Just a BLAH BLAH EKFHWEIRJOWI3ER *unedited* JHFEUHWERJWLEI MY THOUGHTS ON HP moment.
November 1974
It's been happening for just under a year now.
But only in the last months have the requests become so frequent.
She'll retire to her chamber in the evenings to find a note addressed to her in handwriting drawn so tightly together and scrawled so hastily it could only ever belong to him. The notes always read the same, a polite 'offer' for a game of chess.
Chess is a euphemism.
Chess means he needs someone, anyone to talk to; she's known from the start it's not a casual 'come if you will'. At first she had thought that perhaps she was special; that he sought her company specifically and had decided to take her into his strictest confidences. Maybe he would even allow himself to be taken into her strictest confidences.
Maybe.
It was a few months after the first note arrived that she loses all hope, and accepts that she is the someone/anyone option. Well, the someone/anyone option who's a member of the order and always close by.
It's a convenience thing.
On passing some thought to the matter one afternoon, when she should have been marking fifth year essays; Minerva decides it's fair enough that he needs he- somebody, she mentally corrects. For four years now the entire wizarding world has pressed their hopes of survival through this war, into his hands. His mind is capable and willing, but that doesn't mean his emotions don't plague him; that he is not scared of the fight or of the responsibility. It does not mean that each death of a friend, a former pupil or an unknown muggle does not weigh down on him or make his heart heavy with the slow degradation of hope.
The world thinks only of his mind as a vessel of knowledge and strategy; seemingly forgetting that it was Albus Dumbledore's great ability for compassion, as well as anger that had once marked him aside for greatness.
It is with a heavy sigh that from that moment on she endeavours to push aside her selfish hurt that Albus seemingly doesn't care about her; that never asks how she is feeling or if she has something she wishes to discuss. After all, is she not just as alone in this world as he is?
Minerva leaves the essay marking for now and rises from her desk, heading for her room where she will no doubt find another note for a game of chess.
It's that very night that the nature of his request changes, and Minerva realises the extent to which his intellect isolates him.
He's only just returned from abroad, some mission for the minister - who like everyone else expects Albus to win this war single-handedly for them.
He's different tonight she notes, his eyes examine her without their customary twinkle.
He's tired, so tired, he tells her and she thinks tired now must be a synonym for defeated because that is what his appearance screams at her. Evil has slowly been degrading their hope, and tonight it seems to have degraded him.
He's different, so in accordance what he asks of her is different as well.
Would she please, he reiterates, please come and lie down with him while they talked.
Their eyes make contact and they sigh in unison.
Minerva is startled, but not shocked. For forty years she had been a pupil, an acquaintance, a friend – but this was not how their relationship worked. Then again, the last few months have not exactly been customary of their relationship either, so she stops herself before she can think her answer through any further… because it is just so easy to say yes, yes of course.
The world is changing all around them, and correspondingly her world also must change, so she takes the hand he offers her and follows him to his bedroom.
They lie side by side atop the covers and as she strokes the hand he has rested upon her stomach, all the while he talks of the horrors he's seen in the last few hours and the despair that strikes within him just to contemplate the coming battle. He talks with passion and anger and all the emotion in the world.
All the emotion that the world never sees.
His shouts seem endless to her and she wishes nothing more than for him to sleep, so she will have her chance to talk, to quietly confess her fears to a man far too overburdened to even listen. It's hours before his sentences begin to come sparingly, eventually transforming from words to nothing but heavy breathes.
She pities him in that moment. For everything he professes to know and understand, he himself has so little. The mysteries of the heart, to him no longer mysteries; but whose heart after so many years of being placed on a pedestal by the wizarding world, does he have to call his alone? Who is left to give or receive his love? To bask in his endless capacity for emotion?
She stops herself, once again before she can think through answers…because in this case it is just so easy to say no… no, not her.
She pities him. Then again she pities herself also.
It's hardly a relationship of equals.