A/N: I don't even know what this is. I wrote this in one sitting, and it was supposed to be crack, but now it's something else. Credit to mugglebornheadcanon for a few of the quips and Tumblr at large for the general idea of abusing Al's name, and shoutout to my friend Katie for the conversation that prompted this!
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The Adventures of Lucy Weasley, Girl Wizard
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Chapter 1: Draco Malfoy, the Amazing Bouncing Ferret
This time around, the ceremony hasn't even ended before the midgets start hassling us for the Wi-Fi password. I swear to God, I'm still in the middle of clapping for this one freshly Sorted girl, Bathilda something, when she flops down next to me at the Slytherin table and asks me for it without so much as a hello-how-are-you. Like, really, you might want to learn some manners while you're trying to figure out what to do with yourself without your smart phone to keep you company at night.
I sigh and fold my arms across my chest because it's too damn awkward to keep applauding, even though I'm supposed to. According to the profs, the newbies stopped choosing Slytherin pretty quick after the Second War was over; within a decade, the house had barely half the population of the others, and our numbers are still dwindling. "'DracoMalfoytheAmazingBouncingFerret394,' no spaces, capital D, capital M, lowercase T—"
"Hold on, you said the amazing—Draco Malfoy, that's spelled—? Hang on a sec, my phone's still searching for networks…"
I snicker a little with McLaggen, and when the girl starts asking whether I know if Vodafone usually gets good reception around here, I mutter, "I really wouldn't say it does, Bathilda."
"Damn. I'd text my parents to change my provider, but lol. You lot use owls to send your mail, right?"
"In a minute. This is my cousin here up next," I tell her. Sure enough, I may have only half-heard Slughorn call his name, but Al's practically tiptoeing from the mass of first years up to the Sorting Hat's stool, and I can see the beet-red flush of his ears and neck even from here.
"It's Batool, not Bathilda, by the way—"
But I shush her, flapping my hands, before swiveling around and swinging my legs to the other side of the bench. Just in time, too: the brim of the hat's barely grazed Al's hair before it bellows, "SLYTHERIN!"
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding as McLaggen claps me on the back and Smith hollers from across the table, "Nice one, Weasley!"
Ripping my throat raw with cheers, I even catch myself on my feet for a second there as Al's setting the hat back down and booking it toward our table. It'll be nice not to be the only Slytherin in the family anymore, seeing as it's not like I'm best buds with any of these screwballs and the Weasleys are a giant ass family to be alone in.
Cupping my hands around my mouth, I bellow, "Over here, Al!" and as soon as his frantic eyes find me, he practically breaks into a sprint to catch up to me. "Budge up, Tabitha," I tell the new girl, who rolls her eyes and shoves the kid next to her with her bum to make room. "This is Al Potter, my cousin. Albus Severus Lucius Rodolphus Potter."
"Shut the hell up, Lucy," says Al.
It's going to be an excellent year. I can feel it.
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If anything makes me wish the dad-ancestor loved Muggles the way Granddad Weasley does, it's Transfiguration. Maybe then he would have enrolled me in Muggle grade school, and I'd be right up there in the top half of the class with the Muggle-borns who showed up in first year actually, properly prepared to learn pre-algebra.
To my credit, I at least had the good sense not to sign up for Arithmancy, even though the dad-ancestor was railing hard for me to do it. But I've poked around Dom's textbook before when I was trying to get an idea of what electives to enroll in last year, and honestly, even Arithmancy didn't look as bad as Transfiguration is, because it looks like just arithmetic at the introductory level. Sure, I'll bet it gets loads more complicated as you go on, but it at least goes easy on you in the beginning, apparently. Bit of a respite, bit of a refresher, before you get to the really nasty stuff.
Transfiguration, not so much. I swear to God that not even Muggle kids have to learn maths this fast in secondary school because on the first day of class the prof's got us deriving proofs and the Muggle-borns are saying that's physics and pre-calc that Muggles don't get taught until whatever the hell year. When they're like seventeen. Maybe sixteen. I'm barely fourteen and don't have a clue what I'm copying down. I dunno yet what the hell career I'm going to go into, but I hope whatever it is doesn't require a N.E.W.T. in Transfiguration because sixth year is when you have to start doing calc-based physics to keep up and I just don't even have the patience for that rubbish. Lord knows I'll have enough trouble just trying to pass my O.W.L. in it next year.
The problem—well, I guess probably one of the coolest turnarounds McGonagall brought to the table when she got bumped up to Headmistress—but what still usually feels like a problem with McGonagall and her curriculum overhauls is that she wanted us to go back to the fundamentals and learn the stuff Muggles do that got left out of the ancestors' generation's educations. And I get it, I do, the prof told us all about it in History of Magic—how not knowing maths and how to price things jacked up the economy and not knowing physics stopped new spells from being written for a long time and whatever else. We do literary analysis in Muggle Studies now, which is sort of cool, especially when it's fantasy and we actually know enough from all our classes now to be able to talk about the discrepancies between reality and Muggle misconceptions about magic and trace them back to the Statute of Secrecy or to communication failures even before then between wizards and Muggles that we learn about in History of Magic. And spelling and potioneering would be the coolest things of my life if I had the stamina to stick with Transfiguration that long. Potions I'm going to try and ride out—Slughorn's a good time, and the chemistry is enough of a bastard child of physics that I can follow along decently enough—but it sucks balls that Transfiguration's the class that got pegged for spelling. I get it, the correlation makes sense, but there's no way I can stay with it that long, and it's too bad, honestly.
