#( I DON'T CARE I LOVE CRAFTING HP AUS YOU GUYS )

[choosingfreedom-a]

harry potter au.

name. levi ackerman house. slytherin wand. pine and phoenix feather, 10 inches, reasonably supple blood status. half-blood patronus. has a difficult time producing a corporeal patronus, but it would be a peregrine falcon.

summary / au-specific tidbits.

grew up in muggle france but moved back to britain with kenny when he was ten; attended hogwarts; is bilingual, but consciously speaks with a british accent rather than a french one, though the french may slip through if he isn’t paying attention.

(note, though, that i can play a slight alternate where he attends beauxbatons, either transferring to hogwarts halfway through his schooling or remaining in france until after he graduates.)

was in the order of the phoenix for both the first and second wars.

powerful wizard and incredibly skilled duelist. excelled at defense against the dark arts. prefers a wand but can perform wandless magic.

also a wonderful flier. never joined a quidditch team but often flew around the pitch on his own. flying calms him. is notable for being able to aim remarkably well while flying, so can essentially duel from a broomstick. 

comes from a family of purebloods (his father is an unknown muggle), but not a blood purist. 

knows some dark magic and isn’t morally against using it if he deems it necessary to achieve greater ends, but doesn’t often, aware of the stigma against it

wand analysis.

pine.

The straight-grained pine wand always chooses an independent, individual master who may be perceived as a loner, intriguing and perhaps mysterious. Pine wands enjoy being used creatively, and unlike some others, will adapt unprotestingly to new methods and spells. Many wandmakers insist that pine wands are able to detect, and perform best for, owners who are destined for long lives, and I can confirm this in as much as I have never personally known the master of a pine wand to die young. The pine wand is one of those that is most sensitive to non-verbal magic.

phoenix feather.

This is the rarest core type. Phoenix feathers are capable of the greatest range of magic, though they may take longer than either unicorn or dragon cores to reveal this. They show the most initiative, sometimes acting of their own accord, a quality that many witches and wizards dislike.

Phoenix feather wands are always the pickiest when it comes to potential owners, for the creature from which they are taken is one of the most independent and detached in the world. These wands are the hardest to tame and to personalise, and their allegiance is usually hard won.

a pine’s owner tends to be an independent loner, which clearly works for levi, and its penchant for creativity and adaptability is representative of levi’s own resourceful ability to adapt quickly to new situations. he has been known to modify his spells in ways that make them either more powerful or more effective in certain circumstances, and his pine wand reacts well to it. as for the rumor that pine owners live long lives, well, levi considers that to be bitterly ironic, as he doesn’t expect to live long at all, but then, the fact that he seems to keep on surviving while the people around him die might belie that.

as for the phoenix feather, levi is well-represented in the phoenix: an intensely powerful and independent creature whose loyalty, when won, is invaluable, but whose trust takes a great deal to earn. levi is not easily tamed, and he, too, has a tendency to act of his own accord when he believes it necessary, defying orders if need be, so it’s fitting that his wand has the potential for the same.

house analysis.

first, let me discuss why i didn’t place him in any other houses, because i’ve seen people headcanon pretty much all of them for levi.

hufflepuff: i guess he gets this one because he’s loyal and cares about protecting people? but slytherins are also loyal and care about protecting people - and levi simply doesn’t have the temperament of a hufflepuff. despite his protectiveness and good intentions, he doesn’t project patience or kindness (those qualities exist, but they aren’t on display), he isn’t team- or family-oriented, he doesn’t care about avoiding conflict, and he doesn’t have the affinity for nature, food, etc that hufflepuffs often have. to be blunt, y’all, he’s not a good enough person for hufflepuff.

ravenclaw: this one i understand, because levi is very intelligent, and he does care about honesty and truth, and he is innovative. but levi’s intelligence is very practical and in-the-moment; he doesn’t really care about academia for academia’s sake. he values learning for the sake of putting it to use more than for its own merits. he’s not the kind of free-thinker ravenclaws often are. his cleverness is more slytherin than ravenclaw.

