Minerva McGonagall: Topic: Monsters
With slight reference to previous topic, since Minerva pointed out to me that the one led rather naturally into the other. Warning for brief disturbing content.
December 1944
“Certainly it’s poetic,” says Minerva. “A great many things are poetic. That doesn’t make them true.”
“In some people’s minds it does,” Tom says, and lays out the cards. “Inverted nine of swords again, mind you.”
“There’s a ten in – what, sixty-five? – ten in sixty-five chance of any given card showing in this spread. About one to seven. One in thirteen if you were to count inversions.”
“As we are.” He picks up each card as Minerva tallies it on the great curling sweep of parchment, his long white hands curving capably over the deck.
“That still isn’t bad odds.”
“You don’t need to convince me,” Tom points out. “I’m writing this paper with you, remember?” She sighs, and marks yet another instance of the nine of swords, inverted, in the rightmost place of the spread.
On a scrap of parchment to her right is the statistical analysis created for the introduction to their paper, calculating the likelihood of any given card appearing in each place of a Celtic Cross Tarot spread. When they conclude their experimental research, they will analyze the likelihood of said results occurring if nothing but random chance guides the fall of the cards. Minerva is determined to prove that nothing but luck is operating here. She is seventeen years old, and she has dug to the bottom of youthful credulity in order to critically examine the bedrock.
This year, Minerva has filled her class schedule with independent studies. She is writing a History of Magic and Muggle Studies paper on Muggle reactions to the occult – from Catholic canon law to the Victorian fad for spiritualism to the soon-to-be nuclear age’s hard-headed skepticism (of which, perhaps hypocritically, she thoroughly approves). She is writing a Potions paper reviewing Western and non-Western potion theory and accounting for the differences in Potions procedure in terms of supply availability. She is writing up a Transfiguration project in attempting to get Transfigured frogs to breed and produce tadpoles (no luck so far). And because she needed one more elective to fill out her schedule, she is doing a Divination paper with Tom Riddle.
Tom shuffles again. “Do you object on the basis that it’s a fiction or that it’s a poetic one?”
“I’m not arguing with poetry,” she protests, as he gives her the cards; she cuts the deck three times and hands it back. “I don’t object to things simply because they’re beautiful and useless.” She rakes a hand through her smooth black hair, conscious that the gesture rather proves that point; there’s no reason to have hair to her waist, black as sin and twice as lovely, except pure aesthetics. Giving Tom something to hold onto doesn’t count as a practical purpose.
Tom gives her a look that tells her he knows exactly what she’s thinking.
“What I object to,” she continues, crossing her legs the other way so her stockings rasp softly together, “is that it’s completely unscientific, and yet people believe in it wholeheartedly.”
“What we do is unscientific.”
“No, it isn’t,” she says a little irritably. “Magic follows set laws. It’s only that we haven’t detected them yet.”
He nods, conceding the point, and leans across the table to kiss her. She returns it for a moment, their full lips working softly against one another, then leans back to take up her quill again.
Tom smiles, his slender hands caging the deck. “You, Minerva, have no poetry in your soul, or else you wouldn’t say it’s useless.”
“I beg your pardon?” she says a little stiffly.
“Who are we writing this paper for?” he asks, rhetorically, his small gesture taking in the scrawled probability analysis, the fresh Tarot spread he’s just laid, the thick textbook entitled “Statistical Mathematics,” and the Divination book with the pretty lavender cover and Minerva’s angry little notes in the margins of particularly flowery passages.
“Academia,” she replies, surprised he needs to ask. “Professional journals, if someone will publish it.”
“Academia. Professionals. The elite, in other words. The man – or woman – who cares what the laws of his world are. The man who wishes to understand how things work. How many people do you know who care about the natural laws of magic?”
“Me,” Minerva points out sternly. “You. Professor Dumbledore.”
“There is a reason that you love his advanced class and most everyone else hates it. What’s the reason?”
“Don’t patronize me. It’s about theory and useful applications of the principles, not useless showmanship.”
“I can patronize you if I feel like it. I’m making a point. You, intelligent and inquisitive person that you are, you like knowing why it works and how, and what that tells you. How many of our classmates even care? That awful thing with the Chamber of Secrets last year – we can look at the mentality that got started, admittedly mostly in my House, and see an evolutionary reason why it would happen that way. Most people only see the romance of the old families, or else want to keep their large pieces of the wizarding pie.”
“There’s nothing romantic about it,” says Minerva, pure-blood for at least fifteen generations, “and it is a large and growing pie.”
“But you see my point. To the common man, the concept holds because it’s poetic, not because it makes sense. And that is why it’s so useful. Poetry, something poetic, that’s something any uneducated, uninterested peasant can believe in. He doesn’t have to understand it, he’ll believe in it.” One finger taps the inverted Magician in the center of the new spread. “And he believes in this, therefore it works. He believes in this silly bit of poetics so hard that he finds a significance in whatever the random combination of cards happens to say. So he believes in the poetry because it speaks to him, and it speaks to him because he believes in it.” He sits back. “QED.”
