Second Version

Millions of thanks go again to Kelly_chambliss for betaing this story, and to nagandsev, the TPP admin who patiently (re)moves the faulty commas and hyphens scattered throughout my chapters. :-)

TWO

Minerva McGonagall was 21 years old. She was Transfiguration Professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. She had taught for six months so far and was enjoying it, despite the difficult task of being Professor Dumbledore's successor, and having to settle in the middle of the school year, no less. She was proud, too, as one ought to be, proud of his confidence in her and of her achievement in holding the position at such a young age.

Nonetheless, on this Friday evening, June, 7th, 1957, she had had her worse week of teaching so far, and she did not feel good. She sat at her desk in the Transfiguration classroom, door closed and a silencing charm in place, relieved by the rare and precious feeling of privacy, despite the corridors full of students just outside her door.

She knew very well that in her bottom right pocket was to be found the letter from her mother that she had received in the morning. Although very light in weight, it felt heavy on her emotions. The beginning, or maybe the remains of a headache lurked behind her neck and at the base of her skull. She shook her head. It did not help.

She reached for the letter and opened it in front of her. She had to accept what was to be. And now was not worse a moment than any other. So she read, again, what her mother only mentioned in passing. A piece of gossip. How ironic.

Dougal McGregor was marrying. And somehow, this was not only one more wedding in the village. This was not some old childhood friend. This was not just her mother implicitly bringing up the topic of her own possible marriage perspectives. This was not... this was nothing.

And nothing, that day, felt like eternal emptiness of the heart. Dougal had been the love of her prime youth...she had hoped that it was over. It had to be; this was just one thing on top of another, on a difficult evening. After all, she had refused to marry Dougal, and for very good reasons. She thought of her life at Hogwarts, of her life in London during the previous years. Minerva had nothing against Muggles, as her father was one, and so was Dougal. But she appreciated her life in the wizarding world. She appreciated not having to hide. And her parents' example had been enough that she knew: she could get over a broken heart, but she would never have gotten over distancing herself from the whole wizarding world. Better, in that case, not ever having known Hogwarts at all. Rather never having discovered what it was to be a witch.

Minerva McGonagall was very sure that it had been the right thing to do. The more she pleaded with herself, however, the more she rehearsed her arguments, the more her heart hurt, and served her with pictures of him, of love, of domestic bliss. It was absurd. Unrealistic. Useless. And it was there. Tears filled her eyes, and her face crumpled.

Life was unfair.

Someone knocked at her door, and she ignored it. She tried to regain her composure. She breathed deeply, several times, and felt the sobs subside. But as soon as she regained thought, she became aware of a brand new lump in her throat and broke down anew.

She heard a knock again. Someone was at her door. And insisted on coming in.

"Professor McGonagall!"

That was the voice of Professor Dumbledore, making adrenaline shoot through her and her mind suddenly race. Her former teacher, both in a classroom and beyond, respected friend, defeater of Grindewald, famous alchemist, current headmaster of the school. Not 21 years old. Not emotional. Not silly. Probably not in love, although Minerva McGonagall did feel the beginning of a sane amusement at that idea. But Albus Dumbledore was not someone to whom you wanted to expose yourself in such a state. Not that there was anybody...

So Minerva calmed down once and for all and conjured a steady voice. She lifted the wards, stood up, cast a charm on her face, knowing that it would not fool him completely, walked to the window and exhaled slowly. "Come in," she called.

And so he did.

"Minerva, how are you?"

She registered the use of her given name and wondered, not for the first time, if he could see through doors.

"Very well, thank you," she said,

Albus Dumbledore nodded, she saw from the corner of her eyes. She thought her voice had sounded tense, but as long as he could not see her face... She deepened her contemplation of the landscape outside. She did not want him to notice. Not that he would tell, anyway. She felt somewhat irritated by his too-good timing and general demeanour.

"I am tired, Headmaster, nothing more."

Dumbledore looked unconvinced in a way that she could sense even with her back on him, but seemingly accepted it.

"I came to offer that we share a cup of tea, Minerva. Shall I suggest after dinner, my office, then?"

She did not exactly express enthusiasm. And he seemed to notice, as he added, "I will let you rest until then. You do seem exhausted to me."

She said nothing. She could feel him stepping so as to stand next to her. This was not the best evening. Neither for school business, nor for worried father figures. She wondered briefly if she could pretend physical faintness and skip dinner altogether. In that instant, however, he insisted, "I will endeavour to make it an early night, Professor. But I would appreciate your company. As I always do. If you think that your youth can bear an evening with my old age."

