A/N: First an apology. I don't remember how I got the days/dates from the last chapter but upon review I got them wrong (1st Nov 1951 was Thursday not a Sunday not a big deal I know but) I'm not going to change it but from now on the date/ days will be correct so these two chapters might not exactly match up. (I'm not being very clear. Am I confusing you? I'm sorry) Also… transfiguration is hard!
December 1951
November had passed into December in a relatively quiet affair. The senior students had adopted a permanently strained visage that did not seem to provoke the same amount of sympathy in their professors anymore who likewise looked to grow more frustrated with their charges by the hour. A few of the kindlier professors offered gentle reminders every so often to remember to eat and maintain eight hours of sleep a night (at which two seventh years had broken down into maniacal laughter) but none seemed to bother lessening their work load as the holiday's fast approached.
Gryffindor Tower was buzzing with excitement at the prospect of snow and presents but Minerva was positively ecstatic for the day she could spit out the leaves plastered to the roof of her mouth; which, by her count, was tonight.
The three hours of every Wednesday night for the past four weeks had been spend in intensely frustrating lessons with Professor Dumbledore and while they proved to be both highly-stimulating and challenging both parties found that, at least for the first few of these sessions, they parted with a short lived loathing for the other. However, full of the kind of optimism only Christmas could bring, Minerva found herself so excited for her upcoming lesson that she could not concentrate on her Herbology essay. In fact she started so violently when Augusta asked her about the difference in healing properties between rue and mistletoe berries that she upset the ink pot between them, ruining Augusta's lengthy report on medicinal plants.
"Oh for sake of Merlin's sainted trousers!" she cried. Walter did not even look up from his book and flicked his wand lazily, banishing the spilt ink back to its well and returning the parchment back to its pristine state.
"I'm sorry." She apologised lamely, scourgifying the mess from her hands.
"I'll finish it myself," Augusta pouted, pulling Minerva's notes out from under the stack of books on the table, "you're no use to me if you can't sit still. Off with you." And she buried her nose in the tight script of Minerva's notes.
Minerva piled her books into her bag and snatched her parchment out of Augusta's hands.
"Take your own notes next time." And she stuffed it in with the rest before heaving her bag over her shoulder.
She still had not told any of her friends where she disappeared to every Wednesday and while she appreciated their respect for her privacy she was a little put out that no one had even bothered to ask.
"See you later." Walter murmured absently, absorbed as he was in his copy of Madcap Magic for Wacky Warlocks.
…
She knew she was early well before she walked into the empty classroom. Twenty minutes early. She realised, looking at her watch. She could probably finish her Herbology homework before Dumbledore even arrived, she thought, but she dumped her bag unceremoniously at the foot of a random desk. Herbology was the last thing she wanted to do.
She slipped her wand out from her sleeve and laid back on a set of desks and stared up at the stone ceiling with her legs dangling lazily over the edge. She drew up twisted figures of smoke in various colours to amuse herself, bending them this way and that until they formed vaguely sentient figures but soon grew bored with the colour changing wisps. She transfigured the smoke into sand and sat up as it fell to the ground. She brushed her fingers through her long hair and pulled it up into a bun before brandishing her wand again. She whirled her wand round the dusty pile like a gymnast with a ribbon, moulding the minute grains into an elaborate statuette before converting the silicon molecules within to glass; leaving behind a coarse figure that appeared outwardly frail but was quite cold and hard to touch. She hopped off the desk and knelt down in front of her creation, studying the solemn face and flowing limbs of the Greek goddess. With a breathy incantation she blew life into the face of her statue and sat back on the desk to watch as it danced and twirled down the centre aisle.
"You are becoming quite adept in animation." The sudden interjection of his voice had become so common place of late it failed to startle her anymore. She vanished her model of Persephone.
"You're late." She didn't need to check the time to know it was so. He had guilt all over his face and an apology waiting on his tongue.
"Indeed. Professor Simza can be very hard to shake off, she has a way of suggesting that I will befall misfortune upon every occasion I decline an invitation to the Three Broomsticks." He smiled pleasantly, assuring that he believed no such thing would occur.
"How did you escape?" she asked, not entirely certain she'd managed to keep her contempt for the Divination professor, or her subject, from slipping out.
"I've been known to have a certain way with words myself." He admitted, amused by her distaste, "Did you ever take Divination?"
Minerva sniffed indignantly, "The very first lesson she called me a 'hard-faced queen of misadventure' and I never returned for a second."
Dumbledore fought to stifle a laugh and managed to hide it under a polite cough.
"Then let us turn to the lesson at hand, shall we?" He perched himself on the desk across from her. "I imagine you've been crossing off the days on your calendar but I'm afraid you will have to house those mandrake leaves at least until, let us say, the end of this lesson." He saw her posture slump slightly in disappointment. "I know you've been working furiously on drafting your own enchantment but I thought perhaps tonight we should take the opportunity to reflect a little on the work you've done so far and how you might go about completing it."
Her shoulders dropped again.
"Yes, sir." She rustled around in the bottom of her bag for the twelve of so leaves of parchment she had scribbled and scratched over during their lessons and every spare moment she could find and stuck them to the blackboard in some semblance of a pattern. Seeing the pages all stuck up together she could already spot glaringly obvious mistakes she had missed without a broader context and quickly hurried for her quill but Dumbledore put out an arm to stop her.
"I'm not here to mark your work. From 8 o'clock to 11 we are peers in this classroom, now explain to me what you see as incorrect and why."
