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WIP

“The Joneses—Morag and the parents—are all waiting outside of the hospital wing,” says Poppy primly, “but I wanted to know what I could tell them.”

Tell them Hestia’s going to spend the rest of her life a tormented, demi-human monster, Minerva wants to snap. Instead, she rubs her eyes and looks out the window. “Tell them that she was bitten yesterday, obviously. They need to know.”

The nurse nods. “She’s still bearing some marks from her first transformation. Thank goodness yesternight was the last of the full moon. The poor dear… Remus was able to help her through last night, thank goodness, said his friends had done the same for him once upon a time, but there was no time to give her Wolfsbane…”

“Yes,” sighs Minerva. They both know too well what effect transformation has on the unprepared, and the Wolfsbane Potion needs to be administered for more than a week before the full moon to have any effect. “Is he still there?”

Again Poppy nods. “To be honest, he was quite exhausted this morning, so I’ve got him in bed too, not that he went willingly. And Tonks is still in shock.”

“Poor girl,” Minerva finds herself saying before she remembers that she is not in this moment headmistress but head of the Order, and that her charges are not children, and that they need discipline far more than sympathy at the moment. Still, a four-hour firefight against a dozen Death Eaters, most of them alone, a werewolf-bitten comrade bleeding at her feet—Miss Tonks has every reason to be in shock. “Is Remus at all presentable?”

“Oh, you know our Mr. Lupin,” says Poppy, sharing her first smile of the morning, “always charming no matter how tattered.”

“True.” Minerva smiles too, for it is as apt a description of Remus Lupin as any that she has heard. “Perhaps he could help you speak with the Joneses, to give the… condition a more human face.”

“He certainly could.”

“But they are not to be told the nature of Hestia’s mission, is that clear?” Now Minerva feels more in command. “They have my sympathy, but there is no knowing where their sympathies may lie.”

“Yes, m’um,” answers the matron, not quite able to stop herself from delivering a small bob before turning and leaving.

As the door closes heavily behind her, Minerva McGonagall collapses back into the ridiculously large chair that she has inherited from Albus, and from Armando before him. (A wee dram… No.)

First September. The school should be bustling, elves madly cleaning, Mr. Filch screaming at all and sundry, owls reporting from the Express, from the families of children who missed the train. The Scots students should be arriving in a few hours on the Hogsmeade Special.

Instead, the castle is quiet, empty but for a small contingent of Aurors, a few of the staff, and three patients in the hospital wing.

Picking up her spectacles from the desk with a determined sigh, she glances down at the stack of correspondence that must be got through. An update from Molly Weasley on the Order’s current stores—dangerously low on Floo Powder and several other essential items, though the Floos are being closely watched by the Ministry these days—and a number of rather costly items must be obtained if Elphias is to double the amount of Wolfsbane that he is to produce. A long, discursive note from Griselda Marchbanks with recommendations on the reorganization of the Charms curriculum—could pass that along to Filius, but he’ll most likely burn it and so she saves him the trouble. A short, gruff note from Augusta Longbottom that brings a smile to Minerva’s face—Neville’s new wand is apparently a bit too well suited to him, since he has broken two vases and a crystal decanter by Levitating them into the ceiling when he merely intended to float them across the room. What Augusta expects Minerva to do about this information is not altogether clear.

George Weasley wrote to say that Barnabas Toke sneaked in to headquarters late last night, drunk as a skunk, and swearing he’d been providing covering fire from the rear of the Misses Tonks and Jones’s position until he himself had been overwhelmed and driven into hiding. Clearly not to be trusted with a high risk mission.

A scribbled note from Charlie Weasley is rather more worrying: the Patil girls arrived at this morning’s meeting of the DA understandably beside themselves; that they came to the session at all is probably a sign more of their rage and grief than of their balance. Apparently the entire session was taken up in the two usually even-tempered girls’ explosions—crying one moment, flinging hexes and promising death to Pansy Parkinson the next. A headache begins to pound, but she writes a letter of condolence to the twins’ mother Lakshmi in which she invites herself to come and visit the girls the next day after luncheon.

