#postwar hogwarts

[luendland]

Day by Day, Chapter 4, is now available on AO3 :)

[brandileigh2003]

Older wolfstar fic recs: (older in age that is)

let me know what I missed and self recs are welcome (also as always check tags for each one to protect yourself) **And I know older is relative term bc most of these wolfstar are in their 30s I do believe. But. They have more life experience than in Hogwarts or uni.

--orange juice (i've been ready for you to come home for so long) by raggedypond: divorced parents of teddy with one bed at his graduation

-Honey If I'm Not by @brigid-faye divergent post war where remus left, jily lived, and wolfstar only reconnects years later by chance. (Also has a Sirius pov)

---used my best colours for your portrait by @littleoldrachel lie low at Lupin's with flashbacks exploring remus' life

-Looking for Moony by Writer_INFJ_2w1: meet and fall in love birthday party

-Flight of Destiny by @lucigoo lesbian wolfstar meet on plane (Luci also has several others where they're older and lots of beautiful fics

--Aging Gracelessly by orphan_account: texting fic

--the mayors of simpleton by fruity_individual divorced wolfstar get back together, raising teddy

-Second Generation by MsAlexWP single parents, getting back together. The sequel is so perfect too! It's a Nice Day for a Wolfstar Wedding

-the sea is a good place to think of the future by peachyybabe (second in series is mcd but this one is open ending)

-Of Memories and Milk Thievery by moonymoment raising teddy, get back together

--Birthday Blues by YouBlitheringIdiot @blitheringmcgonagall :Sirius is turning sixty and he is appalled...

--Give Quarter to Old Men - @krethes series

--dear your holiness by mollymarymarie

--The Postwar Chronicles by @sliebman10 post canon series

-Vigil Strange I Kept by whitmans_kiss explores effects of lycanthropy

--ten reasons (to go to michigan) by @greyeyedmonster-18 remus headed home, trying to move on from divorce

--Prettiest Star Verse by Raging_queer

-I didn’t sign up for this by Moonystoastandmarsbar divorced wolfstar

-Of Protein Powders and PTAs by @squintclover and @tracingpatternswrites rivals to lovers

-An Infinte Ocean by orphan_account raising teddy strangers to lovers

--The Road Not Taken by @mollymarymarie

-extra credit by MsAlexWP rivals to lovers

-Baby On Board by aqua_myosotis

-Of Memories, Bitter and Sweet by MsAlexWP memory loss

**luci's recs

-my love, take care of yourself by littleoldrachel

-How to romance a guy with (terrible) poetry by BayleyWinchester

-Teddy Plays Matchmaker by grow_as_we_go

-The Front Step Surprise by R33sesPieces

**Recs from others** (I haven't read all these yet but wanted to include)

--Just what the doctor ordered by WrappedUp (be aware there is age gap)

--The Lab by de_sire again an age gap

-Till We Have Arrived Home Again by prouvairing divergent post canon raising harry

-The Patchwork of Us by TracingPatterns

-The Things I Did by Lolo_row

-The Phoenix Agency by LupinsChocolatePraline

-The Fall by EuripidesTrousers

-Pages of You by wolfpants this is drarry main but apparently background wolfstar is really good

-Just Like Heaven by the_prettiest_w0lf_star: mechanic Sirius and librarian Remus

-soloorganaas

-impishtubist

***Self rec***

--Memories of You: mcd exploring memory loss

--Through the Years: Sirius thinks about the past and how handsome his husband is while holding their granddaughter.

--DN(R): Lie low at Lupin's era where they discuss decisions Remus made in the lost years.

**also- the wolfstar librarian is always a great resource make sure to give some likes on posts: 30yo and Up part 2 Bring Black Back Back from the Veil Lie Low at Lupin’s Post Azkaban Grimmauld Place

--Feel free to check my other rec lists, as well as the rest of my fics

[draco-dormiens]

FOR ALL THAT IS RIGHT AND JUST MASTERLIST

draco x fem!auror!slytherin reader postwar au series

BLURB:

Since the Second Wizarding War ended, an unusual peace had blessed the wizarding world for ten years. In the January of 2007, after many years as an Auror, Harry Potter became Head of the Auror Office. Unfortunately for him, the peace the world had come to know would soon be turned upside down, throwing himself and his colleagues into a state of mania.

Y/N Travers and Draco Malfoy are amongst the Auror’s that fall under Harry’s supervision. Friends since their childhood, they have battled the challenges of adolescence and fought in a war that their families were at the centre of. Throughout the years, mutual pining and reciprocated feelings get shoved aside due to their solid friendship and mutual understanding that neither of them want to lose, and the fact that they work in close proximity to one another each day as fellow Auror’s.

When a new threat starts to rear its ugly head, both the Ministry and the wizarding world are thrown into utter chaos. Can Y/N and Draco help Harry to bring peace once and for all? Will mixed feelings and high emotions become the downfall of their lifelong friendship along the way?

CHAPTERS:

chapter one: ministry mayhem

chapter two: draco’s story

chapter three: suspicious wizard on the hogwarts express

chapter four: memorial in the great hall

chapter five: a not so sweet surprise

chapter six: sweet memory lane

tbc

disclaimer: i do not own harry potter or any of the characters or storyline associated with it.

warnings: reader and draco are both 27, blood, injury, fighting, drama, strong language, sexual themes, mutual pining, slow burn (i'm sorry)

status: ongoing

a/n: this list my change over time, due to me changing my mind on chapter titles and warnings and such. i'm currently in the process of writing this and would like to get quite a few chapters done before i start posting - save you guys waiting for an update. i hope you enjoy it x

[whinlatter]

The Ginny and Peter parallel though?? How have I never thought about that?? It‘s so horrifying and insanely compelling to me at the same time. I would love to hear (read?) you elaborate on that.

"Sirius, Sirius, what could I have done? The Dark Lord… you have no idea… he has weapons you can't imagine…. I was scared, Sirius, I was never brave like you and Remus and James. I never meant it to happen…. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named forced me - " "Harry – oh, Harry – I tried to tell you at b-breakfast, but I c-couldn’t say it in front of Percy. It was me, Harry – but I – I s-swear I d-didn’t mean to  - R-Riddle made me, he took me over..."

thank you so much for this question anon.  i have been thinking about this for a long time - about how ginny weasley might have made a really, really good traitor - and would love to talk more about my thinking behind it. a little meta on traitor talk - who flips, and why, and why ginny weasley might be the peter pettigrew to the trio's marauders after all - can be found below the cut (with spoilers for beasts chapter 14). 

hp, as a series, puts great moral emphasis on the concept of choice. after all, it’s about a world at war, where the question of whose side you're on is often a matter of life or death. double agents, deception, treachery, people serving the interests of others (either consensually or under duress): these are recurrent tropes, on both sides of the wizarding war. the plot begins the ultimate act of betrayal - that of lily and james potter by peter pettigrew - and the series concludes with the revelation of another (snape). throughout the books, there are all sorts of characters who spy, or flip, for all sorts of reasons. you have those who knowingly pretend to be serving the interests of one side when actually serving another, for principled reasons, either ideological motivation or out of selfless loyalty to another person: snape, peter, likely rookwood, quirrell, fake moody/barty crouch jr, both sirius and regulus black, kreacher, and narcissa in the forest. and then you have the group who betray either out of fear, or who are manipulated into acts of betrayal and deceit, sometimes through possession but otherwise through blackmail and intimidation, to varying degrees: xenophilius lovegood, mundungus fletcher, pius thicknesse, marietta edgecombe, bertha jorkins, bathilda bagshot, those types. (in a sign of jkr’s consistently dicked-up biases re gender in the series, women are never allowed to be interesting enough to actively betray anyone unless they’re doing it out of maternal love eg. narcissa - they can only ever actively be led astray or hoodwinked, whereas male characters can have a vast array of complex motivations and all sorts of shades of moral grey. we'll come back to that in a minute).

