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How could he have dreamed of returning to Privet Drive for Christmas?
lavenderpatil reblogged
Hatred toward Cho Chang and Lavender Brown and adoration toward Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape, a study in misogyny, sexism and double-standards by me.
believeinprongs
lavenderpatil reblogged
The sword is a heavy weight. The other books don’t say that. They don’t say how it drags the hand down, how though each strike was clear and perfect when tried, it felt like lead when it wasn’t being used.
And none of the books talk about the guilt. If you can draw the sword forth you are, quite simply, meant to bear it. The sword, and the enchantments which hide it have decided you are a worthy successor to Gryffindor, a worthy bearer of the sword, you are one of that rare, elite few who can claim to be called an Heir of Gryffindor.
It is, ultimately, naught but a name, and a name bathed in blood of goblins, if you listen to the stories, a name which encourages you to fight to the end, until you alone stand victorious on the battlefield, and left to trudge home with blood on your clothes and guilt in your heart.
None of the books talk about the guilt.
— Excerpt from Guilt, Guile and Gryffindor’s Sword: The Story of an Heir by Keeley Goode
Source: jarrod343.deviantart.com
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It’s very strange, seeing the Great Hall half-empty. Even more empty now that so many have gone home for the holidays. So many gone, though, not home but elsewhere. So many gone, to Beauxbatons, to Durmstrang.
So many dead.
But Flitwick and she have spent the whole day, enchanting the Great Hall so that it snows gently, with the snowflakes melting and disappearing just before they reach the tables and everything is beautiful and the students are all smiling and laughing as they file into the hall. Some of them pause to ooh and ah over the snow and the brightly lit tree in the corner. They are so young. Uncomplicatedly happy. Untouched, or as untouched as they can ever be, by memories of the war.
That is not a burden for them to bear. They have not, after all, walked these halls for fifty odd years and seen generation after generation walk through them. Children, just like them, laughing and marveling at whatever delicate intricacies they had managed to conjure up by the way of decoration.
(Delicate coloured lights that hung suspended and turned the hall a glorious mix of reds and blues and greens and purples. Ice sculptures. Four hundred blazing candles, for each student. The stars on the roof, enchanted to enact the myths and stories they were named after.)
Children who then grew into young men and women, whose funerals she had all attended.
Such morose thoughts, on Christmas day.
Her lips twist into a smile, seeing these children laugh, the fear and the terror of the previous year long forgotten. A promising bunch. Resilient, as they all had to be, now more so than ever. All brave, not merely her own. All laughing with friends and for once, there is peace in her heart, because there is no threat. No danger, no promise of death hanging over their heads.
This is what Christmas is for, she thinks. A pause between one year and the next, to look back at the year and forget the shadows and remember only the light. Age, it seems, brings wisdom that is self-evident to the young.
“A knut for your thoughts, Minerva,” says Slughorn leaning over, “You look far too serious for a Christmas feast.”
She shakes herself, “Oh this and that. That they all look so happy.”
“Ah, that they do. They’re a very bright bunch, this year. Great promise.”
Minerva McGonagall smiles, “Aye. And wiser than we have ever been.”
Slughorn looks at her strangely, then shakes his head and continues drinking his soup.
The night passes and they break open their crackers and later on, with the rest of the staff, they share a drink or two and sing their old favourite carols, albeit drunkenly and Christmas, 1998, passes and everyone sleeps – or passes out – with a smile on their face.
(For minerrvas.)
Source: dailyrecord.co.uk
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“It’s a nice cottage,” said Hermione, looking up at the house, “It’s nice. To have a place that’s just ours. No work. No one to bother us.”
Ron snorted, “If they don’t Floo us, that is,” he nudged her gently with his shoulder and smiled down at her, “If they can manage without you down at the DMLE.”
She rolled her eyes at him and went inside, “If they can’t handle working four days without me, they bloody well deserve any trouble that comes their way.”
“Righto,” Ron trailed after her, “And the Auror Office?”
