A/N: It's a very fine line between Adriana's sincere oaths and Paul's parodies. That remark serves no purpose but looking slightly deep while actually being just this side of silly, but I'm writing this late at night and I honestly don't have any good Severus-bashing comments this chapter. Mostly because this chapter happens almost entirely in 1941.
A/N: Oh, yeah, and if you haven't figured it out already, though I'll put a year heading on every chapter, the story skips around a lot and the year heading only refers to the time when most of the chapter happened. You'll usually be able to tell from context clues when the rest happened.
A/N: And I still hate you, Severus, you slightly evil-seeming jerk!
Chapter Five: 1941
OK, so they'd kissed on the Hogwarts Express. That had been unexpected, but, Minerva had decided, pleasant. Did that mean they were going to see each other during the school year?
It was over breakfast on the seventh day of classes in the new term—she was sitting next to Adriana at the Ravenclaw table, Paul, her fellow Gryffindor, sitting on Adriana's other side—that Minerva finally came to grips with what this would mean. Going with a Slytherin.
"You're quiet today, Minerva," said Paul, leaning in front of Adriana and studiously ignoring her to smile at the Gryffindor fourth-year.
Minerva swallowed a bite of sausage. "Er…interesting classes this morning. Transfiguration, that will be fun, and"—she fumbled for her timetable as Paul made a scoffing sound that said clearly, "I know you're lying."
"I know you're lying," said Paul, "and I know there's something on your mind. But I'm not going to ask what it is because you're obviously not volunteering the information, and I don't wish to pry."
Minerva stared, perplexed, until Paul gave the side of Adriana's head a significant glare. Adriana turned another page in the book she had propped against the milk jug and continued eating her sausage with remarkable poise.
"Isn't that kind of me, Minerva?" Paul continued at Adriana's hair. Minerva, uncomfortable, stayed silent and looked between her two friends for a few seconds.
Adriana gave a small, exasperated sigh. "For Godric's sake, Paul, don't get Minerva mixed up in this."
Paul rolled his eyes and raised the pitch of his voice in imitation: "By Salazar's serpentine tongue, Adriana, she's in fourth year—she can handle herself."
"Don't mix anyone else up in our personal arguments, dearheart"—the endearment was definitely sarcastic, Minerva could tell, which was not a good sign—"and to set the record straight, I have never sworn by 'Salazar's serpentine tongue'."
Paul made a face.
"Have I, Minerva?" Adriana turned to her.
"For the sake of Helga's sainted hoe," Paul said, "don't involve her in our personal arguments, Adriana!"
"I do wish you wouldn't trivialize the situation by concocting such silly parodies of me."
"I do wish I could understand half the words that came out of your mouth."
"I understood that," Minerva cut in.
"It's easily decipherable to someone of a normal intelligence level," Adriana agreed. Paul did not, and expressed his nonagreement by sticking his tongue out at the back of Adriana's head. Adriana, with her head still turned, must have learned from Minerva's expression what Paul was doing, because she rolled her eyes and turned back to her book with a sigh.
"What book, Adriana?" Minerva asked, looking for a change in subject.
"Ancient Interviews with Merlyn," Adriana replied, flipping another page to reveal an illustration depicting a young, dark-haired maiden. "It's a collection of texts from wizards who claimed to have met Merlin himself in his tree-prison in the woods."
"Yeah," said Paul, poking a finger at the picture, in which the girl recoiled, looking with distaste at his grubby fingernails, "Damn that Nimue anyway, no? Those mysterious forest maidens…"
Minerva frowned. "Nimue?"
"Nimue," Adriana said, jumping in before Paul could make another snide comment, "was a young maiden that Merlin became enamored of. He trusted her and taught her some of his secret magic arts, but she used them to imprison him forever inside an oak in the woods. You'll learn it this year as a legend in History of Magic," she added, seeing Minerva's lost expression.
Paul laughed. "All the sordid details. Love, betrayal, magical imprisonment…"
Adriana grinned. "That's history."
"That's stupidity," Paul corrected. "Some strange girl comes up and looks at him fetchingly, so he gives her the knowledge she needs to destroy his life?"
"Stupidity is repeated often," Adriana commented. She looked at Paul for the first time Minerva had seen this morning, leaned in close to him, and whispered something Minerva couldn't make out into his ear. Paul's face reddened, but he nodded and smiled at her when she pulled back. Adriana gave him a good-natured swat on the arm.
"And don't forget it," she said, and went back to her reading.
Minerva made sure she was absorbed in the book before looking over at Paul again and mouthing, What was that about?
Paul wouldn't give her an answer, but just shook his head with a slight smile on his face. He turned back to his plate of sausage and eggs, and Minerva could see the subject was closed, at least for the time being.
So Minerva was left to her own devices. Which, inevitably, meant Tom Riddle.
