After

When the spiral staircase landed in front of the door to the headteacher’s office any resolve she’d had was quickly gone. How could she open that door when she knew that nothing was where it should be? 

So much of her tenure had been spent in that office, second in command, she knew every inch of that room and the whole filing system like the back of her hand. She should, she was the one who organised it. She knew where each form and file was kept, and where it was supposed to be. And she knew where Albus hid the reports he didn’t want her to see. She knew where his secret stash of sherbet lemons was. She could see it all in her head, the gilded perch that Fawkes had rested on for all those years, the oversized chair that he’d kept behind his desk, the desk itself solid mahogany and covered from one end to the other with plans and papers and letters and books and his preferred eagle-feather quills. She could hear the soft whirring of the many little silver machines on the spindle-legged tables set around the room. She could feel the texture of the over-stuffed armchair that she had spent so much of her life working in across the room. She could recall the feeling of their quiet, busy, evenings spent working across the room from one another in silence. She could recall the laughter-filled evenings of summer, spent distracting him with any number of complex magi-philosophical thought experiments so as to ensure that she would win their chess game. Everything about that office she knew and could recall and see before her, even as she stood before the closed office door. And yet she knew that none of it was there now. 

If she opened the door now she knew that there would be none of that. No remnants of Albus’s reign that she would gently and carefully clear away or rearrange to make room for her own things. No whirring silver machines or gilded perches, no Fawkes, no overly elaborate chair behind the desk, a different desk even. It was as if the whole of the place had been gutted by fire and rebuilt after nothing could be saved. She knew that was what she would find. She knew, but she opened the door anyway. 

She didn’t look far into the room, and she didn’t step inside yet, but she turned the handle and let the door open slowly. Her shoes seemed to be glued to the step outside the door. Her heart was racing but her thoughts had slowed. A chill went down her spine for no discernable reason and she started to turn back around to descend the spiral staircase again. She stopped on the next step down. “No,” She spoke aloud to herself, “You have to do this. No one else can and no one else would, so it simply has to be you, Minerva.” She turned back and took the two steps up to the door, pausing only briefly before she took the first step over the threshold. 

Then it all came rushing back to her, that last year, everything she had seen, everything that she had been forced to endure in that office. Her breath hitched, How was this to be her academic home when she could hardly stand to walk through the door? 

She reached for the door handle with a shaky hand and pulled the door closed behind her as she fled back down the spiral staircase. She passed by the gryffin and was halfway down the hall by the time it had jumped back in front of the doorway. She might have apparated if she’d been in a clearer state of mind, but as it was she simply kept hurrying down the halls until she reached the portrait hole to Gryffindor Tower. 

The fat lady wasn’t there, thank Merlin, and she just waved the empty portrait out of the way, closing it behind her. The day was cloudy and it was dark in the Gryffindor common room. It was no longer in a state of disarray, so many of the students, of this house and not, had followed Harry, Hermione, and Ron, up here to find some rest while the adults started to take care of things downstairs. Minerva had encouraged that, told them to go and stay out while they attempted to recover the bodies from the halls and corridors and classrooms. They had seen and done too much already. Maybe that was why she had come here now. Maybe she had done and seen too much now. 

Or maybe it was just the human urge to run home. This was her first home inside Hogwarts Castle, her first real home of any kind. She sank down on the broken-down sofa in front of the empty grate and tried to catch her breath. She looked around the room at the tapestry-covered walls, the broken-down furniture that the students had refused to allow her to replace for the last decade, and the paintings whose inhabitants were not in their frames, and she started to feel the weight in her chest lighten. She brushed away tears she hadn’t realised she was crying. She knew she was far too old to be running back to the home of her youth, she ought to have a home of her own, some other place with the same sense of safety as she felt there. The Headteacher’s tower should be that home, but it wasn’t, and at this rate, she worried it never would be.

The sense of obligation she felt to correct that office was immense, but not so immense as to overcome her memories of what had happened there. They had wanted to know where so many of the students of her house kept disappearing to, they didn’t realise she wanted to know just as desperately as they did. Gryffindor common room was never beyond half capacity for most of the year, Gryffindor table showed more empty seats than she’d ever seen before. She had no idea where they had gone, but that didn’t stop him from trying to find out. He couldn't use legilimency, he may have been a skilled 'mind-reader', but she was far too talented at keeping her thoughts to herself. They'd had to use other means to break her down. He never cast the curse on her himself, plenty of others he had, but never her, he passed that job off to one of the Carrow twins usually. She could still feel the pain if she thought about it for too long. Eventually, he begrudgingly believed her when he forced her to drink veritaserum. It had forced her to tell the truth, more of the truth than she had been telling before. 

-

She recalled drinking the damn stuff and pitching the vial with the last remnants of her strength so that it shattered against the stone of the fireplace. “And I hope it cuts you, too.” She had said, at barely more than a whisper, glaring back at him before shouting, “Ask Your Damn Questions.”

He appeared unperturbed, which had bothered her so at the time, she wanted him to be uncomfortable, she wanted him to hurt, and she wanted him to regret because goddamnit she did. He was still supremely unbothered when he asked, “Where is Neville Longbottom hiding?”

Minerva, before she could stop herself, said, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I have told you again and again that I don’t know, and God I only wish that I did.”

He seemed to almost smirk at that and she couldn’t stop herself from telling another truth, though it wasn’t really the potion talking. “I hate you, you smug son of a bitch, I hope I see you dead.” 

“Now now, Minerva, no need to get …catty,” He replied with a sneer rather than any expression of amusement. Before she could reply, or more aptly, respond with physical violence, he asked, “Where is Ginny Weasley?” 

“I cannot tell you how much I want to know the answer to that, but I told you before and I tell you now, I don’t know,” Minerva answered, spurred on by the effects of the potion to say more than the simple three-word truth - I don’t know. She hadn’t cried through the curse, but this was enough to bring tears to her eyes. 

He went through the list again, the same students he’d been asking about for the last week, the ones he knew were causing problems and hiding others and leading the resistance he so wanted to squash. Neville, Ginny, Luna, Collin, Lavender, Hannah, Parvati, Padma, Micheal, Susan, Seamus, Ernie, and Terry. He knew those thirteen were the ones he couldn’t catch, the ones who could slip in and slip around the school causing some new affront to his authority every week.

He asked a pivotal question when he finished with that list, “If you knew where they were would you tell?”

She didn’t have the energy to fight the potion’s effect, even though she knew that this answer would bring her more trouble. “Never.” 

He was just toying with her now, mocking her, making her admit things she didn’t need to say, “Why?”

Minerva would have answered that honestly anyway, she was already in a hole, why stop digging? “Because I’m so fucking proud of them.” 

She had barely been able to walk out of the office after that. 

–

Now she couldn’t manage to cross the threshold into it. Her bravery was well-known, her courage was not to be tested but trusted, that was one of the few things that anyone who had so much as read about her would say of her. She was brilliant and caring and shrewd but more than all of that she was brave. Now, as she sat half-paralysed in Gryffindor common room, it seemed to her that she had reached the outer limits of her courage.