June Week

Chapter 7: Ups And Downs

Dumbledore thanked his protégés profusely for their efforts and then, to their intense relief, conjured up some edible food from the castle kitchens. By the time they finished their meal and conversation, night had long since arrived, and he insisted on walking Minerva back to the castle proper. The two of them said good night to Hagrid and left him standing in the doorway of his hut, backlit by the yellow glow of the fire, waving a little forlornly.

A heavy dew had fallen along with the darkness, and the early spring grass was wet under their shoes and around their ankles. Minerva attempted to keep the hem of her dress dry for a few steps, but quickly gave it up as hopeless. Sometimes she missed her school uniform - it had been much more comfortable, and practical for getting around, than the clothes she wore now.

Once they were out of Hagrid´s earshot, Dumbledore stopped her.

"I´ve been waiting to tell you all day," he said. "I brought Headmaster Dippet up to speed on your progress this morning, and he agrees with me that you´re ready to attempt the Animagus transformation proper now. We can begin working on it tomorrow after classes, if you´d like to."

"Like to! I´d start this instant if I thought you´d let me!"

Dumbledore laughed at her eagerness. "Tomorrow will be soon enough. Remember, it will take a while. You won´t get it right on the first try. No one does."

"I know, I know." No number of warnings could ruin this moment, she thought. She´d embarked on the project with only the idea of obtaining justice in mind, but along the way, she´d succumbed to the pure academic challenge of it as well. Now she was going to take a massive step toward realizing both goals. And Dumbledore was the one who was helping her make it possible. She felt dizzy with excitement.

Much later that night, she would sit looking out her window at this exact spot, wondering what mad impulse had made her do what she did next. It might have been the joy of hearing the news she´d been waiting so long for, or the warm afterglow of all their laughter, or even the way the moonlight glittered on the grass. But none of these things were clear in her mind when she twined her arms around her mentor´s neck and planted a deep, passionate kiss - a little awkward, but with all the weight of her love for him behind it - square on his mouth.

As soon as their lips touched, she knew it wasn´t going to work. She´d never kissed anyone before, but she could tell that he wasn´t responding the way he was supposed to. Still, she hung on doggedly, with the thought that somehow if she tried hard enough her feelings might suffice for both of them, until he untangled himself from her embrace.

"Oh, Minerva," he said, almost sadly.

She stared down at her feet, longing for a Time-Turner so she could do the last sixty seconds over again and take everything back. With one stupid act, she´d utterly destroyed the happy mood of the evening. Now he would either hate her or pity her. She wasn´t sure which would be worse.

"I´m sorry," she muttered. "I didn´t mean it. Forget it."

"You did mean it," he said. He reached out, put his hand under her chin and turned her face up so she had to meet his eyes. The look in them was gentle and affectionate, and only served to intensify her misery. "Listen - no, don´t look away. I hadn´t meant to say anything about this, but now I think I should. I know how you´ve been feeling about me lately, Minerva, and I´m so very flattered by it. But I don´t feel that way about you. I can´t. You are a lovely, intelligent girl, but you are a very young girl, far too young to be romantically involved with me. It is simply impossible."

This statement seemed to leave no room for argument, but she tried anyway, as she had nothing left to lose.

"My mother was younger than I am when she met my father," she said, "and he was older than you are. It didn´t matter to them."

"But it matters to me," said Dumbledore.

"I understand." She aimed for a calm, firm tone, and with a massive effort, achieved it. The effect was spoiled, though, when tears spilled over her lower lashes and down her cheeks. Dumbledore fished a large handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped them away, only to see them immediately replaced by others.

"Ssshhh, ssshhh," he soothed. "Everything will be all right, Minerva, you´ll see. I do love you. It´s a different sort of love, that´s all. You and I will always be friends, won´t we?"

"Yes ..."

"Of course we will. Now here - blow -" here he held the handkerchief up to her face again, "and we won´t talk about it any longer. Come, we should be getting back now -"

"No, wait here. I want to go by myself," she interrupted. Walking along with him as if nothing had happened - that would be impossible.

"It isn´t safe, Minerva. The animals in the forest come out at night, and ..."

"I know that! Really, I´m not an infant, whatever you may think. I assure you I can walk up the hill without being eaten by a werewolf. You can stand here and watch me if you have to. I just want to be alone." The harsh sound of her own voice appalled her. What was wrong with her, that all her negative feelings ended up turning into anger?