gryffindor. yes, levi cares about a cause. yes, levi can be noble. but here’s the thing: gryffindors tend to have a strong moral code and stick to it; they have a clear idea of what a just world is and try their hardest to achieve it. levi sees the world in shades of grey, without a clear good and evil. his morality is much more flexible and individualistic; a gryffindor would frown upon levi’s machiavellian does-whatever-is-necessary-to-achieve-his-ends philosophy. levi also doesn’t care about glory and isn’t as social as gryffindors tend to be. frankly, though he can be friends with gryffindors individually (isabel is a gryffindor), as a whole they’re more likely to tire and frustrate him. (to be quite honest with you, it baffles me to see people draw/sort levi as a gryffindor. he’d be so annoyed if he had to be around gryffindors all the time??? let him Rest????)

slytherin. slytherins can be very loyal, but this loyalty tends to be conditional to their in-group. they aren’t highly social, but they do protect their groups, their families, to a fault. this mirrors levi’s brand of loyalty: he’ll only attach himself to a person, like erwin, who has proven themselves to him, and while he’s very individual, he’s protective of the small groups that may form around him. 

he’s both cunning and underhanded - his ability to think on the spot and adapt to situations plus his willingness to play dirty to get what he wants would offend a gryffindor, as would his belief that unpleasant methods can be justified by a necessary result. he doesn’t see the world as divided into good and evil, but rather into groups of people who’ve had to make choices; his grey view of the world, plus his ability to read people and guess the motivations behind their choices, strike me as more slytherin than anything else.

now, one thing that isn’t very slytherin of him is his tendency towards blunt honesty; he might flatly refuse to practice the deceit another slytherin might say is wiser or more necessary. levi is underhanded, but openly so - he’ll do whatever he needs to to get his way, but he’ll tell you that upfront. he isn’t manipulative in the way erwin is, in that his manipulations are, while effective, also transparent. in fact, some might accuse his style of blunt intimidation of being unpleasantly gryffindor - an insult among slytherins, who see discreet manipulation and finesse as far more valuable than physical intimidation, when getting one’s way. (levi, of course, ignores these jabs and continues on anyway.)

i suppose the whole slytherins are evil thing needs to be addressed. obviously slytherins aren’t evil, not as a whole, and levi certainly isn’t. (he isn’t the exception here; there are plenty of slytherins with their hearts in the right place.) but he also isn’t concerned with being seen as a good person - he’d like to be a good person, if he can, but whether others think of him that way is less important. he does want to be seen as a competent person, and recognized for his skills, but the fact is that he’s rude, he’s crass, he’s broody, and he’s unapologetic about it. so while his compassion belies the heartless slytherins stereotype other houses love to indulge in, his general antisocial nature doesn’t do the house image many favors. 

he also, as noted, cares for gaining knowledge so it can be used, rather than for its own sake; hange, a definite ravenclaw (imo), might want to study something just to see what it does, while levi is looking for ways to put that knowledge to use in his favor. (he’s constantly doing this, actually, observing the world around him and filing away any knowledge that might prove useful in the future, as a survival mechanism.) that’s very slytherin, as is his pragmatism in how to use what he discovers. i also think that the kind of adaptability and self-preservation instincts levi possesses and cultivates are pretty slytherin - slytherins are probably the best out of any house at constantly observing, evaluating, and adapting to the situation around them

history.

     (note that anything during his school years and after is flexible, depending on      plotting; consider this the default.)

the ackermans were, once, a prominent pureblood family, renowned for producing wizards of great power. at some point in the past, however - before grindelwald’s rise, but continuing into it - they fell out of favor in the pureblood community when prominent members of the family refused to support the increasing demand for subjugation of muggles and muggleborns. labeled blood-traitors, the ackermans lost their positions of power (discreetly dismissed from the wizengamot, forced out of government seats), and there were those, especially in the fervor of grindelwald’s propaganda, who even actively persecuted the members of the ackerman family, hunting them down until there were few left.

kuchel ackerman, a young woman and competent, if not particularly powerful, witch, fled to france in the late 1950s with her infant son levi to escape such persecution, hoping that disappearing into the muggle world on the continent would keep her son safe. she didn’t dare to use magic lest it give her away, but her lack of muggle knowledge or muggle qualifications made finding and keeping a job difficult, so she and levi lived in poverty. nevertheless, she raised him as best she could, until, when levi was seven years old, she grew very ill and died.

