Neville was a lonely kid. 

His grandmother was a distant and aloof figure who loved him coldly and critically. He never sat on her lap or woke her in the middle of the night or shared frivolity with her - he stood up straight and tried not to be a bother. 

Sure, he had a governess who taught him reading and pureblood traditions, and St. Mungo’s nurses who slipped him candy and commented on his drawings, and the gardener who let him make bouquets of any flowers he wanted, and countless unnamed housecats to cuddle up with when it rained, but he never got to see any other kids. 

It was alright - he was warm and well-fed and spent countless hours reading stories about orphans just like himself embarking on adventures. He spent his childhood dreaming about the train to Hogwarts, where he might meet someone who could take that cold feeling from the top of his chest, that feeling that said he was small and stupid and one more bother on his gran’s ever-present to-do list. 

His Hogwarts letter, on July 31, 1991, was a becon of hope that one day he would be loved unconditionally or even, in his wildest dreams, become a storybook hero. 

Submission from writerandstudent

You would think some of Sirius’s worst dreams would be of prison, Harry dying, losing all those he loves, but they’re not. His worst dreams are of James and Lily alive. Harry happy and safe at home. They’re all there happy and with him. 

Then he wakes up.

Ginny would have eloped in a heartbeat, but she wanted Harry to experience being loved on display - wanted him to stand at the front of a crowd who were all assembled for the sole purpose of seeing her pledge her love to him, wanted him to have the security of that public promise. 

He’d had very few of the hallmarks of love in his life, and damn her if he wasn’t going to get this one. 

At the reluctant close of his long, bloody Quidditch career (or, when Percy’s nagging about his general well-being gets to be too much), Oliver Wood joins the Hogwarts staff as the Quidditch coach, flying instructor, and intermural sports director. 

He takes it as seriously as he’s ever taken Quidditch, and makes it a point to teach captains how to run their teams, rather than choosing the best players from each house and having done with it. Captains are supported in both Quidditch and leadership skills, and the four House captains start to be friends each year because of the time they spend training together with Coach Wood. 

Quidditch at Hogwarts becomes about love for the game and the spirit of the competition rather than hatred between the teams, and that is Oliver’s legacy.

Lucy Weasley admires how fiercely her cousin Jamie loves and defends his family, even having two siblings, a godbrother, and thousand cousins, he never seems to tire of it. He is everyone’s favorite, and for good reason. 

She wishes she could thrive on her own twin sister, and three half brothers, and mess of cousins the way he does, but she gets easily overwhelmed. She is not their leader the way Jamie is, and she’s not a voice for them the way the Molly is. She’s not even a chill presence for them the way Teddy is. 

She wants desperately to be as family oriented as they are, but the only way she can find to be as useful to her siblings and cousins as James is on the Quidditch pitch. She establishes herself as the unofficial Weasley Quiddtich Captain, and trains her cousins from all four houses. 

Memorial Tattoos

Neville’s Frank and Alice tattoos on either wrist made Augusta furious at first, but she grew to like the way the names shimmered.

Teddy Lupin has a tattoo for his mother and a tattoo for his father. For his father, he asks the tattoo artist to capture the moment between casting a patronus and seeing its form, the flash of beautiful white light and the anticipation of something silvery sweet, a sort of Patronus-y feeling of joy and bravery. For his mother, he gets an ever-changing picture of a nose on his wrist that makes him smile every single day. 

Parvati has a line from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock on her wrist in honor of Lavender, who had clung to Elliot’s Wasteland in the midst of their own war.  There will be time to wonder, do I dare? It reminds her of the daring, nerve, and chivalry that she and Lavender had learned to embody together, the six years they spend wondering and the year they spent daring under the reign of the Carrows.

The only reminder of the child Greg Goyle used to be are the tiny crab tattoos on his biceps, in honor of his best friend Crabbe.

All the women in the Bones line have a matching family crest tattoo. When Susan comes of age and is asked to join the family tradition with her mother and her aunt Amelia, the world is it war. It seems uncouth to mark her skin with a mark of purebloodedness given the state of things. When the war is over, she gets a memorial tattoo for the friends she lost in battle instead. She prays that this will not be a new family tradition of mourning the dead. 

