in the au where the wizarding world handles things a little more logically (like, say, checking sirius and peter’s wands for who cast the blasting spell) and sirius doesn’t go to azkaban
sirius ends up raising harry
and obviously remus is along to make sure sirius doesn’t either a: spoil harry into oblivion or b: accidentally kill harry
so harry, growing up with them, goes to hogwarts, and gets someone who asks the question of “do you have a mum” and harry replies with “sort of, i have a moony.”
and sirius hears about this on holiday and starts referring to remus as “moomy” bc he’s horrible
and after some time of this, remus just finally turns around and gives sirius a completely deadpan look and just says
what if the reason nobody can tell fred and george apart is because they really are interchangeable
not in a ~it doesn’t matter~ way but like. molly and arthur used to worry that fred and george might turn out to be squibs because they weren’t doing any accidental magic as children, but they were, THEY TOTALLY WERE, it just wasn’t anything flashy, instead they were just like idly switching bodies all the time
and like sometimes it doesn’t make much of a difference, whatever, wake up in the opposite bed you went to sleep in, but it gets like dangerous and weird if you’re on a broom or in the pond or letting your mum teach you to cook or trying to be mad stealth, so for a long long time everybody presumes they’re clumsy maybe-squibs and that they’re doing their twin lying thing when they try to explain what’s going on, so they learn to handle the issue their ownselves
they just. don’t go anywhere without the other. they start each day deciding which body is going to be which (because at this point they really don’t know which body is technically fred and which is technically george), and they learn to reorient FAST when they switch, and what things set them off, and eventually they learn how to act like nothing’s up even when one of them’s in the air and one’s on the ground or whatever, and then they burn past that til they can finish each other’s sentences — til they can switch midsentence — til they can play beater together — til they can switch in a split second in the middle of a game — til there’s room for other kinds of accidental magic to start showing up
at hogwarts they keep each other awake in history of magic by switching back and forth. in potions they take turns brewing and keeping lookout for the slytherins. in transfiguration and charms they keep their grades up because one of them will always get a spell right on the first try so they switch and make it look like both of them do and then they practice on their own later in private. it keeps the mystery alive.
at first they thought lee was just a lucky guesser but no, lee can always tell one twin from another twin — it’s not exactly telling fred from george, because while they are definitely two distinct personalities neither one of them feels like fred all the time or george all the time — but lee knows who he argued with yesterday or who he lent his notes to or who’s best to ask for help in astronomy and who’s best at runes.
the weasleys are pretty bad at it for the longest time, but then bill comes home from his first year cursebreaking and he can tell, and over a holiday he teaches his trick to charlie so charlie can tell. alicia and katie and angelina can tell. the twins honestly don’t know if oliver can tell or not; so long as they’re doing what they’re supposed to on the quidditch pitch he doesn’t really care about much else. harry can tell. luna can tell. tonks can tell.
the problem is there’s no way for this to end happily
YES THERE IS
THERE IS INDEED A WAY FOR THIS TO END HAPPILY LISTEN UP
so after fred dies, george hates being trapped in one body, feels claustrophobic, misses fred so much he thinks it might drive him insane
but then one day
george blinks and he’s somewhere he wasn’t a second ago, he’s in a place full of white light and he can’t orient himself, can’t ground himself, feels dizzy and sick and overwhelmed but it only lasts for about thirty seconds.
then he’s back in his own body.
and he looks down at his chest, his legs, his arms, there’s an ear missing so it’s definitely still his living body, but there’s something written on his arm, scrawled in messy quill ink.
“i love you. i miss you.”
george flips out, washes off the ink and immediately writes a message in reply— “how’s death going?”
he walks around with that message written on his arm for weeks, always keeping a quill pen somewhere nearby, waiting, waiting, before it finally happens again. the switch. george is alive, so he can’t handle being in the afterlife, he feels dizzy and sick and it’s the worst feeling in the world, but it doesn’t last long, and when he gets back to his living body, there’s a long message from fred waiting on his right thigh, the ink still drying.
this goes on for years, never as often as either twin would like, but it’s enough. fred helps george figure out how to propose to angelina, fred helps plan the wedding. sometimes it’s fred in george’s body when angelina kisses her husband. sometimes she suspects, but she doesn’t mind in the slightest.
it gets easier as george gets older. the times when he switches into fred’s afterlife don’t hurt as much. he almost feels comfortable there, almost feels oriented. he knows he’s getting closer to dying.
then when george is past ninety, lying on his deathbed, he writes a careful message on his palm. “i’m coming soon. where are you?”
they switch, it lasts for almost five minutes this time, and when george gets back into his own body, he sees the instructions fred wrote over his heart.
“you’ll wake up in king’s cross station. take the second train and get off at the third stop. i’ll be waiting.”
Why is it always “Dumbledore is my fave” or “Dumbledore is abusive” and never “Dumbledore is so fucking afraid of letting another dark wizard come to power that he channels his own darkness into training a human weapon from childhood to fight the darkness that he knows he can’t while pretending to be the wise wizard mentor that he wishes he actually was wow that is a super fascinating character and we should write all the fanfiction about it?”
