.
Unrequited
.
She could love. Had loved. Of that, Pomona Sprout was certain. They had been working together when the former Transfiguration teacher's husband had passed. It was tragic, certainly, but Pomona didn't see any reason for her old friend to regress into the dried up prune she was today.
It was over twenty years since Minerva's husband had been laid in the ground, and each day since then Pomona had watched her closest friend grow stricter, colder. Appearing to lose the ability to love. The animagus woman seemed indifferent to romantic feeling – incapable of having anything more than a professional relationship. It had come to the point that made one wonder if Minerva McGonagall had ever had the capacity to love. If Elphinstone had ever held the young witch's heart.
The Herbology teacher sighed. Pausing in the middle of pruning her beloved Warbling Fern as she spotted the newly re-appointed Headmistress sweep her way back toward the castle. Both women were older now. Wrinkled, worn, and tired after surviving two Wizarding Wars. There were times, dark times, when a brandy and a warm blanket in the staff lounge were the only things that kept the women going. Those brief moments when her friend had opened up, relaxed, those were the ones that Pomona cherished. If Minerva truly could share herself then Pomona Sprout was one of the very few people who could say they had shared anything and everything with the stern professor.
The doors to the castle wedged closed behind Minerva and Pomona amended her thoughts. They had shared almost everything. There was a feeling, a yearning that had started way back in their school years, that Pomona had hidden from her friend. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that Minerva would never reciprocate. As the years passed and her friend grew more and more disinterested in human comfort... that feeling had lingered with Pomona.
She shook her head, setting her shears down with a bit more force than necessary as she turned away from her fern. Gnarled fingers swept through her short curls, untangling the coarse gray strands in an attempt to distract herself from her thoughts. It was impossible though. As the years passed and Minerva McGonagall hardened herself against love, Pomona had found herself irrevocably drawn to the other woman. And, as each moment ticked away to the end of their lives, she found herself mimicking Minerva. Hardening, withdrawing. The greenhouse glass that surrounded her mirrored the truth that Pomona didn't want to see. She, too, was becoming a dried up prune.