better go and get your armor

Dumbledore versus Grindelwald, 1945, was no place for little girls, but there Minerva was, stuffing one fist in her mouth and splaying the fingers of the other over her eyes. Later, more foolish wizards would boast of the spellcraft they witnessed, the sheen over Grindelwald's eyes as he toppled; the Prophet, hell, even Witch Weekly would drip with eyewitness editorials; Hog's Head old-timers would wax as poetic as the sloshing of their Firewhiskeys about the old days, when the storm hadn't yet hit Britain, when the sleet plucked silver across the hills and the beams and their heads. But before the grandeur, they were all dashing away, and Minerva lost her head somewhere between the bolting legs and underneath the weight.

The stranger was only a few years older, and so only a lot stupider and a little bit braver, but when she spread out her arms, Minerva lunged like a Cleansweep and buried her face in the girl's knees. "You found me," said Minerva, her whole body shaking into her legs, teeth clacking like mice.

There was too long of a pause, and one of the lights tangoed too close. "What's your name?"

"Minnie."

"Where are you from, sweetie?"

"Scotland."

"Scotland?"

She clutched harder. "My mummy and daddy were yelling, so I went down the street, and then I was running—I was running—"

"Okay. Okay, Minnie from Scotland, let's get you home."

The pretty lights were washing the sky blank, bleaching the ice that pecked at her shoulders, and now she planted Minerva away from her onto the ground and ushered her to join the ones who'd left. As Minerva started to rock, to cry, the girl kissed each finger she tugged in turn from Minerva's mouth, then clenched her other hand hard enough to color it purple as they fled and fled.

"Look at us. We've grown so old," Septima murmurs, noses bumping, and Minerva pales to the touch of Septima's softening hand brushing the stray grey hairs from her temple. "How did that happen?"

"We were born old, I think."

"You were born old, maybe, and all my life it's been rubbing off on me."

They splinter apart like caricatures when the staff room door eases itself open, but Minerva's shoulders drop back down when it's just Pomena, corners of her mouth flickering. They've been wobbling along sharp lines (cliffs on the horizon, the gauntness of her jaw) all year, holding it in and counting it up as they peep beadily at the Ministry of Magic. "Is he around?"

"No, he's shut up in Dumbledore's office again," says Pomena. She stretches her legs over one of the tables and kicks her feet in small circles, nodding to Septima as she passes her a coffee. Even now, none of them can call it anyone's but Dumbledore's. "Minerva, you should have seen the color of Longbottom's face yesterday afternoon—like a golden apple that fell off and got trampled. They're getting bolder."

Snarling low in her throat, Septima says, "You bet they're going to start Cruciating them in the middle of the Great Hall soon? Amycus doesn't make it a secret what he's having them do to each other in there."

"He looked like he'd been punched. Honest to God beaten with fists, like the message wasn't strong enough. And Alectro preaches five days a week about how sick it is to behave like Muggles."

Minerva brings it up again after hours, because the stomp hasn't shaken off yet and here is a woman who used to feel safe. "We need to take back this castle," she says, and her throat creaks back closed into the dust.

"Wish I knew how. But you're a good deputy head, yeah? I swear it. Half the time, if I didn't know better, I'd say Snape's afraid of you."

"Fear isn't something to be proud of, on either side of the thing."

"There you go again with the epitaphs."

"But we're dying off, Vicky. We are."

Minerva has never known how to look her in the eye without quavering. Septima used to tease her (if tease is the right word when her jaw could never stop dangling as she did it) for the radical dichotomy between her strictness with her students and her—whatever she is when she's here with Septima, lifting her lips so high. Perhaps Minerva really is always running. Perhaps Minerva really has always had something worth running from.

After her first kill, Septima came. Neither could live while the other survived, and Mulciber was graying and angry and gleaming like leather beneath the stark beams of moonlight. "You know how I think strong women are sexy," said Septima, and Minerva didn't kiss back, but pooled herself in Septima's collarbone and throbbed.

And when the boy lived, Septima was sitting in a nightclub in Edinburgh tossing back Ridgebacks and owling Minerva to come join, and so she shook Dumbledore and trailed, dodging glory swings with her elbows. "I'll take a butterbeer, please," she said, slouching hoarsely over the counter.

"No, she won't." Septima slid her a shot. "Sweetheart, you don't always have to fight so hard."

For once, Minerva opened her eyes to her now, opened to shame and forward and yes, she kept alive the witchery they tried to stomp out, her village wool unraveling to the ground, orange inching down her arms and bulleting out into blossoms. She wished she didn't love the land so hard, but just ask Sir Nicholas; cuts are never clean; the only black lines she knew were the frames of her glasses, and sometimes she thought that those just blurred her further.

"Take me home," she said hours later, and her quarters were warmer caressing Septima's burnish, and the lion waves roared over her shoulders.

"Find me," said Septima.

"I'm marrying Urquart in the spring," said Minerva.

"Straight women. God, you never recover from anything."

Professor Kettleburn, bless his heart, had always been boisterous and bumbling and out of the classroom more often than in, and this time, he returned from probation bearing one hand, one foot, and a twenty-something brunette buckling under his shoulder as he thundered down the hall. "Minnie!" he cried, and she crunched herself inward as she rallied obediently to his side.

"Bother, Silvanus, you know I hate that nickname."

"Doesn't know her own self," he told the brunette, who was eyeing Minerva, and not above the shoulders. "Never admits it whenever she'll loosen up a bit. Don't think I haven't seen those Quidditch medals you got in your teens."

"How was your summer?" Minerva asked, never quite knowing how to handle those of her coworkers who used to give her Acceptable marks on essays and deduct house points for using her wand in the corridors. She, too, wasn't looking anywhere in Kettleburn's direction.

"Fine, it was fine. But—oh! This is Septima, Septima Vector, she'll be our newest professor in the Arithmancy department—Vicky, Minerva came back to teach Transfiguration 'bout three or four years ago, took a few years off after graduating, spent some time with her family in Scotland."

"I used to know a Minnie from Scotland," said Septima, and Minerva ran cold when she excused herself for the night and departed clumsily to her chambers.

She wore her hair down throughout the First War, so that whenever Dumbledore asked her to hit and run, the strands would crackle alongside her wand tip and shield her eyes. Septima used to call it regal, but Minerva wasn't royal material, just so determined not to be terrified that she tricked the Hat into giving Gryffindor to her. Septima teased her, too, for her own classroom severity, but only because it was hilarious that limping little Minnie could pull it off, so she'd rest a while, nestle her face in Septima's waist, and wish she understood a lot more things than she did.

"You said you didn't want to be here," said Septima when Minerva knocked on her door, bleary-legged and waiting.

"I just—I thought maybe it would be nice, but I don't really want anything, I—…"

"Oh, sweetheart, come here," she told her, and when Minerva's feet stayed halted and her face couldn't talk, Septima sat and patted her lap until Minerva laid her head across Septima's legs and burrowed into the rhythmic scratch of fingers in her hair.

Sometimes she thinks she's all fingers, spindly and frail and nothing to hold onto. You were born old, Septima says, but maybe she's just stuck at ten and always will be, taut under wrinkles and wail under words and wandwork squashed out of her mother's house. And she squashed herself out, too, everything but the cat, so she can perch inside someplace where no one can find the rest of her. Magic puffs like dew in the wake of her paws; she sheds enchantment where it wicker-weaves under her belly and around her marked yellow eyes, jaundiced and cruel, like her, because Minerva always seems to leave. That's what she'll do.