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alt_fen2017-11-13 03:04 pm
Alternity Fic: "To the Revolution"
Below: my Alternity Fic in which the (surviving) Alternity characters discover the new musical, "Hamilton." (Inspired by "They Call Themselves the Trash of the Thing," in which the Avengers discover it.)
To the Revolution
Susan
The ten-dollar founding father without a father
Got a lot farther by working a lot harder
By being a lot smarter
By being a self-starter
The first person in Albion to hear about Hamilton is Susan Bones.
It’s one of her muggle music friends who sends her the bootleg, of course. Hamilton is selling out at the Public Theater, the talk of New York, and there’s no official album released yet. Susan’s friend got tickets, and illicitly sneaked a recording of the music with a wizarding-muggle hybrid gadget Pansy and George came up with for recording live music. Sue, you are going to love this, she says in the letter that comes with the recording. You are going to love this so much.
Susan gets as far as “My Shot” before apparating to Pansy’s doorstep, saying, “you have to listen to this with me right now.”
Frank
Here comes the General (RISE UP)
Frank teaches the current Moddey crowd to sing “here comes the general” every time Alice walks into the room.
He loves that song. He actually loves several of the songs -- he likes to try to rap along with the Cabinet Rap Battles, although as a sixty-year-old British wizard he raps about as well as you’d expect.
But he pretty much can’t listen to the whole album straight through. Too many moments that make him want to drink.
Astoria and Queenie Greengrass
Cuz when push comes to shove
I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love
It is clear to everyone in Albion who knew Daphne that King George is at least partly based on Barty Crouch. Astoria and Queenie are quite certain that Lin-Manuel Miranda was one of the small number of people who saw The Green Wedding during its Broadway run, before the lawsuit shut it down -- that, or he has one of the illicit recordings. Probably both. It’s annoying, but not really actionable. The idea of turning a sordid murderer like Barty into a comedic figure in a musical is the sort of thing that could only make sense to an American.
Luna Lovegood and Terry Longbottom
Look around, look around, how lucky we are to be alive right now.
Luna is one of the last to get a copy of the bootleg because everyone assumes she’s heard it already. Terry doesn’t quite understand why she likes it as much as she does, but goes with her when she decides she wants to go see it in New York City. He was not a huge fan of New York during his vagabond years -- too many people -- but he can tolerate it for a few days.
They don’t have tickets; Luna simply assumes that she’ll win the lottery if she enters, and that is exactly what happens.
Charlotte Finch-Fletchley
Lafayette!
I’m takin this horse by the reins makin’
Redcoats redder with bloodstains
Lafayette!
And I’m never gonna stop until I make ‘em
Drop and burn ‘em up and scatter their remains
Charlotte has always imagined Justin speaking with a French accent, even though he didn’t, so Lafayette, America’s favorite fighting Frenchman, makes a terrific stand-in for him as she imagines the characters of Hamilton as the revolutionaries she grew up with.
She has a set of wizarding photographs taken the year of the May Battle, some before and some after, and looks at them, imagining Harry as Alexander Hamilton.
She is delighted to find out, a few weeks after her obsession starts, that her Mum’s friend Ginny Weasley is also a fan of the musical. Ginny doesn’t disabuse her of her notions about Lafayette, but laughs out loud, then apologizes, when Charlotte shares her theory about Alexander being like Harry. “Harry hated writing,” she said. “Hermione wrote most of his school parchments. Sirius Black was our Alexander Hamilton, if anyone was. He wrote those long essays, argued with anyone who’d write back… Alice wouldn’t have wanted him as a secretary, though, he’d have been a disaster.”
“Oh,” Charlotte said, disappointed.
“You know your father -- Justin, I mean -- he was definitely a right-hand man type. But it wasn’t Alice he ingratiated himself with, it was Antonin Dolohov because he was spying. You can imagine him as all of them in turn, honestly. Alexander, Lafayette, Laurens, HERCULES MULLIGAN.”
“I don’t want to imagine Justin as all four,” Charlotte said. “Part of the point is, they were friends. Good friends. I like imagining Ron, Harry, Draco, and Justin that way.”
