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hartsy congratulating moosey

chapter one: new york, ny - pittsburgh, pa

Narcissa isn’t used to worrying about other people.

That sounds bad—callous, unfeeling, cold, et cetera; the adjectives will always be endless, their meaning perfectly clear—but her social circle, strictly speaking, has never exactly encouraged the practice. There’s her sisters, neither of whom seem to want her help, her concern, despite the overwhelming pile of evidence that indicates they do, in fact, need both, and there’s her parents, who are retired and miserable and eighty-percent plastic at this point, anyway, languishing in a Prozac-fueled stupor in the house on Narragansett, militantly ignoring one another, and there’s Lucius, who—

Well.

The less concern Narcissa has for him, the better, frankly.

But then there’s Regulus.

Sweet, simple Regulus who tries so hard to be neither sweet nor simple, ever, but who can’t quite shed the soft, supple snakeskin of the very young and the impossibly naive. Narcissa owns handbags that are sturdier, hardier, more weatherproof, less high-maintenance, than Regulus.

She’d told him not to do this.

↳ split ends

Draco: it looks good everyday

Hermione:

Hermione: you make flirting with you very hard you know?

Draco: you make me very hard [winks]

romantic (comedy)

pairing: bill weasley x pansy parkinson

setting: modern, non-magical, d-list celebrity au

story concept for rare pair march madness 2020

Pansy’s burned a lot of bridges.

Not literally—she isn’t a criminal—but very, very figuratively, and very, very thoroughly.

There’s a Starbucks in Sherman Oaks she isn’t allowed within fifty feet of, like, legally. Whatever. There are three talent scouts for MTV who have publicly accused her of “cyberbullying” them, like Twitter wasn’t a fucking cesspit before they verified Pansy’s account with that ugly blue checkmark. There are a couple of event promoters who won’t return her texts after her last trip to Vegas—and she wasn’t actually trying to use the broken champagne bottle as a weapon, for the record; she was helping the waitress clean it up and fuck those bullshit clickbait tabloid headlines for daring to insinuate otherwise—and there’s a pending civil suit against her in county court because her third most recent next-door neighbor was a whiny backup dancing bitch who couldn’t even manage to keep his untrained mongrel of a dog from gnawing on the adorable—and festive! It was December!—little potted poinsettias Pansy had put out on her patio.

So.

Here she is.

Fired—again—in breach of contract—again—with only a single cringey fifteen-second pop-up Tampax web-ad booked for the foreseeable future. Her agent is barely speaking to her, her landlord will not stop harassing her about late fees, and the long-lost love of her life, who she had fully planned on winning back after the bruising from her next nose job went away, just announced his fucking engagement.

On Facebook.

With pictures.

Like some kind of fucking sorority girl from fucking Ohio.

The point is—

Pansy has burned a lot of bridges, and she may or may not be running out of options. Choices. Potential revenue streams. Opportunities? That’s a resume word, an interview word, a good old-fashioned audition word. She fucking hates it. She didn’t move halfway across the country, abandon what was left of her old life, suffer through the indignity of wearing sports bras everywhere for two months after finally upgrading to a D-cup—she didn’t do any of that for opportunities. “Opportunities” are for people who aren’t sure what they want. “Opportunities” are for people who need help to get what they want because they can’t do it on their fucking own.

More bridges.

More burning.

The Travel Channel show is the kind of moderately low-budget, niche-audience “opportunity” that Pansy might have scoffed at, before. Six months ago. When she was still riding the adrenaline high of a scandalous, semi-viral appearance as a guest judge on Project Runway. Heidi Klum had liked her lipstick. The face Pansy had made when a burlap sack bikini had flounced down the runway had become a short-lived but exceptionally popular meme. That version of Pansy—she would have rolled her eyes and slurped at her caramel macchiato and refused to even momentarily entertain the possibility of co-hosting six episodes of conspiracy theory-propagating, pseudo-scientific, treasure hunting garbage.

Now, though—

It’s a bridge.

An unburned bridge.

And Bill Weasley is ruggedly handsome and effortlessly charming, with big, callused hands and broad, muscular shoulders and a slew of dark, mysterious tattoos crawling up his neck, peeking out from the partially unbuttoned Indiana Jones shirt the wardrobe department had dressed him in. He’s tall. Masculine. Smart and funny and articulate and competent. He knows a lot about knots, and a lot about history, and a lot about how to smile at the camera with both his eyes and his mouth.

