Happy September 1st!

Chapter 2: 2026: Apologies, Dear Readers

When Lee Jordan realizes he has a crush on George Weasley, he feels like he's choosing one of his best friends over the other. The guilt gets in the way of him revealing his feelings.

Luckily for him, Fred is a bit less oblivious to said feelings than his brother. In true Weasley Twins fashion, he makes the most convoluted plan possible to get Lee and George together.

"Angie, what do you think of pretending Georgie and I are trying to hook you up with Lee so I can trick my dear brother into getting together with him instead?"

"I think it's the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard."

"So you're in?"

"Of course."

5 times a Weasley knew how to clean Harry's glasses better than he did, +1 time he realized why.

AKA: Percy and Arthur are terrible at cleaning their own glasses.

Some insecurities about their ability to function on their own lead the Weasley Twins to experiment with spending a little bit of time doing separate things each day. Not a lot, they still prefer to be together than not, but a bit. It goes pretty well, for a while.

Then George messes up in some way at something the two of them normally do easily, prompting some bullies to poke at the exact insecurities that started this whole thing — maybe the twins are incapable of doing things right on their own, after all...

The normally confident boy is reduced to sheepish silence, for once unable to hold his head high and snap back with a barb of his own. Unable to shake it off with a grin and not spare their words a second thought. How can he, without his brother there to anchor him?

But he forgot one little thing: Fred may be his twin, but he's not his only brother.

AKA: Pompous Percy Weasley sees George being bullied and takes a bit of offense to that fact. Bullying is against school rules, after all, and a Prefect such as him can't just let that stand — especially when it's his little brother that's the victim.

(Note: Percy may be a bit of a prat, but he also canonly — made Ginny get Pepper-up potion when she was sick, comforted and scolded his siblings with no hesitation nor shame, and ran into the lake without thought when Ron nearly drowned, among many other good sibling moments — no-one can say he's not a protective big brother, at the very least)

What if Harry didn't get his ability to speak Parseltongue from old Moldy Shorts? What if Lily was a Parselmouth? What if Harry finds out from Snape, of all people?

Teenaged Severus Snape finds a massive black dog injured in the forest, and bonds with it against his better judgement. He and it meet up regularly, he shares his food and his woes and his dreams with it, he pets it and smiles in a way he so rarely does.

Meanwhile, Sirius Black is trying desperately to figure out a way to keep Padfoot's bizarre new friendship a secret from literally all parties involved, Marauders included.

Too bad Lily isn't one for secrets between friends.

An accident in the dungeons means that all the Slytherin's have to temporarily bunk in the other Houses' dorms. It works in literally any generation.

Malfoy in Harry and Ron's room.

Snape having to stay with the Marauders.

Shenanigans, fighting, and bonding ensues.

Each of the Marauders ends up in a different House. They become best friends anyways.

They even make a secret clubhouse somewhere in Hogwarts and room together there. Their actual dormmates don't tell mostly because at least it gets the menaces as far away from them as possible, and partially for immunity from their pranks (a more and more valuable thing as time goes on).

Six-year-old Dudley Dursley has been begging for a little brother for as long as he can remember. It's gotten to the point where his parents have gotten him a puppy, despite their dislike of animals, to make up for the fact that they can't get him one.

And the puppy is nice, he supposes. But it's not a brother, and he wants a brother. All his friends have siblings, he should get one too!

Then five-year-old Harry Potter shows up on the doorstep, crying because a bad man took his own parents away. A little cousin, Dudley thinks, is a lot more like a little brother than a puppy is.

(An AU where Dudley is a year older and Harry is orphaned at five rather than one. This changes both quite a lot of things and not very many things all at once)

Someone starts pulling pranks with the Weasley Twins' MO, but doing things like pranking McGonagall or setting something off in the middle of the Slytherin Common Room, thus getting the Twins in way more trouble than they normally would be in. They make sure to do it in ways that put the most suspicion on the Twins possible, like targeting someone right after they have a fight with them, and when the Twins have either no alibi at all or only a very weak one. As it turns out, a Slytherin victim of one of their meaner pranks decided to show them just what messing with the House of cunning really meant.

The Weasley Twins keep getting pranked. Over, and over, and over again. They go through suspect after suspect, follow lead after lead, but can't figure out who's doing it. The pranks continue, private and public, big and small.

In the end, it turns out the culprit is a House Elf that the Twins helped out once, and who thought this a great gift — a mystery, pranks, fun. What could be better for them? Fred and George, however, never discover this.

Teenaged Marauders, Snape, Lily, and Regulus are shoved in a room and shown a montage of basically what the next twenty years are going to look like.

Yelling, bonding, horror, and redemption follow.

The Marauders + Lily and Snape are cloned magically. The clones are in their late teens, with their adult memories feeling more like pensive memories they watched rather than things they actually experienced.

After having to survive on their own (?without wands or with cloned wands?) for a time, they decide to use their various levels of genius, inside knowledge, and the fact no-one knows they exist to their advantage as they hunt down Voldemort's horcruxes a bit early.

Peter has a ton of proximity and tracking charms on him, something which part of him wants to feel bitter about but mostly he accepts as a necessity. He's rather traumatized by the knowledge that when push came to shove, his older self chose himself over his friends, in the worst way possible — he doesn't want to make that mistake again.

Lily and Snape eventually reconcile, forming a close platonic bond, but before that they argue a lot. It's of friends betrayed, though, familiar and tinged with fondness despite the anger. His main argument is that he isn't a Death Eater because he himself never took the Mark — this is twisted back on him to force him to play nice with Peter, who technically did nothing wrong yet either. (Listen, I really don't like canon Snape, but I like how he's used in fic; same with the Marauders, really. So this would be a Redeemable AU).

Eventually they meet Harry. And their adult counterparts, for those who are still alive, anyways.

They'd all use nicknames/new names after a while as they diverged more from their adult selves, mostly because it got confusing whenever they were talking about said adult selves (especially those still alive). As well, just for funsies, Snape and Lily get animagus forms as well (a bat and a doe respectively).

As well, the clones are technically something other than human, so spells and such meant to specifically affect or avoid humans react to them as magical creatures of some sort instead — how this affects laws, like regarding Unforgivables, I'm uncertain.

—ALT/EXCERPT—

There was a small bat in the Headmaster's office. It seemed to be a friend of Fawkes', coming and going regularly just to hang from his perch. Albus had of course been worried at first, as he was not an idiot and understood that Animagi made excellent spies, but spells meant to reveal humans and force humans back from their animal forms had no affect on the bat. Just in case, he had used Legilimency on it, only picking up regular bat-ish thoughts and no sense that anyone had sent it.

As Fawkes liked it — often cooing at it and trying to preen it — and it didn't cause any trouble, Albus decided to let it stay as long as it wished. Indeed, he made a habit of looking up from his desk and smiling at the furry little thing.

* * *

The small bat flew across the canopy of the Forbidden Forest, seeming to check around itself to make sure it was not being watched before alighting in a small clearing. Upon landing, it shook itself into the form of a teenaged boy with long, greasy black hair and a large, once-broken nose. The boy walked through the forest for some time, before coming across a simple campsite.

"All this Occlumency is giving me headaches," he complained. "I forgot what a pain building my shields was."

"Did Dumbledore say anything useful or did you just spend another day playing with Fawkes?" This question was posed by a girl crouching by the campfire and throwing leaves into it, her eyes burning a brilliant green and her hair a similar color to the flames.

"Nothing today," the boy admitted quietly. Anyone else would've gotten an earful from him for saying he was playing with anyone, but not her. Never her. He was still trying to earn her forgiveness, after all.