fic: harry potter gen. //crossposting.
I like to archive fic in my own journal - because comms etc might one day be deleted - or not, but I'm paranoid about stuff like there.
So behind cut are the stories I wrote for springtime_gen last year. First one is about Peter; the second one is Longbottom-centric.
Title: Live His Life to the Fullest
Author: fivil
Recipient's name: das_kabinett
Rating: PG-13
Character(s): Peter (mentions of Weasleys, Marauders, Voldemort)
Author's notes: It's rather angsty but hopefully more than that, too. My beta knows who she is.
Peter is missing a hand.
Sometimes, it feels like he's missing a lot more. Pieces of his past, opportunities missed, that sort of thing. He'd rather not look back on it all but at times he has to, even though it's risky - Master could peek into his mind at almost any moment. But it's easier to look back than it is to look forward, where there will be much death and a possible loss, loss of everything he has right now or rather, doesn't have.
He doesn't have much to lose but he's never been one to take the easy way out, in his mind.
*
He remembers when Ronald first held him, the freckled palms surrounding him and he hoped that the boy wouldn't drop him like his brother used to. Ron didn't he just looked at Peter and smiled, and took him upstairs to his new home, the room across his old home.
Peter was Scabbers for a long time, a time he enjoyed and liked, and occasionally misses nowadays, when there's not much but insecurity and fear - and it's now that he actually feel like a rat, hiding in a dirty corner somewhere, eating garbage. In the Weasley home Peter was Scabbers and Scabbers was family.
Peter could've had a family, maybe, he thinks every now and then, he thinks they all could've, him and Remus and Sirius and James. (He tries not to remind himself that James did have a family. He tries not to remember these things, these painful turning points in history. Sometimes he's successful at forgetting.)
*
Peter is not a coward in his own mind. He knows other people disagree, probably disagree a lot.
But in his mind, it's like this: You have two choices, you always have at least two choices. One of them is easy, the other one is difficult. He could've not betrayed his friends and died. This would've, in the long run, proven to be the easier choice. Peter didn't take the easy way out.
Sometimes he attempts to make it all logical and then he hears a laugh.
You're a coward, the Dark Lord says inside Peter's head, and Peter knows he's right. It's just difficult to admit this because he's not them, he's not ...evil. He's a bad person, he knows, but he can't help thinking he doesn't deserve this, all of this, everything so tragic and hopeless.
But he made a choice, and he went with the choice that comes with hardships, the type he just has to endure.
*
In the Weasley household, Peter had a family. His own had never been very interesting or very loving but at the Weasleys he experienced family like he never had before - the warmth, the heated arguments, the cold silences, doors both slammed and slowly shut. Everything that came along with living with a family, and he enjoyed it.
Later on he rarely looks back on his days in the Burrow, because as lovely as the memories are, or perhaps because of that, he doesn't want the Dark Lord to be in on them. They are Peter's and only his.
He learned to know them, his family. He saw Arthur and Molly argue, when Ron accidentally left him downstairs once. He saw Ron cry from anger and sometimes from pain, and like any pet, he tried to make his owner feel better. He didn't know if he helped at all, but Ron's smile as he picked up Scabbers and bumped his nose against the rat's, seemed to say so.
Scabbers wasn't allowed to the dinner table, but Ron took him to most places he went to himself. This included Hogwarts. The moment they arrived, Peter felt a presence he hadn't felt in a long time. He didn't like it. From that moment on, he became a rat.
Not a rat like he had been, the one who lived in comfort and warmth, had plenty to eat and was generally happy. He suddenly became a rat whose heart was filled with fear and terror, a rat who hid and ran and cowered, and shivered in the cold. A sewer rat. A disgusting one.
*
Ron lost him once.
Of course in Peter's mind, Ron didn't lose him, he himself wanted to get lost. So he did, during a field trip one time. There was a sheet the family had spread on the grass, and they had brought lunch and dessert in a basket Molly had carried. Ginny was setting up plates and forks for all nine of them, and one tiny plate for Scabbers. Ron was planning to put little bits of food on it for his rat to enjoy.
Peter remembers the plate and how he still escaped and ran as fast as his little rat feet could carry him. He found a river that flowed fast and he found a road with cars moving 70 miles per hour, and he considered crossing that road.
He had no reason to do it, of course. He was very happy on that moment, very happy being a member of the Weasley family, with his own little plate and own little serving of bits of food. He didn't think he'd have to go back to his past. He wanted to die as a content rat with no fears, no desires. Quit while he was still ahead.
