Curiosity

So Harry was back. A little taller and as thin, but less awkward, more comfortable with his own limbs; his robes fitting, too, although his unruly hair still conspired to make him look as if he'd just woken up. Professor Potter, now; quite aware that he only had the permission of the Ministry to take the post so young because it was not yet safe for him to leave Hogwarts, but determined nonetheless to be good at his job. Permanently harassed, bolting his meals down before rushing off to revise the hexes he was to teach in the next hour, ones that he himself had only learnt a few months before. Just watching him makes Minerva feel tired. And she does watch, and knows she is not the only one.

Minerva wonders. She wishes she did not, but she cannot change her colours after all these years, cannot be wise as Albus is in her old age. Her bones ache in the winter now, but she cannot be retiring and benevolent too - she never has been one to knit by the fireside, and she does not mean to start now. She cannot help but wonder about everybody; friends, enemies, students and colleagues alike. She knows more about what goes on in Hogwarts, not to mention the outside world, than is perhaps good for her.

"You are my eyes and ears, Minerva", Albus has said fondly many a time, always in good humour, but she never misses the shade of regret in his eyes that flickers there, too quickly for anyone less familiar with him to see. She knows that her mentor wishes she could put aside her overpowering fascination with other peoples' lives, however useful it may be to him, and concentrate at last on fixing her own. She loves him for that. People have accused him sometimes of being manipulative, inhuman, even, to fight the common cause, as though that would be blameworthy; but Minerva knows that he has only ever wanted her to be happy. And she tries, she does try, but her life remains the messy, convoluted knot it has been since long before the end of it all, when the dark lord fell for a final time. Perhaps, she thinks in her darker moments, she is too afraid of change, of the possibility of more pain, to allow herself to look to the future. Too many of her generation can be accused of that; it is a different kind of scar obtained somewhere in the long years of war.

She wonders, and observes, wherever she is. She watches from eyes half-closed over marking papers a fourth year boy and girl holding hands under their desk, listens with her slightly augmented feline hearing whispered conversations over breakfast amongst the staff, and talks to the paintings and the ghosts, when she can spare the patience. Old habits die hard, true, but this is no longer wartime, she tells herself time and again - she can no longer claim more than sheer inquisitiveness for her excuse. She always loved running the corridors at night, smelling and seeing perfectly through the stone-cold dark. She is addicted to the excitement of it.

She spent rather too much time in her animagi form during the middle part of her life, a form which has lost none of its aptness over the years, and, she is sure, the irony will take her to her grave. It was useful at the time, her job and contribution, her duty, even; nobody would understand, except Sirius Black perhaps, that there was another reason for seeking missions which would require her to take refuge in her cage of senses and reflexes for as long as possible. Quite simply, that things hurt less there; that loss, pain and fear were dulled by a less complex mind, all chiselled down by the primitive will to survive.

And so now she watches them all. Madam Hooch corresponding daily with her newly wed daughter. Professor Flitwick sneaking out on his little red bicycle to Hogsmeade every Saturday afternoon with his laundry to take to his round, pinafored wife of thirty five years, because he likes his clothes to smell of home. Sleepwalkers, clandestine meetings in dark classrooms, even abortive duels in Astronomy towers; she watches them all.

And she wonders about Severus. Another of Dumbledore's strays, her brother in arms, time was. It's he that she watches most, these days; she sometimes cannot help a catty smirk at how appalled he would be to find that his life has become her pet hobby. Poor Severus. It has to be one of the great ironies of the human spirit that we are most eager to find things out about those who take the greatest pains to conceal them. She wonders what he does to stay so cold and apart, and how long it will be before he breaks, one way or another, or if it has already begun. He has been alone even longer than she has, after all. Her interest was piqued at the beginning of term, with Potter's installment as a member of staff. She knows him too well not to see the signs; his irritation is less predictable these days, his punishments to erring students bordering on the irrational sometimes, even to Slytherins. He looks haggard in the mornings in the staffroom, his sallow skin even paler than usual; Pomfrey had actually offered him a sleeping draught the previous week. Amazing really, that a mediwitch should have so little sense of self-preservation.

He has stopped playing the violin. She used to go down and listen, sometimes, waiting for the headmaster's step past her office in the evenings before transforming and pattering along the damp-smelling stones behind him. He could have taken a hundred other routes to Severus' dungeon, but he always went that way, because he knew she loved the music, and he would not compromise Severus' privacy by allowing her to hang around outside his door all evening. Another thing she loves him for. She knows very little of music, but when she hears the clear silver notes ringing through the stone corridors, the sound pure enough to run with her blood through her veins, she understands what Albus means when he calls it magic. She still cannot quite bring herself to associate that unearthly feeling with the tall, forbidding potions master in her mind; it has always gone without saying that what shows to the world is the least of what Severus really is, but she finds it hard to remember when he drives her to distraction with his petty cruelties that it is he who has enchanted her on so many evenings. The contrast fascinates her.

