Albus sprang from his slumber quite suddenly, covered in sweat. He'd been dreaming about Minerva again. He'd been doing so with a fair amount of frequency for the past week that they'd been undercover.

Albus shook his head. Nights—or days, as they were, since he and Minerva, to better fit with their cover, 'worked' nights—were the worst. During their waking, working hours Minerva was not Minerva. She was someone completely different and he found it easy to ignore his slight infatuation with her. During the daylight sleeping hours, however, she transformed back into herself and he found it hard not to think of her—and utterly impossible not to dream of her.

That was not when it was at its worst, however. When it was at its worst was when they would talk with one another before retiring or in the morning after getting up and checking for letters from Alastor. Albus was utterly fascinated by everything about her—especially her wit, which was at its height when they spoke, and while it was nice to know that he was infatuated with her rather than her attractive form. It was also terribly annoying. He could not so much as talk with this ex-student without finding himself becoming even more entranced by her.

He knew he could end the growth of this absurd infatuation, or at least pause it, by not talking with her. He could not bring himself to do so, however. They'd only spoken in letters over the past few years and the chance to really talk with one another again was welcome. He'd missed it and he could tell that she'd missed it too. He could see it in her eyes, along with something else—a look he was certain he sometimes wore. He could not be certain, however, and the look was fleeting, likely with good reason. She was, he was well aware, attached.

"Albus?"

He turned to the other bed and saw Minerva sitting up in it, staring at him with sleepy eyes. Perhaps unconsciously aware of her sudden exposure, she tugged at her sheet, pulling it up around her.

"What are you doing awake?"

"Dream," he responded simply. "And yourself?"

"I heard you wake up."

"Amazing."

"What?" she asked.

"I'm surprised that something like that would wake anyone. It seems it should go unnoticed."

"I've always been a light sleeper. It's not hard to wake me."

"That must be useful in your line of work," Albus noted.

"That's what Alastor always says," she responded, looking disgusted.

"Why the look?"

"What look?"

Albus pinned her with the stare that had always made her feel as though he was reading her mind. "The one you're wearing right, now. It seems to resemble disgust, if I'm not entirely mistaken." Minerva had always been one to try and cover up such displays of emotion, especially when they lead to a deeper issue.

Minerva sighed. "Alastor has a tendency to view everything as a safety precaution or tactical advantage. It . . . strains our relationship."

"He has good reason to be paranoid, Minerva."

The look of disgust returned, and Albus noted that her eyes were beginning to take a greener shade. Her Scottish temper was beginning to flair. It was best to step lightly. No one cared to be on the receiving end of that.

"I know very well that Alastor had good reason to be paranoid. I've seen the things that they've done to him . . . you'd be amazed at the amount of scars a 60 year old man can get just by being an auror."

"I've not noticed that many scars."

"Well, yes," said Minerva with a blush lighting her cheeks. "He's always wearing long sleeves and that huge coat of his . . ."

It did not take a genius to figure out why Minerva was blushing like that and Albus most certainly did not want to push her to say any more. He did want to think about Minerva engaging in that sort of activity with another man. He felt very jealous of Alastor right at that moment.

"Ah," he said, the emotions flowing through him undetectable on his face. "You were saying then?"

"Um, yes," said Minerva, and it was the closest to stuttering Albus could ever remember hearing her come. "Well, every other phrase out of his mouth either is or is something akin to 'constant vigilance.'"

"I fail to see why that would bother you as much as it seems to. It might wear on one's nerves a bit but nothing as . . . powerful as your reaction would indicate."

"My reaction was not 'powerful.'"

"It most certainly was," Albus countered. "You're avoiding the issue."

"Fine," said Minerva, exasperated by his absurdly annoying ability to see straight through her. "He's too damn cautious. He trusts nothing but his own senses."

"And no one," Albus supplied.

