Hey Lovelies! I'm so sorry it's been a full week and I never go that long between posts! Life got a little crazy there for a few days! Anyway, I noticed that I had Minerva's age wrong throughout the chapters, I had accidentally made her older than she was supposed to be, so those little details have changed. This one has some more Scottish in it, and so there will be a little Glossary of sorts at the end again. I hope you all Enjoy!

Chapter 8 – House Elves, Powerful Minds and Secret Letters

For the third day in a row Harry opened his eyes not knowing where he was, and least until he looked down. Minerva was asleep in his arms, just like the morning before, and he relaxed. He was in her private quarters in the castle, no one would discover them here, and he had no reason to worry.

He flexed the bond towards her, it felt almost tangible in his mind, and he let it drift over the sleeping woman. He could feel the peace that sleep brought over shadowing the worry and the doubt that had plagued her the night before. Harry still wasn't sure that he had made the best call in sharing a bed with her, but he had known then that it was what they both needed.

Just being close to one another was enough for them to share the strength that they were both relying on to get through the next two weeks. Harry sighed they were going to be a long two weeks if yesterday was anything to go by. He didn't think that he could detest someone as much as he did Snape, but Umbridge was starting to cause him to rethink that.

He lay quietly looking around the room. She had only lit one candle last night, and now in the morning light he could really see her room. It was full of rich, warm colors, the fiery crimson of Gryffindor and the deep green of her Scottish roots. He felt her breathing change and he looked down at her. "Good morning."

"Good morning mo laoch."

He smiled at her, "You called me that last night too. What does it mean?"

"It's Scottish,"

"Well I figured that much." She rolled her eyes at his interruption, but kept talking.

"It means My Warrior." Her cheeks flushed a fraction as she told him what her words meant. "I'm not really sure why I'm calling you that but it feels right."

"That's what I thought." She looked confused, and he continued. "As you were falling asleep last night right after you had called me that I called you mo bhanrígh."

She sucked in a tiny breath, "You did?"

"Yeah. I have no idea what that means, but the words just came tumbling out of my mouth and they felt right. Why? What does mo bhanrígh mean?"

She put her hand on his chest and pushed herself up so that she was sitting next to him, looking down at him on the bed. "It means My Queen."

"My Queen?" He pushed himself up to sit beside her and he studied the blush on her cheeks. "Well alright then. How did I know to say that though? How did I know how to respond to you?"

She shrugged, "I have no idea. Maybe the same way you can read my emotions and feel my pain." She looked over at the clock on the table. "We slept through breakfast, I can have an elf bring something up if you're hungry. I don't think I've ever slept in this late." She shook her head at herself as she climbed out of the bed.

"Don't worry about breakfast, I'll get it. You can go ahead with whatever you normally do in the mornings. I'm going to have to find my clothes anyway."

She turned to look at him from her bathroom door. "Your things are still in the hospital wing I believe. Hold on. Dobby?" She called out and the elf appeared in front of her.

"Hello Mistress McGongall. What can Dobby be doing for you this morning?"

Harry shook his head at the elf; he had on one of the most absurd outfits Harry had ever seen. Complete with two mismatch socks.

"Can you go and get Harry's things from the hospital wing and bring them here for me, and after that would you mind bringing up something for us to eat, we seemed to have missed breakfast?"

Dobby tilted his head to one side and looked up at her. "Bring Harry's things?" She pointed behind the elf to where Harry was still sitting on her bed. "Oh!" The little elf bounded over and stopped short in front of Harry, bowing. "Master Harry Potter. Dobby did not know you were here sir. Dobby thought that Harry Potter was in the hospital wing."

"No, but all my stuff is. Can you get it, and then we can move it to Gryffindor tower again later?"

"Of course." With a loud crack the elf disappeared and Harry looked up to Minerva. She was shaking her head at the spot where the elf had just disappeared.

"I figure that we can trust him not to say anything. He seems to like you too much to betray you to anyone."

"Yeah." Harry thought about all of the things that the elf had tried to do for him over the years. "His heart's in the right place, it's just that sometimes he can be a little, extreme, in his methods."

