#and also sorry for the soapbox on molly weasley halfway through this author's note lol

[whinlatter]

author's note | chapter 9: wintering ❄️

thank you so much for reading chapter 9 of beasts. in this chapter, ginny goes home for christmas, back into the fold of the family that anchored the anti-voldemort movement now grieving the loss of a brother and a son - and finds it's tougher to keep secrets from one harry james potter than she might otherwise have thought. this was a tough chapter to write, and one i cared a lot about trying to get right. so - let's have a chat about it (and a little sneak peek of chapter 10)...

✨ spoilers for this chapter below the cut  ✨

writing notes and headcanons:

writing: this is the first chapter where i’ve strayed from the chapter plan and shunted scenes to a future chapter. i ummed and ahhed about it, then remembered no-one else knows what the plot is and what this chapter was supposed to be, then got a grip lol. lesson learned - if it’s hard work and it feels like you’re trying to force it, you probably are, so chill out lmao

this ended up, then, as a chapter about families. we see the blacks, the order itself, andromeda and teddy’s new little unit, little glimpse of the lovegoods - and the possibility of new families, most obviously in the case of bill and fleur’s baby on the way. at the core of this chapter, though, are the weasleys, this openly political family of freedom fighters, first family of the resistance, and a family thoroughly scarred by war. i’ve talked a bit about this elsewhere, but i have always been so struck that the weasleys enter the narrative as add-ons to ron, harry’s mate, but over the series increasingly become the core of the entire anti-voldemort movement, with a history of resistance and also of grief and sacrifice (fabian and gideon). so this chapter spends some time with each member of the family, a little panorama of the weasleys eight months on from the battle to see how they’re all coping (or not). it was really really important to me that each family member’s grief and emotional state got a moment in this chapter. partly this is because i think that writing character-centric fiction shouldn’t neglect attending to the broader emotional context of the ensemble around a character, but also because each family member is quietly showing ginny the different ways they’re all responding to fred’s death in ways that might get her thinking about who she feels most similar to and who her family needs her to be. that bill is the only family member who answers ginny’s wish that her family would talk about fred more and stop avoiding saying his name was deliberate. with his parents struggling so much, bill is clearly stepping up as the person to look after his family. he’s aware of his own emotional responses, he’s discussing his own grief, but he’s also looking to the future, making plans for it and trying to improve the world he’ll spend it in, even though he knows  it’ll be bittersweet. it was important for me to have ginny to have that behaviour modelled to her from someone she singularly admires.

space: as the plot of ginny looking back and processing a childhood at war progresses, i wanted to draw together and quietly contrast two spaces, grimmauld place and the burrow. these are the two headquarters of the order of the phoenix, two family homes, two sites of familial rupture - and, now,  two places equally haunted by the ghosts of people who once lived there and who are now gone. writing this chapter i did a lot of imagining the communal spaces in both residences kind of as a set for a play with ensemble characters walking on and off stage at whim, which actually made the whole thing much easier when i was freaking out about having too big a cast for one chapter lol.

harry and ginny: see here!

molly weasley: my real soapbox issue for this chapter is that molly weasley’s grief really, really matters. i know molly is rarely anyone’s blorbo. she’s increasingly hated in certain corners of the fandom (check the most kudos-ed fic tagged under molly & ginny lol) and even among those people who like molly, lots of postwar fics focussing on different characters’ pics have her just sort of return to normal, get back to fussing about the house and the kids’ relationships and careers in her mumsy way. i do get this: it’s hard to want to give a lot of time in a fic to a (usually) tertiary character’s grief rather than the protagonist’s, especially when everyone is grieving, and molly is an often convenient source of either amusement, nuisance or even antagonism in hinny fics (many of my own favourites!) for her (seemingly) conservative views on sexuality and her busybody behaviour. but i’ve never subscribed to this in my own headcanon as a canon coherent choice, simply because canon is very clear that molly weasley’s worst nightmare is the death of one of her children, and that nightmare happens. (in fact, it’s even worse than she imagines in the boggart, because even in her worst nightmares she didn’t imagine one of the twins dying and not the other.) while i absolutely do not want to relate this fictional loss to the real life experiences of friends and family who have known terrible loss, it was important to me to try and write an alternative version of molly that centred her grief in a way that felt plausible and true, and acknowledged that the loss she and arthur have endured is one that would change them enormously.. truthfully, i don’t think either character would ever really be ok again (which why grief is so hard to work with narratively - it offers no neat conclusions or easily legible arcs of healing).over the past few months, ginny has been worrying about a very teenage set of worries re molly, stressing about her mother’s response to her losing the captaincy and poor school performance, thinking she might get a howler, gearing up for a fight over whether harry can sleep in her bed - only to get home to find her mum has fallen apart. narratively, i wanted ginny to see her mum like this, and to finally start to understand why her mum was so insistent on her being a child and having a childhood and keep her away from the war that ginny was so desperate to fight in. 

