"You have two choices in this world. You can be a fool, or you can be a dragon."
The words echoed in Minerva's ears as she climbed aboard the train to school for the very first time— her mother's parting advice, whispered like a blessing into her ear on the platform. It wasn't Kings Cross yet; that wouldn't be built for nearly another decade— Minerva boarded in her hometown in the highlands and waited for the call to disembark in Hogsmeade. It was 1946, the United Nations (non-magical, anyway) had just met for the first time, and the war was, in theory, over. That didn't make the platform less intimidating, nor did it make the train feel less like the closed-in shelters where she and her family had spent night after sleepless night while bombs burst overhead and planes with holes shot through their wings droned overhead. Being magical didn't prevent widespread destruction, or word of Muggle relatives dying at the front, or news of Grindelwald wreaking his own havoc over Eastern Europe. More than anything, magic could not stop the ever-gnawing sensation in her belly of never quite having enough to feel full.
Those first years at Hogwarts were a refuge. Commendations, for she was good at spells and quick on her feet. Punishments, because her mother had taught her perhaps too well and she never could hold her tongue when an insult rose to it. Friends, who had survived the same war she had, who had lost their childhoods to the same gray underground shelters and the same flashes of light overhead. Abundance, for the country was no longer living on rations, and she could feast on all the roast potatoes and fried fish and thick curries she wanted. For once, there was no fear of being seen a fool— being a girl didn't mean doing household chores and tending the garden and being told not to get mud on her knees, being a child didn't mean being a liability, and being quick-witted was a thing to be praised if she had the knowledge to back herself up.
Oh, there were moments, of course. Like the Gryffindor captain and Keeper, who sneered at her when she lined up to try out for the team, because girls weren't any good at sports and everyone knew that.
Be a dragon, Minerva told herself, and no one was laughing by the time she scored on the Keeper, easily twice her size, four times and with two different throwing techniques by the time her tryout was over. Girls from the Highlands were tough, after all— not like those pampered London girls who didn't know that fresh air did a body good. She was hale and hearty and capable. And she'd trained until three in the morning in the dark on the empty pitch for six weeks, but no one needed to know that.
She earned the school scoring record the next year, and the year after that, until they had no choice but to name her the Captain the next year. The badge shone on her robes, a more polished prize than the Prefect badge that sat right beside it.
And there were rumors— that something dark lived in the walls, that a student five years above her, a seventh-year when she was a first-year, had vanquished it and earned a special commendation. That there was something lurking out in the Forbidden Forest, with too many legs and a web that would swallow students whole if they wandered out too far. Minerva didn't pay those rumors much mind, though. She kept to the permittable edge of the Forest, like she was supposed to. She fed the thestrals, every now and then. Gathered potions ingredients. Occasionally dropped a bundle of grass into the lake, just to see if the giant squid would lazily bob up to the surface to say hello.
She stopped doing that after its many tentacles grabbed onto her favorite pair of shoes, and one of her boots sank all the way down to the bottom. She had to hobble all the way back up to Gryffindor Tower in one sad, damp stockinged foot.
A fool, Minerva scolded herself, and vowed never to be one again.
She went home after her seventh year— a woman with no job prospects, no income, and no family to welcome her back. She received the letter the day after her birthday, less than twenty-four hours after being deemed legally of age. Her mother had died, and the stepfather Minerva hadn't even met yet had already left town. Minerva clutched her diploma and her valise on the train, disembarked in the tiny town that had once felt like home and now just felt like a set of walls closing in on her, and sat in the empty house that had once been her home. She wrote letter after letter, and waited for the owls to return to her. And return, they did.
The Ministry of Magic wouldn't hire a woman as anything but a secretary.
She'd received nine NEWTs, including a perfect score in Transfiguration (that one came with a special note, meant to be tacked up next to her diploma, and a cash prize) and near-perfect in Charms.
The two graduate institutes in France to which she'd applied were at capacity, and even with her perfect Transfiguration score, she would need to wait another six months to try again.