Next she writes Miss Parkinson, suggesting that she may drop in for tea to discuss matters of some urgency. She does not particularly like Miss Parkinson, and her father’s apparent actions suggest her family’s allegiance as strongly as her own sycophancy towards the Malfoy boy, yet for all that she is venal and narcissistic, Pansy is not stupid, nor does she seem particularly ideologically motivated; perhaps a word will yet do much not only to save the Patil girls from Azkaban, but to sway Pansy to the side of Light.

As Minerva is putting a seal to the last note, the hearth flares green, and a huge, well-coifed head appears in the midst of the flame. “Good day, Minèrve,” says her fellow headmistress.

“Olympe, what a pleasure,” she says, and though she does enjoy the enormous woman’s company, there is no immediate cause for them to speak; they conferred on Order matters only last Thursday.

“As always, likewise,” mutters Olympe. “I wanted to let you know that some of my kin may be coming for a visit.”

“Your… kin?” (She can’t mean..)

“Oui, on my father’s side, vous comprenez.”

(She does.) Giants. Merciful heaven. “Oh, my.”

“Oui,” Olympe says with a nod. “I wanted to make sure that they did not arrive with you unexpectedly.”

Minerva takes a deep breath and nods back. “I believe one of my students may have encountered one of your cousins just the yesterday morning.”

Madam Maxime closes her huge eyes and heaves a sigh. “Ah. How charming.”

When Tonks said that one of the enemy had been a giant, Minerva thought perhaps the girl was merely suffering from neurasthenia, battle fatigue. Clearly not. “Yes, indeed. Perhaps we should expect more than just the one, then?”

It seems odd to see Olympe Maxime’s full face look pinched, and yet pinched it looks. “Ah, oui,” she says. “Per’aps an ‘alf a dozen or so.”

“Oh,” gasps Minerva, and then adds for any Ministry eavesdroppers, “how lovely.”

“Yes.”

“Well, thank you for the… warning,” Minerva says. “We’ll look forward to entertaining them.”

“Your hospitality is always most generous,” answers Olympe, and disappears in a puff of green smoke.

“Good lord,” Minerva cries when the Floo is safely closed. “Half a dozen giants? What on earth shall we do?”

“The best that you can,” says a warm, dry voice from behind her. “And that is usually more than good enough.”

(A wee dram. Later.) “However did they get in undetected?” she mutters.

“Well, I do think that the Aurors have been more than usually distracted of late, have they not?” asks Albus’s portrait. “And no doubt they came in as Hagrid brought his brother—disguised as boulders aboard gravel barges.” Then he gives a low chuckle.

Minerva really doesn’t feel like dealing with one of Albus’s moods today, truly she does not. She needs his help. “What on earth is so amusing, Albus?”

“Well, your little performance with Olympe just now reminded me just what a good spy you were once upon a time, Minerva. Quite good at traveling incognito yourself.” He lets loose another low laugh. “I have always had particularly fond memories of meeting up with you just north of Caen…” Another chuckle.

No, she does not have it in her today. “Albus, I would rather not know what went through that perverse and perverted mind of yours at the sight of me in the habit of a sister of the Poor Claires.”

“Then I shall remain as silent as the grave,” he says, and she knows that if she were to turn, his painted eyes would be twinkling, that he would have no idea how devastating a thing that was for him to say. Portraits make terrible conversationalists, even charming ones like the late headmaster’s, for they lack even the most elementary sense of empathy.

“What I need to know—” she begins, but she never manages to ask him just how the Order is supposed to array its already stretched resources to battle giants, because flame bursts into the office again, red this time, and suddenly a familiar inhabitant of this room is trilling on the perch that Minerva has somehow never had the heart to remove.

“Fawkes, my dear bird, how lovely to see you!” says Albus, and in response the phoenix sings a song of such sweet sadness that Minerva’s breath is squeezed from her chest.

The portrait behind her sighs. “Ah, Fawkes, my friend, how I miss being able to understand you. Alas, my faculties are sadly diminished. Yet it is indeed a pleasure to see and to hear you once again, paint and canvas though I may be.”

