Trial by Fire.
April 1952
The fifth, sixth, and seventh years who had elected to remain at Hogwarts over the break were spending their Easter holidays in varying degrees of stress. Tuesday afternoon had been the breaking point for a cluster of frantic fifth year girls who had shouted at two highly alarmed first year boys for playing gobstones too loudly. When Minerva had managed to speak with Ivy for more than a minute after dinner she noticed that those terrible dark circles had sprung up under her eyes again.
Gryffindor was not to versus Ravenclaw until the last week of May and so Sterling had not set any training sessions for his quidditch team until the end of April. Instead, he and Walter were spending increasingly long hours in the school library and not once had Minerva woken in the night to Augusta sneaking down the stairs. She was too busy furiously revising transfiguration and memorising charts of runes. For once, study was the least of Minerva's concerns. All the magical theory in the world could not help her if she could not perform any magic.
She had taken full advantage of her friends' absence and their preoccupation with their homework and took it as an opportunity to experiment with the phoenix wand that Dumbledore had lent her. It was not nearly as stubborn as her grandmother's old unicorn wand which had only ever given up its magic with the greatest reluctance but it did not seem to want to cooperate with her either. She felt that it was playing a rather strange game of tug-o-war with her and, even stranger, that it was being deliberately cheeky. She found herself asking herself if that were even possible but with every spell she cast she became more convinced that it was so. It performed every spell almost perfectly. Almost.
The day before the Hogwarts Express was due to return with her brothers and the rest of the school Minerva shut herself away in an empty classroom on the seventh floor. With regular classes about to resume she was beginning to feel more and more nervous about the lack of control and accuracy she had over her magic. She shut the door behind her resolutely, absolutely determined to wrestle obedience from it before Monday.
She had levitated the tables so that they all balanced one on top of the other until the leg of the very last one slipped and sent them all crashing down. Angry, she had righted them all with a long sweep of her arm only for the desks to all be facing the back of the room instead of the teacher's desk.
She tried summoning books from the shelves around the walls and while they all flew perfectly towards her outstretched hand they somehow managed to soar past her reaching finger tips.
She had animated one of the astronomy charts so that the planets and constellations rotated on their axis. All save for the constellation Auriga. It remained infuriatingly inanimate no matter how hard she tried it would not join its fellows.
Minerva could feel her ears burning in embarrassment and anger and without meaning to a thin stream of fire issued from the tip of the phoenix wand and burned contentedly and contained on the flagstones. She scooped it up in her hands quite easily and closed her fingers over the flames. They licked at her for a moment. Then went out.
The fire had a left a small sooty circle on her palm but it was quite cool. It was her wand hand, still grasping the walnut wand, that had flooded with warmth as it had done when Dumbledore had first handed it to her. It seemed to pulse slightly from the handle, fading away like a heartbeat. She breathed deeply and pushed her anger back down into her chest. Gripping the wand tighter she jabbed impatiently at the front desk. With a squeal it transformed into a very large, very irritable saddleback boar. It snuffled eagerly at the floor before belching up a great deal of shredded parchment. With a little scream of frustration she waved the wand again. The torches on the wall flared excitedly and the teacher's desk sat innocent and still on the dais once more. Breathing hard through her thin nose, Minerva whipped the wand about her head and the flickering torch brackets roared into life.
The room was flooded with a blazing heat. The flames crackled against the stone walls and licked greedily at the ceiling. With a whirl and a flick she tore the fire from their brackets and set it around herself in a dancing storm of red and orange. She had never been afraid of flames. Not even now as they obscured the room and blocked her only exit. The inferno was of her own making and it would not harm her unless she let it. It writhed and coiled about her in furious circles as she whirled her wand around herself like a fiery lasso. With a last wrenching flick the flames rocketed towards the ceiling where they burst in the shape of a great flaming bird before floating almost serenely back to their brackets.
Sweating and covered in soot she decided that that was quite enough for one day. The wand was hot in her hand and seemed to hum slightly. She slipped it up her sleeve for safe keeping, checked the class room was as it had been when she'd found it, and made her way hurriedly to the fifth floor before anyone would see her.
