Chapter Text
McGonagall sat at the head of the staff table and she stared down the length of the Great Hall. Her hands clawed at one another, twisting in her lap as she waited for the first years.
The room was not as full as it had been in previous years. It had been only a handful of weeks since the Battle of Hogwarts and, while they had put a great deal of work into repairing the building itself, many of the scars of the battle remained. Some students had chosen not to return (or their parents had made the choice for them). Some students were still injured and undergoing treatment at St. Mungo’s. Some would never return, but would, instead, become part of a list of names they would all endeavour to remember.
A plaque had been hastily erected in the main hall, listing the names of all those who had fallen. It was a short list, thankfully, but she thought it wise to keep them, and the event, in the thoughts of all current and future students. She did not want history to repeat itself once again.
McGonagall was not going to be Albus Dumbledore.
She had looked into Albus’s pensieve. After Severus had left without any notice whatsoever, taking any information he had found within the pensieve with him, she had been left with few options – and the one she had chosen was to violate Albus’s wishes that Severus be the only one to view his memories.
They were… not what she might have imagined.
Had Albus been there to defend himself, he would have reminded her that he had been poisoned by Voldemort and that he had had no control over his actions. McGonagall saw all of it unfold in his pensieve. But she would have, in return, reminded him that she had known Albus Dumbledore for a very, very long time and she could see the progression of his memories. The poison had not greatly changed his actions nor his behaviour. She could see that now. She could see that he had always had an eye for how best to turn a situation to the Greater Good, which, in most cases, happened to coincide with his own benefit, and how best to use a person to facilitate the outcome he sought.
She was now headmistress and she had become a professor because of his words and his actions, his hints and his prods, but the risks in pushing a young girl into a teaching role were minimal compared to what he had organized for Harry Potter.
She had always imagined that Harry Potter was being, perhaps, slightly dramatic in his few descriptions of his youth before Hogwarts. Not so, she had learned, and more. The poor boy had been pushed and shoved and coerced into nearly every scrape he had ever fallen into, and worse, as being the prisoner to Voldemort was not as she had hoped it to be – a dank cell, isolation and neglect. Instead, it was only now that the boy in question was gone that she learned of everything that Harry Potter had endured over those few months and of how little support he had received on his return. No wonder Harry had left, had vanished into thin air just as quickly as Snape had. But they hadn’t left together, no. Something had caused a schism between them and now they were both gone.
She knew that Snape had bought himself a one-way trip to Tibet, alone, and she knew that Harry Potter had exchanged a decent portion of his Gringotts accounts into Muggle money and then… nothing. No trace of him. No magical trace, at least, and she didn’t have any Muggle connections to exploit, nor did she have a clear idea of Muggle systems of travel. Had he left on one of their flying machines? A boat? He was off the British Islands, regardless, and lost to the winds.
They were not the only ones gone from Hogwarts. Sprout was gone. Hagrid was missing. Her staff line-up was left in shambles, but she had done her best to assemble a rag-tag team as quickly as possible. She had on staff two ghosts, a werewolf, an exonerated murderer, a centaur, and a pupil just short of finishing (in fact, Neville would be finishing his final courses and exams concurrent with teaching all but the final year of Herbology). An odd hodgepodge, certainly, but she was not going to be the headmistress to lose a full year.
Minerva shook her head. Albus was laughing somewhere. She knew it. A fine mess he’d left her, as usual.
Hogwarts must continue so that, perhaps, one day, a few lost souls might find their way home.
The doors to the Great Hall burst open and she straightened her spine, raising her head to gaze down the length of the room. The heads of the seated students turned. The room’s chatter quieted to a hushed rumble of speculation, and the new students crept forward. Firenze, who was now charged with accompanying the first years from the train platform to Hogwarts, kept to the doorway, as he had chosen to abstain from a place at the head table. The new students filed down the hall and came to a stop before the head table to stare up at her.
She took a deep breath and stood.
A new year had begun.