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The bottom of the drawer on her desk is loose.
Minerva finds out about it on a Monday morning, while she’s still trying to get used to her new position as the Headmistress. Sitting on what had been Albus’s desk for decades, and Severus’s for one nightmarish year, a sad kind of inheritance she hadn’t asked for.
She slips her hand into the second drawer on her left, her fingers blindly searching for a particular seal she uses for her professional correspondence. Instead, she finds that its bottom is flimsy in a way a desk drawer has no right to be, and she hadn’t noticed it until now because no one really pays attention to such small details when a whole school is half-ruined and in the process of restructuring.
All thoughts of sealing that correspondence of hers now gone, she pulls out the offending drawer and begins emptying it onto a corner of her desk. At first sight, it looks like an ordinary drawer made from rich mahogany. The more she presses her fingers on it, the more convinced she is that something isn’t quite right here.
When she presses at the top right of the drawer, the wood lifts; this is just a plank covering the real bottom of the drawer.
Impatiently, Minerva struggles to pry the wood loose; she curses under her breath, earning a scathing comment from Headmaster Black’s portrait, an anachronistic opinion about women cussing like sailors. She pays no heed because her curiosity is stronger than her need to snap at the painted depiction of a past authority figure.
When the wood finally gives way, the first thing she registers is the smell of lavender and dittany wafting off; considering how well sealed the drawer had been, this feels almost impossible without magic involved.
Then she sees the stack: small pieces of folded paper tied together with twine and placed under a ward, making them barely distinguishable. Most people would miss the silvery ripple of the magic used for warding, but this is Minerva McGonagall, seasoned in all aspects of magic and secrecy alike.
The ward seems to recognise her because the minutest channelling of her magic makes it dissolve as if it was never there. And when the magic dissolves, she gasps.
She knows this handwriting immediately. Those spiky letters; Minerva always thought they looked like someone wrote them out in anger, and maybe that wasn’t very far from the truth. But here, in the little stack of unopened letters she finally fishes out of the drawer, this handwriting bears her name, and a wave of grief, fresh and all-consuming, overwhelms Minerva.
“Please grant me some privacy,” she chokes out to the portraits, who look at her and then turn their backs on her in tandem.
Her hands are shaking when she opens the first one, dated on the same day she fought Severus in the Great Hall. She reads his handwriting, which isn’t as neat as she remembered it: “If you are reading this, Minerva, it means I am long gone. Thank Merlin. I cannot imagine what life would be like if I had to tolerate you for more years than I already have.”
She wants to laugh, she really does. His humour is as scathing as it had always been while he was still alive. But she can’t, because she now recognises it for what it truly is, and she feels devastated just thinking about it.
“Albus is making me do this, Minerva”, she reads a few lines further down this letter. “He is tearing up my soul and doesn’t even help Potter survive in the process. You will hate me.”
Minerva did hate him back then, before the truth of Severus’s true loyalties came to light. The mere idea that he had predicted it and lived with that knowledge on his shoulders makes the Headmistress let out a choked sound.
She opens another letter; Severus’s words make a part of her ache as if she’s been hit by a curse. "We have been friends for years, Minerva. I know I have annoyed you more times than I can count, but I believed you to be my friend, and the way you despise me now is the worst disappointment of my life after not saving Lily.”
Minerva’s eyes sting in the same way they did when Pomfrey told her after the battle that Severus was dead, and by the time she reads in his last letter, “I hope you will forgive me one day for not telling you what Albus did”, she is crying; those loud, ugly sobs that a dignified Headmistress shouldn’t let out openly.
The people in the portraits still stand, their backs turned to her, pretending not to hear her sobs.