Heart's Desire | Harry Potter for Grown-Ups

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"My dearest Minerva," Elphinstone said, kissing her fingers.

She had a fleeting sense of déjà vu as he swept her into his arms, throwing caution to the winds and kissing her lips soundly.

"Please, El," she remonstrated, drawing back, although it was summertime, and there was nobody to see them but the birds and the Giant Squid, who was lazily skimming the surface of the loch, sunning its tentacles.

"I do apologise, but I'm so very happy," said Elphinstone, releasing her but keeping hold of her hands. "When shall we do it?"

"Soon, I should think," said Minerva.

"Afraid you'll change your mind?"

"Not when it's taken me this long to make it up," said Minerva. "But neither of us is getting any younger."

"Me in particular," he said. "But I think I'm still able to manage a honeymoon," he added with a suggestive wink. "Where shall we go? Now that You-Know-Who is gone, we're free to go anywhere you like."

A week later, as they lay in bed in the small wizarding pensione they had found in Florence, he asked her, "What changed your mind?"

"About?"

"About marrying me."

"I got tired of listening to you ask," she said.

He chuckled at that. "My mother taught me the value of persistence," he said. "But I'm serious, Minerva. I'd like to know."

"You-Know-Who's defeat, I suppose. I didn't want to put you in harm's way."

It wasn't completely a lie. She had been concerned that her work with the Order might make Elphinstone a target. The Death Eaters had shown they weren't beyond killing a loved one to get at an enemy, and it was no great secret that Minerva McGonagall had been—how had El put it all those years ago?—"keeping company" with Elphinstone Urquart.

Despite Amelia's long-ago implication that Mr Urquart was a bit of a cad, it had taken him nearly three years of monthly dinners, lunches, picnics, and what-have-yous before he had laid a less-than-gentlemanly finger on her.

She had been surprised to find that he was a vigorous and generous lover, and despite the various short-lived romances she'd had in the interval between the disintegration of her relationship with Amelia and the advent of Elphinstone's pursuit of her, she had found herself heaving a sigh of relief at the prospect of a semi-regular, familiar presence in her bed.

No, she hadn't wanted to put him in danger, but Voldemort's demise wasn't what had made her accept El's proposal of marriage at last. More than twenty years of life in what often felt like a cloister had made Minerva almost ruthlessly introspective, and once the business of the Order of the Phoenix had been so suddenly and unexpectedly eliminated, she had recognised with some surprise that she was unutterably lonely.

She'd walked into her quarters that day, distressed and irritable after seeing little Harry deposited on his aunt's unforgiving doorstep. Why had she gone to Privet Drive? Why not join in the celebrations that were erupting all over wizarding Britain in the wake of the madman's downfall? Lily and James were dead, yes, and a baby scarred and orphaned—reasons enough to eschew fireworks in favour of a dram of strong Firewhisky—but that wasn't the whole of it. Looking around her empty rooms, she realised with considerable shock that she had harboured a tiny, barely-formulated hope that baby Harry might be entrusted to her.

She'd never given much thought to having a child—not since leaving Dougal standing in the morning fog wearing the look of a man who'd been cold-cocked and mugged—but somehow she'd allowed the notion of raising Lily and James's son to worm its way into her thoughts in the brief hours between learning of their deaths and meeting Dumbledore on Privet Drive.

Fool, she'd thought. What business would you have with a child?

It wasn't a child she wanted, not really, but she wanted someone. She lived with three hundred other individuals in this castle, but when the door to her quarters shut behind her each night, she was utterly alone. The recent war had ensured that she hadn't had much time to dwell on it, but now ... her own footfalls on the polished wood of her floor seemed to follow her, saying no one, no one, no one, in their sharp, staccato voices.

And the following summer, when Elphinstone Urquart made another of his semi-annual proposals of marriage—almost jokingly by then—she'd shocked him by answering in the affirmative.

As they'd stood in front of the registrar, El's sister on one side and Albus Dumbledore on the other, she'd thought fleetingly of her father, dead some nine years, and of Amelia, who had sent a heartfelt note after his death.

~oOo~

When Minerva found El lying on the floor of the small greenhouse he had built in their garden, she checked his pulse, and, finding he had none, sat holding his hand for some minutes as she wept.

You old fool, she thought, but whether addressed to her late husband or to herself, she didn't know.

She kept the cottage but moved back into her old quarters in Gryffindor Tower, and for some weeks, her friends and colleagues took care that she was almost never alone.

She was plagued by a constant stream of owls bearing condolence letters, and tried to take heart at El's posthumous popularity. He'd been loved and respected by many people, it seemed, and Minerva allowed herself to hope that this surfeit of affection had made up for the fact that his wife had never quite given him her whole heart, a fact of which he had to have been perfectly aware.

Minerva dutifully answered each letter and smiled at each correspondent's personal reminiscence of her husband.

This time, there was no note from Amelia.