Gabe certainly did appreciate honesty. Even if such a lot of it, and so earnestly intended, did rather require some measure of reciprocation. "Look," Gabe said, leaning a hip against his desk, "all I knew about Slytherin when I got here was that Professor Smith pruned a mean gardenia and Gryffindors viewed them with suspicion." Then again, that had been Pete, who'd had moments of viewing just about everything down to and including garden gnomes with suspicion. (Then again, the garden gnomes had been tricksy little fuckers.) "Which I didn't give a fuck about once I figured out that really my job here is to..." He had to take a moment; a lot of this had never been outside his head before, and therefore never anywhere near English. "Give you guys space. And encouragement. And shit like that. The freedom to be what you can be."
He prodded at the pile of papers, just to be doing something. This honesty shit was pretty profoundly unnatural. But while he was on a roll... "You're good kids," he added, looking up at Z again. "You're smart and strong and capable. So fuck what anyone says... in the newspaper or wherever, they could scrawl it across the sky. You lot should be allowed to choose your own damn destiny. And that's all I care about."