Authors Note: I'm sorry.
Wednesday Morning
Minerva woke up wrapped in the arms of Hermione Granger, she had tried to stay awake the whole night to savour the experience but at some point she had fallen asleep. She glanced up at the clock noting the time, it was still early, not even light yet but she needed to wake Hermione up.
She tightened her arms around the girl, gently shaking her awake.
"Hey." Hermione murmured sleepily and snuggled in closer.
"Time to get up sweetheart."
"Don't want to..." Hermione kissed her. Minerva returned the kiss but stopped her from deepening it.
"If you wake up now we can have breakfast in bed."
Hermione pulled her even closer for a moment, "When you phrase it like that..." She rolled over onto her back. Minerva touched her hand and got out of bed to go ring for an elf.
When she returned several minutes later Hermione was sitting, propped up against the pillows. "What's wrong Minerva?"
"What makes you say that?"
"The look on you face."
Minerva threw herself on the bed next to her, she sat up sliding an arm around Hermione's shoulders. "I'm sorry, didn't mean to worry you."
"Talk to me Minerva."
"It's stupid."
"No... It isn't." Hermione shuffled so that she was facing Minerva, the older woman had drawn up her legs – resting her hands on her knees, she was obviously feeling defensive.
"Actually it is." She reached out and took a tray from the house elf that had just appeared. Pouring them both a coffee she took a sip of the scalding liquid wishing it was something stronger. "Waking up beside you was wonderful. I'd like to do it for the rest of my life."
"But....." Gone was the nervous Hermione of the previous night, she was calm and quietly confident.
"But... for just a moment it felt like a betrayal."
There was a strange look in Hermione's eyes, something that Minerva couldn't identify. "There's been no one since her?"
Minerva's faint answering smile was self-deprecating. "A couple but none that meant anything or that have spent the night."
"It's not." Hermione said after a brief pause.
"Not what?"
"Not a betrayal. It's understandable why you might feel that way but it's not a betrayal of her."
"Logically I know that."
"Logic isn't everything." Hermione smiled, recalling an earlier conversation when she had been on the opposite side of this argument.
"You've changed your tune."
Hermione responded with a nod. One of her hands remained touching one of Minerva's while they started eating. Both women remained silent, while a bit strange, it wasn't entirely awkward. She would never confess it but she was jealous, not of Alice but of the unnamed women since. Some food and a cup of coffee later she broke the calm of the room.
"Tell me about her."
Minerva looked at her for a long moment before nodding. "It's time." Her fingers gripped Hermione's a little tighter.
"Her name was Alice Foster. I met her on the train up from London our first year. Al was... like no one I had ever met. She was the first muggle-born I had ever known but I quickly realised she knew more about right and wrong, strength of character and morals than any of my pure-blood peers." She took a breath, "Everything I am, everything I have done is a result of my relationship with Al. She changed my perspective on life, made me aware of the failings in my upbringing.
We became friends, then more than friends. My parents tried bribes and threats to keep us apart. One day they forced me to choose between them, the family fortune and her. I chose her."
She pulled Hermione to sit next to her, unable to look into her eyes any more, knowing that this would only get harder. She felt Hermione's free hand begin to stroke her hair, comforting; she could feel the girls' warmth, her presence.
"Like now there were signs of the coming war, we had a choice of a quiet life or choosing to fight. We trained as Aurors and spent almost five years trying to destroy his support network, unmasking his followers. Once the war actually started we were loosing, a major operation was being planned. All the Aurors were to be involved, Grindelwald's followers knew something was going on but not what. They needed information."
Minerva stopped for almost a minute. She closed her eyes.
"Alice and I were captured on the way home one evening, I guess they must have thought that we were easy targets. If I'd have known then, what I know now, I might have been able to save her. We were taken to a dungeon and were tortured for information. For days."
Minerva's voice broke on those last two words. Hermione tightened her grip on her, knowing that Minerva needed to go through this but wanting to support the woman she loved. Some instinct kept her from opening her mouth, from comforting her but she really wanted to.
"After three days I think they realised we didn't know anything. They started playing with us, torturing for pleasure. That was only another technique, they wanted us to know that they were enjoying it." Anger and disgust were prevalent in her voice and she had begun to shake.
"On the fifth day they started torturing us individually, making one watch. I would have told them anything at that point, anything to make it stop. They knew that. Of course my pure-blood was too valuable for them to kill me first." The shaking became worse.
"They tied her up and hung her from the ceiling. What they did to her was no different than what they did every other day. They asked me questions about things I couldn't tell them because I was bound by magic and about things I knew nothing about. Something was different that day, they asked the questions like the answers didn't matter."
Minerva paused; tears were silently falling down her face, drenching the robe that Hermione was wearing.
"It wasn't until later that we realised they were actually going to kill her. There was a moment when our eyes met, she had bright blue eyes and I could see every emotion in them. She knew that they were going to kill her, I could see the impact of that knowledge on her. Could see the moment that she gave up hope but she kept looking at me, wanting the last thing she saw to be me."
Minerva buried her face in Hermione's neck, breath hitching as she silently sobbed. "I saw the spell that killed her... Saw her eyes close, her head fall back. The screaming didn't stop, I couldn't figure out why it didn't stop... Then I realised that it was me screaming."
Loosing the precarious hold that she had on her self-control, Minerva began to cry.
Hermione wrapped her arms around her, listening to the long-repressed tears – she had never heard someone cry like this before, never heard so much pain and despair. There was nothing that she could say, nothing that wouldn't be trite or stupid. She just held her tightly, stroking her hair and back, trying to convey what she was feeling in a simple touch, letting her cry. Then she realised that there was something she could say.
"I love you."
