I’ve seen a handful of AUs where Harry is deaf and I love it but it also makes me laugh because I just imagine Tom Riddle monologuing in the Chamber of Secrets and finally turning to a confused Harry who just signs “I’m deaf” and Tom is just like ??????
Voldemort isn’t present Harry’s 3rd year because his spirit is too busy learning sign language because god forbid he can’t monologue to Harry Potter come 4th year when he finally has a body.
Oh my god,
It took Voldemort two years, because remember, the Tom in Chamber of Secrets is the part of Voldemort’s soul that lives inside his horcrux. Once the diary is destroyed, that soul piece goes, too. I don’t think Voldemort gets it back. (Though that could raise some interesting possibilities…well in any event I’m pretty sure he doesn’t get it back.)
BUT he was possessing Quirrell in Harry’s first year. He absolutely knew Harry was deaf, and honestly I imagine it took a while for most of the teachers to learn British sign language (most of them probably just use that charm to make letters/words appear and float in midair; Snape refuses to do even that and Harry has to watch him like a hawk because he ALSO doesn’t care that Harry needs line of sight for lip reading), and Quirrell, out of a combination of his nervous nature and the side effects of his possession…well I doubt he was very much up for learning or practicing a new language, let alone one that requires reasonably precise finger movements.
All of this is to say, please picture an increasingly annoyed ghost Voldemort hanging out for not one but TWO GODDAMNED YEARS learning BSL to that Harry Goddamned Potter will understand him PERFECTLY the next time he wants to monologue.
God this is so extra, I love it
See this is why disability representation improves literally everything.
i want to know more about charlie weasley’s friends. who the hell agrees to SMUGGLE A DRAGON across international borders on two days notice? who are these people that are willing to accept a dragon in a crate from a couple of small children, no questions asked? i need to know more, tell me about the antics of these mysterious flying dragon smugglers.
ESPCAD.
European Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Against Dragons.
Like PETA but with less grossness and more punk activism. And fire breathing dragons so like no one really fux with ‘em.
speaking as a biologist, i can guarantee i would show up without question to smuggle an endangered species that would otherwise be destroyed across national borders to a sanctuary on two days’ notice.
like. if a small child showed me a box containing a juvenile alligator snapping turtle and was like “you need to smuggle this across the continent to kansas or else it will be destroyed” i would be like “sure, would you like me to send you a postcard, small child”
I cannot help but feel that if Albus Dumbledore had known about this freelance dragon-smuggling association things might have gone very differently for Harry Potter.
“I want you to basically move this child across national borders to somewhere where they’ve never even heard of Lord Voldemort and keep him until I need him.”
“No. That’s kidnapping.”
“He’s an unwanted orphan who’ll be hunted mercilessly by Voldemort’s associates and to make it worth your while I’ll give you these very rare eggs I happen to have come across in my –
“HOW THE HELL DID THOSE GET OUT OF NORWAY okay fine. Gimme. I’ll send a card.”
The smugglers take the eggs and the kid, dropping off the kid with someone’s sister who’s already got a couple and seems to know how to manage them. They check in, though, and it turns out the kid is mega into reptiles. Can even talk to them, which makes him *very* helpful…
Ten years later everyone but Albus Dumbledore is a little puzzled as to why a kid allegedly named ‘Nils Johansson’ has come all the way from Sweden to go to Hogwarts. Nils wears glasses, has a collection of interesting scars including one on his forehead, has two pet snakes that are almost always on his person, knows everything there is to know about dragons and introduces himself to Ron on the train with “You must be Ron, your brother Charlie told me to look you up. He works with my uncle William, visits a lot.”
Hagrid recognizes him instantly, of course, but it’s when he finds out how much Nils knows about dragons that his heart is won forever.
– Draco scrubs the skin on his arm viciously every time he showers. The skin is always red and marked by scratches. He tries so hard to get the mark off of him. He wants to feel clean again.
– George can’t look in the mirror anymore. Not without remembering Fred. He smashes all mirrors in their home. He cuts his hair, he dyes it.
– Neville sees Nagini in his dreams. But in his dreams it reaches Ron and Hermione before he does.
