Chapter 11: Mn

She wasn't planning to go to bed till she had finished marking the term papers. The OWLs wouldn't be marked by her, but they would finally come to her. For moderation if necessary.

That meant she wouldn't be able to look at the one paper that she really wanted to read through, Ms. Granger's. That strictly wasn't true. She was curious to see how Mr. Potter and Mr. Weasley had done as well, along with some of the students from the other houses, like Ravenclaw's Ms. Patil, Hufflepuff's Ms. Bones and Slytherin's Ms. Greengrass. The girls were the best in their year, in that order, though the order would often switch between Ms. Bones and Ms. Greengrass.

Mr. Potter. She wasn't sure what to make of him. At least not fully. She knew he seemed to be a prodigy in Quidditch having effortlessly taken and maintained the position of Seeker in the Gryffindor team from his first year (she had had to convince Dumbledore a fair bit to allow Mr. Potter to be a part of the team). And that trouble always seemed to follow him through every single year of study at Hogwarts.

Her cheeks tinged pink in embarrassment as she realized how she had dismissed the claims of Mr. Potter, Ms. Granger and Mr. Weasley on the Philosopher's Stone without investigating it further. In the end, they had been proven to be right.

Next came the Chamber of Secrets fiasco where Mr. Potter had been branded the Heir of Slytherin and had been shunned by most of the school. Again, she hadn't done anything to aid his cause. Her only defence (however weak it sounded) was that Mr. Potter seemed to be caught at the wrong place at the wrong time nearly every time that happened. The time her doubt had truly been removed from the mind had been when Ms. Granger had been petrified and it was something that she did not want to remember. Neither that nor the subsequent inaction by the staff to rescue Ms. Ginerva Weasley. The pinks of her cheeks intensified as she realized just how very nearly the teachers had condemned Ms. Weasley to her death by entrusting her rescue to that phony Lockhart as they waited for the Headmaster to rescue them from yet another impossible situation.

Thankfully Mr. Potter, aided by Mr. Weasley in flesh and Ms. Granger in spirit and brains, had figured out the location of the Chamber and had somehow returned with Ms. Weasley still alive. They had been very nearly killed, but they had managed to pull through and come out in one piece and kicking.

The staff meeting after that incident had been one that Minerva would not forget in a hurry. She didn't think she was capable of forgetting it even if she wanted to.

For the first time, most of the staff had seen how the normally twinkle-eyed and genial Headmaster could transform into the very version that had defeated Grindelwald, the version that exuded raw power. Dumbledore had ripped into every one of them for having the temerity to send Lockhart to rescue Ginerva Weasley, even if it was just a ploy to get him off their backs while they thought of something else. Dumbledore had been furious with himself as well, for having overlooked so many obvious clues about the Chamber and having to rely on a couple of second years to solve a fifty year old issue.

Needless to say, dinner for the next couple of nights at the staff table had been extremely subdued.

Third year brought the presence of the monsters on Hogwarts grounds itself. And where, as Deputy Headmistress, she should have ensured added protection for the students from the dementors, she did nothing, not even after Mr. Potter had been reported by Professor Lupin to have fainted on the train because the vile creatures had decided to arbitrarily attack him. She remembered, again with a sense of shame, of how she had prohibited Mr. Potter from visiting Hogsmeade, a privilege to those of third year and above. She had harped on a minor point, when she should have realized, after seeing the Dursleys in action all that many years ago, that Mr. Potter would never be able to get anything for himself from them.

No, she had denied him on a technicality, justifying it as a means to keep him safe, and yet not bothering to sit down and talk to him as his Head of House at Hogwarts. She winced as she recalled the line she delivered year after year to the incoming first years, telling them that the House was like a family, which automatically put the Heads of Houses at parental positions.

Yet, not once had she sat down and spoken to Mr. Potter and told him the hoopla surrounding Sirius Black. No, he had had to piece that information from multiple sources, have a confrontation with the man himself and learn that he had never betrayed his parents. Minerva herself had learned of the truth only much later, but even then she realized that she should have spoken to Mr. Potter about this. She hadn't.

While the incidents of Mr. Potter's first and second years saw her trying to understand her mistakes and what she would need to do to address them, the incidents of second and third years got her to begin to look at Dumbledore's actions critically as well. Oh, she was sure that he was still of the light and for the light, but it seemed like too many things kept going wrong.