"Ah." She nodded, "I have an elf that is rather like that myself. He can be a little overprotective of me at times, and I have a feeling that he is not going to take as kindly to this arrangement as Dobby."

"Is he here in the castle?"

"No, not yet anyway. He will remain at my home until the start of term, and then he will be here. If this bond really connects us as deeply as we believe, he will have to obey you as well."

"Really?" Harry's eyes went wide. Besides Dobby, who wasn't really his to command, he'd never had a house elf take orders from him before. "What's his name?"

"Corkin." There was a crack and Harry's trunk appeared at the end of the bed. "Thank you Dobby." She nodded to the elf and he beamed at her.

"Of course Ma'am I will be getting you both some breakfast now. What would you like?" He looked back and forth between them.

"Whatever you all have left from the Great Hall this morning is fine." He looked at Harry who nodded. Whatever Minerva asked for was fine by him. Dobby nodded once and bowed again before disappearing with another sharp crack. When Harry looked up he was alone in the bedroom and the bathroom door had closed behind her.

By the time she emerged from the bathroom, dressed in her normal, everyday robes, though her hair was still loose and she hadn't applied a glamor, Harry was already eating the breakfast that Dobby had brought up for them. "I see you started without me." She chuckled at the embarrassed look on his face. "I'm kidding, it's fine I didn't expect you to wait."

"From now on I will wait. I won't eat before you again, it was rude." His response shocked her and it took a moment for her to respond.

"Harry, I was joking. I don't mind that you started without me. I wouldn't want it to have gotten cold."

He smirked. "Then I guess you will have to get to the table faster from now on."

She brandished her spoon at him across the table. "Yer a chancer Mr. Potter."

"No ah umnae." He responded without missing a beat and they both froze. He met her eyes across the table and he was sure that his own were just as wide. "I don't speak Scottish…"

"It seems you do now." She looked at him. "Do you know what you said this time?"

"Tha." She smirked at him, and he groaned. "I did it again didn't I?"

"You did. I wonder what else you know now? Can you access everything in my head?" They locked eyes again and he tried to see what she was thinking, but he could only feel her emotions.

He shook his head. "I can feel your feelings, but I can't read your thoughts. There is a barrier there."

"What about now?" She tried to think about the bond, and then think directly at him.

"Wow." He jerked back a little, "Yeah. I got that. How did you do that?"

"I'm not sure. I just thought at you."

"Thought at me?" He chuckled.

"Well what else should I call it?" She laughed along with him. "Can you imagine us trying to explain this to someone else?"

"Not yet." He studied her across the table. "Before when you asked me to try and get in your head, you were purposefully blocking me weren't you?"

"Yes, I was. It's called Occlumency and it is a very complex branch of magic. I'm not very good at it, but I thought I'd try. I imagine with time, I won't be able to keep you out."

"Don't worry, I won't poke around in your head. I'm going to try my best to stay out of it." He closed his eyes for a second before he moved on. "Last night you said that you hoped I was getting something out of this bond?" She nodded and he kept going. "Before the dementors I was having nightmares. Memories, of the graveyard, of seeing Cedric die, of watching him come back."

"Harry!" She looked like she wanted to comfort him, but wasn't quite sure how. He could feel the conflicting emotions as they washed through her. "Why didn't you say anything? You could have written me, or Sirius, or Albus, or Molly. Anyone would have tried to help you."

"I would have, but I hadn't heard from anyone all summer. I wasn't getting any letters and Hedwig was locked in her cage. I couldn't magic her out, it's against the rules."

Her attention had been distracted before that. "You weren't getting any letters? Sirius, Ms. Granger, Mr. Weasley? They weren't writing you?"

"If they were I wasn't getting them." The thought of no one writing to him was troubling her. She would have to talk to Sirius, things weren't quite adding up. She tried to focus though because he was still talking. "Anyway. For the last three nights I haven't had a nightmare. I thought after the first night that it was exhaustion. That maybe I was too tired to dream, but now I think that it's you."

"What do you mean?"

"I think that the bond is cancelling out my nightmares. Like somehow it's not letting them get into my head because my head is already full of you and your emotions are intermixed with mine. I can't have nightmares, because I have to protect you."