Minerva McGonagall supposed she would not get out of it easily. Besides, it might very well help her morale. So she resolved herself to a non-passionate, tearless, sob-free, grown-up evening in the company of a fellow adult.

"As you know, I have my content of youth all over the classroom, all day long, Albus. Any specific matter that you want to discuss?" she asked.

"Nothing particular. I thought we would benefit from a last friendly chat before the frenzy of exams is on us."

Minerva felt somewhat soothed by her nonetheless dear colleague. She turned to face him, and he smiled.

"I am happy," he said, "to see that you are not avoiding me, my dear."

"Why would I..." but her voice caught, and she felt tears swell again in her eyes. She turned away promptly.

There was a few seconds of silence. Then she felt his hands on her shoulders.

"Anything I can do?" he asked.

But she shook her head. She could not stop crying, and she felt ridiculous and wished he would leave, but at the same time would not bear to stand here after he left and having given such a spectacle of herself...

Then he spoke again, "Professor, Minerva, I do not want to impose. But I am at loss to understand what would cause such... unhappiness, and I do hope that you are as satisfied with your teaching duties as we are with you."

She did not want him to think that it had to do with her work.

"Yes, Professor, I am. I think I need privacy, right now. I will come to you after dinner."

She walked to the door that separated her classroom from her office and looked at Dumbledore, and at her classroom, unsure of the etiquette.

"Certainly, Minerva. And feel free to attend dinner or not, as you wish. You are excused."

He walked out of the room, and she locked behind him the door to the corridor.

***

Minerva felt tense, a couple of hours later, as she walked briskly to the Headmaster's office. She was displeased at her own blank, very young voice when she uttered the password. And she very nearly jumped when the gargoyle sprang aside...she could have sworn it had been more sudden than was usual. The moving staircase felt like a trap. She was a mouse...the irony of this statement was not lost on her; she would have transformed, just to check on her inner cat, had she not set the littlest bit too much importance on keeping her hair neat and proper and her appearance exactly as it should be.

When she finally went through the door and faced Albus Dumbledore's worried expression, she could feel very distinctly how stiff each of her moves must appear.

He led her to the small sitting area near the fireplace, and she sat with more caution that would have been necessary. She wished they would have work to discuss, and she had to hold rolls of parchments. Or a quill. Books. Something. What did one usually do with one's hands when one had nothing to hold on to?

Albus Dumbledore looked at her insistently. She contemplated the landscape, still visible through the window on that bright summer night. From where she sat, across the office, she could see mostly sky. A very young Fawkes stood next to the large desk, between them and the window. He might have burned that same week, just a few days before.

Dumbledore poured some tea and handed her a cup, still silent. She sighed, did not know what to say, but felt she should steer the conversation toward ordinary grounds.

"I apologize, Albus, for my earlier burst of... emotion. I have been tired, lately, maybe somewhat ill. Nothing that cannot be cured over the week-end."

He nodded. But he said nothing and continued to hold her gaze, intently. This was most different from his usual social self. The astronomical instruments clicked with an annoying regularity.

"So," Minerva McGonagall tried to impel some normality, "how are the preparations going? Will we be on schedule for the exams?"

Albus Dumbledore looked hesitant, but then answered conversationally, although his eyes still looked sceptical, "Oh, the usual last minute preoccupations... foreseeable unforeseen developments... nothing that cannot be smoothed..."

But he fell silent, and the conversation stalled.

"Minerva," he said, with much more intensity, and seeing her try to look unconcerned, he covered her hand with his, "Minerva, I am worried. I can see that you are not yourself. I know that the first term of teaching can be taxing. But I think you have done very well. I can not tell you how much I have appreciated your competence."

He searched her eyes, but she tried to avoid his. He knew her way too well...

"Does it have to do with Hogwarts?" he asked.

She shook her head, and she could have sworn he let out a relieved breath. Minerva McGonagall really looked at him for the first time that evening, and wondered if he had been afraid. Maybe he had thought that she did not want to stay, that she would quit at the end of the year... She felt ashamed, but at the same time, professional plans seemed a very grown up and proper topic. Something in her was glad that Professor Dumbledore had speculated in that direction.

"Does it have to do with me?" said an amused Dumbledore, although she was not entirely sure what was lurking under the amused façade.

"No, Albus, not at all."

A flicker of something went through his face. Relief? And he immediately looked like himself again.

"Do I really have to guess, Minerva?" He was smiling benignly now.

"It is somewhat private, Professor."

"I see, I see." He looked disappointed for a few seconds, but then it passed, and it was just the usual Albus Dumbledore again, that suggested, "If you wish to have a visit from your family over the week-end, we can still accommodate the schedule..."

But she shook her head vehemently.

"... or from a friend?..."

