped Filius and a sphinx-faced Sinistra, she fumed in silence. These meetings were attempts to quell and control, to cow Dumbledore's faithful into submission. Warned to hold a quill or nothing, they all kept their hands folded in plain sight on the table. Hers were white-knuckled, Sinistra's patiently interlaced. Rolanda fidgeted. Filius' hands lay flat, thumbs and index fingers barely touching. Pomona's were cupped one inside the other, palms turned inward as if protecting a precious object. Horace, sitting as far down the table from Severus as he could get, hadn't stopped examining his nails since they convened.
"Madame Hooch. Regarding a change in curriculum that failed to make it onto the agenda: until further notice, all Quidditch training and all games are suspended. Putting students on brooms during this period of upheaval will only lead to them wandering off castle grounds and possibly encountering at-loose fugitives while out practising alone. Until year's end, you'll be on rotation, working at different tasks as I see fit. Beyond that, we'll have to see how matters stand."
"I reckoned it was something of the sort when students failed to show up for class," Rolanda said with a hint of cheek. Severus responded to the hint with a wintry smile.
Minerva shrugged her shawl further up her shoulders. Ominous, this cold. September, yes, but the bite of fear infused it with an early frost. The very least the bloody headmaster could do was cast a warming charm. They weren't all accustomed to dungeon temperatures, but Merlin forbid anyone but Severus reach for their wand.
"Professor Sprout, the greenhouses are falling behind on producing the quantities of monkshood and baneberry necessary for upkeep of our potions stores…."
And so it went, no gossip or laughter or pots of tea, no debate, no discussion of how educational standards had been put on the chopping block. The children would be heading down to breakfast soon. At intervals, the appalling Carrows emitted ugly little jeers and useless embellishments. What malevolent piglets they were. The only satisfaction to be got from this entire farce was seeing Severus pass a butcher's appraising eye over them. Not yet ripe for the slaughter, but anyone (well, anyone not named Carrow) could tell that when the time came he looked forward to disposing of them himself. The whetted edge of his disgust rather gave it away.
Once, Minerva would have said she knew this man. But to know a smart, spidery, unkempt, unpleasant child who got knocked about a fair deal, so sullenly uncooperative when asked to explain himself it was hard to feel compassion; to know a raw, unsuited, downright repellent young recruit, clearly harrowed and haunted by bad associations, thrown into a teaching position that allowed him to take his resentments out on those in his care - was not to know a bloody thing, apparently.
To know that Severus had changed over the years, no less acerbic but more capable of handling himself without disgrace or constant suspicion, more at ease with her and Filius and several others he'd appeared to respect ('appeared' being the operative word) was to know how thoroughly they had been duped.
What really mattered was how much he knew. It frightened her, so Minerva tried not to dwell on it. Severus knew the core members of the Order, he could enter Grimmauld Place, he could name which officials in the Ministry were working in secret to support their side. Albus' side. He was probably better versed than anyone else in Albus' plans. He'd bored so deeply into the structure of the resistance he need merely lean on a weak spot to see it all collapse.
Nor was that the only way he infiltrated and undermined.
There were … dreams.
Dreams borne of stress and confusion and loathing. Dreams of struggling with him in terrible silence, pulling him back, or out, or deeper. Always in some huge shadowy limbo, the hot swell of elusive darkness that represented Severus dissolving in her arms and reforming again, forever out of reach, a blurry, malevolent presence. There were only two instances she could recall with any clarity, and in both of them, Severus wasn't recognisably Severus. She hadn't seen his face, barely saw a figure, but whenever her hands had found something solid in the morass of darkness, before it melted from her grasp, she'd known. She'd felt it was him.
They were terrible, these dreams. Terrible because they were unmistakably erotic. Minerva couldn't describe exactly what made them so, but the first time she started up from sleep, sweat in her hair and under her arms, her body had been one enormous pulse of sexual energy, and she'd burned with shame.
In the light of day, she understood how one's deepest primitive feelings could be twisted, transformed by the chaos of the sleeping mind. Intense emotions triggered similar trembles of response in the body. One shouldn't put too much stock in these shadows, not as direct translations of reality. It made sense that her mind and heart were struggling to reject what Severus had become - what Severus had always been - while being forced to reach for him, hold him back, hold him down.
