Thank you very much for the reviews! I'm so happy that most people continue to like this story, even as it does new things (well, I suppose I always promised comeuppance for Dumbledore and Lily, but the Peter-thing is new).
And here's another new thing: McGonagall POV chapter, non-linear.
Chapter Five: The Course of True Ethics Never Did Run SmoothSeverus had been picking at her all summer.
Sometimes, Minerva thought she should never have tried to make him comfortable at Hogwarts as a teacher, or at least not in the way she had. When he had first started teaching Potions, she had grown sick of his constant sniping at his colleagues and the sneers about how no one could possibly understand him because none of the other professors had come out of Slytherin House. Or been a Death Eater, for that matter, Minerva sometimes thought, but that was not something that one brought up around Severus.
Finally, she confronted him after he had yet again reduced Rolanda to stammering in incoherent rage, and asked him if he really felt as alone as all that. After listening to a long tirade, mixed with sneers, on the necessary superiority and therefore solitude of Slytherin House, she asked him, "And would it change your mind if I told you that I was almost Sorted into Slytherin?"
He stared at her. In a moment, however, he recovered his sneer. In those days, he was never without it. Minerva wondered sometimes why he thought he fooled her, who had taught him through seven years of school and knew the hurting little boy he had been.
"You are lying," he had said, his voice softly poisonous and full of contempt. "Lying out of pity, which is a Gryffindor trait if ever there was one."
"Tell me, Severus," Minerva had asked him, "do you believe that one's Animagus form reflects that person's nature?"
"I know the theory, Minerva." He managed to sound bored and cutting at the same time, which Minerva had to admit was quite a feat for a man who hadn't yet seen his twenty-second year.
"Oh, good," she said. "I am happy for you." He'd peered at her suspiciously then, because she never used sarcasm around him. Ordinarily, Minerva thought, there was no need. "Then you might consider what it means that my Animagus form is a cat, Severus, rather than a sheep."
She'd turned and left him gaping after her then, stifling the other things she wanted to say. She could have mentioned that four Gryffindor students who had recently left school were inveterate pranksters whose spirit she had never crushed in the name of keeping to rules. But one did not touch raw and bleeding wounds, and that comment would have torn them open for the both of them. Severus remembered the four boys who had tormented and nearly killed him all too well; Minerva remembered four prize students who were now shattered into three loyalists and one traitor rotting in Azkaban. That had been less than a month after Connor Potter defeated Voldemort, and everyone was feeling around uneasily in this strange new world.
Minerva had been content at first when her revelation proved to serve its purpose, and Severus stopped pretending that he was some martyr no one could ever understand. Of course, then he started coming to her whenever he had some Slytherin issue that he wanted someone else to agree with him about, from a student who failed every class that wasn't Potions to the darkening reputation of his House in the school as a whole. Most of the time, she didn't agree with him, but he didn't care. They would badger and shout and storm and sneer and whisper at each other, and in the end he would leave, seemingly satisfied.
Once, she'd asked him why he didn't go and converse with Filius, who would at least understand and appreciate the finer abstract principles behind the arguments even if he didn't agree with them morally. Why did he want debate out of her?
He'd looked at her strangely and replied, "Because you were almost Slytherin, of course."
And you hold onto House affiliations with a stubbornness that only Sirius Black and James Potter rival, Minerva thought, but even though that was seven years after Voldemort's defeat, she still held her tongue on the matter of the Marauders.
Of course, the last two years had been different, since Connor Potter went into Gryffindor and Harry Potter into Slytherin. Severus stopped coming to talk with her as often, and then at all. He seemed to spend a great deal of his time giving Harry Potter detentions or private lessons. Minerva, preoccupied with trying to guard the Philosopher's Stone and mentor both the Boy-Who-Lived and Hermione Granger that first year, hadn't really noticed, but as second year wore on, she began to wonder.
