Over the past few weeks, I'd had my detentions with the various heads of houses spread out. I suspected that was partially because they hadn't wanted to deal with me. I'd ended up having a single detention a week.

Professor Sprout had been relaxing; we'd mostly worked with plants and I'd talked about my limited experience in gardening when I was a child with my mother. That hadn't amounted to much, but working with Sprout had been relaxing in a way I wasn't used to. She hadn't been judgmental, and she gave off the feeling that she would actually support you in whatever you did.

It actually made me a little jealous of Hufflepuff.

Snape was supportive in his own way, but it wasn't the same in Slytherin. There, even the first years had to be on guard with what they said to each other, lest it be used against them.

Professor Vector had me writing out star charts. I was still struggling to see the significance of her class, and so this was actually remedial work for me.

Homework didn't really influence final grades anyway; all that was important was the final exams. Homework was simply for keeping track of what students understood and where they needed help. I wasn't sure I liked the system; I really did believe that some students didn't test well, and it put a lot of importance on the result of a single test.

However, I didn't really care all that much.

My detention with Professor Flitwick had involved my teaching some of the remedial students some of the charms I had mastered. It had opened my eyes as to just how slow and recalcitrant some of the younger students could be. The fact that they'd been purebloods had been proof that the stereotype of muggleborn as not being good at magic wasn't true.

Detention with Snape had been the same as always; being forced to work with ingredients that most children found disgusting. For obvious reasons, cutting up flobberworms and dealing with insect parts didn't bother me at all, and I was careful enough in what I did that it didn't bother Snape all that much.

He'd done his best to ignore me during the detention, likely because he felt that my talking to him would make it less of a distraction. I'd spent much of the time mindlessly going through the motions while I was listening in to things happening in the Slytherin common room.

However, now I was supposed to go to detention with Professor McGonagall. I'd threatened her Gryffindors. She was better at hiding her bias against the Slytherins than Snape was in his bias against her house, but it still showed somehow.

Worse, now that the boggart issue had made things worse for everyone, I had a feeling that the professors were irritated with me. It was getting a little tiring having people pointing their wand at me and shouting Riddikulous all the time, even if I understood the reason.

The boggarts seemed to have an uncanny ability to sense what was around them, one that didn't have anything to do with bugs. It had taken me a little while to realize that their abilities had nothing to do with my own; what they had was the version of me that other people perceived.

It meant that they knew when people were coming, and it also seemed to mean that they could sense fear from a greater distance. They seemed to be feeding on that fear, and they stalked the halls because that seemed to be what people thought I did.

I was just glad that none of them seemed to be me in vampire form; apparently nobody had really believed that rumor in any kind of a real way.

The fact that they couldn't be trapped made it even worse. They had to be trapped and transported to a place where there was no fear to be had. Even muggle fear would be enough to sustain them, although it would be a pale imitation that would leave them sickly and weak.

It also wasn't something they could generate, since muggles couldn't really perceive them. To a muggle, a boggart only manifested as an uneasy feeling in the pit of their stomach when they saw an open dark closet at night, or heard a creak in the corner.

The boggarts would fade away eventually if they had no fear to sustain them. How long that would take seemed to vary from boggle to boggles, and wizards didn't seem to have any comprehension of a scientific study.

No one was even sure of just how many boggarts there were; I had a suspicion that there were more than the official count, because I could feel some of them at the edge of my senses with my bugs.

The boggart incident wasn't making me any friends, and it wasn't likely to make McGonagall happy with me.

Gemma was scowling.

"I'm not sure why I need to escort you to detention; clearly you aren't one the students who is scared of them."

"I still can't get the Riddikulous spell right," I said. "Apparently, I don't find my own fears very funny."

"Well, at least if you see another one of you coming down the hall, you know it's not you," she said. "I woke up in the middle of the night with one sitting on my chest. Do you know what that's like?"

"I heard the screaming."

"I'm a prefect!" she said. She looked a little frazzled. Lacking sleep apparently wasn't good for her. "I'm supposed to be the one that comes and takes care of the little ones when they have nightmares. I'm not supposed to be the one who needs help."

At least the one that had attacked Gemma hadn't been in my form. I'd taken note of the students who were most afraid of me, and just as importantly those who weren't.

"I'm sure I'd be just as startled," I lied.

Apparently I wasn't as convincing as I'd thought, because she looked at me skeptically.

