*Shows up 2.5 years late with Epilogue*
Listen, you can't say it isn't on brand for me.
Basically, just all my headcanons for the Next Gen crew as I see them. Some of these stories already exist (Rose, Al, Scorpius, Lorcan, Lysander). Some of these stories may exist someday. Some never will outside of this chapter. Who knows what the future holds?
I've enjoyed putting together my thoughts and exploring who I think these crazy kids are, and I hope that you have, too!
In the end, they were all just pieces. Just parts of a whole, waiting to come together.
Teddy, Victoire, Dominique
Teddy Lupin maintained his aura of unpleasantness so successfully that two weeks into his first year at school, no one wanted anything to do with him. He claimed a shadowy, neglected table in the back of the library and stayed there for four years. He was a smart kid, but school held no interest for him. He did the minimum of work required to keep his teachers (and by extension, his grandmother and godfather) off his back, but otherwise, he kept to himself and defied anyone to try and change that. No one did, at least not until Victoire Weasley's fourteenth birthday and her interview where she suddenly decided to take a stand for werewolf rights and cite him by name.
Victoire expected something to change after her interview, but since it turned out that most of the students at Hogwarts hadn't even listened to it, nothing really did. Adults in the wizarding world might have been making more noise, but at school, Victoire didn't hear it. So the only tangible difference after her interview was that Teddy Lupin started glaring at her constantly.
Teddy had heard the interview, and he thought it was idiotic, and he told her so when she confronted him about why he was glaring daggers at her. He made it very clear that he wasn't alone because of who his father was. He was alone because he was unpleasant and unlikeable, and he'd thank her to stop trying to change that. He wouldn't have reacted so strongly except that several parents who had listened had instructed their children to reach out to him and go out of their way to be nice to him and include him, to make it very clear that they had never been avoiding him because his father had been a werewolf. He shut down the niceties and attempts at connection swiftly and succinctly.
It wasn't just the interview, though. Victoire Weasley bothered him. Her need to be perfect, her need to be liked, the fact that she was always happy and sunny and friendly just put him off. It was too much. It wasn't natural, and he couldn't trust it. She threw him off, and he threw her off. Victoire wasn't used to having someone dislike her. It shouldn't have forged a connection between them, but in a moment of weakness that year, he told her that his secluded table in the library was open to her whenever she needed to "spend some time with someone who couldn't give a damn if you've been a paragon of perfection today." In a moment of weakness the next year, she took him up on it.
Dom was the only person who knew about the strange, furtive friendship that grew between Victoire and Teddy his sixth year and her fifth. Dom had taken her father and uncle's advice that summer and reached out to her sister. She'd expected Victoire to brush her off, but she hadn't. Victoire had needed a best friend, and so had Dom. Being relied on gave Dom confidence, and having a confidant made Victoire's need to be perfect less pronounced.
Dom didn't trust Teddy Lupin one bit. For all Victoire's protests that there was another side of him lurking under all the nastiness, one that was sweet and scared and hurting, Dom was pretty sure that Teddy had spent so long pushing everyone away that he didn't know how to do anything else. While that was pitiable, and while Victoire's efforts to change him were commendable, if she couldn't manage it, she was only going to get hurt in the end.
Just after Teddy's eighteenth birthday, when he was two months away from graduating Hogwarts (or, more accurately, flunking out of Hogwarts, as he was failing all of his classes), Victoire pushed and stood her ground and reached out to try and help him, and he responded by lashing out with the cruelest words he could find. Dom had been right, and because she had shared that fear with Victoire, Victoire stunned all three of them by ending the friendship. Watching her walk away from him was the most terrifying moment of his life. Rock bottom, he thought. Until Dom found him, and gave him the worst dressing down he'd ever received.
The Weasley sisters changed Teddy Lupin that night. Victoire ending what could have grown beyond friendship if he'd been willing to let it, Dom laying out in his faults in a way no one had dared to do before, those things forced him to confront the worst parts of himself. He fell to pieces that summer and finally reached out and asked for help to put things back together.
Turning over a new leaf wasn't easy. He had to convince his professors to let him, but with Harry's help and his Gran's, he managed it. He was given a second chance at a seventh year, and the Teddy who boarded the train at the age of nineteen was vastly different from any Teddy Lupin that any of his classmates had met. It wasn't easy, but with the help of his Gran, Harry, his professors, and the Weasley sisters (who recognized that they couldn't demand a change without standing by it when it came), Teddy made the change a permanent one bit by bit.