Then she began to wonder what Severus thought he was doing, and then Albus. She'd spoken with Harry last year, almost on the brink of doing something…well, something Slytherin, was the only way she could think of it.
But Harry had so adamantly refused her help, and insisted that protecting his brother was his free choice, that Minerva had felt compelled to let it lie. Yes, she could intervene when there was no choice, when there were tears and bruises or Dark curses, and a child's life in danger. But she had never encountered a child like Harry, who seemed to have undergone the most horrible things and yet spoke the wartime rhetoric, the rhetoric that Minerva herself had learned to obey, like an adult. She had felt it would be a betrayal to press him, to help him when he did not want her help. And when he had come back and spent so long in the hospital wing at the end of the year, she had winced, but thought he was recovering, and he certainly had not needed her help. Besides, so far as she knew, his suffering was not a result of his conditioning.
Severus had changed all that, him and his endless picking over the summer, his causal mentions of the latest letter he was writing to Harry or which Harry had written to him from the Malfoys', his recitation of deaths caused in the First War by Albus's tactics, his unexpected and very long discourse on the finer details of Peter Pettigrew's trial for betrayal of the Potters (Minerva still wondered where he'd learned all that). Severus had hinted, and hinted, and picked, and picked, and given her a casual look whenever she questioned why he was doing this.
The upshot of it was that she agreed to meet Harry on the day he came back to school and ask him exactly how she could help him.
Of course, she also had a few questions of her own, ones that Severus did not know she intended to ask. He didn't have much of a chance to guess at them, either.
That is because he's not a Gryffindor, Minerva told herself, and waited patiently at the bottom of the stairs to the Headmaster's office, until the gargoyle moved and Harry emerged from behind it.
Minerva studied Harry carefully. She could feel his power, of course, in the way that witches and wizards of the McGonagall family had long been taught to feel it—as a wind that blew across the surface of her skin in long, cold, steady exhalations. She knew from that that Harry was very strong, the strongest wizard in the school if one excepted Albus, but she had already expected that. She was more interested in the look in his eyes and the expression on his face.
Harry's green eyes shone with a deep clarity that Minerva would not have expected from any child under sixteen, which had been the youngest age that Albus would permit students to be when they fought Voldemort in the First War. He looked as if he knew his choices and knew how to make them. It was the look of a man who had seen down the long road of consequences to the end, and determined to walk it anyway. It was the look Minerva had seen in Frank Longbottom's eyes, in James Potter's before his sudden and unexplained abandonment of the Auror position, in her own when she heard about the deaths of the Prewett brothers.
It impressed her, and it frightened her deeply. That a child could look like this, in these days when no open War raged and Voldemort had not managed to return…
And it finally, in a way that all Severus's nagging little hints hadn't managed, pushed her into a clear, cold anger.
"Mr. Potter," she said, when she had studied him for long enough that a few of her questions were answered, "I wanted to apologize. I should have pressed harder last year, when I first learned that you were a sacrifice for your brother, or intended to be one."
Harry simply tilted his head and studied her out of one eye, letting his hair fall across the other. He did that quite often, Minerva realized abruptly, remembering the times he had done it in Transfigurations class last year. He was waiting for something else, some acknowledgement that she hadn't given him yet.
"You would not have accepted my help then, I know," she continued, and at least this was familiar, this admitting of mistakes. She had made more than her share of them over the years. She usually admitted them to Albus, though, especially after she had second-guessed his tactics. "But still, there were things I could have done, as your professor, to insure that you did not have to return to your parents for any holidays, even the Easter ones."
"I could have chosen to stay here, too, Professor," said Harry, his voice soft. "I didn't. I wanted to be with my family just then." He lifted his head and shook his hair, and for a moment Minerva could make out both eyes and that lightning bolt scar that Severus had made several preposterous claims about. "And that's changed, but not a lot. I'm still a minor, after all. They still have legal control of me. And my brother," he added. "I could hardly run away and leave Connor there alone."