Minerva sat at the kitchen table in her mother's house, which had lost all of its old warmth, and made eye contact with the black cat that had made itself at home by the stove. She hadn't meant to let the thing in, let alone give it a home, but it had turned up outside the door on a dismal rainy day, and the Scottish moors were miserable when the wind picked up, even at the height of summer. And it had mewed so pitifully, and then immediately nabbed a mouse that had scuttled in with it, so Minerva had let it stay.
The cat stretched a languid leg up at the sky, then rolled over and started playing with a tassel on Minerva's shawl, which was hanging up to dry.
Minerva looked at the cat, then at the note that had come with her Transfiguration score, and then back at the cat.
Three weeks later, she had the requisite books from the library, ordered special delivery in a package that took three owls to carry.
Four weeks after that, she'd brewed the potions, she'd kept the damned leaves under her tongue, and she was just about out of money, but she'd done it. She and the black cat roamed the moors together that night, screeched at the moon in unison, watched as the bats flew overhead.
Minerva did it six more times just to make sure, turning back and forth and back and forth, cat to human and back, until her eyes felt dry and her nails felt soft and her insides felt like she'd turned herself inside out. She retched violently, and then promptly filled out a length of parchment as long as she was tall and sent it off to the Ministry.
The reply came back within two days. A man named Albus Dumbledore, whose name she vaguely recognized from the newspapers she'd read as a child and whose picture she half-remembered blinking up at her from the front pages, wanted to congratulate her on the accomplishment of becoming a registered Animagus. And he was leaving his Ministry post in the States to resume his old post teaching Transfiguration at Hogwarts, and since she'd received perfect marks, would she like to be his graduate fellow?
Minerva signed the paperwork almost without thinking. The next five years went by in a blink— she earned a small stipend, enough to buy books and keep a roof over her head. She ate meals at the school, scrimped and saved to keep a neat apartment in Hogsmeade, just one building over from the pub that would become the Three Broomsticks. The weather was no gloomier than the moors of home, and here she could research and publish to her heart's content. And for the most part, life progressed as it should. Until finally, Armando Dippett retired and Albus moved up the tall, lonely turret to be the Headmaster. And Minerva, finally a published and decorated scholar in her own right, took over the Transfiguration department.
It was practically bliss. Or it would have been, except she began to hear rumblings.
First, a rumor in the Hog's Head, that a man with more power than Grindelwald was on the rise. Two Defense Against the Dark Arts professors retired in quick succession. Albus spent days in a foul mood, stomping around in his office as he ripped open notes and threw things at the wall, drawing out memory after memory from a swirling Penseive. And finally, when Sybil Trelawney, freshly employed at Hogwarts to teach Divination, drank a cup of tea and started sobbing at whatever shape the leaves had left behind.
"Oh, for Merlin's sake," Minerva scolded. "Don't be a fool, woman."
Minerva, after all, did not have time to be a fool. She had students to teach and a Quidditch team to coach to victory. Gryffindor finally had the most talented Chaser the school had seen since her own days on the team— a little rich upstart with messy dark hair and thick glasses that he had to keep stuck to his nose with a charm, but damn if he wasn't good on a broom. Or he would be, if he didn't spend every other afternoon in detention. He and his little posse— oh, they had a name for themselves, she was sure of it— should have been acing her class. They all so clearly did their homework and read their chapters, and yet. James would fall asleep in her class, and Sirius Black— because of course she had the runaway who'd defected from his wealthy, political London family in the House she'd just been put in charge of— would spend the whole class flirting, and sweet Peter who she could swear wasn't paying attention until he piped up with the right answer, and then… there was Remus Lupin.
Because of course a whole House full of troublemakers wasn't enough, she had the werewolf. Whose family clearly had destined the poor child for such a fate, because really, who named their child "Wolf Wolf" in Latin? If etymology was destiny, then this boy had been dealt a poor hand. Day in and day out, Minerva wondered if she'd been a fool to fill out the paperwork declaring her own guardianship over the child when he entered Hogwarts as a student.
Don't be a fool. How many times had those words echoed in her mind? She'd nearly forgotten the second half of her mother's advice. Be a dragon.
