The Marauders: Year Six #Wattys2017

Put Your Claws Away

Put Your Claws Away

Minerva McGonagall woke breathless and with tears upon her cheeks. She had dreamed of the green flash of light again. She lay in the bed that had been hers when she was a girl, in a room she had not been in in years, and stared about at the ceiling, and the old furniture, at the knick-knacks and photographs and relics of a life long ago left behind. Being here, in the Reverend's Manse of Faere Dhu, made her feel small in a way she couldn't explain. And now, she shivered from a nightmare beneath the same quilt she'd shivered beneath as a little girl, and it made her heart ache.

Casting aside her blankets, she got up and walked 'round the bed to the window. It was freezing outside, but she bundled herself up in her cloaks and she used her wand to unstick the window frame and melt a patch of the snow from the roof outside her window sill and she sat on the edge of it, like she used to do when she was a small girl, and she stared off at the glow of the town lights over the hill. The town used to be small enough to not give off enough light to glow like that, when she was little she used to be able to see the flash from the lighthouse on Dunnet Head. But no more. Now the street lamps and glow in Faere Dhu caused a faint glow on the horizon that blocked the lighthouse's flash.

She hugged her knees, her nose aching from the bite of the chill in the air.

In the summer, when she was young, Dougal McGregor used to come walking up that driveway, more often than not eating an apple or some other bit of food, and whistling. Oh how Dou liked to whistle, she thought. She could almost hear it. He would stand there at the corner by the barn, look up at her as she sat exactly where she was now, usually holding a cat, and he'd call up to her, "Minnie McGonagall, are yeh goin' ter come down here yeh self or should I come up and get yeh?"

She stared at the place by the barn he would stand, smiling. Sometimes holding a fishing pole, sometimes not.

Sometimes it was at night he would come, like this, and he'd have a low-glowing lantern and would have thrown tiny pebbles up at her window to wake her.

Sometimes she ran through the house, shouting she was going out, and sometimes she had to sneak out, grabbing onto the branches of the old tree and letting herself down slowly - though she'd always had the ability to land on her feet.

She looked over her shoulder into the bedroom and got a sudden urge to give climbing down that old tree a go. Not as a person, of course, she wasn't that silly, but -- with a pop, she was a tabby cat and she took a moment to adjust her eyes to the new way of seeing. The night was less dark when she was a cat - and the feelings weighing her down, the echos of her brothers laughing in the yard and shouting in the halls behind her, all seemed further away. She shook her fur out and walked slowly, gingerly over the snow, shaking out her paws to clear the ice from the pads of her feet as she hopped through it to the gutter rail and prepared to jump. She flicked her tail and took a leap and she would have done just fine, but the branch was coated in a sheer bit of ice and instead of gripping well, her paws slid and she slammed into the branch quite hard, knocking the wind from herself, and losing her footing. She let out a yowl of pain, slipped along the branch, scrambling for grip with her claws out and then felt herself slip from the branch altogether... dropping down... falling, spinning, trying to get herself turned over in gravity so as to land on her feet... and she'd nearly done it when ---

Whomp!

She'd landed in a pair of arms that caught her in mid-fall and pulled her in and at first she panicked, her legs darting out to scratch the offender, until she heard a chuckle, and, "Hey now, hey. Put the claws away."