Minerva had meant what she had said to Tom in Diagon Alley; she truly believed the feud between Gryffindor and Slytherin houses was a silly remnant of days gone by…Tom claimed no side in the debate, but his actions—well, he was the perfect Slytherin in most senses of the word. She had gathered early on that he was prejudiced against Muggle-borns like herself. Normally this would have disgusted her, but the way Tom looked at her (kissed her)…
Did he know? Could he know? Would he have kissed her if he had known that she was a mudblood, the sworn enemy of his founder, the reason for the falling-out in the first place? But how could he not know, having seen her on the streets…well, she'd seen him on the streets and mistaken him for a Muggle, and he was pureblood (how could he be otherwise and be in Slytherin?), so perhaps he really hadn't guessed…
He knew she was in Gryffindor. That didn't turn him off. But she was more of a Ravenclaw than a Gryffindor in the first place, he himself had picked up on that…He must have been watching her for some time last year. She blushed at the thought, flattered.
"All right. Put on hold everything I just said about not prying." Minerva looked up to see Paul grinning at her and nudging Adriana. Her stomach sank.
"What?"
Paul grinned wider. "No, don't try to 'sweet and innocent' your way out of this. You blushed. At nothing at all. What's going on?"
Minerva blushed again in spite of herself. Gods, don't start the Gryff-girl blushing, now…She'd been fighting that trend for three years. "Well…it's nothing too terribly important, but…"
Adriana was grinning now too. "Now, Minerva, where's that Gryffindor courage? If you like him, just say it."
"Who?" Her heart skipped a beat.
"Whoever it is who's making you blush," Adriana said matter-of-factly. Minerva relaxed. Slightly.
"Well…"
"For the sake of Gryffindor's blood-stained banner," Paul said, getting a quick frown from Adriana, "if you can't tell your two best friends…"
Minerva stuffed a lump of eggs in her mouth to keep from grinning in embarrassment.
"It's someone…" she replied after chewing completely and swallowing the eggs. Her voice was level now, and she raised her eyes to meet Paul's grin and Adriana's more sober, but interested, face. She looked away again for a moment, disguising the movement by grabbing her cup of pumpkin juice and taking a drink.
—in so doing, looking across the Ravenclaw table and toward the Slytherin, where—sure enough—Tom Riddle was sitting on the far side, eating a sausage with a knife and fork and staring contemplatively at the far wall behind her.
"Minerva, that was the lamest dodge I have ever…"
Tom Riddle's eyes shifted, ever so slightly, and he noticed her. Looking at him. He grinned and gave a little wave, which Minerva drowned in pumpkin juice—then looked quickly back at Adriana and Paul.
"Don't tell me you were looking at the Slytherin table," Adriana said, and Paul burst out laughing.
Minerva hurriedly shook her head no with the appropriate amount of laughter.
"Thank Helga," Adriana said in complete seriousness, and Paul made a face at the back of her head.
Yes, this was what going with a Slytherin would mean: flabbergasted stares, if not outright anger, from her friends. The very idea was ludicrous to them.
Adriana shifted her weight to turn back toward her plate. "So who is it then?"
Minerva smiled. "I'm afraid you'll have to wait till Slytherin comes back for reconciliation to hear that one…" she said, as was required of her.
Paul made a joke at Adriana's expense. Adriana rolled her eyes, pronounced them both hopeless, and went back to reading her book, as was required. This whole friendship thing was really about roles, Minerva thought, jobs within a group. She caught Paul's eye again and winked before getting back to her own breakfast, which was growing cold.
Just visible between the pumpkin juice jug and the bread basket, Tom Riddle continued to sit and stare, his plate forgotten, his face content.
* * *
8:30: Transfiguration, Prof. Dumbledore; Gryffindor & Slytherin
Minerva had had her desk claimed for five minutes before anyone else stepped inside the classroom, and when she at last heard a whisper of moving cloth from the doorway, she looked up to see Professor Dumbledore. She smiled politely as the Transfiguration teacher came inside and laid a stack of books on his desk, and he nodded in return.
Minerva let her eyes wander over the old classroom, the large, ornately paned windows, the high ceiling painted over in sunbeams, motes of dust sparkling in the air as they passed in front of the windows, the smell of chalk from the large blackboard at the front of the room.
"Early today," said Professor Dumbledore, and she looked up to see his gray eyes twinkling. "As usual. How was your vacation, Minerva?"
"Very good, Professor. And yours?"
He smiled. "Very good as well, though I'm afraid a bit hectic. I did, however, participate in the creation of a new technique for transfiguring large numbers of individual vampire bats with one spell."
Minerva sat up, interested. "How?"
"There was a bit of a surprise at the Romanian Society of Transfigurers' annual conference—you know these silly things they expect us professors to attend—"
Minerva laughed, knowing he would have attended the meeting had the Minister for Magic himself forbidden him to go.