in chapter 14 of my postwar fic beasts, during the course of the hogwarts inquiry, augustus rookwood takes the stand and testifies of an attempt by him and his fellow death eaters to find someone who could play double agent to pass secrets about the resistance, the order and harry to the other side during the second wizarding war. rookwood - himself a former double agent - talks about how to make a traitor. he discusses the different motivations of traitors, how to find a target and how to exploit their existing vulnerabilities and weak-points to get them to come around to your side. he also reveals that, during the death eater seizure of the ministry and hogwarts school, he and his peers identified a would-be target in ginny weasley. in the fic, i have him describe the process of traitor-identification as ‘the pettigrew playbook’: finding someone who is connected, who knows the order’s secrets, who has the information you want, and who will flip less out of an ardent ideological commitment, but more because they are weak and scared but also disrespected and resentful and more inclined to save their own neck than act out of loyalty

i’ve always been very struck by peter pettigrew’s attempts to justify his betrayal of lily and james in PoA (see above). peter pettigrew is always a slippery and elusive character, rendered mostly through other people’s memories or descriptions of him. this is one of the very few times he explains something of his own worldview - though, as we know he is a liar, and in this instance errrr trying to save his own life as sirius threatens to kill him (slay), we have to take even these lines with a pinch of salt. we know pettigrew is a character that acts, at all times, out of a desire for self-preservation, trying to secure his own survival. he was tolerated but never respected by his schoolfriends, made the potters’ secret keeper as a ‘perfect bluff’ because he was a  ‘weak, talentless thing’ voldemort would never bother going after, a trait which ultimately made him the perfect and most vulnerable target. when outed as the real spy by sirius and remus here, he acknowledges he is aware of his deficiencies and weaknesses, and talks about his fear for his own life, his sense of how he did not live up to the principled bravery of his friends, and claims  that voldemort ‘forced him’ to surrender lily and james - presumably through the threat of terrible violence, suffering and death. 

pettigrew’s remarks are particularly interesting when put alongside the justifications and excuses of another character who has betrayed harry to voldemort, albeit under very different circumstances. like peter, ginny’s confession is given through floods of tears as a desperate plea to be believed and excused. in it, ginny begs harry to understand her own lack of culpability. just as wormtail does, she insists to harry she was forced by riddle to cause harm to others and to hand information about harry over to riddle, and to play an integral role in returning lord voldemort to life.  of course, the series always frames ginny’s actions in CoS as the behaviour of an entirely innocent person. but even these lines show a streak of self-preservation and a certain amount of weakness and cowardice that runs throughout ginny’s encounter with the diary. ‘I couldn’t say it in front of Percy’, she says, suggesting she feared getting in deep trouble with no proof of riddle’s hand in her actions. in fact throughout the diary episode, ginny shows real moments of acting to save herself rather than do the right thing and come forward with the truth. she tries to dispose of the diary, but doesn’t go to a teacher about what it has been making her do. she stole the diary back not to protect harry but to protect her own secrets and prevent him from discovering her complicity (at least by TMR’s telling). she even watches hagrid get falsely accused and sent to azkaban, and stays silent in the process, a distinctly pettigrew echo if ever i heard one. 

of course, we know ginny and peter pettigrew’s relationships with voldemort are not alike in dignity. it’s clear that, in so many ways, ginny’s encounter with the diary is much more clearly an experience of victimhood than of malicious intent. we know that ginny was possessed; we know she is not a character who would commit murder without that level of involuntary mental surrender. but there are more uncomfortable echoes of pettigrew in her experiences in CoS. we see them in the decisions of a character acting of fear and a desire to save their own skin in ginny’s experience of the diary than we might like to think. ginny ofc was targeted by lucius malfoy because of who her family was, as stalwarts of the anti-voldemort pro-muggle resistance during the first wizarding war, with powerful enemies determined to discredit and undermine them at every turn. but, as TMR makes clear, what makes ginny such a good target in the end, so vulnerable and so useful, was that she was weak. she was insecure, and lonely, teased and misunderstood and feeling inadequate. in all of that, there was a very rich opening for TMR to access her innermost fears and secrets and to use them to manipulate, pressure and threaten her into compliance, in addition to the active possession of her body to conduct deliberate acts of attempted murder. it’s not a perfect pettigrew parallel by any means. but there’s more than a little bit of pettigrew in that, too. 

maybe more parallels with ginny and peter pettigrew than meets the eye - particularly in ginny’s relationship to the trio. there are a few posts that periodically do the rounds on tumblr and reddit that talk about neville’s relationship to the trio as the parallel to peter pettigrew’s with the marauders - as this post compellingly puts it, ‘all who peter could have been’. neville, these posts usually point out, was a character who was weak and much less talented than his friends, an outsider who needed the protection and patience of cooler classmates, who was always on the outside looking in on a friend group that largely excluded him. what distinguished neville from peter was his approach to his own weakness, and how that approach drove him to heroism rather than betrayal and villainy. it’s an interesting idea, and there’s something to it. but the more i thought about it, the more i thought - is neville + the trio the only parallel with peter + the marauders? what about ginny? 

it’s remarkably under-appreciated in fandom that ginny is remarkably poorly treated by the trio for much of the series. ‘go away, ginny’ - that’s how ron banishes his sister at the start of PoA, because harry mutters to his two mates that he wants to talk to them in private and to ditch ginny. neither harry nor hermione object to it - hermione, though kind to ginny when the dementors arrive, makes no defence of her right to stay. ginny duly leaves, hurt, to go sit by herself on the train back to school, returning to hogwarts for the first time after her deeply traumatic experience in the chamber, dismissed and dispatched. not meaning to drag ron here - this is, ofc, how big brothers have behaved for time immemorial, as is their wont. but it’s kind of the statement for how the trio treat ginny for much of her school career really until HBP, harry and hermione included. ofc there are many textual/plot reasons ginny needs to be held at arms length from the trio. but it is striking that the effect of this plot habit for the reader is a usually unkind and sometimes even callous exclusion of ginny by the trio throughout many of the books.

in CoS itself, ginny is never invited to join the trio or spend any time with them: when she isn’t, you know, trying her hand at possessed attempted murder, she’s doing a light bit of potter hero worship that does recall a certain lakeside snitch-catching display of yore. it’s ginny who’s left feeling left out when the trio are swapping suspicious eyes and sirius secrets in GoF, ginny who is hermione’s back-up friend when the ron and harry showdown kicks off over the triwizard tournament, ginny who shoulders the role as harry’s consolation prize friend when ron and hermione go off to the prefects on the train in ootp (and takes him to neville and luna), ginny who goes defenceless when the trio are demanding to be included in order secrets and is physically removed from the room with no protest from the others, ginny who has to fight her case to be taken seriously and included in the department of mysteries plot to rescue a man she too is friends with (‘I care about Sirius as much as you do!’), being patronised by three friends who pick her up and put her down when they feel like it (always enjoy hermione being like ‘we need three thestrals!’ and ginny being like ffs we need four why won’t you show me an ounce of respect). in fact, when ginny is revealed to be becoming popular in a different social circle throughout ootp and hbp, it is something of a shock to harry and ron, who have spent a good six years making no effort to include her and now are finding she has built a much more successful social life beyond them (you reap what you sow, lads). i don’t say this to overstate the trio’s malice nor to overstate the pettigrew comparisons (ginny is clearly both conventionally attractive and much more socially adept).. but i do think it’s striking that  if there is a character with pettigrew echoes in the trio’s surround, always orbiting the trio, trying to feel included (and hero worshipping the potter at the heart of it), it’s more often young ginny than it is neville. so many of the things that made ginny vulnerable to TMR - her loneliness, her isolation, her insecurities and sense of inadequacy - are not helped by the trio in the years afterwards, and in some cases, actively reinforced.

