Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The next afternoon, Madam Pomfrey accompanied him to the Room of Requirement.

"I'll check in every couple of days," she said. "I want to see how she's doing; she's had serious physical and mental trauma, you know."

"Have you learnt anything to help her?" Neville asked.

"Not yet. The other professors are taking their memories back periodically and are working with me to find some sort of cure, so I'll need to test a few things on Miner ― on the professor." She frowned. "If she'll let me. Professor McGonagall is not the most patient of patients, as I'm sure you can imagine."

"She's different now, though," Neville said. "I mean, it's still her, pretty much, but she's. . .I don't know, more at ease or something."

"Well, she's been under a hideous amount of strain these last few years," Madam Pomfrey said. "And that Stunner attack two years ago didn't do her any good. Maybe this amnesia is a bit of a blessing in disguise. She could use a good rest, poor thing."

"Poor thing" was never a term that Neville would have associated with the sharp-tongued and self-sufficient Professor McGonagall, but Madam Pomfrey was right: these last years couldn't have been any easier on the Hogwarts staff than they had been on the students, and he was rather surprised that he had never thought of this before.

"I hope she gets one," he said. "A rest, I mean."

Madam Pomfrey took Minerva into the bedroom for her physical examination while Neville waited on the stone terrace. There was some sunshine again today, and the air seemed a bit warmer. "Thank you," Neville said to the Room, and he could have sworn that the sun got a little brighter.

He had almost dozed off when he heard a step behind him.

"Lovely day," said Minerva, sitting down at the table with him. "When the heather blooms, this moor will be all over purple, all the way to the village. . .oh, dear!"

Neville was getting used to her flashes of memory, but he could tell that they still unsettled her.

"It's okay, it's good!" he said encouragingly. "It means you're starting to remember." He forbore mentioning that all her memories so far had been of Caithness ― nothing of her life at Hogwarts.

"I suppose so," she said, and then shook off her pensive mood to smile at him. "I hope you've brought dinner again," she said. "Though I promised Madam Pomfrey I wouldn't keep you too long from your studies."

"Oh, that's all right, Prof ― " began Neville, out of habit.

She wagged her finger at him. "Minerva, don't forget," she said, and then looked at him archly. "Unless you'd prefer 'Goddess,' of course."

Neville pretended to think it over. "I could do 'Goddess,'" he agreed, and then waited a beat before adding, "but then you'd have to call me 'your highness.'"

Minerva's laugh was spontaneous and delighted, and Neville grinned in return. These days, he didn't get laughed at the way he often had as a kid, but he didn't have all that much experience of people laughing with him, either.

He thought maybe he could get used to it.

Still chuckling, Minerva gave his shoulder a light squeeze, and Neville thought that the Highland sun had never felt so warm.

* * *

Their walks on the moor became routine. It wasn't long before they were the highlight of Neville's day ― not only because they provided a welcome escape from the increasing stress of life at Hogwarts under Snape and the Carrows, but because of how Minerva's face would light up when he appeared. She seemed genuinely to enjoy his company and to want to talk with him, and while such things were not unknown in Neville's life, they weren't so commonplace that he had come to take even a second of them for granted.

But there was more. Things were different when he was with Minerva. He was different ― or at least, he could be a Neville who didn't have the weight of seventeen years of loser-hood behind him. To Minerva, he wasn't Longbottom, the pathetic near-Squib with the sad, mad parents, the one who lost his passwords and forgot his Remembrall and who was "poor Neville" even to his friends. He wasn't even the Longbottom who had shown such unexpected heroism at the Ministry (so unexpected that virtually everyone who mentioned it to him had to express their incredulity along with their praise).

No, to Minerva, he was just Neville, someone who made her laugh and who knew more about plants than she did and whose arm she liked to hold as they wandered the quiet moor paths. He'd begun to feel a little thrill when she did that, and to arrange more opportunities to touch her, too ― to take her hand or to lean closer to her as they walked. A little human contact went a long way towards making life more bearable, he thought.

One afternoon, when he was a little late in arriving at the Room of Requirement, he entered the cottage to find it empty. This wasn't unusual; Minerva always sat outdoors when the Room gave her nice weather, which it quite frequently did.

But she wasn't on the terrace, either, and just as Neville began to get nervous, he heard her shout from the moors: "Neville! Over here! Hurry!"

She didn't sound anxious, only pleased, but nevertheless, Neville jumped down the stone steps and took the path at a run. Minerva was smiling broadly when he reached her, her hair blowing loose in the wind. "Neville!" she said, grabbing his hand and pulling him along. "Watch this!"

She stopped next to a bush of vaccinium myrtillus that was loaded with berries, and Neville saw that she was holding her wand ― the first time, so far as he knew, that she'd touched it since coming to the cottage.

"Watch!" she said again, and pointed it at the blaeberries. Her hair fell across her face as she concentrated, and Neville had to resist an unexpected urge to smooth it back. She did it herself, though, brushing a lock over her shoulder impatiently as she waved her wand ― and the dark blaeberries turned into pink roses.

Neville stared open-mouthed. "You. . .you can control your magic again?"

Minerva shook her head. "No, I don't think so, not fully. But in the cottage this morning, I wanted my tea, and without thinking, I said, 'accio tea,' and the cup came to me! I haven't been able to do that again, but I've been practicing with the wand, and sometimes things happen. . .well, like that!" And she gestured to the blaeberry bush, where the roses were slowly fading.

"Wow, that's great!" he said, and was not at all unhappy when she took his arm and wrapped both hers around it, squeezing him hard.

"Yes," she said. "Madam Pomfrey said this might happen, a little bit of magic returning at a time, but I didn't expect. . .Neville, I didn't expect how good it would feel. Is this the way you feel all the time ― in control, and powerful?"

Neville covered her hand with his and squeezed back. "Sometimes," he said, "I feel just exactly like that."

* * *

After he returned to the castle, he thought about Minerva for the rest of the evening ― her smile, her scent, the warmth of her hand on his arm. Why had he and Harry and the rest of them ever thought she was old and ugly and beady-eyed? Her eyes were lovely and laughing behind her spectacles, and she wasn't that old. No, she was. . .

Neville stopped dead in the corridor, earning an annoyed, "hey, watch where you're going, Gryffindork" from someone behind him.

But he paid no attention; he was too shocked by the thought that had just occurred to him.

He was attracted to Minerva.

She was his Head of House, and she was older, and injured, and he was supposed to be looking out for her ― and instead he was standing in a corridor thinking about the curve of her jaw and the fit of her bodice and. . .

Merlin on a Cleansweep! What the hell was wrong with him?