"Kid, we've talked this to death, come on, I have work to do." 

"Less than I do, I'd wager. You know, since I am self-studying your bloody curriculum." 

"Oh, is that your new excuse, it's somehow my fault you failed your OWL." 

"Marchbanks is biased to all hell. I did fine in Trocar's class." 

"You audited Trocar's class." 

"Yeah! And did fine! And you're just being a dick because you think, what, your niece-in-law can do better?" 

Scoff. "It's not actually my problem if she decides she'd rather have a dead boyfriend than an evil one." 

"She wouldn't have to have either if you'd teach me how--" 

"I could spend ten years on you and all it'd do is make you die about ten seconds slower." 

"Argh!" Stomp stomp stomp. Mutter mutter. "Goddamned racist. Oh the Weasleys are blood traitors, that totally means they'll be normal about it, ha..." 

"Minerva, dear! I was so delighted to hear from you, it's been entirely too long," hums Augusta, sweeping through the entrance hall like it's her own estate and hooking an elbow around the Transfiguration professor's without breaking stride. "I know you think work-life balance is some kind of exotic fruit but really." 

Most people under this circumstance would stumble and perhaps even fall over upon this occurrence; Augusta Longbottom moves at something of a speed. 

But if you were to try to rank every wizard in the Isles by combined total athletic ability and combat effectiveness, Minerva McGonagall would probably be in the top ten. Maybe even the top five.(1) She's pivoted smoothly and fallen into step slightly before she even actually consciously registers her old friend as a human person and not an environmental hazard. "I'll have you know," she sniffs, "I'm well above average on this metric for Hogwarts professors."  

(1) This depends on weighting, since you have to consider outlier-uneven combinations like Albus Dumbledore, who could outfight any three other people on the planet while standing perfectly stationary but if somehow completely prevented from doing magic would be no more resilient against being punched in the face than any other ninety-year-old man who spends most of his time sitting at desks, or Aidan Lynch, who is astoundingly talented at Quidditch and could probably physically lift and throw a person twice his mass without breaking a sweat but cannot cast a shield charm to literally save his life. But the skillsets overlap nonzero enough that by any reasonably sensible weighting, you'd see a lot of the same names pretty near the top of the list, at least in this decade: Filius Flitwick, Arcturus Black, Septimus Weasley, Peggy Carter (Sr.), Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov(2), Peter Pevensie, Bellatrix Black-Lestrange... 

(2) Unless of course you have an accurate view of his combat prowess (which most people don't). Antonin Dolohov is an exceptional strategist and not actually a very good duellist. He mostly survives fights by standing behind Abraxas. 

"I suppose how this statistic is known is rather self-explanatory, isn't it." 

Wry smile. "Yes." 

It's a lovely day outside. 

".... my office is that way." 

"Yes, yes. It's sunny! Let's sit in the courtyard!" 

"The students," this isn't exactly a question or a statement and she cuts it off before actually saying might hear something they shouldn't, which will only cause anyone within a hundred years to be listening very closely. 

"Pah. Learn to choose your words. I know this is very difficult for Gryffindors but I believe in you." 

Fond, resigned sigh. 

Minerva sits down at an outdoor table and says, firmly, to the table, "An Elf, please." 

One appears promptly. "Yes'm!" 

"Could you please fetch me my chess set, from the shelf above my desk, and also a tea service." 

"Certainly!" the little creature in his Hogwarts tea towel chirps, and vanishes again with a pop. 

A moment later a chessboard appears on the table in front of her, populated on one side, and next to it a wooden tray with a merrily steaming teapot and two ceramic cups with hand-painted hogwarts logos on them. 

"Ooh!" says the white King in a tiny tinny voice, peering up at Augusta with delight. "A lovely afternoon to you good madame!" 

Augusta produces black pieces neatly one at a time from her hat. 

"Eyyyy there's my favorite bastard to murder," singsongs the black King as she places him neatly into place first thing, waving at his counterpart. "You ready to get flattened into marble paste, bro?" 

The king-side knight elbows him. "There's kids here, be nice." 

"Oh come on these guys don't suck though, can't I be normal for once. I have to be nice ALL THE TIME when we're playing the Malfoy set, the prissy fu--"

"GOOD MORNING HELLO," interrupts the white King brightly. "I see you continue to never change, my dear." 

"Not ever once!" 

"It makes you easier to beat, you know." 

"... I know, but hey!" 

 "Oh, what a lovely autumnal tea," Augusta says when she sips it. 

(Usually the interstudent drama starts with the Quidditch season; shouldn't you be gleefully explaining transfig efficiency step ordering algorithms to sixteen-year-olds or whatever?) 