– Harry has multiple wands all around his house hidden in places that only he knows. Beneath his pillow, beneath his bed, under the couch. Just in case.
– Hermione’s boggart is no longer failure.
– Draco and Blaise are afraid of fire.
– Someone accidentally calls George “Fred” once. No one knows who starts crying first.
– Headmistress Miverna Mcgonagall is fierce, powerful and kind. All first years are intimidated and amazed, she seems untouchable. However some nights she roams the school hallways and remembers every student she lost, every life that got taken away too soon, every soul that left them too early.
– Harry suddenly can’t stay in very small rooms. He feels trapped, his throat starts convulsing and his eyes sting.
– Hagrid still feels the weight of what he thought was Harry’s corpse in his hands. It haunts him.
– Hermione, Ron and Harry had gotten so used to spending months having one small meal per day that sometimes they forget they’re supposed to eat.
– Harry rolls in his sleep once and hits his forehead against the night stand on accident, when he wakes up with pain on his forehead his heart sinks and his whole body freezes. It isn’t until he sees the bruise that he’s able to calm down. Because Voldemort isn’t back.
– Ron dreams that he’s back in their tent, traveling and hiding, he’s changing the radio stations and he hears Ginny’s names as one of the victims.
– Molly always has “where’s Fred?” on the tip of her tongue, at all times.
– Harry spends the year post-war discovering who he is, what he loves, other than the Boy-who-lived and the Savior-of-the-Wizarding-World. Because there are things he never had time to think about, never had time to experiment, never had time to experience. Sometimes he wonders if coming back had been the right choice, because it hurt so bad on some days that he couldn’t take it.
– When Teddy is sad or scared and he’s crying, Harry tells him stories and shows him pictures of his parents, it’s then and only then that he calms down and his hair goes back to normal.
– Harry pulls back to himself when the date of his death nears every year, his friends do everything in their power to bring him out of it.
– Draco and Harry have talks about the war some nights, both saw what Voldemort was capable of, Harry in his dreams, Draco in his home. Both understand.
– Luna is quirkier and weirder than ever before. She always does everything in her power to lighten up the mood in the room when the silence is bitter and mournful. It’s like she can’t stop shifting and smiling and nervously twitching and saying random facts about things no one has heard of before. Everyone knows it’s her way of coping, of staying positive. So no one minds. It’s comforting.
– Harry gets the sudden desire to travel all over the world. Sometimes Ron and Hermione come with him, others he goes alone, once Neville joins him. Draco does too.
– Draco starts writing, he writes thousands of words on some nights and none on others. He’s good at it, too.
– Harry always, without fail, looks for Sirius’ constellation. He visits his grave too, tells him how things are going in his life, how he’s coping, how he isn’t.
– Hermione getting a tattoo of blooming pastel flowers on top of her “mudblood” scar, because she’s alive, many her friends are alive and she wants to remember that.
And maybe not all is well, maybe they have scars time cannot erase, but they’re together, their hearts are still beating, so it’ll be okay. They’re going to be okay.
I want to see a fanfic where Harry hatches a basilisk.
I want to see a fanfic where he looks up “magical snakes” as soon as he gets to Hogwarts because that thing at the zoo always bugged him, and so the Trio works out that it’s a basilisk immediately after the first petrification in Second Year. But they don’t know how it’s getting around or where it is or anything, so Harry is just like WELP SET A BASILISK TO FIND A BASILISK while Hermione and Ron are like HARRY NO.
I want to see a fanfic where Harry sticks a chicken egg under a toad and makes all these plans about how he’ll talk to his huge deadly snake and get it eye-blinkers and shit so it doesn’t kill people and make sure it’s not too aggressive, and somehow it never occurs to his twelve-year old brain that the chicken egg has a total volume of about four tablespoons and he is not going to get the giant King of Serpents he is expecting.
I want to see a fanfic where it finally breaks out of the shell and Harry finds himself with a bb!basilisk too smol to even have the murder-eyes yet, who can only petrify someone for about half an hour before the effect wears off. She eats spiders and gets tired very easily and demands that he wear a hood she can curl up in and sleep.
