Star-cunning

1. The Triwizard Tournament of 1787. Jack Aubrey is Hogwarts’ Champion; Etienne Domanova is Beauxbatons’.

2. A modern AU, set a couple of years before Harry Potter is born. Jack Aubrey has just been made a prefect, and is a Chaser on the Gryffindor Quidditch Team. His fellow Chasers are Hen Dundas (whose older brother is Head Boy), and Edward Pellew. Tom Pullings and William Mowett are Beaters, James Dillon is Keeper, and Charles Babbington is Seeker. He has a long emnity with Harte, a Slytherin boy from the year above, whose girlfriend cheated on him with Jack. His best subjects are Arithmancy and Astronomy, and he is currently going out with Sophie Williams.

Sophie is in Hufflepuff. She likes Herbology and Muggle Studies, and shows a keen skill for Charms. She has two sisters, also at the school, and a cousin Diana in Slytherin. All four of them receive regular howlers from Mrs. Williams, but Diana just incinerates hers.

Diana is a Seeker for the Slytherin Quiddith Team, and enjoys Transfiguration and Defence Against the Dark Arts. She also enjoys flirting with Jack, primarily to provoke a reaction from Sophie, or to distract him during Quidditch matches.

At the beginning of their fifth year, Stephen Maturin arrives from Beauxbatons, and is sorted into Ravenclaw. He knows little about life in Hogwarts or in Britain in general; his English is stilted and formal, but he is very good at Ancient Runes, Herbology, Potions, Defence Against the Dark Arts, and Care for Magical Creatures. He spends most of his free time in the Forbidden Forest, and swiftly makes himself very unpopular when an Orphan Bird he was trying to tame disrupts an important Gryffindor-Slytherin Quidditch match.

Christmas comes about, and Jack is reluctant to go home, because his father has just remarried. He decides to stay in Hogwarts over the holidays, as does Stephen, who has no home to return to. The two nearly get into a fight over Christmas Dinner, but Dumbledore breaks it up by telling an anecdote about a kind of magic, believed lost, in which music is used instead of incantations.

That night, Jack and Stephen bump into each other in the restricted section of the library, both looking for Daeron of Doriath’s Magical Musical Theory. The difficulty is that the book is written in Sindarin Cirth, with a mathematical musical notation, and they quickly realise that the only way they can translate it is together. Bound together by the shared interest and curfew-breaking, they decide to steal the book and move it from tower to tower to avoid detection. They begin to organise secret meetings in rooms around to school, learning musical theory. Jack is better at the practical side, and Stephen quickly becomes proficient enough in Sindarin to continue to translate the more advanced chapters. They begin to tutor one another: Jack is so good at Arithmancy that he is allowed to study the Gematria, while Stephen is bad enough at arithmetic, and Stephen helps Jack with Potions and History of Magic. He fails to help with Care for Magical Creatures. Their new friendship is threatened when Jack discovers that Stephen has fallen in love with his Potions partner Diana.

However, all is not well at Hogwarts. Outside the magic walls, the dark wizard Voldemort is gaining power and support, and within, novice Death Eaters Wray and Ledward start to target Muggleborns, particularly Stephen…

That’s a damn unwieldy title.

74: Ask her not to wear those army boots, though.

79: and you’ll look stupid then!

227: we buried truth under playgrounds

400: There’s not a word yet, for old friends who’ve just met.

459: hell is other people.

621: I am glad we are friends.

641: It’s yours!

After being moved from foster home to foster home, and then out of a juvenile detention centre, intelligent young man Stephen Maturin becomes a doctor. However, he is suspended when it is discovered that he has been faking prescriptions to feed his drug habit. After community service and rehab, he is told that he has to get a job until his suspension ends - more importantly, he needs somewhere to live. So he phones up his only friend, whom he knew from their university orchestra: Jack Aubrey, who now owns a bakery in Portsmouth called Surprise.

“You cannot call anything serving food ‘Surprise’! People do not want to buy food and find a surprise; why do you think Greggs is so popular? When you put the words ‘food’ and ‘surprise’ together, you think of one of two things: rats or salmonella.”

Despite his rudeness, Jack offers him the sofa in the flat above the shop. Jack has always had an intuitive grasp of measurements and temperatures, and is excellent at creating recipes and making money. Unfortunately, he is not so good at keeping it, and Stephen’s frugality in the flat begins to have a good effect on the bakery’s finances. He asks if Stephen wants to help out, especially with advertising and marketing, and Stephen reluctantly agrees after some prodding from his court-appointed mentor, Joseph Blaine.

Jack knows he should fire the alcoholic Killick, but he keeps the place unbelievably clean, and makes the best toasties known to man. Students Tom and Will act as cashiers, and Charlie (known as Babbs) is their bike delivery boy. Ex-boxer Bonden helps them with transporting supplies. They play classical music throughout the day, and hang tacky naval souvenirs all over the walls, because Jack has a theme and by God he will stick to it.

At night, Jack experiments with new recipes, and attempts to persuade Stephen to try them. Stephen enjoys chain-smoking and taking unauthorised days off to attend protest marches instead. They fight when Jack doesn’t use fair-trade chocolate in his cakes, or when Stephen adopts animals, or gives out free food. Stephen has a bad habit of slipping and fallling whenever Killick mops the floor, and several women no longer patronise the bakery because of Jack’s unfortunate staring tendency. Sometimes their landlord Harte surprises them with an inspection, and on the nights when Jack goes out to the pub and brings someone back Stephen lies back on the sofa and fantasises about morphine cocktails. Once, Jack said that everyone liked the smell of bread because it smelt like home, and Stephen disappeared for three days. 

And sometimes Jack makes soda bread or xuixos or pastissets, and Stephen stays up all night trying to muddle through Jack’s debts, and sometimes the neighbours complain because they are playing Bach so loudly, and sometimes they bring picnics down to the beach and watch the tide come in.