“Imagine Harry as John Laurens, then. Committed to freedom, died before the war was over. Ron can be Hercules Mulligan, I don’t think he’d mind. I guess that makes Draco Alexander. That doesn’t quite work either, but Lin-Manuel wasn’t writing about us, now, was he?”
Linus Moon
Don’t modulate the key and not debate with me!
Linus doesn’t hear Hamilton until the soundtrack’s official release. He’s visiting a friend at Oxford when someone passes it along to him and insists he absolutely needs to listen to it. He promptly loses the recording at the bottom of a pile of papers and doesn’t dig it up for several weeks.
When he does finally listen to it, he is instantly entranced. It’s poetry; it’s poetry that’s every bit as complex as sonnets but with a completely different sound; it’s poetry about a revolution, about a revolution’s aftermath, about the revolutionaries.
He sends copies of the soundtrack to everyone he knows, an effusive fan letter to Lin-Manuel Miranda, and buys a ticket to New York. He has to have a muggle friend buy a ticket off StubHub for him as he has trouble getting the Internet to work. The next day, he buys another ticket to see it again. The prices are exorbitant and he doesn’t regret a single sickle.
Molly Weasley
You hold your child as tight as you can
And push away the unimaginable
The moments when you’re in so deep
It feels easier to just swim down
Molly Weasley cannot listen to Act II.
Bill Weasley
Can I be real a second? For just a millisecond?
Let down my guard and tell the people how I feel a second?
Bill’s feelings about Hamilton are complicated.
He loves George Washington. He picks up on the fact that Washington raps when he’s frustrated and speaks or sings in a more stately manner the rest of the time, because of his constant awareness of his role in history. He imagines Washington not as Alice, but as Arthur.
The protagonist, on the other hand -- brilliant, energetic, fiery, adulterous, self-destructive -- Alexander reminds him of Rachel. Especially the heartbreaking, raw beauty of “Hurricane,” which sums up everything he loved about Rachel. All the reasons he stayed with her as long as he did.
Eventually Ginny suggests he try imagining Alexander as Sirius Black, instead. “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” she said. “That was Sirius. He was our writer. If someone from the Order had needed to write the Federalist papers, it would’ve been him, don’t you think?”
“Sirius had a lazy streak,” Bill says. You think he’d have written the other fifty-one? He’d have written five and figured the important bits were covered.”
“Remus, then.”
“Snape’s the one who’d have actually written fifty-one,” Bill grumbles. He tries imagining Alexander as Sirius, though, and that helps.
Pansy
I know my sister like I know my own mind
You will never find anyone as trusting or as kind.
I love my sister more than anything in this life
I will choose her happiness over mine every time.
Pansy is hooked from the first time Susan plays it for her. She listens to the whole thing, then insists that Sally-Anne come over and listen to the whole thing, then sends a copy to Hermione, then copies to Ginny, Luna, Evelyn, Maureen and Jeremy, and all her other friends because she desperately wants people to talk to about every. last. detail.
It’s easy to make a war story exciting; what Pansy finds electrifying about the musical is that it makes governing exciting. It makes building the nation afterward exciting. It makes compromise and elections and shifting alliances exciting, and in general is the most Slytherin musical Pansy has ever heard, although George indignantly insists that Alexander is clearly a Gryffindor. (“I’ll give you Laurens,” Sally-Anne offers during one of these debates.)
Pansy keeps a little cluster of photographs on a shelf in her living room -- pictures of all her friends who died during the war, along with a blooming paperwhite that’s been magically preserved. (That means it has no scent, but she also doesn’t have to remember to water it.) Cedric Diggory comes up with a tradition of raising a glass in a toast to everyone on the shelf when Hamilton sings “I may not live to see our glory” at the beginning of “The Story of Tonight.” Pansy likes this tradition a lot. She does not map the characters to specific people she actually knew, because she’s well aware that Harry was nothing like Alexander, and Justin not all that much like Lafayette. But as a musical that memorializes the heroes of a revolution, she’ll take it. Maybe Lin-Manuel Miranda will write his next musical about Albion.
