The Bear and Barnacle

She's been groping in the lower desk drawer for nearly thirty seconds before she tears her eyes from the article she's peer-reviewing for Transfiguration Today and realizes the ginger biscuits are gone again. How does this keep happening?

Also, when did she last remember to eat?

One of the things she misses most about Hogwarts is -- shockingly enough -- mealtimes. For one thing, they were regular. More importantly, they were not cooked by herself.

And most importantly, they were social. She never expected to regret leaving those noisy family-style meals, but sometimes the kitchen seems terribly silent ...

She'll review the article later. She sets it down with a smack that makes It hoot rebukingly from Its cage and goes to the telephone. Maybe Ed's free, or Mina, or Jack and Zelgadis, and would like to come eat with her ... provided she tells them up front that she isn't cooking.

Mina: *is dressed, typically, in a narrow A-line skirt and and button-up blouse, red scarf as always wrapped around her throat- she does own a larger collection of clothes... they just all look alike* *shakes her head at the librarian* No, I am not interested in door-to-door salesmen. I want something of a more unnatural oddity. Unexplained occurrences. Yes, ghosts will be a place to start.
Minerva: *recognizes her from having been simultaneously in the pub on a few occasions* *waits for her to leave the librarian's desk before approaching and remarking* Have you spoken to Teddy Lupin about that?
Mina: *eyebrows raise* Has something of the sort happened to him?
Minerva: He's working on assembling some explanations about the strangenesses that tend to occur here. You might find him quite knowledgeable.
Mina: Teddy Lupin, was it?
Minerva: Yes. You'll have met his and Victoire's daughter, I believe.
Mina: Ah, yes. And Victoire herself. I didn't catch their surname at the time. *pauses* Or yours at all. I'm Mina Harker.
Minerva: *offers her hand* Minerva McGonagall.
Mina: *small twitch of her eyebrow but she takes the hand* A pleasure. I appreciate your information as i find myself very curious about my new residence.

( In which Mina invites Minerva back to her flat... for tea... and there is much exchanging of information and not the catfight we expected... yet )

Both women will accept threading here though Mina will be more immediate since notifications go to her player's email.

Minerva considers herself well aware of her own character flaws. She thinks this is a virtue. She is aware, for instance, that she will do almost anything on a dare. She thinks this is probably a major reason she was sorted Gryffindor despite her noted tendency to Machiavellian morals; Slytherins are often interesting, intellectual, kind individuals, and the presence of one in their common room who can be induced to do anything just by telling them they don't have the balls for it arouses killer instinct like a small, furry animal arouses it in a more literal viper pit.

And Minerva, congenitally, will go to great lengths to prove that she does, in fact, have the metaphorical reproductive organs for anything and everything.

This is probably stretching it.

“Might I ask just why you had this lying around?” she asks archly. She's behind the counter at Ici, Amour, having been left in charge while Victoire is away giving birth.

“The girlfriend liked it,” says John, referring to his two-year-old Alsatian, Mary Ann. “I buy her anything to keep her in style.” John is a Muggle chemist who started flirting with Minerva in a store a couple of months ago. Minerva reciprocated the flirtation once he proved himself able to make a clever and subtle pun on “encyclopedia.” They're now casually seeing each other as Minerva rediscovers the numerous joys of being theoretically young enough to keep her dignity in situations that were unthinkable this time last year.

“How exactly did she demonstrate liking?”

“Looked at me with longing eyes?”

“You've got to be joking,” Minerva says, as her eyes slowly travel further down from the hanger he's holding.

“At least I didn't bring the naughty schoolgirl outfit.”

He has no idea. “When I asked if you would help me come up with something for a fancy dress party this is not at all what I had in mind.”

“You said you wanted something you're usually not.” This had, in fact, been Dora's specification for letting Minerva into the pub tonight.

“Touche. The answer is no.”

“Well, if you don't have the courage ...” John sighs theatrically.

“Give me that.”



She turns up at the Pub on the night of the thirty-first with her soul cringing, though she is outwardly composed if a bit ironic of countenance.



Minerva is aware of her own character flaws, but as she self-consciously adjusts a fluffy pink maribou angel wing, she wonders exactly how he knew about them.

Minerva's memory has yet to fail her, but she's been prepared for it to do so since about eighteen. The habit of keeping extensive, diaristic notes on her research and activities came from her mother, an apothecary renowned for the efficacy of her precisely-prepared remedies. In compact black books Minerva logs her research activities, notes down interesting page numbers from the books she's using, jots questions for later consideration. She also tends to mark things like visits, and interesting weather patterns, and her time of the month back when it mattered, and any interesting newspaper headlines.

Lately the books have been all about Zelgadis Grayweir. There are notes of other things, mind -- "Explosion in Severus' lab, am assured was to be expected," and "Unnaturally hot," and "Rain of fish -- for God's sake," and "Am being haunted by the ghost of Ginny Weasley, with passenger. Am assured of current sanity, but not of its continuance."

( But rarely do three days pass ... )

Minerva's brewing a cup of tea in the kitchen, as is usual for her in the morning, listening absently to the beginnings of morning traffic. She likes this place better in the less crowded winter, she must admit. She taps the kettle with her wand to make steam hiss from the spout, pours the boiling water over the tea strainer, adds milk and sugar and turns to go to the desk she's finally moved into her decidedly Spartan lounge, since Severus was apparently suffering for not being able to cook around her books.

And barely retains her hold on the teacup when she falls gasping against the counter. It feels quite literally like her heart misses a beat.