Minerva wondered if she had the kind of friends with whom one could cry over long lost opportunities and permanently broken hearts... She supposed not.

They sat in silence for a long time.

It was Dumbledore who spoke again, "It must be very lonely, in this castle, for an active young woman such as yourself."

She pondered the possible answers. On another day, she would have dismissed the notion. But truth be told, she did feel lonely. She heard Dougal's voice, years before: 'will you marry me?' she wondered what her life would be, had she...

"Minerva?... Minerva..."

Tears welled up in her eyes. Again. She wanted to shake herself.

But instead, she heard herself ask exactly what she did not want to be asked, "Professor?"

"Yes."

"Have you never wanted to marry?" She had barely avoided saying 'regretted not to', but then thought it too intrusive.

Albus Dumbledore sighed. He sank in his armchair. For a moment, he seemed to take her question more as an answer and looked at her knowingly. But then, he looked down, and spoke.

"Marry? No, no. I have never seriously considered marriage. Probably, I have never found the right person."

"Do you think there is such a thing? The right person?"

"I don't know. This is not what I was implying, though. I have probably never encountered someone with whom I would have considered a lifelong partnership and who would have considered it with me."

"Oh..." That did not sound good. Professor Dumbledore was not young, and if he had never found the opportunity... She refrained from asking if he had ever been in love and scolded at herself for still bearing in her a giggling young woman who wanted nothing more than to discuss people's feelings.

"You see," Albus Dumbledore said, regaining her attention, "I have been in love once."

After all those years, it was quite disturbing that he, more often than not, seemed to answer her thoughts. She knew, positively knew, that it was not legilimency. And who could complain when people answered the questions one did not dare to ask?

"Actually," he told her, "I might have been your age." He looked at her and smiled. "A few years younger, in fact. I was barely out of Hogwarts. I trust you are a bit too young to have heard much about the rumours that surrounded the Dumbledore family, even as a student?"

She shook her head, and he took a breath.

"I will let you unearth the rumours if you wish. But I can give you my own account of what happened. I have, as you may know, a brother and a sister. Both younger."

"I do not think I ever heard of your sister."

"And for a reason. My sister, Ariana, had a very short, and not a very happy, life. Well, I think she had been a reasonably happy infant. But she was attacked, at the age of six, brutally, and was never the same afterwards. This is what prompted my father's retaliation - the aggressors where three muggle boys, they did not stand a chance - and his sentence to Azkaban, of which you may or may not have heard, maybe from your grandparents..."

"Never."

"Well, I am glad that I had made my name famous enough for other reasons by then that they would have forgotten the old scandals... My sister was never the same, though... My mother kept her home and cared for her... she needed constant attention, but we... my mother did not want her put in an institution... that is also why we moved to Godric's Hollow... it was a very isolated life for our family, and my mother wanted it to be so..."

He paused before continuing. "And then, one day, my sister was fourteen, and I was just leaving school, something happened, an accident. Ariana was still very unstable, all those years, and could not control her magic... my mother died."

Minerva gasped. But Albus Dumbledore did not stop.

"So I had to stay at home. To care for my sister. To abandon my other plans. I was her guardian."

He paused, and Minerva remembered what had prompted the whole story. She thought that maybe, it was not teaching, after all, that had stood in the way of his love story. But it looked painful, still, and when he spoke on, she could swear she was not the only one whose eyes held more salt water than they should,

"So I stayed, at Godric Hollow. And that summer, unexpectedly, I met someone there. Someone that I had never met before, who came from a distant land to live with a relative who happened to be our neighbour. Someone brilliant and cunning and ambitious, to whom I could relate, intellectually, and share my interests, my desire to see the world, my feelings at being trapped - if you pardon my young selfish feelings - in that situation..."

"I don't think you were wrong," Minerva McGonagall said. "This must have been very difficult... and at 17... I am glad you found someone in those difficult times." Truth be told, she also felt dwarfed; it all seemed like the history of far greater people than she felt herself to be. But she was not going to say so. Instead, she asked bluntly, "So what happened? Did she not want to stay with you, because you where stuck with your sister?" Minerva thought she would have stayed, under such circumstances. With a wizard. But that was moot. And what had happened to Ariana? Minerva McGonagall was quite sure that Dumbledore had consequently begun a very early career.

"What happened, my dear Minerva, was that he - for he was a man - he was Gellert Grindewald."

Minerva was suddenly not so sure that it made sense any more. But she motioned for him to speak on, anyway.

