Professional Duties

Professional Duties

The man who took Binky from her was eight feet tall and instantly besotted with the white horse. He stroked the great animal's neck and asked, crooningly, if 'e'd like some nice carrion flesh or a bucket o' oats. Oats would do just fine, Susan said quickly and firmly, before setting off across the grounds to the castle.

She paused on the steps, outside the huge oak doors. She'd not met a god yet that she'd been overly impressed by, but Susan took a moment to ask the god of Not Losing Her Temper And Causing Adolescents To Cower At Her Feet Just Because She Could for a bit of a hand. She couldn't begin to imagine what she was about to walk into - wizards on her world were all male, past puberty, and if they wanted to continue being wizards for any length of time, celibate. And they were bad enough.

The room inside was as large and grand as the two front doors had led her to expect. A high ceiling - high being a rather insufficent adjective, in fact - a wide, sweeping staircase, and. . .

She stopped short, staring. No. No, it wasn't possible. She knew that it took more than most people dreamed to keep children . . . not in line, not under control, because those things were utter myths; but willing to do what you wanted because they believed it was the only way to make their life that day good. And she knew about unorthodox approaches, oh yes, but this, this was ridiculous, surely the woman wasn't - wouldn't - couldn't -

"Er, Lady er, Susan?"

She whirled on the figure behind her, and working to keep her professional interest off her face, pointed at the giant hourglasses. "Tell me about those."

"The house points?" An older boy with interesting ears blinked at her nervously. His eyes weren't on hers, but focused somewhere above - she knew why. "Every time we do something a professor doesn't like, we lose points for our house. But we can earn points, too." Then he muttered, "So they tell me."

She relaxed, and felt her hair do the same, re-coiling itself back into a bun. "Ah. Thank you. What's your name?"

"Abercrombie, miss."

"And you're to take me to your headmistress?"

"Yes, miss."

They started up the marble staircase, the first of many. If Susan wasn't the sort of person it was impossible to lose she would have felt lost, very quickly. Her guide was, blessedly, not a chatterer, and Susan was left free to observe the gangly, black-robed bundles of hormones and magic roaming the corridors.

They seemed. . . normal. Light-years ahead, developmentally, of the overgrown children of the Unseen University - and, therefore, no different from any other youths of her acquaintance. While that didn't make them not-annoying (pushing and posturing and yelling), it lent the whole enterprise an air of everyday legitimacy that Susan quite appreciated.

And it made perfect sense. How long would it take the ladies from Lancre to sort out Ridcully and his lot? Five minutes? Here they'd had generations. . . .

The boy stopped in front of a large gargoyle and turned to her, open curiosity on his face. "Professor said there was no need for me to know the password, you could get in by yourself."

Susan tilted her head, considering. Through a gargoyle? Wasn't it likely to have something to say about that? "Thank you very much for your help," she said to Abercrombie. To the gargoyle she whispered an apology, and walked in.

*

Issues of tea and ginger biscuits were dealt with quickly, both being women who found the niceties nicest when they didn't take all day.

The headmistress cleared her throat. "Lady Susan -"

"Susan is fine."

Headmistress McGonagall acknowledged this with a nod. "We asked you here in hopes of receiving some assurance regarding the nature of . . . termination. Specifically, its permanency."

Susan sighed. All the way here for this? "WILL THIS DO?"

McGonagall blanched, and fussed a bit with her collar. "Yes. Yes, indeed, that just might."

Susan gathered her cloak around herself. She probably had more time than anyone, save of course her husband, but she still hated to see it wasted. "Is that all? Because I should really get back to Binky before he gets spoiled to dea-"

"If you could give me just a little longer, Susan. My request concerns a former student. Two former students, actually." McGonagall paused, sipping tea; Susan realised she was in for a story.

And it was quite a story.

When they reached the end, Susan was angry. Really very angry. She had no use for bullies, she had no use for bigots, and she had not the slightest bit of use for people who thought they could scratch out bits of the rules that they didn't like and write their own over top.

How dare this human?

Ah, right, she'd answered her own question there.

"I can see why you wanted to speak to me, in a case like this," Susan said. "I'd want to be dead sure, myself."

"It's not me I hoped you'd speak with," McGonagall said. "I myself have no doubt about the situation."

"You don't? Why not?"

She smiled; Susan recognised it as a certain kind of teacher's smile, a rare one. "Because I know Potter."

*

The hospital wing was quiet. Susan suspected this was because the last classes had dismissed for the day, and there was little point in feeling ill now. She saw him sitting in a chair near the window, a blanket over his legs and a book in his lap.