He doesn’t know a lot about Pansy.

He’s genuinely, sincerely nice to her, interested in her opinions and amused by her initial hostility and seemingly fascinated by how high-pitched her screams are he drags her into a cave to shine a spotlight on a bunch of chalky red stick figure drawings and a spider the size of a Faberge egg scuttles right over her fucking foot. Bill Weasley likes her, she thinks, with a fair amount of dread, and that’s disconcerting. He treats her like a person, not a commodity, not an annoyance, like an equal despite her background and her baggage and her—

Well.

Just her.

And she’d forgotten, hadn’t she? What that was like? How fucking bad it made her feel about herself?

Pansy isn’t nice.

Pansy isn’t interesting.

Pansy isn’t sure, suddenly, what it is that she wants.

pairing: scabior x hermione granger

setting: modern, non-magical, college au

story concept for rare pair march madness 2020

When Scabior first told his dad he was going to college—like, moving out, packing his shit, enrolling in something called “Intro to Humanities”—his dad spit out a watery brown mouthful of chew, threw his head back against the already dented garage door, and laughed.

His dad laughed for a while, actually.

And Scabior shrugged it off, just like he always did, but the reaction—the incredulity, the disbelief, the casual, unintentional cruelty—it stuck with him. Left a little bit of a bruise. Not a permanent one, no, because Scabior isn’t really a dweller, doesn’t let himself hoard bad memories like a pack rat with a nest full of Cheez-It crumbs, but—a kind of tender, bone-deep, soft-tissue one.

A decade later, he barely remembers why.

He lasts two years—well, three and a half semesters—which is just long enough to rush a frat, figure out he’s pretty good at the “mechanical” part of mechanical engineering, and get arrested for selling stolen Ritalin out of the broken dresser drawer in his dorm room. It’s a whole thing. A whole legal thing. He loses his financial aid, misses a bunch of class, flunks out. That, too, is a whole thing.

His dad laughs at him again, but it stings less the second time around.

Expectations, in Scabior’s experience, are things you live down to, not up to; directional malfeasance, the world is not your oyster, et cetera, ad nauseum, whatever.

He knows who he is.

He knows what he is.

He doesn’t miss college. He falls in with what his high school guidance counselor might’ve called “a bad crowd” and rents a smoke-stained apartment above a sketchy 24-hour liquor store. He buys bikes and cars and boats and old appliances—junkers, all of them, rusty and cheap and discarded, forgotten, left to rot—and takes them apart for fun. He’s still good at that, still good with his hands; it’s about finding what’s missing, fixing what’s broken, smoothing out the rough edges of something that can’t quite help itself.

Occasionally, he’s invited back to frat row, to the ramshackle Delt-Ep house, for a party.

Less occasionally, he goes.

He’s too old to be there, maybe.

Probably.

Definitely.

Hermione Granger—the prissy, high-strung sorority president who legit looks like she could get off to a particularly impressive LinkedIn profile—tells him so, in fact. Twice. She’s wearing one of those skin-tight turtleneck sweater dresses that leave very little to the imagination, like, physically, and her breath smells sharp and sweet, like toothpaste and expensive white wine. She’s shrill, condescending, bitingly sarcastic, so hilariously fucking confident that he’s nothing but a greasy, gatecrashing creep who’s there to take advantage of drunk, unsuspecting freshman girls—he wants to shut her up, a little. Mess her up. Wants to smear that tasteful pink lipstick across her face with the pad of his thumb, peel those sheer black schoolgirl tights down her thighs with his teeth.

She’s out of his league.

She’s not even playing the same game.

“Hello, beautiful,” Scabior says anyway, and her cheeks flush and her nostrils flare and her perfectly plucked eyebrows twitch upwards and he knows—he knows—that somewhere, someplace, his dad is laughing at him for this.

replacement level

pairing: draco malfoy x oliver wood

setting: modern, non-magical, minnesota college hockey au

story concept for rare pair march madness 2020

Draco really fucking misses Montreal.