Victoire spent a year after she graduated teaching Transfiguration at Hogwarts for first through fifth years while Professor Boot was on a research sabbatical. Afterward, she got a job working with Astoria Malfoy, pursuing activism in the magical world. But her experiences with Teddy meant that she made sure she actively listened to the people she was trying to help instead of just going forward with what she thought was best for them. She quickly became a force to be reckoned with.
Teddy and Dominique bonded in the years after he and Victoire graduated from Hogwarts over how long it had taken them to settle into their own skins and figure out who they wanted to be. They both agreed that there needed to be a way to help other kids through the struggles they had faced alone for so long, so they worked together with Mungo's and the Department of Magical Education to create a guidance program for students at Hogwarts, providing counseling and life coaching and general encouragement. It was so successful that they soon had requests from schools around the world wanting to adapt the program to suit their students.
Teddy and Victoire had married by then and were expecting the first of their three children, so Dom took over the travel while Teddy kept on at Hogwarts. She met her husband Jasper while developing a program at a magical charter school in Switzerland where he was teaching.
James, Molly, Fred
The announcement of Career Advice meetings toward the end of James's fifth year sent him into a spiral of panic. James had thrown his heart and soul into his trickery at Hogwarts, with Molly and Fred's help, so that all the professors would see the next great prankster when they looked at him rather than Harry Potter's son. It worked so well that James managed to bury the concern and anxiety over living up to his father's legacy right up until the moment the career pamphlets showed up in the Gryffindor Common Room. He tried to hide it, but Molly hadn't become a criminal mastermind by being unobservant. She gave him a week to sort himself out, but when she caught him spiraling into a full-on panic attack the Saturday before the scheduled meetings, she took matters into her own hands.
She led him to the Quidditch pitch where a Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff Quidditch match was just wrapping up, and put him through his paces. James had made Chaser on the house team his second year. He was good, and more than that, Quidditch and flying had always grounded him and helped him focus. He didn't always understand spellwork and magical theory, but Quaffles and formations and making goals were second nature to him. When he was in the air, everything made sense.
Their flying that day caught the eye of Everard Pryce, a talent scout for the Wigtown Wanderers who had come to watch the match, and when he complimented their skill and asked for their names, James braced himself for the usual response. And yes, Everard Pryce's eyes lit up with recognition, but when he spoke next, he didn't mention Harry Potter at all. Instead he said, "You're Ginny Weasley's son."
Those words changed everything. James went into his Career Advice meeting with Professor Longbottom and told him he wanted to play professional Quidditch. He stopped worrying about living up to his father's legacy and focused instead on living up to his mother's. Everard Pryce signed him to the Wigtown Wanderers as soon as he graduated, and James quickly became one of the hottest names in the sport, not because of either of his parents, but because of his own talent and accomplishments, all because of what James believed to be a lucky coincidence. He couldn't have been more wrong.
Molly Weasley probably should have been Sorted into Slytherin, but as soon as the Hat touched her head, she informed it in no uncertain terms that regardless of what House it announced, she would be going to the Gryffindor table, sleeping in the Gryffindor dorms, and following the first year Gryffindor class schedule, so it would really be best if the Hat just put her into Gryffindor and spared everybody a lot of trouble. She didn't really care what House she was in, but James and Fred had both been Sorted into Gryffindor, and they needed her, so there was nowhere else she was going to go.
This incident would repeat itself four years later when Professor Longbottom tried to make her a Prefect. She made her way to the castle in the middle of the summer to return the badge and inform him that if he wouldn't take it back, she would simply ignore the fact that she was a Prefect until they stripped her of the title. The difference that time was that Professor Longbottom, far from being taken aback, accepted the badge with a smile, informing her that she'd just won him about 50 Galleons from his colleagues.
Molly Weasley was a force to be reckoned with, and the only reason the entire school wasn't at her mercy three weeks into her first year was because she didn't want them to be. Molly believed in helping people, but quietly. It had been her experience that most people didn't want to ask for help and wouldn't appreciate it when it was offered outright. But she understood people on a fundamental level, and she knew that they almost always needed help. So she led people into accepting her help by pretending she wasn't offering it.
She was very good at it. It was all about bringing just the right people together or making just the right suggestion, and never letting on that she knew exactly what she was doing. Molly helped quietly because helping loudly often wasn't helping at all. She could easily have taken James by the shoulders and told him that he didn't need to live up to his father's legacy and that he was clearly better suited to his mother's, but it might not have worked and it was just as easy to pay attention to his spiraling, know when the Quidditch scouts were coming to a match, watch for the end of the match out of the tower window, suggest a quick training session to blow off some steam, and let the talent scout say the words for her. It was a gamble, but if it hadn't worked, she'd have found another way.