His attention flicked suddenly toward her. Minerva instantly pinned her gaze on Pomona sitting across the table, bushy ringlets partly obscuring her face, fingers plucking at her unused quill. Beside her, Rolanda twitched Minerva a conspiratorial wink. All pens were down, all parchments blank, all faces stony with suppressed mutiny. No one had scribbled a word. At the first staff meeting, it had been made clear there were to be no criticisms, no unsolicited proposals for curriculum changes. No questions.
Rather like a corpse levitating from the grave, Severus rose from his chair. "One last item."
Very quietly, Minerva let the air out of her lungs. One more petty excuse for intimidation, and they'd be free.
"By now," Severus said tersely, "you have all borne witness to the changes, and I hope you understand, if you didn't before, that the consequences for disobedience are of a different calibre from previous years. Infractions of our Lord's rule will draw swift punishment down upon the heads of offenders and those of their allies. I suggest you refrain from finding out exactly what I mean by that."
There was a faint rustle of backsides shifting in seats, a worried flicker of glances up and down the table.
"I suspect none of you will be surprised to learn there have been attempts by various parties inside the castle to contact the rebels outside. The distasteful task of ensuring the loyalty of those in charge of our children falls to me. I haven't time to spare for the more traditional methods, so I'm choosing expedience instead. Most of you will no doubt object to this. I'll pass your objections on to the Dark Lord ... only if I have to." There was an infinitesimal breath of hesitation before he said, "I'll let you have a moment to prepare."
The room had frozen. Everyone at table glanced around, openly alarmed and perplexed. Prepare for what?
Minerva had an inkling, but before she could say anything, Severus raised his wand for silence. "Let's begin. Professor Sprout. Your attention, please?"
Pomona raised her head, baffled, her hands grasping nervously at each other. Such a horribly helpless gesture. Minerva remembered Halliburton doing the same. "Of course, Headmaster, but what - "
"Look at me."
"Wait!" Minerva cried, but Severus had already twitched his wand. His gaze sharpened, Pomona put a hand to her mouth, and whatever communion or violation occurred was over within seconds.
Rolanda laid her arm across Pomona's shoulders. "All right there, old girl?"
"Well, yes, but - " Faint creases of dismay lingered on Pomona's face, fading as this grotesque trespass upon her privacy joined all the other proof that Severus would stop at nothing. He could only be trusted to betray and betray, over and over.
"Madam Hooch?"
Minerva slammed her hands flat on the table. "Headmaster! This must stop right now. We are here in our professional capacity, and your demand is utterly unacceptable." Severus' gaze didn't waver, and Rolanda widened her eyes at Minerva, clearly reluctant to obey but dreading what would happen if she didn't. Minerva levered herself partway out of her chair. "Surely you can't expect us to believe this is legal."
"There are more exceptions to the rule of law than can be dreamt of in your philosophy, Minerva," Severus said quietly. "Please sit down. I warned you expedience was a priority. This is nothing more than the former headmaster would do if he felt the circumstances warranted. Unless you mean to tell me no one in this room was aware of that?" He ran his fingers over his wand. "Let me be clear. You are not at liberty to refuse."
From their front row seats next to Severus, Alecto Carrow burst out in giggles, and her brother pointed a finger. "Yeah, shut your trap, old witch. You don't get to decide what's right or wrong here, get it?"
The headmaster turned, his profile strangely reminiscent of a reaper's scythe. "Professors Carrow," and the knife-in-teeth scrape added that elusive taste of blood to his voice. "Please stay out of it or you will not remain exempt."
As the siblings shrank back, one with a grumble and the other a snort, Rolanda folded her arms on the table, deliberately looking away. "Sorry, sir. I just don't think my Quidditch fantasies are any of your business."
The strained humour brought a slight curl to Severus' lips. Minerva, seeing that none of her colleagues were ready to challenge him, dropped back into her seat, despairing.
"This isn't a game." The nerve of him, to address the room as if they were a class on the eve of a test. "Catching the Snitch won't end in victory."
"Depends how you define 'snitch,' doesn't it?" Rolanda remarked to the tabletop.
"And so we come to the point." The snap of impatience served as a reminder that yes, this was a test - of Severus' patience. "Are you the Snitch in this case, Madam Hooch? I sincerely doubt it. But," his wand flicked, "needs must."
