#I'm sort of Gryffindor's legacy people with TALK they'll blame my UNCLE for not having time for me and I'm SUPPOSED to be Gryffindor

[goonlalagoon]

The Academy of Witchcraft and Wizardry || Leagues and Legends

A few months back I wrote a Leagues & Legends/Hogwarts AU as a birthday present for a friend who’s also a huge fan of the books, and figured I may as well post it here!

When Laney Jones goes under the sorting hat, her back is perfectly straight and her face is placid, relaxed. Her hands fold neatly in her lap, and none of the students and professors think she’s anything other than calm, maybe even disinterested. 

Internally, she quite seriously threatens the Hat with a fiery death if it spits out her secret. The threat alone would probably merit Gryffindor, but the Hat isn't easily swayed by mere stunts. When the rip along it's hem opens, it sends her to Slytherin.

(Such a thirst to prove yourself. You'll do well there)

She's practically a squib. She makes no attempts to claim otherwise, because if you say you're Merlin reborn everyone watches you, but when they think you're a step away from being a muggle they take the fact that you got some coloured sparks as a victory, even if you're supposed to be turning a matchstick into a needle. Pride is one thing, but Laney knows that sometimes you have to let people think poorly of you so they won't look too close. 

She excels in herbology, potions, and magical theory. She won't excel at History of Magic until her second year, because she is unequipped both for professor Binns and for the way all of the magical history she knew was geographically removed from everything they covered in class.

(Laney Jones isn't a squib; her mother is a squib, so that effectively makes Laney a muggle. Her brother is a wizard, though she hasn't seen him since she was eight. She scours the Prophet every morning, because she still thinks her big brother is the centre of the world)

Rupert Hammersfeld had already read every History of Magic text book on Hogwarts' seven year book list at least once by the time he was ten. He stays awake in Binns' classes making detailed notes anyway, but most of them are his own thoughts and recalled external sources. Rupert likes history; his mother is a curse breaker, and so he knows plenty of non euro-centric history from her, and his uncle made sure to teach him at least some of the history of the parts of India their ancestors hailed from as well. He writes out theoretical alternate lesson plans when he's done transcribing his years-old notes on the British goblin wars.

He's read a lot of textbooks over the years, curled up in the Hogwarts library in the holidays. He watched years worth of students pass through the halls before it was his turn, helping his uncle with the paperwork and quietly finding the homesick kids at weekends with his palms full of hot-chocolate and handkerchiefs tucked into his pockets. 

His uncle fretted, sometimes, that he couldn't give Rupert as much time as he deserved. The world outside thought he did, of course he did, the headmaster of Hogwarts having to raise a child, it was a wonder he had any time for the boy at all. They sniffed and murmured about how irresponsible, how unseemly, it was for that Elizabeth to have not only had a child out of wedlock but to have then left it with her respectable, long-suffering brother to raise while she ran wild. 

He was pure-blooded (that his father had magic at his fingertips was one of the few things Rupert knew, not because his mother gave two figs about blood status but because one of the few stories she shared of him included the elegance of his preserving spells), from a line that could trace itself back to the Founders, and he just wanted everything to be orderly, calm, and safe. He spends ten and a half minutes under the hat, discussing where he should go. The hat is quite adamant, but Rupert knows how people would talk and takes a while to convince.

(Usually, the hat accepts a direct request to go into a certain house - but this is from a self-imposed sense of obligation, and under it there’s a strong sense that the hat’s option would be really nice, actually, so it insists)

The Hufflepuffs and the Slytherins don't have any first year classes together; for historic reasons they tend to be paired with the Ravenclaws, which suits Rupert quite well. He's from a family of Gryffindors, but they can be a bit...much, sometimes. He’s all for chivalry and protecting those who need it, but from a lifetime in the castle he’s familiar with just how often the Gryffindor common room exists in a state of chaos.

He's aware of the black almost-squib in his year anyway, of course. He watched his fellow first years arrive on the boats, matching names to faces as they were called up to the front of the Great Hall, noted houses. And you could never escape the gossip - a castle full of teenagers lived on rumour and hearsay.