(to briefly say something on gender - sometimes wonder if ginny were a male character if people would have made more of this. percy stans, for instance, go to great lengths to point out all the ways percy was bullied or teased by his family as an excuse for his errrrr war crimes. would people care more about many ginny's exclusions if she were a maligned misunderstood young man? probably? it's noticeable too that all traitors in hp are men lol, a classic example of jkr’s weird and fucked feminism striking again. women are led astray or hoodwinked - men get the complex motivations and agency arcs. but i digress).

why does any of this matter? we know ginny doesn't take the path of pettigrew, however much she might have good reason to. harry's endearingly naive line in DH ('I trust all of you, I don’t think anyone in this room would ever sell me to Voldemort’) ends up being borne out: there are no betrayals during the second wizarding war, and certainly not by ginny (though the sword heist almost ended up doing it on accident). but i found myself thinking a lot about this as i was sketching out the plotline for beasts and thinking about ginny’s war, and what is asked of ginny in it. i was particularly thinking about it relation to how the second wizarding war plays out, the unique position of danger ginny would have been in as a hogwarts student in the 1997-1998 academic year, and what a good target she would make for death eaters on the hunt for a spy within the order of the phoenix.

when i was reading DH for the first time, i remember thinking that it is absolutely bonkers that ginny weasley goes back to hogwarts in september ’97. by that summer, the weasleys are the order of the phoenix. no longer just the blood traitors’ blood traitor, they’re now the face of the wizarding resistance, both parents and (nearly) all sons in active combat, something the ministry certainly knows about even when trying to normalise death eater rule and allowing the facade of arthur et al going to go to work in the ministry/gringotts etc. ginny’s family home is order hq: she lives there all summer, and trots off to the hogwarts express straight from the kitchen table where order meetings take place. when death eaters descend on the wedding, she’s there alongside the rest of the rest of dumbledore stans. she is also famously in the DA, and fought death eaters alongside the trio in the department of mysteries, and again in the battle of the astronomy tower. and then there’s the obvious point that hinny shippers everywhere have pointed out is baffling since the dawn of time, which is that the world and his wife knows that ginny weasley is harry potter’s ex, something that might put a big fat target on her head for a death eater or two to have a pop at trying to get some secrets and intel out of her. 

of course, there’s a compelling case for why ginny has to go back. ron’s already used the splattergroit excuse, and arthur’s going to work, and so is bill, and the twins (at least for a bit), and the weasleys are going for normalisation and at least a fig leaf of compliance. so off ginny goes, into the belly of the beast, back to school, despite all the access she has to order secrets and intel, as well as information on harry and the trio. she is in a uniquely dangerous position of risk: it’s a fortress run by death eaters and her card is marked. she finds herself in an unenviable and unrivalled position as a very good person to go after if you’re a death eater fancying some intel about what the guerilla resistance - and harry potter - are up to. we know there are death eaters about who would like to claw themselves back into some level of relevance by working towards the big man and trying to curry favour (yaxley). we know there is a family intimately aware of ginny weasley's weakness and failings who are desperate to get back in voldemort's good books (the malfoys). we also know there are witnesses to ginny's exclusions both from the order and from the trio over the years - in particular, one witness that already sold secrets on the order to death eaters, namely kreacher.

the reason i came back to thinking about parallels between ginny and peter in beasts is because beasts is a story about ginny’s war, but also in part about morality in the wizarding world, about war and sides and choices. at various points in beasts, i’ve tried to play with ginny’s echoes with characters that waver morally - including regulus - or who find themselves drawn to or in some way embroiled in darkness, and who are at times governed by fear and cowardice and self-preservation in a moral universe that prizes bravery, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. so this plot came from putting all these pieces together - ginny's existing vulnerabilities and insecurities, her position of privilege and access, but also her alienation and mistreatment, and this interest in moral motivations and what experiences or traumas might lead a person, or even justify, a person's treachery, moral inaction, or active moral failing. it was even more interesting for me to play with the idea that other people might have noticed ginny weasley's weird position relative to the trio and the order too, people who want to know what she knows and who would be willing to exploit the cracks in those relationships for strategic wartime gain. and that's for chapters fifteen and sixteen!

[percyherondale]

TTPD as the marauders

1. fortnight - starchaser

2. the tortured poets department- wolfstar

3. my boy only breaks his favorite toys - starchaser

4. down bad - dorlene

5. so long, london - starchaser/ wolfstar/ black brothers

6. but daddy i love him - wolfstar

7. fresh out the slammer - starchaser

8. florida!!! - kind of remus

9. guilty as sin - starchaser

10. who’s afraid of little old me? - regulus / remus

11. i can fix him (no really i can) - rosekiller, maybe wolfstar if you squint

12. loml - wolfstar (specifically postwar)

13. i can do it with a broken heart - james

14. the smallest man who ever lived - i won’t say it

15. the alchemy - starchaser

16. clara bow - not a marauder sorry but harry potter

17. the black dog - wolfstar (specifically postwar) but lyrics overall can also be starchaser

18. imgonnagetyouback - starchaser

19. the albatross - dorcas meadows

20. chloe or sam or sophia or marcus - wolfstar

21. how did it end? - wolfstar

22. so high school - starchaser (specifically hogwarts era)

23. i hate it here - regulus / remus / lily

24. thanK you aIMee - them about peter

25. i look in people’s windows - starchaser

26. the prophecy - remus

27. cassandra - pandora / maybe marlene

28. peter - THE BLACK BROTHERS (REGULUS TO SIRIUS)

29. the bolter - remus

30. robin - ?

31. the manuscript - rosekiller/ wolfstar

[lostdrarryfics]

lostdrarryfics monthly roundup Aug + Sept: Part 1

Oops! We got busy and never posted the monthly roundup, so we're splitting it into two parts. Here's Part 1! Please let us know if you recognize any fics!

You can also browse our lengthy lost fic masterlist, where we have compiled every request we have been unable to find over the past few years. We're always hoping someone will recognize a fic so we can let the asker know what it was!

1. i found the fic on pinterest and im pretty sure the person whos pinterest i found it on wrote it but i did read it on ao3. it was an 8th year darry post war hogwarts. there was ptsd in the tags. there were 13 chapters but the last one (13) was an explanation of why it was on hiatus, it could have changed by now idk, the main plot was that draco was cutting himself but specifically to try get rid of his dark mark (or just sh i cant remember) and harry discovered this and wanted to help. he went to this meeting that the students ran and got tips on how to help. was told that for a couple of people painting their arms helped them and one lended their paint to harry. so harry and draco kept meeting up and harry would do these amazing art paintings on his arm(to cover the dark mark specifically i think) and draco was so relaxed. i think they got into a fight and draco relapsed and then harry discovered this in the basement of hunydukes(?). and afterwards draco talks with pansy and blaise and realises that he likes harry (again i could be mixing up with a different fic but im pretty sure it was this one)

2. postwar drarry fic where draco was previously dating another man before his current relationship with Harry and kind of embraces that memory..? I think he was telling Harry about this other man and I think there was this specific line about how draco and the previous man had similar cracks and were similarly broken so they thought their cracks fit tgt and thought it was love but it rly wasn't..???

3. been looking for this fic for a while, so I guess it was posted 5+ years ago. Probably on AO3, but I’m not sure. It’s AU, Harry is poor and decides to sell his virginity at Sirius’ brothel. Draco, also a virgin, buys it. Here it is what I remember: Both Harry and Draco are virgins. Harry needs money (to go to college? university?) and decides to sell his virginity. Sirius is a sex worker/has a brothel and tries to dissuade Harry, but can't. Draco is about to get married (a marrige Lucius arranged for him). Lucius takes Draco to Sirius' brothel. Draco insists in a inexperienced hooker. Draco and Harry hook up and obviously fall in love. Draco pays for Harry exclusivity. All of above are what I'm sure about (or as sure I can be). However, there are other informations that I think were important in this fic: When Harry talks to Sirius, Sirius thinks in selling his wand because it's something rare (like, only tradicional pure-blood have one). There is something about lycantrophy, Remus takes care of other werewolves and he needs Sirius' wand to make wolfsbane.