(She is also the same vivid green as his eyes and already hideously venomous, but doesn’t like using her fangs because she says they get cold and give her brain freeze when she unsheathes them.)
I just… I really want Harry with a haughty, demanding, arrogant danger noodle who has an overinflated sense of her own importance, views Hedwig as a TERRIFYING MENACE because she isn’t big enough to eat owls yet and keeps up a steady stream of insults hissed in Harry’s ear whenever she’s near someone who has a Dark Mark (which she can sense at close range). And who is basically useless as a familiar because she refuses to slither across anything other than sun-warmed stones or Harry, hasn’t got a very powerful gaze yet and doesn’t like biting people.
(Except snake-arm-people. She finds snake-arm-people confusing and annoying, and would probably make an exception on the no-biting thing where they’re concerned.)
I mean there are obviously a lot of factors influencing snake growth rate but if we assume basilisks just get stupidhuge because they grow their whole lives and are immortal, this snake is probably going to be at least 8 feet long by Deathly Hallows, which is a significant and intimidating chunk of scaly muscle that is intelligent enough to do what it is told. Like, you know, hey, bite this necklace.
So I mean by like his fourth year it’s going to be pretty hard to hide this snake that is nearly as long as he is tall and it’s not going to do much for his reputation that the Boy Who Lived has a pet fucking basilisk but holy damn does it make book seven a whole hell of a lot shorter.
I feel like I should write this
can you just imagine him ron and hermione coming up with increasingly ridiculous excuses trying to hide their pet baby basilisk in the dorms (hagrid would be so proud). how long do you think it’d take before harry’s pet basilisk is just a really badly hidden secret between all of gryffindor? and the ensuring antics of the entire house as they try to keep mcgonagall from finding out? (she knows something is up, but even just thinking of what could be big enough the entire house is trying to keep it from her makes her want to break out the firewhiskey)
ron gets the idea to try and practices parseltongue with baby basilisk since he hears harry talking in his sleep with it all the time anyway (and ngl, baby basilisk is kind of adorable and eats all the spiders in the dorm so he doesn’t have to deal with them, he’s pretty smitten once she hatches), and as soon as hermione overhears him trying it, she’s dragging him and harry to the library because, well, parseltongue is a language, why can’t they learn it? so it’s the two of them alternating between hissing at harry and hissing at the basilisk and harry is trying so hard not to laugh because 90% of what they’re saying is utter nonsense and the basilisk doesn’t even bother, because she likes these two humans but wow are they dumb, that’s not how words work.
…hey Harry Potter fans, we’re all in agreement that Dumbledore brought the Philosopher’s Stone to Hogwarts in Harry’s first year as a test to see whether Voldemort was paying attention and what sort of state he was in, now that Dumbledore’s chosen champion was old enough to hold a wand, right?
Like, Harry learns what magic is and it’s time to start moving towards the full and final destruction of Tom Riddle Junior, so Dumbledore has a chat with his long-time alchemy friend who’s been keeping this thing safe for literally six centuries straight, and ‘borrows’ the easiest source of immortality he can find as bait for a trap to lure Voldemort out into the open so Dumbledore can get the lay of the land to prep for the next seven years. This is canon, right?
Yes, this is canon. In none of the other books is the climactic array of trials set up as a video-game dungeon perfectly tailored to the skillsets of three specific children. Hermione and Ron are drafted into this war quickly.
Draco gets so much shit for trying to kill Dumbledore but honestly who wouldn’t
I was on the bus thinking about Harry Potter tonight and I remembered the part where the Dementors all show up at the Quidditch game, and I remembered how they were all looking up at Harry, and I wondered why they would all be staring at him, and then I realized that it’s because he has two souls in him.
On this note, wouldn’t that also be a reason why Harry would have had a more negative reaction than his friends (even Ginny)? He was hearing his mother’s voice as she was protecting him, which in itself was his worst memory. but the Dementors were also forcing the piece of Voldemort to relive its worst memory as well… The memory of being ripped apart by the curse that backfired. No wonder Harry passed out so often.
I literally never thought about that.
omg…
HOLY
Oh FUCKING HELL, you just made me realize that it wasn’t Harry’s memory that was his father telling Lily to take Harry and run, and it wasn’t Harry’s memory of Lily screaming.
