Dougal McGregor, whose beloved, they said, was an unfair woman. Heart as black as her hair, they said. Probably the kind of passionate, silly girl who’d throw anyone away for a laugh.
But the heartbreaking thing was that Dougal knew Minerva hadn’t been like that at all.
(Source: linedanser.deviantart.com)
The Leaky Cauldron was always meant to be more than just a geographic crossroads. For much of its history, its traditional proprietors, the Dodderidges, kept a hidden back room, often in defiance of anti-Muggle laws and even the Statute of Secrecy.
Here, strange new Muggle devices were introduced and refined upon: cameras and ceramic toilets, cocaine and curious antiseptic sprays. Witches who preferred Squibs or half-giants collected in the back room, secure in the Cauldron’s secrecy policy; and wizards whose non-magical lovers were persecuted in Victorian London found this a safe place to engage in a dalliance. Magical painting techniques were invented behind silken screens in the corridor, thanks to a young muse of legendary beauty and dubious name who was perhaps a little bit Veela and who later found fame starring in early Muggle films. Young Hogwarts rebels darted in and out: here was Horace with a half-breed of tremendous power, with whom he could not speak freely at school, and a little bit before him were Albus and Elphias holding court in the corner sedan.
But such places never last long. The Dodderidges doddered out of being some time ago, when waves of political fervor swept our world and dispensed first with the intellectuals and then with the curious and then with the oddball thinkers.
And Tom, fearing for his safety, will not let anyone into the back room now.
(Source: ohaapala.com)
Her graduation gift had been a grand tour of those places specifically associated with Grindelwaldian heroics, from the small cafes where he’d first hatched his plans to the ruined husks of the Baltic Ministries he’d destroyed, to the great and glorious city — Chernobog — which he had intended to make the seat of his new magical era.
She’d packed her finest, boasted of it to every girl in the dungeons, and made clandestine plans to meet her fiance in Minsk. Her sisters, she thought, were surprisingly quiet about the whole affair. The youngest was wrapped up in a certain grey-eyed prefect, and clearly the middle one was content to fly in the rear, aware that this was not her moment.
But then perhaps not.
In Paris, only the first stop of the journey, came the Owl urging her to return home.
Eloped with mudblood filth. Do come back at once, you must make her see sense!
And for Bella that was that.
(Source: carmidoll, via acidbuttercup)
Bodil Blair did not lose her head when her lover, half-goblin Shanley Snipscar, was taken to Azkaban for trading time turners to low-level Gringotts employees determined to reverse the outcome of the last goblin war. But she did use some of his merchandise to rewrite history and set him free, and when this was accomplished Snipscar was a grimmer man entirely and the two had a new purpose: to punish a Ministry that would subject magical persons to Dementors.
Given strength by their love for each other, Snipscar and Blair gathered a band of remorseless outlaws: terrible Tomkin, ill-fated Fortunata Fortescue, tricky Charon Carrow, and old Donn Derwent. And the group went on a stupendous spree, a saga worthy of song, bending time to suit their whims and enacting vengeance on the MLE, killing more than fifteen Aurors total.
Fortunately, Blair and Snipscar are not remembered as they should be, as the wizarding world’s premier gangster and his moll. By time-turners they rose to prominence, and by time-turners they were defeated. Aurors Tonks and Shacklebolt, cleverer than their fellows and not unsympathetic to the anti-Azkaban stance, went back in time and prevented their first meeting by offering Blair a prominent Ministry post in Iceland fresh out of Hogwarts, and pushing Snipscar into the arms of a thoroughly uncriminal Hufflepuff.
They still feel a bit bad about it. The course of love and all that. But it’s not like anyone can prove it happened, as all the evidence has been rewritten by the current timeline.
(Source: eugeniorecuenco.com)
Justin Finch-Fletchley brought the crup home because he wanted to teach it that Muggles were as kind as wizards and witches, but it persisted in snapping at mum and dad. And when it encountered Princess Victoria, Uncle Sholto’s prize hound?
Good breeding and cutting-edge neutering techniques were no match for plain, old-fashioned magical virility.
