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Try as she might, Minerva could never prepare herself for how quiet the castle became after students left for the summer. Every creak and whisper magnified itself a hundredfold. The minor rantings of every ghost or portrait echoed hollowly throughout the halls. Minerva took a lot of walks in the summer.
And this summer was unique. They’d just recently got the castle back in working order after the battle, resettled and resorted the affairs of children who would return in the autumn, and begun to address the staff shortage. So much work remained to be done.
Minerva pushed open the heavy door off of her chambers and started down the stairs towards the hospital wing. The last of the wounded had left the castle a few days ago, and Minerva could now inspect damages to the wing in earnest. She pushed open the door quietly. The long room was still, silent. A thin ray of light danced on the stone walls, revealing a blanket of dust motes in its path. Minerva took out her wand and began to test the stone around her. She recorded changes in magical properties, undetectable cracks, signs of stress. She was just over half finished with this work when Poppy emerged from her chambers carrying a stack of neatly-folded wool blankets.
"Just finishing up the damage estimates," Minerva called out, halting the charmed quill set upon the parchment suspended in front of her.
"Right then," Poppy responded softly, setting a blanket at the foot of each bed lacking one.
Minerva paused. Poppy seemed different--she moved with a kind of mindless but determined energy between the beds, straightening mattresses and smoothing nonexistent wrinkles out of sheets. Minerva hadn't seen Poppy like this--in decades--she realized. Not since the end of a different war.
Minerva finished her work quickly, rolled up her parchment, and turned towards the door.
"I'll see you at dinner, Poppy," she said, raising her hand in a slight wave.
"Yes, see you then."
Minerva could barely make out Poppy's response. She moved into the corridor and set off towards the nearest set of stairs leading out of the castle.
This, of course, was not the first war she’d survived. Not the first aftermath she would tend to. It probably wouldn’t be the last. But she was old now, and tired. Tired of remaining rational in the face of irrational evils, tired of burying children and lovers and dutifully drafting and executing reasonable plans for clean-up and recovery.
Minerva plodded down the stairs leading to a path along the castle's western expanse, and took long, measured strides into the morning sun. A single owl fluttered from its roost and soared over the lake. This war had not been like the first. This time, she’d had less time to herself, fewer friends to commiserate with. In short, more responsibilities. And the kind of bizarre, adrenaline-charged euphoria that saw her through the first conflict—that had been a rare visitor as of late.
Passing a copse of trees and turning to circle down towards the lake, she thought about the first war. About codebreaking. About living with Poppy. About witches and wizards long departed, with whom she’d spent hours bent over machines, puzzling over ancient runes.
In the beginning, she and Poppy had railed against the bullheaded stupidity of the Ministry that kept women out of important war work. But as days decoding Muggle ciphers dragged on, Minerva came to believe that whatever resistance to real rune and code work she’d face would soon crumble in the face of practicality and desperation.
Eventually, she coaxed a Hogwarts classmate named Simon into taking her to see his high-level coding work. This was after they'd spent the better part of a small house party lost in conversation on the subjects of runes and riddles and numbers. After negotiating several trick doors and a charmed entryway, Simon led her into a large room quietly buzzing with activity. The dark devices in question lay on long wooden tables with wizards clumped around them—taking notes, prodding with wands. She and Simon sat down next to the machine that had puzzled him for weeks and started working. None of the wizards in the room questioned why she was there. A few of them were old friends from her school days—who knew her skill with numbers and riddles and had personally experienced her prickly sense of discipline during her years as a prefect. Within a few days, her and Simon's combined efforts unraveled over half of their assigned device's encoding functions.
"I showed the boss our work," Simon told Minerva. "He has no issue with you staying on."
The work was addictive. She returned home to Poppy each night bright-eyed with stories of new discoveries and male antics. Well, not each night—she and the team often worked through the night—stopping occasionally to sneak Muggle cigarettes and tins of beer. Of course there were slights. Of course she generally shunned credit and worked to smooth the egos of the men around her. But she reveled in each new discovery, in solving a piece of each puzzle.
Poppy remained in the Muggle wards, and for all of her cajoling Minerva couldn’t convince her to present herself at St. Mungo’s and make herself indispensible. Not even as the death toll rose and the descriptions of wounds and deformities became even more gruesome. Poppy had her own patients. And she did right by them.
And then it was over. There was glee, and relief, of course. But Minerva felt oddly deflated. Her team broke up. She went off to help the Ministry rebuild departments. And Poppy went to advanced medical training. For a long time after the war, Minerva felt curiously numb. She didn’t miss the war, exactly. Certainly didn’t miss the panic and dread, the deaths and explosions. The constant watchfulness required—a kind of vigilance that in time felt almost like another limb. A limb that, no longer needed, became a kind of phantom limb, ungainly and unsettling. She missed the feeling of flying to work on her creaky bicycle, wind in her hair, mind racing with runes and charms. She missed the softness of Poppy’s skin, the frantic pace of her fingers as they unbuttoned her jacket, her blouse.
By the time she and Poppy had both settled at Hogwarts years later, the war, and their—relationship? friendship? desperate physical use of each other?—was a distant memory. No, Minerva did not want Poppy back. There were other lovers, other relationships. New things, in the very near present, that caught her attention and drove her to the kind of determined industry she craved. Children who needed her matter-of-fact assurance. But sometimes she’d pass Poppy in a corridor or check an ailing student in her ward, and something—the angle of Poppy’s smile or the lilt of her voice—would recreate for a moment the delirious force of those nights years ago.
Minerva shortened her steps as she edged down the hill by the lake. The morning’s mist was gone, and a faint humidity beaded her brow. About twenty years ago, she had started to think of retiring to a seaside cottage or a place in the hills. Of leaving behind the interminable politics of the school and the long grind that each year entailed. No one could say she hadn’t earned it. No one could say she hadn’t done her part. But she’d lived long enough to know how very, very bored she would soon become. And so she stayed at Hogwarts. And firmly set about living the kind of life she would want if she struck out on her own. It would never be exactly what she wanted. No life in any kind of community could be. But it was enough.
Light played on the grey waters of the lake. Bulrush stirred in the slight breeze. Minerva turned back from the shore and regarded the castle. The mid-morning sun hung parallel to the tower as it rose. A curtain fought the wind behind a half-open window. Gathering her robes about her, Minerva started up the steep stone path back to the castle. It was late, and she had work to do.