Fathers Daughter

Part 1: Chapter 3

"Reach back behind your pride;

Pull the thorn from the burning pain in your side..."

As Arabella watched "Sleeping Beauty", far away at Hogwarts, Headmistress McGonagall was returning to her rooms for the night. She was tired. Preparing for a new term was always an exhausting process. Entering her quarters, she cast an illumination spell, lighting candles around the room. She set her wand down on her nightstand and walked to the window. Opening it, she looked out across the vast moor, and sighed wearily.

"It appears that you've forgotten everything I taught you."

Minerva let out a startled shriek, and spun around. Standing across the room was her old professor: Augustus Quincy Barton Porter. He was regarding her with a neutral expression, holding her wand in his right hand and tapping the tip against the palm of his left hand.

"Always have you wand within reach. Never leave yourself vulnerable to an attack," he intoned as if he were back teaching and giving a lecture to a class of Third Years.

"You!" Minerva hissed. "What are you doing here? How did you get into my private quarters?"

Augustus smirked. "It's nice to see you again as well, Madam Headmistress. Congratulations on your promotion, by the way. You've come a long way from that skinny young girl sitting in my classes." He moved towards her. "As for how I got in...I was a professor here for many years. I learned a lot about this castle in that time. Many things. And, Hogwarts remembers me."

He paused when he reached Minerva, and handed her wand. Scowling, she grabbed it from his hand. Augustus went to the window and looked out at the moor. "A rather bleak vista," he murmured.

Minerva stepped several feet back and leveled her wand at him. "Turn around very, very slowly, Augustus," she hissed.

He sighed and continued looking out the window. "Please, don't behave like a frightened schoolgirl, Minerva. If I was going to kill or hurt you I'd have done it before you even realized I was here."

"Turn AROUND!" Minerva raised her voice. It sounded like steel. She was very tempted to just curse him then and there. He was the most wanted wizard in Britain...he was the man who had taken Eleanor away from her...he practiced dark magic, and had murdered many Aurors...he may very well have been the true power behind the Dark Lord...he had corrupted Eleanor, turning her so far into darkness that now they were calling her the Dark Lady...he was right in front of her...she could do it, who'd know? He'd broken into her quarters, threatened her, and she had no choice but to defend herself.

Augustus turned around, folding his arms across his chest and assuming a bored expression. "I didn't come here to fight, Minerva."

Staring at his face destroyed a little of her composure. Like Eleanor, he too looked hardly different than he had when he was her professor. Oh, perhaps a little grayer in his beard. But for Merlin's sake, he had to be close about two hundred years old, but looked perhaps fifty at the most! Minerva took the guess she'd made about Eleanor to be correct: it had to be the effects of the dark magic within them both.

But then all the pent up hate and anger and loneliness, all the years of friendship this man had stolen from her, and worst—worst of all—how he had corrupted sweet Eleanor into a Pureblood supremacist, twisted her into some terribly dark version of herself...all that pent of rage boiled to the surface, and she yelled, "Stupify!" hurling the spell at him with extra force.

It hit him squarely in the chest...and nothing at all happened. The spell rippled across him and dispersed harmlessly. Minerva's eyes widened, before she narrowed them to slits and tried again, with the same result.