But that would've been taking the easy way out to him, so he did not cross the road, but ran back to Ron, who picked him up. They went home, Peter balancing on Ron's shoulder, and years and years later, Peter looks back on that moment and tries not to feel anything, sadness, happiness, nostalgia.
*
He remembers all the times in school when they were about to go off and do something really ridiculous all in the name of adventure, and he was worried because their adventures usually involved him being the one whose robes would tear or ankle would get twisted and hurt. Then he'd look at Remus, who'd smile and shrug and Sirius, who wouldn't look back, and James, who'd hook his arm around Peter's neck and ruffle his hair.
“Come on, Peter, you've got to live your life to the fullest!” James would say.
“Turning all of Snape's wardrobe yellow is living life to the fullest?” Peter would ask and then, being hopelessly infected by James' joy, he'd grin himself. “All right. I'll go drop off my books in the dormitory and join you in a minute.”
He did live life to the fullest. And James, the one who was most eager to, never had the chance. Peter tries to block out the memory because it doesn't feel right, or fair, and yet, it's the only way he's here himself.
*
The question isn't whether he'd rather be a happy dead body or an unhappy traitor, because he's already both, in a way. The moments he realises this, and that he's not really missing a past, he's just missing a past of his own liking, should feel calming.
They don't.
Sometimes he turns into a rat and hides in dirt, because he feels like it, and then he looks back on summer days and picnics, school days and adventure. He did live his life to the fullest. The thing he most regrets about it is that sometimes he doesn't feel bad that he did. Not bad at all.
-----
Title: Nimbus, Or How to Share a Moment with Family
Author: fivil
Recipient's name: bryonyraven
Rating: PG
Character(s): Neville, Frank, Alice.
Warnings (if any): -
Author's notes (if any): Hope this suits your tastes - I tried writing them together but it turned out too Alice/Frank to be called gen. Perhaps I'll put those scribblings online once the writer identities are revealed. I found nothing certain about Frank & Alice's DOB's in canon or the Lexicon, so I wrote it so that they both began their first year at Hogwarts in 1965. Oh, and I improvised Alice's mother name, too. My beta knows who she is and I thank her.
1998
Neville is lying outside the Hogwarts castle, on the greenest patch of grass close to the lake, a large oak somewhere nearby. He can feel the grass tickling his palm, everything growing beneath him. He presses his palm against the ground, trying to feel the movement of earth. He's glad things are still growing, nature working the way it always has.
It's not impossible to imagine a different kind of today, a gray one, the ground burned and dead.
He is 17 years old and he's lived through a war. He's fought and been wounded and survived, and as true as the sky is blue this afternoon, he is proud of himself.
What will you do with your life now, he hears a question somewhere in the back of his head. He lets it sail by, much like the idle cloud passing his vision on the otherwise clear sky.
He doesn't answer the question, doesn't want to. It doesn't feel like it should matter right now. There is so much future ahead of him now, and for the first time ever he isn't frightened, isn't worried. He just wants to live the now.
He hears someone call out his name. It's the day of the Leaving Feast. There's much ruckus, much celebration going on in the castle. Joy in every fibre of air.
Standing up, he feels free.
1970
Frank always wanted to be something grand, a name commonly recognised as an achiever of many great things. If he'll fail this Transfigurations exam, however, he won't be. Grand, or otherwise. He'll just die and that'll be the end of that. No more Hogwarts suppers, no more going to the library, no more daydreaming about Alice McNally. The world would never know of the great potential that was hidden in Frank Longbottom, the 5th year Gryffindor.
Nervously he tapped his chest with his fingers as he lay on the grass outside the castle. With each tap he tried to remember a fact from his study book, the five ways of changing the colour of something. The ink spell, was there such a thing? Was he forgetting something?
Studying had never been an impossible task for Frank, but what he enjoyed more was the action, getting to do the spells instead of just reading about them in a book. Learning was fantastic, but only if it had some sort of a practical purpose behind it. Which was why he aspired to do something of real importance in the future, none of that fiddling around with papers his father was so keen on.
Groaning, Frank pressed the book hopelessly against his forehead as if he thought all the information would leak into his brain. This had never happened previously and if such spells existed, he was sure he'd know of them by now. Desperately he pressed his study book harder against his head, closing his eyes and breathing in the scent of the leather-bound book. He just needed to study. What was he afraid of?
On the sky above him, clouds were starting to gather but through his book, he could not see them.
1968
Alice was 13 and afraid of three things; people yelling at her, the Slytherin ghost and rain.
