A/N: This is the first fanfiction I've written in several years, so I apologise for any rustiness. The following was intended to be a oneshot, but if I get enough positive reviews it might become the first chapter of a full-length fanfic I'm currently planning.
Minerva McGonagall walked slowly up the spiral staircase to her office, lacking the energy to make it carry her to the top itself. One more thing, she thought quietly, that she missed about Albus: she could never remember the staircase static when he had been Headmaster, never remember having to enchant it. She wondered, vaguely, whether everyone else had to climb up it now, or whether this special treatment was reserved for her. Either way, it was nothing short of a taunt to her eighty-two years.
As the door creaked open, she closed her eyes and sighed for a moment, unwilling to enter a room so familiar and yet so unknown. Strangely enough, it was her own possessions that gave it such an air of foreignity. Even after three years, it was peculiarly someone else's office – perhaps because its rightful occupant had never left it, she noted wryly. Everything seemed to be converging, the room looming in on her like the opening to a grave – whisky, she thought to herself, walking to the cupboard that, until recently, had housed Dumbledore's Pensieve. Thankfully, that had vanished at his death – she did not know quite how she would have managed to move the thing without one look, one glance at the strange, white, glistening matter it contained. Dumbledore's thoughts, ever elusive.
Anger surged, and she shook it off, sitting down – finally – in the Headmaster's chair. Her chair, as of – oh, years, now, she told herself as she surveyed the room with deliberate impassivity. Godric's sword in its glass case: they had both been Gryffindors, she saw no reason to remove that. The far corner, where Fawkes's perch had once stood, was now occupied by her hat-stand which, although for the moment hatless, was almost swamped in heavy tartan cloaks. It was turning out to be a miserable April, the proverbial showers proving to be more like snowstorms. Sometimes, Minerva thought, she truly regretted never having left her home country for warmer climes. She took another sip of whisky, paused, and downed the glass.
"Good evening, Minerva," Dumbledore smiled at her from the wall above the fireplace, beside his chair – her chair, McGonagall promptly corrected herself.
"Evening, Albus," she said curtly. She would not rise to the bait; would not voice the thoughts, the angry words, that she had been nurturing. She would keep quiet, as she had done for the past three – three? – years.
"Long day?"
"The Potions master is ill again – it's the draught down in those cellars, I'm sure. Nothing in the hospital wing can cure it, so it's convalescence and a cover teacher until…" She trailed off, the sleeping portrait of Phineas suddenly catching her eye.
"I don't know how Severus managed it… I wish…" She was struck, almost incredibly, with loss: but it would pass, she knew. It had done for years, now – soon it would be decades and, like all her other pain, would become little more than a dull ache. The thought of Severus's death, after all, was nothing but a mask hiding the agonising sting of a more important death that she had been denying for so long, and would continue to deny: indefinitely, if necessary. It came as something of a skill, in old age, to hold such memories and continually ignore them; never to relive the past, never to wonder what might be or even what might have been – a skill she felt sadly lacking in, with such youth all around her and yet in such close proximity to its opposite.
"In remembrance of the dead you must not forget to live," Dumbledore murmured from his perch above her, his voice dragging Minerva out of her sombre train of thought. Looking down on her, as always. The whisky was beginning to take effect, coursing through her aged veins, warming her cold, cold blood…
"And not so long ago you could have said 'we'."
The words fell carelessly out of her mouth, throwing out all the anger of the past few months. Biting, explicit criticism held itself on the tip of her tongue and Minerva felt suddenly stilled, poised on the edge of a verbal vertical drop, her hasty sentence of a moment ago already tumbling down it like loosened scree. She gripped the arms of the ancient chair, steeling herself against a fall, and stared unseeingly down at the mottled floor. Dumbledore's portrait was silent, watching her with a worried air, and the late Headmaster's concerned gaze more than anything propelled her out of her seat, out of her self-pity, and into cold, merciless rage.
"Did you not think?" she screamed at him, sitting in the picture frame with such a benign smile, such carefree wisdom, "Did you never stop to- to consider it for one moment? What about everyone else, Albus?" Her voice cracked, her legs shaking, and she threw the whisky glass at the canvas with all the force her aged body could muster to watch the shards shatter around her feet. They were unimportant.
"A hero's death! An old man's plunge into oblivion – satisfied, are you? On your next great adventure?" Gasping, she stared up at him, waiting for an answer. Something had to be said, something meaningful… Dumbledore was silent.
"What about me, Albus?" she whispered.
Silence fell. Shaking, unsure on her wizened feet, Minerva held the Headmaster's gaze; her eyes, once so bright blue, paler now and watery with emotion. If a portrait could look askance at anything, Dumbledore looked at her askance now; she narrowed her eyes and concentrated all her effort on his guiltless expression, as if to force him to answer her. But he said nothing: nothing in his face revealed the slightest feeling, the slightest responsibility, the merest hint of regret. Just surprise, and pity. He – the dead man – pitied her.
"I don't want your pity-"
"Yes."
"What?" Minerva caught herself just in time, teetering on the verge of another assault but held motionless by that one, small admission. Such a tiny word – such breadth it covered!
"I thought about it… I thought about you," Dumbledore murmured finally, bright blue painted eyes – surely not even magical artists could recreate that colour – fixed on the painted floor on which he stood. A shadow seemed to cross his canvas face. Minerva searched his eyes, those eyes still so piercing and alive, for some recognition, some hint, some guidance.
"Do you – I mean, do you remember- remember everything?" she asked suddenly. He had no need to clarify.
"Everything up to the moment of my death." She nodded in acceptance, casting around and seeing, in the corner, quite suddenly, Fawkes's perch. Occupied, but by a younger bird – Fawkes in the prime of his life, proud plumage shining golden – watching a younger man. So familiar the scene, and yet so strange; so utterly unreachable.
"We could have…"
"But it was so long ago, Minerva," he cut in flatly, seating himself in a chair behind him, identical to that into which McGonagall now sank down. She nodded tiredly, suddenly ashamed of her human weaknesses; her wrinkles, suddenly etched deeper, the dark circles round her eyes.
"Then, too," she muttered eventually, Summoning another bottle of whisky and mending the glass she'd thrown with a strangely heavy wave of her wand. Dumbledore waited patiently – knowingly, even – while she poured out a glass, drank it, and tucked the bottle away in a desk drawer. Finally, she turned back to him.
"I know it would have been difficult, but..."
"You loved me," he finished.
"Yes."
"And I…"
They both let the sentence hang, not needing to bear the shame of seeing it finished. Minerva knew, somehow, that it was impossible to complete. Dumbledore had the rare gift of loving everyone and yet no one, at the same time. She wondered, mutely, whether he had ever felt true emotion for anyone.
"You – you if ever I possibly could," he said finally.
Minerva, understanding, moved to take his hand; to reassure him, to let him know that she didn't… She stopped, inches from the polished frame. Her fingers curled up, faced only with the already cracking surface of an oil painting: peach tones, and pink, and blue-grey, meaningless shapes that gave the illusion of a human hand. She pulled away as if from a hot stove, knowing Dumbledore would have noticed even as she tried to be nonchalant. His face, however, gave nothing away; his blue eyes held nothing but pity. He pitied her! This relic of an all-too-mortal man, a leftover, a shadow in a world Albus had long since quit, had humanity enough to pity her.
"Goodnight, Albus."
And she turned away from those blue eyes, and left the room.
A/N: I know JK has hinted that Dumbledore is gay, but I like to think he also had a soft spot for Minerva - if ever he could. If this does develop into a full-length fic, it won't be Albus/Minerva: I shy away from pairings involving relations with a bit of canvas :)
