Previously: Previously: Kali Black boarded the Hogwarts Express and made an impression among some of her peers. Her first encounter with a Dementor brought up some bad memories, but she and her new friends didn't suffer any permanent damage. The Sorting Hat hesitated on where to place her, but her subconscious made the decision without her.

Chapter Five:

Animagus, Animagi, Animagum

Minerva sat at the head table, sipping on scalding tea and staring at the Slytherin benches, her breakfast forgotten.

Yesterday had been a whirlwind of Dementors, fainting students, and Time-Turners, yet it was Kali Black's sorting that had played on her mind all night. After checking on Potter and handing a Time-Turner and its user manual to Granger, Minerva had expected to see Black seated at the Gryffindor table but had instead found her wedged between the Greengrass sisters.

"It only took a minute," Filius had said over dinner. "I expected it would take longer what with her being a couple of years older than what the Hat's used to, but I suppose the Blacks have always been easy to sort, even …"

Even Sirius, the Gryffindor Black whose colours of red and gold had not stopped him from descending into infamy.

Kali flashed a grin at Blaise Zabini. It was Sirius's smile—Sirius's curls, Sirius's chin, Sirius's eyes. Sirius's child.

Pomona Sprout had won fifteen Galleons when Sirius announced that he was going to be a father. Everyone else on the Hogwarts staff had bet against it given Sirius's penchant, but the universe had aligned into a drunken one-night stand that had forced Minerva to lighten her pockets. She'd known the mother only by reputation: Asherah Morrigan, international Quidditch star, two-time winner of the World Cup.

Lily and James became pregnant later that year, prompting Sirius to natter about joint play dates and James to start plans of fielding a Marauders' Sprogs Quidditch team. Sitting at Order meetings, Minerva had despaired for herself and anyone else who would end up with the second generation of the Marauders on their hands, the Black and Potter duo that promised to wreak such mischief on the world.

That envisioned future never came to pass.

Lily and James died, Harry became an orphan, and Sirius killed twelve Muggles and one of his best friends. The war ended but at a cost, and Kali Black and Harry Potter grew up to be strangers to one another.

Now they sat reunited under one roof, but the distance between their two House tables might as well as have been a thousand miles.

Kali's grey and green tie hung from her neck like a noose. It turned her into exactly what everyone feared she would be, another infamous Black set to become a dark witch sooner rather than later.

She spoke with her new classmates, sitting straight-backed and talking with waves of her hands and tilts of her head, but her gaze kept flicking toward the hissing whispers of students huddled together. Those bright eyes of hers darkened with every glare she received.

Metal shrilled as Severus Snape cut through his sausage and tried to saw through his plate, his jaw set and his eyes fixed on the Slytherin table.

Minerva sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Hogwarts needed a quiet year. She needed a quiet year.

With a shake of her head and a silent goodbye to tranquillity, Minerva left the Great Hall and followed the teachers' corridor to her office. Her class schedule and lesson plan sat on the desk along with yesterday's newspaper. Sirius Black screamed from the cover.

He'd often talked about being front-page news when he was a teenager.

The Daily Prophet had dedicated an entire section of the paper to unconfirmed sightings of the escaped convict. Another page boasted survival tips on how to keep dangerous criminals out of people's homes and away from their families. The columnist, Rita Skeeter, had vilified Aurors who had turned down her interview requests and praised those who had agreed to her invasive questions.

Minerva threw the paper into the fire as the flames flared green. The newspaper muffled a curse, and she yanked it out, uncovering Freyja Morrigan's face.

Freyja pursed her lips. "That was rude."

"I apologise." The clock on the wall read 8. "You're on time."

Freyja hummed, and Minerva straightened to avoid slouching like a scolded child. As a student, Minerva's shoulders had never drooped despite the frequent tellings-off, but Freyja Morrigan had a look about her that could cave even a steel spine.

"If you were not expecting punctuality, I can come back later."

"No, no." Minerva moved her chair to the hearth, sat, and waved the sooty newspaper. "Have you read this?"

"Yes." Freyja's voice curled around the word with a sword's edge. "One would think we're at war again."

The recommended security spells had evolved since You-Know-Who's reign of terror, but the Daily Prophet's layout had reverted to that of those darker times. Sybil Trelawney had spoken of portents while reading the paper yesterday. Minerva had called it sensationalism and left the staff lounge before Sybil could say anything nonsensical.