4. draco and harry are already in a relationship but draco is so self hatred and he believes he don't deserve harry. Im not sure if he already tried breakup with harry but harry is so in love with draco that he don't accept de breakup so draco to finally leave harry líes to him tellin him that he don't want to be tied in a relationship and he wanna explore being with other people and be more sexually adventorous or something in that context. These are the  scenes that i remember: Draco talking with ginny because he knows she still in love with harry and would have him back no matter how and that this is a chance draco is giving her. After the breakup harry find draco and tell him that they dont have to be boyfriends but that at least draco  let harry be one of the persons that draco have fun with because at least that way he still in draco's life. In the end ginny based on harry's heartbreak make harry come back togheter with her and draco see them in a restaurant and believes he make the righ choice.

5. I'm very positive this story is in ao3. I don't remember much but the story is set after the war where Draco discovers the hidden secrets of his ancestor Malfoy, I remember it has something to do with dragons and daggers or something. Then Harry and Draco went together to uncover the mystery. I remember they went to some kind of desert place? Then a cave where there were a lot of paintings or stuff from Malfoy's ancestors. Then I remember Draco and Harry sort of doing a sex ritual on a stone table I think. Then Draco got pregnant. In the end I remember Scorpius and Harry living in that cave if I'm not mistaken.

6. I think it’s set during eight year, I remember no one wanting to pair up with Draco, and I think it must’ve been in Potions. Harry must’ve volunteered to pair up with him. I remember it being in Draco’s POV, and that he described Harry as looking sleepy between Ron and Hermione. And then somehow, they get transported to like the countryside or the highlands where they have to operate a muggle car to get back to Hogwarts. It’s like an adventure of sorts. I’m sorry it’s vague but it’s what I remember. There’s no fake relationships trope or anything like that. I think it might’ve been before the war or maybe an au? But it’s defo like an adventure fic with them trying to operate a muggle car. Fic is not Right Hand Red by lqtraintracks

7. I read it about 8 years ago and I think it was on a drarryforum.com/forumdrarry.com. Okay, so it's after the war - they're all adults living their lives. Draco is working in a bar/restaurant/bistro/sth like that for a man that he is indebted to. I think he works as a waiter too, but he definitely is available to "rent". He's forced to work as a sex worker for the food place owner till he pays off his debt. I think the owner used/is using him as well. One day Potter comes to the place, the owner is happy and they chat (idk if they know each other, but maybe) and Harry sees Draco (maybe he's waitering for him?). Harry is delighted in Draco feeling humiliated, and somehow the owner tells Harry about their arrangement, offers Draco to him (maybe even for free cause of admiration for Potte) and Harry ends up renting Draco for some time. Harry is very dark, possibly with PTSD, definitely taking pleasure in hurting Draco and degrading him. The first time they are in bed together he humiliates him verbally, I think by making Draco admit to enjoying what Harry's doing to him, and forcing Draco to ask Harry to continue/let him come (something like that). It's non-con (duh lol), very dark and there's a lot of angst. I think they develop some feelings for each other maybe, but doubt it has a happy ending - certainly not fluff. It has several chapters, is in English (I read a Polish translation I think?) and is sexually explicit. It's possible Harry is violent towards Draco overall, but I might have confused it with another fic I'm looking for. Maybe there are some other characters in the background, but mainly It's Draco and Harry. Lucius might be dead and Narcissa is either dead as well or very sick and/or poor and Draco has no one. Harry has some power position probably,  Aurors with Ron, prime minister or something like that, and Draco is bottom and submissive, but that might just be cause Potter has all control. And it's 100% not the fic in which Draco has some sort of debt and is using some potion to not look like himself. And Harry is really cold and damaged. Might be vengeful towards Malfoy, either for the school years, or him being a Death Eater or both.

8. Looking for an ao3 fic. In this one Draco has a really special bond with his wand, and I only remember this scene where he is at the quidditch stand with the professors and he is practicing magic in there, but I don't know what. Also the wand is a lot of the plot, maybe it's bc he can't do magic with another wand and maybe he was a Ravenclaw but I'm not sure either:( but I think he was happy and wasn't bad like the canon. I remember one more thing I think, Draco was with McGonagall on a scene looking at a quidditch game, he was really happy with her and McGonagall likes him as well, I think he had a special bond with the professors bc Lucius and Narcissa was bad parent, maybe even wasn't with him anymore, also he was a ray of sunshine! He was really cute/adorable Fic is not The Mirror of Ecidyrue series by starbrigid

9. I think the title included the word "tomb". Anyway Draco and Harry were in some desert and they were traveling with other authority figures (I think Aurors and Harry was head Auror). For some reason they were looking for something and they found an entity which killed two people traveling with them or badly injured them. The entity targeted them because it thought Draco was it's long lost lover. I also remember a scene where Draco didn't want to get on a camel because it was uncouth or something.

[greenerteacups]

What do you think as Hermione's career would be post battle of Hogwarts? To me her being minister for magic really doesn't make sense. She does not have patience or tact to wade through murky waters of politics 😭😭

So hard to say! The Trio are so, so young when we leave them, I find it almost impossible to project their futures farther than a few years out. The job that suited me at 17 would be radically unsuited to me now. That's why of all the Trio, Ron's ending strikes me as the most realistic — he jumps straight into the save-the-world business again, burns out, realizes he's actually Done The Fuck Enough, Thanks, and pivots into a low-stress career where he gets to see his family a lot. Feels accurate! The others are weirder to me because they do seem to just... pick a lane and stay there.

With Hermione, you could spin her a couple ways. You could say that she leans into her bookish side and does research or teaching, which is not my preference for a couple reasons (namely, I don't think Hermione would like academia as a profession; she finds her classwork interesting and enjoys intellectual validation, but she'd be stifled and wasted in a DPhil program, and she'd be infuriated by the administrative politicking of your average higher-ed faculty). You could say that she gets disaffected with politics and ends up as a barrister or a lobbyist of some kind, but if anything that requires more political finesse, because you don't actually have institutional power, you're just handling the people who make decisions and trying to persuade them of your goals. This is not Hermione's preferred method of influence. She's not even particularly good at persuasion, she just happens to be smart enough (and right often enough) that people take her ideas seriously.

Or you could say her brashness fades with the years into a softened flavor of tell-you-like-it-is honesty, which some politicians actually do successfully trade on; as we see in British politics today, you don't have to be all that charming or clever to get ahead, you just need to be really driven and well-connected (which Hermione completely is; she fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the first postwar Minister and her bestie, the Literal Messiah, runs the Auror Office.) But I don't know if Hermione especially wants to be Minister, after the war. She's just watched years of horrendous bureaucratic incompetence plunge the country into a violent civil conflict. She's had not one, but two Ministers of Magic try to bully or shame her friends into complicity with fascism. Her view of government is... likely extremely dark.

But Hermione also isn't the kind of person who sees her life as a quest for happiness. Babygirl has a savior complex that makes Harry look selfish. (She basically kills her parents — yeah, obliviating is a form of murder, #changemymind — "for their own good," and justifies every batshit, vindictive, mean-spirited move she ever pulls on the grounds that it "helps" one of her friends.) She is a mean, lean, dragon-slaying machine, and she needs a dragon. After Voldemort, the Ministry is the no. 1 threat to muggle-borns and non-wizarding Beings. As a war heroine with basically infinite political capital, I'd be surprised if she didn't try to do something there. That said, Hermione is so vivacious and dynamic that she could potentially grow in a hundred different directions; it's possible that all of this, while true of her at 18, becomes completely inaccurate by 22. That's why I'm not too fussed about any particular fanon interpretation.