Her first fear she could handle just fine, though it always made her a bit self-conscious about what she did and how people reacted to it. She didn't like being yelled at. She'd do anything to avoid it (being nice, shutting her ears, casting a charm, singing). The Slytherin ghost she could easily evade as well. She had learned to walk on only certain corridors, at certain times of the day, and to only look at members of her own house while dining in the Great Hall. She was quick with these things. Quick to learn.
Her fear of rain, however, had been there as long as she could remember. It was completely irrational, of course, a fact that only made it worse. She couldn't understand it, or explain it, she never could have, so she never shared it with anyone. She just kept quiet and stayed inside whenever it rained, closing the curtains so she didn't have to watch it. She had a feeling it perhaps wasn't so serious as she liked to believe - her feeling of gut-wrenching fear had slowly waned into strong dislike by the years.
Still, she avoided rain like poison and had been determined to do so for the rest of her life until she had come to Hogwarts.
Now she was a Gryffindor, and what Gryffindors did was face their fears and conquer them. Which was why Alice was lying on her back on grass outside the castle, facing the threateningly dark sky.
The wind was blowing harder against her robes and she held her breath as she saw the first drops of rain come down from the dark clouds. She stayed still for a minute or two, feeling the rain get heavier, soaking her hair and face and the grass beneath her fingers. She breathed in and out, closed and opened her eyes. It rained on.
She brought her hand to her chest, realising there was no longer a twisting ache there, a worry, a fear. She smiled and then heard a voice.
A brown-haired boy in her year had been studying under a nearby oak tree. He had packed up his books and was now jogging towards her.
"Oi!" he yelled one more time before reaching her. She sat up and looked at him.
"Are you mad?" he asked, slightly out of breath. "It's pissing in here, let's get inside."
She brushed her wet hair off her forehead and stood up. Still smiling, she took his hand and together they ran back to the castle.
"I'm Frank," the boy told her after they had reached the castle and were walking down a corridor towards the Gryffindor dormitories. She squeezed his wet hand and eventually let go of it as they continued down the hallway, watching the rain paint the windows.
I'm fearless, she wanted to say but didn't.
As a sort of ending note, I really like these stories, especially Peter's. I don't remember why I ended up writing two stories but just as well, they were both nice and inspired and made me really think about the characters I was writing.
So behind cut are the stories I wrote for springtime_gen last year. First one is about Peter; the second one is Longbottom-centric.
Title: Live His Life to the Fullest
Author: fivil
Recipient's name: das_kabinett
Rating: PG-13
Character(s): Peter (mentions of Weasleys, Marauders, Voldemort)
Author's notes: It's rather angsty but hopefully more than that, too. My beta knows who she is.
Peter is missing a hand.
Sometimes, it feels like he's missing a lot more. Pieces of his past, opportunities missed, that sort of thing. He'd rather not look back on it all but at times he has to, even though it's risky - Master could peek into his mind at almost any moment. But it's easier to look back than it is to look forward, where there will be much death and a possible loss, loss of everything he has right now or rather, doesn't have.
He doesn't have much to lose but he's never been one to take the easy way out, in his mind.
*
He remembers when Ronald first held him, the freckled palms surrounding him and he hoped that the boy wouldn't drop him like his brother used to. Ron didn't he just looked at Peter and smiled, and took him upstairs to his new home, the room across his old home.
Peter was Scabbers for a long time, a time he enjoyed and liked, and occasionally misses nowadays, when there's not much but insecurity and fear - and it's now that he actually feel like a rat, hiding in a dirty corner somewhere, eating garbage. In the Weasley home Peter was Scabbers and Scabbers was family.
Peter could've had a family, maybe, he thinks every now and then, he thinks they all could've, him and Remus and Sirius and James. (He tries not to remind himself that James did have a family. He tries not to remember these things, these painful turning points in history. Sometimes he's successful at forgetting.)
*
Peter is not a coward in his own mind. He knows other people disagree, probably disagree a lot.
But in his mind, it's like this: You have two choices, you always have at least two choices. One of them is easy, the other one is difficult. He could've not betrayed his friends and died. This would've, in the long run, proven to be the easier choice. Peter didn't take the easy way out.
Sometimes he attempts to make it all logical and then he hears a laugh.
You're a coward, the Dark Lord says inside Peter's head, and Peter knows he's right. It's just difficult to admit this because he's not them, he's not ...evil. He's a bad person, he knows, but he can't help thinking he doesn't deserve this, all of this, everything so tragic and hopeless.
