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It was the morning of the twenty-fourth of December, a day in the Christmas holidays much like many before them, only that these days, more students seemed to be staying behind. She felt for the stragglers, because she had been one of them for years. Still, this year, Minerva found her heart was just a bit heavier than usual.
It had been thirty years since her father had died.
She tried not to think about it, her mother’s frantic message, apparating home and only getting there too late, the cooling hand and the uncharacteristically sombre face on the pillow. The sound of her mother out in the garden, her screams rising up into the night like a banshee’s. Rob had been the one to calm her down after over an hour of this. Still, Minerva had lost so many more people before and since then, surely, she was used to it by now? Surely, this was a time to celebrate what she still had rather than grieving a loss so old?
Minerva looked at her young, living students who shared her table, making herself exchange nods and smiles with them, and then settled in next to the familiar shape of Severus, whose eyes were too serious and too attentive. She stared at her chair instead, drawing it back, when the scent hit her.
She only noticed the scorching tears had rushed into her eyes when her vision blurred. It was the scent of candle wax in the Great Hall, she realised, as she made a vague remark and turned on her heel.
The scent had conjured up a ghost that took shape unbidden in front of her mind’s eye, because it was also part of his familiar scent.
For a second, she had been back home, the stone floor so cold that it crept up through the soles of her new boots that were still too tight about her heel. The large, warm hand gently reaching down to hers to help guide her into the pew, the familiar everyday church turned festive and holier through the addition of so many more candles. The silence of the congregation in anticipation of midnight mass on this holiest of nights.
It had been the first time Minerva had been allowed to come along, and she had been extra careful to keep her upright posture in her starched blouse, her father’s smile shining golden in the candlelight. Although she could not remember the sound of his voice anymore, she strangely could remember what his voice in song sounded like as fragmented songs filled her head, psalms, carols and liturgy all mixed together.
Minerva just made it to an empty classroom, in which she leant over the desk, taking deep, gulping breaths, forcing herself to concentrate on the familiar Hogwarts scent of the place, trying to banish the sudden pain in her throat and hammering of her heart.
In many ways, she was less alone than she had ever been, and yet, in parts, she had no language for talking about what so weighed on her heart. It was not only the death, it was the loss of other things that had been such a large part of who she had been when she was a wee slip of a thing.
There was precisely one person in the entire castle who was likely to have even ever seen an altar candle, emitting the scent of wax into the close and holy darkness.
One who potentially might have attended a midnight mass.
Two at most who knew what a carol singer was.
Nobody who knew the words to the songs that had been the calendar of her childhood.
Nobody who knew the words that structured every week.
If she tried to explain, it would sound childish, and alien, and she had never tried to put into words the other strange bereavement that had followed her father’s death.
Holding her breath and then pressing her cold knuckles to her cheeks in an attempt to banish their redness, Minerva pulled herself together, straightened her back and opened the door on an exhale.
Walking back to the Great Hall, she tried to ignore how much the architecture around her reminded her of the churches of her childhood, too. The very stone was the same, the vaulted ceilings, even a few of the windows had an all-too-familiar design.
Her ties to the kirk had died with her father, but tonight, in her heart, she heard the very absence of the church bells that would have wafted across the snowy hills all through Christmas louder than the chatter of her students. Back then, she had hardly heard them because they had been so frequent, and now, there was only this pounding silence.
She was getting silly in her old age, Minerva reprimanded herself. She had put religion behind herself with that part of her life. It had been three long and eventful decades, decades since she’d knelt in an icy pew, decades since she’d stood next to the mound of frozen earth, her grief too deep for tears. Everyone’s had been. He had been the last minister to serve this parish, his love shining through all his actions, but now that light was gone with the man. Their parish church had closed soon after, the parish being split and absorbed by two neighbouring ones, her mother moved out of the manse and back in with her now forgiving parents. The aging congregation scattered to join others, the village itself had slowly vanished and with it her childhood, and the girl she had been.
Now, nothing of this past self remained. She fancied she could no longer play the three songs she’d been able to play on the small pipe organ, which had long since been dismantled and sold off to America by the council. Then, the dilapidated roof had caved in and it had somehow been a sight rawer than the sunken cheeks on the deathbed the decade before. Decay had set in a lot swifter than she’d have believed.
She stopped staring up at the clouds visible in the vaulted ceiling above her and marched herself back to her chair. She tried hard to ignore how much the dark oak of the table looked like the one in her parent’s kitchen in the manse. Severus was still looking at her with questioning eyes but was too kind to comment on her state and merely picked up the tankard of water and filled her goblet.
Sitting, she frowned into her porridge, unseeing. This went deeper than candles, and pews, and even the stony vaulted arms of the building that now also no longer remained. No one had a sense of the strange gravity that pulled her to what was left of her childhood home, those ruins still not quite covered by brambles, in this place that now no longer existed on any maps. Only the graveyard remained these days, fittingly, though most of the graves were no longer tended to.
When she saw the long-fingered hand tentatively reaching for her arm under the table, she gratefully entwined her fingers with his and rested both on her leg. For once, she did not even care that students might see. She was grateful for their noise and bustle, the excitement especially of the first years who were gleefully exclaiming over the varieties of Christmas food. And daring each other to work up the courage to ask Filius, who was sitting to Severus’ right, to pull Christmas crackers with them. Albus on her other side chuckled fondly. She did not look at him. She knew that he had long since cut all ties with his family and would think her self-indulgent.
Not that she could have explained this to him, anyway. More than the physical objects, what she missed was a way of being, the feelings she’d had then. She did miss her father with a suddenly urgent pain, but also listening to his bright, serious voice in the pews, a hand ready to turn mother’s pages as she played the wheezy organ. She missed the feeling, brought forth by the loving light of the candles in so many windows, real as the songs rising up from all the chimneys in her neighbourhoods, real as any memory, as real as her father was now that he was gone.