“We’re in a Dark Age,” Minerva says, a little disgustedly mostly because she knows he’s right. “But someone has to stop people believing in unscientific things.”
“People will follow poetry over logic any day of the year, Minerva. People are sheep.”
“I think it best to hope,” she says crisply, “that one day they will be scientific sheep.”
July 1945
The landlady tells her immediately and severely that she does not permit unrelated male visitors.
“Well, we’re engaged,” Minerva admits, falsely, her fingers curled in Tom’s, “but we decided not to marry until the war was over, and there are still countries that haven’t surrendered.”
She's horrified at the sugariness of her own lie, but this patriotism wins her landlady's reluctant permission, “so long as the door stays open.” A few quick charms and it doesn’t matter one way or the other – she’ll think they’re sitting at a demure distance on Minerva’s worn sofa, whether or not they are.
“It’s really a hideous sofa, isn’t it,” she says lazily, lying on top of Tom on the cushions. He’s hard underneath the pressure of Minerva’s hips, her workday shoes are about to fall off her toes, and she’s waiting for Tom to discover that she isn’t wearing underwear.
“Very,” he agrees, twirling his wand in his fingers so the tip sparkles slightly. “Why don’t you Transfigure it, O Mistress of the Art?”
“No one else has new furniture, you know. Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
“Are you drunk?” To her laughter, “You’re a witch, Minerva. Who are you inconveniencing by doing what you do best?”
She considers this. “It’s the point, I think,” she says. “And I don’t think we ought to appear to have more means than Muggles, not if we’re going to live with them. As I intend to for a while,” she adds.
He shakes his head at her. She settles into the conversation. “A tailor’s shop? Really, Min?”
“Why not?”
“Because a tailor is positively the worst thing to be right now. Maybe not in wealthier places, but the wealthy have all gotten out of London.”
She nods, unconcerned and focused on the inevitability of his hand up her skirt. “It’s all but over. Business will pick up again soon. Wedding clothes and baby clothes and such.”
“It’s beneath you. Miles beneath.”
She raises an eyebrow at him. It’s a look that came to her without practice when she started tutoring first years for Dumbledore. “Beneath me?”
“You are a pure-blood witch who graduated at the top of your Hogwarts class. Why do you waste yourself as a shopgirl? There are hundreds of better uses for your talents, hundreds of things that would interest you more.”
“Very true. But none in London.”
“Minerva,” he says, and she looks at him, meets his sharp eyes. “I worry about you.”
“There are people who need to be worried about more than I do. And that is why I’m here.”
“To work in soup kitchens and tear bandages for Muggles.”
A little sharply, sitting up slightly, she corrects him, “For people who are suffering because of the war. I can help and it’s my responsibility to help. What have you been doing?”
There’s a long pause, and then he admits, wryly, “About the same thing. Relocation, picking up the pieces and such. But not in London. What if someone decides to unsurrender?”
He moves his legs, and she can feel the cloth of his trousers sliding over her skin. She bears down a little. He won’t need telling if she has anything to do with it.
“The Ministry wrote me to ask if I know your last whereabouts. Why didn’t you report the move?”
She arches an eyebrow at him. “Should I need to inform the government of my movements? Really? I hope you didn’t give them my address.”
He puts his head on one side and smiles at her, small and slow and charming and intense. “Now there’s the woman I know. Quit your shopgirl job and come rule the world with me, Minerva.”
“Start with Wizarding Britain. The world isn’t in rulable condition.”
“True enough,” he agrees. “I didn’t give them your address. I imagine your parents did, though.”
She makes a curious face halfway between fond smile and enduring grimace. “They write once a week to tell me to come home.”
“They’re worried,” Tom says pointedly.
“This is our war too. And it’s not just a war on France and Germany, Tom, no matter what people like to tell themselves, and it’s not just a war for Muggles, no matter what the Ministry keeps saying to keep us out of it. And it’s not just a war for soldiers. Their part is almost over. The part that happens at home? That is just beginning.”
“You really were born in armor, Minerva.” Tom’s hand curves over her upper thigh, then he appears to register that there’s only one layer of cloth between his fingertips and Minerva’s skin. His eyebrows jump. “When did you take those off?”
“I didn’t put any on this morning.” No expression.
“Really?”
“I knew you were coming over.”
He smiles, and flips her skirt up. “I’m glad you’ve left off any armor against me,” he says, and she cheerfully agrees.
September 1945
How strange it is, not to be going back to school. How strange that the autumn comes and her routine does not change.