"Harry…" Minerva looked as though she wasn't sure that she wanted to be the reason that he wasn't dreaming.

"Hey." He reached across the table and grabbed her hand. "I don't miss those dreams one bit, and if losing them really is because of you, then it's one more thing I have to thank you for."

She smiled at him and pulled her hand away to finish eating. "Are you planning on going back to the library today?"

"Yeah. Are you planning on locking yourself in your office?" She tried to hide her smile, but her eyes betrayed her. "You know she's going to figure out that you are avoiding her right?"

"I'm aware."

"And what are you going to do when she confronts you about it?"

"Hope that there is someone around to rescue me."

"Don't worry. I will be." He stood and lifted her unoccupied hand to his lips. "I'll see you at lunch."

"Beannachd leat."

"Sealbh math dhuit!" He winked at her and disappeared out the door.

She sighed and with a wave of her wand sent the remains of their breakfast back down to the kitchen. "Good luck indeed." She mumbled under her breath as she pulled a piece of parchment and a quill out of her desk. With a final look towards the door that Harry had left through she set about drafting her first letter of the day.

Sirius,

Sirius sat alone in his bedroom in Grimmauld Place. Everyone else was working on cleaning some room, the parlor he thought maybe, and he was hiding away up here. He was sure that Hermione had noticed the book missing from the library. She had started to ask him about it this morning at breakfast, but thankfully Tonks had knocked into something and everyone had been distracted.

He wasn't ready to answer her questions yet. He wanted to find some answers to his own first. He looked down at the things scattered around him on the floor. The Scottish volume, Dìon Mionn, was lying open on his lap and a book of translation spells was next to his leg.

If he was right, if what he had seen between Harry and Minerva really was like the book described he didn't know if he should be scared, or awed by them. True, it was incredible magic, they both had to have been very strong, but it was also incredibly dangerous. Bonds were no little things anyway, and bonds during wartime, those could only be even more complicated.

A sharp tapping on the window pulled him out of his thoughts. A large, grey owl was sitting on his windowsill. Carefully he slid the window open and allowed the creature to perch inside. "What have you got boy?"

He took the letter from the bird's beak gentle and flipped it over. The same handwriting that had been on Harry's letter yesterday, the same handwriting that he had copied from a chalkboard for seven years. Minerva.

Sirius,

Something has happened, and you being you I'm sure have figured that out by now. Harry is here, and he's safe, or as safe as any of us can really be. He doesn't know that I am writing this to you, and for now I would like it to stay that way. When the time comes I will tell him.

He confided in me this morning that over the summer he didn't receive any letters, or such. You said that he responded to your birthday card, so I'm sure he meant other than that. I'm concerned about this, did you not write him, and did Ms. Granger and Mr. Weasley not write?

Please tell me that you were all so busy that you had simply forgotten? Please tell me that there is not something else going on here? If indeed you did write to him, I need to talk to you. Alone. Today. I cannot leave Hogwarts, not while Harry is here and that new Umbridge woman is lurking about. (I'll explain when I talk to you.)

Albus has a meeting at the Ministry at 2. If you can pop through the Floo to my office, I will secure it so no one will know that you are here. Sirius, don't tell anyone you are coming. There are things at play here that need to be kept quiet.

I'm Trusting You,

Minerva

Sirius looked up from the letter to the clock on his bedside table. It was already noon. He shrank the book he was looking at and stuffed it in his pocket before he clambered up off of the floor and yanked open the top drawer of his dresser. He fished around until he pulled out a black cigarette lighter. Holding the letter by the very bottom corner he let the parchment catch the flames.

She was trusting him, and he was respecting her wishes. There would be no evidence of their meeting. No one would know where he had gone. If she wanted silence, then it was silence she would have.

Dìon Mionn = Protection Oath

Mo Bhanrígh = My Queen

Mo Loach = My Warrior

Yer a chancer = You're pushing your luck.

No ah umnae. = No I'm not.

Tha = Yes

Beannachd leat = Goodbye

Sealbh math dhuit = Good luck