the other point here, and i do feel strongly about this, is that for a fandom very interested in how families, loss and trauma during wars shapes characters (marauders fics are some of the richest best explorations of these themes), i worry we don’t care nearly enough about what molly weasley goes through, and about how women respond to their grief in complicated and nuanced ways. as @saintsenara has pointed out, the lack of attention paid to molly weasley’s backstory and grief over her brothers, and especially her grief after fred’s death, smacks of misogyny. perhaps molly’s frumpy mumsy unchic domesticity fretting about her children’s grades makes her not a cool enough character to care about her pain: perhaps it’s that she beefs sirius, everyone’s traumatised fave (and a character i adore). but i do really care in this fic about offering a rendering of molly that shows a possible way she would respond to fred's death, now seeing in her children the grief she has lived with already for so long, no longer able to return to the person she was before. i think molly weasley is a person who understands how their awful world works and tries to encourage her children into a path that will provide for them with material security and offer chances to do meaningful work towards reform. and while you can disagree with that as advice to her children, i don't think that worldview invalidates her right to thorough, compassionate treatments in fics and analysis as a character who is so very loved and special to harry. molly weasley is the only person who demands these children have a childhood and we should not forget it!

andromeda: ahhh man. ok this chapter i learnt people writing andromeda are really strong soldiers because i tried like 30 different characterisations until i found one that didn’t make me want to gouge my own eyes out. she couldn’t be too warm, because she’s a) a black and b) canonically wary of strangers and quick to be offended/insulted (ted’s the gentle one of the two of them). she does have to have a certain domesticity to her because tonks mentions her knack for household charms, but couldn’t be overly mumsy, in contrast to molly, because tonks clearly was drawn to molly’s mothering instincts (early HBP kitchen scene) in ways that suggest andromeda’s were less obvious. i wanted her to be a proud person, someone polite but wary, self conscious (and self critical) of her own particularities and mistakes as a parent, who has a working relationship with harry but not a maternal one, and who would probably be a bit suspicious of all these teenagers playing with teddy, who is now the centre of her world, lest they drop him on his head or stand on his baby toes. i imagine ginny and andromeda having a cordial but eventually slightly fractious relationship - 'girlfriend of the teenage godson to my orphaned grandson' is a weird role to play in a person’s life, after all. i can see ginny reminding andromeda of the daughter she lost, and it was fun to draw that out a bit here (andromeda immediately kibboshing the broomstick idea as a case in point).

relatedly sirius: finally getting to begin using some of my sirius scenes now we’re at grimmauld place 😈 i’m really excited about the plot to draw in the memory of sirius in this fic, and so it seemed right to begin bringing him in in a chapter about families, generations (mothers!) and what living with trauma and grief after war can do to a person. we see him finally arrive in person in a flashback to the day the weasleys arrived in his house, freshly reconfined to grimmauld and sullen because of it, but also being perceived by ginny and the weasleys as someone with great presence. he becomes the subject of a great deal of interest and hero worship by the twins and ginny, with only ron (following hermione) noting that sirius black does not seem to be a well man. sometimes in fics the (understandable) impulse to focus on sirius’ good godfather traits can be taken a bit too far with authors overstating how warm/inviting/interested sirius would be in the parade of weasleys who move in with him at a very low moment for him personally. i liked having sirius being sort of shrug about their arrival, having only the briefest moment with ginny where a commonality between them (the betrayal of a brother) is identified but saying nothing about it. sirius black is in no place to reassure someone about sibling estrangement. ginny, in her approach to sirius, tries to position herself in opposition to her mother, apologising for her with an eye roll kind of vibe, and raging at her for excluding her from the order meeting when no one else was. she also expresses empathy with sirius’ plight of being confined for your own protection when you really want to fight and have your revenge (👀). meanwhile, in the present, harry and ginny wake up in sirius’ childhood bed, spend the day inside grimmauld watched on by paps, and the ginny goes back to her own family home, where she throws herself into christmas planning and prepping to try and raise spirits and distract from all of the shit going on, à la sirius in ootp. (i’ll finish that sirius and ginny meta before the next chapter i swear). 