Minerva said, primarily because it was true and only secondarily because it would irritate Severus, "You would have made a fine Gryffindor, Mr. Potter."
Harry smiled at her. Severus spluttered. Minerva ignored him. Harry was more important than scoring House points, in the end. Any student who had suffered so would have been, but Harry was, in this case, the student who had suffered so, and it would take much to pry her from his side now. But she couldn't afford to let that through her stern mask yet.
"Mr. Potter," she said, "what do you intend to do, now that you know the truth and have recovered a good portion of your power?" His magic was near a gale now, though she felt the cold wind only on her skin and not her hair or her body. It still made the hairs on her arms stand up.
"Do?" Harry echoed as if he hadn't really thought about it, and blinked. Minerva nodded slightly. She had been right to ask, and never mind that Severus was trying to get some word in edgewise. This was important. She could hardly condone some of the actions that Harry might reasonably want to undertake right now.
"Do you plan to take revenge?" she asked him quietly. "I would not blame you if you wanted it. But if you tried to kill or maim someone else, then I would stop you. I promise you that."
"Minerva!" Severus hissed. "What the child has gone through—"
"The child is standing right here, Professor Snape," said Harry, with more than a trace of irritation in his voice. "And she's right. I want revenge, but how can I expect the Head of Gryffindor House to let me hold down and torture my father, or cheer me on as I kill my mother?"
Minerva peered hard into his eyes. The words were lightly spoken, and the burning clarity in his face had gone shuttered again. She was not sure if he meant what he said or not.
Either way, some truths must come clear now.
"Indeed," she agreed calmly. "Of course, you could not expect me to stand behind you if you were intent on killing and enslaving people who had never done you wrong, as You-Know-Who did, or on controlling and compelling others, as—as Albus has done." It was still strange to speak of him that way, the Headmaster who had saved so many lives during the First War. But he had done this, too, and if Minerva could not change the whole base of her ethics in a day or a season, she could at least acknowledge that leaders were not perfect. And this was far enough from perfection to sway her loyalties in the matter of Harry.
"I will never do either of those things."
Minerva's heart soared as she watched Harry's face when he made that vow. He spat the words, his lip curling at the thought of either murder or slavery. She had hoped that he would say such things, and had even thought there was a good chance, since, after all, he had been a slave himself and would not like the idea. But Voldemort had been mistreated as a child and yet had not learned empathy, and Albus had loved the whole wizarding world enough to destroy the Dark Lord Grindelwald and yet had not loved a single child enough to spare him becoming a sacrifice. Contradictions existed in the world, and powerful wizards tended to embody them more than most.
More than that, Minerva thought, they impact on the world more than we do. So many people might yet feel the weight of Harry Potter's contradictions, did he have the best intentions in the world.
"Has Professor Snape told you what my highest ambition is, Professor McGonagall?" Harry went on, his head high and his gaze directly focused on her.
Minerva shook her head. Severus had nattered on about a great many things, including how Harry could help unite the wizarding world in his unique position as the son of a Muggleborn witch who knew a great many pureblood traditions, and what he might do for the reputation of Slytherin House, and even how he could usher in a whole new era for the wizarding world. Minerva had no doubt that those were Severus's major ambitions for the boy. He wanted to help Harry, she had no doubt of that, but he was already looking to what would happen when the boy had mastered his rage and his magic and was free to use both as he wished. Minerva was more interested in the immediate consequences of his actions.
"I want to be free," said Harry, and his face glowed and his voice rang with passion. "I want to know what it's like to wake up in the morning and have something on my mind other than duty. I want to help other people find freedom, too, and maybe even help balance their freedoms." He shrugged, looking slightly embarrassed now. "And I also want to help protect my brother and insure that he survives his victory over Voldemort. But I don't think those two things need to contradict each other, so they're both my highest ambitions."
"You should be thinking more of your own life," Severus stepped in then to chide him.
