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Story: [Reader, Feeler, Magic, Seer]
Summary: Four children with powers that are... just a little bit different from what the world would've expected.
Genre: Friendship?
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Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
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They called it a 'vivid imagination', patted her on the head, and sent her on her way. For a long while, she actually believed them.
She couldn't really blame herself for believing them, it really did technically fit into the same idea. Describing a vivid imagination would be a lot like describing her ability. The difference mainly stemmed from the fact that normal people didn't spend years trapped inside of fictional war-zones, following the story to the letter, seeing so many things more than what was actually written down, and having time warp strangely around herself as a result.
It was hard to keep track of what day of the week it was, when you could barely keep track of what age you were.
History-books were a bit better. They at least didn't really do anything except play out what they were about. Different shades of plastic depending on how exact it was, or how truthful the actual content was, but rarely more than a few dialogues or speeches, coupled with more constantly-rearranging maps of either countries or political landscapes or family-trees, with a few statistical graphs added in for flavor.
But she couldn't be expected to live on history-books alone. They were so... woefully lacking, and so often painfully warped by the authors and whatever agenda they might've had when writing it.
Usually that agenda was mainly to reduce an impressive amount of information into bite-sized chunks for easier perusal, but far too often she'd seen it casually ignore massive influences or present something as a 'mystery to never be solved' when it was obvious to anyone with eyes that it was the result of the struggles of a people they didn't want to acknowledge to exist.
History-books were more likely to end up mindlessly frustrating than a fictional book was. Fictional books, for all that the worlds they reflected tended to be equally mired in the same prejudices as the factual ones, at least the stories they told didn't taste as obviously of plastic when she entered them.
Hermione would be the first to admit that some of those plastic tastes were cheerfully replaced with something disturbingly vile, but apparently that was just a matter of opinion. She didn't quite see how torturing children and condemning them to crippled futures was in any way acceptable as an 'opinion', but apparently that wasn't something other people saw when they read about 'Willy Wonka'.
So they called it a 'vivid imagination' and for a long while she'd believed them. She didn't really have a better word for it even afterwards, not until a woman showed up on their doorstep the summer before her twelfth birthday.
She was a witch. And what she could do was 'magic'.
XXX
They said he was a very sensitive kid, which was technically even true.
It didn't even begin to explain the sheer mass of why he couldn't stand to be in the same room as people arguing, even when he knew that there was nothing serious about the regular confrontations between siblings. But technically? It was entirely true.
Ron had heard from his mother enough times that he'd been fussy even as a baby, crying loudly whenever someone in the area was upset. She used to joke that the only reason she'd made it through his toddler years without working herself to death was that he tended to sleep like the dead whenever the rest of the house did.
Of course he slept when everyone else did. It was exhausting feeling everyone's shifting emotions during the day, swinging one way or the other in an endless whirlwind of impressions. The sleepiness surrounding him, leaking into him by the overwhelming proximity, certainly didn't make it any easier to crawl back into wakefulness.
He knew his mother thought that his table-manners were a bit of a lost cause, and he tried very hard to not make her feel disappointed about it, but it was very hard to remember his manners when he was surrounded on all sides by people who were already hungry.
Ron didn't really like books. It was mainly a result of the twins' silent contempt of anything requiring someone to sit still instead of doing 'fun stuff'. It wasn't helped much by his mother's worry that he would hide away in his room and not make any friends. So Ron enjoyed other things. Things that didn't require him to deal with people and their constant arbitrary shifting emotions, but were still outdoorsy activities.
Quidditch wasn't too bad, though the competition stung unpleasantly, and the jealousy of Ginny at being excluded didn't exactly make him willing to suggest it as something to do. He'd tried growing plants and stuff, but his mother had been so obviously conflicted about what she saw as a woman's job of keeping the kitchen filled with food, that Ron hadn't really been able to enjoy that either.
At this point, the closest thing to a favorite thing to do was cloud-watching. And for all that it was painfully dull, at least it was just boring, rather than overwhelmingly unpleasant.
