(no subject)
In a windowless room, sitting at a crooked table, the boy - freckled as Ron, hair messier than Harry’s own, teeth something like Hermione’s the day he met her - holds up the paper monstrosity like a prize. It looks something like a windmill or an asterisk, riddled with staples, clearly something of the boy’s own creation. “Look,” he tells Harry, brandishing the thing, fished out of the rubbish bin specifically for this chat, “it ain’t a weapon, they shouldn’t have chucked it. I told them, I said, we’re only playing magic. It just turns people into chairs and stuff.”
Harry glances down at his clipboard - Devon Smith, age 12, it says on the boy’s intake form. “Playing magic?” Harry repeats, his mind on the letters in his briefcase. At first he’d fancied himself to be a little like Dumbledore coming to Tom Riddle in the orphanage all those years ago, had thought that this assignment might be something like that; it’s not. This place is all cheerful wall murals and brightly colored linoleum, and even if the paint is peeling in places and the glass in some of the windows is cracked, it’s as far from the dark dank depression of Riddle’s orphanage as it’s possible to get, Harry thinks. “Do you all play magic often?”
That's all I've got so far, and I sort of feel like I'm as close to permanently being out of the Harry Potter fandom as I'm going to get, but while every other HP fic I've started is either unfinished (and staying that way) or just plain disappointing, this one I think I might someday finish. It was originally intended to be a long, chaptered thing, but currently I can see it as more of an extended one-shot, and that I think I might be able to pull off.
The idea for this actually came to me one day at work - I spent the past year working as a direct care staff at a children's home, mainly with kids with varying degrees of behavioral and/or emotional issues - after one of the boys made an interesting excuse whilst trying to circumvent the "no weapons" rule on the unit. Most of the boys had actively been involved in cooking up various ways to get around it, i.e. making a paper gun (we made a lot of crafts on our unit) and then telling staff that actually it was a glitter shooter or something else innocuous-sounding. It was starting to create a lot of uneven enforcement of the rule and general discontent on the unit ("but it's a magic staff!" "why does he get to have a wand and I don't?"), and it was right in the midst of all that that this happened.
A lot of the excuses had been of the "oh this isn't a weapon - it's magic!" variety, and we'd recently decided in a meeting that since magic itself could be used as a weapon (and they definitely were using it that way half the time), "magic" items would be confiscated, too - which the kids totally knew about, but weren't necessarily very accepting of. So one of the boys made this absolutely ridiculous paper thing that looked like an oversized ninja star covered in staples, which I unfortunately had to confront him about, and he of course pulled out the "it's just magic!" thing on me, like that was going to get me to back down. And right as I was taking it away from him, he started to get really agitated, and shouted at me, "It's not a weapon! It's magic! It just turns people into chairs and stuff!" And he was absolutely serious about this, and another boy chimed right in and backed him up, completely serious and disbelieving himself: "Why can't we turn each other into chairs?!"
Anyway, I thought it was hilarious, and then somehow it turned into an idea about the children's home being St. Brutus' and what if the kids weren't just pretending to have magical powers, but they actually did? And then I threw in Auror partners Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy, working a case at St. Brutus' about why the majority of the children there were recently discovered to have been eligible for Hogwarts letters that they never received. Eventually it was going to develop a rather significant Harry/Draco romantic subplot, but if I actually do write this, I think it's more likely to be incidental than anything (I probably won't be able to entirely refrain from adding one in, knowing me).
I think half of the reason that I like this so much is that it sort of incorporates something that I'm familiar with, in that the setting basically mirrors my old workplace, and I feel like that would enable me to write it at least somewhat believably. Aside from that, I think it's an interesting premise, more concrete than any other HP idea I've had before, and definitely more plotty. Plus I've always had a soft spot for Auror case!fics, so there's that, too.
Mostly I'm posting this here to remind myself that this idea exists from time to time. I don't plan on working on it any time soon, but I definitely think I'd like to write it someday.
In other news, my dog died on Friday and I recently discovered that I've written over 22k words (of fanfic) in something like the past 3 and a half months, which is absolutely unprecedented for me. Just wanted to get that off my chest.