One ~ The Term Project
I do not know what possesses people to want to tell their life stories.
Certainly we are all not so egotistical as to think that our lives hold some great and mystic import, and I can personally attest to the fact that I do not crave fame, nor do I wish to broadcast my histories to the world, yet I am still compelled to write it all down. Perhaps it is my own way of dealing with age, or my own personal immortality – but no, those are wrong, too, and not quite apt for what I want to say. If I am going to do this, I might as well be brutally honest, and, consequently, truthfully, this is nothing more than my confessional.
I am not some horrid sinner, but I believe that everyone needs to be cleansed, in a way, and I have always firmly believed in the ability of the written word to transfer guilts and sorrows and half-forgotten memories from the mind to the paper. Call it a primitive sort of Pensieve, if you will, with no magic and no silvery glittering to mask what lies underneath. Muggles keep diaries – why shouldn't I?
Reasoning aside, I have chosen to do this, and when I choose to do something, I see it through until the end. I am by no means an experienced writer and will probably come off far too teacherly – years of speaking properly have their way with you – and I find I do not know where to begin. The present? I am sitting in my private library, in a hard wooden chair with candles and quills as my companions. There are mirrors here, and I am old in their multiplied reflections – but that won't do at all, for no one wants to hear about the mundane activities of an old woman, not even the old woman herself.
Nor can I begin at the beginning, proper conventions of that Muggle Dickens aside. It is no great significance. I was born to a Muggle family at a farm in the Scottish highlands. I had two parents and a sister called Kitty. I once, quite by accident, turned a sheep into a riding pony because I dearly wanted to have one, and that was when Mum and Dad started to realize that something was not quite right with their older child. Nor can I begin when I got my letter from Hogwarts. I was not an adventurous girl. I spent my time at Hogwarts studying, learning the intricacies of each subject as if each topic were the most fascinating thing in the world – perhaps, to me, they were.
There are times, even now, when I wake up in the morning and expect to see Kitty's sleeping face across from me in the loft, but instead I see my own hands and remember the magical power that I harbour within my own skin. Sometimes I feel as if I have lived a life in a dream world, and that I will, indeed, wake up one day and find I've been late to collect the eggs from the henhouse again – and it seems I shall never finish this if I continue to digress in such a manner.
I will begin in the September of my fifth year at Hogwarts, for there truly is nothing to tell about those first four years except that I absorbed all the knowledge that I could, and that I was lonely. In those times, it was uncommon for Muggle-borns such as myself to be admitted into Hogwarts – there were only three others in my year, and only one of them in Gryffindor, a girl called Myrtle Markels. The wizarding population had not yet been thinned out by war. To make it worse, I was known as not only a Muggle-born but also as a studious girl, and anyone who has ever been a student knows that this is a great atrocity and a curse. I was slightly shunned in my first year, and it grew steadily worse, until, at the beginning of my fifth year, I felt alone and friendless.
My only friend at that point was the teacher of Transfiguration, Professor Albus Dumbledore, who saw in me a proficiency for his subject, and, on my very first day back at Hogwarts, the first day of that fifth year, during the Sorting Ceremony, he came to me and asked me to see him between sessions on my first day of classes. I was curious; I agreed.
The next morning I had to sit through History of Magic before I could go. Though I loved learning, History of Magic was the class I loved least, for two reasons. One, my professor was an elderly and rather monotonous man named Professor Binns, and I constantly thought that it would not be particularly surprising if he simply keeled over one day, mid-lecture. Two, my desk partner was a disagreeable Ravenclaw girl named Olive Hornby, and, to this day, I have no idea how she was sorted in a house known for its academic prowess when all she did was sleep through class every day. True, lectures about the restorative discoveries of Sepulchra the Snub-Nosed back in 1641 certainly aren't the most compelling listening in the world, but there wasn't a single class she was able to sit through – and she snored loudly at that.
At lunch that day, I intended to eat as rapidly as possible, but I was accosted by Myrtle Markels, who was square and dumpy and was well-renowned for her wailing. As a Prefect, it was my duty to listen to the complaints of the other students in Gryffindor, and Myrtle was a particular fan of complaining. "They're horrible!" she exclaimed to me as she grabbed a bit of pastry from one of the trays. "Utterly horrible! Can't something be done?"