From what Slughorn's said of it, spelling's sort of like computer programming in the Muggle world, if you know anything about how that works. Magic's like this consciousness—okay, well, that part's not like coding—but like this energy reservoir that's got this sentience to it that I don't really understand, and people with the magic gene can tap into it to channel it through their wands to make, well, magic happen. I dunno; Slughorn said something about something called thermodynamics and how, for Muggles, doing work uses up energy and then makes it like unusable in the future and they think it's leading to this thing called heat death, but what the Muggles don't know is that magic can take that used-up energy and reset it, sort of. Like, there's this thing called entropy—that I actually followed—this property that means that everything in the world is naturally moving from order to disorder, like how you set off Peruvian darkness powder and it's naturally going to expand outward into the air, or how no matter how many times you clean your room it's always going to get messy again. But magic means you can flick your wand and maybe say a few words to refold the socks and un-break the teacup and put things in order again.
Only it's actually more complicated than a couple of words—that's where spelling comes in. And you can do it in any language—apparently wizards in other cultures have totally different words to do the same spells as us, or sometimes totally different words to do totally different spells from us, too, depending on how they developed it before globalization started happening and we all compared notes—but root magic is supposed to be all about using the language of magic to like feel the consciousness and speak to it to get into it. Learning the language and composing the sentences to say is the deepest layer of spelling, actually, but the type of spelling you usually learn first is the level where you can do stuff to assign words to these huge, intricate spells to act like a shortcut to having to say this big paragraph to do what you want. That's why something like Levicorpus that sounds really arbitrary can do something specific like swinging somebody upside down by the ankle—somebody coded it to do that, basically.
Sometimes I feel like maybe I would've made a good Ravenclaw. But all the Death Eater brats choose Ravenclaw now because they're too scared of what the upperclass Gryffindors would do to them if they wound up in Slytherin looking like God forbid they took after their ancestors too much, and I don't care how many cousins I've got in there or what Aunt Hermione says about unity; I don't want them mixed up with me.
At any rate, I'm probably not smart enough to be cut out for Ravenclaw. Those common room riddles? Forget it. Let alone goddamn blasted Transfiguration.
By the time we move on past proofs into the day's practical work—cockroaches into beetles—I haven't got a clue what any of the equations I'm writing mean. I'll pester Dom about it later. Uncle Bill and Aunt Fleur had the good sense to enroll her in grade school as a kid.
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Maybe I'm just being my insecure self again, but seeing as Friday night's the first I see of Al since the Sorting Ceremony, it definitely feels like he's been avoiding me. "So what's your deal—too ashamed to be a Slytherin seen in public with another Slytherin? We're family."
He flinches when I surprise him with a cuff on the shoulder, and his muscles stay tensed even as I plunk myself down cross-legged on the floor and tilt my head up to his perch in his chair in our common room. "I'm not ashamed of you," says Al, but he has a tell that he's showing tonight: from his cheeks to his collarbone, he always goes all blotchy—a patchwork quilt of red blush with white pallor—when he's uncomfortable.
"Half this house is Muggle-born anymore. Look at them."
We both look. Al flails his head around like he's scared of getting hexed by a Death Eater brat if he keeps his gaze on any one person for too long, but I hone in—on the girl wizard selling tampons to purebloods at two Galleons a pop (for real! two Galleons!); on the bloke telling a fervent newbie that the Wi-Fi password's 'DracoMalfoytheChosenCaptain' if only his phone could connect to the network already.
"The brats all pick Ravenclaw instead of Slytherin now," I reassure him. "Nobody's going to think worse of you for being here. Haven't you gotten to know any of them yet?"
He shrugs a little and rubs the back of his neck. Can't blame the kid, really. They may not be what Al's scared they'll be, but there's still a lot of cutthroat bastards, like me, for example.
"It took the Sorting Hat about a millisecond to know you'd fit in here, Al. It's got to have a solid reason for that."
"Was it that short for you, too?"
"No, it…" I begin, and then my mouth hangs open stupidly for a few seconds there as I grasp around for a way to put whatever the Hat did to me into words.
It was long, yeah. Maybe not so long that it counted as a Hatstall, but long enough to make me sweat like a little bitch and make me grateful I'd changed out of my Muggle clothes into robes loose enough not to get pit stains. I can't say the efforts to block it out have worked, exactly, but memories have a way of getting fuzzier and fuzzier the more times you bastardize them into fresh iterations, and that's helped blur out the dialogue, anyway. I catch myself wondering whether it would be any distorted in a Pensieve before remembering that either way you wouldn't be able to hear from the outside a conversation I had in my head.