"—and it seemed they plopped us down in a village where there were a large number of bats in the hills roundabout. Well, old Viktor Levski, their Minister for Magic, was just determined to demonstrate his technique for transfiguring inanimate objects into animals, so outside the meeting hall one day he transfigured a large boulder into a dragon—"
"No!" gasped Minerva.
"Yes," Dumbledore said, the twinkle in his eye telling her that no one had been seriously hurt. "So the newly animate rock went roaring for the mountains, where we can only guess it found a suitable cave, for about two hours later we began to hear screaming. And we discovered, outside, a cloud of thousands of vampire bats, in several large swarms, flapping through the village."
"What did you do?" asked Minerva. "How did you discover the spell?"
"Trial and error, mostly," he said, "and relying on the old, slower techniques. About a half-hour into the invasion we began to look for shortcuts."
"Could you show me?" Minerva said eagerly.
"I would, Minerva, but I don't see a large cloud of vampire bats handy." She blinked, disappointed for a moment, but then she saw his expression—twinkling gray eeys, off-angle beard suggesting a half-smile—and she knew he was testing her. Looking around the room, she bit her lip in concentration, mulling through possibilities…
"The dust motes," she said finally.
"Come again?"
She beckoned him over toward her to look through the shafts of sunlight from the windows. "The dust motes. There are thousands of them—they're much smaller than vampire bats, but all you need to do for that is adjust your wrist motion."
"Very good," Dumbledore said, smiling beneath his auburn beard. Minerva beamed at the praise. "Very original solution. Now what should I turn them into?"
"Leaves," she replied, saying the first thing that popped into her head.
He nodded. "Leaves it is, then. And how do I adjust for that?"
"Hold the image of the leaves in your mind as your perform the spell," she said.
"Exactly—you haven't fallen out of practice over summer holiday. Now—" He made the tiniest of wrist motions, pivoting his wand around between his fingers to encircle a good few thousand dust motes, and flicked the wand with his wrist—suddenly, as if appearing from mid-air, a cloud of oak leaves fell to the classroom floor and scattered all about.
"That's amazing," said Minerva.
"It is," said Dumbledore. "And to think: all because of an unsettled population of Romanian bats!"
She helped Dumbledore tidy the leaves up into one pile in the middle of two rows of desks, and by that time, the rest of the class had started to trickle in.
"Welcome back to the daily grind," Dumbledore said to the students from his desk at the front of the room, eyes twinkling. "Yes, Mr. Nott, I'm afraid you do have to face Transfiguration class once again. Will all of you please take three or four leaves from the pile between the second and third rows? And we'll begin…"
Minerva already had her leaves, so she sat at her desk and watched the rest of the Gryffindor and Slytherin fourth-years get settled. Tom Riddle bent to pick up his and straightened, looking behind him—Minerva, on the fourth row, gave a small smile, which he returned. He settled himself on the second row in a huddle of Slytherin boys and opened his textbook to the page Dumbledore was now writing on the chalkboard. Minerva hurriedly followed, and began to review techniques for transfiguring plant life.
She found, though, that it was hard to keep her mind on her work…
* * *
her chin.
"Tom…"
"Minerva." Dimly, a part of her wonders whether this is possible. He has been gone…
"I will always be with you, Minerva." He's sixteen. "Forever."
Dear god, he should be as old as me now…
"Age has no meaning," the marble-and-shadow figure says. "No meaning but in the realm of the corporeal, and that, sadly enough, is life."
She shakes her head, bewildered. "Tom…"
"Didn't I tell you," he says, smiling, "that I would live forever?"
He leans down close to her face. "And forever is a long time…my dear." He leans in to kiss her lips and Minerva bolts awake, shivering in the latent heat of the summer night.
* * *
Herbology wore the day on into lunch, with potions class to round off the afternoon. Minerva did not see Tom in any of her other classes that day, and would not—if she remembered last year's classes aright—again until Arithmancy next afternoon.
Why can't Gryffindor have more classes with the Slytherins? she thought, and stopped short. As she had been walking through a crowded hallway on the way to dinner at the time, this caused a minor pandemonium behind her, and there were a few almost-fell recovery noises. Minerva muttered a quick apology and hurried into the Great Hall, where she found Paul buttering a dinner roll.
"Adriana's in the—"
"—library," she finished as she sat down. "Looking for more books on Merlin?"
"No, actually," said Paul. "I saw her after double History, and she said something about needing an Arithmantic formula for a test next Friday—" he shrugged. "Bread?"
"Thank you."
And that was the evening. Minerva had a little homework, which she finished in the library with the aid of the ever-helpful Emeric Switch. A quiet game of cards with Paul in the Common Room before bedtime. The School Day Grind continued, same as ever—she loved it last year, her classes were wonderful this year, and still—it ground on.
Until next day's Arithmancy class.
* * *