When she graduated from Hogwarts, Victoire wanted her to come work as an activist, but that was too public. Her professors wanted her to stay at Hogwarts as a teacher, but that was too stifling. Her sister (and Everard Pryce) wanted her to go play professional Quidditch, but that would have led to Fred and James figuring out that the real reason she hadn't gone out for the House team with them in their second year wasn't because she didn't care that much about playing organized Quidditch (which was what she'd told them), but was because she knew she'd beat them out for the spots they wanted, and it was way more important to them to be on the team than it was to her.
Professor Longbottom was the one who asked her what she wanted to do, and because the incident with the Prefect badge the summer before had proved that her Head of House had the measure of her, she was honest. She wanted to keep doing what she'd been doing at Hogwarts. She wanted to help, but quietly.
He helped her get a job working the bar at the Leaky Cauldron, and she also took a job as a Welcome Witch at the Ministry. Everyone kept waiting for her to ascend through the ranks, but she didn't. She turned down promotion after promotion, and refused to give up her pub work and just smiled and assured the bewildered people convinced she was wasting her potential that she was happy and fulfilled and exactly where she wanted to be. Most people failed to notice that a disproportionate number of people who, after venting their troubles to Molly Weasley over the bar or the Welcome Counter, suddenly found themselves crossing paths with exactly the right person who could help them out. But the people closest to Molly - James, Fred, Lucy, and her parents - figured it out eventually.
Fred Weasley reveled in the freedom from responsibility he encountered at Hogwarts. For the first time in his life, he was allowed to just be a kid. He didn't have to keep the peace or hold anything together. For his first few years, he enjoyed being known as a prankster, but as time went on, he started to miss being someone people came to and relied on. At home, his parents counted on him - to help teach and encourage Roxie, to mediate arguments, to manage the store. But at school, no one took him seriously. He was only a prankster. At fourteen, he realized that while his classmates were amused by him, very few of them saw him as anything more than a decent Quidditch player and all-around goofball. He wanted to change that.
He told Molly and James because he told them everything, and at first he was afraid of their reaction, afraid that they would think he was turning on him. But they supported him entirely, and during their fourth year, all three of them buckled down. Fred improved his grades across the board, and worked on improving his image. He volunteered to coach the first and second years Intramural Quidditch League, he helped out with some of Hagrid's CoMC classes, and he offered to help weed the greenhouses. He still played tricks and made people laugh, but he balanced it by proving he could also be mature and responsible.
He was gunning for Prefect, and he got it. He worried for about eight seconds that James would be jealous, but when he mentioned it, James looked at him like he had lost his mind. So that put that worry to rest pretty quickly.
Achieving Prefect was the firmest goal he had for his life. He always figured that he would probably end up taking over the shop for his dad someday. He didn't have the same zest for it, exactly, but he enjoyed it well enough. He liked developing new products, and he worked well with his dad and his dad's partner Lee Jordan and Lee's son Liam. So that's what he told Professor Longbottom he wanted to do in his Career Advice meeting.
When he told Molly and James about taking over the shop, Molly let out a shocked "What?" like it was the last thing she expected to hear. And that threw him, even as she immediately apologized because of course if that was what he wanted, then she supported him entirely. And while she was true to her word, that initial reaction sowed the seed of doubt that kept prompting him to ask if taking over the shop was what he wanted.
The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that it wasn't. But the thought of telling his dad that he didn't want a share in the store that he'd started with the brother he'd named his son for . . . that didn't bear thinking about. Molly and James had much less patience with that line of thinking, especially once they'd graduated and Fred was still carrying on as if he'd take over the store because it beat letting his dad down.
Molly was the one who eventually tipped the scales in some of the least quiet helping she ever did, timing a loud "Fred, talk to your dad!" just as his dad happened to be passing one summer day at the Burrow. Glaring, Fred accused her of doing it on purpose, which she openly acknowledged.
But George Weasley already knew what his son was having a hard time telling him. He and Lee had discussed it and had been preparing to tell their sons that they were off the hook - Weasley's Wizard Wheezes should go to people who were genuinely passionate about the store's mission, not just serving out an obligation to their parents.
And George knew more than that - he knew what Fred actually wanted to be doing with his life. Two months later, Fred started working for the Ministry of Magic, in the Department of Magical Education. Once he'd obtained his teaching license, there were no open positions at Hogwarts. But his Uncle Percy put him in touch with Penelope Clearwater, an old friend who was now Headmistress of a magical school in Austria.
Scorpius, Rose, Al
Scorpius, Rose, and Al, despite admonitions from various fathers, became fast friends on the train to Hogwarts. The three of them shared a unique determination to be their own people and make decisions for their own lives, not based on their families or what the world expected them to be. This shared determination didn't stop Rose and Scorpius from quietly panicking over their Sorting into Ravenclaw, however, and fear of what their fathers would think.