Dumbledore saw her spiraling out of control and yielded. "All right, but go quickly."

"Good night," she said, and started walking, holding herself stiff as a tin soldier to show him that she wasn´t running away or falling apart. Her skirts were thoroughly soaked for the last several inches now, so dark with moisture that they looked black instead of the dark blue they were. They clung to her legs and made walking difficult, but she didn´t stop.

How ever am I to work with him now? she wondered.

~~~

Working together turned out to be much easier than she had feared. She came to their first real practice session with a knot in her stomach, prepared to feel uncomfortable and embarrassed, but Dumbledore was true to his word and never mentioned their awkward moment on the lawn. He acted so normal and matter-of-fact that she was able to relax and get to work almost immediately.

If only the work itself had been so simple. The Animagus transformation was a different type of spell than she had ever attempted before. And Dumbledore had been right - she wasn´t able to do it on the first try, or any try after that. She was used to being the star student, the one who caught on to everything right away, and as weeks and then months passed, she became terribly frustrated with herself, with Dumbledore, and with the situation.

There were a few glimmers of progress. Sometimes she succeeded in giving herself a set of whiskers, sometimes one paw or a tail or patches of fur on various parts of her body. Sometimes she shrank halfway to the size of a cat, but kept her human form. But at no time did she succeed in achieving her desired shape completely.

After one particularly hard session in early September, when in three hours of struggling she´d managed to twist herself into every frightful pseudo-feline shape possible, she reached the breaking point. She´d been trying the transformation over and over, without stopping a moment to rest in between, and was trembling and drenched with sweat, no longer able to put any real energy into her attempts, but helpless to leave off. Finally, Dumbledore shook her sharply by the shoulder and said "Minerva, stop it!"

She stopped, feeling sore and tired and a little sick, and looked up at him. His face was both worried and irritated.

"I´ve been telling you to stop for five minutes," he said. He still had hold of her shoulder, gripping it hard, though not enough to really hurt. "Couldn´t you hear me? What´s gotten into you today?"

"Nothing´s gotten into me!" she snapped back, annoyed that he didn´t understand how important it was for her to master this.

He can´t understand, whispered her inner voice, because he doesn´t know why you want to do it. He thinks it´s just you getting obsessed the way you always do. Suddenly she felt the disconnection between them very keenly. It was as if she was on one cliff and he was on another, and in the middle was a vast chasm that held all their assumptions and unspoken secrets. The thought came near to undoing her.

"I´m sorry," she said softly. "I can´t help it. This means a lot to me, and I hate that I can´t do it properly yet. Please don´t be angry."

Dumbledore turned her loose, and she rubbed at the spots where his fingers had dug into her flesh.

"I´m not angry. I´m concerned," he said. "Minerva, I think perhaps you should stop working on this for a while. I want you to be successful as much as you do, but not at the cost of your health. Remember what I said back when I agreed to help you? You weren´t to let the training consume you. Well, you look half dead from it."

Considering that she felt half dead, she couldn´t contradict him, so she repeated "It means a lot to me."

"I know." He put his arm around her (a bit diffidently - one thing that had definitely changed since her lapse in March was the amount of physical affection he showed her), and she leaned against him, wishing, not for the first time, that she could just tell him everything and have done with it. "You needn´t give up altogether. Just take a few days off, rest, and come back to it when you´re fresh. Do it for me."

~~~

Sometime during that night, Minerva found herself having a very curious dream, a dream that was almost like a memory. In it, she was very young, sitting on her father´s lap and listening to him read from one of the Muggle books he had owned so many of. ("Muggles may be damned fools sometimes," he´d explained to her once, "but they write corking good stories.") It seemed to be her bedtime, because she was terribly drowsy, and because she was cuddling the stuffed Puffskein she´d always slept with as a child. She was also sucking her thumb, as she had done incessantly from birth to age seven. Oh, the orthodontic spells she´d had to endure as a result of that habit!

Her father smelled of pipe smoke and the strange ingredients he put in his potions, and his voice rumbled and reverberated through her small body as he spoke.

"'As for you,' Alice repeated, catching hold of the little creature in the very act of jumping over a bottle which had just lighted upon the table, 'I'll shake you into a kitten, that I will!'"

"Can you really shake someone into a kitten?" Minerva interrupted.

"You´d be surprised at what you can do, if you try," he said. "Do you want to hear the rest of this story or not?"