her brother, kenny ackerman, had meanwhile found other ways of avoiding persecution. in his youth, angry at the rest of pureblood society, kenny had secretly murdered several purebloods, with such skill and stealth that he’d never been caught. that ended, however, when he attempted to murder uri reiss, a powerful wizard - uri caught him, but rather than having kenny punished, struck a deal with him: kenny would be uri’s right hand man, lending uri his immense magical skill, and in turn kenny would be under the reiss family’s protection. this deal lasted for almost a decade - until uri died, and his successor had no such kindness for kenny; he cast kenny out of his household, threatening to reveal kenny’s past murders to the public, and kenny was forced into hiding.

he went to france, thinking to find his sister, whom he hadn’t seen in many years, but when his search led him to a rundown tenement, he found only a scrawny, half-starved child hunkered down in the dirt. unaware that his sister had ever had a child, assuming that this boy was nothing but a squatter, kenny almost left - until the boy looked up and saw him, and kenny was blasted backwards with a force that made the rotting foundation shake.

the boy’s posture hadn’t changed - he still huddled on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chin - but the force was clearly magic, and powerful magic at that. so kenny investigated, and wrung the story of his mother’s life and death out of levi. kenny decided to stay and look after his nephew, though he never revealed to levi that they were related, introducing himself only as a family friend. 

levi’s magic was powerful but dangerously uncontrolled; the burn marks on his hands proved that it had already hurt him at least once. kenny taught him to harness and control his magic. levi didn’t of course have his own wand and kenny refused to give him his, but he taught levi the basics of wandless magic, as well as how to open his senses to other people’s magic and focus his intent. but that wasn’t all -- kenny also taught levi to survive in a magicless world, to fight with both fists and blade, to steal, to observe, to trust his own strength. it was the only way he knew how to raise a child: teach him to survive, whatever it takes.

when levi was ten, they moved back to britain, and kenny started disappearing for a few days at a time, never explaining his errands to levi. the summer after levi’s eleventh birthday, he got his hogwarts letter. (this was, incidentally, the first time levi saw his last name; neither kuchel nor kenny had ever told him, so at first he thought the letter addressed to mr l ackerman was a mistake.) kenny wouldn’t go with him to diagon alley, so levi went alone with the money he had saved up and bought himself as much as he could from his list. when he returned home, robes and new wand in hand, kenny wasn’t there. levi assumed he was off on another errand, or testing levi in some way, but when kenny still hadn’t returned by september first, it was left to levi to find his way to king’s cross alone.

at hogwarts, he was sorted into slytherin, but showed little interest in the forming of alliances that quickly began amongst other slytherin first-years. in fact, he ignored both friendly and unfriendly advances from his housemates, some of whom thought him easy prey because of both his size and his last name. but when one would-be bully ended up in the hospital wing with a broken wrist after a confrontation with levi, he was left mostly alone.

the truth was that levi had no idea how to make friends, how to even try, and he couldn’t help but size up everyone around him as a potential threat; years under kenny’s tutelage had ingrained him with suspicion. his main goal was simply to avoid being bothered, and he focused more on his classes than his classmates. he quickly proved himself an intimidatingly skilled wizard: he excelled especially at defense against the dark arts, with charms as a close second. he also discovered, during their first flying lesson, an immediate love of flying, and though he never joined a quidditch team, he would often sneak out to the quidditch pitch at night, pick the broomshed lock, and steal a broom to fly until he felt calm.

when levi went home for the winter holidays, kenny wasn’t there, and obviously hadn’t been there in quite some time. rather than tell anyone, however, levi resigned himself to living alone; the small amount of wizarding money he possessed was useless here, but he could steal and forage for what he needed, and that’s what he continued to do throughout his years at school. it was an odd sort of double life, spending most of the year in comfort if not joy, and then returning to the muggle world over the summer to live alone as just another kid on the muggle streets.