The phoenix’s song now is purely sad, and Minerva’s heart is nigh to breaking—or perhaps she only now is made aware of how close to breaking it has been all along. With a golden claw, the bird holds out to her a tightly rolled parchment. “Thank you,” the headmistress manages to mutter, turning the letter to reveal the very familiar, very tight script of Hermione Granger. As on the previous two occasions that Fawkes—or, as the girl insists rather whimsically on referring to the bird, Firesong—brought a missive from the three prodigals, it is Hermione that wrote.

Not that Minerva misses reading Potter’s writing—nor Weasley’s, Lord knows—but she is worried about all three of them, and she would like to hear that they are well directly.

As usual, the letter opens with vague assurances of the trio’s health and their continued assiduous pursuit of whatever quest it was that Albus set them on.

She has asked the portrait several times just what he sent the three children to do—for though they may be adults in the eye of the Ministry, in her eyes they are her own students, and therefore forever to be numbered among the only children that she has ever had. Indeed, she threatened to feed the picture to Charlie Weasley’s dragon if it could not be forthcoming. The thrice-cursed portrait, of course, twinkled its eyes at her and remained mute. Silent as the grave indeed.

This letter’s true objective is quickly thereafter revealed: Granger wishes to know the whereabouts of Aberforth Dumbledore. It is a question that has troubled Minerva since Albus’s funeral; though the Hog’s Head has seen a huge upswing in prestige and business since Rosmerta’s complicity in the headmaster’s death became known, the owner has been conspicuously absent, and the poor barmaid there has been besieged. Yet even when Minerva waited for the young woman after Last Call, she was unwilling—or unable—to answer Minerva’s questions, hair frazzled, smock stained, but no less determined to serve her employer and to guard his privacy.

“Would that I had your gift for Legilimency,” Minerva sighs.

Fawkes—or Firesong, or whatever the bloody bird is named—coos at her, while Albus’s portrait tisks. “Legilimency can be a curse as much as it is sometimes a terribly useful tool,” he says. “Harry Potter has learned that to his own cost, I think.”

“Perhaps,” Minerva says, her lips pinching together of their own accord. “Miss Granger is seeking for your brother.”

“Oh, dear,” the painting says, managing to sound both pained and amused. “I’m afraid that, since the goat incident, my brother has learned how not to be found when he does not wish to be.”

“Perhaps,” Minerva snaps. She would never have spoken so sharply to the original Albus, though she might have been tempted to. “But what should I tell the girl? There surely must be some safe place to leave a message for Aberforth.”

There is a silence—the unnatural, summer silence that should never blanket this school in September. After a minute or more, the portrait answers, “Perhaps if Miss Granger—and her friends—were to send a note to my brother at his place of business via Fawkes here… Yes, I believe the young lady who works for Aberforth would know what to do from there.”

The nasty portrait across the way—Headmaster Black, who was still a legendary target of scorn in Minerva’s days as a student—mutters, “Is this the headmaster’s office, or the Owl Post, I ask you?”

“Shut up,” says one of the other portraits, for which Minerva is quite obliged.

“Thank you, Albus,” Minerva says, and efficiently responds to Granger’s request. Once the letter is done, she holds the parchment out for Fawkes (no, she will never be able to think of the bloody bird as anything but Fawkes). The phoenix takes the letter, and then leans its head forward so that its eyes fill Minerva’s sight; it then looses a slow, low note, and as Minerva’s throat begins to thicken, it nods once and disappears in a flash of Gryffindor-colored flame.

By the time that she has stopped crying, the sun is beginning its afternoon march across the office floor. Minerva can just see the Quidditch pitch, empty in the unseasonably warm September sun.

“Minerva,” says the portrait behind her in a voice that is low and sad like the phoenix’s, “do you remember when I first visited your family?”

She snorts wetly and spins the huge chair around. “My mother said that I was canny, and my father said, ‘Uncanny’s more the like.’”

“Yes,” says Albus, and he is smiling, and though she knows it is merely a portrait, Merlin help her, she cannot help but smile back. “Do you remember, I wonder, what you asked me when I told you what you, in fact, were?”

“I asked whether I would be able to do magic.” It is the question that most Muggle-born ask when told that they were in fact different from their peers.