Cloud-watching, chores, avoiding his bickering siblings, spending enough time with his siblings that none of them felt like he was actually avoiding them, and hoping that maybe he'd be able to find something better to spend his time on when he finally started Hogwarts.
XXX
Harry always saw them coming a mile away, whenever they suddenly burst into his life to shake his hand and then disappear off again. It was hard not to, with how they sparkled everywhere, glowing and giving off sparks both.
Aunt Petunia called them 'freaks', so they were probably like himself. Not that Harry really saw a lot of sparks that came from himself.
A few times, here and there. A nasty teacher's hair turning blue, a flight from danger that landed him on a rooftop, an ever-shrinking ugly sweater, a hair-cut that grew back in within hours. But nothing like the people who appeared to shake his hand before disappearing again.
They shone with it. The sparks danced freely across their skin, clinging to them like a second skin, turning their presence bright and noticeable even in the thickest of crowds.
Harry wasn't sure if it was because they were surrounded by other 'freaks' and that constantly shaking hands like that allowed the sparks to sort of add up. Or maybe it was down to becoming older? Harry had never had a chance to ask them questions.
There one moment, gone the next. Only appearing before him to exclaim his name and shake his hand, and then never seen again.
Miss Figg sparked sometimes too, but it never seemed to come from inside of her. Like it lingered on her skin from someone else shaking her hand, and then... nothing. Honestly, Harry thought that it might be more that she got it from her cats, more than anything else. They always sparked when they thought nobody was paying attention to them, clever eyes taking in the world around them.
Miss Figg's house also had a few sparks along the fence. Though not nearly as many sparks as Privet Drive did, what with how it would some days warp the very sky over the house, the sparks turning so thick and slow that it was more like a brightly lit soup that felt like nothing to the touch.
Harry didn't understand what any of it meant, but he could guess that receiving a letter practically sparkling with sparks was important.
He was still a bit too stunned by it to take precautions though.
Thankfully, the next day, they got even more letters.
And the day after that, even more letter than that.
XXX
Luna didn't trust Ginny Weasley.
It wasn't because of anything she did, it wasn't because she was an unpleasant person. It was just that Luna couldn't look at Ginny and not see... things.
An obsession left unchecked that would become a ruthless mania, a shyness that continued to be forced upon her turning into putrid hatred, a cheerful daring bringing her wherever she wanted to go, a good heart nursed into a sensible mother, a trickle of frustration and loneliness fueling a bitter kind of ruthless cruelty to all who stood in her way-...
The impressions just never stopped around Ginny. It was like she was a different person whenever Luna looked at her, and it was nerve-wrecking.
Luna's father had mostly stopped shifting, even before her mother died. Now it was more that her father faded at different rates. Sometimes he faded away earlier, sometimes later. Only really lingering to watch over Luna, and not really solid enough to convince himself that he was truly needed for the role.
Spending time with her father was also tiring, but more in a sad way. She knew that she'd look back on these moments with him and think them bittersweet, just like she did with the happier moments with her mom, but that knowledge mostly just motivated her into making more sure than ever to enjoy them to the fullest.
Ginny, on the other hand, was a bit like trying to make friends with a neighbor's dog. Only, there was no neighbor to ask reassurance of, and you weren't entirely sure if the dog was actually a wolf, or diseased, or rabid, or sweet and gentle, or cheerfully friendly, or planning to rip your throat out and eat you. All you really knew was that its teeth were mighty sharp, and whether it was for licking or biting, its mouth was definitely aimed at your face.
Spending time with Ginny was a lot worse than spending time with the rest of the Weasley family.
The twins wavered between cheerful and cruel, constantly shifting between them, but in a way that made it easy to keep your distance. Percy was constantly guided along by books and notes and rules and regulations and a pride to succeed, not really a bad person so much as one easily guided along by authority, whether to bad places or not. Percy's shifts were numerous but rarely significant to his actual personality, instead being almost entirely down to who he decided to follow, whose words and calling-signs he was willing to mimic, and for how long.