dolohov: me, a few months ago, realising that the man killed fabian and gideon prewett also killed remus

percy: so far in beasts, percy has come up only in passing - unfavourable press coverage, and on the board in graves’ classroom, part of the machine that sent muggleborns to azkaban and some, in all probability, to their deaths. lots of brilliant brilliant fics (some rec’d below) explore percy plausibly as a resistance agent working within the ministry, but i’m always a bit suspicious of this reading, given his line in the room of req  (‘it’s been coming on for a while, but I had to find a way out and it’s not so easy at the Ministry, they’re imprisoning traitors all the time’ - this doesn’t sound to me like a road to damascus moment the second scrimgeour died, does it? when exactly did you realise you'd fucked up perce? like babe you’re the assistant to the minister - how many people did you help imprison, given the muggleborn registration commission was up and thriving within a month of the ministry takeover?) i think, whatever the extent of percy’s resistance (and there will be more on this!), it’s clear that ginny, of all of the siblings, would probably be the least likely to forgive percy. it’s not just that the decisions he makes are so far from her own, or that his treatment of her parents was egregious, it’s also her loyalty and ferocious protectiveness of harry, who percy royally fucks over at every possible turn with little remorse. (he doesn’t engage with or apologise to harry in the room of requirement!) ginny wasn’t there with percy when fred died like ron was, an experience that i think would help ron decide life’s too short and make a cordial peace with percy. i think ginny would want percy to feel a hell of a lot of shame before ever warming up to him again. i like percy as a character, i think his arc is so good, but i also find satisfaction putting him in the corner at the weasley christmas with old xeno, stood with the other guy who should have done the brave thing and didn’t.  just because your family tease you doesn’t mean you should commit war crimes!

teddy: me writing this chapter like 

the order: the interaction i have in this chapter between lee and ginny, over whether the order beat voldemort, is my attempt to get something i have been thinking a lot about without much resolution, which is (partly) what does the order actually do, but also how do the order think about the end of the war when it turns out they kind of were peripheral to the effort of winning it? obviously they did some things, and order members obviously fought in the battle, but the order actually were instrumentalised by dumbledore into a bigger plot that involved harry that he kept them in the dark about. i think it would be very weird for the order in the aftermath of war to think about what their efforts really meant when their losses are huge and their accomplishments minimal, other than helping keep harry alive at times - and weirder still for ginny, who was never old enough to join and was kept at arm’s length from the soldiers’ table only to find out those soldiers didn’t really matter anyway.  no profound takes just curiosity on my part, but very interested if anyone has any takes on this!

ron and hermione: very sorry to the lovely anon who just asked about hermione — saying nothing for now but what do you think’s going on there! weird innit. a real mystery. if only someone would tell us

harry’s kitchenware collection: what’s up with that hmmmmmm

songs on the playlist for this chapter:

i listened to a lot of choral music for this chapter - ofc christian symbolism is all over the series (can't move for it), so was leaning into that a bit (lol), and the little church by the graveyard in godric's hollow with the muggles inside on christmas eve has always struck me as a very beautiful and sad image, so i was trying to channel those vibes too a bit in this chapter (ginny and bill listening to the carols in the village in the garden, and the view from molly and arthur's window of the ottery st catchpole church spire). my favourite is the holst arrangement for lullay, mine liking, a fifteenth century carol originally in middle english, which has these very tender lyrics that are about the infant christ but also work painfully well for molly's grief: lullay, mine liking, my dear son, my sweeting.

lullay my liking (arr. holst) by the godley singers | hey, ma by bon iver | gregorian chant for the dead by aurora surgit and alessio randon | 7 o'clock news/silent night by simon & garfunkel | i don't like my mind by mitski | this is me trying - the long pond studio version by taylor swift | should have known better by sufjan stevens (i mean - my brother had a daughter/the beauty that she brings - illumination. perfect no?) | hope by james newton howard (i have a lot of songs from the soundtrack to terence malick's incredibly beautiful film a hidden life on this playlist, because that film remains a real touchstone for the visuals i'm imagining for a lot of this fic but also a lot of the vibes of family and resistance)

reading list: 

on percy (loads here):

dawn is coming, open your eyes by dialux (an all time fave) The Last Something That Meant Anything by Anonymous (TW for sexual assault) 'Hope' is a Thing With Feathers by PeachyKeener

on molly (and molly and ginny):

Every Mother is a Grave by @witchofimber Mother, any distance greater than a single span by Simon Armitage (did anyone else read this for gcse english lit and still find themselves thinking about it a dozen years later?

on sirius and molly:

'He slammed the door in her face' by @ashesandhackles Meta: An alternative read on Sirius and Molly's argument also by @ashesandhackles

on andromeda:

turncoat: in defense of andromeda tonks née black by dirgewithoutmusic

on teddy and the potter family:

little accomplishments by irnan

ok technically i am cheating with this sneak peek because technically i shared a bit of this scene a bazillion years ago/way back in january, a month or so before i started putting the fic out (over here), so here's... a bit more of it hehe:

‘Did it hurt?’ she asks. ‘Becoming an Animagus?’ His laugh is a bark. ‘Unbelievably.’  ‘It must have been worth it, though.’  ‘It’s hard to know what things are worth.’ Definitely in one of those moods.