Well. Minerva had lived through a war, lost a parent, and been given charge of a whole House-ful of students. She was hardly going to let one of them suffer for lack of a good parent and a fortunate name. If that meant being a dragon on his behalf, then so be it.
So she cleaned out the old shack on the hill in Hogsmeade. Quietly used Albus's name and a fair amount of outright bullying to buy the deed of land as a "research facility" for Hogwarts graduate students, creating a fellowship that she had no intention of staffing. Pulled aside the Bloody Baron one Halloween and offered him a letter of recommendation for a ghostly secret society if he would go down to the shack and scream very loudly at midnight every few weeks, just to give the place a bit of a reputation. The Baron, it turned out, didn't even need to be bribed, and even took to dragging Peeves along with him just to give students an extra reason to avoid the place.
She burrowed out the tunnel herself, Transfiguring dirt into stone and shaping it as she went along. The Whomping Willow was easy enough to acquire when Albus ordered it in the name of the Potions department needing "particularly fresh willow bark," which Horace Slughorn was perfectly pleased to accept. The entrance wasn't difficult to access if one knew the right pattern and the right places on the ground to step, and Minerva only bothered to show little Remus in the form of a cat during the darkest hours of a new moon night so that no one would see a tall professor, striking in her long robes, leading a scarred little boy through a minefield of branches.
She pretended not to know anything when Horace complained that he was missing four mandrake leaves. Pretended not to notice that she was missing four students each night from their beds, and not just one, during the nights of the full moon. Tried, and barely succeeded, to hold her laughter in when she heard James Potter referring to Remus's "furry little problem" on a regular basis in front of Lily Evans, who despite being Muggle-born seemed to have the best marks of the year in at least three subjects.
Minerva may have encouraged it. She even asked Remus in class if his rabbit was behaving any better, or if perhaps he needed a recommendation for a lupine behavioral specialist.
If only the werewolf were her only problem.
Horace seemed to have lost control of his own House. Minerva docked Lucius Malfoy nearly a hundred and fifty points over the course of a month despite his Head Boy badge for being in off-limits hallways, for sneaking around the campus, for being in Hogsmeade on days when students certainly weren't allowed down to visit. Bellatrix Black kept turning up smelling of rotten potions ingredients and cheap perfume.
Well. They were all children, and they were all her students. But that didn't mean she had to like them all. But she grieved all the same as she lost them, one by one, in the coming years. As Tom Riddle became more powerful, as the children lost any consistency in training how to defend themselves.
Be a dragon.
Minerva didn't hesitate when Albus told her what he was up to, when he gathered the most promising students of the seventh-year class who came from politically specific families or families of no significance at all, and began teaching them what he could. She snatched up her own wand and taught them everything she could, too.
It wasn't enough. She taught by day, tutored by night, and still cried tears of grief and exhaustion in all of the hours in between. She cried as the Prewett boys both fell in battle, as Alastor Moody lost an eye fighting a man in a dark sweeping cloak and a bone-white mask. As the mask was revealed and it turned out to be one of the Rosier brothers, who Minerva had taught only two years before.
And then, on Halloween in 1981, it was as though she'd lost them all.
James and Lily Potter, married for less than two years, dead in their home.
Sirius Black, seemingly the agent of their doom, on trial.
Peter Pettigrew, dead.
Remus Lupin, studying on a borrowed visa in the States, and unable to come home, even for the funerals. Funerals which Minerva attended, in the same black shawl, stony-faced and feeling a fool for believing she could protect any of them at all.
And a tiny part of her, underneath the mountain of all of the grief, was glad.
Because at last, it was over.
So she gathered up her things and she brought tiny baby Harry to a dreadful Muggle house in Surrey. And even though no one told her to— and indeed, even though Albus had specifically asked her not to— she sat on the fencepost and watched over him.
And life went on.
Hogwarts, after all, was home. To smaller class sizes now, it was true. But to students who learned and thrived. To teachers— including, to her chagrin, Severus Snape, who took over Horace Slughorn's old post. To occasional magical creatures who got too adventurous and had to be put back in their places. And, after eleven quick, peaceful years, to the Philosopher's Stone.
