Except on Midnights Like This
post First Wizarding War - angst, regrets, memories, you name it
At first, she had done her best not to think about it. About the baby. About them. After all, it wasn't like her life wasn't busy, with the school years stretching and now blessed with generations of students not constantly frightened of what was happening outside the walls of Hogwarts. With the homework, the exams, her duties as Head of the Gryffindor House, even with adjusting to some new colleagues (she had never really liked Severus, but Albus had vouched for him and to be fair not even Minerva McGonagall could deny the young man was really gifted in Potion making). So she had kept busy, refraining from escaping to Surrey from time to time and look at how the kid was faring, trying her best not to think too much as she walked the corridors or entered the Great Hall or worse, the Gryffindor Common Room.
Summers were more difficult. Without school, her mind would wander again, far and wide, to a manor house now tragically and completely empty, to a widowed mother mourning her son, to how much a certain family, apparently unscathed from the war, was surely still gloating, to a young man, far too young, who had lost everything and probably himself along the way since he seemed to have disappeared. During those long warm weeks she was especially grateful for Poppy, who insisted on having her over in her small cottage on the coast of Cornwall, to look out at the sea and keep each other company, like two prematurely little old ladies with only memories to talk about. Because even sweet, optimistic Poppy sometimes slipped, especially when a full moon was shining over the sea.
"I wonder where he is," she would whisper.
"Remus is a bright lad," Minerva would answer, squeezing her hand. "I'm sure he's safe. He's mourning worst of us all, we need to give him time."
As the years passed, she believed less and less in what she was saying.
In the end, she allowed herself one exception to the rule, not by chance on Halloween night. As the students kept celebrating in the castle, she usually ended up on the Astronomy Tower, breathing in the cold air, letting for once the memories rush back in ebbing tides to the front of her mind.
Bright, so bright, with a fiery temper. She had been Horace's favourite and her death had shaken him so much he had retired early, which was why Severus had taken his place. Apparently the Potion Masters of Hogwarts were doomed with having Lily Evans haunting them. Lily had never doubted they would win the war one day, she hadn't faltered once even when her own baby son had been marked with a prophecy that might as well have been a death sentence. Apparently she hadn't even faltered at the very end. Lily and her strength, Lily and how smart she was and what she could have achieved once the war was over. And now the only time she heard someone speaking of her bright, brave girl was as just the mother of the Boy Who Lived.
"That one's for you, Professor!" she remembered him shouting from his broom after a goal for the Gryffindor Quidditch team.
She always got at least a goal, like she always got a wink right before she scolded him for the lastest prank he had pulled. It was the only thing she ever scolded him for actually, brilliant as he was. He could be staring at an empty wall during her lecture, evidently lost in thought, but the second she asked him something he answered quickly, correctly and sometimes even without too much arrogance. Ah yes, James Potter's arrogance. She had seen it dwindle as the boy grew into a young man who always had an arm around a friend while he walked somewhere in the castle, always had a joke to make people laugh, always had time for his team to ask him things even right before a match. In his last years, all arrogance had been changed into a protectiveness that extended from his family, his friends to the whole wizarding world. Until the very end. His last years, Minerva thought. His last years and he had only been 21.
Really, it wasn't fair. The boy had been dealt a horrible hand already by fate since the Werewolf bite, and now this. Now he was still out there, somewhere, dealing with the worst loss possible, with a grief probably too big to be comprehended by anyone. And yet she remembered him being happy. A quieter way of happiness perhaps compared to his very loud friends, but happy nonetheless. She remembered when he had started blushing in class, when she had caught him daydreaming more than once and she had refrained from calling on him because he deserved it. Remus deserved softness, he deserved love, he deserved happiness. She knew he was planning to propose once the war was over. She wondered what had happened to the ring.
She might have known, really. Peter surely was less of a presence than his friends, but he was always there, always had their backs, was always ready for whatever they decided. And if there was one single thing you remembered about Peter Pettigrew, it was that he moved around James like a planet around its sun. He wasn't the only one, James had always had that magnetic quality that made people very attracted to him in multiple different ways, but the thing with Peter was that he had been the first. The two boys had grown up in the same village, had dreamed about being put in Gryffindor together, had boarded the Hogwarts Express as a duo when they had turned eleven. So it hadn't been so much of a surprise when she had found out how he had run after the person guilty of his best friend's death without even thinking, without even remembering that Charms, let alone Duelling, had never been something he had been good at. A small planet, hurling itself against a meteorite all because its sun was gone.
Those Halloween nights up in the Astronomy Tower, Minerva really tried to fight it, she really did. She let the memories of four of her favourite students come back in flashes she welcomed for once, focusing hard on that number four, on the four people she had lost one way or the other. Her smart girl. Her three precious boys.
And those Halloween nights up in the Astronomy Tower, every single year, Minerva failed.
Other memories came back like a cry, and she caved even if they were the worst of all, filled with regrets, what ifs, anger and resentment. And yet she let them come. Two silver eyes filled with utter terror under the Sorting Hat as a name no one had predicted still echoed in the Great Hall. How easily he had fallen in step with James first, then Peter and Remus. How utterly brilliant he had been. How broken too, every time he came back to school after a break. How brave once he ran away, how happy once he had been free, how in love in those last years. How she had sworn from the very first moment she would do her best to protect him, how much she had loved him, loved the brave young man he had become.
How much she had been wrong.
The one who had ended up destroying everything around him.