Having served for so long as Albus' deputy, Minerva was familiar with the range of skills among the staff. None were trained in Occlumency but herself and Severus. At least not to the extent necessary to keep such an artful Legilimens at bay.
Her calculated feint come to nothing, Rolanda endured the assault, then cast herself back in her chair with a gusty sigh. Minerva forced herself to breathe. Pomona patted Ro's shoulder, whispering loudly enough for the entire table to hear, "Buck up, dear. It was worth a try."
Vector was next, submitting without protest. So far, Severus had stopped short of mental bludgeoning. No taunts, no forcing their compliance with threats of torture. He was quick, he was ruthless. In search of what? What did he see? Whose secrets? How much blackmail material did he need? He was so - Minerva caught herself staring and blinked down, annoyed by her own carelessness. Controlled. That was it. His power was infinitely calmer and more contained than the faceless, writhing heat that infected her dreams.
Merlin's teeth, bloody stupid to think of that now.
"Professor Slughorn?"
She heard Horace's chair scrape an inch or so over the floor, caught his nervous little hum, his weak chuckle. "Oh, come now, Severus, is this really necessary? The head of Slytherin, old chap? You don't seriously believe I'm - "
A flash of panic stuck her lungs to her ribs. She could draw her wand. But then what? Beside her, Filius sat as if praying to the table, hands pressed down flat, brow furrowed, eyes shut. They should have anticipated and prepared for the dangers of having a Legilimens in charge. But how? How to resist? Deflect?
Of course, what leaped clamouring to the forefront were all the private matters she needed to keep as far from the headmaster – the usurper – as possible. All contact with Kingsley and Nymphadora. All knowledge and names of rebellious students. Their hiding places, their secret codes, their loyalty to Harry. Their wish for someone to protect them. Their sobs in the common rooms, their longing for home.
And their fear. Their terrible fear.
Filius' eyes sprang open, accompanied by a silent gasp, a little jump of his shoulders. He stared at Severus as if he'd been stabbed in the back. Even now, the shock of ambush. The difficulty of believing Severus would do this to them.
Across the table, Rolanda sent Minerva a stealthy thumbs-up.
The silence of Severus' unspoken summons fell upon her like the tap of an obsidian wand.
Coolly, Minerva turned her head and stared back. She had the right, damn him. A cat may look on a scoundrel as well as on a king. Let him see her contempt, her withering scorn. Let him see her defiance.
Her desire.
It snapped across his path, the erotic shape-shifting of her sleeping mind, there and gone, a flare of breath-stopping arousal. The memory flinched through her, an unconscious depravity born of horror and disgust. The remembered heat of it trailed a burnt wraith behind - heat of anger, night sweats, of waking damp between her legs with suffocating nightmare lust. It didn't matter that they were only dreams. She might as well have exhaled a cloud of pheromones into Severus' face. She had spilled a humiliating secret, blood for the hunter, a clear mental lure he could follow no matter how desperately she tried to hide it.
And pursue he did, rippling through the shadows, lured on by the scent of guilty pleasure. The weight of his gaze didn't widen or otherwise give him away, but to Minerva's alarm the foreign presence inside her brushed over one raw, sensitive edge after another, caught up with every fleeing thought, merged and blended along those seams of memory. Wherever his magic and her mind met, a hungry, inchoate heat spread from him to her, a wisp here, a lick there, a stroke, a tease. And every trespass, every touch, inflamed the lingering traces of dream, reawakening those smoking remnants piece by piece.
Then he was gone. Minerva managed not to make a sound but only just. Her cheeks burned.
He had seen.
She swallowed. He had - but that was all he'd seen.
Across the table, Ro and Pomona were watching her anxiously, and Minerva forced out a perfunctory nod.
"Well," Severus said with almost insulting composure to the room at large. "Thank you all for your cooperation. Let this serve as notice that I'll be conducting similar inspections as the events unfold. And despite what most of you have been taught," he paused to bestow an idle, baleful smile upon the Carrows, "I don't need to look into your eyes. It's the most common method, of course, but if the Legilimens is skilled enough, not required." His black, sleepless gaze roved over them, unfazed by the seething anger staring back. "Over the years, I've looked into your eyes a thousand times. I know the windows of your souls and can enter your minds at will." He pointed his wand, and the morning's useless agenda burst into flames. "Meeting adjourned."
