After

She finished repairing the walls in the Great Hall before she was starting to fall asleep standing up, and gave up for the day, though it was nearly midnight. 

Upon waking in the daylight for the first time in several days, there was an odd sense of normalcy. The things around her were the same as they were before it began. The curtains, hanging open, were still the same shade of red. The sunlight streaming through the window still caught the dust particles in the air the same way it did before. And yet nothing was as it was before.

Today was the day she tackled the hospital wing. The Great Hall, without the furniture, windows, or even the piles of debris, was just too empty for her to stand. There was too much space in a room like that when one was well and truly alone. 

She began work in the main corridor outside the Hospital wing, separating stone debris from portrait frames and library books, and wondered how long she would be left alone before someone came looking. 

She thought it would likely be Filius or Pomona who came calling first, after not finding her at her summer house. They were the only two people left in the world who knew its location. She replaced the broken pieces of ornate stone around the doors to the infirmary and thought that it might well be Poppy who came back first, searching for her, likely with Septimia not far behind. They were like that, always looking out for her, and she loved them for it, though it did make her feel a bit like someone’s grandmother. She had always looked out for them, from their student days and through their professional tenures in the school, and she wasn’t ashamed to say she was quite fond of them. She almost smiled at the thought. Then she opened the doors to the Hospital wing. 

She was greeted by utter and complete chaos. For a place that was usually meticulously clean, it was in quite a state of disarray. 

Minerva knew Poppy would appear and rearrange and re-clean and redo almost everything that she would do, but that didn’t matter so much as returning the room to some semblance of order. She started with a scourgify charm around the whole room, simple but effective. She cleaned away bandage scraps, empty potion bottles, vials, and several bloodied scarves that must have belonged to Sybill. 

She straightened all the furniture, trying to match what she knew of Poppy’s very exacting standards, why she didn’t know. It was all pointless anyway, all of it would have to be redone by the head medi-witch. Just for her own comfort. Still, it was nice to know that things looked as close to normal as she could get them, in some places at least. At least Poppy wouldn’t come home to a scene of total disaster, and if Minerva was to be headmistress she had resolved to be the headmistress of more than rubble. 

The hospital wing was righted, and it hadn’t taken as long as Minerva had thought it would. So the main staircase was the next on the list. 

She was back to working with stone. It was tricky in some aspects but much less fiddly than working with glass, and much simpler than working with metal. The main trouble with the staircase was just how much of it was missing. Minerva realised that was her own fault. She had taken it out on the first floor with a blasting charm, in hopes to keep the death eaters from going any higher, to where they could reach the towers and the people who were there, defending from the birds' eye. It had worked for the most part.  The people who came back down just had to jump onto cushioning charms. The only one who complained was Pomona, but more out of an attempt to lighten the atmosphere than anything. 

Now she had to put it all back together, and that was going to be a rather extensive task. 

She worked slowly, ensuring that the stairs and banister were sound as she made her way up from the ground floor. At the top of the stairs, she leaned against the wall, every joint sore and aching. She realised that the only medical care she had received after the fact was after Septimia dragged her away to the hospital wing for an emergency once-over, and there were probably a great deal of deeper problems that she should get sorted out. 

As she went back downstairs to keep repairing flagstones on the ground floor (an easy job she could think of other things while doing), she tried to take stock of what had happened to her during the battle for Hogwarts. 

Working backward she remembered she was caught in the radius of a good blasting charm, which had sent her across the room and out the doors of the Great Hall. That was a rough landing. Before that, she got hit in the hip by a brick that was shot out of a wall when it exploded, that she barely felt until much later. A shard of glass had cut a gash in the side of her face, but that was already fixed up now. Something had hit her in the chest… some piece of stone… no a piece of the front doors. That took her to the floor for a minute, but it wasn’t enough to kill her, probably just break a few ribs. Exhaustion and a hard year on top of that didn’t help, of course. 

She should probably go to St. Mungo’s before Poppy came looking for her and got all up in arms about it. Minerva sighed at the thought. She wasn’t leaving Hogwarts unless someone came to drag her out. The thought of leaving it empty of all living inhabitants, letting it be a place of disaster and death, was unacceptable. She hadn’t been any further than the gate since late April the year before, more than a year. How could she possibly leave now? 

So she didn’t, she continued working, not registering the time, ignoring the pain, and letting the work take precedence. The staircase to the second floor came together under her magic, pieces fitting together, melding and reforming smooth surfaces that looked like they’d never broken. 

On the first floor, there were a few disassembled suits of armor still, so she reassembled them and set them in their rightful places. She repaired statuary, marble and stone stretching and molding like it was clay until they were the same as they had been before. Portraits were a difficult repairing process, reassembling shattered gilt frames and then reweaving and stretching torn canvasses back into place, more difficult than that would be coaxing the inhabitants back to where they belonged. 

The detail work was exhausting, but it kept her mind busy rather than just her hands. Still, she was likely to burn out at this pace. Besides, there would be more ands coming, she knew, more people who wanted to take on the work of repairing this broken place. Filius would come and take the task of portrait repair, she was almost certain. So she redirected her focus from the difficult to the simple, the essential. Get rid of the bloodstains, put the walls back up, fix the stairs, make sure the floors are sound. 

So that’s what she did, she returned to the ground floor and repaired walls and floors and steps and doors, removed scorch marks, and made sure the blood was gone. She swept aside broken trophy cases and their erstwhile contents, to repair later. She stacked any books she found against the wall outside of the library, and soon enough that was the only room on the ground floor that she hadn’t attended to. She decided that could wait a while. 

She would have to go to the lower levels next, the basement and the dungeons, just to make sure they weren’t in total disarray. Not much had gone that way, it was mostly superficial damage. Just broken flagstones, torn tapestries, and a few doors off their hinges. All of that she repaired without much trouble. 

She climbed the stairs back to the ground floor slowly and struggled to catch her breath once she was at the top. Her repairs were coming along well, she should have felt some kind of relief, but she didn’t. Not yet. She looked at the watch on her wrist, which she had been determinedly ignoring. Just past midnight again. 

The time combined with exhaustion made her give up on the idea of getting anything else done for a while. She went to the kitchen, having once again ignored the essential functions of life in favour of work. 

She almost laughed when she thought of just what her Medi-witch friend, or really any of her colleagues, would say to her now. They had certainly been witness to her workaholism before, for years, some of them decades, but this might surprise even them.