Professor McGonagall leaned on her staff, looking out across the water of the lake. Up at the school, she knew, the students would have long since stopped paying attention to lectures, tantalized by the coming holidays. And, oh, what jokes they would play! She laughed, remembering Sirius Black's "to pee, or not to pee" reinterpretation of Hamlet's soliloquy, and later, in the great hall, the absurd potato phallus, and James Potter exclaiming, "Alas! Your dick, Horatio!"

Oh, she'd said hard words to the two of them, but afterward, in her office, she pictured Black holding the absurd potato phallus, and she'd laughed until tears streamed down her face. It was one of the things they had to be constantly on alert for, after all... teenagers being what they were, hormones running strong in them. Minerva remembered the time they'd discovered, the day after a snow storm, the ten-foot snow phallus with a Hufflepuff scarf tied neatly around it.

"Not a bad likeness," Professor Hooch, the Flying master, had said, as they studiously didn't look each other in the eye, and poor Professor Sprout had sighed, and demolished it with a wave of her wand, before bearing the scarf off to her House to give a lecture on propriety. Not that any of them had believed it was actually a Hufflepuff who'd built the thing... though you never knew, really.

Minerva knew she had not been the friendliest of the school's masters, but it often seemed that the girls would come to her, anyway, and ask certain questions. Minerva had made a habit out of having certain potion recipes, and certain charms always written out. She understood Professor Flitwick had done the same, and even Professor Snape, greasy unpleasant git that he was, never turned away a girl who needed a morning-after potion... though he was known to serve it up with a helping of scorn.

Minerva ran her hand lightly over the wood of her staff, checking for splinters. Wizards of the LeGuin school on Catalina Island, she remembered, used staves instead of wands. Professor Keaton had always maintained that wands were a crutch; that they were a focus for those whose magical language lacked precision... indeed, the Irish polyglot had never used a wand, that Minerva could recall.

He'd taught composition, and Latin, and any other language a student cared to learn, as well as the spells for understanding languages one didn't speak, or read. He'd also taught fencing, and when one of the other professors objected, had said only, "a sound mind in a sound body... and there are only so many spots on the Quiddich teams." Aside from which, he'd confided to Minerva privately, later, hadn't Godderic Gryffindor used a sword? "The pen," Keaton had said, on another occasion, "is mightier than the sword... but that's no reason not to study them both."

Harry Potter had come along after Keaton was gone, but Harry had pulled the Gryffindor sword from the sorting hat, and used it to defeat a basilisk. Minerva smiled, and shook her head, turning her back on the lake, and heading for the town of Hogsmeade. The joke was, Keaton had been head of Ravenclaw house, and no one had ever told of Rowena using a sword.