"Who is horrible?" I asked. I stared into my shellfish stew and hoped that it would be over quickly; Myrtle loved to whinge about everything from the weather to boys in our year to the unfortunate position of being a Muggle-born witch, and it was because of this last she felt we were somewhat kindred – kindred enough to warrant ceaseless whining, at any rate.
"Ghosts!" she said dramatically. "I was walking down the corridors, minding my own business, when that awful Peeves came down the other way and – and whooshed right through me! And then he laughed that horrid cackling laugh of his and called me four-eyed right in front of Emmet Fawcett!"
Emmet Fawcett was a seventh-year Beater on the Hufflepuff Quidditch team and was generally regarded as extremely handsome if not slightly Squibbish. "Now, Myrtle, it can't have been as bad as all that." Seeing the look on her face, I quickly added a fib. "I'll see Headmaster Dippet about it as soon as I can."
Myrtle nodded fervently. "They really are the most dreadful creatures." She turned away to comment on the quality of the pastries to Cliona Brocklehurst, and I took that as my cue to exit.
Professor Dumbledore was waiting for me in the Transfiguration classroom when I arrived there. If there is one room in Hogwarts I loved, it was the Transfiguration room, and not only because it was the room I ended up teaching in. It was beautiful in a desperate understated manner, with its stone walls and floor, its ancient desks and muted tapestries, not dark but not light enough to shed full brilliance on the room – sufficiently mysterious to seem magical. I approached Dumbledore with uncharacteristic excitement.
"Please sit down, Miss McGonagall," he said quietly.
I did so, atop the desk closest to the teacher's, and waited for him to continue.
"I've summoned you here to ask you if you are interested in conducting a term project in Transfiguration," he explained, all in a rush.
"A term project?" I asked. Most of the students did them in their seventh years, if they intended to take the NEWTs and go on to university, or wanted a high-end job straight out of Hogwarts, but I had not given my subject any consideration. It was too early by years. But of course it would be in Transfiguration – it was Transfiguration I loved best. "What sort of term project?"
"Have you heard of Animagi?"
My heart about stopped when he said that.
"O-Of course I have," I whispered. "Transforming oneself into an animal – but it's not like performing an ordinary transformation with a wand, or even human Transfiguration. It's finding the animal that's within you – if that makes any sense – and being one with it, in a way. Without a wand, even."
"Yes." Dumbledore was nodding.
"What about it, sir?"
"I think you can do it."
"You – you do?" I felt like a stuttering idiot but also felt that this was forgivable, as something astronomical had just happened. "Think I can become an Animagus, that is to say?"
He chuckled. "I do believe you've thought about it, Miss McGonagall."
"How could you tell that?" I was astonished.
"The manner in which you reacted. It was as though," and here his eyes were alight with mischief, "I had just given you the greatest gift in the entire world. Greater than sherbet lemons and chocolate sundrops mixed together, I daresay." When he saw that I was too stunned to say anything, he turned around and picked a small stack of books off of his desk. "I take it you'll say yes," he murmured, still laughing goodnaturedly. He dropped the books into my arms. "Read these. They will get you started."
I looked at the top one – Finding the Beast Within: Human-to-Animal Transfigurations and You! – then looked back up at Dumbledore. "I am grateful for this, don't think otherwise, Professor – but why this? Why offer this to me now? I know I'm a good student, but don't the teachers usually make it their unofficial policy to let the students choose their final projects without any prodding?" I stumbled over the words.
Dumbledore sighed and I knew I had caught him at something. "You are a perceptive girl, Miss McGonagall," he said slowly. "And I will be honest with you. You must not tell anyone of your term project. If anyone asks, you are to tell them that you and I are working on a particular difficult transfiguration that involves altering the cores of wands."
"Professor – why?"
"The Ministry has asked me to train an Animagus," he said plainly. "I do not know why." His eye twitched. "They presume there is some threat emerging that might require the services of one, and the only other two known of at present are an elephant and a sea-horse, both of which are relatively useless for whatever purposes the Ministry intends. Do know that your training will not preclude you to working for the Ministry – that is and will always be your own choice. But they have asked that it be done in secret."
"And they did not tell you why?" I whispered. I felt a bit like a mimic or a small child, with the way I kept asking why, but I knew that there was a great mystery here, even then. It was all very unreal.