Her thoughts turned now to the incidents in Mr. Potter's fourth and fifth years. Fourth year had been a real torture for him, having been put into the tournament against his will with no exit clause and then having to endure relentless taunts from the rest of the student population. Again, in her capacity as Deputy Headmistress she could have stepped in and done something about it, but again she had kept mum, this time reasoning to herself that it was just name-calling and that it didn't matter. Even when Ms. Granger had been hurt by the buboter pus hate mail, she had done nothing, especially when the rest of the school again laughed at her.

By now, Minerva's eyes were streaming with tears. She couldn't believe that she had let her charges down so easily and so many times. If she were a student, Minerva was sure that she would have docked the student a hundred points and assigned detentions with all of the staff to learn basic humanity. What she would have assigned, she would have to do herself, as repatriation for her mistakes from the past.

And then there was the matter of Moody. She had known Alastor Moody for so many years and she had still not managed to figure out that the person was an imposter? True, the acting had been excellent and had fooled Dumbledore as well. How did they both miss? It was at this point that she realized that Dumbledore too was human. He made mistakes from time to time, and yet because most of the wizarding world placed him on a pedestal and saw him as Merlin's heir, they ended up ignoring his faults. And because he was such a big man, the aftermath of his mistakes were that much more devastating.

She resolved to herself that she would keep a critical eye on Albus. No more of this blind hero worship. No more of this listening and obeying his views without first checking if it made sense.

She would redeem herself.

In her eyes, to a certain extent she did. When she stood up for Mr. Potter against the woman she first had to call colleague and then her superior - Dolores Umbridge. It was an open fact, right from her little diatribe at the Welcoming Feast that Umbridge was out to persecute Mr. Potter. Minerva was happy with herself that she had taken up the challenge of making Mr. Potter's ambition of becoming an Auror come true, something that Dolores had openly dared her to do.

Her spirits which had risen on the back of her defiance of Umbridge plummeted when she realized that she had offered no help to Mr. Potter during the entire blood quill saga. She should have been more aware of it, and the very fact that none of them came to her for help was a clear indicator to her of how much trust they had in her (it could be argued that the students were trying to protect their good teachers as much as the teachers were trying to safeguard the students, but that would only be a part of the reason for not coming to her, and she had no intention of lying to herself)

And then there was the Department of Mysteries disaster where Sirius Black had died. For someone who was technically innocent of all crimes (and yet not one person, herself including herself, had helped him to clear his name) to have died before he could truly taste freedom and before he got to spend meaningful time with his godson after having spent a dozen years in Azkaban.

Black's adult life had been miserable, and she felt guilty about having not done anything to have helped him out the few times she had seen him.

Perhaps a quick chat and a positive word or two might have helped.

But now she would never know.

The assignments, which she had stopped grading the moment she had started her contemplation, had gone nowhere. She noticed that she had underlined the title "Transfiguration" in a third year Ravenclaw's essay about a dozen times over the course of her thoughts, but had done nothing else. Sighing, she realized that her earlier rule of not going to bed before she had finished grading the assignments would not be feasible. She had cast the Tempus charm to find that it was well past two in the morning and she had to be up at around seven to attend to some of the other school work.

Knowing that the assignments were a lost cause, but still feeling quite miserable, she pulled out a piece of parchment from her personal supplies, wiped the quill clean of the red ink that she had used to grade the homework, dipped it in black ink and began to write:

Dear Harry (if I may address you that way),

I know it seems strange to receive a letter from me. Be rest assured that I am writing this in my individual capacity and not as your Deputy Headmistress of Head of Gryffindor.

First, I offer my deepest and most heartfelt condolences on the death of your godfather Sirius Black. I know how much he meant to you and how much you looked forward to spending time with him, and I am sorry that that has been cruelly taken away from you.

Second, I must apologize. I have had an epiphany and have realized that I have failed you repeatedly. Whether or not you realized that is something that only you will know and which I perhaps don't want to know the answer to. However, I would like to ask for a blanket apology for all the times I did not help you out. I have no explanations for the same, and as they say, it is only in hindsight that I realize how wrong I had been.

If there is anything that I can do for you, please let me know and I will try to help you out as much as I can. As long as it doesn't cross my mandates and responsibilities as Deputy Headmistress and Head of Gryffindor, this offer stands.

In case you need advanced instruction or just want someone to talk to, my office door is always open to you.

Take care Harry.

Minerva McGonagall

Yes, it sounded a little weird even to herself, but that was because she had let her strictness and ego define her till date. It was perhaps time to loosen up a bit and try to help those who needed it, like what she had intended to do when she first joined the teaching profession all those years ago.

She would redeem herself!