Rupert sneaks down to Hogsmede regularly, to meet up with Sez and Bart. He slips past Laney in the halls or out on the grounds, unseen, and he says nothing to anyone - not that there was a student out of bed, or about the mix of muggle tricks and magical practical jokes she was carefully practising with, night after night.

They don't meet properly until third year, when they chose between the optional subjects and classes became more widely mixed between the four houses. Laney takes Ancient Runes, Arithmancy, Care of Magical Creatures and Muggle Studies. She doesn't particularly like the sound of muggle studies, but she knows her own grades - the extra work is worth it, she figures, for that number of perfect grades to outweigh her abysmal practical demonstrations. Besides, she's eyeing the idea of a political career, and she figures it wouldn't hurt to be officially Able To Speak the Muggle Lingo.

Rupert signs up for all of the same subjects except for Muggle Studies as well, so their schedules rather abruptly align almost completely. It's several weeks into third year before Rupert (hesitantly) offers her the recipe to a colour changing powder he'd found in a market stall, one summer visiting his mother. Laney had been hiding dyes up her sleeves and hidden in bracelets for years, turning mice green when she was supposed to make them into a pin cushion. The Dozen Drop Dyes she’s been using are expensive, and require active enchantment to make. A powder is in several ways easier to hide, and it’s something she can make herself with the help of a few magical ingredients.

She drops her Magical Theory books down next to him in the library the next day because he'd been struggling with the underpinnings of Gamp's Exceptions (again. It just didn't make sense! What was different about food? He could conjure wooden furniture, but he couldn't conjure spices that were made from dried bark. It wasn't logical) and Laney was painfully aware of anything even close to a debt.

By the end of the year, she would be trading notes and explanations because it was easier to study together than alone. He would be occasionally transfiguring things in class for her, always partially and always incorrect, and talking her through the non-magical defences he'd learnt over the years of helping Sez and Bart track down dangers in the streets of Hogsmede and the edges of the Forest.

At the start of their fourth year, there are  two arrivals of particular note. One is a red-head who towers over the first years, and the other is short even by the standards of his cohort. Farris, Jack, goes into Gryffindor. Sanders, Grey, has an extended period under the hat and is finally sent to Ravenclaw.

(Jack thinks the hat sounds a bit grudging about it)

It turns out that Jack is actually in their year, a transfer student. When asked where from, he shrugs and says "here and there", which people generally take as either home schooled, or expelled from every other magical school in the world, because it turns out that Jack gets into fights the way most people breathe.

It isn't even duelling; magic is rarely involved. Rupert half-suspects that's intentional. After all, when you're fighting someone over the fact that they've just said something dismissive about the muggleborn, sending them to the hospital wing with a broken nose without drawing your wand at all does rather illustrate the point. Rupert lectures him about fighting and files neat, official complaints and sends home form-written teacher’s notes where it will help.

(Grey slips safely beneath the radar, by and large. He doesn't get letters at breakfast, but occasionally he'll find a book he's never seen with his name on the fly leaf in the Ravenclaw common room. Spider had been at Hogwarts, once upon a time, and he used to slip out to Hogsmede, and after all -  the Ravenclaw tower was guarded only by riddles.

This was all immaterial, given he could also turn into a spider at will, but at heart Spider appreciated the detail of these things)

Laney and Rupert quickly discover that it is very difficult not to like Jack. He seems permanently cheerful, but has a streak of dark humour that never fails to make Laney snicker. His magic is all over the place, which Rupert marks down to his haphazard teaching. Some of the fourth year material  is old hat to him, and some of their first year spells are novelties.

He also has a distressing (to Rupert, at least) tendency to wander at will into the Forbidden Forest. Rupert makes sad sounds whenever he catches Jack wandering in or out of the trees, and ignores the guilty awareness that he's been gradually working on containing an acromantula infestation in there for years. 