"Yes, Professor Weasley recommended it." (He is who I want to talk about, and also this is literally true.) 

Long pause. 

"....he is. Getting along well with the young Slytherins." (Which might be a problem, no offense.)

"Really! And here I thought you'd all lost the skill." (Are these ones less evil or something?) 

"Well, Merlin knows the rest of us have," (no, not really), "but-- ah. Hm." 

(help she wants to say something rude about her colleague and metaphors are stupid and the worst.) 

She looks down at the chessboard, which is now well into swing driven only by the occasional gentle nudge from either of them. Surely the chessboard will contain a metaphor. Something about knights? 

"...queen-side bishop, my friend, I think you've taken rather the wrong lesson from that last capture." (When you make a reckless mistake and someone dies, the appropriate response to it is not, generally, to get closer to the people who killed them. And also this is literally true.) 

"YEAH HE DID," crows the black king, prodding his knight to go stomp on the bishop. The bishop sulks off to go sit next to his rook on the edge of the tea tray.  

Snort. "Oh, I don't know, this looks like a very recoverable position to me," hums Augusta, tapping her king with her teaspoon admonishingly. "Bit less hubris, dear, you are a chess piece and not a phoenix-wielding hero of ages."  

(You could just kill him if he seems likely to be a strategic hazard. Well, I mean, probably you can't actually but Dumbledore can, right.)

The black King makes a tiny face. "Yeah okay but he isn't either!" 

"I'm secretly Herpo the Foul actually," deadpans the white King. 

"Betrayal! Treason!" opines the white Queen from across the board where she's looming threateningly over a very nervous black king-side rook. 

"I think he just did regular crimes and not treason actually," says the other black rook. "Might depend on what the Greeks considered political though, wasn't he Greek." 

The recently-captured bishop says, "Didn't the Greeks think everything was political?" 

"...wait so technically if I was a greek king maybe it would be treason for you to win this chess game," proposes the white King, thoughtfully. 

His counterpart frowns at him. "Don't they kind of famously not have kings though." 

"Really? How do they play chess?" 

Nelya Vector likes to use her next-youngest sibling as a rubber duck. 

Pancha Vector loves being a rubber duck. It's incredible for her grades.

"--and it really wants to self-correct towards a preferred state, right, spells are like bowling balls falling down cliffs except weirdly way more opinionated than that? So a lot of spell design is actually about making it perceive the, like, metaphorical bottom of the cliff, as the state you want it to have. Because to be clear if you don't do that on purpose it will pick something really really really stupid. And this sounds like it should be easy, right, you just have to define your coordinate system with the right zero point--" 

"--decays into this stabler state and you get a bunch of energy out, right, so you just have to make sure the spell knows what to do with all that energy, and Ted is using like three quarters of it for his pet theory about dispel resistance but this is fine because shields are actually really energy-efficient if you do them right--"

"--augh, what the hell, I forget which operator this symbol means, can you run over to slash-Diophantine--"

"That's a stupid shelf label, it doesn't mean anything." 

"Hm? Oh, no, it's not a description, it's the name of some guy, blame the people at Delphi." 

"...I guess. Nel, have you eaten recently?" It's not like Nelya to forget weird symbols. She loves those. She wins every time they play rune crosswords at home, even against Ena and Tri who went to a whole postNEWT runes seminar at Beauxbatons last year. (Deuxième refused to attend that one on grounds that the French laugh when she introduces herself, which is fair.)  

Blink blink. "Erm-- I'm not, like, hungry, but I don't... remember... eating breakfast... so maybe not..." 

"Right okay I will fetch you books from the Named After Greek Math Guys shelf later, right now we are going to lunch." 

"Okay so I swear this isn't just gossip, I keep accidentally stepping on his feelings and I would really like to stop, what on Earth happened to Brutus's uncle?" 

"Why do you think I know this." 

... yeah, fair cop. 

"Okay so you know how Aurors have that thing where there's always two of them?" 

"Ye--es." 

"The official story is she was randomly murdered by mysterious unidentified terrorists while they were on vacation." 

... 

... 

"...and this wasn't investigated? For an Auror?" 

"Well, I've heard 'Scrimgeour's family did a coverup because it was his fault' and 'the Order of the Phoenix, which definitely exists, did a coverup because it was one of their fault', and 'the Death Eaters, who definitely exist, did a coverup because it was one of their fault', and 'Scrimgeour's family did it on purpose because they didn't like her for some reason', and 'Arcturus Black personally came out of retirement to do the murder and that's why Cedrella Weasley, specifically, filed like twelve lawsuits' and I can only assume there are more." 

