The White Queen

She is perfect.

Impossibly lovely; her pale hair spilling over pale skin and a pale gown, graceful in her movement and her stillness. Achingly young; she looks barely old enough to have graduated from Hogwarts. And utterly serene; she sits with her head turned, as though she's heard something unusual enough to catch her attention but not alarming enough to cause her to rise, or even to lift her chin from the hand it rests on.

In all these years, in all the battles they've fought together, Minerva has never seen the other woman lose her composure.

She sits, beautiful, unflappable, beside her husband, and pays little or no attention to the army he watches across the field.

In her mind, Minerva calls her Guinevere. The White Queen. Without whom the kingdom falls.

The chessboard in Albus' office - no, it's her office now, and possibly her chessboard, too, if Aberforth doesn't claim it - has been left in play, somewhere near the beginning of a game she thinks, as only two white pawns and a black bishop stand sulking off to the side and many of the stronger pieces are still on their starting squares.

Minerva can't help but wonder who Albus played his last game against, as she slowly returns their pieces to their proper places.

The person who designed this chess set was not what you might call subtle. The black pieces are aloof, sinister, faceless, the queen veiled, the king and his warriors helmed. When she first heard of the Death Eaters, she saw them as looking like the black pawns she had faced a hundred times across this chessboard. It somehow made them more real, more of a threat.

More dangerous.

When they played, Minerva was always white. Whenever she would offer to play black, Albus would smile and shake his head and say, "Ladies first, Minerva."

It would be nice, tidy, if real wars were like those fought on a chessboard. With rules that both sides knew and followed. There are no spies on a chessboard - no one whose moves or purposes are unknown. And while you might try to keep your overall strategy a secret, a surprise, a mystery, the moves that make it up are all there for your opponent to see.

Above board.

Minerva looks down at the black bishop she's holding, his cloak pulled up, the hood casting his face into shadow. The king's bishop, who stands at his left hand, who has the king's ear, before he moves out to join the battle. Who then slips past the other pieces at angles, cutting a zigzag across the neat straight paths of pawns.

"Were you ever on our side, Severus?" she asks.

She isn't surprised when the bishop doesn't answer. They've never been chatty, these pieces.

She starts to set him back in his proper place, and then stops, and sits down behind the white pieces, still holding the bishop, and studies the board.

If she were setting this up to reflect the battle as Albus left it, would she set a black bishop by the white king, or is it too much to hope that there might be a white bishop standing beside the black one? How much of a handicap is it to have already lost a white (Black) knight?

Is there any point at playing on at all, with the white king already taken? Is it even possible?

The king never leaves the board, even when the game is lost. Without him, the other pieces are just moving around the board - aimless, goalless, purposeless, defending nothing, fighting because they have nothing else to do, but without hope of winning.

One thing she has never doubted is her own place in the game. Minerva is not the king; that has always been Albus. She has stood at his right hand, ready to do anything he asked of her, to provide aid and support and advice, to die defending him if necessary.

His queen.

Not that their relationship had ever been romantic, no matter what the comments Argus routinely had to take Mrs. Skower's to in the school lavatories said. But she was, nevertheless, his queen. In every other way. In all the ways she thinks mattered.

Still matter.

Minerva looks at the board again, then carefully sets the black bishop in his appointed place, the game now set up to begin again.

Minerva lifts the white queen from the board, holding her in her left hand and thinking. The queen looks up at her, surprised clear on her face. The queen cannot make the opening move, hemmed in as she is. And then Guinevere nods once, slowly and regally.

White moves first.

Minerva stands, sweeping one arm across the board, sending thirty-one pieces tumbling, alarmed, protesting, into the floor. Then she sets the white queen in the middle of the board.

Alone.

Minerva is done observing the niceties of rules and turns and patterns. She'll play on because she has to, but she'll do it on her own terms, whatever they are or need to be.

The White Queen. Minerva. Who will not leave this kingdom to fall.