"Do you remember where you were," Freyja asked, "when the news broke of Voldemort's defeat?"

Minerva shifted to hide her flinch at hearing the name spoken aloud and cleared her throat. "Of course. Everyone old enough to remember does." She had been on an Order mission, disguised as a stray cat, listening to people's secrets. The deaths of Lily and James Potter was the only pivotal information she'd learnt that day—the only significant knowledge she'd ever gleaned during her missions. "Do you?"

Freyja nodded, shifting the coals around her chin. "At home, preparing for a trial. My daughter called. I learnt the news before the international papers did."

The celebration had been worldwide even though most foreign wizards and witches had followed the war only with the distant, morbid curiosity generally reserved for human Transfiguration accidents.

Folding the paper, Minerva slipped it into the waste bin. "I apologise for the lack of connection to Remus's fireplace. I'm afraid that last year's Defence Against the Dark Arts professor used the Floo so often that he broke it."

Freyja blinked, slow and deliberate, her only reaction to the ridiculousness that was Gilderoy Lockhart. "That's all right. It's kind of you to act as an intermediary."

"Of course. Our Potions Master, Professor Snape, had the Wolfsbane Potion ready for Remus as soon as the train arrived. It was an easy night for him. Your granddaughter is making friends and adapting to her House."

"Slytherin." Freyja rolled the word in her mouth. "Not the House she was expecting. Her owl last night sounded forcibly enthusiastic."

"It's a distinguished House and a great honour to be chosen for it."

"You almost sound like you mean it." Freyja's lips twitched, but the hint of an expression vanished as she turned her face, showing the profile of her strong bone structure. "I shan't keep you. I have an appointment with the Ministry's Archive."

Sirius glared at Minerva from the waste bin.

Her fingers jerked with the urge to push her letter tray on top of him. She clutched one palm with the other on top of her lap instead, but the words left her before she could think to stop them. "Did you know him well?"

Dark eyes reflecting the orange glow of the coals, Freyja turned away from whatever had caught her attention on her end of the Floo connection. "Not as well as you did, I'm sure, but I knew him well enough to know what he is and is not capable of."

A sting crossed Minerva's cheeks, the accusation sinking to the pit of her stomach. "You've made a career out of defending killers."

"Every killer I defend receives my services only once. I have a dislike for incarceration and an interest in second chances, no more than that."

"I've read about some of your cases, magical and Muggle. I can't say that many of your clients deserve second chances."

"Because they took a life? Because human souls are precious and should not be squandered?"

Boredom laced Freyja's words with whips. "The dead will remain dead. It is only the living who require healing. When my clients are guilty, which they are not always regardless of what the media may have you believe, their actions have wounded their souls, not destroyed them. Given the sanctity of human life, do these men and women you would condemn not deserve the chance to heal and atone?"

Minerva had to swallow past the ball in her throat that Freyja's tone had created, but she kept her posture straight while doing it. "How many hours did you spend rehearsing that speech?"

The hard line of Freyja's mouth tilted at the edges, her smile showing more in her eyes than on her lips. "A few. It was part of my closing argument on a manslaughter case I dealt with a few years ago."

"The verdict?"

Her brows rose by half a centimetre. "You need to ask?"

"You're among the best at what you do." Minerva's posture loosened. She sank into her chair in a way that felt like sagging. "If the Dementors find Sirius, if the Ministry agrees to a trial, if you win ... it won't mean anything. You'll defend him whether he's guilty or innocent."

"I will, but that won't make it meaningless. If he's innocent, he'll be released from twelve years of wrongful imprisonment. If he is guilty … Have you ever been to Azkaban, Professor?"

The heat seeped from the room as though swallowed by the fire. Minerva grasped her hands more firmly. "No."

"I went once to interview a potential witness. It was a wasted trip. Azkaban had made the man useless to me." Her gaze fell to the waste bin. "You know what they say about that place, yet it's somehow worse. No one with a conscience would inflict that on anyone."

When Hagrid had returned from Azkaban after being accused of the petrifications of Muggle-borns last year, he had lost weight and his skin had turned pale, but more frightening than his semi-spectral figure had been the emptiness in his eyes, a deadness that had leeched the life from his surroundings. He had only spent a few months in the prison; most people spent years.

"Would you defend You-Know-Who?" Minerva asked.