Laney tells Jack she isn't even an almost-squib, magically speaking, early in their fifth year. She had thought about it the summer before but she couldn't bring herself to do it. She's too used to secrecy, and she can't just hand this over to someone without knowing for certain that they won't let it slip. He stares at her, delighted, and immediately produces a battered jacket imbued with a shield charm. She pours over it, and he promises to write to the friend who made it for him to see if she can be persuaded to share her secrets. 

Laney and Rupert are too busy with their own studies to help Jack catch up on the patches in his own past learnings completely, so he’s had a mismatch of tutors since the professors first realised he was missing several foundations. Somehow he ends up being taught second year Charms by the runty first year he shared a boat over with. Grey trades off time running Jack through old class notes borrowed from Laney and Rupert to explain things he hasn't necessarily studied yet himself for time going over the material the fifth years are currently studying. 

(Grey is vaguely considering taking his OWLs early, except then he'd take the NEWTs early too, and he'd be stuck out in the world with stunning grades but no legal guardians, too young to do things like rent a flat or get a job even with his forged papers placing him as a few years older than he actually is)

Jack gets letters sporadically, usually accompanied by pictures covered in sticky fingerprints. They rarely seem to be delivered by the same bird twice, until he goes home to Mexico for one winter break, Grey in tow. They have a great time, even if Grey complains about the heat, but he also notices that none of the family know anything about what their youngest has been up to for the past six years. 

He corners Jack about it once they're back at Hogwarts, in a roundabout way, and it spills out - the one magical son in an entirely muggle home, except for a mother who had some magical relatives and extended family friends in several different countries. They'd fabricated an excuse for why he was leaving home, and Jack hadn't gone back since. His mother had been insistent that it would be good for him, better than staying at the local underground schools or going to the closer boarding school in America, even if she hadn't been able to verbalise why. She just knew.

His mother had been quite keen to hear what he'd been up to since he ran away from school, but Grey knows he wasn't supposed to have heard that conversation and won’t be getting any answers if he asks.

Laney listens closely, peers sidelong at Grey, and smirks at them both. 

"Well, I had to forge enough paperwork to get onto the Hogwarts register and fool my mother." While Grey splutters at the new information, Rupert tilts his head and asks ‘why Hogwarts’. She's never spoken about this before, and he hadn't wanted to pry. Laney shrugs. 

"Uagadou acceptance can't be faked, and I was actually born in England - mom and dad were over for a year living with my uncle, diplomatic stuff - so it was just feasible that I would have gone onto their register not Uagadou's." She smiles, sharp. "And anyway, everyone at Uagadou uses gestures not a wand, so magic would be a lot harder to fake."

They derail into a conversation about different schools of magic. If Rupert or Laney find it odd that Grey goes quiet when they mention Mahoutokoro, the school of magic closest to his home town (though they don't know this, precisely, just that he has a certain face structure and accent, and a tendency to slip into Japanese when he’s grumbling over books without realising), neither mention it. 

Jack waxes unexpectedly, passionately lyrical about how colour coding robes is harsh and minimising and biased anyway, because it rewards grades not effort, and some of the more flashy, non-grade related ingrained colour shifts follow no reasonable pattern, with no care for context.

Did you know that if you kill an aggressive giant with a third year spell you'd use to play pranks on your friends every week (and a lot of luck), your robes turn shimmering gold for 'services to the community'? But if you kill a rampaging dragon as it tries to eat you after razing an entire village with a curse you've only heard of and never dreamt of using, they'll go white as snow.

The year Laney, Rupert and Jack reach their sixth year of school, Grey is finally old enough to go to Hogsmede with them - well. According to his paperwork, anyway. They had offered to take him before through the hidden passage Rupert preferred for getting to the village to meet Sez, but he'd waved an ink specked hand to decline because he was too recognisable, too obviously not old enough to be on a Hogsmede trip, and that meant he wouldn't be allowed into the bookstore, so what even was the point?

Jack cheerfully trails Grey into the bookstore, holding a growing pile of books and trying (and failing) to see any kind of rhyme and reason behind the collection. Laney peels off to the joke shop to buy a few new toys. She comes out with a mental list of other purchases for Rupert, Jack, or Sez to pick up for her later to make sure nobody draws too many connections to her.