Scorpius had no idea what his father's expectations were. Draco Malfoy was loving in his way, but he was distant, and Scorpius had no idea where the bar was set, though he was pretty sure that being the first Malfoy in centuries to go to a House other than Slytherin, on top of making friends with the children of the Golden Trio, wasn't even in the right direction. But Rose and Al understood. They understood what it was like to have a famous father and be faced with unfair expectations from the world around them. And he wasn't willing to give that up, especially when he had no idea if his father was disappointed or not.
Rose, on the other hand, was positive that her father was disappointed. How could he not be? She was in Ravenclaw instead of Gryffindor. She was terrified of heights and couldn't fly. She'd rather spend the day reading and studying than having adventures and getting into trouble. And then there was Scorpius, who her father had specifically told her to stay away from. But her dad was just seeing his arch-enemy from school, not the sweet and shy and clever boy who just wanted to be accepted that Rose knew. She wanted so badly to be her own person, and she hated that that meant failing to live up to what she knew her dad wanted her to be.
Al alone of the three had no fear of what his father would think. Al knew that his dad wanted his kids to be their own people and be happy, no matter what. So since he didn't have to deal with the fear of what his father would think, he set his mind to helping Rose and Scorpius get over that fear for themselves. He wasn't entirely successful, but he did help them put it to the backs of their minds while they were at Hogwarts together.
Scorpius's friendship with the cousins had given him the confidence to walk into his Career Advice meeting fifth year and tell his Head of House that he wanted to join the Aurors. If Professor Flitwick was surprised, he didn't show it. Professor Flitwick was the only person Scorpius told of his plans. It was the second secret he'd ever kept from Al and Rose (the first being his technical betrothal to a girl from Wales). He hated keeping secrets, but that one was necessary. If he told anyone, but especially his best friends, it would give people reason to think that Al's dad had admitted him on anything other than his own merit.
Unlike Al and Scorpius, Rose finished her time at school with no idea what she wanted to do with her life. Untethered and shaken by Scorpius's admission of love at the end of their seventh year, and still struggling with the expectations she imagined her father had for her, she made some ill-informed decisions, breaking Scorpius's heart and immediately leaving on an extended World Tour.
Though they could all have done without the heartbreak and three-year rift in their friendship, in many ways, it worked out for the best. In the three years Rose was gone, Scorpius joined the Auror force and was assigned to Ron Weasley's training squad. He earned Rose's father's respect and admiration, something he had not held while they were at school. Rose found a sense of belonging in a trip that had started out as an escape, and by the time she returned to England, she knew what she wanted to do with her life and was well on her way to earning a reputation as a standout International Liaison.
It took some meddling from Al, a push in the right direction from Scorpius's intended Honoria, and some open and long overdue conversations with fathers, but eventually Rose and Scorpius got themselves sorted out and married. A little more meddling and frank conversations saw Al and Honoria get themselves sorted, too.
Lily, Hugo, Lucy
Lily's Career Advice meeting with her Uncle Neville was a wake-up call. Almost overnight, she became a different person. She applied herself to her work and her studies and stopped caring what people thought of her. Teachers who had missed that she was holding back suddenly saw the full extent of her mind and what she was capable of. And over the summer, with Neville's help and gentle prompting, she had a long-dreaded conversation about death with her father.
The conversation went much better than Lily had thought (which Neville would have been happy to tell her if he'd thought she would listen). Harry didn't love the idea of his daughter working in one of the most dangerous departments in the Ministry, but he recognized that as head of the Aurors, he didn't have a lot of room to make objections. And he remembered her childhood interests and comments as vividly as Neville. There was a part of him that would always see her as his little girl and remember the darkest moments of his life, watching her fight for hers, but being with Ginny had taught him that he had to let people grow beyond their weakest moments. So he promised her what he'd promised her mother years ago - he would never lose the urge to protect her, but he could learn not to act on it.
Lily got into the Department of Mysteries with ease, and she flourished. Her entire life, she had dealt with a brain that couldn't be quieted, that was constantly firing in a million different directions at once. But the Department of Mysteries and all its questions and puzzles challenged her and occupied her and gave her the focus she had found in so few other places. She loved it, which came as no surprise to those who knew her well.
Lily's focus throughout school was on magic and its properties and how it impacted her life. Hugo was just the opposite. Magic was always secondary to him. He went to classes and learned the spells because Hogwarts was a school of magic so that was what one did. But there was no class he preferred to his piano. If he wasn't in class or finishing homework, he was in the Room of Requirement, playing away, pouring his heart and soul into the music.