Molly was perfectly established, only really shifting in dramatic moments, moments where she would fade much like Luna's father did. Arthur was equally set in his ways, though his shifts were more chaotic in whether or not he came home without a job one day or not, a constant worry and a constant danger with muggles being viewed the way they were.
All in all, the Weasley-family weren't the worst people to spend time with, as long as Luna was allowed to stay away from Ginny. Luna really didn't want to spend any more time with Ginny than what was absolutely necessary.
Ron was much better like that. He noticed, and usually ended up distracting Ginny one way or the other.
Ron's shifts were sad too, like her father's. More a kind of inability to care for himself leaving him a broken wreck, rather than a fading will to live, but painful to watch nonetheless. Oh, sometimes he'd shift to violence too, but that was rare. Mostly, he'd shift between breaking himself apart to keep anyone from noticing that they made him miserable, or he'd just... leave, and disappear forever into isolation that he wouldn't enjoy any more than he did cloud-watching.
It was sad.
Luna didn't really know how she was supposed to help one shift from happening, or what she was supposed to do about it. All she knew was that Ron had asked her not to tell anyone. So she wouldn't. She'd promised she wouldn't after all.
XXX
Hermione trusted the magical world about as far as she could throw it.
She'd read enough stories with secret hidden-away societies to have a lot of faith in them as general institutions. It mainly came down to a matter of transparency, and how a society built on secrecy would generally be utterly appalled by the very notion of being honest about things that made them look bad, so corruption would be... basically the only option, long-term.
The question was more about whether or not Hermione was in a position to refuse the magical world's invitation to Hogwarts, or to what extent this corruption stretched. There was a difference between a society where you had to bribe your way into getting – and keeping – permits for a business, and a society where you could be pulled off the street and shot in an alleyway because some rich person decided that you'd fit some arbitrary subjective view of 'shady'.
Points seemed to be going towards the former more than the latter for Wizarding Britain, but that was no reason to let her guard down.
There were certainly enough hints in the more hidden-away corners of the bookshops to figure out that 'purebloods' sneered at all the people who weren't themselves, with a special disdain for muggles – who were seen more as clever animals than humans – and muggleborn – who probably stole their magic from good honest magical folk, somehow.
It was patently ridiculous, but that was how prejudice worked. It didn't have to make sense, it just had to make the person feeling it feel justified when bad things happened around the people they felt it for. And bad things always happened around any group, sooner or later. A statistic that wasn't helped by how – when enough people agreed to feel prejudiced against one group – those groups would be actively sought ought for the sake of involving them in bad stings happening. Whether as desperate people to take the blame for things going wrong, or as victims for other people's cruelties.
So no, Hermione trusted the magical world about as far as she could throw it.
Which was a shame. She'd been a bit excited to hear that she might have an adventure of her own to look forward to some day. An adventure that maybe wouldn't turn out as miserable and desperate as those in the stories, where magic was allowed to be a fascinating thing to explore, rather than a piece in a puzzle for a much larger story.
Honestly, the excitement had barely lasted her the full day of meeting Professor McGonagall, before her thorough experience with 'being recruited' in all of those many many stories she'd read had started to properly ring the alarm-bells.
But at least it didn't look like they were planning on setting her up to be some kind of figurehead for an army to rally behind. That was actually better than her first few worries. She was just another muggleborn face in the crowd. Nothing at all to separate her from the masses.
Hermione carefully kept her mouth shut about her 'vivid imagination'.
There was no reason to tempt fate.
XXX
Ron wasn't super-happy about the Hogwarts Express.
He was a first year, and he'd known his brothers for long enough to expect the detached way that most older kids looked down on younger ones. He hadn't expected quite how thoroughly the twins had cemented the reputation of the Weasley-family, but could in light of that understand why a lot of older kids would take one look at his hair and then very pointedly pretend he wasn't there.