Moaning Myrtle
Moaning Myrtle hates the entire musical because so many Hogwarts students like to sing it in the shower.
Ernie MacMillan
Burr, the revolution’s imminent. What do you stall for?
If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?
Ernie tries listening to Hamilton, because everyone was talking about it.
It makes him feel irritated, and after putting it away for a while he realizes this is because Burr’s “gentlemen, lower your voices!” play-it-safe keep-your-head-down attitude is being so sharply criticized, and that … that feels personal.
He goes back and listens to the whole thing. Once. He doesn’t really feel the need to listen to any more than that.
Fred and George Weasley
Lock up ya daughters and horses, of course
It’s hard to have intercourse over four sets of corsets…
Fred and George listen the first time because Pansy is so enthusiastic about it. A week later, Fred finds an exciting business opportunity in New York because he wants to see it live. He doesn’t buy tickets, assuming he’ll be able to get tickets once in New York, and returns home greatly disappointed.
Padma Patil
I’m not standing still
I am lying in wait
Padma is in her first year teaching at Hogwarts and the students are all singing bits and pieces of this thing. After a colleague tips her off about what it is, Padma queues up the soundtrack one night, pours herself a stiff drink, and listens all the way through.
She’s surprised at how sympathetic the musical is toward Aaron Burr. Weirdly, it makes her feel understood in a way she doesn’t expect. She sends a note to Seamus and suggests he track it down, or even go see it, since he’s living within easy apparating distance of the Richard Rogers Theater.
Evelyn Longbottom
How does a ragtag volunteer army in need of a shower
Somehow defeat a global superpower?
How do we emerge victorious from the quagmire?
Leave the battlefield waving Betsy Ross’ flag higher?
Evelyn is living in the U.S., but New York is much further away from Florida than her friends back in Albion realize, even for someone who can apparate. (“Would you visit Moscow on a whim?” she asks Pansy, exasperated, as they chat by Skype. “Because it’s almost exactly the same distance from London to Moscow as it is from Houston to New York.”) She enjoys the soundtrack enough that she buys herself a t-shirt that says “I WANT A REVELATION” under a picture of the Schuyler Sisters.
She is perplexed when one of her colleagues comments on the t-shirt, making it clear that he thinks she somehow missed the point (“we were fighting against you guys!”) since it’s about a war with England.
“You know I actually fought in a revolution, don’t you?” she says. “Like, when I hear the lyric about the ragtag army in need of a shower, that’s me he’s singing about, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Well, sure you were around for it, I guess--”
“I fought in the May Battle. Look it up,” Evelyn says. “Check the Wikipedia page. There’s a page with a list of everyone who fought in that battle and my name’s on it. My parents led the revolution, one of my brothers died in the revolution, and I personally fought in it. With my wand. Just because you don’t see me do magic very often doesn’t mean I can’t.”
He does apologize later for his stupid assumptions. And when his copy of the Hamiltome shows up he lends it to her when he gets done with it.
Nymphadora Tonks and Charlie Weasley
You will come of age with our young nation
We’ll bleed and fight for you, we’ll make it right for you
If we lay a strong enough foundation
We’ll pass it on to you, we’ll give the world to you
Goblins who listen to Hamilton (which a number do, because Adam is a fan) find the rhythm and the rhymes compelling but the appeal of Hamilton himself completely mystifying.
Jefferson may be loathed by most Hamilton audiences, but he’s got the Goblin Nation on his side.
Blaise Zabini
While we’re talking, let me offer you some free advice
Talk less
Smile more
Blaise instantly identifies with Aaron Burr, and as far as he’s concerned, the real tragedy of the show is Aaron abandoning his principles of detachment and patience to dirty his hands in politics (a fatal decision that leads inexorably to his disgrace at the end).
It’s a shame that Lesley Odom Jr. is a muggle, because Blaise would quite like an autographed picture.
Alice Longbottom
I want to sit under my own vine and fig tree
A moment alone in the shade
At home in this nation we’ve made
Like Evelyn, Alice strongly identifies with the “ragtag army, in need of a shower,” facing impossible odds and somehow winning. Like Molly, she finds the song “It’s Quiet Uptown” gut-wrenching enough that she prefers not to listen to it.