"...sorry, what is the one about Madam Black-Weasley, uh, how does that follow?" 

"Yeah nobody knows what the lawsuits were about so that one's either 'she hates him because he famously tried to kill her husband and was trying to get people to hand over their evidence so he'd go to Azkaban' or 'she actually secretly is chill with him and they're up to something and she was trying to get people to not hand over their evidence' or I guess probably there could be other ways that would somehow be related. Or, you know, it could actually have been totally unrelated, people are just assuming it's related because it happened in the same like two months and the Quidditch season was boring last summer." 

"Right. Okay. Aaaand Brutus is really touchy about this because everyone keeps asking him what happened and every time I say something vaguely related he feels like I'm fishing for info which is a giant flaming friendship dick move?" 

"Most likely." 

"Noted, thanks." 

"Sure, yeah, most of the kids who Sorted out are staying out, but it's not all of them. Just because Ravenclaws aren't usually that useful in a fight - no offense, Drew--" 

"You said usually! I take no offense at being accounted unusual." 

"--right, my point is if you want to try to stamp out bullshit in the kids you gotta pay attention to the boring ones too or they'll get real bullshit while you're not looking." 

"Yeah but do you really gotta look that often?" 

"How bad can they get in three months, they're babies." 

"Rosier's little brother has been having a study group with baby Headmaster Brutus the Third and the littlest Vector. ... the second littlest? The boy one." 

"Em, they're numbered. His name is Hex, he's the sixth one. The littlest one is called 'Septima'." 

"I literally Cannot be bothered. My point is we are getting out-outreached." 

"OK the nerd has a point though." 

"Yeah probably outreach works better with kids whose names you can remember." 

"Not if your outreach consists of hexing them until they stop making utterly insane decisions." 

"...that seems worse actually." 

NO COMPROMISE WITH EVIL 

wait no fuck he's right

Siiiiigh. 

"Okay, yes, but we really should do something about it. Talk to the Fawleys, maybe."  

"What do you mean they don't officially exist? Everyone knows--" 

"Anyone with any sense, certainly. But the Aurors closed ranks, I hear, as they are wont to do, and so the Ministry party line is that the Order of the Phoenix is a fairytale for children." 

"Huh. ... Well, there's got to be some way to leverage that, hasn't there, if they don't officially exist then they cannot, for example, make official statements..." 

"Neither can we and it's probably for the best, can you imagine the Dark Lord getting up in front of a press conference and politely denying involvement in something that doesn't meet his public relations standards?" 

"Hey how come you show up to the Nelya lectures and Hex doesn't? Like I know you wanna be separate people and not be like the Prewetts, I get that, I love and support you, but--" 

"Oh ugh I have been not thinking about it because it makes me so mad. I think he grew a 'girls have cooties' this spring or something, he just allllways wants to hang out with his new friends who incidentally are cool important rich boys. He says it's networking." 

"Oh ew. Well on the bright side Deuxi also had a slytherin phase and she totally grew out of it, he'll probably get bored of them as soon as he starts having math opinions they don't understand." 

"I guuuuessss. ... speaking of developing math opinions too cool for the Slytherins to understand I am lost reading this book Tri gave me, I think maybe he forgot I am not you, I have a list of questions?" 

"Oh yeah sure lemme see." 

"...and I guess Tonks is like special and impressive or whatever but it's really bad for social cohesion, you know, having to make exceptions--" 

"Is it? I wouldn't know, you're the expert on social cohesion." 

"Take Ed Bones, right. We love Ed. Ed loves everyone. It's such a waste of his talents and energy, a good supportive community would be helping him filter, you know? Like Prince, sure, staggeringly talented and her mom is only mildly an embarrassment, but like, some of the Ravenclaws who are barely worthy of the name- unlike you, of course- I mean, we call it a friendship quest because it takes effort. You won't help anybody if you burn yourself out trying to help the unhelpable." 

"I see, I see..." 

"So how's your Kestrels this spring?" 

"Oh, absolutely avalanched by the Wasps. Nobody's been able to touch them for ages. Sasha thinks they're cheating but I think Bagman's just really good." 

"Did you hear that rumor that they tried to get Darren O'Hare to play Chaser?" Daniel does not entirely know what this sentence means but it's really important to him to know things about his friends' interests. 

"Oh man yeah. Insane behavior. O'Hare is the best Keeper of his generation and just because he's good at strategy they want him on offense? No wonder we're bottom of the league. They oughta fire whoever suggested that and make him the manager."