From the Diaries of Minerva McGonagall: May 2, 1954

Dear Diary,

They say “pride goeth before a fall,” but in this case it was cheating, a foul foul that has confined me, during the last weeks of my final Hogwarts term, to a hospital bed.

Everyone else is preparing for final exams and graduation parties and I am stuck here because those Slytherins deliberately fouled me on the Quidditch pitch. I’m going to miss out on everything—the banquet for the prefects where they should be toasting me as Head Girl; the Seventh Year Skip Day; the dinner where my friends and I planned to take Polyjuice Potion and attend as each other, to see if anybody noticed.

Plus the Slytherins won the Quidditch Cup! It is unfair, but the rules of Quidditch can be unnervingly unfair. When Brutus fouled me he only got a time out, but I was taken out of the game permanently, with a set of broken ribs and a concussion.

I have to assume that they did it on purpose. It’s such a Slytherin thing to do: to calculate the value of one player being temporarily removed from the game versus an opposing player being permanently removed from the game. It wasn’t even like Brutus was their Seeker. They played chess instead of Quidditch and sacrificed a pawn to take down a queen!

This is the worst thing to have ever happened to me. When I said that to Professor Dumbledore, he laughed and told me that meant I was a very fortunate person, but I don’t feel fortunate. I’ll miss the entire end of term, everything I’ve worked for, all of the fun, and we lost the Quidditch Cup! My friends are planning a camping holiday after graduation, and I might not even be well enough for that.

Everyone’s been very kind and they’ve all come to visit me; Alina from the Gryffindor dormitory comes in every day and asks if I need anything from my trunk, and Pomona brought me a vase of flowers that she charmed so they would never wilt. Professor Dumbledore automatically passed me on all of my final exams, since I won’t be able to take them—but even that feels a little disappointing, because now I won’t ever know whether I could have gotten perfect scores.

When I’m out of the hospital, we’ll all be adults instead of Hogwarts students. I don’t feel like an adult. I like being a student, and I’m sad to miss my last few weeks of student-hood. So I will do a very un-adult thing and vow revenge on Slytherin. Someday, in the future, I will ensure that they lose a Quidditch Cup, and that Gryffindor wins.

Yours faithfully,

Minerva

Previously in The Diaries of Minerva McGonagall

Show of hands if you think young Minerva could sucker punch Draco with as much/more force than Hermione?