Must you be such a melodramatic bastard. But that was the least of the reasons to despise him. Minerva swept to her feet and waited for Filius to precede her. Once they were in the hall, Pomona joined them, with Rolanda coming up alongside to bump shoulders. Horace orbited a little outside their close formation but led the way down the stairs like the drum major to a military detachment. Breakfast next - Minerva ate in silence, tasting nothing - then a full course load of teaching children without succumbing to the desire to rampage through the hallways hexing Death Eaters.
For the rest of the day, she picked obsessively at her inadvertent exposure and the intensity with which Severus had pursued those deplorable fantasies. She cursed her mind's sleep-smitten interest in - in what? His self-possession, the harnessing of his dark, cold-blooded magic? How ironic that his ability to provoke an erotic reaction had come at the expense of everything admirable about him.
Because Severus' cruelty was no longer merely petty; it was terrifying. His spite wasn't a childish by-product of his scorn for his students; it was a genuine threat to their well-being. His dark mockery and frequent withdrawals into silence during staff meetings had coalesced now into an unforgiving, cold-burning grimness.
Minerva had always been impatient with the school's youngest professor, his distrust, his petty complaints, his willingness to engage in interhouse hostilities, and especially his failure to embrace this reprieve from his tainted past.
Now they knew why. Dumbledore had been wrong, and Severus had never sworn off his allegiance to that past in the first place. But even then, when it had seemed merely sullenness, what a frittering of magic! What a tendency to disperse his energy in pursuit of irrelevancies! Minerva had never looked kindly upon waste, and when it was merely an excuse for trivial vendettas? Forget Severus' scowl and his disastrous hair. His immaturity had been the least appealing thing about him.
Poppy had championed him, once upon a time. The infirmary's store of tinctures and salves and antidotes was as well-stocked as an apothecary's, Severus' brewing exemplary, his discipline a great boon to the school. Horace had never considered it part of his contract. Entirely fair, of course, but it did mean the infirmary had paid higher prices for remedies that were arguably inferior and certainly less fresh. Nice to know Severus was good at some part of his job, but it would have been even better if he'd stop dragging his emotional baggage into every possible circumstance.
It had annoyed her even more that her colleague, with his malicious temper and pedagogical abuses, nonetheless extorted such high marks from his students.
So she'd been shocked – first, of course, at his appointment by the board of governors, the hideous insult alone. But then by the absolute focus he brought to it. Utterly concentrated, distilled. All the juvenile fretting and point-scoring, the knee-jerk defensiveness, had been stripped away. Beneath those flaws lay a hard, dark imperviousness, self-contained in ways she would have doubted him capable of. Condensed like this, Severus burned with surprising power, cold and reserved and undeniably compelling.
Which was fortunate, because the Carrows needed to be compelled.
Classes finished at last, Minerva swept through the halls like a racing broom. Just a few minutes more, and she could toss this dreadful day in the bin. Or so she told herself as she descended the stairs from the infirmary, having checked in on Halliburton and learned he'd been released to his dorm - when what do you know, up the stairwell came the haranguing voice of one of those repulsive parasites lording it over yet another hapless victim. Minerva quickened her pace. Not that she looked forward to ruining her evening by having to confront the wretch, but she'd prefer being sacked to standing by while another child ended up in the infirmary.
"Get in there, you lot. That's right, all three of you. You, too, Ingram, you stupid chit. You and your smug faces, you'll be sorry at the end of the hour, I promise you. And if you don't hurry it up, I'll make it two. And no dinner in the Great Hall tonight, do you hear?"
Minerva strode from the last stair straight towards the peevish voice, censoring some of the words as they left her mouth. "Professor Carrow, may I ask what you're doing?"
She glimpsed the terrified faces of three children of different ages before Alecto shoved them into the classroom and slammed the door. "Detention, what does it look like? And what's it to you?"
"One of them is a member of my house, and I don't recall being notified of any offence. What have they done to deserve detention without supper?"
Alecto handled her wand as if threats were a perfectly reasonable response to a simple professional demand. "You think that's your business, do you?" The door behind her started to creak open, and she yanked it shut again, swearing. "None of that! Be on your way, Professor Tabby. You take care of your troublemakers and leave me to take care of mine."