Contrasts. There are so many of them in Severus, so hard to hold together behind one name, one face. Whatever outlet the violin gives him is stopped up, now, and she wonders why. She would have believed that it was the nightmares again. Oh yes, she knows about them too. They have gripped him, on and off, for years; it was only the last time that they stopped him playing, though. It was nearly a month before the music sang from the stones in the lower corridors again, only to cease again after the beginning of term.

Minerva was never good at potions, but she remembers one law her exasperated professor told her once, as she stayed behind to scrub burnt frogs skin from her long-suffering cauldron. In every recipe there is one ingredient that binds all the others together, and makes a whole. Without this unifying agent there is no meaning, no context or sense. Always find the unifier, McGonagall, or you'll never know what the potion's going to do. Appropriate, to compare Severus to a potion. She smirks to think what he would do if she asked him about his unifying agent, though.

Minerva memorises the school patrol shift timetable the day it was issued, as she has been in the habit of doing for almost ten years now, which like so many of her other habits, has proved to be unbreakable. Always best to know whether the member of staff creeping around the school in the small hours of the morning is there officially or not. She is out every night, shifts notwithstanding, and she never fails to feel a slight twinge of guilt that the knowledge could save her colleagues an awful lot of sleep. Of course, she is not the only one, and he has even less excuse than she has, being exempt from the staff rota. The Boy who Lived, invisible to human eyes, also walks the corridors of Hogwarts at night, even though he no longer runs the heady risk of punishment on discovery. Perhaps he, too, finds his habits hard to break. With a self-restraint rare in her she allows him to go unobserved, now that there is no longer a need for it within these walls. The boy deserves some peace, Minerva. Dumbledore's words, not ever actually spoken aloud, but heeded nonetheless. She leaves Potter be, and does not inquire into his nightmares. He too bears scars, she knows, which do not heal so easily as those which mark the skin.

Wednesday - 10pm-1am - SS. Only Minerva saw Severus find Harry Potter one Wednesday night, the invisibility cloak half slipped off him, curled up asleep in an empty classroom near the Ravenclaw common room. As it happened, she was not following Severus this time - their paths crossed on their nightly wanders when she heard his quiet exclamation as he found the door ajar, and saw Harry, minus most of his torso and a leg, on the floor just inside. Severus had knelt by Harry swiftly, frowning, before he realised he was merely asleep; then he had pulled the invisibility cloak fully off him and folded it absently, gazing at the young man sprawled across the stones. There he had stayed, unmoving, watching Harry sleep deeply, for once, despite the cold hard floor.

And Minerva had watched Severus watch Harry, fascinated by the expression on his face that she did not ever remember seeing there before in all the years she had known him. She thought, after a few minutes, that it was like the one he sometimes slipped into when he thought he was unobserved, or at his cauldron, immersed in recipes she couldn't even read, let alone follow. Focused, but peaceful. At ease with himself. But never this distant longing on his face that cut into her heart, never tenderness. She wanted to leave when Severus tentatively reached out to brush the boy's hair away from the moonlight-coloured scar, and when he did not stir, kept it there, stroking quiet circles over the dark head. She was held as strongly as by any spell, though, by the strangeness of the scene before her, and by the fear that if she moved he would catch her shadow in the corner of his eye, and turn to see her.

As Minerva watched, finally he stood and slowly rubbed the cold from his legs, and took one last look at Harry before gently pulling the cloak over him again, and turning away. Halfway down the corridor he stopped, pointed his wand at the invisible sleeper and muttered, "Excitate", before melting into the darkness just as Harry, with a sharp intake of breath, opened his eyes to the empty classroom.

Minerva still wonders. She watches Severus's darting glances, now, when Harry enters the room, and Harry's hesitant smiles at his ex-teacher, now acknowledged by a quick, expressionless nod, rather than a glare. He looks less tired, these days. She sometimes feels someone pass her in the corridor at night, and feels the cat-part of her mind protest at the impossibility of seeing no-one, but she does not follow to see where her senses might lead her. As the nights get longer she finds the cold stone penetrates her worn paw pads as it never did before; she is an old cat, after all. But there are always essays to mark, unruly Gryffindors to counsel or reprimand, classes of young faces to teach. Albus has asked her to find a suitable periodic publication on Transfiguration for the Hogwarts library. She is shocked at how far the field has advanced, and has spent much of her evenings reading about the new research being done in Milan on Animagi transformations. She is sure Albus is pleased.

She talks to Rowena Hooch about her daughter, and her grandchild-to-be; she has promised to give Minerva a photograph of the new baby, when it's born. She thinks sometimes she is not too old, perhaps, for small changes.

The new year is coming.