he didn’t make his first real friend until farlan church, a charismatic ravenclaw, partnered himself with levi on a project and hadn’t left him alone since. levi resisted farlan’s attempts at friendship at first, but eventually relented; farlan was clever and humorous, but also perceptive and level-headed, and never seemed to mind levi’s dour attitude or black humor. in time the duo became three when levi stepped in to protect isabel magnolia, a younger gryffindor, from a gang of students she’d managed to offend. isabel attached herself to levi, calling him her big brother - a move that garnered both laughter and anger from other students, in a time when, as death eater attacks were becoming more common outside hogwarts’ walls, befriending slytherins was becoming increasingly taboo.

by the time levi and farlan graduated, the three were an inseparable trio. farlan and levi moved in together, and isabel began joining them over breaks rather than going home to the orphanage. though war had broken out in the wizarding world, levi had no desire to take part; all he cared about was keeping his head down and sticking with the people he’d begun to think of as his family. 

but the luxury of remaining uninvolved didn’t last long. it wasn’t long after isabel’s graduation. there was a death eater attack. farlan and isabel (a half-blood and a muggle-born respectively) were killed, and levi - levi who had gone out, levi who had left instead of staying home like isabel had asked him to - arrived only in time to see the bodies fall, lit by the curses from within.

he snapped. by the time members of the order of the phoenix arrived in pursuit of the death eaters, what they found instead was levi, blood-spattered in the middle of a ring of carnage, wizards falling around him, the crackle of his magic in the air. one of the order members, erwin smith, a hogwarts graduate some years above levi, already knew of levi and his dueling skills, and it was he who approached levi and convinced him to join in the order, to fight for revenge against the people responsible for isabel and farlan’s death.

so levi joined. as one would expect, he made few friends in the order, at least at first - he was a slytherin, for one thing, and utterly uninterested in working with the rest of the order. angry, antisocial, he tended towards solo missions, convinced anyone else would get in his way, and it was a long time before he learned to work with others. in fact, when suspicions of a spy within the order came out, there were more than a few fingers pointed levi’s way. but erwin vouched for him, and dumbledore trusted him, and it became clear soon enough that whatever else levi was, he was dedicated to saving lives, and the amount of times he protected his fellow order members and civilians alike from death eaters was undeniable. some said that he was the reason the order hung on as long as it did, even fighting a losing battle.

eventually, though, the battle ended. they won, not through levi’s skill or erwin’s planning, but through little more than luck, or so it seemed - one baby’s inability to die. and just like that there was no more fighting to be done. levi was left to figure out how to live in a world at peace - until, of course, a new war came along, and a new generation to fight alongside.

(this is where the timeline gets especially flexible. what does levi do in the intervening years between the wars? whatever works best for the thread, really. some options are these:

dragged along by erwin and hange, who both become professors at hogwarts after the war, levi becomes the flying instructor and head of the dueling club. he isn’t exactly a personable teacher, but he’s a formidable and respected figure, and legends run rampant about his deeds during the war. some students dislike or fear him, while others hope to impress him, and others still have seen the kindness he shows to young students who need a listening ear.

though he refuses to actually work in the ministry, and turns down offers to join the auror program, he does consent to help the aurors hunt down death eaters who fled after voldemort’s fall. once that’s done, he - sticks around, call him a freelancer, there are aurors he knows who were in the order, and he helps them, tracks down dangerous criminals, steps in when his skills are needed. he’s still not ministry, though. shut up.

it’s hard, adjusting to peace. it’s hard, trying to live a quiet life when his body seems trained to expect disaster. but damn it, levi’s going to try. he’s earned that. he owns a tea shop in hogsmeade, a tidy little place. he doesn’t make a fuss, and only a few people think to the connection between levi the tea proprietor and the levi ackerman who killed so many death eaters during the war. but his instincts never go away, and neither do the nightmares.

when voldemort returns, levi isn’t surprised. the world’s a shitty place, after all, and it’s too much to expect that evil dark lords will just stay dead. it sucks, but in some ways it’s almost a relief, rejoining the order, taking up the fight - because this, in the end, feels like it’s all he was ever meant to do. he was made for war; let war take him.