#made by gina

   Lily Potter was twenty, prophecy in her belly, love in her whole being. At times, she was vain, willful, and prone to intrude, but a year later no one would remember those parts of her; only her kindness and love would survive her. Her kindness and love would end the war.

[ficlets by hpedit]

THE HOGWARTS UNDERGROUND CHESS SOCIETY

    Hogwarts castle morphed along with its inhabitants’ secrets. Whims and wars lay groundwork for hidden rooms and protection spells that trickled silently through the generations, forgotten until some intrepid student dared to push a little further into the shadows.
   Twenty years passed before the underground chambers were uncovered again. Their purpose fulfilled, the chambers protected little but rubble and rusted keys… and an impressively large chessboard that filled the fourth room, complete with life-sized pieces that sprang to life with a touch.
   But they would obey no commands until a player took the place of one of the pieces.
   Playing the board became a rite of passage for daring Wizard’s Chess enthusiasts. The best—and some say, the most merciless—of such students formed the Underground Chess Society, the school’s first secret society since the war. Ascension was bloody, for rising in their ranks required playing head-to-head games to completion, and a win no longer necessarily required felling a king; having a knight draw its sword on a classmate forced to stand in for the bishop would do just as well. And the more one played, the less one hesitated to make the move…

[ficlets by hpedit]

    Every November, Slytherins sponsored an all-school lake party, being “the hottest house in the coolest of seasons.” The shore lined with warming lamps, beach chairs, and students in confusing swimsuit patterns. Gladrags sold out of their mood-changing argyle-print swim trunks, though no one could fathom a reason why they were fashionable that season. (“Magical subversive marketing! They’re literally charming your brain!”)
     The main event was the Swim-Off—a four-way capture the flag game played in the water. The rules became more elaborate every year, per usual of magical society’s sports, with addendums for everything from giant squid intervention to rubber duck usage. No one knew the full scoring and penalty system, and as a result, the winning house changed depending on who you asked. Everyone cheated, anyway.

[ficlets by hpedit-the next gen capersverse]

    Ginny learned of satellites when one was masquerading as the tip of Orion’s bow.
    "Are they like stars?“ she asked, and Professor Sinistra chuckled and explained how Muggles used them to study the world and the universe beyond.
    Ginny liked imagining them as pretenders still—false stars altering divinations and shooting across the sky to be wished upon. As if humanity was doing everything in its power to build their own fates.

[more ficlets by hpedit]

part i. the dreaming cynic/part ii. the cynical dreamer

    Her idea. His money. End goal: an electricity-to-magic converter.
     The idea—amazing. Revolutionary.
     Actually collaborating together—terrible, bloody awful nightmare.
     No one outside of Scorpius and Bea’s friends understood what they were doing, although their reputations preceded their partnership. Bea Chang was Weird. She looked weird, smelled weird, talked weird (“for the last time, physics not psychics”)—because of her explosion-prone inventing, but the fact remained. Scorpius Malfoy was arguably weirder with his rainbow tartan blazers and blathering on economics, but his eccentricities were explained away by money—that is, he had so much money, he obviously had no idea how to exist around poorer folk, which was everyone except his paramour Anjali.
     Behind the scenes, the two were just trying to get the converter to work. And not kill each other. Scorpius was an over-managing financier, who huffed whenever anything went wrong and poked everything like he owned it. Bea was the classic prodigy: unyielding, indelicate, and kept unsustainable habits. On paper, their partnership was a terrible idea and in action, it was worse. Bea endured it. She would grit her teeth into powder to get what she wanted, because there was no other way. People like Scorpius—they didn’t have to do anything, ever. He dropped galleons like he breathed them, and galleons in enough quantity was as good as a wish-granting djinn. Could he blame her for being snippy?
     Her dreams were bigger than his. All he wanted was a shiny new toy for his family’s company, while she saw the plight of the Muggleborns, the half-bloods, the split families across Britain. She knew firsthand how swiftly the knife flew down these invisible boundaries when the Ministry threatened to Obliviate her Muggle dad for trying to use magical studies in his science research. She couldn’t blame Dad for leaving, as much as she wanted him to feel like she did. She missed him, mostly.
     How much better could her magical world be when it enveloped children into reliance, made reconciling their old lives impossible, and made family too fearful to question it?

[ficlets by hpedit-the next gen capersverse]

part i. the dreaming cynic/part ii. the cynical dreamer

    Scorpius was a dreamer first and an entrepreneur second. Don’t tell his father.
    Malfoy & Co. was the biggest British conglomerate of the new millennium, making its fortune absorbing businesses and homogenizing the market i.e. taking other people’s ideas and marketing it better. Wizards had been slow to adopt mass production of specialized wares, and Father had been the first to capitalize on manufacturing via duplication. Scorpius couldn’t reconcile that young pioneer with the rigid executive of today, but whenever he asked about the past, Mother would snap at him to be quiet. They didn’t talk about the war in this house.
    “Innovation isn’t always profitable. Internally, rarely, and you have to find the right moment,” his father said when he was in good enough mood to humor his son. “Put the same time and money into doing what we already do best and we’d make ten times the amount easy. Don’t underestimate the fear of change; let some upstart test the waters. Imagine what a blunder would do to our reputation, to our investors. You can’t untarnish a name.”
    Said the man who had done the very thing.
    Scorpius had wised up to his father’s roundaboutness long ago: it would never be the right moment. But he couldn’t wait. He’d seen the Muggles. They’d gone to the moon and beyond. They had ways to talk to anyone, anywhere in the world—sometimes, even the whole world at once—while wizards were still communicating through methods that left a mess on the Great Hall table. Wizards needed to look at the Muggles, he wanted to say, but he wouldn’t dare bring up such a topic after the last time he tried.
    Unfortunately, he didn’t know what Malfoy & Co. could actually do; he was shit at ideas. He liked the idea of ideas. One couldn’t fail at an idea when it hadn’t come to fruition yet. It was the wide-open possibility—the impossibility of them—of proving his father wrong. Impossible only meant it wasn’t yet possible.

    Sixth year, it became possible.

[ficlets by hpedit-the next gen capersverse]

     At school, Peter was Remus’ closest friend. Peter was his study partner most years, as neither Sirius nor James could behave for an hour straight in the library. They’d squander their afternoons together too, when they couldn’t find their friends soon enough to make the time before dinner useful.
     Sirius and James—they were exuberant. They would conquer the ground they walked on, mouths wide and cackling, as if they could swallow the world. Remus was ever grateful for their friendship—their acceptance had saved him and he would never speak a bad word about it—but he couldn’t say that Sirius and James truly understood like Peter did. Walking in their friends’ shadow together, taunted by the ease a few feet ahead. The envy of it. Sirius and James could swallow the world, but Remus could never swallow the moon and keep it dark forever. He could never wield that brightness with how it stirred his blood and how he craved for the nights when the moon was skinny.
     Peter knew the hopelessness of it, griping along instead of offering false encouragement, and they’d revel in their cynicism until the dinner bell tolled. Remus was just as grateful for that.

[ficlets by hpedit]