“Tell them to sod off,” she said, “We’ve been working non-stop for five bloody years they can do without us for four days. It’s bad enough that this is our honeymoon and our Christmas holidays, you’d think we’d be able to take more than four days off and without having to run away and get married in secret –“
Ron cut her off by kissing her.
“It’ll be fine,” he said.
_____
It wasn’t.
On the first day, they both woke up to a Howler from Molly Weasley, furious that they went ahead and got married in a private, secret ceremony with only Harry and Ginny and Luna as witnesses.
That was pretty rich, Hermione thought, coming from her when her own wedding had been a hastily contrived elopement. But then, she supposed, it was rather rude of them to have married in a small and hasty private ceremony without telling her when clearly she’d been looking forward to planning their wedding in its minutiae.
In the afternoon, poor little Hugo Wentworth from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement flooed Hermione in a right panic over some papers that had gone missing and it took half an hour of Hermione patiently walking him over his last actions for him to remember that he’d filed them all away for safekeeping.
Hermione was not pleased at Ron for snickering in the background.
_____
On the second day, Harry flooed them at 6 AM and then ruefully apologized when he realized he’d woken them up. There had been, apparently, some disturbance down in Northumberland. A stray sighting of someone who matched the description of Fenrir Greyback, or somesuch.
Turned out to have been an old muggle tramp who looked rather a lot like Fenrir, but was definitely not Fenrir.
Ron ended up spending the afternoon filling out the paperwork for the case and then got caught up and dragged along to the pub by his fellow aurors (I can’t come, Hermione’s waiting – Hermione can wait – no no she can’t, Merlin’s beard).
“I couldn’t say no,” he told Hermione when he got back.
“Oh good,” she said, “Well I couldn’t say no to the oven, so you can have burnt roast and burnt pudding.”
Ron decided, very kindly, not to tell her that he couldn’t tell the difference between this dinner and last night’s one.
_____
On the third day, Christmas day, Hermione decided that the only way they’d ever have time for themselves was if she spelled the Floo off and then had a great big roaring fire in all the rooms of the house, just in case someone decided to Floo in by accident.
“You’re mental,” Ron told her with his usual frank candour.
“You’re rude,” she said, “But I don’t go around telling you that.”
“Because I know it,” he said, fanning himself, “I don’t think you know how mental you are sometimes.”
She kicked him and then plonked down next to him on the couch, “I just want a proper holiday.”
“Didn’t you get the memo?” he asked her, drawing her closer, “Heroes don’t need holidays, especially not Christmas ones,” he kissed her head gently, “Not if they’re smart and know how to solve everyone else’s problems –“
“Or recklessly brave and always up for a pointless mission if it cleans our world up –“
“Saving the world is a full-time job,” he said solemnly.
“Mm. I wish it wasn’t though.”
A long drowsy silence ensued, Ron gently stroking his wife’s hair and Hermione’s eyelids slowly drooping shut.
“Either way,” said Ron, after a while, “It’s Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, husband dearest,” Hermione said softly, “I wish we didn’t have to go back to our desks on Monday.”
“Mmm, we might actually have a national crisis on our hands if we don’t,” he replied, “But in the meanwhile,” he craned his neck and whispered in her ear before pulling back and looking at her, now a bright shade of red. He grinned.
“Merry Christmas love,” he said, “No talk of work. Let’s enjoy ourselves, yeah?”
(For the anon who wanted to hear about Ron and Hermione’s first married Christmas together.)
Source: Flickr / schwurlie
lavenderpatil reblogged
Favorite missing book quotes → Ron’s dueling advice
lavenderpatil reblogged
Smart girl, that Hermione.
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'we must unite within her walls or we will crumble from within'
stories for the ladies of hogwarts, who cry, waver, giggle, trespass, and who deserve our respect all the same
—
Cho’s was not that kind of grief. Hers was the grief of the living. She was flying and learning and loving and, yes, crying. Cedric was not. Her pretty world, at fifteen, had been shattered. It was darker than anyone had ever warned her of, but she was growing into it. She was growing up. Sometimes that takes tears.
