Since he had died.
That was what everyone kept on repeating, their words echoing in her head over and over without ever coming any closer to making themselves understood. Since he had died. That was what she could not, would not understand had become of reality.
It had been two months since Poppy and Xiomara and the rest of the lot had begun prefacing what they said with that cold phrase. It was vile. She wanted no part in it, could not accept it as part of her lexicon.
She ran the school much as she always had-- Albus had been a terrible organizer for as long as she'd known him, and that was the better part of her sixty-odd years. He had been her teacher, first, and then her mentor, and then, finally her boss, officially. Unofficially he had been her best friend for the past thirty years, and she could not will herself to put him behind her as if he were a figment of her past that merely haunted the halls that he had presided over, humming ridiculous tunes to himself while wearing that dreamy half smile that she had seen on his face first as a student and then as an equal, a companion.
A companion. That's what they were, life long companions. It would be useless to analyze their relationship further, as Minerva McGonagall had little patience for speculation and idle dreaming. She was one to live in the moment; that was why Albus had made such an ideal companion, in part. Dreams were somehow made more tangible, more acceptable coming from Albus; he had a way of making reality dreamy, light, funny, something to ponder, muse over, savour, in ways that warmed her chest. To Albus, the whole of the world was dreams, and the cold hard truth was never cold and hard with him. He lived in a world of shades, and his renderings were somehow had coloured her visions as they mingled with his in the steam of tea brewed effortlessly over the seemingly neverending games of chess.
It struck Minerva that it had been a long time since their last game of chess. She had won, as usual. There were some who might have called their weekly chess matches boring; Albus won rarely, and hadn't for many years, and although he played intelligently, winning mattered little to him. It was Minerva who played competitively, ruthlessly, and yet she knew as well as he did that the actual winning of the game mattered not nearly as much as the pleasure of playing. Sometimes they would play long into the night, and sometimes their matches would last for days, the board laying untouched in their corner of the staff room, nearest the fireplace. In that corner they remained slightly detached from the rest of the staff room, and gave them leave to make use of both silence and conversation equally. Conversation was easy between them, both experts in their field, both fluent in the same language of philosophy and curiosity, both rather wildly intelligent in their own quiet, comfortable existences. Silence came easily, too, and passed frequently as thoughts wandered between moves on the board, leaping from one square to the next as patterns formed from the thin air and materialized in the form of words. Sometimes those words found themselves in scientific journals; Minerva's most recent publication had sprung from one of these discussions, and Albus had been the first to congratulate her, surprising her one morning with a Chocolate Frog card charmed with her own picture on it.
She flinched at her own memory.
No, she could not just discard him as a fragment of the past. Much as it went against her nature to dwell on things that had been, she held on to his memory fiercely, refusing to let go.
Because it was Albus, this was not only possible, but necessary.
She needed his otherworldliness with her, she needed her dearest friend as much as she missed his presence, silly and annoying as he often was, no matter how he tried to provoke her with gumdrops stuck to her doorknob and whistling in her ear from across the other side of the room. She never could stay annoyed at the man, however hard she tried.
She needed her companion of over fifty years, even if she could only have his memory.
In private, he had called her his better half, declaring on numerous occasions that without his dear Minerva, not a single sheet of paper in the school would have found its way out of the mess, as he never had had a head for business. She would then point out that everything was a mess, particularly in the direction of his office, which she had not been able to salvage fully.
His better half. He had called her that-- called her that, and more. She knew that. He knew that-- had known that.
The trouble was that nobody else knew it, and her secret had been lost with the death of her co-conspirator; that part of her was lost.
It had always been the two of them together against the world, first and last and always. She had been at his side, been his comfort, when the world wanted him as a great mind and then later as a hero, and all the while she had been there with her greatest friend, hardly noticing the ripples in the wind and the excitement caused by his genius and the awe with which he was treated by colleagues and admirers. Between the two of them, at least, nothing changed; she had never been inclined to pay much attention to fame, true to her nature, and he had little interest in it. Together they ducked the storm, continued on in their lives much as they always had, arguing over the little things and sharing thoughts on cosmological theory over endless cups of Earl Grey that they both had a fondness for. So many evenings had been filled so; there was no one day in particular that distinguished itself from the rest; rather, conversations and bad jokes (Albus had been particularly fond of those) stood out from the never ending stream of memories that flowed from one to the next, in no particular order, as if a lifetime belonged to the room itself. The best of those had been the particularly rainy Sunday mornings, when he had opted not to walk the grounds, as was his custom; then, she would find him already in the sitting room, leaning back in the the red velvet arm chairs, teacup resting on the worn arm. She would often find him in his chair, eyes serene and far away, gazing out the window at something that only he could see, and she would wonder where he had wandered off to, what beautiful puzzle or musing he had stumbled upon this time. He was often far away, lost in his musings, and she never interrupted, practical as always, having accepted that he saw things she did not. Not right away, anyway. She would brew a fresh pot of tea and set it steaming between them, taking her place without comment. If she had marking to do she would set it aside when he returned from his thoughts, but on most days she would hold the saucer between her hands, warming them, lose herself in the damp green of the ivy that lay between her and the cracked-open grey of the sky.
Minerva sighed, lost in her thoughts, oblivious to the soft click of the door to the staff room.
If she had looked up, she would have seen the stricken look on the face of the newest Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry duck behind the furniture.