So I'm just joining the lovely tumblr HP fandom from AO3, and I'm hoping to gauge interest in an Age of Sail/Pirates AU! I've started plotting and written a few short scenes for this fic, which will be longform and mostly gen (with a few canon pairings featuring). Marauders and Auror gang will be the main POV characters, with other POVs making appearances here and there. But I'm not well-read outside my usual pairings! Has this been done to death already? Am I missing out on pirate shenanigan fics?
Who am I kidding, I'm writing this anyway. Here's an excerpt, see you soooooon
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The waters were calm under vivid magenta skies.
If Tonks had learned anything from her years at sea with the Ministry service, it was not to trust Muggle superstitions about harbingers of good weather. The ocean was a fickle thing.
The magenta was quite nice, though, and worth trying out.
It was just a moment later, with her nose scrunched up and her hair shifting from acid green to deepest pink, that something on the horizon caught her eye.
She gripped the wooden railing with one hand, fumbling inside her scarlet Auror’s coat with the other. Once the telescope was in her grasp, she aimed it across the water and peered at the offending object with a frown.
A smooth-sailing brig ambled along the horizon, her white sails set aglow by the radiant pink of the setting sun. From the stern staff, blowing gently in the patient evening breeze, a flag of crimson and gold was stitched with strange, unfamiliar designs.
“Captain!” Tonks called back to the quarterdeck, where her commander was stationed at the wheel. “A ship, on the larboard side.”
The step-thump, step-thump of Captain Moody’s approach echoed over the noise of Dawlish up on the quarterdeck, scrambling to see what Tonks had caught sight of before him.
“Bearing?” grunted Moody as he drew level with Tonks and drew his own telescope.
“Two points abaft the beam, sir. I don’t recognize their colours.”
“Hm.” Moody’s scarred lips pursed. “Whatever that daft flag is, it doesn’t look like any Muggle ensign I’ve seen.”
He switched the telescope from his regular left eye to the swiveling electric blue one, metal touching upon glass with a disconcerting clink. Tonks had always wondered how well the eye’s penetrating abilities functioned through the lenses and mirror of a telescope, but Moody had never given her a straight answer.
“Not a Death Eater flag either, though,” she said, peering through her own scope again at the strange ensign. It looked handmade, and overly complicated in design, like a futzy crest of arms overpopulated with creatures of some kind. Dogs, maybe, and…were those antlers?
“Their heading is the same as ours,” Tonks added. “North-east toward Founder Isle.”
“Porting in Rowena,” said Moody.
“Maybe with prizes in their chests,” said Tonks, nodding.
Moody snapped his telescope shut with a frown. “Not without running them past us. Admiral Scrimgeour’ll have a bloody fit if he sees any more pirate booty smuggled through our port.” He stomped toward the hatch that led down to the lower decks. It was habitual for him, whenever they encountered a new ship, to retreat to his great cabin so he could inspect his foe glass and at least one sneakoscope.
“Dawlish!” he cried, already halfway down the ladder. “Hail the vessel a-larboard. Tonks, set course to intercept.”
“If they make a run for it?” asked Tonks.
Moody paused, gnarled hands just visible around the edges of the ladder, and his face twisted into a frightening half-smile as he looked up at her.
“Then we’ll bloody well pursue them, won’t we?”