But it’s “One Last Time” that makes her weep. It’s a song that truly makes her feel seen -- Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote this song for her, whether he knows it or not. At home in this nation we’ve made. The first time she hears it, she immediately listens to it again, then shuts off the soundtrack and goes to sit outside in the memorial grove for the rest of the day.
Rachel Brodie
See, I never thought I’d live past twenty
Where I come from some get half as many
Ask anybody why we livin’ fast and we laugh, reach for a flask
We have to make this moment last
Ron’s the one who points Rachel at the Hamilton soundtrack. “It’s about a revolution,” he says, a little too casually. “The American one, not ours. I think you’ll like it.”
The first line that grabs Rachel by the throat is I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory. Like Alice, she feels seen, but she feels seen inside and out. Why do you write like you’re running out of time? Rachel isn’t a writer, but that’s how she lives her life; that’s how she’s always lived her life. Lord, show me how to say no to this. In the eye of the hurricane there is quiet. My first friend, my enemy--
She spends about a week listening to Hamilton instead of sleeping, then calls Ron. “I’m thinking of going to New York.”
“Well, get tickets before you go,” he tells her. “Fred and George and Pansy went all the way over and they couldn’t even get in. We’re apparently not the only ones who like this thing.”
Sally-Anne Perks
I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory
This is where it gets me: on my feet
The enemy ahead of me
If this is the end of me, at least I have a friend with me
Weapon in my hand, a command, and my men with me
Sally-Anne recognizes that Hamilton is in various ways portraying the effects of PTSD, which she’s intimately familiar with. When Pansy organizes a group sing-along of the soundtrack (after Fred’s failed attempt to go see it), Sally-Anne starts to sing along with Yorktown, then falls apart, oddly enough over “we won, we won, we won, WE WON.”
The tension between “Talk less, smile more” and Alexander’s boundless energy speaks to her strongly. (Exhausted many days by her still-very-young kids, she has been wondering if her days of accomplishment are entirely behind her. Hamilton actually helps her put that into perspective: she may not have written fifty-one essays on government, but she did help win a revolution.)
She doesn’t confess to anyone that hearing Burr sing “Death doesn’t discriminate / Between the sinners and the saints” always makes her think of Antonin Dolohov.
Jason Montague and Seamus Finnigan
History has its eyes on you.
Seamus is living in Boston and working at an Irish bar. Padma’s letter persuades him to go listen to Hamilton.
Padma identified with Aaron Burr, but Seamus hears bastard, orphan, son of a whore and hears the echo of taunts from his pureblood cousins in the years before he came over from Ireland to attend Hogwarts. In New York, you can be a new man echoes the promise he heard from Jason when they came to the U.S. after the war.
“You should come see it with me,” he writes to Jason.
They’re still on good terms, though no longer together, and Jason writes back that if Seamus can get tickets, he’ll fly out from California and meet him in New York. Seamus buys overpriced tickets off a reseller site and Jason makes plans to travel, only to have to cancel at the last minute due to an on-the-job injury.
Alone in NYC, Seamus finds himself a wizarding pub near the Stonewall Inn, chats up someone he finds attractive, and flashes his Hamilton tickets. The other wizard’s name is Joel and they wind up attending the musical together, then walking to a muggle bar after. (Not in Times Square. At the suggestion of Seamus’s date, they pick a direction, walk for a half mile, then find a bar.)
Seamus’s date is more savvy than Evelyn’s coworker. “You’re actually Irish, aren’t you? So you had a revolution. In this century. Well, last century.”
“Late last century, yeah.” Seamus sips his drink, and on impulse, because what does he even care what this stranger thinks, adds, “I fought in the war, in some of the really big battles, even, but … I fought on the wrong side.”
Joel looks at him and Seamus is pretty sure he’s doing math in his head. “You’re don’t look old enough.”
“I’m turning 36 next month. I was eighteen during the Albion revolution. Legal adult, even here.”
