**Steve Rogers × Harry Potter**
Some wars leave scars.
Others leave ghosts.
Years after the Battle of Hogwarts, Alice Queenie Scamander leaves the wizarding world behind in search of a new beginning, believing that nothing could ever hurt more than...
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By the time the evening feast began, Hogwarts no longer felt like the same castle Alice had woken up in that morning. There was a certain electricity running through the ancient walls, a restless excitement that seemed to have seeped into every stone, every corridor and every corner of the Great Hall, as though the castle itself had remembered the days when hundreds of years of magical tradition gathered beneath its enchanted ceiling and young witches and wizards from different corners of the world arrived carrying their hopes, their fears and their dreams with them.
The students could barely contain themselves.
The long wooden tables, usually filled with the familiar noise of conversations, laughter and the occasional argument about Quidditch, were now filled with whispers about the two visiting academies.
First-years stared openly, completely unable to hide their fascination, while the older students attempted to appear far more composed than they truly were, pretending that they were not impressed even as they leaned closer to hear every detail about Beauxbatons and Durmstrang.
Alice watched them quietly from the staff table, and for a moment she allowed herself to simply observe.
There was something strangely beautiful about watching children experience something magical for the first time. She remembered that feeling.
She remembered being fourteen years old and believing that every adventure, no matter how dangerous, would eventually end with laughter and a celebration. She remembered sitting at those very tables with Harry, Ron and Hermione, believing that the world was enormous and frightening, but also believing that somehow, together, they could face anything it decided to throw at them.
Those memories felt impossibly distant now, not because they belonged to another life, but because they belonged to another version of herself. A younger Alice. A girl who still believed that the people she loved would always return home. But reality was cruel with that truth.
Her fingers tightened slightly around the edge of her goblet before she forced herself to relax. Tonight was not about the ghosts of her past. It was not about graves, or promises that had been broken by fate, or the boy whose name still carried both warmth and unbearable pain inside her heart.
Tonight was about Hogwarts, about new beginnings, about reminding herself that not every story had to end in tragedy.
The enormous doors of the Great Hall opened, and the room immediately fell silent.
The first to enter were the students of Beauxbatons Academy.
Their arrival carried a kind of elegance that seemed almost foreign compared to Hogwarts' lively chaos. Their pale blue robes moved gracefully beneath the candlelight, the delicate silver embroidery upon the fabric reflecting softly as they walked between the tables, and there was a quiet confidence in their movements that suggested years of tradition and discipline.
