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Minerva McGonagall had had it. No, she had beyond had it. Snape had allowed the despicable Carrows to… punish yet another student. As far as she was concerned, James Addison would be the very last of her students to be subjected to the cruel hands of Death Eaters. She wanted to kill – no, to violently detach their head from their shoulders and shred the horrid, horrid people within Hogwarts who were harming her students, her children. Not her actual children as she had none. But she considered every student she ever had (which would be all of them to ever enter Hogwarts since 1956) her children. Snape had been among her children, a favorite too. The Carrows had been counted as well.

But it was different now.

She hated Snape and the Carrows, all three of them deserved to die. Snape more so as he had murdered… Albus. Minerva stopped her march and took a great steadying breath, smoothing her robes down despite there being no wrinkles. The Carrows deserved to die more than Snape, she decided heavily, wearily. Even after all that he had done, she still held a soft spot for the once gangly teen who had been bullied and hated all throughout his seven years at Hogwarts, and then hated during his time as the Potion's Master… and now as the headmaster.

She reached the Gargoyle and said aloud the name of the previous headmaster. Why, Snape had set that as his password, she did not know. Perhaps to rub salt in the staff's wound, so to speak. Honestly! One moment she was doubting her hate for that man and then she turned around and he easily provided her with another reason for her rage to swell. She growled to herself as she rode the moving staircase upwards to the office, flames dancing in her eyes. Minerva burst into the office in a flurry of robes, but the scene that greeted her stopped her in her tracks as if she had run into a brick wall. Snape was sitting, not behind the desk as he always was whenever she came to report this or that (not that he listened or cared), but in front of it in one of the chairs usually reserved for visitors. Not the headmaster.

He hadn't realised she had burst in, or he had and he was ignoring her for the time being. Minerva was too displaced to be annoyed. And now she had the perfect opportunity to make a few observations on the man she couldn't decide if she hated or loved. His back was still to her and he was hunched over the table as he wrote furiously. The sight brought forth an image of the same man but almost ten years ago when he was a teenager in her Transfiguration classes, taking notes for the subject that he was horrid at. Her lips twitched upwards ever so slightly at the memory but it faded and her eyes dulled when she realised that he had changed drastically. She closed her eyes briefly to bring herself back to reality. This man was a murderer. He was allowing her metaphorical children be tortured for small mishaps that would have cost them a few points just three years ago.

She craned her neck in an attempt to see a part of his face. His sallow, pale face that she knew all too well. His greasy hair hung limply on his shoulders and created a curtain around his forbidding features. But she could see small parts of his face through his hair, and she caught a glimpse of something. Something that looked like glasses. Snape ran a hand through his hair, pulling it back from his face momentarily and she saw that he was indeed wearing glasses… half-moon glasses.

Albus's glasses.

Rage coursed through Minerva's veins fiercely but it was short lived when a thought popped into her head. Albus had been buried with his glasses on. So… where had Snape gotten those? And why did he get similar ones to the man he had killed? She felt confused now; she took this time to further examine him for oddities. His hair hung limp and was greasy as ever, "Not taking care of himself still…" she noted before she could stop herself. With a light shake of her head, she continued her examination of him. He was frequently opening and closing his non-writing hand, squeezing it shut tight enough that it turned white. He was tense, yet his shoulders sagged as he slowly made his way through the massive stack of paperwork sitting next to him. They sagged as if he were carrying the world on his shoulders.

He inhaled sharply and exhaled slowly before he turned in his seat to look at her, his eyes seemingly dead, but a question was alight in his dark eyes. "What is it now?" he seemed to be asking. She just stared at him, mostly at the glasses, and when he felt that she wasn't going to speak for a good long while he voiced the question aloud in a startling quiet voice, "What is it that you want, Minerva?"

So many things were off with the man sitting before her – he hadn't called her Minerva since… since Albus had died. She opened her mouth and shut it, thinking for a moment, several questions floating through her mind before she settled on one. "Why aren't you seated behind the desk?"

The questioning gaze shifted to a meaningful one, one Minerva couldn't discern. He answered simply, his voice still a shadow of its former terrifying power, "I cannot stand that chair."

Minerva blinked once or twice, stunned. "Why don't you remove it then?" she asked with bated breath.

His gaze deepened and he said, "I love it as well."

And then she knew.

She gasped, a hand jumping to her mouth, tears forming in her eyes and falling down her face. Sn-Severus had been with them all along. Before she could express a single thing that was going through her mind, he stood and gathered his papers and said in the cold voice she had become accustomed to, "If you are just going to stand there and cry, do yourself a favour and refrain. I have much to attend to and I frankly do not care, Professor McGonagall. Take your emotional self elsewhere and attend to your students."

As he had be talking, he walked around the desk to sit in the chair they had been talking about, taking off his half-moon glasses as well. His eyes didn't seem as dead as they had moments earlier, and his shoulders no longer sagged. Minerva had simply caught him with his guard down. She wiped her eyes and said, "I'm not as emotional as you take me to be, Severus." The way her voice cracked said otherwise.

He raised an eyebrow at her, but didn't comment further on the matter. With a flick of his wand the door to his office banged opened and he hissed coldly, "You know the way out. Leave." And she did, but not without a lingering look at the man sitting behind the great oak desk. He had fooled them all. And it seemed that he intended to continue to do so.

The next day at breakfast Minerva didn't spare him a second glance, nor did he her. She knew that her heart would shatter further if she looked at him now, knowing what she did. He was just keeping up his façade.