Rupert wanders around the local houses with his pack full of gifts he's carefully brought down from the castle - a pepper up potion brewed with better ingredients than a family could afford, a handful of pages carefully transcribed from an old rare book that only existed in three collections in the world for someone's research, several bags of cookies baked in a corner of the kitchens (the house elves had gotten used to this when Rupert was a child and didn't panic too much nowadays) to hand out to anyone he knows is having a bit of a rough patch, or will just appreciate a friendly visit.

They meet up at Sally-Anne's place as always, because it's good, cheap food and Rupert wouldn't dream of going anywhere else unless required by circumstance to be a Noble Example of a Pureblood Son.

(Sally had inherited the Hog's Head not more than a couple of years ago, but she's been practically running it since she was fifteen so everyone thinks of it as Sally-Anne's)

When Rupert arrive there are already textbooks scattered over his favourite booth. He, Jack and Laney all have a Care of Magical Creatures group project to work on. Grey is theoretically working on his own History of Magic essay, but is actually pouring wide eyed over their notes. Jack is waving his hands as he talks at length about dragon communications to an increasingly fascinated Grey and a frustrated Laney, because none of this is in any of the five books she's read, Farris, where are your sources - Rupert nudges her as he sits down, because while the mystery of Jack's sporadic yet strangely specific knowledge base is something they both agree they need to get to the bottom of, they've also agreed they should probably make sure they do it somewhere they can't be overheard, given how much he slides away from it.

Halfway through doodling a dragon (it's supposed to be a Liondragon, but Jack knows it's a poor copy of the carved sketches he's spent years watching George leave on tables, support beams and pieces of firewood) Jack feels a chill on the back of his neck, and shrugs it off as residual paranoia. 

The window explodes a moment later, and he pushes himself thoughtfully up from the scattered glass.

"Huh, so I guess that was an anti-apparition ward being set." He tries to explain this to the aggressive fellow Gryffindor who's loudly threatening to go fetch the aurors, and winds up tearing up his robes to act as a tourniquet because he isn't carrying any dittany and it's not like he's going to be given his wand back to actually repair the splinching wound anyway so he needs to do something.

Laney catches his eye as the two searching men start tearing up the floor in search of the rumoured tunnel to Hogwarts. She's fiddling with the bracelet on her left wrist, a dark wooden bangle with - if Jack remembers correctly - some constellation etched onto it. Rupert goes very still beside him, eyes apparently fixed on Sally shouting furiously at the Wizards tearing up her pub.

The hidden compartment on Laney's bangle flips open, and the room is abruptly plunged into night as it fills with dark mist. Jack lunges forwards towards the wizard holding their wands, and rolls cheerfully to his feet amid the sound of them clattering to the floor. From somewhere off to his left he can hear the loud oof of someone who has just been punched in the guts and probably hasn't been in a fight other than a magical duel since he was ten and doesn't remember how to roll with the punches.

In the dark, Jack grins.

#Remember the Dust #Beanstalk #Echoes of a Giantkiller #leagues and legends #L&L fic #L&L!Hogwarts AU #Laney Jones #Rupert Hammersfeld #Jack Farris #Sanders Grey #This is a bit jumpy and no particular plot but it was fun #I went back and forth on which house Rupe should be in for ages #Because he screams Puff to me in a lot of ways #but I could be swayed to Ravenclaw as well #and I feel like baby Rupe would sit there going #No I should be Gryffindor #I'm sort of Gryffindor's legacy people with TALK they'll blame my UNCLE for not having time for me and I'm SUPPOSED to be Gryffindor #but I decided that the hat would go nope not the right reason to make yourself miserable I know what your uncle thinks and it is not that yo #u are a disappoinment if you don't wear the family colours #George is still running around in Japan learning magic on the down low from Bea #I...didn't decide what happened to Liam #Grey's dad is a squib but one who took it A LOT LESS GRACEFULLY than Laney's mom #Hence why Grey had to run somewhere else to get his education #Also yeah I was really struggling for a nice title for this one so #my writing