After

Storming through the empty halls, quickly swiping away angry tears, and fighting the urge to go back and rip the portrait off the wall and pitch it from the window, Minerva thought back to that horrible night that Severus had killed her oldest friend.

When Albus died the first thing Minerva remembered was feeling like someone had pulled a rug out from under her. She had landed in a chair that Poppy had conjured up, mind buzzing as if she’d just been hit over the head. Pure shock, and a momentary inability to speak or understand or feel anything. She recalled very little of that conversation, other than that someone had told her that it was Severus that had cast the curse, she didn’t remember what she’d said in response to that, or much of the rest of that evening until she’d had to take up the office of Headmistress and convene the heads of house and the ministry officials. Even then it had all seemed so distant and faintly ridiculous. 

When she learned more of the story - the plan, the carefully calculated plan of his death, which he had callously and cruelly and stupidly left her out of, she was shocked in much the same way. Could a friend as dear as that really be so deceitful? Could a friendship as long and abiding as theirs really mean so little? 

And then more and more had come to light and she had only grown angrier, his puppeteering behaviour had caused such suffering and the deaths of so many. All because he had refused to even consider another avenue. Minerva had little faith in Divination as an academic branch and saw no compelling reason that any decision so major should be prevailed upon by prophecy and cryptic mysticism. In her opinion, there was no reason that Harry should ever have been considered the only one who could end this war. The prophecy seemed to be true because he made it true, she was convinced. And if one thing had gone differently, or if she had been in the know about any of this idiocy, everything might have been different. 

So now she could only hold anger against Albus. All the years of friendship were ruined, all the confidences were lies, all the trust had vanished, and if she were honest there was something very akin to hate sitting in her chest.

Yes, she had begun to hate him. Before the confrontation with his portrait, based solely on what he had learned of him after the end of the war, from Harry and from the documents she had discovered in the office, she had begun to hate him. 

But more than hate for him she felt anger at the idea of hating him. Not because she was wrong to be angry, but because everything else about the situation was wrong. The lying, deception, manipulation, the anger she felt, it was all wrong. They had truly been friends for more than sixty years, where had all of that gone? They were colleagues and co-conspirators and confidants, it was out of order that they should be so at odds… well, to an extent. 

Of course, they had been at odds before, she had argued with him on many a point and he had done the same to her. They had disagreed academically (an arena in which Minerva usually won), Politically (Where they had most often come to a draw), and practically (Where she usually faced defeat), on an array of topics so diverse it could be mind-boggling how such a friendship survived. 

It seemed that they thrived in the arguing, sometimes just choosing a topic to bicker over whether it bore any weight or not. They each knew the most effective ways to get under each other’s skin, they knew what to say to make the other instantly livid, and they both used those powers with well-practiced skill. And she had proven, time and again, that she was the hot-headed one between them, that she was the one more likely to lose her temper, to slam doors and storm off, to lose her ability to take the ‘joke’.

Yet, she was also the one who knew when to quit. She could read that man like a book, or so she had thought, and she knew when to lay off and when to stop pushing buttons. Of course, occasionally she ignored those signs, but that’s of little consequence. She much more rarely pushed the envelope too far. She was not interested in coming to blows with every conversation and even in the middle of a heated argument she knew where the line was and she knew when not to cross it. That seemed to be a skill that Albus did not share, especially when he realised that he was wrong, or when she was particularly vehement on an issue. He seemed almost to take pleasure in shutting her down with some truly awful remark, usually in reference to her beloved former students, her Marauders, her contentious family, or any of her many failed romances, or her sad and short marriage. 

She too had knowledge of some of the worst things Albus had ever done, the worst things that had ever happened to him, and the most private instances of his life. She could have hurt him, and badly, if she had wanted to. But more often than not she bit her tongue at the right time and held back. He was the one who could see the line and then cross it in the most flagrant, egregious manner he could think of in the moment. Was it any wonder she lost her temper?

She had already walked past her rooms on the fifth floor and stomped down the stairs passing by the corridor that led to her office in the Transfiguration corridor and to the second floor. She hadn’t really been thinking about where she was going, but she wound up in the disheveled charms corridor and realised that in her moment of anger, she still went somewhere where there was work to be done. There was no arguing with her subconscious’s logic, it needed to be done and she needed something to do. She set about working again, trying to channel anger into productivity before she channeled it into throwing Albus’s portrait out the tower window.