Minerva had been leading what could well be called a double life ever since that conversation with her brother. Determined to follow the dictates of her heart and rescue the young man who had taken possession of her thoughts, she knew she would never find peace again if she left him to his fate.
It all began with the exchange of correspondence, though distrust regarding the security of the letters ate away at her; only seeing him in person appeased her anxiety. To her, that den of depravity was nothing more than a prison consuming the boy's youth. However, opportunities to visit him were scarce due to her limited free periods and the need to take extreme precautions. Under no circumstances would she allow herself to be seen in that brothel again. In fact, she detested setting foot there, as the location's atmosphere seemed to betray her own body; she was convinced that the air must be impregnated with some kind of magical substance or aphrodisiac that clouded her senses. It was the only logical explanation she could find to avoid admitting that, in front of this boy who was the age of her students, the only thing she desired was to entwine her body with his.
Fortunately, she devised a method discreet enough to infiltrate the place. Tom had confided certain secrets of the property to her, such as a hidden conduit used for the entry of pets and courier owls. Capitalizing on her Animagus form, Minerva slipped into the wicked establishment as a cat, managing to meet with him if only for a few brief minutes a day.
Minerva rushed to the rescue whenever her duties allowed. However, given the nature of Tom's trade, she did not always find him available or in the best condition. When she arrived in her Animagus form and they met after an exhausting day of work on his part, the pungent, musky aroma emanating from the youth almost turned her stomach; but far from pushing her away, that horror armored her resolve to get him out of that life.
Every time she appeared, Tom feigned a joy so genuine that it ignited McGonagall's latent maternal instinct. She tried to be his guide, his teacher, and his support, obsessed with the idea of offering him a future away from prostitution. She never left without swearing to sponsor him and pull him out of that hell. Tom—or the entity adopting his form—merely played along with an impeccable performance, pretending to learn lessons he had already long mastered, amused by the unexpected entertainment.
Unconsciously, Minerva enjoyed those encounters with the devotion of a first-time lover. Despite seeing him during the day, the need to send him a note at night became imperious, and vice versa.
Nevertheless, the line she had drawn for herself was prone to blurring. Despite her efforts to maintain the bond on a chaste and platonic plane, her maternal figure facade faltered. Whether due to Tom's insistence on pleasing her or Minerva's own emotional exhaustion driving her to seek comfort, physical contact eventually ended up being consummated. Sometimes it was intimate caresses; other times, carnal encounters that marked her deeply. And the mark began to be literal.
Soon, the change ceased to be a mere internal sensation and was reflected in the mirror. Minerva noticed with stupefaction how she rejuvenated after every encounter. Her skin tightened, her wrinkles vanished, and both her bust and silhouette regained the firmness of yesteryear, as did her physical energy. She felt like she was a woman in her forties once more. The confirmation that something dark was operating within her arrived when she ran straight into Andra in the brothel corridors. The madam observed her with a feline smile and a look laden with malice.
"Don't you like my gift?" Andra snapped at her, licking her lips as she scanned her up and down. "Now you should have enough vigor to keep up with the young ones."
Minerva felt a shiver run down her spine. Although she wished never to see that woman again, avoiding her was impossible, as she was the owner of the place and of Tom. Knowing herself altered by the magic or caprice of such a being filled her with dread. She secretly went to St. Mungo's and consulted expert healers she trusted to examine her health, but the diagnoses yielded no anomalies. Left with no other options, she was forced to use her skills in Transfiguration to artificially add years to herself and disguise her appearance. At Hogwarts, the change no longer went unnoticed; some students stared at her longer than usual, drawn to her attractively mature, renewed appearance. Though most attributed her change to the use of expensive beauty elixirs or aesthetic potions, Minerva knew she was walking on thin ice. She could not trust Andra, no matter how miraculous the benefit received was.
During that very encounter, Minerva decided to gather her courage and confront Andra, demanding Tom's freedom. She was willing to bargain with this demon with a woman's face.
Andra merely burst out laughing at the demand. Minerva tried to project the severity that characterized her in the classrooms, but her posture betrayed the immense tension the procuress caused her. The negotiation stalled immediately. Andra, with exasperating condescension, agreed to let Tom go in exchange for financial compensation; however, the figure she put on the table was astronomical—a fortune that not even the wealthiest families in the magical world would part with lightly.
Minerva was left breathless, stupefied.
"What did you expect?" Andra mocked, crossing her arms. "Tom is a gem, our star worker. He generates incredibly high revenue and is the most coveted in the club. Besides, he's young; he has many years of productivity ahead of him. I can't let him go for less without losing a fortune."
Silence fell over Minerva like a slab. Although the woman's cold words held an insane mercantile logic, she refused to accept it. She did not possess such an amount of gold, at least not without completely emptying her vaults and leaving herself ruined. But the alternative was unthinkable: abandoning Tom, the boy who had brought warmth back to her mature heart and whom she had sworn to save, allowing him to continue to be used and degraded by anyone who had enough Galleons to pay for him.
In the end, the confrontation led to nothing. Minerva was forced to swallow her pride and retreat to design other plans, painfully aware that she stood no chance of defeating Andra on her own turf.
