It's odd the way laughter can resound in a decrepit old hallway years after it originally vociferated.
Minerva McGonagall sucked in a harsh breath, reaching out to place one hand on the wall beside her. For a moment there, in the middle of her rounds, she'd felt the sensations of time travel.
The question of whether it had been in her mind or if she'd really heard it remained to be answered.
I am getting too old for this.
She studied the cracks in the wall beneath her hand. It, like her, like this castle, like so many wizards and witches of the time, had been bruised, battered, and broken. These walls told a story, a story she had spent her lifetime reading and adding chapters to, a story she didn't know the ending to, a story she sometimes doubted even had an ending.
She loved these crumbling walls, but at the same she hated them, hated herself. She was crumbling.
It had been too long of a fight and Minerva McGonagall, despite having been on the winning end of it, felt as if she had given up.
"Alright there, Professor?"
The Head Girl had come around the corner, her intelligent gaze concerned and curious.
"Yes, yes, just tired, I'll be off to bed now, finish your rounds and do the same, I'll see you tomorrow in class," Minerva replied hurriedly, gathering up her robes and rushing off down the dimly lit corridor, leaving a confused student in her wake.
But she didn't head to her bedchambers, she went to her classroom. She plopped down, in the chair she'd been sitting in for years. She laid her wand down carefully, shook out the arms of her robes, and folded her hands neatly in front of her.
"That'll be two detentions, I'm afraid, you know what time class begins."
Her voice rang out determinedly in the empty classroom, but she didn't feel any more like herself. Sighing, she buried her face in her arms, letting out a loud groan. She took several long, deep breaths, and when she lifted her head, she let out a loud yelp.
She blinked and the images disappeared. For a moment there, a class from a long time ago, a class she'd never forget as long as she lived, had appeared before her eyes, their youthful faces beaming at her full of eagerness to learn, to laugh, to live.
She blinked rapidly, trying to convince herself she wasn't losing her mind. She had, after all, been fairly positive she'd heard Sirius Black's barking laugh earlier in the hallway. And now here she was, hallucinating that his class year was sitting before her. But Black was locked away in Azkaban, and that class had graduated years and years earlier. Some of the people she had pictured were no longer living, victims of the war.
And when the Head Girl had come around the corner before, Minerva could have sworn Lily Evans was the one asking if she were alright.
If she closed her eyes, she felt like she was back in that time. The wrinkles smoothed away, the cracks in the walls tightened, and the laughter grew a little louder.
James Potter had always tried her patience. That was the only way to describe him.
He and his partner-in-crime, Sirius, had been among the brightest wizards to come through her doorway…on the days that they bothered to show up.
Students think they go undetected when not in the classroom, but the professors always know more about them. After seven years of teaching a class all she knew, or all that they possessed the capacity to learn, she knew more than just their skills and talents. She knew their personalities, their strengths, their weaknesses.
She knew that Sirius Black and James Potter and Peter Pettigrew had found out about Remus Lupin's secret, and, as a result, had a secret of their own. Had she not admired their strong bond so much, she might have taken it upon herself to find out more about that secret.
Then there was Remus, with his kind, dazed eyes and reasonable mind. It was his sense of morals and the moments, however infrequently they occurred, in which she witnessed his attempts to control his friends, that had made her recommend him to Dumbledore as a prefect.
"He'd make a good Head Boy alongside Evans," had been her exact words. And while Dumbledore had agreed about Evans, James Potter had made Head Boy.
She'd had her doubts. Oh, he'd taken Quidditch Captain seriously enough, but that hadn't surprised her. Head Boy took responsibility and maturity, qualities she wasn't sure he possessed. For the entirety of seventh year, she sat back and watched, inwardly pleased and proud, as he proved her wrong.
For the year, as well, she had watched Potter and Evans become closer. She'd seen the signs years earlier, for no one could deny the way they sparked when together, but that year marked a new beginning. When James and Lily had entered the Great Hall with fingers entwined for the first time, Minerva had simply held out her hand. Filius Flitwick, grumbling all the while that she was not allowed to gloat for the rest of the year, had dropped a Galleon onto her palm.
Minerva had simply smirked. "You knew better, Filius. You know I know my students."
Remembering those words, Minerva let out a long sigh. She hadn't known anything, she now realized. For she would have bet not just a Galleon, but her whole life savings, on the belief that Sirius Black would rather die than see anything happen to James and Lily. And yet, there he was in Azkaban, serving a life sentence for handing them over to the Dark Lord.
Some days she felt deep down in her bones that there had to have been some kind of mistake. She pictured those four boys, could practically see the bonds of life and love between them back during their Hogwarts days, particularly James and Sirius, and could not imagine a situation in which Sirius would betray them. She remembered the Order meetings, the missions James and Sirius had gone on together, the fact that it had been Sirius who had calmed Lily down when James had forbid her to help out once she was pregnant, the way nothing, not graduation, not war, not marriage could drag James and Sirius apart. She knew, during those moments of reminiscing, that Sirius Black would never have betrayed his best friend.
But there was the fact that Sirius had been their Secret Keeper. And Pettigrew's finger. And Black's crazy, maniacal laughter. Perhaps that was the final clue, after all. Something in Sirius had snapped, he had lost it, his marbles had spilled all over the place, he had gone insane and joined Voldemort's forces.
That had to be it. War does things to a person. Sirius, it seemed, had been both a victim and a sinner.
She remembered the funerals, the brief moments of sorrow in the middle of such raucous celebration. One person wasn't celebrating. Minerva would never forget the vacancy in Remus Lupin's gaze. She thought about what it would be like to learn that your best friend had killed your two other best friends, sending himself to prison for life, and understood why Remus looked like he would never smile again.
These new classes of hers had no notion of war and what it meant. The oldest ones had been mere toddlers when Voldemort had reigned. They didn't know what it felt like to have a heart not just break, but shatter. They didn't know that if another war were to break out, she would send them off into the world with terror in her heart, and she would cry over each and every name of theirs that she read in the Obituaries.
But it was not the same, she thought. No class could mean as much to her as Black and Potter and Evans and Lupin and Pettigrew and all the rest of that generation had. She thought of James and Sirius in the back of her classroom, James ruffling up his hair and Sirius leaning back in his chair on two legs, ignoring Remus's warnings that he'd crack his head open. She thought of Lily, her long red hair flipping over her shoulder every time she turned around to glare at James for charming paper airplanes to zoom around her head. She thought of Peter, his desperation to be included so fierce that it could not be ignored. She heard their laughter, resonating in the empty classroom, in the hallway, in the Great Hall, out on the grounds, in the dormitories. It had followed them, they wore it on their sleeves, it had been them. Their laughter had been so strong and resilient that it would not fade, taking up shelter in the cracks of the walls to haunt the corridors for years.
One day, Minerva swore to herself, she would be able to move on, to push thoughts of them to the back of her mind, to forget that this war and that generation had ever even happened. One day, she was certain, her soul would mend.
A corner of an important-looking piece of paper stuck out from underneath a stack of essays. It was getting close to the end of the year, a class was graduating soon. She always got a little emotional during this part of the school term.
She pulled the paper out, recognizing it as the class list of the first years that would be arriving in September. Smiling slightly, she allowed her eyes to scan the list, realizing she hadn't yet looked it over.
And there it was, halfway down the list: the reason her soul would not mend any
Potter, Harry.
She couldn't help wondering if the joke had always been on her.
hmm..let me know what you think.
Thank you for reading, as always.