[foursaints]

berliner remus thoughts 🤲🤲🤲🤲

yes yes that man is sitting by an open window in freezing weather eating a single hard boiled egg and flavorless pasta salad, and he can unwittingly come across as quite unsentimental or rude or blunt, and his jokes are awful and overly literal (“a werewolf? he’s sitting in my chair!!11!1”) so remus is a damp paper towel, i agree. but these same things also make him a really stereotypical berliner schnauze

in terms of modern au it's just a funny detail that makes a lot of sense (remus is in a knit turtleneck but still stomping his way through Friedrichshain in crustie doc martens), but its more interesting to me in my personal view of canon?? like this is the 70s. it's before the fall of the iron curtain, remus is growing up in a postwar city halved by the Wall, isolated from the world by the cold war, and filled with spies and punk music and poverty

in my headcanon, remus was separated from his (bavarian) family by the wall and grows up alone as a muggle in kreuzberg, west berlin. i like the idea of remus as a penniless lycanthropic preteen at the very height of Deutschpunk, cynical but still young, going to all the shows covered in scars just looking for a place to sleep. he grows up collecting gutter cigarettes and not eating enough and sharing a filthy flat with a rotating cast of sometimes-benevolent older teens with drug problems. he sees things pragmatically and he sleeps too much and spends his full moons in the abandoned train tunnels under Potsdamer Platz and he shaves his head to fit in and he loiters, eating peanuts off the bar at all the music clubs down Oranienstraße, thinking his life is dull and lonely and monotonous and grey and wishing it could maybe be something more. and then, of course, he gets his Hogwarts letter

[danpuff-ao3]

Eileen Recs

Eileen Snape (nee Prince) is a character I always find myself curious about and drawn to. There are so many questions. Where did she come from? Why did she leave? Who is this person who helped shaped Severus Snape?

So here I've collected a few of my favorite stories about and/or featuring Eileen, and the various versions of her I've fallen in love with.

The Seahorse

by Acid (@ac1d6urn, @humblenug.) Rated M. 21k. Lee (Eileen) POV. Trans Male Character.

Lee is used to winning his Gobstones matches, and he thinks he can come out ahead in the game of life. If only things were as simple as when he first met Tobias at that pub in Cokeworth. In a perfect world, he sure as hell wouldn't be pregnant and learning his way around a Muggle kitchen, but it's 1959, and he is all bones and weary mind, weighed down by the flesh that doesn't feel like his own.

Underneath the North Star and the Sycamores

by Femme (@femmequixotic.) Rated M. 5k. Eileen/Tobias.

I'm restless, eager for something I'm not quite certain of, something I never thought I'd want.

Not Your Trophy Wife

by hermioneclone. Rated E. 20k. Eileen/Horace. Eileen/Tobias.

After a chance encounter with Horace Slughorn in Diagon Alley, Eileen Prince Snape realizes that he just might be the key to delivering the Prince family heir to her estranged parents and securing her own future. Horace is more than happy to uphold his end of the bargain.

Triptych

by kelly_chambliss (@kellychambliss.) Rated M. 14k. Eileen/Tobias. Eileen/Sybill.

He hadn't married the girl for love, Tobias was the first to admit it.

No Room for the Weak

by perverse_idyll (@perverse-idyll.) Rated M. 10k. Eileen POV. Pre-Snarry.

There's a Boy Who Lived and a boy who didn't, and even a mother can't always tell them apart.

Ghosts of Christmas

by PinaNaponi (@vulnerasanenturmyprince.) Rated E. 45k. Harry/Severus. Found family. Mental health issues. Mentions of abuse. Hurt/comfort. Injury recovery. Postwar.

Prompt #53: Harry visits a recuperating Severus at Spinner's End at Christmas and ends up learning quite a lot from Eileen, who has been taking care of him.

The Fair

by titC (@titconao3.) Rated G. 2k. Poverty. Unhappy.

Eileen and Tobias Snape take their six-year-old son Severus to a fair in Cokeworth.

Playing for Keeps

by vissy. Rated M. 5k. Eileen/Tobias. Eileen/Severus. Non-con. Incest.

Eileen Snape, former Captain of the Hogwarts Gobstones Team, is losing her marbles.

[evesaintyves]

trick or treat 👻🎃❤️

thank you @whinlatter 💕

you get a snippet of my shitty first draft of the Beasts tribute fic i started. for non-whinlatters, Beasts is her absolutely astonishing Ginny & the Weasley family fic that follows her postwar seventh year at Hogwarts, intertwined with glimpses of her development as a child & teenager, and there's a brief mention of a care facility where recipients of the Dementor's kiss live out the rest of their lives. Highly recommend this fic - it's just such a rich portrayal of the whole Weasley family, the fraught rebuilding process after the war, and Ginny's emotional & intellectual life.

tw: illness, death, and very unpleasant hospital stuff

this idea of what happens to people after they've been kissed by a dementor really spoke to me for a few reasons - i couldn't help but think about some of the things i've seen in my professional life. i work in a healthcare specialty i can't really name without potentially doxing myself (it's a small world) and early in my career i occasionally participated in testing to determine death by neurologic criteria - essentially, flat lines on an eeg, which is a really terrible thing to see if you know what you're looking at. it's a difficult thing to even comprehend, especially for a parent - that a child who was splashing in the pool a few hours ago, now seemingly asleep, will not wake up, is damaged so profoundly that they they will never take another unassisted breath. i also regularly worked with people who were incarcerated in the state prison system. it taught me a lot about - let's keep it short and just say inhumanity: in the american healthcare system and especially where it intersects with the criminal justice system, and, unfortunately, in some of my colleagues and the way they cared for their incarcerated patients.

in my current role i work with a lot of patients who just aren't going to get better, who are entirely dependent on caregivers to keep them alive and maintain their quality of life. and it is - i hope you'll understand when i say this i say it as someone who is devoted and privileged to do it - often difficult and demoralizing work. for families and for staff.

my youngest sister was one of these people: she suffered a hemorrhage in infancy which resulted in serious damage to her brain. she never spoke, walked, fed or bathed herself. it was difficult to know what she understood, perceived, felt, wanted. she was a beautiful, calm, sweet-natured child who was easy to love; not every family in our position is so fortunate. it was also easy for us to project on her an interior life that may or may not have really been there, which was a great comfort to my mother. but her daily care needs were enormous, taxing, frustrating, and her inevitable deterioration and death were devastating to witness.

obviously i don't really want to equate people with brain injuries and whatever other special needs with people in the hp universe who no longer have souls - that's part of the reason i've struggled with this fic. there are a lot of potentially-unanswerable questions about the humanity and interiority of victims of soul-removal in this fictional context, but i think the only responsible practice for a clinician working with such patients would be to assume that they still feel, experience, and need what any other person who cannot care for themselves would. including not just nutrition, hygiene, etc. but also company and touch and positive regard. and that whatever crime, even atrocity, they might have committed is irrelevant to my duty to them as a caregiver. but that is easier to say than to do, consistently, every day, at home or in a medical facility, and i know from experience that it won't always happen that way.

anyway, if for some reason you have read this far, here's an excerpt from the story, complete with first-draft placeholders where i decided to rethink some dumb on-the-nose character names, lol. it needs to be rewritten from scratch, honestly. it's set at the end of GoF, when Madame Pomfrey is tasked with removing the house-elf Winky from Barty Crouch, Jr.'s side after he has received the kiss, and I've decided for the purposes of this silly little fic that she has experience in the care facility where he'll end up.

working title is My Beautiful Dead Friends.