Worse was the other children his age. First years who took one glance at his ratty inherited robes, and sneered. Or worse, the ones who felt pity even as they turned their eyes away.
At this point he was mostly resigned to finding another kid whose clothes were just as ratty as his own, and then just hoping for the best that they'd at least be able to get along.
So when he found a kid like that – a muggleborn from the cut of his clothes and the way he simmered with awe as his eyes darted this way and that through the window – he was a bit taken aback.
Green eyes turned to look at him, and everything just... paused. For a long moment, Ron watched the boy's jaw growing slack, eyes wide, a kind of mixture of awe and appreciation-of-beauty.
Ron wasn't entirely sure how long they both remained like that, Ron standing in the doorway, stunned silent by the other boy's reaction, and the other boy staring at him like he'd never seen anything as amazing before in his life. But then the moment ended, and the awe flickered underneath self-conscious embarrassment, even as the boy still struggled to pull his eyes away.
As for Ron himself, he'd never felt anything like that aimed at himself before. It was... a bit of a rush.
So, two embarrassed boys sat down and struck up a conversation, both pretending not to notice the way Harry's eyes lingered whenever he forgot to not look.
Turns out Harry Potter was nearly as strange an individual as Luna Lovegood. Less sad though, and perhaps a little bit less perceptive, for all that Ron kept getting the feeling that he could see something that he didn't talk about.
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Diagon Alley had been... an experience.
It'd been Harry's first real understanding about what the 'sparks' were. They were magic, a particular kind of personal magic that seemed to be amplified by age and access to a wand. There were other kinds too, and he'd spotted enough of what was probably property-wards that he wondered how the thick sludge of Privet Drive had been created.
He'd always just called it sparks before, because nobody else could see it, so it was the same thing as the sparks that sometimes appeared from within himself. The people he'd met wanting to shake his hands had also had some of that, so he'd called it sparks then too, but it was more like a steady stream of brightness for all that it didn't do much more than cling to the skin of the person in question.
All in all, Harry could admit that 'sparks' was a very inadequate word to describe magic.
Hagrid had a heavier kind of steady brightness to him, different enough that it felt more like the brightness had been mixed with something else to create a very interesting color-combination. Though calling it a 'color' was also inadequate.
Ollivander seemed to be able to anticipate some of the magic, even if his methods were... weird.
Harry hadn't wanted to interrupt the man, but after the first few dozen attempts at matching him to a wand, he'd been very tempted to share his own insights with the man. If only to get away from him.
He hadn't though. He'd waited patiently and pretended not to notice how some of the wands sent curious sparks his way long before they were placed in his hand, or the way they all seemed to stop after trying it a few times. All except for the one. One wand that kept sparking towards him, curious, interested, seemingly enjoying the way that Harry's own sparks bubbled out in silent response to its distant prodding.
Then Ollivander finally placed it in his hand, and told him that its brother-wand had killed his parents.
Which had rather forcibly reminded him of the fact that he was apparently a celebrity now, because of something that'd happened before he could remember.
'Great' wasn't the same as 'good', as Ollivander had reminded him, but it'd certainly been a great day all around. Filled with wonders and startling facts about his life and what was to come.
Going back to the Dursleys for a bit before being driven to King's Cross by an uncle who'd chortled happily to himself at the realization that Harry didn't have a clue how to get to the 'freaks' who'd invited him to their school, Harry had found the Platform surprisingly easily. He'd just followed the glow. And the sparks of the people going in the same direction.
He wasn't entirely happy about the fact that nobody had thought to mention how to get to the Platform to him earlier, but it'd been a very eventful day for him and Hagrid, and he'd probably just simply forgotten. Harry was a little worried that other muggleborn would've been similarly uninformed, but he hadn't really spotted anyone with sparks lingering around outside, so he'd decided to ignore it.
If Hagrid met all the kids, he would've probably been a bit more structured about it by now, so him showing up was probably more a matter of Harry's special situation than anything else. Which made Hagrid forgetting to tell him about the Platform a lot more forgivable.
