And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Ulysses, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
It was a crisp autumn day, the kind that crackled with intense colours and made even septuagenarians itch to get new stationery. The lawn outside the Great Hall was still a bright green, dotted with students relaxing between classes.
It could have been any year since Minerva arrived at Hogwarts for the first time aged eleven – the fashion in robes changed little, whatever students wore beneath, and the post-battle renovation crews had left the ancient stone looking the same as it ever had.
Minerva saw an owl soar, then another – all the first years writing home with a fervency soon to wane.
It was a day of beginnings, of sowing seeds that would bear fruit in time. Minerva snorted. At her age, one had better fertilize one's metaphorical seeds or any fruits would be largely irrelevant.
A bewildered third year turned around at the sound: “Headmistress?”
“No matter, Miss Payne. Good luck on Friday.” Slytherin-Gryffindor Quidditch matches were a reliable antidote to ageing – it did not matter how many one had seen, they were still as absorbing as ever.
Something tugged at her mind, like a tiny hand pulling her robes. A student was in distress, and Hogwarts itself delicately nudged her magic to make her aware.
It was almost like Mr Ronald Weasley had described Albus' Put-Outer device. She let her legs guide her to the right location, no conscious thought required. She still wondered about Albus, often. The more time separated them, the closer it brought her to equalling his experience as Headmaster of Hogwarts, and yet the chasm between what they considered important remained as wide as ever.
Magic was mostly about intent, and Hogwarts responded to Minerva the way it did because she considered the welfare of individual students of utmost importance. Albus' mind had worked differently to hers, so it would have been unfair to castigate him because his connection with the castle had not worked the same way.
She had no compunctions criticizing his actual failings, nor about wondering what the castle had shown him back in the days of fighting a war of shadows.
It had been a heady feeling, at first, the weight of the school like a mantle of wonders resting on her shoulders. Then, it frightened her: how could she tell who was leading the dance, the ancient castle or the fragile human? Stairs would rumble and click into place at a mere thought of hers; emotional breakdowns inside a student's head turned into a beacon for her to track down hallways and corridors, shredding any privacy into pieces, so how could she be certain her thoughts were really hers?
That had been the time when Hogwarts had felt the most oppressive to her – not even when she had believed Severus was imposing the will of Voldemort upon her school had she felt as uncomfortable there.
Of course, there was no one to ask. Armando Dippet died in 1992, and however much Minerva admired the art of wizarding portraits, she drew the line at posing existential questions to enchanted pigment and canvas.
She had to figure out for herself, and so she did. Eventually.
During one particularly windy walk across the moors beyond Hogsmeade, it finally dawned on her. Magic was about intent: the meaning you assigned to an action determined the outcome, and therefore Hogwarts could never ensnare or enchant her. What she brought to the exchange determined the outcome: any enchantment would have originated in her own soul.
She was no mere vessel; she was the mistress of her fate, for good or ill.
The certainty had stayed with her over the years after she had returned to the castle on light feet, as she reflected how short their lives must seem to the school. Was it really so different, the concept of an institution as perceived by Muggles and the living embodiment of it in Hogwarts? Both had memory and a life transcending those of its humans; both affected human behaviour, carving out a space of their own in the world.
Minerva was as certain as she could be that Hogwarts was a force for good in the world, and with that she was satisfied (and not above reaping the benefits of using the castle as her eyes and ears).
She hadn’t quite decided yet what it meant for her; if magic was about intent, did one have a responsibility to use it wisely and for better? Or did that lead in the direction of the ‘Greater Good’, a destination she was determined to avoid at all costs? She was still undecided as she dealt with the matters at hand, all the duties of a busy Headmistress.
“Now, dear,” she told the student hidden in an alcove on the third floor, where they no doubt had expected to be able to cry in peace. “You may as well tell me what is wrong, to get me to bugger off.”
The nights drew in, the new students settled down and a war between the Centaurs and locals was narrowly averted – just an ordinary term at Hogwarts. Minerva directed school governors with a firm hand, dispensed tea, shortbread and advice to whoever needed it, and patrolled the corridors on soft paws.
Several times, she turned a corner half-expecting Albus to meet her on the other side. Hogwarts seemed to be full of sounds evoking him, in a way it had not done for years.
She wondered if the castle was trying to tell her something – if that was the case, she was not very keen to find out.
The last weekend of November, Minerva went to London. She went every year - three months was enough time to lose oneself entirely in school concerns, and by then any disastrous new teacher appointments had usually been stabilised.
She walked through London, joining the Muggle crowds and rejoicing that she was not responsible for any of the teenagers, before stepping through The Leaky Cauldron and back into the streets where almost everyone knew her in some way.
Diagon Alley's post-war renovations had gone further than Hogwarts' – not merely restoring but modernising and extending. Still, it felt parochial compared to the spacious Muggle streets and their myriad styles, not to mention the constant stream of people and vehicles. She wondered what it said about wizards and witches that they kept their world small and looked to the past, not the future.