“Sure, legally you were an adult. Eighteen, though, that’s not…” Joel was clearly trying to remember what he knew about the Albion revolution. Americans knew about it, but their grasp of the details tended to be sketchy, like some remnants of the giant Notice-Me-Not field were still affecting people.
“‘I was younger than you are now / when I was given my first command,’” Seamus sang.
“Washington was twenty-two.”
“Well, I wasn’t in command of anyone. For the most part. I was taking orders, not giving them.” Joel was looking at him, troubled, and Seamus added, “I’m a half-blood, so I’d been put in fostering and raised to believe the party line. They actually made me a Death Eater, about a year before the regime fell.”
“Did they send you to prison?”
“No. A friend of mine turned out to be a double agent. He cut a deal with the Order on my behalf, and I walked free. You can see why I was eager to get the hell out of Albion, though.”
Seamus thought he and Joel would probably spend the night together, but Joel winds up claiming that he can feel a headache coming on and heading home early.
Jeremy and Maureen Stretton
A civics lesson from a slaver? Hey, neighbor
Your debts are paid cause you don’t pay for labor!
Arista and Gemma are huge fans of Hamilton and get Jeremy and Maureen hooked on it, too.
Maureen is cynically amused by Cabinet Battle #1, and Hamilton’s blistering takedown of Jefferson. The early United States’ willingness to compromise with slavery and slavers reminds her of the Order’s willingness to compromise with Death Eaters, in the end, to save bloodshed. She understands their reasoning, it’s just … ironic, in some ways.
Arista’s favorite song is “The Room Where it Happens.”
Aurora Sinistra
The fact that you’re alive is a miracle
Just stay alive, that would be enough
Aurora, now Head of Hufflepuff House, gets tipped off about the musical at around the same time Padma does. She’s keeping some emotional distance -- it’s about a revolution, but not her revolution -- until she gets to “That Would Be Enough.”
That song -- and “Helpless,” when she listens to the soundtrack again, and the orphanage -- those make her remember Raz so strongly they even bring back his scent, all these years later. Raz, and losing Raz. She wonders if “just stay alive, that would be enough” was something she ever spoke aloud, or if it was just something that lurked in the back of her mind.
She sends a copy to Antonin with her next letter. I think you might enjoy this, she writes, not sure what else to say. I am fairly certain that Eliza is a Hufflepuff, and Angelica a Ravenclaw, but I can’t decide what House Alexander would have belonged in.
Antonin Dolohov
Death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints
It takes, and it takes, and it takes.
History obliterates in every picture that it paints
It paints me and all my mistakes
Once, Antosha was a revolutionary.
Working with lifelong friends as close as brothers, he fought against a clueless, controlling, and corrupt ruling class and built a new order, only to watch its earliest decisions, failures that seemed at worst a minor oversight, eat his new nation from within.
He deeply identifies with Hamilton -- how do you write like you’re running out of time, indeed.
And Burr.
Now I’m the villain in your history.
And Burr.
Poppy Pomfrey
Take a break! Run away with me for the summer
Let’s go upstate!
Poppy is not the least bit surprised that Hamilton’s refusal to take a break with his wife and family was followed immediately with his clandestine (and later disastrous) affair.
Mind you, she’d been expecting the adultery subplot to involve Angelica, so if he’d gone off Upstate and had his secret affair with her, that wouldn’t have surprised her, either.
Ron Weasley
HERCULES MULLIGAN! I need no introduction! When you knock me down I get the FUCK back up again!
Ron loves the musical’s band of brothers -- Hamilton, Lafayette, Laurens, and HERCULES MULLIGAN, who’s the least subtle character of all time and also the spy who passes along the key intel for the Battle of Yorktown. The fact that loud, brash Mulligan is performed by the same actor as clever, political James Madison also speaks to Ron in a way he has trouble articulating. Except for this: if you knock Ron down, he gets the fuck back up again. And again. And again.
When the Twins and Pansy try to see the musical (and fail) and he checks ticket prices (spendy even by Pansy’s standards, though if she’d planned in advance she could’ve made it into the theater), Ron ponders his options, then sends a few owls. He wants to see it; Sally-Anne wants to see it; it would be an awful lot of fun to treat Pansy, for once. But the key, he knows, is going to be connections and string pulling. Or borrowing the Cloak of Invisibility from Draco and just flat-out sneaking in.