It isn’t that he hates Minnesota; Minnesota is … fine. Cold. Boring. Sterile. Oddly, heavily populated with Scandinavians. It’s just that NCAA hockey—college hockey, period—has never been his idea of a good time. His idea of a bright future. But his father wanted him to go to Europe and his mother wanted him to stay in the Q and the Kestrels, the team that actually drafted him, actually wanted him—well, their player development guy is from Minnesota. Went to Minnesota. Fucking loves Minnesota.

A little too much, in Draco’s opinion, not that he’s been permitted to have any of those, lately.

Whatever.

It isn’t Minnesota’s fault that he’s homesick.

No, it’s Oliver Wood’s.

Oliver Wood, his captain, who’s a fucking headcase.

A big, strapping, neurotic, almost hysterically wholesome fucking headcase who unironically uses words like “heck” and “darn” and “shucks” and who visibly frets over the bruises on Draco’s ribs—and Draco’s legs, and Draco’s back, and Draco’s face, too, because apparently that part of him is still eminently punchable—and who keeps showing up to Draco’s hideous wood-paneled dorm room with Tupperware containers full of fresh-baked cookies and macaroni casseroles, who won’t stop offering to help Draco study and help Draco figure out the laundry room hours in his building and help Draco practice his faceoffs, his slapshot, his stickhandling.

Oliver Wood is friendly and fidgety and talkative and so earnestly, inexplicably nice—he never shuts up, never calms down, never quits. He’s the first guy off the bench to celebrate a win, the last guy in the locker room to brood over a loss. He argues with the refs on Draco’s behalf more than Draco thinks is strictly, technically necessary, and starts a line brawl during the third period of a tied game when Draco is bloodily, violently boarded by some Notre Dame shithead. He’s protective. Enthusiastic. A tiny bit crazy.

Honestly, Draco’s done cocaine that was less energized than Oliver Wood is during a grueling five AM bag skate.

He’s the very antithesis of Montreal; the very personification of Minnesota. If he ever went to Montreal, he’d be one of those laughably ridiculous, flannel shirt-clad, wide-eyed mouth-breathing idiot tourists pronouncing “poutine” all wrong, tripping over the rain-slick cobblestones, frowning helplessly at street signs that don’t have English translations stamped across the bottom.

So.

So, maybe it isn’t so much that Oliver Wood is responsible for Draco’s homesickness, so much as it is that Oliver Wood is responsible for Draco’s definition of homesickness beginning to slowly, awkwardly, inexorably change. Which is—

Well.

That’s unacceptable, isn’t it?

no trespassing

pairing: hermione granger x cormac mclaggen

setting: modern, non-magical, small town au

story concept for rare pair march madness 2020

Contrary to what is apparently popular belief, Hermione does not need a vacation.

She sleeps fine. She goes to barre twice a week. She has a perfectly, medically valid prescription for her tension headaches, and she helps curate the monthly selections for her contemporary adult book club, and she meets Harry for brunch every Sunday at a place in Brooklyn that’s just eclectic enough to offer both tableside guacamole and bottomless mimosas. Her apartment is immaculate, her credit is superb, and her blood pressure is excellent. She can try dating again when she’s thirty, or when she finally gets promoted and escapes the soul-crushingly bureaucratic quagmire that is corporate middle management, whichever comes first. The occasional federal holiday, quite literally government mandated, provides her with more than enough downtime to catch up on—whatever it is she’s supposed to catch up on.

Television.

Meal prep.

Haircuts.

Either way, her life is full, carefully compartmentalized, both personally enriching as well as professionally satisfying, and there’s absolutely no good reason for her to irresponsibly waste five of her very responsibly accrued vacation days on a boring, trivial, utterly pointless trip to—where is she?

South Carolina?

Some kind of damp, vaguely  picturesque marshland with a lukewarm sea breeze and a whitewashed two-stoplight town and a lot of ramshackle chicken-wire fences winding through the sand on an otherwise empty stretch of beach?

Why is she here?

To relax, allegedly.

To unwind.

The bed and breakfast she begrudgingly checks herself into is quaint, if not a little musty, and a five minute walk from the only restaurant within a thirty-mile radius, according to Google. Although “restaurant” is kind of a generous term for what it actually is, which is either a dive bar that used to be a tackle shop, or a tackle shop that doubles as a dive bar during tourist season. It reeks of salt and beer and fish and old frying oil, and when she drags the pad of her finger across the uneven wood-plank bar, it comes back … sticky.

