Entry tags:

beholder 2009, fic, het, kingsley shacklebolt, minerva mcgonagall

FIC: "Carrying Old Delicious Burdens" for miraielle
Recipient: miraielle
Author/Artist: flourish
Title: "Carrying Old Delicious Burdens"
Rating: G
Pairings: Minerva McGonagall/Kingsley Shacklebolt
Word Count: 2,654 words
Warnings: Entirely canon compliant, although you can ignore the epilogue. Otherwise, none!
Summary: After the Battle of Hogwarts, McGonagall makes a new start.
Author's/Artist's Notes: Thank-you to P, my fantastic beta-reader, and to everyone involved in the Beholder challenge!

***

Minerva McGonagall, tall and stubborn. Her long thin black hair pulled back too tightly, giving her face a stretched appearance. Her robes solid emerald green, in defiance of her House. Her voice not loud but insistent, explaining just what her classmates had gotten wrong, in nineteen forty four.

Minerva McGonagall, tall and strict. Her hair still black, pulled back less tightly now, giving her a softer appearance than in her youth. Tartans like her mother's tartans, however unfashionable. Her voice not quavering at all with age, laying down the law to students, to the Board of Governors.

Her voice ringing through the Great Hall, saying that Professor Snape had, "to use the common phrase, done a bunk."

After the Battle of Hogwarts she thought that that had been her finest moment. Certainly it had managed to break the horrible tension. Certainly she hadn't done nearly as much as she ought in the realm of duelling. After the first flush of victory, when she and Horace and Kingsley had been caught up in the swirling mass of well-wishers cheering Harry Potter, she had felt a strange sort of guilt come upon her, and withdrawn to watch the celebrations from the sidelines.

Horace and Kingsley - Kingsley especially. He wasn't much more than a boy, really, only James Potter's age. But Horace too: fat, lax, sly but slow to draw. What a muddle. And she had needed them to support her in the battle. Horace had caught her elbow in the middle of it, just as she was steeling herself to drive at Him with a curse, and said "Surely you aren't thinking of going it alone, are you?" Kingsley had come up beside them and taken her other elbow and said, "All right, Minerva, let's do this together," and she had looked at Kingsley in the African robes he affected and at Horace in the emerald silk pajamas he hadn't had time to change out of and had thought, acerbically, a motley crew indeed.

***

Late the previous night Kingsley had come up to Hogwarts for the battle. She had been greatly relieved to see him, more greatly relieved to realize that she could designate him their battle-leader. When they had swept through the passageways, trying to plan their tactics as they walked from the Room of Requirement to the Great Hall where the students were assembled, she had told him, "Thank God. There isn't anyone else I'd trust. Schoolteachers against this - it's not to be imagined."

"You know the castle better," Kingsley had said calmly, "so you should be our general. The older students will stay to fight. They'll take orders more easily from you. They don't teach battle tactics in Auror's training."

Minerva had straightened her bent back and pursed her lips tightly and said "No." It was not that she felt incapable of fighting, or even incapable of leading untried students into a fight. But she felt so very old, so creaky. Better to have Kingsley's energy, Kingsley's steady hands.

He glanced at her. He must have read something in her face, because he did not protest. "All right," he said. "I don't imagine you'd be willing to be my lieutenant, either, then."

"No," McGonagall said, doing her best to keep any hint of gratitude out of her voice.

***

She had been pleased to see Horace in the Great Hall when they assembled - more pleased to see him remain to fight. He sidled up to her as Kingsley spoke, rousing the remaining students, dividing them into fighting groups.

"You didn't put yourself in charge, I see," he said quietly.

"No, I did not," she replied.

He hemmed and hawed for a moment, and at length asked, "do you think he'll be much the same?"

"No," McGonagall said, "I believe he'll be quite different."

"I suppose it will be less like killing a friend, for you, then," he said, shaking his head ruefully.

"I don't expect I shall kill him. I can't kill him, anyway," she replied.

"Yes, well. I wonder that we're here at all, then. If Mr Potter is fated to do it -"

"Horace Slughorn, shut your mouth and do your duty," she said, "or I shall make you do it; you know that I can."

"Now, Minerva, you know that that isn't what I meant," he said, in wounded tones.

