After

The teachers and staff at Hogwarts School were all set to begin their preparatory season a little late this year, the seventeenth of August, but most of them had only been out of the building for a few days before that. Minerva hadn’t left from the day before the repairs began, excepting the five and half hours it took to find a new wand. She’d been busy planning classes, writing opening speeches, drawing up student schedules, taking meetings with the members of the newly created eighth-year class, and sorting out her offices. 

She’d cleared out her ground-floor Deputy-Headmistress study to make it a part of the new Defense Against the Dark Arts Department. She’d had to repair and replace much of her office in the Transfiguration Department, thankfully with a lot of help from Septimia (“Well you fixed up my office, it’s only fair.”). And she had fully moved into the Headteacher’s office. Her desk from the ground floor took center stage in the room, a coat of arms above the fireplace, dark red curtains on the windows, her books lining the shelves, tartan armchairs in the sitting area, tartan biscuit tin on the table, it was certainly starting to look like she worked there. 

Each of these rooms held another aspect of the past that she had to face. Her ground floor office was where she had presided over detentions for her Marauders and hundreds of other students. It was where she had proctored Remus’s O.W.L exams when he was unable to complete them with the rest of the class, where she had counseled Hermione on the use of time turners (though she regretted that now), where she had settled disputes for her Gryffindor charges for nearly sixty years. This was her first taste of authority above her professorship, where she had truly become deputy headmistress of Hogwarts…and it was over now. 

Long gone were the days when she was second in command, far past were the times when she felt she had another person to turn to, even if he was generally inept. Now she was the last turn, the highest power within the realm of Hogwarts, she had the final say and it, very secretly, made her nervous. 

She had always ranted about Albus’s poor decisions and overall idiocy, but there was no real way of knowing if the decisions she would have made in those places would have turned out any better. Of course, she believed that they would have, obviously… but she had no proof that her gut reactions and undeliberated decisions would really guide the school to success in peacetime. She worried that she had known war for too long. She led the school into battle, but now it seemed that was the easy part, the peace that came next was unfamiliar territory. Unfamiliar, but not unwelcome. As she closed the door to what used to be her office she turned to face new, more personal, battles.

Her office in the transfiguration department was in shambles when the repair crews arrived, and everyone who saw it noted that she had repaired the places in the castle that were important to everyone but herself. 

The Transfiguration department was her first home as a professional, and the first place she had excelled as a student. Those classrooms, that office, that was where her heart lay. Administration is important, as is keeping order and staying within regulations. Ensuring that things are run in a way that balances dignity and safety with self-discovery and joy is of the utmost importance to creating a place where students can learn, and Minerva does all of that well. But all of that, as seen from the headteacher’s office, is nothing compared to the art of teaching. 

A young Minerva would never have imagined this life for herself, never even considered teaching as a career, let alone chosen it, but she didn’t know anything anyway. And when she needed to go back home, after a difficult realisation that the Ministry held no future for her, it was Hogwarts she ran to. Dumbledore vouched for her because he knew she was a skilled transfigurationist, and knew that she would be able to teach, but even he had not imagined just how phenomenally she would take to it. 

It was like flying for the first time all over again, or rather, like watching others learn to fly. She had almost forgotten that in the horrible war-torn years, almost forgotten what a gift it was to be allowed to stand before a room of young people and open the skies to them. Almost forgotten what a hallowed profession it was to guide the minds and imaginations of new students toward the future. 

This was where it had begun, and she was only too thankful that it was to continue. She had been unable, mostly due to unwillingness, to find her replacement in the transfiguration department. She needed it, the teaching, the grading, the lessons, she needed the one thing she was truly truly good at because she was determined to remember who she was before everything went so wrong. She was determined to do what she could to bring back that person, the one who found such joy in the simple act of lesson planning, who cared so deeply for her charges that she was willing to bend and adapt until she reached them where they were. She was going to be Professor McGonagall again, she felt she had to find that person again before she could really become Headmistress McGonagall. 

So she reset the office, there was a place for everything and she made sure everything was in its place. It would never stay that way, she knew, but it’s nice to start each new school year on a clean slate. As she left that office, the door still bearing her name, she was content that this battle was won but the lesson was not over. 

Lastly her new office. The office where someday, hopefully not soon, her portrait would hang, the remnants of her wisdom left to guide the next headteacher, and every subsequent one after that for as long as Hogwarts would stand. She was a part of a great chain of brilliant minds who had stepped up to choose the path for the school and it’s inhabitants and to defend it from outside meddling. This new heredity that she had joined began with the four founders and flowed through centuries to her. It seemed that the universe wanted her to be daunted by the task, and she was, but she would never admit it. She took it as a challenge and she is not one to back down from a challenge. So when she opened the door to that room again and was struck by just how much of herself was visible there, just how much the office had become her own, she could see the future laying out before her and found the determination to go on and to lead the school into the future.