Whoo! At last I've decided to return to this and I hope that there's people still reading. If you are, please please tell me whether you want me to continue, for, to be honest, I know how the story is going to unfold. I don't need to write it out, but I'd very much appreciate the encouragement and incentive to write it out, especially since by my reckoning we're about 40% through the story. Anyway, 'nuff said...

C H A P T E R S I X : A Warning Unheard

"Please wait a moment, Miss McGonagall."

Minerva watched as her young sister stepped out of the line stampeding for the door of the Transfiguration classroom, and sighed. The girl stood to one side as ordered, her eyes flitting everywhere but in the direction of her Head of House, rather as if she thought she was a mouse and Professor McGonagall a rampaging cat intent on having her for lunch.

Minerva waved her wand to close the door as Remus Lupin and Lily Evans sidled out, clearly as reluctant to leave their friend as she was to be left. "Didn't you get my message last night?" she demanded. turning to Meta. She'd always believed in going straight to the heart of things, and she wasn't going to stop now.

The girl mumbled something that even Minerva's feline enhanced hearing did not catch.

"Meleta!"

Meta looked up, her grey eyes turned to slate. "I've already told you not to call me that!"

"Miss McGonagall, I will not tolerate impertinence from you!"

"That's easy for you to say!" Meta flung back at her furiously. "So long as I'm good an' polite an' all that, you'll be a nice sister, but as soon as I lose it a bit you'll come the Head of House over me. What're you going to next, take points?!"

Minerva sighed again. She hated to admit it, but the child had a point. She came round from behind her desk and summoned a couple of chairs with a quick flick. Keeping her eyes fixed on Meta, she took one herself and indicated the other. "Sit. Please."

Meta stayed where she was, and Minerva tutted. "Goodness, child, you really are a McGonagall! Are you going to sit or not?"

An unwilling quirk curved the corner of the girl's mouth. "That's what Mum always says."

"We McGonagalls are a stubborn breed," the older woman agreed, secretly delighted that Meta seemed to be relaxing somewhat. "Although don't let her fool you - Rosa can be every bit as bad."

"I'm worse," Rosa's daughter said gloomily, sitting down almost tentatively. "Mum always says that -" She broke off suddenly and Minerva raised an eyebrow to prompt her to continue, but the child remained quiet.

"You're worrying about what Mr Potter had to say last night, I know," Minerva began cautiously. "That's what I wanted to speak to you about, but I-"

"I don't want to hear it," Meta said fiercely.

Minerva felt some of her patience evaporate. "Meleta, dark days are coming for the wizarding world. I don't need to be a Seer to be sure of that!" She sniffed. "There's ... rumblings against Muggle-borns and half-bloods in some quarters, and you must face the facts. Your mother married my father and broke five hundred years of tradition in doing so. That automatically -"

"Don't say it!" Meta implored, her grey eyes wide. "You mentioned Papa just now. Don't you remember what he used to say?"

"About what?"

"Words. Using them. How they can make things real..." Meta shuddered.

Minerva fought down a pang of ancient bitterness. "Is what you think? That if you don't talk about what's happening then it can't be real?"

"Mum says, 'be careful what you ask for, you may get it,'" the girl returned. "Isn't it the same thing? Don't say it, please."

"Our father must have gone soft in his dotage," Minerva said, trying to speak lightly. "I don't remember him saying anything of the kind to me." No, four decades ago Jove McGonagall was too absorbed in his own career to give much thought or time to his elder daughter. Apparently he'd remedied that with the younger...

"Maybe he did and you just don't remember," Meta said with the airy mercilessness of youth. "It was a long time ago."

Minerva eyed the young girl over the top of her glasses, teacher-fashion. "Not that long ago," she said drily, "and my memory is better than you give it credit for, Miss McGonagall."

Meta visibly flinched at her tone. "See, there you go again! I say something you don't like and it's back to being my teacher!" She huffed and flung herself back in her chair, and Minerva gritted her teeth and wondered, yet again, how she'd managed to keep her sanity in the fifteen years since she'd started dealing with temperamental teenagers on a daily basis.