"We're here," she said, with what sounded like relief.

"Miss Hebert," Professor McGonagall said. Her voice was cold, and conveyed none of the warmth I occasionally heard from her when she talked to some of her own house.

"Professor," I said, my voice as neutral as I could make it.

"After the things you did to my students, I was very concerned about your continued presence at this school," she said. "Which is why I chose to have my detention be the last of your detentions. That would give me a chance to observe you and overcome my own... biases."

"And what have you concluded?" I asked.

"Until recently, you have been an exemplary student. Your penmanship is beginning to improve, and you seem to have the writing skills and mind of an adult."

I fought to keep myself from wincing. Did she know what I was, and was she fishing, or was she trying to offer me the sort of complement that any other eleven year old would have been flattered by.

"That is why I feel that I can be honest with you," she said. "I am worried about you."

"What?"

"I saw the pensieve memories of your boggart," she said. "And those are not the fears of an ordinary, well adjusted girl."

"What's a pensieve?" I asked.

"Wizards have ways of extracting memories and allowing others to view them," she said. "To step into a memory and move around within them."

I stared at her in horror.

"That's... that's a violation," I said.

"A certain degree of cooperation is required," she said. "Else the memory will not be reliable."

"So if someone goes to trial, they can just use this pensieve thing to prove they aren't guilty?"

She shook her head.

"It would be easy for a criminal to simply obliviate himself," she said. "To wipe his own memory of the crimes. Already criminals sometimes obliviate their victims to make tracking them more difficult."

There must have been something in my expression, because she grimaced.

"I did not begin this to give you ideas for further atrocities, Miss Hebert," she said. "I am here to speak about my concerns for you."

"Could a pensieve work on things that someone didn't sense?" I asked. "If their eyes were closed?"

"I'm not certain," she said slowly. "It is true that the pensieve sometimes allows the study of things that the original user does not remember seeing. It is possible that they actually saw these things, but were not aware of them, though."

"So if someone only had the memory of voices," I said. "Say, of their parents' killers, there might be something that could be done with that?"

"Pensieves are rare," she said. "Only the most powerful wizards have them."

"Like the headmaster," I said.

She stared at me.

"You said that you had viewed the memory; that means that the device is likely here, in the school. The most powerful wizard in all of Great Britain is the Headmaster. It's not a great leap of logic."

"I'm not used to children of your age using logic much," she said.

"Any wizards, really," I said.

She looked vaguely offended.

"Muggles don't have the same advantages that wizards do," I explained. "Which means that they have to think harder if they want to get anything done. Also they have the advantage of a greater talent pool."

"Oh?"

"Imagine that there were only ten wizards in all of Britain instead of ten thousand. The law of averages suggests that at least half of them would be idiots. Most of the rest of them would be normal, and there might be one or two of them who is exceptional."

She nodded cautiously.

"One person can't do that much by himself," I said. "And a genius surrounded by idiots is limited. Every genius needs competent people around him, or he will be stunted in what he can do."

She was silent, watching me closely.

"So ten thousand wizards will have five thousand idiots, and maybe one thousand competent people. That's barely enough to run a society. The muggles have more competent people because they outnumber witches and wizards by six thousand to one. There are a lot of stupid muggles, but there's also a lot of competent muggles out there, which wizardkind doesn't want to acknowledge."

It was why large high schools tended to field better football teams than small ones. It wasn't that the players on small rural teams were terrible; occasionally there were some really good ones. It was because the available talent pool left coaches with more to pick from. In a class with twenty boys, putting together a football team pretty much involved including everyone who wasn't actually in a wheelchair.

Wizarding Britain had the population of a small town. Worldwide, the Wizarding population would have had a third the population of Jamaica.

"Whatever your thoughts are about the Wizarding world, you have to live in it, dear," she said. "Perhaps if there are things you do not like, you will work to change them?"

"I will," I said. "As soon as I have the power."

"Preferably without murder and mayhem," she said.

I was silent.

She stared at me and then she sighed.

"Severus tells me that you tend to see these sessions as additional tutoring. These are supposed to be punitive, and although you have been doing better, you still have to pay for your crimes. After thinking about it, I think I will have you muck out Thestral stalls."

"The bone horses?" I asked, surprised."Do they even defecate?"