It wasn't like Harry had really had any issue getting to the Hogwarts Express, once he'd spotted the brightness of the wall between the ninth and tenth platforms.
Entering the train that had sparks crawling along every inch of it, Harry had found an empty compartment without having to look too hard.
And then he'd just sat there, watching the sparks, the brightness, the colorful people and their own brightness-... Just, taking it all in.
Of course not long after the train started to actually move, a redhead popped his head into Harry's compartment, and it was like a galaxy.
A weight that pulled everything else in, like gravity towards its center. The result was indeed very similar to those pictures Harry could remember seeing of galaxies in his school-books. Not necessarily brightness, so much as it was an undeniable weight that radiated brightness as a distant afterthought.
It was beautiful.
It took Harry a long moment to realize that he was staring, and he didn't really know how he was supposed to say 'sorry' about that.
The redhead's name was Ron. Ron Weasley, the boy with a galaxy spinning undeniably inside of him. Harry was a little bit in awe.
XXX
Hermione didn't really know what she'd expected when she stepped on to the Hogwarts Express.
The older kids to look down on her for being a firsty? Yeah. The purebloods to look down on her for being a muggleborn? Yeah.
The complication was more that humanity and personalities tended more towards a sliding scale than a binary kind of 'yes or no'. There were purebloods who turned up their nose at her – the spoiled blond kid with his heavy-set friends quickly sprang to mind – purebloods who didn't seem to notice blood-status at all – usually being too caught up in talking to their friends to pay much attention at all to other people – and purebloods who seemed to be very curious to learn about muggles – though with how unthinkingly insulting they were of muggles, Hermione would much rather avoid those if she could manage it.
There were older kids trying to help out the younger years, older kids too focused on their own friends to think the younger years to be anything other than furniture, and older kids who'd happily find ways to mess with the younger ones just because they could.
It was all a mixture, and she supposed that it'd been a while since she'd been so personally exposed to it. Reading the way she did, there was still that sensation of displacement when bad things happened around her, like it happened on the other side of a glass screen.
Oh, it wasn't any less viscerally real to watch a man be cut in half, but she always knew in the back of her mind that it wasn't real, and that the man in question wasn't actually a good friend of hers. It was a good friend of the main character in a fictional story. She didn't even have to worry about bloodstains, even if she still recalled the desperate showers of trying to scrub it off her body.
The worst Hermione could ever recall having been affected by anything was the one time she'd had to cut her time short in order to throw up. But that was rare. Normally she'd simply let herself be carried along through the story, and deal with her inevitable trauma in the manner of the person who actually experienced it as they did so.
Whether that was by focusing exclusively on work or an assignment, or if it amounted to screaming into their pillow in the middle of the night, or if it was just wandering around in a daze. It was as good a way as any to deal with trauma, and at least that way Hermione didn't have to run the risk of worrying her parents.
Unfortunately a lot of stories ended up turning that after-trauma part into a plastic caricature, which was probably unhealthy, but it wasn't like Hermione couldn't go back to some of the better ones and just find a part of the story where she could delve in and experience a better version of dealing with trauma.
Books were amazing like that.
No, perhaps the true surprise came in walking into a compartment to ask about another first year's lost toad, only to realize that one of the people inside just kind of... immediately classified her as a person worthy of respect.
She'd had it happened in her stories enough times that she could spot it a mile away, which was one of the reasons she'd never... quite gotten along with the teachers who indulged her as if she was a unusually clever toddler. But she'd never really had someone respect her with a glance. Grow jealous and defensive? Yeah, lots of times. But the honest straightening of his spine, the way his eyes flickered over to her-...
It was like she mattered. As if, in that one moment, the boy in front of her had somehow managed to guess that she was different, and rather than spurn her for it, he'd decided to listen very carefully to anything she might say.
The other boy reacted too, a bit of confusion, a tiny bit of thoughtful suspicion, weighing something silently inside of his head.