Noting the hard set to the girl's jaw, she lifted her shoulders in a near-shrung and rose to her feet. She was a busy woman and there was no point in wasting her time. "Very well. It's clear that on some level we're both worried about the same thing, but if you won't talk about it...." Her gaze softened despite herself. "Meta, I know this is a difficult situation for both of us, but unless you want to ask your mother to move you elsewhere, we need to deal with it for the next seven years. If you can't talk to me, find someone you can talk to - an adult, I mean, not Lily Evans and company. Professor Sprout -"

"I hate plants and Professor Sprout is always mucky," Meta said grumpily and inaccurately, for her sister had heard only positive things about Meta in the greenhouses.

"Now you are being impertinent," Minerva told her severely. "Stop it. You know what I mean. If you want to continue in a blissful haze of ignorance, I won't stop you, although I do feel you're being very foolish about it. Here. Have a Ginger Newt and begone with you!"

Suprisingly meekly, considering, Meta accepted the proffered biscuit and left the room as fast as her feet could carry her, whilst her sister sank back into the chair behind her desk with a groan. Why couldn't Meleta have been Sorted into another house, she wondered resentfully. Rosa would expect her to watch out for the child as it was, but trying to walk the line between sister and Head of House ... and always, always there was the nagging dread that she might find herself doing more. I am not a mother, she thought as she Vanished the chairs, and summoned her pile of books. I made that choice a long time ago. I hope it is not going to be taken away from me now.

Much to Minerva's relief, the next few days passed with particular incident amongst the students, although the atmosphere in the staffroom was becoming increasingly tense. Dumbledore seemed to spend more time at the Ministry than he did at the school, and some of the Sixth took to swooping around Hogwarts with an air of gleefully restrained menace that disturbed their Deputy Headmistress more than she cared to admit. Paperwork stopped for no man or woman, however, and Dumbledore's absence meant that Minerva spent more time than ever in the tower room, frequently working long hours into the night in an attempt to keep up with the essentials of keeping a large school running smoothly.

At the end of the week, Minerva was sitting in the staffroom catching up with some marking and basking in the quiet and often random chatter of her colleagues. Their little oasis of calm was broken when Sir Nicholas wafted through the walls, looking more annoyed than she had ever seen him look

She looked up. "Trouble, Nick?" In public the official ghost of Gryffindor House was always 'Sir Nicholas' to its housemistress, but in private she reverted to schoolgirl nomenclature.

"I'm sorry, Minerva, but there's a small riot brewing outside your common room," the ghost began apologetically.

"Nothing new there, then," Kettleburn muttered from the across the room, winking. Minerva conjured a cushion and threw it at him, enjoying his look of astonishment when the harmless-seeming cushion exploded, turning out to be filled with pepper that set him sneezing furiously. She smirked and turned to leave.

"Couldn't my prefects deal with it?" she demanded crossly of Sir Nicholas as soon as the staffroom door closed behind them.

If a ghost could look sheepish, Nick did.

She huffed and began moving towards the hallway and the bottom of the stairs. "I suppose that means they're up to the eyes in it. Really, I can't think what possessed Albus and I to allow those Prewett boys - Mercy! Is that the riot you're talking about?"

"I'm afraid so," Nick said.

Minerva did not wait a moment longer. She dwindled down into her tabby form and began to run, her small paws eating up the distance between the staff room and the entrance to Gryffindor Tower much more quickly than she would have managed as a woman. She was not even winded as she forced her way into the melee and cast a rapid petrifying spell that froze the combatants where they stood. Then she turned and glared at the audience, and watched with some satisfaction as most of them melted away, clearly unwilling to risk the Deputy Headmistress's wrath.

With another flick of her wand, she returned the power of speech to the petrified students. "Well?! What excuse can you possibly have for this brawl - and on the stairs, too! Someone could have been hurt!"

The smirk on Ted Nott's face told her that was probably the plan, and her temper began to fray. "Gideon Prewett!"

The redhead looked wary. "Yes, Professor?"

His Head of House speared him with her eyes. "Don't you 'yes, Professor' me, Mr Prewett! You know very well what I meant! What happened - and how did these children get involved?"

Prewett's eyes followed hers onto the gang of first years who were in a frozen huddle. "Well," he began. "Er-"

"Get on with it, man!"

"Er, well, you see, Professor, Nott here was taunting the kids. You know, threatening them and that. He said-"

"I told them the truth," Nott sneered.

