Hag Tales

VI. The One with the Diffident Deputy

Merlin, she's good, Neville thinks as he watches the headmistress work her way through the room, glad-handing and chatting as if there's nothing she'd rather be doing.

Neville knows differently.

Minerva hates these gatherings with a passion that nearly eclipses her passion for the Holyhead Harpies and wipes the floor with her hatred of Celestina Warbeck's music. (This last Neville only discovered when, in his first year as deputy, he'd been tasked with arranging the entertainment for the staff holiday party. Minerva's tart remarks would have soured his evening had they not been good enough friends by then to know that she enjoyed the opportunity to exercise her scathing wit almost as much as she enjoyed a good single-malt Speyside.)

He's never been much good at this part of the job, but Minerva has told him he best learn, because she intends to put him forward as her replacement when she retires the following year.

"After the last hundred years, Hogwarts could use a young head. Well," she said, eyeing his expanded middle mischievously, "younger, at any rate."

To say Neville was gobsmacked would be like saying Severus Snape had been a bit tetchy. Neville glanced at the erstwhile headmaster's portrait, which, thankfully, always seemed to be sleeping whenever Neville entered the head's office. One black-painted eyebrow was twitching, and Neville suspected the portrait would be having a word with the headmistress later. He didn't know for sure, but he strongly suspected they spoke regularly, and he sometimes wished he could be a doxy on the wall when they did.

Maybe he'll have conversations with Snape's portrait. When he's headmaster.

Which he still can't quite believe is going to happen, even though Minerva has told him the governors reacted favourably to the idea at their last blue-sky session.

He had always thought Minerva made him deputy after Flitwick's retirement out of ... not pity, he'd known her too well for that by then, but a surfeit of the kindness he'd discovered she possessed sometime around his sixth year in school.

Back then, he and Hannah needed the extra Galleons that came with the deputy post, as the fees for Hannah's courses at St Mungo's had rapidly been eating up what they'd managed to save from their salaries when Hannah had been employed at the Leaky.

"You'll have rooms and board in the castle," Minerva said when offering him the deputy's job, "which will cut down on expenses. Unless Hannah prefers to remain at the Leaky during her training. Apparition to and from Scotland every day and at all hours can be taxing, as I'm sure you know."

Neville hesitated before answering. It hadn't occurred to him that Hannah might stay in London when he moved to Hogwarts. If he moved.

"A weekend relationship can be as strong as a full-time one," Minerva said. "And a week of abstinence can have its benefits during the reunions."

Her eyebrow rose, and Neville's face heated up. She still had a way of embarrassing him, even after a decade as her colleague and only a bit less than that as her friend.

Before he could formulate a response, Minerva invited him to have a cuppa with her, and he gladly accepted.

The tea and a plate of ginger newts in front of them, they spoke more about what Minerva required of her deputy.

"When I was Albus's second, my role was largely administrative," Minerva said. "Except for those responsibilities that fell more along a—shall we say—martial line." She didn't smile, but her eyes crinkled in the way Neville knew meant she was joking, sort of.

"Barring the need to run another wizarding-worldwide conflict out of the school," she continued, "I'd like your efforts as deputy to focus more on student development. I've got rather good at the administrative side, so I need little assistance there, and the academic curriculum is solid, but I think we could be doing more to improve the overall well-being of our students. It's something I'm afraid I've neglected, and your talents would be better suited to that than are mine. In fact, I suspect you'll be brilliant at it."