Once, in his third year, he forgot to ask the Room to be soundproof while he practiced, and when he emerged after an hour or two, he was stunned to find the corridor filled with students who had been sitting, listening, enthralled. The attention didn't bother him; he was used to playing for crowds after all. He still toured every summer to play with various orchestras around Europe, and every time he was home for a break, he recorded dozens of videos of his new music, which his grandmother uploaded to YouTube every two weeks like clockwork. So the attention didn't bother him. He was just surprised to find so many students at Hogwarts who cared enough about music to sit and listen to him flit from song to song for two hours. The truth was, half the population was in love with him, but Hugo didn't notice a bit of it until Eli came along.
Hugo fell, and he fell hard, and Eli fell just as hard, but Eli was a Muggleborn with a conservative family, and he couldn't overcome the sense that what he and Hugo had was, on some level, wrong. For three and a half years, Hugo and Eli were on-again-off-again. They'd have three beautiful months of whispered confessions and intense kisses and stolen afternoons in the Room of Requirement, but Hugo wasn't allowed to tell anyone, and the relationship wasn't allowed to leave the Room, and inevitably, something would spook Eli and he would break it off. It didn't matter how many times Hugo tried to tell him that wizards didn't care, that no one would think differently of him or harass him. Eli couldn't shake it. He kept promising he'd be ready to be public one day, but "one day" never came. Finally, in their seventh year, Hugo put an end to things once and for all. His music was what kept him from breaking down entirely.
Upon leaving Hogwarts, Hugo pursued music professionally. There was no Wizarding Music Academy anywhere in the world, but several of the most prestigious conservatories in the world had developed small, underground populations of magical musicians. Any young musician who wanted a spot at one of those conservatories had to be sponsored by a musical magician of an older generation, who put them through rigorous testing and auditioning to ensure that their musical talent was up to snuff. Then and only then would the sponsor perform the necessary bit of fancy wandwork to make the school forget that they'd never seen test scores or secondary school transcripts.
Hugo's sponsor to the Royal Academy of Music was Consuela Sunoz, his piano instructor. But she refused point blank to tell him who else she had sponsored. The expectation of all the young magicians was that they would live as Muggles while they were at the conservatory and not draw attention to themselves.
For the most part, the students obeyed. But there was a coded question Hugo had been taught by one of Consuela's former students, a test of words used to identify other magical students. The wizards and witches always found one another, and in the seventy years since the practice had been started, it had never once failed. At least, not until Hugo, who swore up and down that he had held the coded conversation word for word with the cellist in question, accidentally let an African-American Muggle named Brayden into the inner circle.
It was Molly he went to in a panic, thinking if anyone could get him out of the quagmire he'd created, it was her. His mother may have been the better option, but Hugo didn't want to put a Senior Undersecretary of Magical Law Enforcement into a situation where she'd be forced to lie for her son or have to erase Brayden's memory. So he went to Molly, who listened patiently to Hugo's conundrum, then laughed and said, "Hugo. If nobody knows that Brayden knows except you and him? Just lie about it."
Since Brayden was eager to do anything that would enable him to keep his friendship with Hugo, it was an easy choice. They concocted a magical backstory for him and Hugo taught him everything he'd need to know about the wizarding world to answer any casual questions their mutual friends might ask, and they simply operated in a legal gray area for five years until Hugo proposed and Brayden could officially be read into the Statue of Secrecy.
Lucy's grand Quidditch plan was derailed almost immediately when she made the Hufflepuff team as a reserve Seeker her first year, a whole year ahead of schedule. The Hufflepuff team was so far behind that year that even a win in their final game wouldn't change their overall standing, so the captain let the reservists play. Lucy caught the Snitch in seven and a half minutes, only just missing out on breaking her Uncle Harry's record from his first year.
She landed a spot in the Chasers her second year while also completely revitalizing and reorganizing the Intramural League. When the Hufflepuff captainship came up for grabs her fourth year, it was initially given to the senior seventh year on the team, but she had been watching Lucy since Lucy's arrival. She'd seen Lucy's skill at every position, as well as her ideas for how to improve their training and standing. She wanted to see Hufflepuff finish someplace other than the bottom of the lineup, and she recognized that the surest way to make that happen was with Lucy Weasley at the helm.
And so Lucy became Quidditch Captain at fourteen, right on track.
She let 21 students on the Hufflepuff team that year, tripling the usual size, and there were no permanent Chasers or Beaters or Seekers. Every team member learned every position, trained every position, and she kept careful track of their strengths and weaknesses, building a different team for every match, designed to have the best chance of matching the make-up of the other House teams. Every other team captain laughed at her methods. They stopped laughing when Hufflepuff not only won the Quidditch Cup for the first time in 47 years, but did so with an undefeated season. The summer after her sixth year, Lucy held summer training intensives for all the other House captains, saying it would be nice if someone was able to offer her team at least a hint of competition.
