😃
@itswitchery
It was easy to underestimate Edgar Bones. A Hufflepuff who fully embraced the traits of the house, his good manners and gentle nature hadn’t made him particularly noteworthy amidst the gaggle of First Years ushered into Minerva’s Transfiguration class that year, save for, perhaps, not being that one little shit that showed up without fail in every year. To Minerva, who was never given to easy praise, Edgar was unfailingly polite, rarely late for class, would always help his friends without them needing to ask and his wandwork never blew up her classroom, (which when it came to first years was really all you could hope for) but he was neither troublesome enough or brilliant enough to demand a great deal of attention.
In his third year, upon finding him hurtling down a seventh floor corridor towards the hospital wing at top speeds with one of the school’s owls cradled in his arms and receiving a teary-eyed explanation (“It’s leg is broken”), Minerva had been half convinced that there was an elaborate con in action and she was being distracted from it (the suspicion had abated when it had become clear he was entirely genuine and Madam Pomfrey had given her a fondly exasperated look that suggested this was not the first time this week that such a thing had occurred.)
In his fifth year, when he had sat down for his first career counselling session Minerva had already scrawled down Healer next to his name before he had bluntly informed her he was going to be the Minister of Magic some day. She hadn’t been sure whether to laugh or be stunned (the Bones family’s reputation within the Ministry was longstanding and prolific enough that it shouldn’t have been a shock) but as it was the first time she’d seen any resemblance at all between Edgar and his younger sister and it came in the form of a steely kind of ambition and focus, she’d instead told him to think about where in the Ministry he’d like to start from.
In the summer before his seventh year, when Albus had proposed his name for Head Boy, it had come attached to a lengthy debate — with the war alive and well outside their doors, his gentleness had seemed ill matched with the challenges that would face the student body. At the end of that year she would decide it would be the last time she would question whether Edgar was capable of taking on the challenges he was presented with.
It is for this reason, perhaps, that Minerva is so disappointed in how Edgar has handled his loss at the election. For a woman not given to easy praise, just this once, she hopes that she hasn’t overestimated him.