Mourning is not selfless. We do not weep for the dead. We weep for the living—what could have been and the tragedy that is. We weep because our hearts are breaking. It is not selfless but neither are we. We are selves.
-
Hannah went out every few nights to breathe in green and work on her own projects. Sometimes Neville was there and sometimes he was away running defense lessons in the Room or, god forbid, sleeping. Sometimes they worked in companionable silence. Sometimes they talked about the DA, or wondered where Harry was. Neville told her about his disastrous early attempts with every non herbological magic. Hannah told him about her mother.
"This is where everything starts," Professor Sprout had told them, back when Hogwarts was still a place of light, smiling under that frizzing grey hair. Professor Sprout had buried her hands in dirt and said, "This is what everything grows from. The ground up."
Life is something you bury. Life is something you bury your hands in.
-
"Have you ever been Crucioed?" she asked.
The Auror opened his mouth to speak, but Parvati kept going, calm, dismissive: “I don’t mean in training, in a nice padded room with an instructor who will take you for beers after. I don’t even mean by some criminal in a dark alley when you don’t know if you’re going to make it to the end of the day. I mean have you ever been Crucioed in a classroom, in front of your sister and a bunch of terrified children. Have you ever been Crucioed by someone who enjoyed it, when you were expendable? Have you ever gasped yourself back to life when they were done and known the next morning you were going to walk right back in and sit at your desk, and wait, and hope it happened to you and not some kid half your size?”
The Auror had gone silent.
Parvati looked him over slowly. “I have been an object lesson in disobedience from people I couldn’t get away from. I have watched children scream, and done nothing, because I was in a war and it wasn’t strategic and they were soldiers too. They would survive. And most of us did. But we are not the same as we were. You will respect our war.”
-
She and Harry had both done what Voldemort could not—died and come back. Harry sacrificed, a lion’s death giving him a lamb’s rebirth. Ginny was risen in the Chamber of Secrets at the strike of a fang to a poisoned diary but she was not reborn then. Leaving the Chamber, she was as much a shade as Tom Riddle’s desperate ghost.
It was not Harry’s heroism, Ron’s desperation, her mother’s love, or her brothers’ toilet seat humor that brought her back (though the toilet seat helped). Ginny breathed deep at night. She wept. She remembered how to rage. She snuck out at night and stole each of her brothers’ brooms in turn. She took to the skies and brought herself back to life.
-
“Why are you here?” Parvati asked Pansy once. People asked her a lot, when they found her in Flourish and Blotts, or at work on the Prophet. Their eyes raked her, looking for green, for silver, for venom. Sometimes she’d smile back and let them see the danger.
"Because I’m not fifteen anymore," said Pansy. "God, do you know what precious Potter Sr. got up to at school, the bully? But boys get to grow up to be men, you see, and us girls just grow up to be bitches."
-
When Andromeda got married, it was in a dress that was silver, not white. The guests called her luminescent, but her cousin Sirius, who spun her with comical and affectionate abandon across the dance floor later that night, smiled, and said, “You thought green would be too obvious?”
"Too garish."
"A snake changes it’s skin, but it’s still—”
"I’m not going to pretend I’m anything I’m not, cuz," she said.
-
You have to make things your own, laying out new earth or filling your too-small kitchen with song. You have to live in your skin. It’s worth living in.
Susie learned the lines of scar tissue on her arm, like cracks in a ceiling, like the specific pattern of fissures and gouges that made a place its own. She traced her fingers over the raised scars while she studied obscure legal texts in her first little office, and felt like she was flicking her wand, casting ward circles, like she was circling this and claiming this, calling it her own.
-
In the spare bedroom at Shell Cottage, Ollivander made Luna a new wand. They hiked, slowly, through windswept bluffs until he found a tree he approved of.
"Willow?" Dean asked. "Or reed? I mean, it’s Luna, she’s kinda bendy, isn’t she?"
Ollivander went on Transfiguring his toolset out of bits of driftwood and sea glass. Luna smiled back, wide.