A footstep rang further down the hall, oddly loud, as if the approaching figure had cast Sonorus on his boots. The next second, the headmaster appeared from around the corner, walking with his usual silent, gliding gait.
That sharp clack of heel on stone had briefly frozen the scene, Alecto pointing her wand and Minerva bracing herself to deflect her attack.
Severus drifted to a stop, boredom oozing from him as if he encountered professors duelling in the halls every day. "Is this disturbance absolutely necessary, Professor Carrow?" His ominous pause implied there had better be a very good reason for inflicting their combined undesirable existence upon him.
"I've got detentions to supervise! A bunch of smart-mouthed brats who don't do their homework and think they can slag off their teacher." She glared at Minerva. "No dried-up old bluestocking gets to tell me how to do my job." Before Minerva could swat her down, Alecto stormed over to the wall and turned to face them, her wand twitching angrily behind her back. "I caught one of them scrawling graffiti, Snape. Traitorous insults to the Dark Lord!"
"Did you indeed," Severus said, holding Minerva's gaze for a brief second before transferring his attention again to Alecto. "Please stand aside so I may see what it says, Professor Carrow."
Alecto strutted back to put herself between Minerva and the door. Severus frowned and walked over, bending to make out the scrawled black letters. "A rather pathetic effort, I'd say. I'm almost certain I recognise the handwriting." Minerva started to interrupt, as she would have in the past without a second thought, "For Merlin's sake, she's lying," but Severus straightened and turned, his grave-desecrating stare slanting past her to Alecto.
"The Boy Who Still Lives," he said. The message was one that had begun to appear on walls all over the castle, usually in bold, defiant splashes impossible to miss. This was a small, straggly version, illegible from where Minerva stood. "Tell me, how do they know?" Severus murmured. "Although I suppose if Potter's luck had run out, his demise would be all over the papers."
"You think I care?" Alecto sneered. "The sooner the Potter scum's dealt with, the better. Same with the brazen little liars waiting behind that door to serve their punishment."
As if on cue, the door cracked open, and one of the students, Oldfellow by name, said in a shaky voice, "Professor, please, we didn't mean to disobey, but we've always been taught it's illegal to - "
Alecto grabbed the boy and hauled him over the threshold. At sight of the headmaster, the child wilted and seemed on the verge of passing out. "This one!" Alecto crowed. "Here's the beggar! He ran, I tell you. Had to catch him, I did. And why run if he'd done nothing wrong, eh? Look at him, Snape, guilt's written all over him."
"I haven't given you leave to address me in familiar terms, Professor Carrow," Severus said, his words stringing a spiderweb of ice on the air. "All this exaggerated fuss merely fuels the students' imagination. Of course they'll continue to misbehave if you give them the reaction they're looking for."
Really, the irony of Severus saying such things without a flicker of embarrassment - it took the biscuit.
He shifted his corpse-cold stare to Oldfellow and pointed at the wall. "Clean it off." The concise syllables were a hundred times more frightening than Alecto's bluster, no matter how calm the headmaster or how vicious the Carrows. "Professor McGonagall will oversee your detention and that of your friends. I expect on my return to find every speck of paint removed and no trace of insubordination left."
"You'll let her punish them?" Alecto said, echoing Minerva's own surprise, only with malevolence rather than amazement. Sparks drizzled from her wand tip. For a moment, Minerva prayed to her reverend father's god that this sadistic witch would make the mistake of trying to hex the headmaster. "Feh, she'll go easy on the brats. It's not right, Sna - eh, it's not bloody fair. I'm the one they cheeked. It's up to me to decide what they deserve."
"Oh, don't underestimate Professor McGonagall's ability to discipline unruly students." Minerva frowned, put on her guard by Severus' subtle, insinuating sneer. "If she favours you, Minerva will, of course, bend the rules on your behalf. But if she doesn't - "
She could have sworn his smirk deepened to something more personal, touched with implications that made her breath stall and her nape bristle.
"Well, I can attest to her treatment of those who don't meet the requirements of her unswerving moral code." Severus' eyebrow just barely rose, with much the effect of a secret, beckoning finger, a subtle toying with her self-respect. He was leading her to remember that unfortunate self-exposure from the morning, that red herring of sexual heat, a moment before he said, "Although lately I've wondered if our dear professor is really as irreproachable as she would like us to think."
