Chapter 32: conflict

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With a sigh she placed down her scotch on the table in front of her. She had been drinking too much as of late.

Memories of the war at its worst came more naturally at this time of the year, when the conflict would have been at its prime all those years back, and with those memories came the thoughts of her husband and her DMLE friends who had given their lives in the war, sending her into a drinking spiral that Albus Dumbledore often had to come and put a stop to.

And then there was Harry Potter.

She told herself that to treat him different from any other student would be a disservice to both him and herself.

But how could she treat the son of James and Lily like any other student? But she would try, she promised herself.

She had her regrets letting Dumbledore place him with those muggles. Every year she would go and check up on him every year, always finding him a bit too small for his age, wearing clothes thrice his size and working in the garden most of the time.

But hindsight was twenty-twenty. Besides, she had felt the blood wards around Surrey-felt them assess her worth and intent before letting her pass through.

Harry Potter was untouchable in those wards. There was no doubt about that. And if anything was worth her suffering and guilt, it was Harry's safety.

McGonagall went to pick up her scotch for one last swig.

Perhaps in an alternate reality, where she was more inebriated than she was now, she would have pushed her tumbler off the table and into the ground, shattering it.

Then, more irritated than before, she wouldn't have looked over that last batch of letters and would have waved her wand at them, spelling them away to the Post room directly which delegated Professors to handle the muggleborn and owled the rest of the letters to be posted.

However, in this reality, she took a swig and placed the tumbler back down without an incident and went over to the letter stack to look over the letters.

After erasing the bedroom numbers off of the addresses of two muggleborn children, she finally came down to the youngest student of the year.

Confusion, guilt, and anger tore at her in a violent maelstrom of emotion as she looked down at the letter in her hand.

Mr. H. Potter

The Cupboard under the Stairs

4 Privet Drive

Little Whinging

Surrey

Minerva McGonagall was having a perfectly fine day. And then she wasn't.

Ping!

You have slept in your own bed; HP and MP have been restored 100% each. All ailments and negative status effects have been cured.

As Harry woke up, he was a bit surprised to realize that there were tears in his eyes. Quickly wiping them off, he snapped on Gamer's mind, cutting himself off from all emotions before they had the chance to grip him.

Taking a deep breath, he got out of his cupboard and headed up to the bathroom to freshen up and start on the Dursleys' breakfasts.

Lately, he had taken to keeping Gamer's mind engaged all the time he was awake. The dreams and nightmares had started the day after he'd returned from the dungeon.

The guilt and self-loathing that had been eating away at him throughout the course of the day had been too much and after realizing that the Gamer's mind didn't use up any of his mana and was capable of cutting him off from his emotions, he had decided to perpetually keep it active.

Unfortunately, he couldn't do it in his sleep, so the night was when his demons came to haunt him. He tried not sleeping, but honestly, the sheer boredom from the isolation of his tiny cupboard was even worse than the nightmares that came to him.

At first, the school officials had been insistent on keeping the students coming to school for the summer break in the name of extra classes, no doubt due to Ms. Roemmele's interference. She had most definitely realized that there was something strange about Harry.

The strange looks in class… her eyes following him around in the playground like a hawk… the time he had overheard her muttering to herself about 'impossible amounts of accidental magic'… the missing of Carrow's Invisibility Cloak that he'd forgotten to pick up that night… Harry was sure of it. She knew that something was up with him, and she wanted to keep an eye on him.

So in order to avoid any form of suspicion, Harry just kept doing everything as he normally would, not even practicing magic around school anymore. Eventually, his strategy seemed to work, and she stopped following him around.

Harry often wondered if she had just assumed that Carrow had been caught off guard by his accidental magic or that some other wizard Samaritan had intervened, but he had neither the courage nor the wish to go find out what she thought.

The school had finally let up after Harry had accepted a rather rewarding quest involving some seriously smelly compounds from the Lab, a garden snake, and a Literature teacher who was terrified of both.

It wasn't a prank in the best of spirits, considering the poor woman had fainted and then hospitalized after the prank, but Harry was finding himself more and more capable of ruthlessness with Gamer's Mind online all the time. Had he spent some time reflecting on his actions without Gamer's Mind, he would've been rather horrified with himself.

But no emotions meant no limits.

Besides, he had Hogwarts to look forward to. His limited research looking for other people's descriptions hadn't yielded much since Vance and Diggle were the only magicals that were around ever since Carrow had left.

So, on the day of his birthday, it was with an odd anticipation that Harry checked his post, waiting for the letter that promised to come.

But it wasn't there.

Harry was both a bit disappointed and worried. Johnathon had said that he'd make it, but what if it didn't? He had been fantasizing about all the ways he could get the letters as he made the morning tea, each fantasy more spectacular than the next.

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