Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality

Chapter 62: The Stanford Prison Experiment, Finale

Minerva gazed up at the clock, the golden hands and silver numerals, the jerking motion. Muggles had invented that, and until they had, wizards had not bothered keeping time. Bells, timed by a sanded hourglass, had served Hogwarts for its classes when it was built. It was one of the things that blood purists wished not to be true, and therefore Minerva knew it.

She had received an Outstanding on her Muggle Studies N.E.W.T., which now seemed to her a mark of shame, considering how little she knew. Her younger self had realized, even then, that the class was a sham, taught by a pureblood, supposedly because Muggleborns could not appreciate what wizardborns needed to be told, and actually because the Board of Governors did not approve of Muggles at all. But when she was seventeen the Outstanding grade had been the main thing that mattered to her, she was saddened to remember...

If Harry Potter and Voldemort fight their war with Muggle weapons there will be nothing left of the world but fire!

She couldn't imagine it, and the reason she couldn't imagine it was that she couldn't imagine Harry fighting You-Know-Who.

She had encountered the Dark Lord four times and survived each one, three times with Albus to shield her and once with Moody at her side. She remembered the damaged, snakelike face, the faint green scales scattered over the skin, the glowing red eyes, the voice that laughed in a high-pitched hiss and promised nothing but cruelty and torment: the monster pure and complete.

And Harry Potter was easy to picture in her mind, the bright expression on the face of a young boy who wavered between taking the ludicrous seriously and taking the serious ludicrously.

And to think of the two of them facing off at wandpoint was too painful to be imagined.

They had no right, no right at all to set this on an eleven-year-old boy. She knew what the Headmaster had decided for him this day, for she had been told to make the arrangements; and if it had been her at the same age she would have raged and screamed and cried and been inconsolable for weeks, and...

He is no ordinary first-year, Albus had said. He is marked as the Dark Lord's equal, and he has power the Dark Lord knows not.

The terrible hollow voice booming from Sybill Trelawney's throat, the true and original prophecy, echoed once more through her mind. She had a feeling it didn't mean what the Headmaster thought it did, but there was no way to put the difference into words.

And even so it still seemed true, that if there were any eleven-year-old within the Earth entire who could bear this burden, that boy approached her office now. And if she said anything at all like 'poor Harry' to his face... well, he wouldn't like it.

So now I've got to find some way to kill an immortal Dark Wizard, Harry had said on the day he had first learned. I really wish you had told me that before I started shopping...

She'd been Head of House Gryffindor for long enough, she'd watched enough friends die, to know that there were some people you couldn't save from becoming heroes.

There came a knock at the door, and Professor McGonagall said, "Enter."

When Harry entered, his face had the same cold, alert look she'd seen in Mary's Place; and she wondered for an instant if he'd been wearing that same mask, that same self, this whole day.