He didn't stay to watch Minerva's cheeks burn, turning away with the words, "Come with me, Professor Carrow."
"Not until I've put the fear of our Lord in these ungrateful hooligans," Alecto said stubbornly.
Already some way down the corridor, outside the bright bowl of flickering torchlight, Severus glanced back over his shoulder. He could have been baring his teeth or sticking his tongue out; he could have had no face at all, smothered as it was by shadow. "Suit yourself. Our Lord will be sorry to hear you prefer mutilating your playthings to faithfully attending his meetings. I'd assumed you and your brother would want to join me, but I have no dragon in this fight. I'll be happy to let his lordship know you were too busy."
He walked on. Alecto swore under her breath, but the spectre of the Dark Lord's displeasure dealt a blow more alarming than Severus' disdain. "Have you told Amycus?"
"I was on my way to fetch him when you so loudly and fortunately crossed my path," Severus replied, the dry syllables echoing slightly. Afraid to step on Alecto's pride, Minerva restrained herself from taking charge of Oldfellow until the boy was suddenly shoved forward, tripping over his own feet and nearly falling against her.
"Slow down, Snape. I'm not letting you spread lies to the Dark Lord about me," Alecto shouted, saying as she stalked past Minerva, "There'd better be bruises on them tomorrow."
"There will be nothing of the sort," Minerva snapped. Under her hand, the boy's shoulder quivered with the effort to hold back a sob, and she squeezed a warning for him to hold tight. "Corporal punishment is a relic of more barbaric times. I'll not stoop to using it."
She waited, her hand's soothing pressure keeping Oldfellow quiet, until the Dark Lord's lackeys were out of sight. Then she flung open the door. "You can come out now. Detention's over." When the other two, hardly daring to believe their luck, shuffled into the hall, she gathered them together and spent a moment questioning all three about what they'd done to earn detention. As she suspected, nothing deserving of more than a few lines of revision, if that. Minerva sighed. "Let's get the wall cleaned up, and we'll consider it time served."
Five minutes later, the (misspelled) scrawl obliterated, she shooed the three off to their respective houses. "Practise that spell until you can cast it in the blink of an eye," she said sternly. "You never know when it will come in handy. And mind, don't skip dinner!"
On her way back to her rooms, she entertained herself with thoughts of which hexes she'd use if she were ever allowed to duel the degenerate Carrows. Once inside, door double-locked with latch and spell, she threw her hat in a chair and -
What? Paced. Stalked to the sideboard, picked up a decanter, and set it down without removing the stopper. She did her best to ignore the nagging sensation of shaking fingers. Nonsense. Her hands were steady.
But bloody hell. What was Severus up to?
No. What was she up to, that was the real question. Why was she allowing Severus to trick her into playing games? Yes, of course Minerva noticed him, and not only because she had to. Not only because he was Albus' murderer, Voldemort's righthand man, and under these circumstances a more personal and dangerous adversary. She, and all the staff, watched him obsessively. They had to. The students' well-being, their very lives, depended on it.
But her awareness of him went beyond antagonism, beyond a bitter resentment of the power he possessed to crush the lives in his care. No denying how blessedly difficult it was to distinguish between the prickle of her skin caused by being constantly on guard and the wakefulness closely akin to appreciation. Self-preservation drove her to assess him with a critical eye, thus luring her deeper into curiosity about his austere self-control.
And what did she think she was doing, daring to consider for even one second, to give a name to the possibilities she'd sensed flickering between her and Severus when he'd - when -
Stop.
The idea hovering at the ink-blotter edge of her mind, the boundary defining how much she would concede and what she could endure, made her ill. It seeped across the line between thinkable and unthinkable, black and illegible, and nothing she set in its way could get rid of it. She wished she could unthink it. She had never entered into any sort of devil's bargain before, but she grasped the danger inherent in it, the unavoidable ethical griminess and the risk of crossing a line she might not be able to come back from. The damage it could do, making her unable to bear herself, because Severus - call the devil by name - could not be trusted. Could twist and cheat and mock. Take something essential from her and turn any permission, any compromise at all into an excuse for much worse.
She knew that. She knew it. So why was she even wondering -
Minerva swung her arms out, cutting through the maddening sting of thought, and set her carpet on fire.