"I am," Harry snapped back at him, and Minerva caught and hid a chuckle as she saw the spirit flare in his eyes. This would be one of the reasons that Severus was so drawn to the child, she thought. Severus might convince himself that he would be best pleased if every student obeyed him without thought and without question, but in truth, he would be bored stiff. He needed a challenge, someone whom he could mentor and who would mentor him back, and it looked as if Harry would be that person. "I want to be free. That's thinking of my own life."
"And what about breaking free of your convictions of duty?" Severus asked in a drawl gone silky. Minerva was fairly certain she could have stepped away then, and neither would have noticed. Harry was glaring at Severus. Severus was looking back at him if he were a Potions ingredient that unaccountably refused to be diced up. "You know that you want to be free of them. How can you be free if you still want to protect your brother?"
"Strange as it may seem," said Harry, his back and voice both gone stiff with indignation, "someone can want to be free, and can even be cunning and Slytherin, without being an utter bastard."
Severus's eyes narrowed, and he was almost surely preparing to say something unfortunate. Minerva shook her head. "Harry," she said, and the boy's eyes snapped back to her. "You have reassured me greatly. Please, come to me if you are ever unsure about what you want to do next, or if you wish to know some methods for controlling your magic, or if you simply want to talk."
Harry blinked at her. "You could show me ways to control my magic?" he asked.
Minerva smiled, and felt a knot of tension that had been gathering itself in her spine at the thought of what she must do next relax. "Yes, of course. Calypso McGonagall was my ancestor, one of the most powerful witches who ever lived. She had to control her magic, or she would have destroyed Scotland several times over. And she had to come up with ways to do it on her own, as no one like her had existed in the bloodline until that point. Her methods have come down to me as part of my family history." She inclined her head slightly to Harry. "In Merlin's name, not all pureblooded witches and wizards are in Slytherin."
The boy looked as if someone had slapped him in the face with a haddock. He blinked several more times, then nodded. "Thank you, Professor McGonagall," he said. "I'll remember that."
"Thank you, Harry," she said. "You have made it easier to be on your side." She stepped past him and towards the staircase. She could feel both Harry's and Severus's eyes on her back. She ignored them both. There were some things that she had to do alone, and some ways in which she was not a Slytherin. Albus deserved to know that she would stand to oppose him from now on, or at least until she discovered some reason that she should not.
"Be careful, Minerva," said Severus.
"If I don't come back, Severus," she said, without glancing back at him, "take care of my Gryffindors."
She could feel him making a horrible face. She ignored that, too, and rode the staircase upwards, thinking of a battle that Harry would only have read about and Severus had not fought in—the battle that had secured her loyalty to Albus Dumbledore.
"Back! Back!"
When Frank Longbottom sounded the call for a retreat, the battle had turned for the worse. Minerva maintained her position for a moment longer nevertheless, sending curses at the Death Eaters in front of her without a pause for breath. One of them returned her spell for spell, and the other was holding a weakening Shield Charm. Minerva broke that one's protection with a spell she had developed herself, and had the satisfaction of seeing that wizard fall, screaming, before she followed the others.
Around them, the gray skies and green grass of Ireland glowed ferociously, as if to make up for the burned patches where curses had struck and the blood shed by fallen bodies. It had been a vicious battle, Minerva saw. Over twenty Death Eaters were dead, and nearly as many on their own side. As she fled, she wondered why Frank had sounded the retreat at all.
Then she glanced over her shoulder, and saw Voldemort coming.
There was no mistaking the Dark Lord's arrival. His darkness spread out from him, visible, lifting wings. Those wings were part of a spell that he'd created, and which the Order had no way of countering, but which they called the Black Plague in honor of those it left dead. Minerva held her breath and ran madly for the Portkey point. Anti-Apparition wards were already in place around the battlefield, maintained by both sides. Neither wanted their foes to simply flee.
The ground shook as Minerva gained the safety of a small copse of yew trees, and she grimaced. There were giants coming. You-Know-Who had made a treaty with them that no one could figure out the terms of; the giants were allowed to ravage as much as they wanted, but also obeyed Voldemort's battle instructions. If they showed up, the battle would turn, swiftly, very bad.