"I had become friend, and possibly more, with young Gellert Grindewald. We shared ideas that were brilliant, but not pretty. And, which is worse, he was dangerous. My brother could feel that, but I was blinded. I kept spending time with him, for weeks, often letting my brother care for Ariana, at home, probably much better than I could have... and I invited Gellert in our house, where he was not always welcome. There was tension, but I refused to see it. There was hatred."

Minerva was mesmerized. She did not want to say anything.

"And one day, it all exploded. I am not sure I can talk about it, even now."

Truth be told, Albus Dumbledore's voice had cracked. He was on the verge of crying. Which did not seem very possible to Minerva. She had no idea what to do. So she just listened.

"My sister died, Minerva. She died. And it was all over. Gellert went away. My brother and I were alone. But we were never together even in our common grief. He never forgave me. Gods know I never forgave myself..."

Minerva McGonagall looked at him, uneasily. His tears glistened in the evening light, but did not fall. She thought she could hand him a handkerchief, but he already had one. She thought she could pat his arm, but she did not dare, and the moment passed. He recovered.

Somehow, she did not feel like it was the right moment to ask if he had ever felt attracted to a woman. She wondered why she wondered. Well, it was all a surprising piece of news about someone you had known pretty much forever...

"I think, Minerva, nothing makes us vulnerable like love."

"Have you never fallen in love again?" This seemed like a much more appropriate question.

"I don't think I allowed myself, after that," he said, "or maybe I never encountered..."

"... the right man," she finished for him.

He sighed. "Yes, maybe I never encountered the right person," he acquiesced.

"I don't suppose being a teacher gave you a lot of that kind of opportunities, either."

"Worried, Minerva?"

There was a silence. "Should I be?" she asked.

"I don't think so, my dear. I am sure such a young woman as you can not escape notice from the outside world, even if she spends her days and nights behind the thick walls of Hogwarts. Is it what troubles you?"

Minerva hesitated... "Partly, yes," she said, "although I think I might have passed up my chance already..."

"Why would you think so?" Dumbledore looked surprised.

Minerva dropped her eyes. She did not feel that young any more. "Because," she said, "I may have turned him down a few years ago."

Albus Dumbledore quirk an eyebrow.

"He was a boy from a neighbouring farm," she went on, "in Caithness. I decided against that way of life. It was not him, you know...," she sighed, "it was definitely not about him. But I could not envision settling in the Muggle village, marrying, and leading that kind of life, you know..."

"Your mother's life?" he asked.

"Something like that, yes. It was years ago, anyway. The summer after I left school."

"Oh. Fateful summers, after one leaves school... And you never regretted your decision?"

"I don't know." Of course she knew. "I learned to live with it. I thought it would pass, with time."

"Has it not?"

"I thought so." She was not going to tell him where she kept Dougal's letters. "He is marrying, now. Dougal. That boy. The one I could have..." She paused. "He is marrying, anyway. A nice girl, I know her. They will certainly be happy. Happier than... " She knew she sounded dramatic.

"Perhaps," Albus Dumbledore said, "perhaps one should not decide for people whether they will be happy and what will make them so. What would, however, be of interest to me, is your own feeling on the matter. Are you unhappy here, Minerva?"

Minerva McGonagall was not sure what to answer. She liked her life. She would want no other. Yet knowing that she could not have another, that hurt.

After a silence, Albus Dumbledore spoke again, "I am sorry, that was an impertinent question. I would not presume that having tea with an old teacher once in a few weeks makes up for a happy marriage amongst your family and friends."

"No," she said, "I do not regret being here. Hogwarts is my home, as much as Caithness would be."

Albus Dumbledore looked up.

"It is," she insisted, "I have lived here nearly half of my life. And I love teaching, Professor...Albus, I will never thank you enough for giving me that opportunity. I feel wistful, though. It is not easy to let go of dreams... but I could never have everything."

"You could still meet someone else, Minerva. You do realise that it is not unheard of for Hogwarts teachers to have a family."

"I realise that, yes. But not yet, I think. I... this was not just someone, you know. I think I..."

"You loved him?"

"Yes."

She looked elsewhere. Fawkes moved a bit on his perch. And she sniffed. She pushed herself a bit, because she felt like she needed to say it, "I don't think I am over it, yet."

Albus Dumbledore looked at her. Fawkes trilled. She saw Dumbledore breath deeply, and the lines on his brow softened; she felt relieved, too. She looked in his eyes and thought she saw them twinkling. Give it more time, and he would look like Merlin in the one portrait that was left of him. She wondered if Albus Dumbledore would some day be as legendary as Merlin. Fawkes trilled again. She wondered if it slept in the same room as Albus. If it sang in the morning. If it made Dumbledore happy, if a phoenix's song always felt like it just had. She wondered how it would be, to live with a Phoenix.