Hey y'all! This is a rewrite of an earlier attempt of mine to write a Twilight/Harry Potter crossover that stalled epically. I really hope you like it! Essentially it is the same story that I envisioned years ago, and will share many of the same characters and plot points, it will simply be stylized a bit differently. For now the chapters are short and bite-sized but they'll probably get longer as time goes on. Let me know what you think!
When I was a little girl, I'd sit on the floor beside my grandmother's arm chair, lean my head against her knee, and listen to her parse spells and read allowed book reviews from Modern Potioneer.
No one had to tell me that magic was real, in other words.
My grandmother was ancient, in only the way a pureblood witch can be. She used to joke that her mother had been Morgan LeFay, and when I was quite young I believed her. Despite her age and station in life she was always kind to me, an impish half-blood, product of some youthful tryst between her daughter and an American muggle. I'm sure that my high energies and impertinent questions upset her refined sensibilities and disrupted her plan of a graceful decent into age and insanity but she cared for me nonetheless and did her best to educate me in the ways of our kind. Never once during the course of my childhood did she cause me to feel shame over my origins and, although she despaired of my diet while in his care, she dutifully delivered me to my father's house twice a year, for four days in the fall for the American feast of Thanksgiving and two weeks in the summer. As much as I disrupted my grandmother's silver years I truly baffled Charlie's quiet, solitary existence. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Charlie delighted in teaching me everything he could about his happy and simple world, where the weekends were spent fishing and watching sports and the weekdays were spent guarding the townspeople.
No one could dispute that I was beloved and loved, in other words.
By the time I entered Hogwarts I was a well-formed girl of eleven, equal parts curious and dutiful, well mannered and clever. And because I was still a child I didn't pay much attention to the darkness that was stirring throughout Wizarding Britain. It didn't matter that Sirius Black, mass-murderer and death eater had broken out of Azkaban, the fact that I was sorted Ravenclaw clearly took precedence. My roommates and I laughed and studied and explored despite the dementors that surrounded our castle home. The next year when we were barred from the Yule ball simply because we were "too young" we held our own party in a spare classroom and at midnight we snuck through the halls, ducking behind suits of armor and tapestries of dancing trolls and pressing our faces up against the windows of the Great Hall in order to glimpse the older students dancing past midnight. We watched the tournament tasks half filled with trepidation, half with boredom and we cried ourselves sick when Cedric Diggory, the most beautiful boy any of us had ever seen, was killed. In third year I joined the DA despite my roommate's pleas and in fourth year I was thrown down the Grand Staircase when Voldemort's followers invaded the school. A lot of things happened my fifth year. For one, I turned sixteen. For another, I stopped viewing myself as a child and started to think of myself as a soldier.
No one had to tell me I would die young, in other words.
Nevertheless my friends and I prepared for the inevitable final battle, faced our own mortality head on, and still managed to hold a fantastic New Years bash.
The real shock was the fact that after the war was over, I was still alive.