“Yes, of course you did,” Albus answers, that intoxicating smile still warming the whole canvas. “And when I said that, yes, you would be able to do all sorts of lovely spells, rather than ask for a demonstration as so many do, you asked—”

“I asked… if I would be able to make the world better.” Standing there, staring up at the imposing, white-bearded figure in the odd, plum-colored suit, for all that her question was huge, thinking of nothing larger than her parents’ poverty and the death of young Oonagh to influenza the spring before.

“You did.” He nods, and the smile does not waver. “And do you remember what I said in return?”

“You said…” It is the moment in which Minerva McGonagall became Albus Dumbledore’s forever. “You said that it is within each human spirit to do wonderful things, whatever the means. And that it is in each human heart to choose to make the world around us better… or not.”

“Yes,” says Albus, and smiles serenely down at Minerva, who feels, peering up at him, once again like the eleven-year-old girl she once was and not a witch of nearly eighty years that she appears to have become.

“It is hard, Albus,” she sighs.

“Oh, yes, it is, Headmistress.” The smile does not dim, but the eyes sadden. “And it never ceases to be. ‘What is good, and what is easy,’ you know.”

“Yes.” She sits there for another five minutes, staring up at the portrait, which seems to have no more to say.

Minerva is about to go down to the hospital wing to visit the Joneses, Miss Tonks and Mr. Lupin when the Floo flares green again. Kingsley Shacklebolt’s shiny pate seems all the darker for the green tint of the Floo. “Professor,” he says, face tight, “there’s been a development. A half-dozen of the Dementors seem to have sneaked past Charlie’s patrols and have reached London. He can’t attack them here, and they’re creating turmoil here that is just…”

By the time that Minerva has finished her conversation with Kingsley—the despair that the awful creatures are spreading throughout the metropolis has caused what was already a crisis after the Spencer girl’s death into an outpouring of public grief that seems totally out of proportion with the actual tragedy—a call from Sturgis has come in confirming Miss Tonks’s sighting and Olympe’s intelligence. A handful of giants have been seen making their way across the South, and though they have not as of yet done damage, they are certain to do so.

Minerva marshals her forces, such as they are:  few of the Order’s forces can cast a corporeal Patronus, but they will have to do what they can. Remus and Tonks are sent straight from their hospital beds to London, bless them, to join the Weasley twins, and Minerva makes a Floo call that she swore to herself she would never make: she reaches Ginny Weasley, who is having tea with the Lovegood girl, and asks her to pull together however many of the DA that she believes can manage a full Patronus to meet with her brothers in London. Molly she informs by post, along with the other parents of the students that Ginny suggested—not the Patils, however, not tonight—requesting the children’s assistance in the current crisis. She feels afterward that she should have used the Floo, but… Even Minerva feels overmatched by Molly when the Weasley mater familias is feeling protective of her brood. Ginny and the boys will be safe enough, Minerva knows—they will only be herding the Dementors, not confronting them directly. Even so…

The giants she confronts with the only weapons at her disposal: Charlie Weasley and that dragon of his. Her orders to Charlie are clear: keep them in your sight, but do not attack unless they are headed toward populated areas. She does not think that even a dragon will be able to take on six fully-grown giants, and she does not wish to lose so powerful a weapon.

Hagrid and Grawp she writes, asking them to head from their current hiding place in Cornwall towards Devon; it seems likely that these new giants are headed towards the Dark Lord’s stronghold in Wiltshire, just to the northeast; perhaps some of them may prove less than hostile, and perhaps the two brothers can convince some of the behemoths to side with the Order.

As the operations move into action, the sun begins to set. Thank goodness last night was the last of the full moon. Hestia and her family will be spared another night of horror—until next month, of course.

Minerva eats at her desk, house-elves coming and going all but unseen as she receives and responds to communiqués. The moon is shining in through the window by the time she finally gets up and stretches her no-longer limber bones—past midnight, then.

The portraits all offer sleepy salutations.

Stumbling up to her quarters, she murmurs, “Aye, a wee dram, I think so.” Looking back down the stairs, she can see the moonlight just catching the bottom to the frame of Albus’s portrait. Nae so wee, she thinks.