Probably something none of them wanted to hear, given the post-war consensus to keep Diagon Alley looking almost like it did when the Statutes of Secrecy were signed.
She had to Apparate again to have tea with Augusta. None of the old families lived in the wizarding enclave of London.
One may visit the shops, but one did not live next to them.
It had been amusing to see Hermione Granger shattering any delusions of grandeur still held by the likes of Lucius Malfoy in recent years. Geography took longer to change than someone's sense of entitlement, however rock solid it may appear.
Shaking off the tiny drops of rain she had acquired on Augusta's front step, Minerva hung her robes on a peg in the marble-floored hall and stepped into the cosy drawing-room. The Longbottoms did not keep house-elves, so someone else must have placed the tea tray on the table in front of the fire just before Minerva arrived.
Augusta sat in her usual chair, left foot propped on a cushion telegraphing to those in the know she was suffering from gout again. One had better not allude to it in conversation, however. Augusta despised the ailment and was not averse to showing her cursing abilities were still as sharp as ever.
Pleasantries were exchanged, followed by news about acquaintances – those numbered most of the Wizarding world, so it took some time before they touched on more personal concerns (other than gout).
Minerva had just finished describing exactly how she had convinced Percy Weasley rekindling the Triwizard Tournament had been his own idea before the latest meeting for the Hogwarts Board of Governors.
“But why would you want him to do that?” Augusta had abandoned the tea several hours ago and brought out the sherry.
“So Astoria Malfoy would veto it, of course. The last thing we need is another bloody tournament – I still get a twitch beneath my eye when I think about the last one, which is saying something considering what happened afterwards.”
Augusta stuck to sherry for herself, but being a good hostess she Summoned the bottle of whisky and poured Minerva another two inches. “I'm not sure what's got into you, Minnie. A little more whisky can't hurt, anyway.”
Minerva did not disagree, on either count. “You know what they say, women only get more dangerous as they get older.”
“That's not a saying,” Augusta said.
“Then it is one now.”
“Cheers to that, then.”
They both raised their glasses, like so many times before.
The conversation moved from the personal to the philosophical, neither of them having a very interesting personal life at the moment.
“In my opinion, all those who point out only men become Dark Lords are rather missing the point,” Minerva observed, eyeing the whisky bottle while debating whether to top up her glass or not.
“Which is?” Augusta had emptied her bottle some time ago and made impressive progress on the second.
“What if women spent less time thinking up anagrams and fancy masks, and more time quietly pursuing their objectives?”
Augusta frowned. “Don't you think we would have noticed that by now?”
“Only if their goals were as harebrained as their male equivalents.”
“Really? Did you wake up this morning, look at the state of the world today and decided it's in the hands of a female leader clever enough to avoid detection and achieve world domination, but not to make a better stab at it?”
“When you put it that way...” Minerva reluctantly had to concede.
“Still. It was good reasoning from someone who's drunk as much as you have. I'm surprised you can say that. You hold your liquor better than you used to.”
“I've practised”, Minerva said darkly. “There's very little to do at Hogwarts after nightfall that doesn't involve house points other than drinking.” After the first three or four decades, the long nights had started to get to her. Somehow, somewhere, she was sure other people led more interesting lives, and they did not have to deal with the tiny drama pressure cookers that passed for teenage brains.
“Well, cheers then. Again.” They raised their glasses; Augusta's best crystal survived, but just barely.
Afterwards, she put it down to there being no snow that winter.
If there had been, she may have gone back to recruiting teachers who were at least half-literate (as opposed to barely so) and letting her mind drift comfortably alongside Hogwarts, feeling streams of students moving through the building like shoals of fish.
She did not, because the moors stayed stubbornly grey and brown. One did not have to be a witch to understand that meant something was deeply wrong with the world, and suddenly, Minerva was all out of patience with the fools running it.
Perhaps her tentative plan was the ultimate arrogance; how else would one describe attempting to foist one's will upon the world?
However, as Augusta would say, it only took one look at the current state of the world to determine considerable improvement was required. After serious reflection, Minerva reckoned it was worth seeing what a determined witch could do to change matters, without paying too much attention to the niceties.
She wasn't setting out to run the world, or anything equally foolish; she was merely going to give the world what it needed rather than what it thought it wanted. If she weren't able to do that without breaking the Statutes of Secrecy, she was not worthy of making the attempt, and that was all there was to it.
Putting her affairs in order took some time, but on a soft August morning with drizzle painting the hills a hazy grey she finally stepped out of the front gates, her trunk shrunk to the size of a dice in her hand.
This was it, then.
She wondered if Dumbledore had ever felt as if he were bunking off when going on one of his frequent excursions. It did not really matter; she was not coming back, so this was completely different.
“Here's to a better tomorrow than yesterday. I reckon that's the best we can hope for.” She raised an imaginary glass to the front gates of the castle, and Disapparated.
THE END