A small girl wearing a Gryffindor scarf over a slightly-too-small flannel nightgown is curled up in one of the kitchen chairs, her knees tucked to her chest, her carrot-red hair falling around her shoulders, her brown eyes enormous in a pale, freckled face.

I always said Weasleys would be the death of me, she thinks in a distant cynical part of her brain as she tries to get herself breathing again, and more dimly yet, one day I'll have to admit I'm going to someday be too old for all this. Breathing. Setting down her teacup. More breathing. It's slowly becoming possible again. Now work on blinking. Pulse will take care of itself.

She still sounds strained and frightened when she speaks, but it's under control. "Ginny? Ginny Weasley?"

The girl looks as frightened as Minerva feels. "Professor McGonagall?"

Minerva nods, and sets down the teacup before she crushes it. She's already cracked the handle with the force of her clutching hand, she notices, and she's bleeding a little. "Yes, Miss Weasley. Don't worry; everything is fine." It's not fine, and it may show; comfort does not come naturally to Minerva. Ginny is small, young. Eleven, isn't she? Of course, yes, bloody well eleven. And the scarf and socks with the nightgown, it must have been winter. "One moment and then we'll sort things out."

She returns to the sink to wash away the trickle of blood. She'll call Victoire -- no, Victoire is heavily pregnant and might still be resting at such an early hour. She's the only direct family Ginny has here, but with the baby -- well, Ginny can spend a few nights with Dora until they work something out. Minerva will sort matters somehow.

But when she turns around once more, bloody hand pressed into a folded cloth, Ginny is off the chair and standing huddled in the mote-filled beam of morning sunlight that streams through the kitchen window. And the dust that dances in the light dances through her. The brilliant red of her hair, the bold stripes of the scarf, the pale rose of the nightgown and even the charcoal gray of falling-down knee socks are clearly apparent, but Ginny is transparent as any ghost, bisected by the warm light.

She raises her head, and her eyes appear curiously pale and blank. She smiles sweetly. "Dear Tom says hello too," she tells Minerva.

Minerva tries very hard not to faint dead away.

She accepts the bit of cake with thanks when Ivonka pokes it onto her table, only looking up to be polite, then dives back into her reading. She's surrounded by three painful-looing books, a half-drunk cup of tea, and a thick diary of notes, heavily scrawled with marginal cross-references and thickly drawn arrows, abloom with question marks. Occasionally she turns a page or two; less frequently, she inks her quill and makes an abbreviated entry.

As she nibbles the brownie, however, the page-turns grow less frequent, and she goes from book to notes more often, as though she's having trouble focusing.

After about ten minutes, she reaches up and pulls a couple of bobby pins from her hair, shaking it out so it falls down her back. It's still thick and heavy and surprisingly long, though the black has been heavily ribboned with grey for fifteen years now. She also appears to have been reading the same paragraph for quite a while now.

Soon she gives up and sits back in her chair, taking a sip from her teacup and grimacing to find it stone cold, finding herself a little more able, at the moment, to focus on people-watching than her endless frustrating research.

Minerva hasn't got many secrets anymore. She's more or less given them up now that she doesn't have a career riding on them and her reputation seems able to take care of itself.

This isn't to say that she's advertising about her life, but her greatest secret was Tom (and Myron, who would have been sixty by now, how old she's somehow gotten ... and how young she was then), and that she's discussed with at least two of her new acquaintances. Of course, she hasn't seen Susan or the Doctor in months, so apparently that secret is safe, but she feels no imperative to hide the experience now. This does not, however, mean that she's going to chat about it.

When she thinks about it, she's never had many secrets as such, apart from the affair with Tom and its result. There was Dumbledore and the reason why she was his standing date to Ministry functions, but that wasn't a secret so much as something everyone knew who had a reason to know. There's a distinction.

All Hogwarts professors who know what's good for them keep their private life private, since teachers who see most of wizarding Britain in their classrooms are perforce something of public figures and their personal enmities, love affairs and youthful indiscretions would be interesting gossip to literally every adult in their culture. She doesn't see this as secrecy so much as good self-management.

( But to her deathbed, Minerva will never tell anyone ... )

Minerva wasn't sure of the workability of this idea when it finally occurred, but it was the best she had and Xellos seemed to think it would be fine.

She goes into Canterbury to find a calligrapher and is greeted at the door by a young woman in a sleek pantsuit -- the shop is sleek and modern, monochromatic with dashes of red, the lines clean and sharp as the works the room is intended to display. It's lovely, but Minerva is still not entirely convinced.

But after she explains her errand as thoroughly as possible, the young woman invites her cordially upstairs into a small studio where a bent old woman, perhaps her own age, in very thick lenses grinds red ink on a stone. This is the master calligrapher. She explains the mechanics of the process dutifully, showing the paper, the silk scroll, and the red and black inks, pointing out examples on the walls in a clearly prepared sales pitch. When Minerva repeats her description of Anotsu, though, she seems to catch the woman's interest.

The calligrapher explains how the balance of the work is crucial to its success, how every composition must contain at least one blot where the brush is heavy with ink, and a dry fan where it's running lower, because while the harmony, rhythm and uniformity cannot be compromised, what might seem to be an imperfection is what carries beauty. Minerva is entranced. As they discuss the commission, the calligrapher mixes ink and paints a few ideas, small and quick, on thin paper.

They decide on the phrase onkochishin: "Respect the past, create the new." Minerva picks up the finished scroll in two weeks, and leaves it at Anotsu's door while he's out, with a note.

For Anotsu Kagehisa from Minerva McGonagall, in hopes you will find pleasure and use in this gift.

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. )