(Source: timwalkerphotography.com)
It’s a surprisingly nice dining room when you don’t have a dead Muggle Studies professor above the table.
(photo and caption submitted by retrousse)
(Source: liberi-per-sempre, via whimsical-nostalgia)
We purchased a marvelous antique from Mr. Borgin last week, but given what happens when the candles are lit, we would very much like to enquire into his return policy.
(Source: halucynowa.deviantart.com)
Magical architectural buffs declared the stair a phenomenal example of Rowenan charmswork on stone, one of the many treasured corners of a most marvelous building, and a credit to all wizardkind.
But Filius Flitwick persisted in thinking it a rather tedious morning commute.
(Source: professor-moriarty.com)
the blacks.
They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…
Seamus’s mum was utterly consumed by flights of fancy. Pundits on the WWN captivated her. Unfounded rumors she saw as truth divined by Merlin himself. And so, as he aged, Seamus had to strike out from her a bit — to side more often with his sensible Muggle father, to brave painful truths instead of easy reveries, to choose the solid dangers of adulthood over her safe and comfortable fantasies.
But he would always, always defend her to others when necessary. Whatever her flaws, he adored her. Seamus’s mother was not a stalwart person or a sensible person or even a particularly smart person. But she was an imaginative one, and she’d been a very good mum, in her own way.
(Source: fashiongonerogue.com)
The photograph taken by Ginny Weasley of two of her favorite people. It has been carted to various Quidditch stadiums around the world in a bottomless bag and has jolted against so many Quaffles and been folded into so many wrinkled, stuffed-away jumpers that its magic has gone a bit haywire, and its movements are now jilted and repetitive.
But she keeps it with her always anyway.
(Source: ivoryskinned, via aneclecticcontradiction)
It was a memorable first kiss: the waning light of morning after the Yule Ball; with one’s best robes packed away; but the effects of hair primping, assiduous skin-scrubbing charms, and perfume still lingering. And to agree to meet up with someone quite special, and to have that someone arrive! Even after so much time spent wondering if they would, and what they saw in one, and whether they would be able to tell that this was one’s first kiss.
And then to be able to say, later on, that one had known them, and to hint that one had kissed them.
“Oh yes, but that was before all this fame and adulation, of course. We were younger and simpler then.”
So perhaps Hermione had moved on (and anyway she’d already had her first kiss, after weeks of reading human sexuality textbooks, with an orthodontist’s son at a Healthy Teeth Conference in Vienna over summer holidays), but Viktor would remember it always.
(Source: mala-lesbia.deviantart.com)
Ministry men and women were often so heavily married they depressed even their spouses, and so it was with some trepidation that they confiscated a trove of back-alley Knockturn-traded erotica, a terrible naughty pictures racket that used film developed in Amortentia to coax innocent Muggles into licentiousness.
“It’s despicable!” Cattermole said to the Prophet people who’d come to write up the scandal.
“Downright disgusting and depraved,” said Umbridge.
“A bit bewitching, though,” Ogden reported, “Imagine what it must be like for the weak little Muggles. Poor fellows. They’ve got no defense against this sort of thing.”
This became the consensus around the drinking fountain until Weasley, the resident expert on Muggle-loving, discovered the secret sticky papers Muggles used to combat such self-indulgent sauciness.
“Observe,” he said very solemnly, pushing his glasses up on his nose, “The patron saint of Muggle morality, her nose pointing upwards in defiance of all scarlet behavior. It must be that these stamps, as they are called, are intended to stamp out inappropriate images. What else could Muggles possibly use them for?”
And this was considered sound. Owls were quickly dashed off to the Prophet with corrections. So many poured into the paper all at once that the Reporter In Charge of Howlers became very distraught tracking who had sent what, and whether each letter-writer had properly credited and paid for use of the Ministry Owlery. He had to wonder if there was a better way to do this postal thing.
(Source: ohaapala.com)
Some magical children dream of being Aurors, or Quidditch players, or Minister.
But Dulcinea, who grew up to be the candy lady, always wanted to ride the rails.
(Source: browndresswithwhitedots)
