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A student without a teacher is lost. A teacher without a student is alone. And a teacher who has had students and has lost them? She is shattered.
She of all people should know.
Her chest still hurts at night when she passes the common room and is smacked with the memory of long-ago parties filled with the laughing voices of long-dead students. Her heart still aches during the Yule Ball, when she can almost see a dark haired boy tug his scar-riddled friend out into the gardens, flushed and laughing all the while. A stray tear builds in her eye when she remembers every student she has ever loved and lost.
But still she pushes on.
She loves child after child, searching their eyes and smiles for the ghosts of students past, but also for the promise of the adults she hopes they will become. She is stern and stoic, but she loves them all, she does. No matter how broken she feels, how hurt she is, she will never stop loving them.
But oh, is she unprepared when she sees Harry Potter for the first time. He looks just like James, it’s true, but there is something hungry in his frame that his father had never carried. His eyes are as green and kind as Lily’s, but there is a sort of desperation in them that had never lurked in her own. He is so James, and he is so Lily, and yet… and yet. He holds himself with a wariness, a sense of otherness in his expression that reminds her of Remus in his first year, the way he separated himself as though he were uncertain he actually belonged in this world. He is full of ghosts, down to the glimmer of defiance, a determination to prove himself that quietly reminds her of a similar spark in the silver gaze of a young, wild, innocent Sirius Black.
He is not the only one who is woven through with the ghosts of the past, though. There is a boy in Slytherin who is a perfect picture of his father, but that is not who she sees. She sees a glimpse of Narcissa in his posture, but even more than either of his parents does she see a sort of second coming of Regulus Black. The poise, the heart under armor, the wounds behind a steely gaze. Appears one way, but is so much more than meets the eye. He is such a reflection of her former student that it almost hurts to see. She hopes more than anything that his story will play out differently, though. She hopes he will reach the ending that Regulus had deserved.
Her ghosts are not only dead. Sometimes, they come in the form of innocence, of youth, of who people were and who they may have been. She sees this when Remus comes to teach, and she cannot decide whether to embrace him or cry at the sight. In the end, she does neither—simply regards him with an arched eyebrow and the smallest but warmest of smiles. He is tall—taller than she had remembered—with the same scarred frame and soft eyes. He is the same, and yet so different. The tired circles under his eyes seem to carry more weight, and his shoulders slump slightly as though bearing some unseen burden. His honey brown curls are streaked through with grey, and there are scars on his face that were not there the last time she saw him. The years have taken their toll on him, she can tell, but he is still Remus. He will always be Remus, and it is hard to look at him and not imagine him surrounded by mischievous giggles, troublesome smirks, and a long-fingered hand with black painted nails clasped around his own. And, judging by the golden ring he wears on a chain hidden under is old jumpers and patchwork robes, he cannot quite put those ghosts aside either.
She sees this again the next year, when the man everyone had thought was Alastor Moody turned out to be one of her former students instead. He is loud and brash and more than a little off his rocker, but she will not let him be taken away before she speaks to him. She slips into the room where he is being held while no one is looking, locking the door behind her. She sits on the floor with him for a moment, soft silence permeating the still air. Finally, she looks over at the man next to her, and for a moment, she sees the boy she used to know. “Why?”
He laughs. The sound is dry and brittle and more than a little unhinged. “Why not?” There is no mirth in his voice as a joyless grin stretches across his face. His grin should not look like that, she thinks. It should be sharp and a little wicked, but with a sparkle of mirth and mischief.
She does not answer him.
He tosses his head back, wild hair slipping over his forehead. “You know they’re all gone?”
She eyes him, waiting for him to continue. He will in his own time. Always has, always will. He has changed, but not that much.
“They’re all gone,” he repeats, and his voice is hollow. “All of them, gone. Panda, Dorcas. Regulus.” His voice catches. “Evan. Did you know that? Did you care?”
For a moment, she thinks she hears the boy she used to know.