Every team in the league offered her a spot, playing any position she wanted. She could write her own professional Quidditch ticket. Her godfather Oliver wanted her to sign on with his old team, Puddlemere United. Her aunts Ginny and Angelina thought she should join the Holyhead Harpies. And James did everything in his power to get her on the Wigtown Wanderers. "Though that is mostly because I don't want to face you in the arena," he told her, not at all joking.
When she signed on with the Chudley Cannons, the reaction (from everyone except her Uncle Ron, who was thrilled) was incredulous dismay. "Why?" Uncle Oliver demanded. "When you have so much talent, why would you throw it away on a team that's been at the bottom of the League since the League was founded?"
She just looked at him as if he should already know the answer and said simply, "Because when I'm done with them, they won't be."
It took her a few years, but she was good to her word, and in 2030, she was the youngest player named to the English World Cup Team. Japan just edged them out in the final match, not because Lucy as Keeper couldn't keep up with their Chasers, but because Japan's Seeker was phenomenal. In 2034, she was back on the team in her preferred position as Beater, and that year, they took the title. Having earned the ultimate accolade, Lucy Weasley retired from professional Quidditch just as she always planned, a household name. The Department of Magical Games and Sports kept her on reserve to help as needed in the Quidditch world, but she took over from Natalie Creevey as Hogwarts' Flying Instructor, and loved every minute of it.
Roxie, Lorcan, Lysander
Roxie Weasley was Sorted into Slytherin when she got to Hogwarts, and there were plenty of whispers that it had to be some kind of mistake. How could George Weasley's daughter, of all Weasleys, be a Slytherin? Neville Longbottom alone out of all the professors wasn't shocked. "Talk to me tomorrow," was all he would say.
The next day, at the end of the first day of classes, Graham Pritchard, Head of Slytherin House, informed the Headmistress and all the other Heads that Roxie Weasley was asking if there was any rule against her taking O.W.L.s early, and if not, she'd like to be individually assessed to be placed into O.W.L. level classes for Charms, Transfiguration, and Defense Against the Dark Arts. Neville told them all that even if there was a rule against her taking O.W.L.s early (as it turned out, there was not), they should strongly consider bumping her up to a higher class level in those subjects because otherwise, she would be bored out of her mind, given that she could already perform all the spells, flawlessly, non-verbally, and without a wand.
It took only a week of classes and extra assessments for Professors Flitwick, Boot, and Patil to agree that Roxie should be placed in 5th year Charms, Transfiguration, and Defense Against the Dark Arts classes. She tested with the 5th years that June to raised eyebrows from Ministry officials - until they saw her spellwork. She received three Outstanding O.W.L.s at the age of 12 and passed into N.E.W.T. level classes. She was pleased because this enabled her to continue the work she'd started with the Ollivanders when she was nine.
Fred had been right - Garrett Ollivader, ten years Roxie's senior, had been absolutely fascinated by the tiny child in front of him who could do wandless magic by waving her hand through the air. He and his father both put Roxie through her paces again and again, but it was Garrett who took the time to explain to her what they were looking for and testing, and in exchange, she described how she saw magic as best she could.
It was a foregone conclusion from the time she was twelve that Roxie Weasley would one day be working for the Ollivanders and that she would make earth-shattering discoveries about the nature of magic and how it worked. But for all that, she was a remarkably well-adjusted and well-liked kid. She was friendly and open and got along with everyone. Like her oldest cousin before her, she was willing to help anyone with homework or a spell they were struggling with, and her help was an unusual blessing because she could actually see what was going wrong.
She was making wands with the Ollivanders by the time she was thirteen, and working full time at Ollivanders in the summers by sixteen. As soon as she graduated, she was as common a figure as Garrett or his father. She spent the year after graduation at Hogwarts, completing the in-depth studies she'd started as part of her N.E.W.T. work about how different wand elements connected to the wielder and helped to channel different kinds of magic.
Lily was constantly on her to join the Department of Mysteries, but Roxie turned her down with a smile every time. The DoM, she said, cared too much about solving mysteries and keeping them a secret. She wanted what she learned to help the world as much as possible. So she became a full time wandmaker and magical analyst, and after a few years, she married Garrett and became an Ollivander in full.
Lysander Scamander was Sorted into Slytherin just a year after Roxie, but despite being in the same House and near the same age, Lysander rebuffed all overtures of friendship. His disastrous first night in the dorm built walls between him and everyone around him. After all, if his mother couldn't even be trusted, how could he truly trust anyone else?