Minerva saw the whole horrible thing and it was all over her face, what it had done to her. Poppy has never seen it happen, and neither had [supervisor], which seemed to irritate him; he'd read about it in books. The soul emits a colourless glow as it exits, he said, visible for an instant before it is consumed. For some time in the eighteenth century the Kiss was performed in public, on a platform raised above Diagon Alley. People would bring their children. There were woodcuts depicting the moment, dementors in swirling curlicues, the bound hands and dark mouth of the convicted, and the soul, represented as a star or sometimes a tiny naked man, caught in the moment of transit. It was striking how carefully, how delicately, the little soul was etched, with lines of light coming off it. Even the soul of a murderer, a beautiful shining thing. Minerva had marched Barty to the infirmary dozens of times in his schooldays. Sometimes because Horace wasn't fond of the long walk, nor of standing up to his own students, but often because it was one of her Gryffindors who'd done it to him. He was there all the time, hexed, cursed, punched in the face. It seemed, at first, simply the lot of the delicate-featured son of the head of law enforcement to be regularly trounced. He gave at least as good as he got and sometimes there'd be an entire queue of students behind him covered in boils, missing or extra limbs, pinching their nostrils to stop the bats from flapping out. Barty might chuckle through a mouth of blood while she saw to him, or he might writhe and moan as if in agony; Poppy had a suspicion that it depended on whether there was a Hogmeade weekend or an exam coming up. It wasn't only the usual interhouse skirmishes with Barty—Once, he limped to the hospital wing on his own, so badly beaten she had to put him out for a while and repair his perforated intestines with dozens of tiny movements of the tip of her wand. When he came to, she asked him what had happened, who had done this. He grinned at her with half his teeth gone. "Jusht the cosht of doing businesh, Madame," he said. Bubbles of red on his lips as he spoke. She found out later from Filius that he'd scammed a bunch of Ravenclaws into a sort of pyramid scheme, buying and reselling junk from Zonko's to each other. She was sure he didn't need the money: his robes were clasped with real-silver fasteners in the shapes of snakes. His mother came to take him home for the weekend after that one. He pressed the side of his face into the bosom of her robes and sobbed pitifully while Poppy left them to it behind a screen. On his way out the door, later, he waved to her, like, see you soon! Now he looks content, drowsy, like he's just had a meal. It was always hard to square the faces of the Kissed with what they'd done. Barty could almost be his seventh-year self, resting in the lull of a potion—though he might have already been a murderer by then, she realised. His hands, which had once aimed waves of pain so brutal they'd evicted poor Alice and Frank Longbottom from their own minds, are laced together at rest on his stomach. His thumbnail picks occasionally at the wand-callus on his forefinger. Some unlucky trainee healer will be alarmed by that one day. The Kissed do those little things. Their eyes follow you, sometimes, across the room. They smack their lips when they swallow the bubblemint-flavoured nutrition potion. They sit up in bed. "Look—he's doing it—I've told you—" Llanzo's mother had once cried, summoning the whole staff to come and see. She was tickling Llanzo's ribs with her fingers, and his lips had pulled back, his chest was jerking with spasms of laughter, no sound but a sort of clicking in his throat. "It's a reflex," [supervisor] told her. Llanzo's younger brother slumped in his bedside chair and stared sourly at his mother. She got angry, understandably, and shouted a bit before storming out.

"A rat will make a rhythmic sound if you tickle its belly," [supervisor] told Poppy in private. "You can call it laughter, if you like."

Llanzo was the only one who ever got visitors. He'd been accused of leading a nine-year-old witch away from her parents at Gray's beach and leaving her face-down, strangled, in the shallow mud of the Thames. His mother had given an alibi, which wasn't enough to keep him from being arrested, and he'd been shipped off to Azkaban to be held pending trial. As they'd approached the jagged rocks of the island he'd broken his bonds somehow and heaved himself over the side of the boat. Escape, suicide, or just some motiveless panic, it wasn't clear, but when they'd caught him and hauled him onshore the Dementors had fallen on him at once. He was seventeen, on his summer holidays. Lying in bed on the ward a year later he still looked like a child. Poppy wasn't sentimental, as a rule, but at the end of shift after those visits she'd sometimes have to have a little cry in the car park before she apparated home. "If you ask me I think she's on to something," Catherine told her once, in low tones, eyes on [supervisor]'s office door. "I've seen things. The way they look up at you. You can leave them on the pot for an hour, they won't do a thing, then as soon as they're back on the bed, haven't even had time to get a nappy out—" she made a squelching sound in her cheek. "Pure spite, I swear."

His mother came back the following week, brother in tow, and sat with him reading from Quidditch Through the Ages, turning the book to show him the moving illustrations. Sometimes his gaze moved to land on them and sometimes it didn't. "He was a Chaser," she told Catherine, who'd come to give him a bath. "Fast as anything. His Dad and I were both hopeless on a broom, but he's—" She swallowed hard. Llanzo was smiling faintly, as he often did when he got his bath. His breath came in soft vocal sounds that were almost sighs. "—he's my superstar," she finished. When they left, she made his brother say goodbye to him. Poppy was scrubbing up at the bedside sink to do his skin integrity assessment. Llanzo's brother gripped his hand, and leaned down as if to kiss him on the cheek. "Fucking die," he whispered, lips almost touching Llanzo's motionless face.

[thefangirlibrarian]

When the Weight is Gone

grieving postwar harry oneshot; setup to harrymort time travel series

The first few weeks after the battle are all celebration and relief. Harry has done the impossible, and even more impossible, he’s survived it. He spends a few days at the Burrow with Hermione and the Weasleys, then, when Molly Weasley’s alternating ebullience and grief gets to be too much for him, retreats back to No. 12 Grimmauld Place with his war veteran of a house elf.

There are ravenous well-wishers and disgruntled Death Eaters on the loose, so Harry doesn’t go out much. Diagon Alley, the one time he’d attempted it, had been a disaster. So Kreacher does the shopping, and Harry nests. It all feels very cozy at first.

Kingsley wants him to testify at the trials of all the bad guys they’ve been rounding up, but the longer Harry stays safe under the renewed Fidelius at Grimmauld, the less he feels like leaving. In the end, he writes a statement of support for Draco and Narcissa Malfoy and leaves the rest for other heroes to bear witness to.

As the summer wears on, his friends start to make plans for the future, now that they have one again. Harry tells them he still needs time to breathe, and no one questions it. It has only been a few months since the battle, since his death and resurrection saved the whole Wizarding world. Harry is entitled to do a bit of nothing.

Still, Ron refuses to start Auror training without him, so he’ll be working with George in the joke shop for now. Hermione is neck-deep in research to try to restore her parents’ memories. Neville will be apprenticing with Professor Sprout in the fall, and Ginny and Luna are returning for their final year at Hogwarts, along with Dean Thomas and some of the other Muggleborns who’d spent their seventh year imprisoned or on the run.

McGonagall had encouraged Harry, Ron, and Hermione to come back as well, saying they could help set the tone of post-war rebuilding, but the three agree they have grown beyond Hogwarts. Hermione will sit her NEWTS at the end of the year after revising independently. Harry and Ron have resisted committing to this, or any other course of study, but Hermione feels she can wear them down eventually.

The thing is, Harry already feels worn down. Too worn down to think about NEWTS or Auror training. His life’s purpose had been fulfilled at seventeen. What else is there for him?

The blaze of possibility that had filled him in the immediate aftermath of the battle has burnt down to little more than ashes in the months that followed. It wasn’t so bad when he’d kept busy at first, but the longer he is alone and quiet, the more he notices it. He feels empty and wrong, like something has been scooped out of him, leaving behind an abscess. Or maybe it’s more like an amputation. Harry thinks of Wormtail cutting off his own hand to do what was demanded of him. If Voldemort had never replaced it with that treachery-detecting prosthetic, would Wormtail have sometimes felt the tingling of the phantom limb? Would he have reached for his hand, only to remember with renewed despair that he no longer was as he had been?

[broomsticks]

Day 25: A fic rated T

Hopeless

@kellychambliss on tumblr | kelly_chambliss on AO3 • 10k, T • Millicent Bulstrode

Millicent Bulstrode is hopeless. And that's not always a bad thing.

