分卷阅读5（1 / 2）

“The Slytherin dungeons were closed off and the dormitories relocated, as you know,” McGonagall said, walking with Harry down the corridor to her office.

“What do you use them for now?” Harry asked, knowing nothing in Hogwarts ever really was eliminated, only repurposed or left to rot. Part of him hoped it was the latter, thinking that perhaps if there was any trace of Malfoy left, it would be there.

“Storage,” McGonagall replied, smiling tightly.

“Oh,” Harry replied. He couldn’t help but feel as though she was hiding something, but he had been accused of being overly suspicious since the war, and to be frank, who wouldn’t be?

“We don’t have many free offices,” she continued. “There was quite a bit of shuffling for the more desirable ones as teachers have come and…gone in the last few years, and I’m afraid the biggest space left is Severus’s old suite. I’ll have it cleared out and filled back in with some newer things, if you’d like to take it. It’s in the dungeons, so it’s near the kitchens.”

She remembered his tendencies to go to the kitchen for snacks, then. Harry couldn’t say he wouldn’t feel odd staying in Snape’s rooms, when there had been so many years with no love lost between them. He couldn’t imagine making a space that had belonged to Severus Snape for so long his own. Then again, without the Slytherin common rooms in the dungeons anymore, there wouldn’t be as many students wandering around there once classes were over.

“I guess I’ll take it, then,” Harry answered, trying to push his hesitations aside. It was only a room. Whoever lived there had nothing to do with it. Snape’s offices were now just vacant rooms. The Slytherin dungeons were just vacant rooms now, too.

Harry was startled by a pressure on his legs, looking down to see a calico winding around his shins.

“Hello,” he said softly, bending to scratch her chin.

She meowed back to him rather intelligently, leaning into his hand.

“What’s your name? You’re much prettier than Mrs. Norris, unless my memory serves me wrong,” he said.

“No, she belongs to one of the students. Not sure which, as she’s always wondering on her own. And appears to have been abandoned here for the summer holiday.” McGonagall replied.

“Are you quite sure she isn’t a student?” he asked, motioning to his own glasses and looking back at the cat. Her markings looked remarkably like glasses, a trait he knew both McGonagall and Rita Skeeter shared in their animagus form.

“I’d know if she was,” she answered shortly.

“There were animagus in the castle before without you knowing,” Harry pointed out, referencing his father and his friends. He stood from his crouched position, the cat walking away at a leisurely pace.

“Fool me once, Potter,” McGonagall replied lightly, raising her eyebrows at him.

“Right,” Harry replied, though he couldn’t help the little whisper of doubt in his mind.

They arrived at Dumbledore’s office, now McGonagall’s. It made Harry want to laugh, how unchanged the castle looked while at the same time being completely different. Or maybe it made him want to cry.

He followed McGonagall into her office, where she continued to speak.