"Yes," she said, nestling deeper into the crook of his arm. He went back to reading.

"The Red Queen made no resistance whatever; only her face grew very small, and her eyes got large and green: and still, as Alice went on shaking her, she kept on growing shorter - and fatter - and softer - and rounder-and -

-- and it really was a kitten, after all."

On the last word, she woke up all at once, heart racing, the almost-forgotten sound of her father´s voice echoing in her ears. Her blankets were tangled around her. Their weight was almost intolerable, as if they were made of lead instead of cotton. They were making her feverishly hot. She squirmed fretfully until she got out from under them - and realized that there was more wrong here than just too many covers. Her bed seemed to have grown since she´d fallen asleep, grown into a vast plateau the size of three of the tables in the Great Hall pushed together. The ceiling looked miles away. So did the floor, and all the walls. Some things were blurrier than usual, some things were sharper, and the colors of her curtains and carpet were very muddled.

And her vision wasn´t the only thing that had gone strange. Every inch of her felt hypersensitive, as if she´d been sunburned. Without the oppressive blankets on her, the very air itched and tingled on her skin. The room was full of powerful, conflicting odors, too: owl feathers, wool, ink, parchment, perfume, tea leaves, and others she couldn´t pick out individually.

She bolted upright in a panic, trying to figure out what had happened. The last time she´d woken up so disoriented had been that awful morning in June - but this wasn´t the same. She didn´t feel ill or in pain, just strange.

I´m not myself, she thought. I´m not myself AT ALL. It seemed a ridiculous understatement, but it summed up the situation better than anything else.

Slowly, fearfully, she looked down at her own body to see what sort of condition it was in, and nearly fainted. She had fur, soft grey fur with black stripes. Her hands and feet were soft, padded paws. And that long whippy thing behind her- she switched it experimentally - was a tail. For once, all the parts she´d been producing singly were there at the same time.

She was a cat. Somehow, in her sleep, she´d accomplished the task she hadn´t been able to while awake. But she hadn´t even tried to do it, and now she wasn´t sure she´d be able to get back again - she´d been practicing under such close supervision from Dumbledore that she´d assumed he would be there to help her when this moment arrived. Someone was supposed to be there, just in case something went wrong.

Nothing terrible seemed to be happening, though. She felt confused and distressed, but she still had a fair grip on the situation. Perhaps she could change back on her own after all.

Stay calm. It´s only Transfiguration, really, and you know how to do that. Just try the reverse transformation, and if it doesn´t work - well, then you can figure out what to do from there.

Closing her eyes and plucking up all her courage, she concentrated hard on the reversal spell. Nothing happened the first time, or the ten times after that, and she began to lose hope. Then on the twelfth attempt, with a slightly nauseating stretching-and-growing sensation, she turned back into herself.

No sooner had she finished changing than she was off the bed, wrenching open her door and pelting barefoot through the halls as if chased by trolls. She reached Dumbledore´s private apartments, barked out the password (he´d given it to her some time ago in case of emergencies), slammed his door behind her and burst into the bedroom, where he lay asleep with his glasses still perched on his nose and an open book facedown beside him. Without a thought to the propriety of her actions, she fell on her knees at his bedside and flung herself across his chest.

"Argh - what - Minerva? What are you doing in here? What´s happened?" Pushing her off, he sat up and looked at her in surprise and suspicion. She realized that he probably thought she was making another clumsy attempt at seduction, but she was too excited to care.

"The transformation - I woke up and I was - but it happened by accident - Albus, it worked! I turned!"

"You did? Completely?"

"Yes, completely. I don´t know how I did it, though. I was asleep, and when I woke up, I was a cat. I had a little trouble with the counterspell, but I got it right eventually. Then I came here." She ran a hand through her loose, tangled hair and tried to smooth the creases out of her nightgown, thinking Oh, my Lord, I must look like a madwoman from a Gothic novel. No wonder he´s staring at me like that.

"Fascinating," Dumbledore said. "Minerva, I promise you we will sort it all out, but for now, please excuse me so I can get dressed. And I really think you ought to get dressed too. Go put something on and come back in ten minutes."

"Oh ... oh, of course," she said, standing up and sidling toward the door. "I´m sorry I barged in on you. I was, ah, a little agitated."

"That is completely understandable," he said with a smile. "Oh, and Minerva?"

"Yes?" She turned, almost at the door, and looked back at him.

"Congratulations," he said. "You´re an Animagus."