Rec: oh this was a tough prompt to rec for. i won’t go into all the fics i considered and all the reasons i decided meh or nah or doesn’t fit because this fic!!! this one was PERFECT. millicent is so earnest and such a precious bean, and the author carries her voice just beautifully through her growing-up years, finding and defining herself through dance lessons and teas with her muggle gran, to entering hogwarts and getting to know a bunch of other delightful misfits. neville! colin! prof sprout! what a wonderfully humanizing fic.

Read on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/632635

p.s. bespoke, postwar millicent gets a suit and also a butch lesbian mentor, is one of my fave fics and this one reads so well as a prequel to that!

--

@hprecfest | hprecs on dreamwidth | my #hprecfest picks

[dracopetal]

12 & 7 for for Harry and for Lucius

12 for Harry: what do I think this character is up to post-canon?

Post CC Harry I hope is connecting with albus more and, if they have it, going to wizard therapy lol.

However, if disregarding cc and the epilogue and going from directly postwar, then harry is helping round up death eaters, both because harry wants other people to be safe but also because he isn't entirely sure who he is without Voldemort and being the chosen one. fingers crossed he'll figure it out, go traveling for a bit, quit being an auror and go teach defence at hogwarts.

7 on harry here

12 for Lucius: rotting away in the manor, being hated by both the death eaters and the light side, regretting re-joining Voldemort, not because he particularly gives a toss about muggleborns but because of what voldemort and war did to his family. his only confidants, other than his wife and son, are the peacocks.

7 for Lucius: what is my unpopular opinion on this character?

LUCIUS LOVES HIS WIFE AND SON MORE THAN ANYTHING! ESPECIALLY DRACO! (and draco loves him right back)

This is def more common with people who have only seen the films, but a lot of people act as if Lucius was abusive towards him but he was not! Lucius loves Draco so much he gives him everything he wants and spoils him rotten, and in turn Draco idolises him almost to the point of hero-worshipping him. He buys the whole Slytherin quidditch team new brooms, he tries to get the hippogriff that attacked him put down (sidenote: that wasn't rly dracos fault but thats another post), he gets them seats in the ministers box for the quidditch world cup. I don't think he was necessarily a good parent - Lucius allowed Draco to be a bully and he groomed Draco into idolising a violent murdering purist cult, then got himself thrown in prison and couldn't protect Draco from his own naivety when it was his turn to join. (And Voldemort saw how much Lucius loved his precious son and set him up with a suicide mission as punishment).

Draco wanted to be a Death Eater yes, both because he was a blood purist who had no idea of real violence and because he wanted revenge for Lucius' imprisonment. There's a bit near the end of ootp where Draco confronts Harry on getting Lucius arrested, Harry is in full idgaf mode but Draco, instead of formally calling him Father he calls him Dad and I love that bit (forever questioning why draco was essentially an extra in that film) because it shows them more intimately.

And during the battle of hogwarts, Lucius wants to call off the fighting to look for Draco. Lucius and Narcissa are running around through the fighting wandless and defenceless screaming for Draco, drawing attention to themselves, because they love him so much. And remember at this point the Malfoys are all completely fucked - they've got both the order and the death eaters gunning for them now.

Lucius also seems to be the most involved father of the series. James? Dead (rip). Arthur? Can't remember how many kids he has. Remus? Trying to abandon his wife and infant son. Hermione's dad? All I know is that he's a dentist. Seamus? Dad didn't even know his wife was a witch. You know fatherhood in the wizarding world is a sorry state when Lucius Malfoy comes out top.

(sorry for my long response i just really love the malfoys)

[st-severus]

thinking how when i did a poll for postwar snape him living alone won and when i did another poll for what pet he might have at hogwarts none also won...

[whinlatter]

author's note | chapter 7: caged 🪽

thank you for reading chapter seven of Beasts! this chapter, we see the fallout from the controversial punch, watch harry and ginny go through about ninety bottles of ink writing precisely one bazillion letters to one another (my loves), and fret as the residents of grimmauld place fight a losing battle with pixies that may or may not be a metaphor for our characters’ own multiplying traumas, chasing everyone around and refusing to be contained. pray for our babies, for no-one is thriving - let's chat chapter seven! (plus a sneak peek of chapter eight, which includes a letter from a character yet to make his Beasts debut...) 👀

✨ spoilers for this chapter below the cut  ✨

writing notes and headcanons:

vibes: this chapter, i wanted the vibes to be claustrophobic, tedium, all hogwarts, real focus on ginny and her restlessness and over-it-ness, her starting to write a lot, both to harry and to others, and her starting to push the boundaries and rebel now she's lost her sense of purpose in returning. (@pocket-lilacs brought up pandemic-era uni vibes of 'what is the point of studying when all this is going on' and that is exactly the energy here). the politics is more a backdrop to ginny's arc in this chapter, though the thicknesse trial has uncomfortable echoes for gin's own set of experiences, and i'm having so much fun but also banging my head up against the wall/grappling with turning up/turning down the volume on the different macro/micro plots in different chapters to try and get different effects and to follow ginny's own engagement with the Big Questions of the postwar wizarding world. scale is hard, who knew!

quidditch: by far the hardest part of this chapter to write was the quidditch scene. it was 3000 words long originally, and i had to go at it with a sledgehammer to bash it into bits, dump most of it, and then just keep the most important parts to fold into this much quicker, punchier scene. the worst part of writing is spending days crafting a section and in doing so learn that you don't need it lmao. so yeah that's why this chapter was a week late. this one was a nightmare but we got there in the end lmao

the forest detention: our first flashback to the war year at hogwarts! why haven't we had more? answers on a postcard, all will be revealed, including the context for the silver trio's forest detention, but for now will just say the fact that snape sent the gang into the forest with hagrid for detention after stealing the sword has a) always had me in a chokehold because all of the endless ginny/forest foreshadowing but also because i've never been satisfied with the explanation that the detention was just an obvious easy option. can't wait to share more !!!

harry and ginny: all i want to do is write more letters for those two. 'sneaking out of grounds, booze, leather gangs' - that was how @madammalkins23 summed it up beautifully, getting at the vibes i keep coming back to with both of these characters: the sirius-black-shaped elephant in the room, basically. escaping from hogwarts with buckbeak? the risk being what makes it all fun? harry fixing up the motorbike? fighting a war against grimmauld place and getting on the whiskey? the looming shadow of molly weasley? it's truly giving padfoot. the idea of harry and ginny in cahoots, as partners in crime, really kept me going when writing this chapter - like, what if harry for the first time did have another person in his life who was of the 'fuck it' school of thought? (i even went back and read that jkr short story of sirius and james on the motorbike lol). basically, the sirius echoes just sort of ended up writing themselves, as they always seem to do in this fic. when it comes to the letters, it's striking to me that in canon harry is very preoccupied with who does or doesn’t write to him - at the dursleys', but also after sirius' death ('It’s just hard,' Harry said finally, in a low voice, 'to realise he won’t write to me again.' - HBP). i've never really got fics that have harry as a non-loquacious letter writer in the post-war period, especially to ginny - harry seeks huge comfort and reassurance in getting letters from people who care about him, and channels his worries about people he's close to into letters, especially people he views as family (sirius, ginny). that harry and ginny would become a bit emotionally codependent through letters seemed in some sense a natural choice, basically, and although they're still being very avoidant, in some ways, i think they're building a foundation towards becoming each other's person in ways that's important. (i am putting together a sirius and ginny parallels meta playing with these ideas and character-trait overlap that i'll share hopefully soon, so stay tuned on that one)

why won’t ginny open up? by far the question i've been asked most this week! i am really really excited and happy about the arc i’ve got in store for ginny on this question, so don't want to reveal too much, but there have been some beautiful insightful guesses in the comments section about why ginny is struggling to come clean with harry or her family. here we see harry begin to see through gin's defences, a little bit, but also show his own blindspots that come from him not having asked the right questions or always probed about her interior life before now. i'm always so grateful and blown away by the trust readers have put in me to deliver on all these protracted question marks but this week especially i felt v glad for readers' compassion towards these characters and especially for ginny and hermione, as they fuck up and get it wrong and struggle yet still get grace in the comment section. both are on a journey, but i know more impatient readers could be sick of waiting for them to get there, so just to say i am really glad everyone is getting it and seeing where both characters are at with empathy and kindness, because ofc what they’re both doing is frustrating (and, when it comes to gin, harry is beginning to think so, too)