"Conflict of interest. I couldn't if I wanted to."

"Because he hurt your family, and for that he deserves to be punished."

"Yes. To properly defend my clients, I need to be impartial yet on their side. I am the advocatus Dei to the prosecution's advocatus diaboli. Their job is to demonise. My job is to canonise. I can't do that if I'm looking for some form of vengeance. Under different circumstances, though, yes, I would defend him."

Minerva's tongue grew to twice its size and threatened to choke her. She clutched her throat. "He committed genocide."

"I would take his case, not to defend the man, but to protest the institution."

"If anyone deserves to be locked up in Azkaban forever, it's him."

"I would argue that no one deserves that. We are violent, revenge-driven beasts, but punishment is not justice. Hurting someone else will not undo the harm done to us. Nothing will other than time. Favouring rehabilitation over incarceration at least means one less soul lost."

Minerva's eyes stung. With a sniff, she straightened her spine. "You believe that?"

"I wouldn't be as good at my job as I am if I didn't." She looked over her shoulder again. "I should go. Perhaps the next time we speak, if I haven't ruined myself in your esteem, we could discuss the debate of nurture over nature."

Blinking away the undue emotions, Minerva nodded. "Owl me when you're free." She rose and brushed dust and ash from her robes. "Be careful around the Leaky Cauldron. I hear they're having trouble with their Hobgoblins."

"Little monsters. Nothing that size should be able to cause such trouble, except perhaps cats." The smile returned to her eyes. "Good luck with your first day back at school, Professor."

She disappeared in a shower of green sparks, and Minerva stared into the dying flames. That conversation hadn't alleviated her doubts on whether or not Freyja remembered her. She suspected not because of the shortness of their first meeting and how long ago it had occurred, but Freyja did not smile at strangers.

Minerva's most vivid childhood memory was of Freyja Morrigan, sixteen years old, dressed in Muggle clothes in wizarding London during the height of Grindelwald's efforts to quench Muggle authority. Even Minerva's father, a Muggle, had taken to wearing robes when in wizarding spaces.

Grindelwald's followers had swarmed Diagon Alley and hadn't allowed anyone to leave while they held a rally.

Everyone had stayed silent as witches and wizards without masks had explained the inferiority of Muggles, everyone except for Freyja Morrigan, who had contradicted everything they said in a voice that carried better than theirs. Arguments had turned to threats; words had turned to drawn wands. Freyja, underage and unarmed, hadn't flinched.

Albus Dumbledore and a team of Aurors broke through the protestors' line. In the chaos, Minerva ran from her parents' side to where Freyja still stood her ground.

"Why did you argue with them?" Minerva asked. "They would have left us alone. They don't hurt people with magic."

Freyja had looked down at her for an eternity before answering. "Silence only encourages them," she said. "If no one disagrees, how are they to learn that they're wrong? And if no one speaks up, how are others to know that there's another way?"

It had taken Minerva years to stop hero-worshipping the strange girl who had turned a protest into a riot.

Eyes falling to Sirius's face, she shook her head and grabbed her lesson plan, leaving the paper undisturbed in the bin.

The third-year Slytherins and Ravenclaws shuffled into the classroom and took their seats, Slytherins on one side, Ravenclaws on the other. Kali Black sat next to Daphne Greengrass, a quiet girl who, up until now, had always sat alone.

"An Animagus," said Minerva when she had her students' attention, "is a witch or wizard who can transform at will into an animal. The first recorded person to master this art of self-transfiguration was an Ancient Greek wizard named Falco Aesalon, who could turn into a falcon."

The students wrote her words on their sheets of parchment with their quills and inkwells; except for Black, who wrote in a large, orange notebook with a Muggle pen.

"It is a complex and time-consuming task to become an Animagus. If done incorrectly, it can go dramatically wrong. As a result, Animagi are rare—fewer than one in a thousand witches and wizards."

Minerva carried on with her lecture and received the appropriate applause when she demonstrated her transformation into her Animagus form, but she kept looking at Black, whose neon notebook drew er attention like a beacon.

"Miss Black, what can you tell us about the relation between Animagi and skin-walkers?" Minerva asked.

It was not a trick question. Anyone who had studied, however briefly, at Ilvermorny would know the answer, but the girl paused, and a retraction hung over Minerva's tongue.