And speaking of sticky—

The bartender.

He introduces himself with a wink and a grin and an obviously well-practiced flick of a checkered red dishtowel over the broad, heavily muscled line of his shoulder, a slow, syrupy, southern-accented, “Call me Cormac, sweetheart,” like he’s inadvertently trying to insinuate that “Cormac” is not, in fact, his real name. It is his real name. Hermione knows that now, because he tells her all about himself while plying her with sweet tea and bourbon and a suspiciously tasty chicken salad sandwich.

Call-Me-Cormac is awful.

Call-Me-Cormac is the worst. 

He interrupts her with such heartfelt, transparent obliviousness that she wonders if he might have a hearing problem, and he frowns in oddly endearing befuddlement when she doesn’t laugh at any of his sexist frat boy jokes, and he continuously, unnecessarily, lifts up the bottom of his plain white t-shirt to fan his face like there isn’t an air conditioner six feet away, sputtering loudly from behind a ceiling vent.

He’s smug and he’s pushy and he’s irritating and he’s wildly self-centered and he’s a stark reminder—a deliciously poignant, artfully stubbled, remarkably chiseled reminder—of why she doesn’t date, and why she doesn’t leave New York, and why she doesn’t mind being alone. Being lonely. She doesn’t miss the wanting. She doesn’t miss the unpredictability of it. 

So.

Of course she sleeps with him.

Of course.

cease-fire

pairing: harry potter x cedric diggory

setting: modern, non-magical, undercover cop/survivor au

story concept for rare pair march madness 2020

Harry has never seen an episode of Survivor.

He understands the basic premise, and he understands why other people—people who are not him—might enjoy watching all the lying and scheming and backstabbing go down in the proverbial shadows of swaying palm trees and strategically loud waterfalls. It’s scenic. It’s dramatic. It’s a staged, contrived, tropical island shitshow with obstacle courses and tiki torches.

He gets it.

What he doesn’t get is why he’s being asked to go undercover as a fucking contestant on the staged, contrived, tropical island shitshow with obstacle courses and tiki torches.

It’s an asinine assignment.

It’s a flagrant goddamn waste of his valuable goddamn time.

The producers are nice to him, sort of, even if they’re a little bemused as they explain precisely how they’re going to rig the “tribal council vote” in his favor every week. Or is it every night? Moody said Harry would be stuck there—“there” obviously meaning both Fiji and a highly specific circle of Harry’s own personal hell—for thirty or forty days. And math has never been Harry’s strong suit, but he doesn’t think there are thirty or forty elimination episodes.

Christ, what if there are?

He meets the other contestants on the flight over, and they’re exactly what he expects. High-achieving, athletic, self-absorbed. Not as smart as they want to be, not as friendly as they seem. There’s a pretty pharmaceutical sales rep with an exaggerated French accent, a retired professional soccer player with bushy eyebrows and a farmer’s tan, and—

Cedric Diggory introduces himself to Harry with a firm handshake and a bashful smile.

Harry silently stares for a second—two seconds, three seconds—and then forces himself to respond. Later, he will not remember what he said or how he said it or why it made Cedric Diggory laugh, and the thought will startle him. Alarm him. Cedric Diggory is a handsome, charming, egregiously likable twenty-nine-year old firefighter from Denver, Colorado. He speaks three languages and has dimples in his lower back that Harry wants to trace with his tongue.

Cedric Diggory, Harry notices immediately, is there to win.

Harry is not.

Harry is there to keep tabs on Igor fucking Karkaroff.

So, really, there isn’t much of a conflict of interest. Harry could—what’s it called—form an alliance with him. With Cedric Diggory. That wouldn’t be against the rules. Harry could help him out. Be on his side. His team. Cedric Diggory’s team. Harry could do that, and it wouldn’t even be much of a distraction because Karkaroff is competing, too, which—Harry has to act like he gives a shit about all of that, doesn’t he? The competition? Cozying up to Cedric Diggory would basically just—be his job. Harry’s job. He’d be clocking in, boots on the ground, ready to fucking work. That’s it. That’s all that would be happening.

Besides, there’s almost no conceivable way a mostly fake alliance on a staged, contrived, tropical island shitshow with obstacle courses and tiki torches could end in disaster. Spiral out of control.

No way.

Absolutely none.

Well, almost.