Hydra Finch-Fletchley
Confess your sins.
Ready for the moment of adrenaline when you finally face your opponent.
Alexander reminds Hydra of Justin.
She’s really startled by Charlotte’s adoration of Lafayette, because the Justin/Alexander equivalence seems so clear to her. Justin was a muggleborn rather than a bastard, but in fact his father did take off, and he lost his mother, if not to death than to distance. The fierce brilliance, the temper, the duelling, the commitment to freedom for everyone -- he’d even made an excellent right-hand man. If he’d been Alice’s rather than Dolohov’s, maybe he’d have even survived the war.
When Ron drops by her office to float his approach to getting tickets, Hydra signs on. As revolutionaries ourselves, we’re eager to come and attend together, Ron explained in the letter. I’m not sure how you arrange for back-stage visits, but would it be possible for us to make one? There are, in fact, tickets held in reserve for this sort of thing, especially when dates are flexible.
Hermione Granger
You’re like me.
I’m never satisfied.
Hermione is one of the last to actually hear the whole soundtrack. She’d caught bits and pieces and of course people kept quoting bits of it at her but sitting down to listen to a two-and-a-half hour long soundtrack is a bit of a time investment and she is extremely busy.
When she finally does listen, it’s late at night and Hydra is a bit taken aback when Hermione turns up at her doorstep because she knows Hyda liked it, and she wants someone to discuss it with immediately, not eight hours from now, now. Because Alexander. And Angelica. And the Cabinet Battles! And Non-Stop! And why do you suppose they left out the detail that Thomas Jefferson was a wizard? And...
“Good thing you got round to it,” Hydra says. “Our tickets are for next week. Has Draco listened?”
“No! And you have to let him come, he will love this,” Hermione says.
“Of course he can come,” Hydra says. “He’s been saying he can’t get away. Your job is to see to it that he does.”
Draco Malfoy
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?
Who tells your story?
Who tells your story?
The music is still ringing in Draco’s head when they all get back to their hotel, where they’re spending the night in New York before heading home to London. They came, they saw the show, they went out to a pub to talk more about the show…
Hermione, cross-eyed with jet lag, goes straight to bed when they get back to their hotel room.
Draco sits down at the hotel room desk and casts a dim lumos to see by.
Who tells your story?
He sketches a picture of Harry, with his glasses and disheveled hair. Then a little picture of Harry at eleven, the Sorting Hat on his head. Then he spends a long time drawing Harry’s eyes as he remembers them when he was trying to talk Draco into his mad, horrible plan.
To Harry, he writes under the picture of Harry at eleven. Who taught me how to make toast, just for starters.
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That's such excellence!
(I'm in trouble, by the way. My five year old - who has never read Harry Potter - has been talking to me about magic wands and how young wizards get them. And I can't ever read him the original Potter books because Alternity Is My Canon. He'll have to ask his father.)
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It has made me all teary.
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I love this crossover and everything you've done with it! I would quote things but I'd end up quoting the whole thing. But oh, Hermione as Angelica and Pansy loving that they made the governing bits sound cool, and Jeremy & Maureen with that particular couplet, and the various ways people identify with Burr, and Rachel trying to say no to this, and Frank getting the kids to sing "here comes the general to Alice, and Alice and the fig tree, and Arista wanting to be in the room where it happens, and Draco being inspired to start his book at the end.
(And as Susan's player I'm so happy to see Sue & Pansy & music together again, and i can't help coming up with additional headcanons)
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And, oh, my heart, Molly can't listen to act 2.
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(Possibly also Lin-Manuel is a wizard. I'm not entirely convinced he's not one in the REAL world.)
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My ridiculous brain is trying to pick and choose favorite segments. I'm not gonna let it, but I do think that Seamus bit'll be sticking with me for quite some time...
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Thanks for this.
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Now I do.
(It's all bloody brilliant, but the bit that got me the hardest was Molly. Just as a data point.)