"Skin-walkers belong to Navajo culture," said Black, the words coming slowly. "The belief in these beings holds a central and powerful place in that people's understandings of the world. It's much deeper than just a scary story told to children to get them to behave. It's important to them."

She twirled her pen and licked her bottom lip. "Colonisers have appropriated and rewritten indigenous traditions, simplifying them and modifying them to fit their world views. Witches and wizards with coloniser origins never took the time to understand the cultures they were invading. They called Muggle medicine men frauds and likened skin-walkers to Animagi because they couldn't accept that these people weren't like them."

A disconfirmation replaced Minerva's thoughts of a retraction.

She had read that the legend of the Native American 'skin-walker'—an evil witch or wizard who could transform into an animal at will—had its basis in fact. The myth had originated around the Native American Animagi. Muggle medicine men, who feared and disliked witches and wizards for possessing real magic, had spread a rumour according to which skin-walkers had sacrificed close family members to gain their powers of transformation.

"What are your sources?"

"Dr Hayden Kline," said Black. "She graduated from Ilvermorny with honours and wrote a paper a couple of years ago called: Native Appropriation in the Wizarding World. I have it with me if you'd like to read it?"

Minerva nodded but asked, "If skin-walkers are not Animagi, what are they?"

Black shrugged. "It's not our place to know."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning we have to accept that there are things we aren't entitled to know. Skin-walkers fall into that category."

Damien Chamberlain, a tall, fair-haired Ravenclaw, snorted. "Knowledge isn't meant to be limited. If these skin-walkers know some special kind of magic, it's only fair that they share it with the rest of the world."

Black gave him an even look that he couldn't hold for more than a few seconds. When he looked away, she glanced at Minerva.

"May I respond?" she asked.

Uncertainty rang like a bell through her mind, but Minerva nodded.

Black turned back to Chamberlain. "Fairness has nothing to do with it. Native cultures have suffered centuries' worth of erasure and appropriation since first contact, not to mention the genocide of its peoples. If not discussing certain things with outsiders is how their cultures survive, so be it."

"None of that is our fault." Chamberlain folded his arms over his chest. "I don't see why we should be discriminated against because of it."

The corner of Black's eye twitched. "We can't be held responsible for our ancestors' actions, but we can make sure that we don't keep making their mistakes."

Chamberlain's sneer did not falter. He opened his mouth to raise an objection, but Black had a glint in her eyes that Remus had often worn. The last time Minerva had seen that look, Remus's sharp tongue had made a boy cry.

For fear of Chamberlain bursting into tears, Minerva cleared her throat. "That's enough for one day. For next week, I would like each of you to write a twelve-inch essay on the dangers of becoming an Animagus as well as a detailed explanation of the steps to follow to become one. You are dismissed."

As her students hurried out, Minerva dropped into her chair. Black took her time packing her things, waiting until only Greengrass lingered by the door before she stepped to the front of the class.

"What is it, Miss Black?"

Black drummed her blue fingernails against the desk, tapping out a melody that tickled the edge of Minerva's memory. "I'd like to apologise."

"What for?"

The melody stopped as Black curled her fingers against her palm. "I spoke out of turn with the Ravenclaw," she said. "Your classroom isn't the place to be getting into arguments. It was disruptive and inappropriate."

Minerva blinked. The longer she stared, the more Black shifted, rocking on the balls of her feet and biting her lip. When Minerva managed to nod, Black exhaled a smile.

The girl was halfway to the door when Minerva's senses returned to her. "Miss Black?"

Kali glanced over her shoulder.

"Five points to Slytherin for your excellent manners and another ten for having taught me something new."

She grinned Sirius's grin. "Thank you, Professor. I'll bring you Dr Kline's paper next lesson."

She and Greengrass left for their next class, and Minerva leaned back in her chair. She was getting too old for this.

A/N: This chapter ended up being quite dialogue-heavy. Do you think it works in keeping the plot moving forward, or should I add more action?

If you're interested in reading more about about the skin-walker/Animagus debacle that flared up a few years ago when JKR introduced the concept on Pottermore, I can recommend Adrienne Keene's website Native Appropriations and her two-part article titled Magic in North America. A number of other scholars and writers have discussed the issue, and there's a bunch of articles online.

As always, a huge thank you to everyone who has reviewed, favourited, and/or followed this story! I hope you enjoyed the chapter.