"Minerva!"
She turned at Alice's call. Together, they touched the small silver ring that would bring them to the safety of Hogwarts.
It didn't work.
Minerva swallowed heavily. She had not sensed any spell blocking the operation of Portkeys on the battlefield, though of course there could be one. She reached out, and felt nothing behind the anti-Apparition wards. She shook her head.
"He's found some way of making the spells undetectable," she said, and Alice nodded.
Then she coughed.
Minerva quickly cast the Bubble-Head Charm on both of them. It would not hold for long against the Plague, but it might matter. She turned and saw other bubbles of clear air sprouting around the Order members.
Except for one. Young Cassiopeia Marchbanks was on her knees, already hacking. Minerva felt Alice stir as if to go to her, but Minerva grabbed her arm. If Alice touched her, there would be nothing anyone could do to halt the Plague's spread into her, too.
They had to watch as Cassie writhed, her body wriggling and straining like a sack full of kittens about to be drowned, and then burst. From her skin, black polyps burst, and a thick black liquid ran out, staining the ground. Dark spores launched into the sky, seeking for victims. Minerva eyed them, and decided the Bubble-Head Charms would keep them safe for now, at least until the spores found another victim. The second-stage Plague could not be stopped by the Charm.
A high, cold laugh announced that Voldemort had arrived. Minerva turned, holding on to her temper and her pride. She would die as a McGonagall died, as a Gryffindor died.
The Dark Lord was a point of red light at the center of a whirling cloud of darkness, his Black Plague and the power that boiled off him so thickly it was actually visible. His eyes were red, his wand glowed red with the curse he was preparing, and his hands were red, too, Minerva thought, or should be, given the amount of blood he had spilled.
We are going to die, Minerva realized. This was the first time she had seen Voldemort so close since the War began, and she knew, now, that there was utterly no trace of anything human left in him. She raised her wand.
Voldemort had opened his mouth to speak the first words of the curse when a piercingly sweet song rang out over the battlefield. The Dark Lord turned his head, eyes narrowing.
The phoenix that came down and almost took out his eyes—he ducked at the last moment, cursing—was one Minerva knew. She began to breathe more easily, her eyes following Fawkes as he rose and circled, cutting a swath of light through the storm of the Plague, his song heartening the warriors of the Light. Could he really be here?
But he had been miles away, on a battlefield in England—
And then he was there, after all, Albus Dumbledore, striding along under his phoenix. He glowed white, from his beard to his robes to the air around him. This was his own power, Minerva knew, the power of the Light, which she had never seen manifest like this. It was like warm wind across her skin, which built up to broiling desert wind as he stopped, facing Voldemort.
"You have come out of your school to die before me then, Albus?" Voldemort asked, his voice high.
"I have come to fight you, Tom," said Albus, his voice calm and mild.
And then they began to fight.
Minerva could remember surprisingly little of the battle, for all that she had been as close as anyone. She remembered stormclouds of Light and Dark, writhing white fire that withered the Black Plague cloud, a red curse that turned Leda Swanswallow inside out, and through it all a high, steady phoenix song. But there was little more than that, until the moment when the Portkeys abruptly activated again and snatched them away from the battle to land safely in Hogwarts.
Albus remained. If he had tried to leave, Voldemort would have followed at once, and probably managed to inflict damage on a good many other people. Instead, he stayed, his anger at Albus up, and then turned tail and ran when his fear overcame his rage.
Albus saved twenty-six lives that day, twenty-seven if one included the child that Alice Longbottom had not yet known she carried. And he did it again and again, fearlessly, coming incredibly close to sacrificing his own life each time, knowing the lure of killing the Light's strongest hope would bring the Death Eaters, and Voldemort himself, to the battle.