She didn't look surprised that I could see them; supposedly only people who had seen death could see them, which made me wonder if I could see them better than anyone else. After all, I had seen more death than anyone in this entire world.

"Not as much as an ordinary horse, but they are living beings, dear. Hagrid has been reinstated as of yesterday, which means that the stalls haven't been mucked out in a month. I would like you to report to him at his hut and he will show you what to do."

"I like horses," I said. I smiled up at her slightly. "Thank you. You could have done something terrible, like having me dust the restricted section in the library."

She stared at me for a moment, and then gave a startled laugh.

"You'll have to wait for a naive replacement of Mr. Travers before you get one of those. There's not a professor in this school who would be that foolish."

I shrugged. "It was worth a try."

I'd known she wouldn't go for it, but since she'd been this decent to me after I'd threatened to murder her students, I'd thought it would be worth a laugh.

"We aren't done speaking about this," she said. "Knowing what you've gone through, I can only imagine how difficult it might be."

"You can understand how I might not want to talk about it, either," I said. "I appreciate the fact that the staff hasn't spread around what happened to my parents, leaving it up to me just how much I wanted to talk about it... or not."

"I haven't heard that you talk about it at all," she said.

"Even so," I said.

"Sometimes it is good to talk about these things," she said.

"I understand the point of therapy," I said. "But there isn't anyone in Hogwarts, and maybe not anywhere in Wizarding Britain who is trained as a counselor, and a muggle therapist wouldn't be allowed to hear anything about this world."

She frowned.

"Professor Snape told me on the day that I met him. I don't know why some Squib or minimally competent Wizard doesn't go to school to get a degree ; it looks like Wizards could use counseling."

"More now than ever," she murmured faintly.

Was that a comment about me, or about Voldemort? Maybe both? I couldn't really read her meaning.

"Off with you now," she said. "Rubeus is expecting you sooner rather than later."

"All right," I said. Looking up, I asked her, "Is using a pensieve difficult?"

"They are difficult to make," she said. "But not to use. However, some skill is required to extract the memories. I do not believe that you will be able to break into his office and use the headmaster's pensieve without his assistance."

I looked up at her, startled.

"I have taught at this school for much longer than you have been alive," she said. "Which means that I know how young people think. For all that you are a Slytherin, I think you have many qualities of my house, including bravery, but that also means you can sometimes make foolhardy decisions."

Shrugging, I said,"My decisions seem perfectly logical to me."

"I'm sure they do, dear," she said. "The question is whether they will seem the same way in ten years."

"Judging that would require me to still be here in ten years," I said. "Which is what I'm trying to do. I'd love to just... what do ordinary Wizards do, anyway?"

"They work for the Ministry," she said. "Or open their own shop."

"So government or the private sector," I said I frowned. "Maybe I could open a private security company? Bodyguards, protecting assets, that sort of thing?"

"It sounds like you'd like to be an auror," she said.

I shook my head. "They don't get paid enough and nobody likes them."

"The only people who fear aurors are people who have done something wrong," she said.

I smirked. "You still believe that. In the hands of a corrupt government, police become thugs and enforcers. In the worst cases, they become agents of terror, who make people disappear to be tortured and then killed. It's endemic in the muggle world, not just in past history, but right now."

"That wouldn't happen here," she said.

"Wouldn't it?" I asked. "Can you tell me that there weren't sham trials after the last war, where people who were rich were released because they claimed to be under some kind of curse, while the poor were killed or even worse, Kissed?"

She was silent, frowning.

"When the rich get to make the rules, people lose faith in the system," I said. "Why follow the rules if you do not think they apply to the fellow down the road?"

"The poor are usually not the ones who revolt," I continued. "But they usually follow those who are richer, and the problem is that if they win, they tend to become the rich ones, and then the cycle starts again."

"So cynical for someone of your age," she said.

"Family murder tends to do that," I said. "I think Hagrid is expecting me?"

She nodded and I stood up.

"If I need anything, I will call you," I said. "But I'm doing my best not to need anyone."

As I left the room, my bugs overheard her murmuring, :That sounds like a lonely life."

Shoveling thestral crap wasn't the worst detention I could have been assigned, and if I was lucky, I might even be able to find new kinds of bugs I had never seen before. Feces often had weird kinds of larvae in them, and magical feces might have magical larvae.

Or maybe it would just be crap. That was the story of my life, after all.