"No," he admitted. "They asked that I choose a student both talented enough to pull this off and discreet enough to keep it hidden, and you, Miss McGonagall, are the only one of my pupils to fit this description. If you choose not to do this, if you've changed your mind—"
"I haven't," I said firmly, not giving him the chance to finish. "I won't change my mind. I want to do this. You know how much I enjoy Transfiguration and this – well, I suppose this is the ultimate in Transfiguration, isn't it? I wouldn't pass up such an opportunity. I couldn't," I finished with conviction.
"I thought so." He smiled, but for a moment he looked slightly sad. I might have imagined it, really, it was only there for a second, a swift and momentary vanishing of the shine that usually stayed in his eyes. "Well," he said briskly, "you'll be having a class in a few moments, won't you?"
"Yes, I've got Potions."
"Never liked Potions myself. Wasn't very much fun when I took it. Please read the books, Miss McGonagall, and see me after dinner on next Thursday night. In this classroom, of course," he added.
I said goodbye and went off to the Potions dungeon in something of a haze, the books Professor Dumbledore had given me tucked neatly away in my knapsack. To be extra careful, I laid my textbooks atop them. Ordinarily, when I walked through Hogwarts, I tried to look as stern and forbidding as possible so that any wayward students wouldn't run afoul of my Prefect's badge. But I imagine that I was walking rather oddly that day, lost in something of dream. I wondered what my animal would be; I dearly hoped it would something noble like a lion or a stag, and not something distasteful like a rat, or worse, a snake.
I got into Potions and took my seat. Every year since my first, I'd had Potions with Slytherin House, and every year since my first, my lab partner had been the same person. If Olive Hornby was a mild annoyance with snoring in History of Magic, and Myrtle Markels another with her constant complaining, my Potions partner, Tom Riddle, was a full-blown aggravation in a subject I might have otherwise enjoyed thoroughly.
He was another Prefect in my year and privately I thought that Dippet ought to look at more than academic grades when choosing future Prefects – because Tom Riddle was, for lack of a better term, a complete bastard. Certainly I know what became of him, but I wish to treat him in this telling as I knew him at the time – fifteen-year-old Minerva rather than seventy-year-old Minerva. I respect objectivity. And, at the time, I only saw him as a little frightening and very arrogant, and I loathed him.
"You're different today, McGonagall," he said simply.
I kept my eyes steadfastly away from his. There was something about his eyes that I found distinctly disturbing, and I made it a point to keep away from them as much as possible. "How so?" I asked, counting out the seven blessroots we'd need for the Prostasus Potion we'd been assigned to brew.
"You're keeping a secret," he elaborated. His gaze was down on the long desk, as if he intended to burn through the wood with his eyes. He was measuring bluebottle wings, frighteningly meticulous.
I had to fight to hold my hand steady while I hacked into the blessroots. How had he known? But, then again, it is a rare person who is not keeping some sort of secret at any given point in his or her lifetime. "What makes you say that?" I hated my voice; it went a little trembly.
"I can tell by the way you're standing, by the way you're moving," he said, still not looking at me. "Let up on those blessroots. Professor Caldecott said to shred them, not to massacre them."
"They're fine," I snapped, even though I did stop slicing quite so hard. I tipped them into the cauldron and watched as it bubbled up and turned a pinkish colour. I consulted the textbook. "Put in the bluebottle wings," I ordered.
He glared at me sullenly, then did so. Professor Caldecott came hovering over us, clucking in approval. He was a kind and awkward man, with hair the colour of old straw, infinitely preferable to his acidic successor. "Miss McGonagall, could you explain why it is necessary to add blessroots to the Prostasus Potion?"
"Because it counters the effect created by the mixture of the two active ingredients," I said automatically. "Both bluebottle wings and hazelwort juice give the magic boosting effect that the Potion is known for, but create a deadly poison when combined. The essence of the blessroots, as they dissolve, purifies the poison and renders it harmless."
"Five points to Gryffindor." Professor Caldecott was in the habit of circulating around the classroom during each session and springing a question on every student, to give them a chance to earn house points. "Mister Riddle, what other ingredient, besides blessroots, would have the same effect?"
"Unicorn's blood," Riddle said dryly.
"I – I beg your pardon?"
Professor Caldecott was staring at him, and, to be honest, so was I. One simply didn't mention Dark ingredients during everyday classroom activities.
"Unicorn's blood." Riddle spoke as if it were the most natural conversation in the world. "Its purity will remove any ill effects from a brewed potion, including those far more severe than the poison developed in this particular Potion. However, since it is both difficult and illegal to obtain, blessroots are the far better option. In this case."