Lorcan, bewildered by the change in his brother, continued trying to reach out, but Lysander shut him down, first gently, and then gradually more and more harshly until he seemed to get the message.
Lysander didn't want the world to leave him alone, though. Just Lorcan, and whatever band of misfits Lorcan would inevitably fall in with. Lysander wanted what he had always wanted - to be normal. Normal, and undefined by his parents. So he pushed away everything that would make him stand out negatively. He put up with the ridicule from the boys in his dorm, forcing himself to laugh along with them, forcing himself to pretend the incident didn't fill him with anger and shame. Look at my ridiculous mother and the things she told me, that's what he said to redirect whenever the moment came up. If he could show them that he knew how loony his whole family was, he could show them that he was different, which was all he'd ever wanted.
It wasn't until the summer after his sixth year and his brush with El Tunchi in the Amazon Rainforest that Lysander fully came to terms with who he'd become and how far off the mark it was from who he wanted to be.
Lorcan was convinced that if Lysander came back to Hogwarts and just hung out with different people, that would be enough. Lysander knew better, because he knew himself. He knew how easily he would slip into his old patterns because he wasn't brave enough, in the end, to stand up to the version of himself that everyone knew. He knew he couldn't go back to Hogwarts. So he applied to the exchange program at Castelobruxo. New school, new country, new life.
Lorcan had little trouble making friends at Hogwarts. He missed his brother keenly, but he'd always had the knack of adjusting to new places and new situations with ease. He had no patience for those with disparaging things to say about his mother, and he cared very little about social standing or status. He fell in easily with Roxie Weasley as soon as she sat herself across from him at the Hufflepuff table, despite being a Slytherin, and asked if his brother was always so difficult. He became good friends, too, with Maddie Longbottom, who he knew a bit from his pre-Hogwarts life. The Longbottoms were old friends of his parents, and they'd always made a point of visiting when they were home in England for any stretch. When Roxie's cousin Lou came to school, he joined their group, along with Callie Dursley, and the five of them, spread out across all four of Hogwarts' Houses, became an unintentional beacon of Interhouse Unity that the older generation had been watching and hoping for.
He had plans, for his final year at Hogwarts. But then the trip to the Amazon had happened, and Lysander had announced he was transferring to Castelobruxo, and Lorcan had to make a choice. It was one of the hardest choices he'd ever made, but at the heart of it quite simple. He couldn't abandon his brother.
This time when they found themselves confronted with the unknown, they were together, navigating it as one. It was slightly astounding to discover that while everyone here knew who their parents were, just like at Hogwarts, at Castelobruxo where Herbology and Magizoology were the focuses, no one had anything but the utmost respect for Luna Lovegood and Rolf Scamander.
It took two weeks for someone to ask them if it was true, had they really found El Tunchi in the forest that summer. That student was a Muggleborn who had grown up with the stories, and Lysander became fascinated by how many magical creatures popped up in Muggle stories of one kind or another. He started studying and collecting these overlaps as part of a class project, and he never really gave it up. Lorcan was no less fascinated, and so it was that they stumbled unwittingly into what they would spend the rest of their lives doing - collecting and publishing Muggle stories of magical creatures for wizards and witches to read and enjoy.
Callie, Maddie, Louis
Callie Dursley was Sorted into Ravenclaw and started asking questions from the moment she set foot in the castle - about magic, about history, about the wizarding world in general. Very few people had the energy to keep up with her, and the only person who did so with an enthusiasm that matched her own was Maddie Longbottom.
Maddie Longbottom fascinated Callie, because they were magical opposites. Maddie had been born to magical parents but had no magic. Callie was a witch born to Muggles. For the daughter of a geneticist who had long wanted to be a geneticist herself, this raised more questions than she could possibly answer, and she was dismayed to find that no one at Hogwarts could answer them, either.
She was also dismayed to find out, at the end of her first year, that Hogwarts would not be offering her any classes in maths or science or geography, or anything that a Muggle institution would use to admit her to a school of higher learning. She admitted to her parents that summer that she wasn't sure she could go back.
It wasn't that she didn't love Hogwarts - she did. She loved it more than any place she had ever been. She felt at home there, like she belonged. But she couldn't become a geneticist without getting into university. She couldn't get into university without passing A levels. And she couldn't pass those tests if she spent the next six years studying Charms and Herbology and Potions instead of maths and science and literature. She wanted both, but how were both possible?
It was her mother who came up with the solution. She would still attend Hogwarts and study magic during the week. And on the weekends, she would study a Muggle curriculum that Suzanne Dursley would oversee. "We'll call it homeschooling," her mother said right before Callie launched herself across the settee into her mother's arms.
