After

To her great surprise, no nightmares arose. Exhaustion took over and she slept so deeply that any dreams were forgotten before she was awake. A true escape for once. The only nightmare now was the one she was living in. 

It was dark when she woke, just past midnight, she had slept for nearly 12 hours, more than she had gotten in a week for the last several decades. But she did not feel any better upon waking than she did when exhaustion forced her to sleep. 

The fireplace was still lit, though anything in it had long since been ash, she put out the fire and vanished the remnants of her clothes and wand. Wandless magic came naturally after so many years, but it still felt odd to be without a wand, as if that were the weapon and not the magic, not her. As if that wand had done what was really her fault. As if that wand had killed and not her. 

She stood before the empty grate, trying to come up with what she should do next. The only thing that felt natural was to sit and do nothing. Doing nothing had never felt natural before, and it wasn’t acceptable now. There was too much left to do, too much that others shouldn’t have to see. She had to do something, anything that would save the others from what had happened here. She never even paused to consider asking who would save her. She already knew that answer. Not a soul. 

She used her magic to clean the dust and the blood, thankfully only hers, from her hair which she replaced in a simple bun at the back of her head. 

She checked the side of her face which had been slashed open in the mirror on the wall near the fireplace. It had healed nicely, and not even a visible scar remained, Poppy was talented. Not that it would be her first, no of course not. It merely would have joined the litany of other raised white ghosts of slash marks and burns, though it would be one of the few she couldn’t hide. 

The old scar over her collarbone, where she’d been struck by a very nasty cutting curse that was deflected in her direction during a battle in the war against Grindelwald had necessitated high collars on her robes for the rest of her life. Her sleeves hid the scar that wrapped around her arm from the top of her hand to the elbow, left by some thin rope of dark magic that had nearly dragged her to her death. Now it was crisscrossed with the scars of that year, cutting curses and slashing spells taken in place of her students. The thought sent a cold chill through her.

There was work to be done, and she was the only one left to do it. She turned away from the mirror and tried to find something in her wardrobe that wasn’t black, remembering her vow from the night before. 

Standing before the open wardrobe she was suddenly conscious of just how much black she owned and wondered why she had treated every day like it was a god-damned funeral. She used to wear colour, emerald green, ruby red, sapphire blue. She wasn’t always like this. So stern she was scary, so cold she was unapproachable. She was always stern, but not to the point where she frightened anyone past their first year. She resolved to turn back into that woman, the one who deserved to be the head of this school, who deserved the position she had held as the head of Gryffindor House. She didn’t know what it would take to get there, but she was determined she would get there. For now, the best she could do was a dark, almost black, green skirt, and a white shirt-waist. It was nearly two in the morning now. 

She apparated to the entrance hall, somewhat comforted by the fact that it was almost whole. She realised then that she was starving, she hadn’t even noticed before. She couldn’t remember the last time she ate anything, and yet she couldn’t stomach the thought of eating now. She decided if she had ignored it this long she could ignore it a while longer. 

She went to the Great Hall, where there had been a million meals and feasts throughout the centuries. Where she had once sat as a student, under a red and gold banner, eyes bright with a desire for knowledge and a longing for everything that came next. Where she had sorted generations of students and watched them join houses and the school that became home to so many. Where she had sat at the right hand of Dumbledore for her entire tenure, first as his assistant Professor, later as an equal, and later still as a woman of authority second only to his. 

Now her authority was unquestionable, she had found that out yesterday, in that very Hall, as she walked among the others and found that she was the one they turned to, asked for, and looked to for leadership. The remaining members of the Board of Governors were nothing less than deferential, the respect from her students had multiplied ten-fold. She was well and truly in charge of this school, and its future fell into her hands alone now. 

The torches she had lit yesterday were burning still, providing some light and some hope to the otherwise dark ruins of the hall. She started at the door and worked her way in, fixing just the walls, for now, she would go back to the flagstones when the debris was off the floor. She fixed the frames around windows that had been there longer than anyone alive could tell. She replaced missing panes, stretching and reforming shards to replace the glass that had been blown to dust. It was delicate work, time-consuming, but also attention-consuming, and that is what she needed more desperately than she could have said. 

When one window was done, with all of the glass back in the intricate pattern she had studied for years and looked to for inspiration, she stopped a moment and looked up at it once more. The symbol of her house, the lion of Godric Gryffindor. She realised, looking up at that familiar form made of golden glass that more bravery was required of her now. The windows could wait. The decorative stonework of the entrance hall could have waited. There were repair teams coming before the month was out, she had scheduled them herself. What fell to her now was to complete the most basic tasks of repair, to sift through debris, to raise fallen walls, to replace doors, and steps, and to lift the blood stains and burn marks from the walls and floors. No one should have to see that, they had already seen too much. 

She breathed deeply the cold air of the night and turned away from the window, leaving it the only one put right, the repairs standing out like a scar against the wreckage. 

She went back to repairing walls, just the most basic stonework. Putting bricks back together to the shape of where the windows should be. As she worked more and more of the debris left the floor as parts of the wall were returned to their right spots. She used the broken tables and benches and chairs to form a staircase and used it to inspect and correct the higher-up places moving it along the wall as needed. She performed feats of corrective magic that would have left jaws dropped if anyone were present to witness it. Climbing higher and higher, she passed the enchantment that showed the cloudy sky outside and she repaired that wall to the ceiling. 

She looked down from her high perch at the shrinking piles of debris, threading across the floor like the raised imperfections left behind by dark magic. She felt the pain of loss again and instead turned her gaze to the ceiling, summoning up the missing and broken pieces of wood and stone that should seal out the rain that threatened to fall. She wasn’t quite finished replacing the roof when a cold rain began to fall in, it did not phase her, she hardly seemed to notice. She went on working, closing out the rain that fell on and around her until it was done and the roof was once again water-tight. By that time her heavy robes had grown slightly heavier with rainwater, she cast a drying spell and moved on again, working her way down the wall opposite where she had begun. 

The sun was rising behind the rain clouds, just barely adding its light to the torches that illuminated the Hall. She stopped a moment, sitting on the wooden steps she had created and turning to look out the empty window frame at what remained of the burned quidditch pitch. It was hardly visible through the misty rain which reassured her that any fire there was out for good. She would have to wait some time before that could be repaired. 

The skeleton of the last remaining spectator stand stood lonely, scarring the darkened sky and Minerva recalled some of the finest hours of her youth had taken place on that pitch. Scoring her first goal in a match by knocking the keeper through the hoop with the quaffle in her second year, her first school-girl crush on the quidditch captain in her third year, ensuring a win against Slytherin for the quidditch cup by keeping the score 160 points ahead as a fourth year. It had also been her first undoing, that favorite game of hers, falling from such a height at the end of her seventh year, losing her prospects in professional quidditch. She might never have been a teacher at all had it not been for that fateful moment on that old pitch. Even now though, she was almost thankful for that too, the fall that pointed her in the right direction, that helped lead her to the career she was meant for. 

Even now she felt she was in the right place, even as it tore her apart to live and breathe inside of Hogwarts School. This was home, and despite the fact that darkness had crossed her threshold and had had to be pushed back, she was determined to restore the light. Someday the sun would shine on a whole and complete Hogwarts again, she was certain of it. She would make certain of it.