War Heroes
by Bil!

T – Angst, Romance – ADMM – Oneshot

Summary: War is never simple, even if you want it to be, and neither is recovery. Long before Voldemort arose there was another war and another set of soldiers.

Disclaimer: I'm not the one who shoved them into a war and left them to recover on their own.

A/N: No idea where this came from. It just did.

Set late 1940s, after Grindelwald's defeat.

They don't leave parties together. She leaves first, usually in a huff over the latest idiotic politician who has congratulated her and tried to win her over to his or her side in a single breath or another drunk wizard wanting to get into her knickers. She's a hero, somehow. Minerva doesn't understand that. She left school at fifteen to fight in a war and their side won and she played a (painful, terrible) role in that and now she's a hero. At eighteen she is a war vet and a survivor and a hero. She's supposed to be an innocent seventh year about to leave Hogwarts for the real world, full of hopes and dreams and expectations for a bright, beautiful future. She wants to be an innocent seventh year. She will never be innocent again. Minerva thinks she has forgotten how to dream.

She has also forgotten how to control her temper. That's why she's the one who leaves first.

He won't leave until hours later. He was always more patient than she ever was. Besides, he is the one with the dream. He speaks of it sometimes in the dark, this dream of a world of freedom and justice and equality, the world he has to build. He needs to gather power, political power, for his dream, and that's why he stays at those horrid Ministry parties for hours and hours and hours, wooing and winning over the people who fawn over him, tying them to his cause, to his dream. It is not a happy dream, it is not a true-soul dream. It is his penance, his punishment, his hair-shirt to atone for all his wrongs, all his foolishness, all his mistakes.

Only Albus could wear the world as a hair-shirt.

Eventually, though, even his patience will run out and he will leave and then, inevitably, he will turn up in her tiny Ministry-appointed flat and he will stand in her spartan, microscopic kitchen-living room and he will look at her with the lost look of a little boy alone and adrift in a world that he doesn't understand and that he fears.

Minerva thinks sometimes that the war took their souls. And what do the soulless have left but each other?

"This isn't love."

He's naked in her bed and that's what he chooses to say when he wakes her in the middle of the night. But this is them and so it's okay. She understands. More than he does, sometimes.

"What is it, then?" she asks, for his sake rather than for hers. He is the one who needs to catalogue and describe and understand. The one who analyses every step, every choice, to try and make sure there are no more mistakes, no more failures. Minerva doesn't care about whys and hows and wherefores. As an auror she gets enough of those at work. For her it's enough that he is here and she is here and he doesn't think of her as a war hero.

"I don't know," he says, and he sounds troubled.

Minerva puts her hand to his face; the beard he is growing to hide the scars is soft under her palm but she can still feel the damaged, unhealing tissue. "Sometimes," she says, "it is enough to need."

"Need?" he asks, sounding like that lost little boy. They are both so lost. But somehow it is easier to be lost in company.

"Need is stronger than love," she tells him. He shakes his head, but she knows it is true.

"I'm sorry about Apollo." He says it over breakfast, like it's a part of 'please pass the salt' and 'would you like another sausage?'

No one else has ever said that. Apollo was one of Grindelwald's loyal followers, he was the enemy. When he was alive he was to be hated. When he was dead he was just another body to throw on the pile to be Incendioed. He was the enemy, not to be mourned, not to be cared for, not to be loved.

Not her big brother with his clumsy hugs and his teasing and his laughter and his joy for living. Not the one who looked after her when their parents died and took care of her and made sure she was safe and well and happy. Not the being she loved better than any other in the world.

The man who joined Grindelwald. She left school the day she learnt that, left to find anyone who would take her with them to the fight because her brother, the one she loved, had done something so terrible, so wrong, and she had to make up for it. Albus found her, Albus took her in. Albus gave her the chance for atonement she so desperately needed. Not that anything she could do would ever make up for her brother's decision, but she could try. She could be everything he had proved himself not to be.

She misses him like a terrible ache, yet is furiously and viciously glad he is dead.