As she had expected, the castle was mostly empty but nonetheless she crept along the hallway of the fifth floor until she came to the statue of Boris the Bewildered and whispered "Gillyweed" against the door it concealed. Minerva slipped inside and locked the door behind her. It had been a long time since she had last used the prefect's bathroom. It was too far away and usually in too greater demand for the trek from Gryffindor tower to be worthwhile. She crossed the cavernous room on silent feet and turned on several of the golden taps.
Great streams of hot, perfumed water gushed out of three of the taps until the air was thick with the scent of juniper berries and crushed pine needles. Enormous pillows of glossy white foam spilled from another while its neighbour dripped giant bubbles of luminescent gold. Minerva peeled of her jumper and shirt, stepped out of her trousers and set down her wand beside her clothes before diving into the full bathtub. Resurfacing, she shook her wet hair out of her eyes and wiped a great deal of foam away from her face before swimming lazily back to the tub's edge where a stack of fluffy white towels were neatly folded. She sat herself on a ledge a little way under the water level and unwound her hair from its plait before dunking herself again. The foam around her turned grey as she scrubbed the soot out from her scalp and washed away from her hair. She reached over the edge of the bath for a flannel and pushed off from the wall towards the deeper centre. She floated lazily in the hot, soapy water and popped the golden bubbles as they drifted past. They burst in cold sprays of orange scented oil. Sinking up to her chin she washed her face until the flannel came away clean and scrubbed at her hands until they were red. The mermaid glared at her from her portrait on the wall but Minerva paid her no mind and dived under the surface again. The water was so warm and silky against her skin that she could almost not bring herself to climb out but she could practically hear her charms work calling her from her school bag upstairs.
She swam a few more lazy laps of the pool sized bath tub and rinsed her hair one last time before pulling herself out of the water and hurriedly wrapping a warm bathrobe around herself. She combed the tangles out her hair with her fingers and picked up her wand again. She ran the tip over her dirty clothes like a small vacuum and was pleasantly surprised when it did not burn a hole through her jumper. Not quite brave enough to try and dry her hair with the wand just yet she pulled her clothes back on over her wet hair.
It was late afternoon by the time she returned and the common room was just about empty. Edgar Jones was seated at one of the desks by the window mouthing along to his potions notes with his fingers in his ears and Robert Hudson was snoring softly on the lounge by the fireplace; one arm cast over his eyes, the other dangling to the floor. She crept to the stairs to her dormitory and retrieved her school bag as quietly as she could. She settled herself in one of the armchairs in a small alcove, tucked her feet up under her and took out her school books. The sky was still blue outside, Walter and Sterling would not be back for hours yet and Augusta, no doubt, would reappear when Walter did. It was times such as these that Minerva missed Balthazar's company. Two years above her, Balthazar Smith had been one of the Gryffindor beaters before he had graduated last year. He had been clever and amusing and Minerva had found him to be perfectly likeable (much to her surprise he had thought her to be so too). Despite taking on only 5 NEWTs he would always study with her while her friends were otherwise occupied and took every opportunity to ask about muggles and how they lived. In fact, he had been the first person she had willingly spoken to about her father and her life outside of Hogwarts. Staring around the room from her armchair, she wished that he were here now to distract her with questions about motor cars and kitchen appliances. A small smile crept into the corners of her mouth at the memory and she opened her charms book and started to read.
Sterling staggered through the portrait hole just as it was starting to get dark almost bent double under the weight of the books he'd piled into his bag. Minerva pushed her own things away and got up to help him.
"You'll do yourself an injury if you keep this up." She reprimanded quietly, picked up the tomes poking out of the top of his bag and examined them, "You don't even need this one." And she set the books down on the table.
"I thought it might be useful." And he eased himself into the armchair beside hers, slipping his bag over his head as he went.
She pursed her lips, "Have you ever heard of the saying; work smarter not harder." But Sterling was leaning back in his chair with his eyes shut.
"You know me McGonagall. I've taken too many bludgers to the head." And he grinned without opening his eyes. "Not seen Walter today have you?" he asked with a yawn. Minerva shook her head as he sat up and grumbled something she couldn't make out. She was watching the horizon as the sun sank lower and lower in the dark ruby sky. Waiting on the sun, she decided, was a very tedious business. The moment that nightfall was a sliver of gold away she slid her wand from out of her sleeve, touched the point to her beating heart and repeated the words she had said that morning.
"Amato, Animo, Animato, Animagus."
"Can we eat now?" Sterling asked wearily as she put her wand away again.