Dudley has a bunch of petunias on the inside of one arm, an array of lilies on the other. When he hugs his daughters, they feel his love through both. 

Hestia Jones is the first Defense Against the Dark Arts professor to break the curse of the position. 

She spends her first year, the year after the war, mostly accessing what the students already know and doing her best to repair the damage that a year either under the Carrows or in various degrees of hiding had done to a group of teenagers. Neville Longbottom, who has the best grasp on the students’ existing knowledge, helps her prepare to a curriculum. 

She’s competent and well-liked, trying to bring love and empathy into her classroom each day, even with the school in a delicate balance. No one seems to know who to trust - it’s not easy to spend school days at the scene of so much death and destruction, and no one has an easy time that first year. Not Hestia, not the seasoned teachers, and not the students. 

At the start of her second year of teaching, though, the students and staff stop holding their breath, and begin to treat her as something permanent within the school. She teaches for over a decade, leaving her mark as the first Defense Against the Dark Arts professor to gain tenure in half a century. 

Because magic allows wixen to have what they want and when they want it pretty much any time of the day, and modifications are easy to make with the wave of a wand, food accommodations are very common in the wizarding world. 

There is very little magic can’t provide.

If you get in good with the House Elves at Hogwarts, if you come into the kitchen and share a kind word, you’ll not only get a cup of tea and basket of biscuits to take back to your dormitory, but you’ll earn their eternal loyalty. It’s then that you can ask for your meals vegetarian, kosher, halal, allergen-free, super rare, or just without tomatoes. 

I know this is late, @shiro-naru​, but thank you for the prompt! 

Ron’s favorite stories about his heroic experiences tend to crop up in very specific circumstances. The stories about his friends’ heroics – Harry’s dramatic sacrifices and Hermoine’s clever saves – are his favorite topic of conversation with new people, but he hardly talks about his own unless he’s been drinking, or talking about money. 

The escaped-from-Gringotts-on-the-back-of-a-blind-dragon story is never is never further than three pints away from a dramatic retelling. And since talking to any of his friends or siblings about money makes him itchy, he immediately turns to blusteringly proving himself with tales of his own past heroics as soon as he can possibly get off the subject that’s been a source of shame for him since he was six. 

Classroom management at Hogwarts is a bit of a mixed bag, owing mostly to the fact that none of the teaching positions require educational training or experience.

Many of the teachers, most notably Sprout and Flitwick, keep students attention by keeping their classes interactive, with students engaged in hands-on activities. Some teachers leave the students to do what they will, leaving the onus of learning on them rather than on themselves. Professor Binns and Professor Vector in Arithmancy are guilty of this type of teaching.

For more the more serious – and potentially dangerous - subjects, Potions and Transfiguration, Professors McGonagall and Snape go for an authoritarian approach to classroom discipline. They establish themselves as absolute rulers within the four walls of their respective classrooms, with rigorous coursework outweighing any potential for silliness or deviation.

The difference between them, the reason McGonagall’s classes are remembered fondly and Snape’s with leftover uneasiness or derision, is a fundamental difference in the way the two teachers see their students. McGonagall looks at hers with respect, always assuming that they want to learn what she teaches them. She’s firm and strict, but gives them the benefit of the doubt, and her underlying caring shows through her gruff manner. Snape, meanwhile, uses the same strict rules, but with a contempt rather than caring. He does not have his students’ best interest at heart the way McGonagall seems to, and his pushing is never to help a student succeed.

One of Ginny’s best qualities is her comedic timing. She's usually the funniest person in any room, in a far different way than her loud, slapstick funny brothers. Her humor is sharp and direct and so well timed that even people she's fighting with can't help but laugh.

The worst of the Great Potter Flu of 2012 was nearly over, and Harry was so tired from being sick (and having three sick children and a traveling-for-work-wife) that he was struggling to keep his eyes open. 

Nine year old James was asleep, splayed across the armchair and somehow still looking like trouble. His still-stuffed nose was making him snore a tiny bit. 

Seven year old Albus was in Harry’s lap, making essentially every point of sweaty post-fever contact possible and watching the cartoon on the Muggle television set intently, completely tuning out his sister. 

Lily was sitting on the floor at Harry’s feet with all of her dolls spread out in front of her, making them play out the illness she and her brothers had just gotten over. 

