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Parker never gets her letter to Ilvermorny.
Whatever magic the owls have, it doesn’t extend to circumventing no maj bureaucracy. The letter with her name on it is probably still buried under a pile of paperwork on some social worker's desk, or stuck in a box with junk mail and years out-of-date coupons and unpaid bills at whatever foster home she was living at.
She uses her magic accidentally for a long time, till she figures out she actually “can” make stuff happen when she wants it to, but only sometimes. It’s not till Archie that she learns how to harness her magic to make her a better thief.
She never gets over the idea that it’s cheating just a little though and mostly she does things the no maj way. It’s more fun, anyway. She never does get the hang of a wand. She doesn’t mind though, after all, it’s easier cracking a safe with two hands.
&&&&&
Hardison always gets the mail. It’s been his job since he moved in with Nana. They all have chores that rotate but every kid that stays with Nana has one job that belongs just to them. This time, there’s a letter with his name on it.
He knows what it is. Nana had talked to him about magic after his glass of milk somehow turned to orange soda. She told him all about Ilvermorny, Uagadou and Hogwarts, and the other magic schools. He looks at the letter for a long time, long, skinny fingers running over the fancy writing. He stops outside and tosses it in the trash can, and tries not to look guilty when he gets in the house and finds Nana standing with her arms crossed and a disappointed look on her face.
“Alec!”
He drops the rest of the mail on the floor and runs to her, wrapping his arms around her hips, face buried in the soft wool of her sweater.
“Please don’t make me go. I wanna stay with you!”
“Honey, you need to learn how to use your magic properly.”
“Nun uh. I won’t use it, I promise! Just please don’t make me go.” The last thing he wants is to spend nine months in some place that is too much like a group home for comfort.
“Sweetie, trying to suppress your magic is dangerous. Never do that.” She wraps her arms around him and sighs. “I suppose we could try homeschooling.”
Alec holds on tight a little longer. Nana gives the best hugs he’s ever had. Someday he’s gonna hug everybody like she does, like she loves you the most in the whole world. Magic school wasn’t nothing compared to hugs every day.
Plus Nana said TVs and computers didn’t work and he wasn’t missing Kenan and Kel, so fudge that.
&&&&&
Sophie is ecstatic when her Hogwarts letter comes. Susan and Linda got their letters last year and when they come home, all they talk about is how much fun they have. She can’t wait to join them, but her mother insists on Beauxbatons instead. French witches, she said, were chic in a way that most English witches couldn’t match. She’d wanted to go herself, but “that nasty Grindelwald business was still fresh” and her parents insisted that good old England and Hogwarts were good enough for generations of the family and it was good enough for her, no matter what fancy airs she gave herself.
The first face Sophie ever put on was on a train full of snobby witches and wizards who laughed at the jumped-up “rosbif” with the fancy name. She doesn’t bother explaining. Knowing her mother chose it from a muggle book would just make it worse.
By the time she leaves Beauxbatons for the muggle world, her real name is a secret she doesn’t share, her English is posh, her French native, and her charms Veela-like. Her Charms aren’t bad either.
&&&&&
Eliot looks at the room full of bodies sick to his stomach. The magnified killing curse had taken out everybody in there before Aurors could get past the locking spell.
Vance slapped him on the shoulder. His attempt at comfort. “This wasn’t our fault, Spencer. It was bad intel.”
“Yeah, that seems to be happening more and more lately.” Bad intel and lots of collateral damage. Eliot had joined the Aurors fresh out of Ilvermorny. He’d grown up on stories of the wizarding wars. Eliot’s great-grandpa had worked with MACUSA and fought against Grindelwald, and all Eliot had ever wanted to do was work in magical law enforcement. Stop people like Grindelwald and Voldemort from destroying their world.
It was nothing like the stories, though. The lines between light and dark blurred, and he found that MACUSA was willing to justify even the most horrible things in the name of “justice” and keeping the wizarding world a secret.
He turned in his badge a week later. Eliot found it easy to find jobs among the no majs. The skills he’s picked up without a wand served him well. His hands got just as dirty as they had when he’d been an Auror, but at least he wasn’t pretending to be the good guy.
&&&&&
Nate’s mother got sick a few months after he left for Ilvemorny. He came straight back home, even though she protested. A no maj,she’d been fascinated by the world of magic, and even at the end, she’d laugh like a delighted child watching as Nate made flower petals dance on her hospital bed.
Magic/no maj unions were still frowned on by some, even if they weren’t illegal anymore and his father practically had to beg to get the medi-witches to treat her. In the end, they couldn’t heal her, and over the next year, she slowly faded away.
Ironically, when his mother died, so did his connection to the magical world. The precarious line that connected him to his father snapped... whatever was good in Jimmy Ford went into the ground with his wife. There was no place for a twelve-year-old kid in his life and one morning he packed a suitcase for Nate, gave him a wad of money, and dropped him off at his grandparents’ house.
Nate didn’t see his father for another five years. His grandparents were good Catholics who would have worn their knees raw praying for his soul at the mere mention of “magic”. Seminary school replaced magic school and Nate found a certain peace reciting the rosary that was its own type of magic.