Bend and bend and never break. She could almost touch the tip of the wand to its hilt, when he was done. Ollivander gave her some oil to rub into it to keep it supple and one day, after the war, Luna curved it into a perfect circle. She held it up to her eye and thought about the last riddle she had ever used to open up Ravenclaw’s tower. A circle has no end.
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livesandliesofwizards-deactivat
Dear Professor Dumbledore,
Thank you for the owl and for coming to see me at St. Mungos. I’m sorry I was sleeping. Yes I did like the Aelfred Doge ward but no I didn’t know the Mr. Doge who built it was your friend. That seems nice of him. It is nicer than Dai Llewellyn. In answer to your question no I don’t know what I want to be when I am older except that I don’t want to be a werewolf anymore right now so probably that. The mediwizard at Aelfred Doge said probably I still will be and also he said werewolves should really be put in isolation so they don’t hurt people which is sensible. So I guess when I’m older I will be alone.
Sincerely, Remus J. Lupin
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hp aesthetics / luna lovegood
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livesandliesofwizards-deactivat
Until this past century, the Holyhead Harpies bowed to conservatism. Their uniform was feminine-if-impractical, their public morals were above reproach, and there was absolutely no talk of a naughty calendar; they annually disappointed legions of Quidditch fans by releasing a very sensible book of nutritious recipes instead. Despite these restrictions, they gained thousands of fans and they won countless matches. Season after season, over and over, they continued to win. Some say that it was a special joy to win back then: though held to a higher standard, with the odds stacked against them, still they triumphed.
Even then, the Harpies had a defiant, competitive, unbreakable spirit.
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livesandliesofwizards-deactivat
Regulus was not a Gryffindor and did not act recklessly. He only thought very hard about why his elf should be forced into that cave. And it occurred to him, all ambitions aside, that there was simply no justification for it.
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Book remake - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
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wit beyond measure is a man’s greatest treasure.
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rubeus: view one
He couldn’t sleep. So he did the math.
Hagrid’s wand was snapped in two, then those two became four to doubly make sure he would never do magic ever again. They let him keep the pieces, though. They dumped them into his two upturned hands. The fragments gave him seven splinters, but Hagrid didn’t dig them out. He thought maybe, just maybe, he could still be a wizard if he let the oak stay embedded in his flesh. That had been in 1943. Some quick subtraction told him his last day as a Hogwarts student was just over 70 years ago, an entire lifetime ago. He wondered if they still did that, let people keep their wand remnants, if they snapped wands at all anymore. He remembered Sirius Black, locked in Azkaban for 12 years - a year for each Muggle he’d been charged with killing. Sirius’ wand had been kept in a safe for him. All it needed was a polish.
1945. His first day back at the castle. His first day not caught in a spiral counting everything he’d lost. No wand, no Hogwarts, and no father to tell him it would all be sorted in the end. He wanted to be too proud to take the job offer, but that’s not who he was. If anything, he was scared by how the depths of his gratitude shook him.
Hagrid took out a match and struck it. He wished he could remember the words. His dad was the one who had said them.
He had decorated more Christmas trees than he had lit Hanukkah candles. This he knew without figuring out the math, but thought through the numbers anyway, just to know. The tops of all the candles were melting now, liquid wax slipping down their sides, and he couldn’t remember the words. But he could do the math. 69 years as gamekeeper, 12 Christmas trees for the Great Hall every year. 828 in total. That was a small forest of garland and baubles. And Hagrid had picked out each tree himself, trudging through the snow to find the best ones. He wanted to do a good job. Give the students something beautiful.
He watched the delicate flames flicker, let the wax drip onto his fingertips. He liked to imagine the wand splinters were still buried in his palms, against all odds, the hot wax sealing them in year after year.
Hagrid didn’t know the words, but he knew the story. Candles that shouldn’t burn anymore, but burned all the same. Magic that shouldn’t be there, but it was. Oh, but it was.
Source: ronnie-long.deviantart.com