There was a level on which Harry was completely miserable - his head ached, his eyes burned, and he hadn’t eaten much more than tea and crackers in a couple of days, but another where he knew that this level of peace and enjoying his kids rarely happened and he was determined to make the most of it. 

He didn’t often feel like he was enough as a father, but sometimes when Ginny and her constant competence and seamless motherhood was unavailable, he surprised himself with his ability to take care of the three young lives that depended upon him. He was better than he gave himself credit for, and he was as loved by his children as they were by him. 

Remus tries his best not to feel scolded by Molly Weasley, sitting perched next to her as she cooks dinner for somewhere between twelve and twenty as she does most nights at Grimmauld Place. She’s telling him all the things that still need to get done, and though he knows she’s just letting just her own anxiety spill over, he still feels responsible for the lack. 

He’s been running intelligence, tracking down objects and people, dueling with opposing forces, negotiating with groups who had allied themselves during the first war for years. He’d held together what little resistance they had left in a world filled with delusions of safety almost alone.   

When she brings up everything that still needs to be done, he can feel thirteen years of footsoldiering ceasing to matter. The Order has been his for the last thirteen years, since the end of the first war. He’s grateful for their help - Molly’s, and everyone’s, but it’s hard not to feel protective of the work now that the whole of Wizarding Britain seems to have their hands all of it. 

When Sirius kissed Harry’s forehead before sending him back to school after the Christmas holidays, it was to remind himself that he was watching Harry leave, and not James and he shouldn’t feel like he’s being sent back to Grimmauld Place for the summer hols. 

He is responsible for the boy with the scarred forehead as he never was for James…and it’s because of that scar that he is. 

Nicknames 

Fleur has a lot of French endearments she uses for Bill, who basks in the affection in them, even when he doesn’t understand them literally. 

Minerva McGonagall cycled through a lot of nicknames in her life, but found that using her own name held the most power. She encouraged Nymphadora Tonks - then going by Dora - to claim her name, too. It wasn’t her fault the girl chose her English surname instead of the traditional name her mother had chosen. 

Hermione tolerates being called ‘Mione, but only by Ron and Ginny. Harry’s never tried, and everyone else gets corrected immediately.

Draco had never been allowed a nickname as a boy, for his father’s fear of their Dark Lord using names born of love as tools to mock, calling them Wormtail or Half Blood Prince. It seemed to exploit the vulnerabilities of those unlucky enough to have them. It was a small measure of protection, but he taught Draco never to answer to anything other than his given or family name. 

Endearments for his brother - for his last living flesh and blood, for eyes that look at him like he’s everything - just slip of Hagrid’s tongue. Grawp is not only “Grawppie” and “big guy,” but also “honey” and “tiny” and whatever else comes to mind, often names from his grandmother’s Welsh folklore. It makes no difference to Grawp himself what he’s called, but it feels like part of Hagrid’s duties as an older brother.

Hermione is the only one who calls Ginny Ginevra in an affectionate way. Anyone else, and she knows she’s in trouble.

Kingsley Shaklebolt seems to have it all together – he’s the right hand of two governments, smooth and clean and competent, leaving no room for questions or arguments. His documents are flawless, and no one in his considerable network of connections has a thing to say against him.

Anyone would think that he takes the work home – entertains in some Sacred Twenty Eight country home of decadence and splendor, serving port on silver trays beneath vaulted ceilings. He’s got the money, after all.

What really happens when Kingsley gets home to his considerable four-story London house in Warwick Square, inherited from his titled great-uncle, is not half so interesting. In fact, the house is hardly touched most nights. He lives only on the first floor, in the two rooms he uses as a bedroom and an office. Neither are kept exceptionally clean, but they’re comfortable and lived in. His infrequent guests sit in the living room he mostly uses for the Floo. He’s alone, and likes it that way. It gives him the energy for his daily performances at work.

The second, third, and fourth floors have under-charged tenants, usually students and young families. He likes knowing the space is being used. He smiles if they pass him on their way, and is quite forgiving as a landlord, but otherwise they stay out of each other’s lives. 

The only tenant who ever made Kingsley change his routine was Nymphadora Tonks, whose two year stint in his top flat gave the house its loudest, most fun, and latest nights in its history.