From that day forward, with a much greater urgency than before, Minerva began to urge Tom to escape, assuring him that she would cover his flight and provide him with a safe haven. However, the young man flatly refused. He manifested a warped sense of attachment and a moral debt toward the brothel that had sheltered him since his childhood; he considered himself an ingrate if he abandoned them. Faced with such submission, Minerva could only grit her teeth in frustration. Her desire to help him was authentic; someone his age should never be subjected to such degradation. Even if he chose not to study at Hogwarts, she yearned to offer him a dignified life, the comfort of a legitimate home where he wouldn't have to abase himself. On more than one occasion, after learning that Tom was forced to fulfill aberrant whims or be physically harmed by twisted clients, Minerva had to restrain herself with all her might from reducing the brothel to ashes in a fit of magical fury.
Thus it came to today. Minerva had requested a day off and, after delegating the acting headship of Hogwarts to Snape, she went to her appointment ready to spend a much longer period with Tom than usual.
She infiltrated through the owl conduit and stealthily slipped into the agreed room. Tom was waiting for her on the bed; upon seeing her enter, he stood up with overflowing enthusiasm, gifting her that smile that always softened the witch's defenses. As she approached, Minerva noticed the absence of the characteristic and unpleasant smell of others' fluids on his skin; she deduced that he had not serviced any clients before her arrival or that he had taken great pains to bathe to receive her.
Resuming her human form, she shared a time of apparent calm with the boy, determined to instruct him about the outside world, science, and the secrets of Hogwarts. It was her subtle way of tempting him, of sowing the seed of freedom in him and convincing him to accept her protection.
The atmosphere was idyllic, but Tom was not slow to try to break the platonic boundary. With calculated movements, his hands began to slide over Minerva's body, seeking a more intimate contact, but she stopped him firmly.
"Tom, no!" she declared.
"But, Minerva... I... I just want to make you happy," he pleaded, looking at her with clouded eyes and a helpless expression—a technique that usually ignited the lasciviousness of his regular clients, but which in Minerva only provoked profound pain. "I want love... I asked to be released from today's services just so I wouldn't have sex with anyone, to be clean for you..."
"No, Tom... I don't care if you are with other people... Well, I do care, but it's not because of that. I..." Minerva held his hand, battling her own difficulties to express herself. "What I'm trying to tell you is that it isn't necessary. This isn't love. Love is something much deeper... I've already explained it to you."
She resisted desperately against the growing betrayal of her own body. She could perceive once again the heavy influence of the aphrodisiac in the air, forcing her to breathe in short gasps while feeling an internal burning that demanded she surrender. Tom continued to press, but feeling the line of her self-control about to snap, Minerva stood up abruptly, rejecting him.
"Let's leave things like this for today. I... I must return to the castle," she stated, despite still having time available. She knew she wouldn't last another minute without giving in. She wanted to prove to him that affection did not equate to carnal submission; she couldn't give up now.
"But I can please you!" Tom insisted, sitting on the edge of the mattress, a prey to anxious impatience, as if he believed his lack of skill was the reason for the rejection. "I've perfected my Metamorphmagus abilities... I can transform into a cat if you wish, and we can do it in our animal forms."
The young man's desperate tone betrayed that he was willing to bend to any fetish just to retain her by his side.
"NO! Tom, that crosses all boundaries. You don't have to do something like that," she reprimanded him severely, adopting her strictest teacher posture, though her true anger was directed toward the environment that had corrupted the boy's mind. "We will speak of this another time. I need to leave right now."
The atmosphere felt charged and dense. Despite having taken an antidote preventively before coming to the brothel, the substance in the air seemed to be different from what she was used to, threatening to cloud her judgment completely.
Without wasting a second, Minerva adopted her tabby cat form, ready to leave. However, Tom, "interpreting" her retreat as the game of a difficult client whom he had to subdue with greater persistence, lunged from the bed, instantly transforming into a black cat with a white stomach.
With an imperious meow, Tom pounced on her in a wild attempt to prove his worth. Before Minerva could react, the feline mounted her, sinking his teeth into the nape of the female cat's neck. Pain and surprise tensed McGonagall's muscles instantly, just before she felt the violent penetration of the feline anatomy.
There, on the bedroom floor, Tom—completely dissociated from the fact that his action was far from a display of affection—possessed Minerva in a blind copulation, like two animals swept away by heat.
Meows of pain erupted from the Animagus's throat as she felt how the thorny morphology of the feline member wrought havoc inside her. The experience surpassed any atrocity she had ever imagined; she was submerged in an immoral and aberrant act, trapped in her animal form while her instincts ran wild. The physical pain coexisted with disgust, fury, and an amalgam of destructive emotions that threatened to make her snap, but she found herself unable to reverse the transformation.
Whether due to the accumulated effect of the brothel's drugs, the repression of her own sexual needs, or the relentless submission of the feline instinct governing her transformed body, the bite on her neck and the torment that made her weep with pain ended up triggering an atavistic response and a twisted pleasure. Her human mind capitulated, accepting that profane, wild, and instinctive mating.
The surroundings blurred into a smear of extreme sensations. The vigorous cat that was Tom subdued the old female cat McGonagall had become, in a true clash of beasts that moved from the cold floor to the disheveled blankets of the bed amidst agonizing meows and panting.
...
After a few hours, both lay exhausted in their feline forms, curled up on the bed after a succession of brutal copulations that Minerva's animal body was forced to endure due to Tom's relentless insistence. In the center of the mattress, the two small furballs rested in a display that would have looked tender and peaceful to anyone, but which promised to turn into a true psychological nightmare as soon as they regained human consciousness and remembered the nature of what they had just consummated.