It was the strangest experience in her life. Probably.
It didn't help when both of them refused to act on it, simply letting it slide away without commenting on it at all. As if neither of them were willing to share a secret that she might be part of.
Hermione wasn't good with small-talk. She'd watched people do it tons of times, but she'd never quite managed to figure out how to do it on her own.
Still, she tried, trying to figure out what in the world was going on.
Not that she could really delay her mission of finding Neville's toad indefinitely. She needed some kind of excuse-... and the green-eyes boy with glasses just gave it to her, because she'd never mentioned liking books, had she?
The boy swallowed, looking a bit stunned and put on the spot. "Ah... but you're a library."
Hermione wasn't sure if she'd ever been so utterly offended in her entire life.
"I'm a person!" She glared at him.
The boy glanced at the redhead, a confused kind of worry, a glance that lingered for long enough that Hermione wondered if she ought to smack the boy for ogling his boyfriend when he was supposed to be apologizing to her.
"That's-... That's not what I meant!" The boy frowned, a little bit desperate-sounding as he tore his eyes away from the redhead. "Your sparks!" The color started to drain from his face. "Your sparks... are like a library..." He finally muttered almost entirely silently to himself.
He was the single worst liar Hermione had ever met.
"You have no idea how to avoid a subject, do you?" Hermione asked, feeling a little bit fascinated.
She'd never been the socially competent in a conversation before. It was a new and refreshing experience.
The redhead frowned at her, looking like he was moments away from interfering with whatever the hell was going on between the two of them, but his face was conflicted and he hesitated. Allowing the boy with glasses to speak.
"Everyone... everyone's sparks are the same?" The boy made a face. "Normal people don't even have sparks." He shook his head. "But the sparks are all the same, bubbling up from inside." He glanced over at the redhead and seemed to lose track of his thoughts for a little bit. "But it's like rustling pages and ink bubbling up through you with your sparks."
Hermione tilted her head, suddenly a little bit curious. She'd guessed that her 'vivid imagination' was something different even among the wizards and witches of Hogwarts. But she hadn't really thought about what would happen if someone else had something similarly different.
She glanced over at the redhead who was looking a little bit less confused and possibly a little bit disappointed? It was hard to tell, Hermione had barely known him for a couple of minutes. "Oh? Then what does he look like?" She gestured towards the redhead, not really sure what she was expecting.
"Ah... That's-..." The boy with glasses swallowed again. "It's like a galaxy, pulling everything in, warm and bright, always swirling..." He trailed off, staring at the redhead again.
The redhead who was now actually blushing to the tip of his ears.
Hermione frowned, silently wished Neville the best in regards to finding his toad from where she'd sent him off to find a prefect before agreeing to continue looking for it on her own, and stepped fully into the compartment to close the door behind her.
"I step inside of books." She said, sitting down next to the redhead. "My parents call it a 'vivid imagination'."
The redhead glanced her way, then sighed. "I feel other people's emotions."
The boy with glasses continued to stare at them for a moment, seemingly confused about why Hermione had joined them, but contributed his own strangeness when they both turned towards him. "I see magic. It's very bright."
And that was the start of a rather different kind of friendship.
XXX
Harry's first reaction to her had been the kind of quiet regard one might have when a teacher steps out from their classroom.
Not really a formal nervousness, but something a bit like respect but a lot more like habit. And the clear suspicion in Hermione made it very obvious that she'd noticed it.
Ron didn't really want his new friend to end up getting in trouble with someone, but it wasn't like he could really interrupt the conversation properly without coming off as rude, and Ron had never been all that comfortable with being rude to people. People always frowned at rude people, even when they didn't show the frowns on their faces.
So he'd let it play out all the way until Harry mentioned books and Hermione leapt at the chance to properly unravel the source of her suspicions.
Ron wasn't... entirely surprised.