***

It was not until after the battle that she wondered if Horace hadn't had a word with Kingsley. She stood with her back to the wall watching cheering young people throw food into Grawp's waiting mouth and she wondered. Horace was the only one who could have said anything; he was the only one who seemed to remember that she had known Tom Riddle when he had been called Tom Riddle.

There were people kissing, people cheering, people dancing. There were people standing around in shell-shock. She imagined that she looked like one of the latter, although she was certain she wasn't shocked; she was certain that she'd known that Potter would prevail. He looked shocked, but then he had a good reason to, having just accomplished his life's purpose.

His life's purpose. Yes. Anything Potter did now would be an anti-climax, wouldn't it? It was lucky, she supposed, that her great life's work - to support Potter, to help lead the Order of the Phoenix - did not take place until she was old.

It occurred to her that if Potter weren't so quiet and self-effacing he might have looked rather like Riddle: the black hair.

***

Minerva McGonagall, tall and stubborn. Her long thin black hair pulled back too tightly, giving her face a stretched appearance. Her robes solid emerald green, in defiance of her House. Her voice not loud but insistent, explaining just what her classmates had gotten wrong, in nineteen forty four.

When class let out no young men offered to carry Minerva's books. They were frightened of her, mostly, or too embarrassed to admit that when it was Woolton pie again for supper they couldn't Transfigure it into something nicer and she could. She had offered to do it for one stupid Quidditch player and he hadn't spoken to her for weeks. It was fine, it was fine, it was always fine. She had her dorm-mates and the approval of Professor Dumbledore, and that was better, even if rumor had it that he was a poofter - he was a powerful poofter.

No young men offered to carry her books, and she walked quickly down into the dungeons. There were tunnels upon tunnels there, catacombs leading down deep into the earth and under the Black Lake itself, and it was easy to lose one's way. The halls were dark; she incanted "Lumos!" calmly and walked on undeterred, her footsteps echoing off the damp halls. Then a rat scampered into the pool of light that surrounded her.

"Hello, Melchisedek," she said to it. It squeaked. "Shall we?"

More rats spilled out of the darkness, forming themselves into a neat line, and cut funny capers in unison as they led her on down the hallway to a thick wooden door. They slipped under it one by one, and when they had all gone she opened it. Tom Riddle had already set bluebell flames burning in the sconces on the walls and was amusing himself by making moths stay away from them. He was only fifteen, two years younger than she, but with his dark head wreathed in a halo of moths he looked older and more powerful than he was. The rats sat obediently at his feet, an adoring court before their king.

"Hallo, McGonagall," he said casually. "Have you been practicing up? Think you've got it now?"

"Yes," she said.

"I'll let Melchisedek go, then. Finite Incantatem!"

The rat looked bewildered, its nose and ears twitching, and made to run off, but Minerva was quicker.

"Imperio," she said.

A week later, Professor Dumbledore had asked her where she always went after his class. He looked at her solemnly, sternly, and she found herself telling him about Melchisedek. "It isn't really like cursing a human being," she said, but even as she said it she knew it wasn't true. "I didn't mean anything by it. Except I was so bored -"

She did not explain about Tom Riddle, and Dumbledore did not ask. He only looked at her closely and she shut her mouth, silent, embarrassed. She bit her tongue. She put Riddle out of her mind.

After a long moment, Dumbledore turned away, and she relaxed; but she did not feel as though she had won anything.

She spent the next month fixing Transfiguration mistakes from Dumbledore's first year class, grateful that he hadn't turned her in to the Ministry. "Got detention, McGonagall?" Horace Slughorn asked her over their Potions work. "Why? Did your boyfriend drop you?" He asked her every day for a month. When he stopped asking she knew he had sussed it out. Perhaps Riddle had told him about their real relationship, which she fancied much more interesting than some stupid petty teenage fling. She could imagine that Riddle would choose Horace as his next disciple.

Everyone else seemed to forget that she had ever known Tom Riddle, that she had ever been assigned detention at all.

---

There had been days, after the Incident with the stunning spells in the Department of Mysteries, where Minerva had thought she would never get out of her bed again. She could not lift her arms. Albus was years older than she, but Albus was made of stronger stuff. Then she thought about Riddle's rats, how they would squirm and squeal when he would Cruciate them. Somehow - perhaps it was the maundering of old age - those rats seemed more real to her than the Longbottoms, than any of the other people Tommy Riddle had tortured since; it was almost funny.