Minerva had never forgotten it. Albus asked much of his troops, but he never asked more than he was willing to give himself. He had made decisions that no one else could have—he had been the first one to realize that the Black Plague could not be cured, either, and that bringing victims of the second-stage spores along merely insured that others got sick and died in violence and shrieking pain—and he had stuck by them. Her loyalty was his.
Until now, Minerva thought, as she stepped off the moving staircase and into Albus's office. Old friend, why must you have stumbled at last, asked for one particular sacrifice that you had no right to ask?
She found Albus sitting behind his desk, staring at nothing. When she came in, he looked up. He did not even seem surprised, his eyes sorrowful and intent. He knows what I have come about, Minerva thought, and knew it was true.
"Albus," she said. She had planned an elaborate speech, but found it wasn't necessary. She merely leaned forward and placed her hands flat on his desk. She needed just one word, other than his name. "Why?"
Albus sighed tiredly and looked at the perch on the other side of the room. Fawkes was gone, Minerva saw. Her heart gave a slow, steady thump, heavy as the fall of a coffin lid. It felt as though the world had just confirmed what she already suspected. She stepped slowly away from him.
"I made one sacrificial decision too many," said Albus softly. He sounded as if he were talking to himself, not her, as if he had forgotten she was even in the room. "I wanted so badly to spare one I loved from the perils of having to make a harsh choice. I found someone who was willing to agree, to make that choice instead. And it cost him. Oh, it cost him. But the cost was willingly paid." He let out a shuddering breath. Minerva thought she had never seen Albus look so old, not even when the news of the Children's Massacre came from Ottery St. Catchpole, where the Death Eaters had crucified dozens of Muggleborn children and left them to die.
"And past that point," Albus went on, his voice a murmur now, "there were other decisions to make, things that might have hurt someone else unless they were stopped and checked. When one bitter, bitter sacrifice is made, what is another? There were those who said I should have murdered Tom Riddle when he was a babe in the cradle, should have killed him when he was a student, should have smothered his magic when first it showed itself in its power. And I hesitated. I remembered my own long struggles to master my magic, and wondered if someone else would have looked at me, declared me a danger to the wizarding world, and killed me. For the good of wizarding kind, of course."
He closed his eyes. Minerva waited, listening.
"I let him grow," Albus whispered. "And that was a mistake. When I found a child who seemed to be part of his legacy, whose magic was deeply unnatural in more ways than one, what was I to do?
"Not kill him, of course. But bind him? Yes, that was an option. And what better way to bind him than to ask him if he wanted to be a sacrifice, and to accept his answer?" Albus closed his eyes again.
"You should have known," said Minerva, "that he was too young to make that decision." She kept her voice iron. His words affected her, of course they did, but she was a Gryffindor. It took more than pretty words to sway her.
"He made it," said Albus, and looked up at her with a face as weary as time. "And it must be kept as made, Minerva, or have consequences that you cannot conceive of."
"Do you really believe that Harry Potter will become a Dark Lord?" Minerva folded her arms and stared at him.
Albus shook his head. "It is not even that," he said. "It is worse. It is the opposite." He smiled, but it was a horrible rictus of a grin, and Minerva was not sure what he found funny. He stood and looked at her evenly. "I must put him under the phoenix web again. It can be renewed. Once the choice is made, it is not so easily taken back."
"I stand to oppose you, Albus," said Minerva.
"You are following your heart, Minerva?" Those blue eyes looked deeply into her. "And not the call of power? You are sure?"
"If it were the call of power," said Minerva, "I would still be yours." She found her breath coming short. There were so many old loyalties falling to pieces here, so many things changing.
"True enough," said Albus, and looked away, releasing her from the grip of his eyes. "To both sides of this struggle, then, Minerva. I would rather have you for an opponent than anyone else in the world."
Minerva crossed the office to the door. She hesitated for a long moment, until Albus looked up at her.
Then she swept her palm in front of her as she bowed her head, the old pureblooded salute of a challenge given and accepted, and departed.