But he made a choice, and he went with the choice that comes with hardships, the type he just has to endure.
*
In the Weasley household, Peter had a family. His own had never been very interesting or very loving but at the Weasleys he experienced family like he never had before - the warmth, the heated arguments, the cold silences, doors both slammed and slowly shut. Everything that came along with living with a family, and he enjoyed it.
Later on he rarely looks back on his days in the Burrow, because as lovely as the memories are, or perhaps because of that, he doesn't want the Dark Lord to be in on them. They are Peter's and only his.
He learned to know them, his family. He saw Arthur and Molly argue, when Ron accidentally left him downstairs once. He saw Ron cry from anger and sometimes from pain, and like any pet, he tried to make his owner feel better. He didn't know if he helped at all, but Ron's smile as he picked up Scabbers and bumped his nose against the rat's, seemed to say so.
Scabbers wasn't allowed to the dinner table, but Ron took him to most places he went to himself. This included Hogwarts. The moment they arrived, Peter felt a presence he hadn't felt in a long time. He didn't like it. From that moment on, he became a rat.
Not a rat like he had been, the one who lived in comfort and warmth, had plenty to eat and was generally happy. He suddenly became a rat whose heart was filled with fear and terror, a rat who hid and ran and cowered, and shivered in the cold. A sewer rat. A disgusting one.
*
Ron lost him once.
Of course in Peter's mind, Ron didn't lose him, he himself wanted to get lost. So he did, during a field trip one time. There was a sheet the family had spread on the grass, and they had brought lunch and dessert in a basket Molly had carried. Ginny was setting up plates and forks for all nine of them, and one tiny plate for Scabbers. Ron was planning to put little bits of food on it for his rat to enjoy.
Peter remembers the plate and how he still escaped and ran as fast as his little rat feet could carry him. He found a river that flowed fast and he found a road with cars moving 70 miles per hour, and he considered crossing that road.
He had no reason to do it, of course. He was very happy on that moment, very happy being a member of the Weasley family, with his own little plate and own little serving of bits of food. He didn't think he'd have to go back to his past. He wanted to die as a content rat with no fears, no desires. Quit while he was still ahead.
But that would've been taking the easy way out to him, so he did not cross the road, but ran back to Ron, who picked him up. They went home, Peter balancing on Ron's shoulder, and years and years later, Peter looks back on that moment and tries not to feel anything, sadness, happiness, nostalgia.
*
He remembers all the times in school when they were about to go off and do something really ridiculous all in the name of adventure, and he was worried because their adventures usually involved him being the one whose robes would tear or ankle would get twisted and hurt. Then he'd look at Remus, who'd smile and shrug and Sirius, who wouldn't look back, and James, who'd hook his arm around Peter's neck and ruffle his hair.
“Come on, Peter, you've got to live your life to the fullest!” James would say.
“Turning all of Snape's wardrobe yellow is living life to the fullest?” Peter would ask and then, being hopelessly infected by James' joy, he'd grin himself. “All right. I'll go drop off my books in the dormitory and join you in a minute.”
He did live life to the fullest. And James, the one who was most eager to, never had the chance. Peter tries to block out the memory because it doesn't feel right, or fair, and yet, it's the only way he's here himself.
*
The question isn't whether he'd rather be a happy dead body or an unhappy traitor, because he's already both, in a way. The moments he realises this, and that he's not really missing a past, he's just missing a past of his own liking, should feel calming.
They don't.
Sometimes he turns into a rat and hides in dirt, because he feels like it, and then he looks back on summer days and picnics, school days and adventure. He did live his life to the fullest. The thing he most regrets about it is that sometimes he doesn't feel bad that he did. Not bad at all.
-----
Title: Nimbus, Or How to Share a Moment with Family
Author: fivil
Recipient's name: bryonyraven
Rating: PG
Character(s): Neville, Frank, Alice.
Warnings (if any): -
Author's notes (if any): Hope this suits your tastes - I tried writing them together but it turned out too Alice/Frank to be called gen. Perhaps I'll put those scribblings online once the writer identities are revealed. I found nothing certain about Frank & Alice's DOB's in canon or the Lexicon, so I wrote it so that they both began their first year at Hogwarts in 1965. Oh, and I improvised Alice's mother name, too. My beta knows who she is and I thank her.
1998
Neville is lying outside the Hogwarts castle, on the greenest patch of grass close to the lake, a large oak somewhere nearby. He can feel the grass tickling his palm, everything growing beneath him. He presses his palm against the ground, trying to feel the movement of earth. He's glad things are still growing, nature working the way it always has.