She thought of the rats because her hands shook and contorted so when she tried to use them. It was as though the stunning spells had interrupted her energies, as though her mind could no longer direct them. They would spasm and she would drop whatever she was holding. She did not touch her wand for weeks.

Before she could walk again, but after she knew that she would walk again, she spent hours sitting in her bed, too weak to contemplate magic, brushing and brushing her hair, which made her feel still young. No one had seen her hair out of its bounds in so many years. When it was down around her shoulders, spilling over the pillows, she admired how black it still was. She did not need to dye it. Nevertheless, the skin of her hands was papery and thin, like an old woman's, and the fingers closed tentatively around the handle of her brush.

An old woman could not be expected to face Lord Voldemort alone, she thought later, saddened.

---

"You did very well today," Kingsley said to Minerva, after the battle was done, after she had retreated to her observer's post, back to the wall. She was not listening. There were great chunks missing from the marble staircase at the far end of the room, and she was mentally calculating how long it would take to get the castle in order again.

"I am very glad you think so," she said, and it came out bitter.

Kingsley didn't respond for a long time. She thought perhaps he had gone away; she couldn't hear footsteps over the din of the party, and he was standing just outside her field of vision. But at length he said, "I'm sorry you feel that way."

She looked over at him with a stern stare that ought to have bowled him over. It ought to have; she could remember him in Transfigurations class, just fifteen, mostly solemn even then, and how he was as susceptible as anyone to her sternness. "Whatever do you mean," she said. It was not a question.

"I shouldn't have said it," Kingsley said, "only you looked sad. You ought to be celebrating! Harry Potter -"

"I congratulated Potter," Minerva said crisply, "and you know I am very proud of him."

"But he is only a boy," Kingsley said, "and he doesn't know the things we've faced."

That isn't what I meant at all, she thought. "No, that's not so," she said aloud, "Albus always asked too much of him. He's seen more violence than I have."

Kingsley shook his head, squinting his kindly wide-set eyes a little as if to see her better. "But he is only seventeen. Only seven years of living with his magic. He'll turn out all right, but he doesn't know a thing. He's been aimed like a wand; he hasn't been the wand-hand."

"I could be his great-grandmother."

He threw back his head and laughed, catching Minerva by surprise. He's giddy, she thought. She had seen Arthur Weasley passing a bottle of something suspicious, had even seen him let Ron take a nip. Kingsley must have gotten into it too; she had never seen him so gay. "You can't be that old, Min," he said, clapping her on the shoulder.

She smiled a little: she couldn't help but smile at someone calling her that. There weren't any good nicknames that came from Minerva. Even Albus had never tried it. Kingsley had a right, she supposed. It was Kingsley's party more than anybody's, except Potter of course. They had relied on Kingsley's plans, Kingsley's leadership; it was Kingsley's victory. "Go celebrate," she told him.

"Not unless you do!" He was smiling now, his teeth very white in his dark face. His hand on her shoulder made her think of his hand at her elbow, holding her back from dueling Tommy Riddle. Or did it make her think of his hand at her elbow as they swept through the passageways, earlier still, when he'd so gracefully let her off the hook?

That was when it occurred to her that Horace had spoken to him. Horace Slughorn had told him, likely, that old Minnie needed a bit of fun in her life, that she was moping after that boy she used to follow around, that when they were children she'd been horribly disillusioned -

"I don't want pity," she said, low and steady.

"Pity?" Kingsley asked, squinting his wide-set eyes. "Really? Who's pitiable? What matters, now that we've won the day?" He bent toward her, as if he were trying to read tiny letters on her face. Coward, she imagined they would say. Too old and scared to stay friends with Riddle; too old and scared to fight You Know Who. Too scared to say his name even.

But he was not reading any letters. Even though she had seen such things happening, even though the sound of cheery singing celebrating people filled the ruined Great Hall, even though Lord Voldemort's body lay cold and dead, even though she herself had seen Professor Sprout and Professor Sinistra in an extremely unprofessional embrace, she could not quite imagine what he was doing.

He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth, firmly, not quite chastely.

"Come celebrate, Minerva," he said, while she was still standing shocked with a hand to her lips, her heart suddenly leaping to her throat.

"I -"

"You aren't that old," he said, and his deep voice had laughter in it.

---

From this hour, freedom!
From this hour, I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,
Listening to others, and considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
- Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road," from Leaves of Grass