"Er – yes, quite right. I had been thinking of dryad dust rather than unicorn's blood, but you are correct nonetheless. Five points to Slytherin." Professor Caldecott walked off in a hurry.
"Dabbling in the Dark Arts, Riddle?" I said tartly.
He turned and looked at me then, cold and marbled. "What is it to you?"
There was something very sinister in his expression and I moved away quickly, turning my attention to the potion brewing. "It's done," I whispered, peering into the cauldron – sure enough, it had turned a bright red-rust, almost the colour of blood.
"You try it," Riddle said loftily.
I opened my mouth to snap at him, then shut it again. Carefully, I spooned out a bit of the potion. I was always skilled at making potions in school, but, even in my seventh year, I still got a twinge of nervousness in my stomach whenever I had to test something that could be potentially dangerous. I drank the Prostasus Potion and drew out my hand, trying to think of a harmless spell. After a moment, I cried "Orchideous!" and a full bloom of flowers came springing out of the tip of my wand, roses and violets and lilies. They fell all over the desk and onto the floor, coating the area with flowers. "It worked!" I shouted, not caring that Riddle-the-ass was standing right beside me and scowling. "Ordinarily I can only manage about six roses with that spell."
Before Riddle could make another bored comment, Professor Caldecott came over and exclaimed at our potion-making skills, and then class was dismissed. As was customary, with Potions, I slipped out of there as quickly as possible. Not only did I want away from Riddle, but I wanted to take a good look at the Animagi books Professor Dumbledore had given me.
When I got back up to the Gryffindor common room after dinner in the Great Hall, Myrtle ran to me before I could escape up to the dormitory. "M-M-Minerva!" she shouted, and there were tears running down her face – it was all red and blotchy.
I sighed and wondered if this was what being a Prefect would mean for the whole year – constant complaining from overly sensitive Gryffindors. "What is it, Myrtle?"
"That wretched Olive Hornby again!" Her voice, when she was especially hysterical, went all high and reedy. This was one of those times. "She's – she's hideous, that's what she is! She came straight up to me at dinner and told me that I was a great chubby crybaby and that I ought to just throw myself into a river because no boy will ever love me and it'll just be awful for the rest of my life!"
"Myrtle," I said crossly, "you and I know both know that Olive Hornby is a great twittering idiot more concerned with pimple-concealment charms than with her schoolwork. How she ever got into Ravenclaw, I'll never know—" I cut myself off. It was bad form to insult those in other houses, even if they weren't around to hear me. "Listen, you aren't any more of a great crybaby than she—" I had to stop again.
"But she teases me all the time! Oh, it makes me so miserable, and you're a Prefect, you must be able to do something, Minerva." Myrtle was wiping her nose with the back of her hand in a rather unattractive gesture. "I can't live like this!" she added melodramatically.
"All right." I was suddenly very sorry for her, and I placed my hands over her shoulders, then brought them down to touch her comfortingly. I myself was not a gorgeous girl, but I was not ugly, only plain, and, though it is rude to say it, Myrtle Markels was unattractive, squarely built and too tall and blocky to be considered even remotely feminine. I have seen too many times, both as a student and as a teacher, the pains that girls who are not beautiful endure in school. "I'll speak to her at lunch, tomorrow."
Myrtle cheered considerably. "Don't tell her I sent you."
"I'll tell her that there have been complaints, that's all."
"There have been complaints," Myrtle repeated in a whisper. "Oh, that's clever, Minerva, no wonder they've made you a Prefect." She appeared to think at length. "Listen – do you want to come into Hogsmeade with Cliona and Cora and I on Saturday? We're going to go into Gladrags and look at the new winter robes."
"Huh?" Although the prospect of examining new winter robes did little to stir my interest, I was shocked that another girl had actually asked me over to Hogsmeade, even if it was Myrtle Markels. All the times I had been I had gone alone, and there were places I wanted to see but didn't dare brave by myself, like the Three Broomsticks or Zonko's, the new joke-shop. "Er – all right then, Myrtle."
"Great!" Myrtle said. "And you be sure to make that awful Olive squirm tomorrow!"
I bit back a reprimand; it wasn't my position to make people squirm, but I thought better of saying this to Myrtle. "Yes," I said distantly as I finally managed to ascend the staircase to the girls' dormitory. That night, I managed to get through two chapters of Finding the Beast Within – with my curtains drawn around my bed, of course – and I fell asleep with my school clothes still on, and the book pressed into my face.