Tom comes by often, though not as often as either of them would like; when she asks him what he’s doing, he tells her only a little. At last he says, “Minerva … there are things I can’t tell you about, things I’m doing that you can’t know about.”
“Can’t?” She rolls over in her bed, propping herself on an elbow to look slightly down at him.
His long fingers follow a lock of hair from where it pools darkly on the bedsheet, over the firm curve of a milk-white breast and the shadowed slope of her neck. “I know you could handle knowing, but I don’t know if you would agree with the methods, Minerva.”
She looks at him for a long moment, stretched out in the bed too small to hold them both in the shadows of her cramped bedroom. He’s beautiful, she thinks, almost detached. He might be drawn in charcoal at this moment. She lets a hand rest on his chest.
“You’re quiet still,” Tom says after a minute like this.
“What’s this end I won’t like the means for, Tom?”
“Just as you’re doing – making people safe. Rebuilding Britain as Britain ought to be.” Slight pause. “Whether the Ministry likes it or not.”
She kisses him, after a moment, bending to touch her lips to his. “And these methods?”
“I don’t require you to agree with me, Minerva, because we don’t agree on scientific theories, let alone on social and political issues. On this point I don’t think you will. And …” he looks away for a moment before he meets her eyes again. “I’m doing dangerous things. I hope you can bear that I won’t tell you about them.” Another long, long pause. “Partly for your protection.”
Her hand curls over his chest. “The Ministry was asking for my last known address, but they never asked me for yours.”
“They think they know it.”
“Do they?”
“No.”
She nods. “I won’t ask any more, then. I understand.”
He curls an arm around her, pulling her even closer than the narrow bed requires.
1945-1948
And so it goes for three years.
She moves once in the first year, to a Manchester flat where the landlord won’t be able to keep a virtuous eye on her back stair. She’s lonely in that city; she sees Tom even less often than before. At least when he’s there her bed is large enough now that they don’t have to worry about falling out. He snorts at the florist where she’s now working, but she lifts an eyebrow and points out her window box of scientifically tended, Transfigured floral shoots, changed from too-old flowering plants to carrots and potatoes and Venus flytraps. They all die in sprouthood, but she’s accomplishing some sort of trials.
“You could do much better than this, and make much more of a difference. Don’t look at me like that, you know it’s true. We’re young, we’re powerful, the world belongs to us! And here you are wasting all your talent in Manchester.”
She moves again back to London around the time Tom stops nagging her to do so, because she’s found a job filing rare manuscripts in Diagon Alley. Now she can rent a tiny walk-up near the Alley (the prices are too high within it, but no matter that). She was beginning to grow anxious for the news of her own world.
“Of course you were. I’m sorry to keep flogging this, but you belong in the wizarding world, not sneaking about among Muggles hiding who you are.”
“Tom Riddle, I am going to murder you.”
“I think if we’ve progressed to death threats, you must realize I’m right.”
“Take your shirt off and stop thinking.”
“Take your dress off and I will.”
It’s good, she finds, to go for her tea in a shop full of busy, important middle-aged wizards and booted, leather-vested young ones, to buy the Prophet and a tin of tea from the whiskery robed man on the corner, even to have an old witch with an iguana nag her daily to have her fortune told. She’s missed the culture she belongs to. Sometimes she thinks that Tom’s right, that she should demand a place in it.
“Demand what you’ve earned,” he reminds her. “What you’re worthy of. What you deserve.”
Since she’s among wizards again – among her own kind, as Tom says and she is forced to acknowledge – she begins to overhear things. This small death in a small village is not so mysterious as the Muggle papers claim, not when seen through the eyes of a wizard. And this vanishing gas leak in Kent, that unidentified pollutant poisoning an often-used well in Lancashire – what if there was never any gas, what if the poison originated in a cauldron? But, she reminds herself with customary skepticism, no mystery is ever mysterious to a café’s armchair detectives. And she is distracted from such rumors by the research journals she devours on her breaks, and by Tom’s visits.
For a long time she’s too stubborn to admit to Tom that she’s been looking for some sort of internship just as he keeps urging her. She writes four-inch abstracts and sends them off regularly, until the entire Owl Post Office knows her by name. She has a box under her bed full of rejection letters she can refer to in future. Many of them point out that the writers have their pick of apprentices and assistants from eager applicants just out of school. Her OWL, her NEWT, her excellent seventh-year research seem not to speak for themselves. The academic world is penalizing her for the soup kitchens and welfare work, for trying to help rebuild Muggle London after school prepared her and the world called her to aid.
“You know how ungrateful people can be, Minerva, how self-centered people are, and more involved in their day-to-day lives than thinking of larger issues. There must be some way for your quality to be rewarded.”