Oh man, it is time for some HARRY POTTER OPINIONS here on this blog (also: the first time I accidentally typed “Happy Potter opinions,” and let’s all just take a moment to think about what a different series that would have been). As always, take these with several grains of salt, both because all Harry Potter opinions had by anyone are just fiction-based thoughts spiraling into the void, and, of course, because the Harry Potter series at large is narrated by a very damaged young child who, let us all recall, one time spends an entire book YELLING ALL HIS FEELINGS, and can’t remember the names of most of his non-Gryffindor classmates, and though skilled at fighting evil is at one point brought to desperate confusion when a girl he has invited to a dance becomes annoyed when he completely ignores her therein. Harry Potter is many things, but a reliable narrator is not one of them.
HAVING SAID THAT, let us discuss Albus Dumbledore, Professional Puppetmaster. Let us discuss him in bullet points (and beneath a cut, because JESUS CHRIST, this got really long).
Ginny Weasley not using black ink after her first year. Navy and brown and purple are the colour of her thoughts, not his masquerading as hers as they flow from her quill.
Sleep isn’t the problem. Sleep is dark and deep and soothing; there is nothing there, waiting for her. She hasn’t dreamt since that first Halloween at Hogwarts and she doesn’t dream now. It’s when she’s awake and someone moves too fast, or there’s a shine off of something, an out-of-place sound that she thinks she sees him.
Ginny Weasley touching that locket and the back of her brain recognising that heartbeat that strives to match her own, that curls under her veins, that tugs at the edge of her mind and makes her want to get rid of it as soon as possible. She throws it into the sack and feels just as unclean as the House of Black is. Years later, when she knows about Horcruxes, she thinks she should have recognised it, that she should have known it by the sheer abjection she felt toward it.
Ginny Weasley listens. You can learn an awful lot by listening, especially if whoever’s talking doesn’t think much of you. By her sixth year, she’s no longer quiet, but she still listens, only now it’s the whispers of first and second year students. She knows what it’s like to be utterly terrified by Voldemort when you’re eleven. She teaches them that you can lock away different parts of your brain, smother them into silence, and that’s another form of bravery, standing there, smooth-faced and lying to the Carrows that there’s nothing wrong. Defiance is not always big things like stealing the sword from Dumbledore’s old office.
The Carrows don’t scare her, and it’s not just Gryffindor bravery talking there. The Carrows are loud, mean, and crude. They’re unrefined bullies. They couldn’t get someone to trust them just through words if they tried. She tells Alecto that they should’ve sent a better class of Death Eaters to Hogwarts and gets a Cruciatus for her efforts. She spits out blood where she bit her tongue and smiles with red teeth because the Carrows are easy.
She tries on different personas like outfits in her fourth year. It bemuses Michael, who never hits her with a spell during the DA meetings, who never sits with her during Gryffindor v. Ravenclaw Quidditch matches, who is far too sweet even though he’s a bad loser, and she realises that she’s just trying this on after that last game.
At the beginning of her fifth year, she marches straight into the trophy room and defaces Tom Riddle’s award for special services to the school and feels vindicated when the award is removed and never seen again.
After everything’s over and Myrtle’s bathroom has taken enough damage in the fight that the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets is no longer secret, Ginny Weasley goes down there and stares right into the ruined eyes of that basilisk corpse for a solid ten minutes, then nodding as all of the shakes and shivers she’s had since she was eleven and this was her own personal hell fade away, leaving her with clenched fists and bright eyes. “You lose,” she says to the empty Chamber, and leaves, smiling.
Neville as eventual headmaster is very important to me though.
Neville, who thanks to his enduring friendship with Luna sees the vital importance of fostering interhouse relationships, downplays the rivalries between the houses without lessening the importance of intrahouse unity by pushing the Quidditch Cup and House Cup as more friendly competition than all-consuming-must-be-won-enimity and introducing other means of emphasising house pride for those students who are not athletically or academically talented to the point where they feel as though they’re making an important contribution to their house.
Neville, who has so much goodness and kindness in him, having a zero tolerance policy for bullying, by staff or students, and serious punishments set down in official school policy for anyone caught bullying or intimidating a student for any reason.
Neville, who saw first hand just how vital it is, throwing the Ministry-approved DADA curriculum out the window and working with the DADA teacher to build a useful curriculum based on his two most useful years of DADA classes, those being third, under Lupin, and fifth, under Harry.
Neville, who understands how hard it is not to be One Of Those Kids, ruthlessly digging out any elitest groups like the Slug Club and disbanding them.
Neville, who understands that sometimes the teachers don’t choose as wisely as they ought, introducing a democratic system for prefect and Head Boy/Girl selection.
Neville, who knows what it is to be the bottom of the class, making a point of introducing a voluntary tutoring system for students who are in the same position he once found himself in – and making certain that it’s well known that had such a system been in place when he was at Hogwarts, he would certainly have availed of it.
Neville, who is a hero and a marvel and wonderful, brave man, fostering that same bravery and goodness in every one of his students, fighting to help them become the absolute best people they can be regardless of academic talent or world-saving ability.
Neville, who is everything that Albus Dumbledore was not, setting to rights so much of the wrong Dumbledore allowed and sometimes encouraged in Hogwarts.