It's not impossible to imagine a different kind of today, a gray one, the ground burned and dead.
He is 17 years old and he's lived through a war. He's fought and been wounded and survived, and as true as the sky is blue this afternoon, he is proud of himself.
What will you do with your life now, he hears a question somewhere in the back of his head. He lets it sail by, much like the idle cloud passing his vision on the otherwise clear sky.
He doesn't answer the question, doesn't want to. It doesn't feel like it should matter right now. There is so much future ahead of him now, and for the first time ever he isn't frightened, isn't worried. He just wants to live the now.
He hears someone call out his name. It's the day of the Leaving Feast. There's much ruckus, much celebration going on in the castle. Joy in every fibre of air.
Standing up, he feels free.
1970
Frank always wanted to be something grand, a name commonly recognised as an achiever of many great things. If he'll fail this Transfigurations exam, however, he won't be. Grand, or otherwise. He'll just die and that'll be the end of that. No more Hogwarts suppers, no more going to the library, no more daydreaming about Alice McNally. The world would never know of the great potential that was hidden in Frank Longbottom, the 5th year Gryffindor.
Nervously he tapped his chest with his fingers as he lay on the grass outside the castle. With each tap he tried to remember a fact from his study book, the five ways of changing the colour of something. The ink spell, was there such a thing? Was he forgetting something?
Studying had never been an impossible task for Frank, but what he enjoyed more was the action, getting to do the spells instead of just reading about them in a book. Learning was fantastic, but only if it had some sort of a practical purpose behind it. Which was why he aspired to do something of real importance in the future, none of that fiddling around with papers his father was so keen on.
Groaning, Frank pressed the book hopelessly against his forehead as if he thought all the information would leak into his brain. This had never happened previously and if such spells existed, he was sure he'd know of them by now. Desperately he pressed his study book harder against his head, closing his eyes and breathing in the scent of the leather-bound book. He just needed to study. What was he afraid of?
On the sky above him, clouds were starting to gather but through his book, he could not see them.
1968
Alice was 13 and afraid of three things; people yelling at her, the Slytherin ghost and rain.
Her first fear she could handle just fine, though it always made her a bit self-conscious about what she did and how people reacted to it. She didn't like being yelled at. She'd do anything to avoid it (being nice, shutting her ears, casting a charm, singing). The Slytherin ghost she could easily evade as well. She had learned to walk on only certain corridors, at certain times of the day, and to only look at members of her own house while dining in the Great Hall. She was quick with these things. Quick to learn.
Her fear of rain, however, had been there as long as she could remember. It was completely irrational, of course, a fact that only made it worse. She couldn't understand it, or explain it, she never could have, so she never shared it with anyone. She just kept quiet and stayed inside whenever it rained, closing the curtains so she didn't have to watch it. She had a feeling it perhaps wasn't so serious as she liked to believe - her feeling of gut-wrenching fear had slowly waned into strong dislike by the years.
Still, she avoided rain like poison and had been determined to do so for the rest of her life until she had come to Hogwarts.
Now she was a Gryffindor, and what Gryffindors did was face their fears and conquer them. Which was why Alice was lying on her back on grass outside the castle, facing the threateningly dark sky.
The wind was blowing harder against her robes and she held her breath as she saw the first drops of rain come down from the dark clouds. She stayed still for a minute or two, feeling the rain get heavier, soaking her hair and face and the grass beneath her fingers. She breathed in and out, closed and opened her eyes. It rained on.
She brought her hand to her chest, realising there was no longer a twisting ache there, a worry, a fear. She smiled and then heard a voice.
A brown-haired boy in her year had been studying under a nearby oak tree. He had packed up his books and was now jogging towards her.
"Oi!" he yelled one more time before reaching her. She sat up and looked at him.
"Are you mad?" he asked, slightly out of breath. "It's pissing in here, let's get inside."
She brushed her wet hair off her forehead and stood up. Still smiling, she took his hand and together they ran back to the castle.
"I'm Frank," the boy told her after they had reached the castle and were walking down a corridor towards the Gryffindor dormitories. She squeezed his wet hand and eventually let go of it as they continued down the hallway, watching the rain paint the windows.
I'm fearless, she wanted to say but didn't.
As a sort of ending note, I really like these stories, especially Peter's. I don't remember why I ended up writing two stories but just as well, they were both nice and inspired and made me really think about the characters I was writing.