"Exactly," said Minerva, grudgingly. Albus was far too perceptive for her tastes. He was certainly far more perceptive than she was, and she thought that he might very well be the most perceptive individual she'd ever known. He had a knack for perceiving things she did not want him to know. She'd often, as a student, felt as though he could see right through her or read her mind. It had made her fear that he would, at some point, perceive her unspoken, romantic love for him. Luckily for her, he'd never been able to think of her as anything other than a child. IT had been terribly annoying at times, but it had served its purpose.

As much as she was very much a grown woman now, she had a small hope that he would still think of her as he had thought of her then: as a child. If he still thought of her that way then she knew she would be safe from the possibility of him noticing the lingering effects of her old love for him, a still very potent attraction. She'd done a very good job covering it, and ignoring it, in her own opinion. She was not struggling with it the way she had a teenager, and she suspected that was due in no small part to her increased control over herself as an adult and the decrease in the powerful hormones teenagers were subject to.

That and she'd only spent a week with him so far. While she'd been in school there had been years for her romantic feelings to be fostered and grown. After only having known him for a week in school, she'd not felt the way she did now about him at all—but that was to be expected, Minerva knew. She'd been not quite twelve when she'd first met Albus. She'd been a preteen. Of course she hadn't had feeling like this for Albus. After all, she'd been fourteen and in her third year before she'd developed feelings for Albus. That was a far more mature age. One could reasonably expect such crushes from teen girls, but not twelve year olds.

So there it was. She was resisting him better now than she had while she was in school.

"You think he doesn't trust you."

Minerva's thoughts were pulled quickly back to Alastor. "Well, with the way he goes on about his 'constant vigilance' and with the way he acts . . . It certainly feels like he doesn't."

"I'm sure he trusts you, Minerva. He probably only mentions such things because he deems your safety important."

Minerva made a noncommital sound and took a quick glance at the clock. It was about noon.

"I can see you don't agree with my assessment."

She locked eyes with him. "Don't get me wrong here, Albus. I trust your opinion. More often than not I think you're right, but you and Alastor are very different people. You trust everyone, Albus. As you've probably noticed, Alastor really does not."

Something in Albus was screaming him to stop right now, to not try and make everything with Minerva and her lover all right. If they broke up, then the way would be clear for him . . . But that was not the right thing to do. He could not break up what appeared to be a basically fine young couple for his own benefit. Moreover, despite the fac that both were adults, he was not entirely comfortable with his interest in Minerva anyway.

He spent the next half hour talking with Minerva about her relationship with Alastor, and then her relationships in general. Looking at her past lovers, Albus had to admit he saw a pattern. Minerva seemed to generally like intelligent men a fair amount older than herself and a certain amount of . . . greatness, as it were, to them. Alastor was the best auror the Ministry had had in years. The current Minister of Magic numbered among her ex-lovers and the boy he remembered to be her first boyfriend, Malcolm Kincaid, was becoming a very influential member of the Wizengamot.

"When did you date Adam Harper?"

Minerva thought for a moment. "From mid-June to early August, right before he became head of the Department of Experimental Charms. It wasn't a very long relationship, obviously."

"It seems that many of your relationships are brief."

"I'm picky," Minerva told him, fixing him with a brief look he could not help but think was meaningful. Like many such looks that might indicate she had an interest in him, however, it was gone within the second. Albus had to wonder if he only imagined them. "I'm not an easy person to woe. I have high standards to live up to and I don't tend to allow myself to get emotionally attached before I find that those standards are met."

"Have any met actually met these standards?"

"A few," she said. "Alastor, of course, and I've fallen in love before as well."

"Do tell," said Albus, his interest piqued. The idea of Minerva in love was an attractive one, and unlike his embarrassing jealousy where Alastor was concerned, her felt unthreatened and quite curious about her past love.

