A/N: This is completely plotless and I suppose just a little dip into how I might think of Minerva McGonagall as a character... I was going to do something like this for each of the Hogwarts Heads of House but it wasn't going anywhere- maybe in the future. Cross-posting from AO3.
Minerva McGonagall's belt had four pouches on it, and they were all filled with buttons.
Wooden ones, carved and sanded, were in the leftmost pouch. To the immediate right were buttons of metal—silver, tin, copper, and gold. Then came porcelain ones—some painted, some plain. The last pouch held plastic buttons, and a few made of glass.
Buttons, Minerva had learned early on, were good to transfigure. They were small enough to keep several on her person at a time, and they weren't particularly heavy. They were all sorts of different kinds, too. This was useful, as like calls to like—the more different materials, the more things she could easily transfigure.
Metal button to scissors was one of her favourite transfigurations, and she needed no incantation for it. Her wand movement was fluid and sure, and a single button turned into delicate, sharp, embroidery-size scissors that could cut acromantula silk.
Wooden ones were useful for furniture in a hurry. It was always easiest to use a button or two to create a miniature desk, or chair, or bookshelf, then enlarge it to the appropriate size with a flick of her wand. The troubles that other witches and wizards had with proportion had passed Minerva by decades ago.
Although she rarely used them in that way, her last-defence-move involved throwing metallic buttons at an attacker, swiftly transfiguring them to shards of metal, then using a banishing charm to speed them towards her attacker. Initially she had made knives, but soon found that any sharp bit of metal would do.
One of her favourite pastimes was hunting for buttons. At second-hand stalls, in haberdashery stores, from her brother's old clothes and her mother's sewing basket, Minerva found them. She cut them from their cloth and savoured them, turning each one over in her agile hands, imagining what each would become. This one, a vase. This one, a knife. Another, a corkscrew. A watering-can, a tin for the floo powder. This one…