Minerva sighed as she built the chess set, imbued it with magic, spent afternoons teaching it strategy. She fed the three-headed dog on her way out of the chamber.
"This doesn't belong in a school," she hissed to Albus as she went off to teach her third class of the day.
"It's the only way to keep it safe," he replied.
Whether he was talking about the school or the Stone, Minerva honestly wasn't sure.
But nevertheless, the school wasn't safe, not really, and no one seemed quite as adept at proving that as Mr. Harry James Potter. It panged Minerva's heart to see the crop of students that year— Neville Longbottom, the spitting image of his mother Alice her first year, lower lip quivering as he lost his toad for the millionth time. Draco Malfoy, a tiny boy puffing himself up like the emperor who hasn't yet been told he's got no clothes. Ron Weasley, whose older brothers looked so much like Fabian and Gideon Prewett that Minerva did a double-take when she saw them on the train for the first time. Hermione Granger, who just needed red hair and green eyes and she'd be Lily Evans all over again. And Harry Potter. The Boy Who Lived, seemingly against all odds.
She watched them grow up, watched them throw themselves into challenge after challenge that no child should be involved in. A cave troll was bad enough. But then it was the Weasley boy, beating her own chess set in a death match. A basilisk, paralyzing students left and right. A Horcrux, nearly eating poor Ginny Weasley alive (heavens, there really were a lot of Weasleys).
And then Remus Lupin was back in her care. Sneaking out to the Whomping Willow alone, with no stag, dog, and rat to keep him company. Minerva went with him, a few times, keeping her distance. And while the large, Wolfsbaned canine howled softly at the moon from inside the shack, Minerva pressed her own furry nose to his coat in the absence of his friends.
She suffered the indignity of Dolores Umbridge. She wept as Albus fell from the tallest tower. As the Dark Mark set the place ablaze, as the whole world burned and children vanished and no one seemed to care.
She was no fool, the years had taught her that. And she felt her age in her bones, but there was no choice to be made. She was a Gryffindor, through and through. And the symbol on the House banner may have been a lion, but Minerva was a dragon.
So she gathered herself for the fight. Called the statues that had guarded the school for centuries into battle. Gathered up her students, who she knew perfectly well had been living in the Room of Requirement under her nose all year, and told them that it was okay to go home but she certainly wasn't going to. Evacuated the Slytherin students who had done nothing wrong and certainly didn't deserve to go into battle against their own parents.
And she fought. And fought. And saw Remus and Nymphadora on the ground, their hands tangled together even in death, and she wept. And then she gathered herself back up and sent more curses flying, delivered more death than she'd known she had in her.
Her home. Her children. Her world.
If she coudn't defend them then she'd burn the world down trying. Albus might be gone, Severus might be a traitor or dead, she honestly wasn't sure. The children she'd taught, now adults, all dying. She'd still be there, even if it meant she was the last one standing.
When it was all over, she picked up the rubble with her bare hands. Started her list of students over in the office in the top turret that she still didn't think of as hers. Made room for the eighth years. Made room for the students who had never known a school that was truly safe, who had never sat in class without fear, who would need to be taught a way out of the trauma. She sat through more funerals, wearing the same cloak she'd worn to those seventeen years before. And then she returned to Hogwarts.
Be a dragon.
And she had been. Because if Minerva was anything, she was there— fiercely, proudly, always. She was irascible and inflexible, perhaps. But if she was anything, she had always been dependably, solidly, present.
This is, somewhat obviously, a tribute.
I generally, as a rule, do not write HP fanfic anymore. I'm not comfortable with the harm that JKR and some chunks of the fandom are comfortable with doing to the trans and queer community, and I'm not comfortable with engaging in the discourse.
However. The world will miss Dame Maggie Smith so very greatly.
I'm grateful for Mrs Medlock, for Grandma Wendy, for Minerva McGonagall, for Desdemona, for Rosaline, for Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham. I hope to carry forward an ounce of the grace, pride, and wit that she leaves as her legacy. And I sincerely hope that somewhere, she's having a perfect cup of tea. ~GT