Here I was, just eating a cup of applesauce under the 14-year-long assumption that the reason a small infant was able to remember something was because this was a fictional world of magic, but no, now this entirely reasonable and somewhat less terrifying bubble has burst and I’m never going to recapture that innocence.
what if the boy who lived was the girl who lived? scruffy tomboy harriet “call me Harry” potter, getting extra rubbish from the Dursleys both from being a girl and being the wrong kind of girl
and absolutely nothing in the entire 7-book series changes except for pronouns. because girls can be brave and imperfect and angry and sulky and loud just like boys can.
(except a girl harry would room with Hermione Granger and the Patil twins instead of Ron and Sean, but that’s literally the only thing I can think of that might change)
absolutely nothing whatsoever changes with regards to Ginny. except that in addition to “why doesn’t Harry notice me as more than a chum,” she grumbles, “why hasn’t Harry managed to realize that CHO IS STRAIGHT”
IF this becomes a popular text post, this is how I want to be remembered
i couldnt help it
changing dorms would change a lot actually. :
(aka i express howo much i love this post through comic s)
i’m totally down with this post
except
“but Harriet would room with Hermione Granger and the Patil twins instead of Ron and Sean”
who the fuck is sean
obviously dean and seamus. combined into one. one whole sean.
not to get stuck on this point, but very much swol athlete Ginny and accidentally walking into walls Luna
but also intrepid explorer Luna and starstruck Ginny
but also them bonding about shared history, shared traumas
i think also a little of Ginny and a need for separation from the hugeness of the Weasley family and finding somewhere quiet and private with Luna
but also sometimes hosting all the friends and family they know for giant absurd blowouts like some Nargle-related ritual Luna insists on
Luna never quite ~getting Quidditch and them inventing a game they play with rules no one else can follow that Luna explains as if it’s totally obvious
Ginny retiring from being a professional athlete to write for the Prophet and the odd argument that erupts about rival publications and spying
Luna’s unfailingly successful column about sports that she does not get at all, just utter dada-ist nonsense in best Luna form
Ginny grieving for her lost family/friends and a little at loose ends because nothing seems to work and even George seems better equipped with his sadness than she does but then Luna teaches her this beautiful, absurd ritual that she does for lost ones and it involves a lot of things that look crazy from the outside, exactly the sort of thing that got Luna her “looney” nickname, but it just works for Ginny, it actually works and she can breathe again
Luna on long explorations of far-off places where she can’t really Floo much less come back for a weekend visit and Ginny getting slowly grouchier and she gets whatever the equivalent of being in the penalty box for excessive violence a little too often but it happens regularly and everyone knows when it’s happening but it also means everyone is so damn happy to see Luna when she gets back
Ginny at cocktail parties for book publishers when Luna’s latest book about such-and-such a place and such-and-such a creature that Luna encountered
Ginny arm wrestling at the pub
ALSO upon further reflection
let’s all spend a moment imagining Luna in a sort of Luna-flavored mashup of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. Like. This is a very specific mental place I’m directing you towards so:
unexpected strong
but more like very, very lithe and also refuses all weapons because that’s mean
that special brand of her calm, cool “this will all work out” but while facing a tiger
out of the side of her mouth to local guide, “is this a Muggle tiger?”
guide, visibly shaking with fear, “i don’t know what that means”
luna nods and does an intense eye contact with the tiger who then just fucking leaves
luna meditating on the top of a very tall tree to try to encourage a very rare magical creature about the size of a fist that has green spikes and an incredibly potent skunk-like smell to come hang out with her
luna who is the human embodiment of Humans Will Pet The Thing
luna who Takes An Interest in every wild folklore or tiny sad creature
but also at the same time luna who comes back to london and follows a pigeon across town because it has such fascinating markings
when told “it’s just a pigeon” gives a lecture about rock doves and urban compatability
but also a luna who absolutely does not back down from things ten times her size that are monsters and definitely guarding some kind of cursed treasure and a luna who breaks the curse and finds a very distressed kitten under all that dark magic
Question of Smoke 