Minerva McGonagall stood in the empty graveyard as the wind bit at her face. She tried not to come here too often; she tells herself she just has nothing new to say and pushes off the visits she desperately wants. Secretly, she knows if she visited more she would not have the willpower to leave. Her eyes felt full when she caught the date of death of both of the tombstones. They had been so unbelievably young.
"James, you should have seen him," she whispers in hushed, rough tones.
"His first time picking up a broomstick! The youngest seeker in recent history! You both would have been so, so proud," she finished hurriedly.
She couldn't help thinking of when she first saw Harry walk into Hogwarts. She had had to blink away the imagine of another black-haired bespectacled boy who had looked like a carbon copy, minus the eyes.
She could see him and the rest of them so clearly it hurt. The first time she saw them -the Marauders, as they would later nickname themselves- walking down the hall laughing, she had stopped in her tracks.
"This is it," she had thought to herself as she fought tears on the way to her office. "That love is what will end this war." (Of course, in a couple years she would be right about that one, in a way.)
She, to this day, lived in awe of James Potter. He was born in the midst of a war, the bloodiest and most painful war the wizarding world had ever seen. The war had seeped into his entire life, had even colored his education at Hogwarts.
But none of that stopped James Potter from loving without abandon and always wholeheartedly. First with those other three boys who so desperately needed that love, then with a girl who was one of the only ones able to return such a love in full.
It was a blessing and a curse that Harry looked just like James. It meant she got to see him everyday, but it also meant she got her heartbroken again as she blinked to remember it wasn't James and he was dead and he was never coming back.
"You both would be so proud," she mummered again.
The graveyard was silent. It was unchanging and uncaring in the midst of such strong emotions.
She hung her head in defeat as her heart longed for the image she saw in her head; just one tombstone, hers, surrounded by James and Lily and Harry and Sirius and Remus and countless others who were all alive and well and happy. She saw this so clearly, just as she had seen it in the Mirror of Erised. Her greatest wish, after all these years and after every loss -each one cutting deeper than the last- was simply to be outlived.
The guilty beating of her heart was the only thing that echoed in her ears as she conjured flowers for the two graves she desperately wished were empty and she turned to leave.
Wishing was a fools game and she tried to shake it out of her head as she went back to Hogwarts. She did, after all, have another Potter whose class would be waiting for her in an hour.