A hundred bits of poetics: the flattery she’s too proud to notice, the subtle and foreboding allusions to great causes and shady methods. Tom plays on her disdain for their government and her belief that youth powers change. It’s brilliant, really. Anyone would have to admit that. Ingenious how he hides his monstrosity.
It’s his absences that tell her in the end. Minerva is too much herself to allow anything to happen without knowing what it is.
The calendar in her little kitchen bears light marks, a code known only to her, which Tom doesn’t even notice. She reads the Prophet. She sits every day and reads it cover to cover, tracking every disappearance, every murder, every act of unidentified terrorism. And then she compares dates.
They match up all too well.
So she makes her decision. She will give him one chance to explain, and if he fails to do so, she will not see him again, even though it feels like it will wrench her heart from her chest when she thinks about not having his next visit to mark her time by, her bed empty and her days unfilled, because she knows her Tom, knows how he thinks and what he does about his thoughts, and she knows he won’t be able to explain these small acts of terror – always against Muggles, always against Muggle-borns, all these crimes of hate – to her satisfaction.
And two days after she makes her decision, she glances at that smug, marked-up calendar again and realizes that she’s missed a period.
She lives barely five minutes’ walk from Diagon Alley. There are six different apothecaries within another five minutes of her workplace. No one would sell her all the ingredients for that potion together, not in any shop one should trust for something about to be consumed, but she sacrifices portions of her small amount of cash to buy those for six other potions. After a week of well-spaced visits, she has assembled everything she needs, and she begins the month-long simmering process.
But then she finds herself waiting. Minerva is decisive; where came this paralyzing indecision? Perhaps it’s because of the enormity of the choice (so she tells herself), perhaps it’s because she isn’t sure of the circumstances yet (so she can’t quite convince herself), or perhaps it’s because she is a young woman who has loved a monster for years, who still darkly does. What morality can she claim anymore, even to herself? None, she answers her own question, her inner voice bitter and hard. Her moral compass is skewed; the logic she applies, the ruination of her life and the inadvisability of bringing Tom’s bastard into the world seem as though they weigh against this other life, but she cannot trust her own decisions anymore, not now that she knows.
So she waits, and waits more, and goes to work daily and eats and sleeps mechanically, when she remembers to do so. The retching in the tiny bathroom at work eventually ceases. The headaches don’t, but she half-blames those on the stress of waiting until the slight swell of her belly and the strain of her nipples against her brassiere become too obvious, the tension of waiting for Tom to stop accepting that she’s too busy and come unannounced.
Then, after what must have been two or three months, through the slight ache she feels the baby moving inside her while she’s walking home from work wrapped tightly in her coat. Without really having to think about it, she goes home and tips her small simmering cauldron into the sink, and reckons up her dates, so she knows exactly what’s happening inside her. The book she purchased (in a Muggle shop, where she wouldn’t be known) says it’s too early to feel movement. Maybe she imagined it, or maybe she wanted to imagine it, to save Tom’s child from herself. She reads the book from cover to cover, and thinks on how she will tell her parents why when she loses her job.
This is why she knows it’s the fifteenth week when the nausea comes back, and with it the blood.
So much blood. It’s dark and muddy scarlet and she could move to clean it up but the pain is sharp and deep inside her, intermittent stabs, and she can see the blood clots that were the life of her son in the fuzzy nap of the bathroom rug. Skeptic that she is, Minerva knows even then it’s not true, but she thinks she feels him die.
So this is what she lives with now. This memory of a stench of death, of pain where there was life, of the blooming shade of scarlet that she once deceived herself she didn’t see in Tom’s eyes. This name, Myron McGonagall, half-consciously chosen and never to be used by a living man. This knowledge that she will raise a thousand children from a distance, trying to give them truths to combat the seduction of poetry and taking both success and failure unflinchingly. Is this her penance, or her comfort?
And she will always wonder why it happened. To this day she wonders it. Was Tom so far from human, so soul-killed even then that nature could not bear his child? She doesn’t believe it. Is her very body incapable? Or was it a matter not of the body but of the heart, of the mind, of her own unsettled desire to keep her life? She has read too much about baby-magic and wordless magic and wandless magic and what they suggest about the powers wizards don’t know they have. Until two weeks before his death she didn’t want the child, and wished him gone.
And if she somehow made that happen? If her own magic, her own wish, killed her child?
Then it isn’t only Tom who is a monster.
22 July, 1948 Miss McGonagall, You may be aware that the estimable Professor Dippet has chosen to retire before the beginning of the next school year. I will be succeeding him as Headmaster of Hogwarts. This leaves our Transfiguration position open. I am aware that you have continued some independent research in this field, though you seem to have abandoned your proposals in the past few months. I also recall that you came to find some passion for the subject in the latter years of your schooling. Please do consider applying for this position. Hogwarts would do well to have such a fine mind teaching Transfiguration students. I will await your application. An interview slot has been saved for you on August the first.