The matron led the way across the room, wearing a starched white cap, as all good matrons should. "Potter, you have a visitor," she said, her voice a study in disapproval.

After she'd sniffed a reproachful sniff and moved off, Susan spoke. "Hi, I'm Susan. I'm Death's granddaughter. Headmistress McGonagall asked me to come see you."

He stared. It was a reaction she often got when she introduced herself - completely introduced herself, that is. She liked it on him, though, his eyes were interesting in a much better way than poor Abercrombie's ears.

"Professor McGonagall?" he said, after a bit more staring. "Now there's one I didn't see coming."

"No, no," she said hastily, "I'm not here for that." Susan held out her hands. "See? No scythe."

"Then. . . ?"

"I think she thought that the minute you could, you'd go haring off on some sort of quest to see if the job had really been done. And I can prove it to you pretty simply. No heroics necessary."

He pushed his glasses up on his nose. "Okay, then. Let's hear some proof."

Susan took a breath, and stopped. No, she thought. Not the voice. He deserves more than that. "How do you feel about flying?"

*

The matron was having kittens. Loudly.

"I hope you didn't eat so much that you're going to have stomach cramps on us halfway," Susan told Binky. She looked over her shoulder at Potter - good, he was able to stand. She hadn't been sure.

Susan gave him a leg up, then mounted in front of him. "You can hold on to me," she said, "but don't worry, you won't fall." He did, lightly gripping her waist, and they were off.

It grew cold. Stars rushed past them. Susan was not one of those people who saw every silence as something that must be filled, but this one was growing long, and she was curious. "I'm guessing you came because you were bored? Surely you don't actually trust me, not that quickly."

He laughed in her ear. "Definitely bored," he said. "But I also, ah, took a peek at your mind."

Susan was impressed, annoyed, and intrigued. "And?"

"And I'm not the greatest at it, but I did see a skeleton holding you upside down by your ankles when you were small, so I thought, why not?"

Susan smiled at the memory. Her grandfather had always been the best for those games - he had height on everyone. . . .

It wasn't until they landed in the black garden under the black sky that her companion began to show signs of nerves. "Erm. . . is your grandfather likely to be here?"

She shrugged. "Hard to say. He's very busy, you can imagine."

He said quietly: "Oh, yes."

Susan didn't know exactly what was wrong with Potter, beyond nearly dying saving the world a few months ago and living under a nurse's care ever since. He walked with a limp, she noticed, but he was obviously controlling it, and that told her that any delicate inquiries into his health would be met with a stone wall. He was abnormally pale, too, and growing more so as they walked - not just a trick of the setting, light skin against a dark world.

So she turned toward Death's ridiculous sitting-room, with its black overstuffed chairs and footstools, rather down the hall that led to the library. "I'd like something to drink first," she said, "would you like me to get you something, too?"

He took a chair as if it were just something to do, rather than a way to keep from falling. "Sure. If you're going."

After a nourishing grape juice and biscuits interval (she was used to feeding six-year-olds), they went to the library. Potter sucked in a breath at the sight. "Oh. Er. Wow. The R's?"

"The R's," Susan said. She thought carefully about where they were likely to be, in this place that fit the definition of the word 'room' only because it had four walls, somewhere, not because it was anything like room-sized. She didn't want Potter to exert any more effort than necessary, but she'd thought it best that he saw this, and read the book here rather than in a comfy chair, even if it was black.

"This way," she said, heading right.

When Susan found the book and handed it to Potter, he looked at it for a long moment. "It doesn't look any different from any of the others," he said.

"Not from this side, no." She sat cross-legged on the dusty floor as if it were something she always did, and he followed suit.

Potter flipped right toward the back of the book. Susan didn't blame him; she wouldn't want to read any more of this life than necessary. She looked away, listening to the scribble-scribble of books writing themselves, and to Potter turning pages. It couldn't be easy: too much of that book was his life, too.

Finally, she said, "I'd show you his lifetimer, but they disappear when you do. So that's all I've got."

Potter cleared his throat. "No, it's fine. This is good." He closed the book, and looked at her. "Just one thing, though - what if someone tries to mess about with time? Go back to when he was still alive and change things. . . I've never really understood all the rules, but we have these things called Time Turners, and first they told us they'd all been destroyed, but suddenly, oh whoops, they weren't, and his people were using them . . . ."

Susan smiled. Not the cosmically reassuring smile of a partly-immortal, but that of a very human wife who knows exactly what the first topic of conversation will be at the dinner table that night. "It won't happen again. Trust me."

He smiled back. "You know," he said, "I think I do."

*