“Of course I did,” she murmurs. “Of course I do. They were my students—nothing will change that.”
He laughs like a maniac. “They’re dead. Dead!” The words crash from his mouth like a raging waterfall, or perhaps a volcanic eruption. He is mad. He is mad, but yet.. he is not entirely unrecognizable. “They’re dead.”
She sighs, narrowing her eyebrows at him. “We haven’t much time, and I am not here to talk all day. I just had one question for you—if you had the chance to do it all over again, would you make the same choice?”
His eyes are manic. “Yes! Yes!” He shakes his head wildly as she looks on. “Yes! No!” Finally, he drops his head down into his hands, body shaking. When he looks at her through his fingers, he looks just as young as she remembers. “I don’t know.”
The words are barely a whisper.
She forces herself to keep looking into those eyes that for a moment look so very lost. “The Bartemius Crouch Jr. that I used to know cared about very few things, and I assume that has stayed the same throughout all of these years, but he would rather have died before seeing any of his friends dead. Pandora, Dorcas. Regulus.” She pauses, remembering two boys folded into each other, laughing hysterically. Two boys piercing each others’ ears. Two boys simply holding each other, in love until the bitter end. “Evan. But here you are tonight, helping raise the man that killed Dorcas, that Regulus died to defeat, whose bitter war was the only reason Evan was in a fight the night he died. If you could change that, would you? Or are you no longer the student I once knew?”
For a moment, she thinks she has gotten through to him.
“I would,” he whispers.
She knows he will be mad again in a moment, that he will be carted off to Azkaban once more, that in a few minutes’ time, he will be unrecognizable once more, but for a fleeting second, he is the Barty Crouch of her memories.
“You know,” she says as she stands up to leave, a sad smile on her time-worn face, “you were always quite good at Transfiguration. I always thought you could go quite far.” Perhaps in another life, but as she shuts the door, she knows that her memories of him, those classes, that brilliance are naught but ghosts of the past.
The year after, she meets a building of ghosts in the form of Number 12 Grimmauld Place. The house is full of hate and danger, the furniture screams of tragedy and violence, and the walls are permeated with bigotry and abuse. This is no house, it is a cage—a cage for another ghost. This ghost is not quite as tall as Remus, with haunted silver eyes and a tumble of raven curls and high, aristocratic cheekbones sharp enough to slice diamond. He is dead and alive, a lie and the truth, an innocent and a compromised. He is a walking contradiction, but she supposes that has always been the case for Sirius Black. Despite it all, though, his tongue is as sharp as ever, his smile is as perfectly quicksilver, he still has the same fondness for Queen that he always has, and there is a silver ring on his fourth finger that she realizes perfectly matches the gold one Remus had worn on a chain. About time, she thinks with a soft smile. It may not be ideal, but her students are alive. They are not lost, she is not alone, and for a moment, she is not shattered.
And then, two years later, the battle happens. She fights like a lion, a tiger, a chimera, a mother, and yet it is not enough. It is not enough to protect Remus from facing the same fate as his husband two years before. It is not enough to prevent the divine separation of two inseparable twins. It is not enough to halt the blowing out of a sharp, colorful young auror’s undimmable spark. It is not enough.
She attends far too many funerals, but she does not miss a single one. She watches far too many old students bury new ones, and watches even more new students bury old ones. She almost cannot bring herself to watch, but she has too, because more than anything, she loves them. She wonders, as she slinks away after each funeral, as she rebuilds Hogwarts for all the future generations, and she grants the gifts of knowledge and love unto each and every student to cross her path, if she is a ghost herself. Nothing she has done has ever been quite enough, and as her time begins to wane, she wonders if she has already begun to fade.
After all, a student without a teacher is lost. A teacher without a student is alone. And a teacher who has had students and has lost them is shattered. But when it is finally time for her step beyond the veil, the faces of students young and old greet her with love, and hail Minerva McGonagall as a hero.