"He said that what happened to Charles and Lewis Diggle was only the beginning," Gideon continued, lifting his voice so as to be heard over the mutterings of the Slytherins on the one hand and the murmurings of the 'firsties' on the other. "He told them they're blots on the wizarding landscape and genetic freaks who should be eliminated-"

"He said WHAT?" Minerva could not prevent her voice from rising to a pitch that made the students beside her visibly wince. They could not back away, after all.

Now that he'd started, Gideon clearly had no problems continuing, and his voice became harder as he went on. "Then he said we'd be picked off one by one, like flies in a spider's web. Lily and the Brown girl because they're Muggleborn, Meta because her mother is, Sirius and Gwen and us because we're blood traitors, apparently, and Remus because -"

"That's quite enough, Mr Prewett," Minerva interjected swiftly. Merlin, how many of them heard...? "I get the idea. I hope," she went on frostily to the Gryffindors, "that all of you have enough sense to know not to heed these lies. You are not what he said. You are all valued members of the wizarding community, and that is why you are here - because you all have something powerful inside you and you need to be trained in the use of it. Understood?"

They nodded as one. Alice and Lily had tears on their cheeks, she noted, and Remus was so white that for a moment she contemplated sending the boy to the hospital wing - but wouldn't that only lend credence to Nott's poisoned words, even if in that specific case he spoke truly? There were no tears on the cheeks of the other children, but she found the burning blackness of their eyes even more worrying. She touched her wand to each child she wished to release from the petrification spell and urged them into the safety of their common room. She would need to see Poppy Pomfrey about sleeping draughts for some of them, she thought, as each clambered with trembling clumsiness through the hole in the wall. Finally only Prewett was left, and she gave him a pat on the shoulder as he followed his juniors in. He was, she thought with an affection that she would never show, a good boy.

When the Fat Lady materialised over the hole once more, looking more furious that Minerva had ever seen Gryffindor's placid guardian look, she turned back to the four Slytherins who stood behind her, still frozen in attitudes that told her exactly how physically threatening they had been to the youngest and most vulnerable of her cubs.

"I don't want to hear a single word," she told them, her voice hissing through her teeth in a suitably snake-like manner. "Until now, I've always admired your house. Ambition and cunning can be wonderful things, and that drive can do so much for our world. But - and it's a big but - you've used it only to terrify and hurt. If you want the wizarding world to look on the Serpent with dislike and fear for generation upon generation to come, you're going the right way about getting it!" She stopped before her Scots burr became so pronounced as to make her incoherent, and looked at the students in turn. her eyes falling on Nott, Avery, the younger Black girl, and Malfoy, hoping against hope to see some glimmer of contrition or guilt.

She saw none. Malfoy's well-cut upper lip curled in a supercilious grin, and he bowed with ironic gallantry. "Have you finished, Professor?"

She let the breath she did not know she had been holding go. "I have, but you have not heard the last of this. Malfoy, you've already been warned once this term. Do you want to be expelled, so close to doing your NEWTs?"

Lucius lifted one shoulder in an elegant shrug. "I won't be," he said simply. "The Board would never dare."

I wish I could tell him he's wrong in that, Minerva thought grimly, but she knew - and he knew that she knew - he was right. The Malfoys were enormously wealthy and they had poured almost unlimited funds into Hogwarts' coffers over the years. No child of that family would be expelled, no matter how much they deserved it. With another wave of her wand she disarmed them, ignoring the cries of anger and annoyance that rose.

"The use of magic is a responsibility and a privilege," she told them fiercely. "Not a right. You have abandoned your responsility and you do not deserve the privilege. Come with me."

She raised an eyebrow as supercilious as one of Malfoy's best efforts when they tried to protest and failed, and again when they trailed after her to the Come and Go room, where she intended to confine them in comfort - she would not do less - until they could be dealt with by Slughorn and Dumbledore. She could feel their puzzled and murderous gazes on her back as they went. Few people knew that the McGonagalls had a trace of power that went beyond magic - something similar to, and yet not, the Imperius Curse. When she gave a command in a particular voice with particular intention, it was almost impossible to disobey. Certainly none of the young witches and wizards behind her were powerful enough to gainsay it, and Minerva took some comfort in that. At least, even in Albus's absence, she could protect her own in some small way.

She shivered as the sullen Slytherins entered the Room of Requirement on the word, knowing that their glances promised retribution - somewhere, somehow - and some future date, and that all her efforts could never be enough. There was darkness coming.