Maddie was the first to ask her why she suddenly had no free time on the weekends for pick-up Quidditch or Broomstick Dodgeball or just hanging out around the lake. When Callie explained what she was doing, something she said resonated with Maddie in a way she had never anticipated. "When you're Muggleborn," she said, "they tell you that if you don't want to be a wizard when you're done with school, you can go back to living a Muggle life. But you can't, not really. You can't be part of both worlds if you're only educated by one."
That was the day Maddie asked if she could learn the Muggle subjects, too.
Maddie started taking a full roster of classes the year she would have been a first year. It was entirely unofficial, of course, given that she was a Squib. She was not Sorted, so she floated around from House to House for classes, usually landing with Ravenclaws or Gryffindors to be with Callie or Louis, but taking Herbology with the Hufflepuffs and Lorcan, since she was a good few years ahead in knowledge there, having basically grown up in the greenhouses with her father.
She had a wand, but it was mostly for show. Roxie had helped her pick it out, but it had never worked for her. She kept it in her bag but barely touched it. While the rest of the students practiced wandwork, she doubled down on learning magical theory with Roxie. It was the perfect fit because the classes Maddie couldn't work magic in were the very classes Roxie had tested out of as a first year. Now a fourth year, Roxie had already achieved her N.E.W.T.s in Charms, Transfiguration, and Defense Against the Dark Arts, so she had the time to teach Maddie, whose entire focus was on passing each and every one of her O.W.L.s.
Louis Weasley was the final member of the Squad, as Callie had dubbed them. It had never been his intention to fall in with Roxie, Lorcan, Callie, and Maddie. He'd fully expected to spend most of his time at Hogwarts with the boys his age from Tinworth who he already knew. But then those boys refused to sit with Maddie Longbottom because she was a Squib, and Louis, a Gryffindor to his core, had told them all off thoroughly and publicly.
He told anyone who would listen that Maddie Longbottom was smarter than he was, by a long shot. He was glad to have Lorcan in the Squad, because when the girls all started chatting a mile a minute about magical theory and wands as conduits for magical currents, it was nice to have someone to lock eyes with and silently communicate that, yeah, this was over their head, too. Not that he begrudged them. He thought they were brilliant, the lot of them. But it was nice to break up the out-of-classroom lectures every so often and go school the four of them on the Quidditch pitch. Maddie could beat him at Broomstick Dodgeball - the girl was a fiend and utterly ruthless - but he flew rings around her with a Quaffle in his hands.
Callie, Maddie, and Lou all passed their O.W.L.s with flying colors. Callie and Lou each earned 10; Maddie earned 11 - Outstandings in everything except Charms, Transfiguration, and Defense Against the Dark Arts, where she earned Acceptables on the strength of her practical and theoretical knowledge. Callie and Lou stood beside her at the meeting of the Board of Governors she attended that summer when she dropped her test results on the desk in front of Governor Hornby and repetitioned for the right to be admitted as a student to Hogwarts. This time the motion passed, 7 to 5.
Callie and Maddie took their G.C.S.E.s the next summer with equal success. They agreed to spend their seventh year entirely focused on the wizarding world and their N.E.W.T.s. After graduation from Hogwarts, they turned their attentions to Muggle A levels. Callie convinced Maddie to move out of Hogwarts for the first time in her life and live with her in her parents' home for the year, studying. Then they went to uni together at the University of London. Callie studied genetics and molecular biology. Maddie studied Literature and fell in love with the theatre. She also fell in love with Callie, and they were very happy together.
Callie and Roxie never stopped searching for answers about what made people magical or Muggle and their discoveries revolutionized the ways that magic was understood for generations to come. Maddie eventually took a teaching post at the Wizarding Academy for the Dramatic Arts, continuing to live her life surrounded by magic of all kinds.
Louis's seventh year at Hogwarts was his niece Celeste's first, and he couldn't help but feel it was appropriate. It felt like something coming full circle. Louis was Head Boy his seventh year, and Co-Quidditch Captain for Gryffindor. He was confident and likeable, comfortable in his own skin, and hidden in no one's shadow. People of course made comparisons to his father and uncles and sisters. But Louis didn't mind. He knew who he was and what he was a part of, and he made sure Celeste knew, too. He and Callie and Maddie made a big deal of passing on the Map (kept safely from his Uncle Harry and Maddie's father for their full seven years) as his final year at Hogwarts drew to a close.
Lou didn't know, upon leaving Hogwarts, exactly what he wanted to do with his life. But he was at least secure in the knowledge that he had plenty of family, friends, and connections waiting to help him figure it out, which was as it should be.
In the end, they were all just pieces.
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