plus thicknesse: had a long chat with @saintsenara about ol thicknesse, because he's kind of a baffling figure - ex-auror who gets successfully imperiused, becomes minister and then goes on to actively commit horrific war crimes while under yaxley's control. what's fun about the trials, though, is that you can use them as a conduit to raise these big moral questions for postwar wizarding society - in thicknesse's case, it's questions about agency, free will, and culpability, in ways that has real implications for ginny's reflections on her own experiences. so cheers pius love u

harry's patronus: i am salivating at all of your theories for this one - obviously i'm saying nothing for now, but keep them guesses coming, i live for em! and if you guess right, i'll come up with some kind of prize lmao

detention, career advice (and graves' apathy): back in the site of former detentions, ginny shows her remarkably sparse knowledge of wizarding careers in a scene that i hope shows her trying on for size different role models/authority figures and seeing which ones she feels most like. (i like the idea that ginny would actually be a bit interested in being an auror, if only she'd been in of age and able to benefit from kingsley's hiring amesty after the battle). having ginny hover over the idea of being an unspeakable was particularly important for me, because i like the idea of the dept of mysteries being quite a formative space for her (i feel like all i do is say 'wait and see!' but... i have things to do and say with this dimension i swear!) graves is like, do what you want, babe, i don't care. i'm here for the pension, frankly

michael corner: 'surprise bitch!' - michael corner, probably. do i think michael and ginny were mates after the breakup end of ootp? no i do not. but i have always been so struck that ginny and michael must have actually spent a lot of very intense time together during DH as die-hards in the DA (michael is the only character we hear whose torture by the carrows after attempting to rescue a younger student is described as particularly severe, which i think suggests his level of commitment to the cause). readers will recall my open disdain for michael corner up til this point - i have described him as the jack berger of hogwarts quidditch, for my satc fans - but i'm afraid to say i have now decided i quite like him and am excited for him to rock up in person real soon. i think he's a know it all softboi but with a goodie core. also as a writer there's something quite refreshing about bringing in a character who is an ex who probably can see through some of ginny's shit by virtue of having spent a lot of time with her but no longer needing to/caring about impressing her, placating her or keeping her on side lol

hermione: alaskanastro left a comment that summed this up: 'Man, Hermione is really just doubling down on the whole "I'm going to try desperately to control something in life to feel like I'm in control even if it's my friend's life" isn't she? Or at least trying to'. yep, that's what she's doing! we still don't know all that hermione's going through, but this hit the nail on the head fr. i feel bad that this fic is ginny pov at this stage in its arc, because i think ginny sees hermione in a particular way rn (their final conversation in this chapter really speaking to these tensions - ginny does not want to feel mothered, at least not by hermione...), but these two have a long way to go to get to a point of mutual understanding. wanna write a meta on their friendship soon, hopefully will get chance to before i finish chapter 8. but anyway - wonder what's going on with her and ron... hope we find out soon... hope someone tells us... :) :) :)

everything but the ghoul: the dumbest pun, but had to use this joke in a chapter where ginny skips school (everything but the girl's most famous song is called 'missing'... get it)

songs from the playlist for this chapter:

girls getting grouchy and teenage in their feelings is the big ol mood this week:

the middle of the world - nicholas brittell | sidelines by phoebe bridgers | difficult by gracie abrams | simulation swarm by big thief | crisis by elizabeth m. drummond | delete forever - grimes | chinese satellite (copycat killer version) by phoebe bridgers

i did promise a sneak peek didn't i...

From the desk of the MINISTER OF MAGIC Whitehall, London Dear Ginny,  I hope you’re well. I’d like to meet with you on Saturday the 12th of December at 11 o’clock. It’s important that we’re discreet. Please vanish this letter after reading. Sincerely, Kingsley

[perverse-idyll]

Writing patterns

Rules: List the first line of your last 10 (posted) fics and see if there's a pattern! Tagged by @yletylyf - thank you! Most of these are itty bitty fics and out-takes, but here we go.

1. The headmaster of Hogwarts, as yet unaware he had entered upon his last day on earth, raised his thin hand to stroke the unsmiling face of the woman who had afforded him so much unlooked-for happiness. [Year of the Thestral, HP, Minerva McGonagall/Severus Snape. An excerpt from a quasi-romance novel written about them after their deaths, a fact the reader won't understand until the end of the fic.]

2. Sometimes all Severus had to do was turn thirty-plus years of repressed hunger upon him, and Harry would start shaking. [Snake Charmer, HP, Snape/Harry. Out-take. A line signaling the co-dependent and sexual nature of the relationship.]

3. When Harry made his way out to the reception desk, there was barely a trace of almond left on his skin. [Coda to "Soft Touch," HP, Snape/Harry. Afterthought to a pre-existing fic. If I'd thought about it, I might have punched up the opening line by combining it with the last sentence in the paragraph, making it both clearer and funnier to readers who hadn't read the main fic: "When Harry made his way out to the reception desk, he didn't look like a man who'd just let Severus Snape bite his arse." Oh well. Missed opportunity!]

4. At around four in the afternoon, with three chapters to go in the espionage novel she was reading – since popular thrillers provided not only diversion but an eye-opening refresher course on Muggle slang and cultural attitudes – Minerva glanced up from the page to find Wil leaning in the doorway, watching her. [Candles Lit Against the Dark, HP, Minerva McGonagall/Wilhelmina Grubbly-Plank but heavily featuring Snape. Scene- and relationship-setting, basically.]

5. It was possible none of this would have happened if not for Hermione. [The Afterlight, HP, Snape/Harry. A simple declarative sentence appears! Mildly mysterious, but since we as fans know this is a ship fic, the mostly likely suspect for the category of "this" is a relationship Harry's friends consider a mistake.]

6. Severus persisted in accompanying Harry to public events, in part because the wizarding world still needed it shoved down their throats that he and Harry were a couple. [Social Lubricant, HP, Snape/Harry. The premise in a nutshell. The rest of the ficlet just embellishes it.]

7. "You need to choose wisely when to be a dick, Potter." [Bad Manners, HP, Snape/Harry. Teensy fic. Sets the mood. Makes it clear who's speaking.]

8. Into the lives of all upstanding citizens, an occasion must fall where we fumble the biscuit and end up owing an undeniable debt to mankind. [Jeeves and the Secret Society, crossover between HP and Jeeves & Wooster, Jeeves/Wooster, Snape/Dumbledore. Establishes a different narrative voice from my usual, hints but doesn't confirm a first-person POV - although fans of Bertie Wooster will probably guess.]

9. Radiant in the wasteland of a European battlefield, the vessel of Clara's memory shrugs. [Truce, Doctor Who, Clara/Twelve-ish. Drabble. Scene-setting, suggests this isn't literally Clara but a (precious) memory.]

10. For one of her first acts as headmistress, Minerva shatters the Mirror of Erised. [Spirituous, HP, Minerva, Albus, Severus. Drabble. Establishes a postwar timeline and implies Minerva's state of mind.]

Patterns? Hm. Well, anyone who's read anything of mine, even the drabbles, can already guess I'm fiercely wedded to compound sentences and fond of opening with dependent clauses. I also default to narrative prose over dialogue. And most of these first lines have some degree of hook to them, whether I planned it or not. Otherwise, um ... I think you need more to go on if you want to analyze the more interesting kinds of authorial habits and themes.

Does anyone else want to play? Tagging @danpuff-ao3, @ripeteeth, @saintsenara, @squibstress - and anyone else, because I have to be good now and go back to work!