"Hex Goddard. He was . . . very bright. Exceptionally so, actually. He worked under Adam Harper, actually and he was kind of a rising star in the department. The really fascinating thing about him, though, was how . . . free, he was. You'd expect someone like him to be more business like but he could really cut loose. Kind of the opposite of myself really. It was a nice compliment, really."

"What happened with him?"

"We fought a lot. Eventually it was just too much for us. He was very smart, but his opinions about things were quite different from mine—and we were both very hard-headed."

It had always been rare to see Minerva get choked up about something. It was not something Albus had seen often, despite the fact that he'd been her teacher for seven years. He could only think of three occasions where he'd seen it, and this was one of them. She was holding it back, but it was there, just under the surface.

A moment of comfortable quiet settled between them. It was Minerva who broke it, after she had cleared away the tangle of emotions that talking about Hex had pulled up. She decided that this conversation needed to be pushed away from herself. She would hate to lie to Albus if he suddenly decided to ask if she'd ever been in love at any other time, though she would if he did.

"What about you, Albus?" she asked. "We've talked about my love life for about an hour now. Surely you've got far more fascinating stories to tell."

"I've spent more of my life pursuing knowledge than love."

"You must have fallen in love at least once. I've heard you extol its virtues. A man who's never been in love doesn't do that."

"Well," said Albus thoughtfully, "there was Miranda."

"Miranda?"

He nodded. "This was back in the 1870s. I saw her one day while she was taking a stroll through the garden at a party. A Muggle party."

"She was a Muggle?" Minerva asked curiously.

Albus nodded again, and continued. "I've always felt that one should understand Muggles. They're our brothers in the world, after all, so I would sometimes attend some of their different social functions. When I first saw Miranda she took my breath away.

"I went straight up to her to talk, as soon as I saw her. She was quite bright, very serious though. She had a certain interest in Muggle science. It was fairly undeveloped, however, as women were not supposed to be interested in such things but it was very much there.

"I spent the nest three years courting her, very slowly. I did my best to ingratiate myself to her and her family. Finally I decided it was time to marry her, so I went to ask her father for her hand. He refused. He'd let me court her, but he'd always thought I was odd. He was a man who did not like men who wore too many bright colors or about whom so little was know."

"What did you do then?"

"I asked her to marry me anyway. This whole asking for a woman's hand thing was a Muggle formality as far as I was concerned. We stopped doing that around my own parents time. I figured it was unimportant. I was wrong, of course. She refused to marry me without her father's permission and was so horrified that I'd asked without it that she demanded I never see her again."

"Did you give up?" Minerva asked, her eyes soft.

"Not right away, but eventually, yes," he answered. "Miranda was far too much a product of her time to allow me to persuade her. The fact that we loved each other meant nothing."

Albus saw Minerva's eyes had taken a subtle green tone. She was not in a temper, however. Her mouth was quite visible and her eyes did not blaze so much as seem hardened by some very strong emotion. "If she couldn't bring herself about something like that, then she didn't deserve you."

A laugh rose merrily from Albus' chest. Minerva was stunned by it.

"Minerva, you did not live in those times. I imagine you yourself would have had a hard time breaking away from such a societal law, especially given how much I know you loved your father. Miranda was a woman in some ways very much like yourself."

For a moment, Albus worried he had said too much, but it soon became apparent that Minerva had been made too indignant by his past hurt to pay much attention to what he was saying.

"You can do better than a girl who doesn't want you."

"I thank you, Minerva."

"Well, you're welcome."

"We should sleep."

Minerva cast an eye at the clock. "I suppose. I hate this sleeping during the day thing. My animagus form may be a cat but I am most certainly not nocturnal. I'll be happy when we get this done with and I can go back to sleeping the way I was meant to."

A chuckle escaped Albus lips. "Good night, Minerva."

"You mean 'good afternoon,'" she responded tartly. "And thank you. Good afternoon to use as well."

And with that they both returned to their sleep, the thoughts of each occupied quite heavily by what had been spoken about between them.