Luna saw things too, after all. And feeling other people's emotions registering to Harry's sight like a swirling vortex of gravity? It didn't sound all that farfetched, even if Ron wasn't sure if he was disappointed or strangely fascinated by Harry describing it.
He'd known that Harry wasn't really looking at him when he stared at him with that glazed kind of awe, but his eyes were turned Ron's ways, and the feelings were very hard to ignore and oddly flattering too. Being told that he had a galaxy in his heart was... also not the worst way of revealing what the boy had been staring at.
If Ron hadn't been entirely aware of how literal Harry had been about that, he probably would've been quite charmed. As it was, his ears still turned a bit red.
Hermione wasn't the most trusting of individuals, and her feeling echoed that fairly well. Which meant that soon Ron knew exactly what Harry had been feeling the first time he laid eyes on her, though for probably different reasons.
Hermione was a librarian, moments away from frowning at you for causing a ruckus, but also... always willing to point the way to the books you were looking for. Someone worth being wary of, but still not a bad person by any stretch.
Considering that her power was apparently to dive into books and experience their stories in full, the fact that she felt more like an adult than a child made a certain amount of sense. Most books were supposed to have adventures spanning for years at a time, and if you went through a couple of books every week, you'd experience a lot more than your own age would show.
Ron was also pretty sure that a lot of the books he remembered hearing about from muggles had a lot of people dying in them. And people weren't always... right after somebody died near them.
Luna had been lost in her own head for nearly a full year after her mother had died, and Luna's dad still hadn't really recovered. There was still something terribly broken about the way the man's feelings always kept flickering away into hollow emptiness.
Ron doubted that it was the same for Hermione, but... he wasn't going to ask her about it either, and it'd be stupid to say that it definitely wasn't like that at all.
Ron wondered why he'd never heard about anyone else with powers like that. Powers that didn't translate to picking up a wand and performing 'great deeds'. He'd met three of them and he hadn't even started at Hogwarts yet, technically.
Hermione who read books, Ron himself who felt feelings, Harry who saw magic, and Luna who saw things that weren't. Not that he was going to bring up Luna in this particular conversation.
That wasn't his secret to tell, just like his wasn't hers. They'd both promised, after all.
XXX
A/n: I think one of my driving forces with writing this fic was the future pairings, which would've been fine, except that I needed to start it... oh about four years before we ever reached those pairings, and the changes already made would affect the entire path up to that point.
For example, Scabbers? Discovered by constant cloud of magic from Harry's side. Flamel? Hermione would have a lot more difficulties forgetting him when a face is attached to the name, so that quest for information would be heavily shortened. The Diary? Harry would notice its magical nature even when Ginny was holding it, and Luna would be sort of suddenly hyper-aware of a future where Ginny isn't Ginny any more, not to mention Ron reacting to Diary!Ginny's feelings being completely out-of-whack. Werewolves? Hermione would be furious about the myths surrounding them within the first time she picks up a book on the subject of what they are. Barty Jr? Ron would definitely notice the very specific kind of hostility Barty would feel towards traitorous Death Eaters and Harry and be mighty suspicious.
Basically? So much would change that I'm not sure if I'd have a story left to write by the time I reached what I wanted to write about, and I'd probably have to resolve all of it in some really awkward ways. All for the sake of writing out a few pairings that were great fun to think of, but that I don't mind going unwritten for another story.
(And before anyone asks:
Harry-Ron, because Harry sees him as a goddamn astral body and is in awe, which makes it really difficult for Ron to not bask in the feeling of being seen for something that is entirely himself, to the point where he ends up very much falling in love.
Luna-Hermione, because Luna's stories are truthful but utterly bizarre, and always worth experiencing to the fullest, and Hermione is just so... unwavering in how her future flickers. She's not always the nicest of people in those futures, but she's always very thoroughly 'Hermione', and it makes it a lot easier to feel comfortable around her, even as she's relentless enough about herself that Luna can't help but be a little bit awed.)
So yes, enjoyable pairings, but not worth writing an entire freaking book about, just to get to the part where the fun starts.