"I'm sorry about Apollo."

Minerva nods. "I know."

"Should I have killed him?"

The first grey light of dawn is filtering through her curtains and she doesn't even know if Albus is aware she's awake or just thinking out loud. Then he rolls onto his side and looks at her as she blinks the sleep from her eyes. "Should I have killed him?"

"I don't know." It isn't the answer he wants but it's an honest answer and he appreciates honesty. These days she's one of the few people who gives it to him.

"We would be safer if he was dead." He is honest too, through the bitterness and self-loathing.

"I know."

"I should have killed him."

"Maybe."

"I couldn't kill him."

"I know."

She was there. She saw Grindelwald kneel deliberately on the floor, unarmed and helpless, and beg for his life. She has done a lot of terrible things in her short life but she doesn't think she could have killed him. Not then. Not even for Albus. Not even for Apollo.

"I loved him once."

She pulls him into her arms. "I know, Albus. I know."

They made her an auror, Minerva thinks, because they didn't know what else to do with her. (She agreed because, well, what else does an eighteen-year-old war vet do with her life?) You can't send a war hero back to Hogwarts like a runaway schoolgirl. And all the skills she has are in fighting, in hunting, in running, in killing. There was nothing else they could do with her. And she's good; a little too good, she thinks, because the other aurors look at her smooth young face and see a child and then look in her eyes and flinch. They don't want to know what war does to children. They're too busy trying to pretend war didn't do anything to them. Trying to pretend Azkaban doesn't howl with the screams of the foe. Trying to pretend none of it happened.

It's a relief to go back to her tiny pocket-handkerchief of a flat, a relief to go back to Albus and bury herself in his arms and know that he doesn't see a child or a war hero, he just sees her, the terrible, broken truth of her. And he doesn't flinch.

"Thank you for fighting Apollo." For being the one to kill him.

His arms tighten around her. She knows how much he hates killing, hates the memories it brings back, the fear and shame it generates. How he hates the waste of it all, knowing from his own life how a person can change for the better. But he took Apollo's life anyway; he did it for her, because it was what she needed, and she is grateful, more grateful than he will ever know.

Apollo will not rot in Azkaban, Apollo will not be tortured or driven insane or Kissed. The happy loving brother of her memories will remain, untarnished by living ghosts. Safely dead.

If she is a war hero, Albus is a deity. And though he plays on that reverence, though he uses it as a weapon and a bribe to those who will be useful in building his dream, Minerva knows how much he hates it. How much it eats at his soul. Once, he wanted to conquer the world, to remake it. Now, the power for that is in his grasp and he doesn't think himself strong enough to withstand it even though he is stronger than he will ever believe. He cannot be Conqueror. That is no longer the dream. The dream is more painful, more difficult, more soul-destroying.

It will break him, she thinks. It will break him. But she will be there and she will put him back together again and again, as long as it takes, just as he does for her. Because he needs her, just as she needs him, and she was right when she told him need is stronger than love.

Need is the strongest thing in the world.

"If you decide he must die," she tells him in the dark, "I will do it." She has already planned it, just in case. Knows how to get into Nurmengard, find Grindelwald's cell. "I will do it."

It is too much to ask him to do, just as she could never have been the one to take down Apollo. But for him, she will do it. Because he killed Apollo for her. Because she will follow him even if he descends into the depths of Purgatory and she will help him build the perfect world of his dreams. Because she will do anything that makes him happy. Anything that stops him hurting.

Right now, all she can do is hold him.

At eighteen years of age she is a war veteran, in a secret relationship with a man over twice her age, and trying to somehow make sense of her world again. Minerva wonders if it's even possible. If she can be made whole, if Albus can be made whole, if they can take his desperate, determined dreams and make them reality. She wants it to be possible. She just doesn't think it is. But she is Minerva and he is Albus and together they will do the impossible because there is nothing else for them to do.

They will build his world, his bright, glorious world. There will be no more eighteen-year-old war veterans if she can help it. They will make a better world. They have to.

It is the closest thing she has left to hope.

Fin