Minerva flushed slightly to be called a peer of Albus Dumbledore and it took her a moment to regain her train of thought.
Listening to her speak, however, was perhaps even more engaging than conversing with that of his contemporaries. As it was in most instances those of his generation were rooted in the past and the established 'way of doing things' and as a result he had let his own interests stagnate. Nothing new or interesting ever seemed to crop up in journal publications anymore, just dry rehashes of already established theories and half-hearted challenges to those still with a breath of conjecture left in them. Minerva knew the theories; it was evident in her methodical approach to transfiguration, but he could see a flair between the lines of her spell craft that was entirely her own. There was excitement and curiosity bubbling beneath the surface that almost threatened to challenge the laws of transfiguration; a hair's breadth away from becoming dangerous. She was new and fresh and the longer he listened the more he could feel the study of transfiguration begin to excite him again.
"I'm afraid I don't understand your inclusion of human consciousness," he frowned when she was finished, "I would imagine it would be inferred with intent, why include it in the body of the spell?"
Most students, most accomplished witches and wizards, would falter when their work was called into question and he was pleasantly surprised when, instead of shrinking, she lit up and began pacing the foot of the board, gesturing animatedly at her linking equations.
"At first I thought so too but the more I thought about it the more I was convinced that to omit it would be an error." She paused and took a deep breath. "You explained the enchantment as a kind of 'self-charm' and a kind of 'self-transfiguration'; we know that during interspecies transfiguration the subject does not retain its core functions, if you were to transfigure me into a dog I very much doubt I'd know how to get back to Gryffindor Tower or remember that my name is Minerva despite the fact that a dog would be able to trace back a scent to the seventh floor and has the ability to associate a word as itself. Therefore a kind of charm would be required to maintain the subject's core function despite transfiguration. Cogito ergo sum; I think therefore I am. The human preoccupation with self-consciousness is so ingrained in consciousness, so unique of the human condition it could be a grievous mistake to discard it from the equation… I'm not sure I'm adequately explaining myself…" she confessed suddenly.
"Most eloquently, though a little rapidly, give an old man a moment to catch up." His eyes sparkled and she accepted his subtle offer and took a moment to reshuffle her thoughts.
"Though unproven it is considered that only human beings are in the possession of self-awareness, of consciousness; if you were to put a cat in front of a mirror it would not recognise itself but see another cat. If it is indeed true then how would I exclude that which makes me human from an enchantment to retain the human functions of my own brain?" she summarised a beat more slowly.
In preparation for these lessons they had touched on subjects of human transfiguration that went even beyond his seventh year NEWT class and Minerva soon proved that she was no stranger to these concepts and had even experimented cautiously in the free time she somehow managed to find amid her harrowing schedule. Her intelligence and the deep abstract thought she exuded forced the cobwebs from his knowledge of theoretical transfiguration as she put him through his paces.
He pondered her assertion. The finer details of animagi enchantments were highly personal and unique to the caster, intense personal insight was what made this brand of magic possible and, at the same time, so temperamental. If the inclusion of the fragility of the human psyche was so significant to her then it did indeed make perfect sense to include it though, he noted, it would have to be carefully formulated.
"And what is it, other than self-awareness, which makes you human Minerva? Or, to go beyond that, what are you?"
Long into the night they debated the complexity of the human condition and all its many triumphs and failings. They discussed in intimate detail the practicality and potential of theoretical transfiguration. They broke briefly when Dumbledore mentioned she could spit out the mandrake leaves and arranged a small tea tray from a pair of very obliging house elves but polite conversation was soon taken over with the nature of progress, the position and role of politics and eventually the place of the individual within broader society and how society shapes the individual until their intellectual conversation was interrupted by a long yawn.
Over the course of the four hours Albus had moved from his perch on the corner of the desk to one of the many students chairs, to his padded teacher's chair and back again until he was leaning back in balanced equilibrium on the rear two legs between two rows of tables; twirling the tip of his beard around his finger absentmindedly. He set himself down back on all four legs of his chair and pulled his curious pocket watch from one of his many pockets. It was well past curfew even for a prefect.
He crossed over to where Minerva had sank down against the wall and offered a hand to help her up.
"I think we've run a little over time."
She yawned again, stifling the sound behind the back of her hand, her eyes had gone red and a little puffy from fatigue.
"What time is it?"
"A little after two, time does fly under stimulating conversation." He picked up her bag and escorted her back to Gryffindor Tower.
"I didn't even realise..." They walked in silence up the marble stairs, her head filled with thoughts of her warm bed, heavy blankets and soft pillows and his; preoccupied with trying to recall the last time he had enjoyed an evening of academic banter half as much as he had tonight. He found it very strange indeed that a few hours with a seventeen year old girl surpassed half a century of dusty conversation with acclaimed warlocks. Nicholas was of course an exception and even, he conceded, Gellert to some extent but here; walking half asleep beside him was, in all appearances, a perfectly ordinary young witch who he was sure would one day outstrip him in tranfigurative magic.
Dumbledore rapped lightly on the Fat Lady's frame to wake the dozing portrait, "Plum pudding."
The Fat Lady started and knocked over a box of sugared violets, "Minerva McGonagall wandering the castle at this hour!" she scolded, sleepily.
"Remedial transfiguration." Dumbledore placated calmly, handing over Minerva's bag.
The Fat Lady scoffed, "That will be the day!", but the portrait swung forward.
"Good night, professor."
"Good night, Minerva."