"Took maybe like three or four minutes. Ran circles around everything but Hufflepuff until finally winding up here," I say after a while.
"Dad said I'd have a choice," Al mumbles. "He said if I really didn't want to end up… someplace, the Hat would listen to what I had to say before making up its mind."
That sweet summer child, thinking dads aren't wrong sometimes. "Buck up, Albus Severus Remus Nymphadora Hedwig. Slytherin's all right now. And you've got me."
It's not like we've ever talked much: Aunt Ginny keeps them well away from the dad-ancestor; honestly, the whole clan keeps well away, especially Uncle George. We didn't even hear about the baby until two weeks ago, when the sister-Molly got home from her sleepover with Grammy Molly and boasted about Angelina stopping by and letting her feel the baby kicking inside of her, four months along now, or maybe five. The sister-Molly is just like the dad-ancestor, except where he derives pride from working in middle management at the Ministry, she takes it in winning people's favor and hogging their confidence. Little prick.
Honestly, I can't blame the rest of them for keeping us the hell out, even if the feeling's not mutual. Dom's cool to me, though, when I seek her out, and I've always thought Al's a cutie. Maybe Slytherin'll force him to grow a pair so that we can be on par with each other.
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If Transfiguration is the worst, then sex ed is the second worst.
It's a two-week, twice-weekly seminar. My year are the guinea pigs, unfortunately, and Vector, who teaches Arithmancy, is the prof. She's ancient, but she's handling the thing with pretty impressive amounts of candor and humor. Fat load of good that does her, though, because the purebloods and half-bloods are all repressed and the Muggle-borns are slut-shamers like you've never seen in your life.
"I'm sure you're all expecting to start with the fun parts," Vector says with a smile, "but sorry to say, we won't be getting to the mechanics of sex until next class. We'll do a brief overview of anatomy—I know you've all mostly reached puberty by now, but you'd be surprised how much misinformation tends to circulate out there among those who've never heard a proper explanation—before talking advantages and disadvantages of safety charms and their Muggle alternatives, as well the mechanisms of pleasure and orgasm for both sexes—yes, pleasure, Mister Smith, and don't let me catch you making that gesture again. For today, though, I'd like to start the discussion with ethics and, more specifically, with consent—"
"You've got to be bullshitting us," interjects Hakim.
"Language, Miss Hakim, and I'm afraid I'm not. Actually, let's take a few minutes to reflect on the importance of doing so, if you'd like to help me out for a moment: can you tell me how familiar you are with wizarding law about rape and consent?"
"'Fraid I can't, Professor. I'm Muggle-born, remember?"
I shake my head when McLaggen leans in and tries to tell me, "Prof needs to check her pureblood privilege." I want to see how this plays out too badly to go at it with him right now.
Unfazed, Vector goes on, "And I'm sure even if you did grow up in the wizarding world, you wouldn't be able to then, either: there's shockingly little legislation in place to defend victims of domestic and sexual violence. Understanding and respecting your partner's autonomy and the importance of consent is the most important factor in carrying out a satisfying sexual relationship, whether casual or—"
"That the excuse you make for yourself when Professor McGonagall eats you out like a heathen in her office every weekend, Vicky? Consent's more important than morality?" busts in Smith.
We've all heard the rumors—heck, I've probably even spread the ones I've heard a bit further out—but still, I hadn't seen that comment coming, not directed straight at the subject like that. Vector's momentarily spared from responding, however, because a large barn owl chooses that moment to hurtle through the window and unleash a Howler that promptly rickrolls one very pissed-off Edwin McCann.
"Gold star, Vicky, you tried," whispers McLaggen.
"I need to get laid," I groan.
Raising his eyebrows, he asks, "You taking volunteers for that?"
Oh, why the hell not—and so we cut Charms afterward and use the password he got off Jordan to hack into the prefects' bathroom.
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"Albus Severus Dippet Phineaus Nigellus, I think your fellow first year over there wants to ask you for the Wi-Fi password."
"I will hurt you," says Al.
"Bravest men your dad-ancestor knew."
"James is trying to crack it, you know," he tells me abruptly. "The ban on Muggle electricity, I mean. He reckons there's a workaround, even though it's not supposed to work around this much magic. It's all Muggle physics in the end, isn't it?" I shrug, and he adds, "And I don't get why you call them that. Ancestors."
It's because we're postmodern millennials, Al, hopped up on pop culture and bitching out Death Eaters and their brats the way that used to get first years Cruciatused by their profs a generation back. Once, I asked the dad-ancestor why Uncle George never comes to Christmas at Grammy and Granddad's, and he said he's got a whole swarm of dementors living in his head keeping him and Angelina in that flat all day—that everyone who survived the Second War does. Us, we drug up on Cheering Charms and don't look back up the family trees.
