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laventadorn · 2 years

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rough draft of two nje ch 15 scenes

so rough you could exfoliate with them! feel them strip the dead cells right off and leave your skin glowing and healthy*

*results not guaranteed

i've had an ass-kicking cold for the past four days; as in, it's kicking my ass. while i wait to breathe normally again, have some... more draco pov? idk why it's so easy and fun to write him -- maybe because i'm not emotionally invested in him and he's kind of a wet rag.

Harriet leaned over the bar, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“You did not tell me,” she said in a low voice, “that it was this many people.”

“Well, I – didn’t know they were going to be this. Numerous,” Hermione said (squeakily).

“They must’ve told their friends,” Ron muttered. “I swear we were just talking to prefects in our year–”

Asteria patted Harriet on the back. Her hand might’ve been shaking a little (or a lot). Harriet didn’t blame her one bit – instead of a few prefects, all the Gryffindors in their year had turned up – Dean, Seamus, Neville, Lavender, Parvati and her sister Padma with her; Ginny and the other girls on the Gryffindor Quidditch team; Fred and George; that Luna girl from the train; a handful of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws from their year who Harriet only knew in the most general way from sitting classes with them for five years; and, most surprisingly, Cedric Diggory and Cho Chang. At the sight of this many people trooping in to discuss her teaching them defense spells, Harriet had considered faking poisoning to get out of it – surely in the Hog’s Head it would be believable that she could’ve accidentally picked something up, even if it was just a long-term growth on her butterbeer bottle.

In the end, the most she’d done was woodenly excuse herself and hunker down at the corner of the bar. Hermione, Ron, and Asteria, who’d been sitting in increasingly loud silence as the number of attendees grew, had scurried after her.

“Should we make a break for it?” Ron asked in a low voice. “I see a door behind the bar there. Probably leads to the yard.”

Harriet took off her glasses to scrub her hands over her face. Then she hooked the ends back over her ears with a sigh. “No . . . we’re already here. Anyway I’ve made more of a prat of myself in front of a bigger number of people.”

“You won’t make a. Prat of yourself,” said Hermione firmly. Asteria nodded vigorously, though she looked about to faint.

The barman gave a soft snort, like he didn’t agree. He seemed sort of familiar, but Harriet couldn’t place him. He was rubbing a dirty glass with an even dirtier rag, and she got the sense the only reason he hadn’t told them to bugger off was a disinclination for speaking to customers.

“How can you say that, after knowing me all these years?” said Harriet to Hermione; she patted Asteria on the arm. “I make a prat of myself hourly. All right, let’s get this over with.”

Fred and George were handing out dusty bottles of butterbeer to the five-times-larger-than-Harriet-would’ve-preferred group that had overtaken a couple of tables to one side of the taproom. As she approached, all eyes pinned on her, and she almost made a break for the back door after all. She realized it was one thing to make a prat of herself spontaneously and quite another to get up in front of a bunch of people prepared to make a prat of herself.

“Er,” she said.

Draco breathed the open air in Hogsmeade. The best thing about it was that it was currently Pansy-free.

Actually, he’d been having some good Pansy-free time lately. She was so fired up with this Inquisitors business, she’d stopped resembling a human-shaped growth on his arm. Prefects had to follow certain guidelines, but Umbridge’s Inquisitors had more leeway to properly abuse power. Draco hadn’t really known Pansy would have the initiative, but she’d proven quite good at conjuring up random infractions to inflict on people; other Houses were leaking points in small but significant totals. He was sort of impressed, but if she wasn’t careful, she was going to wind up with a head full of leeks when somebody snapped and hexed her.

He’d also seen her scheming a lot with Daphne, probably to get back at Potter. He’d heard Tracey warning Daphne off – “You don’t want Potter as an enemy, don’t you remember?” – but he hadn’t said anything to Pansy. Aside from the fact that she wouldn’t listen, it wasn’t his business to make her smart about it. Besides, if she was busy crafting Potter voodoo dolls in dark corners, she wasn’t clinging on to him.

Yes, he had a lot of time to himself lately. It was . . . rather quiet.

Really, he wasn’t sure he liked it. His mind tended to go places that were dark and full of shadows.

And yet talking to people was so much work these days. They hadn’t been – where he’d been.

(Wasn’t it pathetic? He was fine now. Why should he still struggle to fall asleep in the dark because it was dark?)

He was drifting down a side street when he saw something peculiar: Asteria and Potter meeting up with – Granger and the Weasel.

He edged behind a street lamp, but he was far enough away that they didn’t spot him. But he couldn’t be too careful: Gryffindors might be oblivious as a fence-post, but Asteria had been better taught in Slytherin. And he’d noticed her tall form and fair hair.

Asteria was hanging back a little behind Potter, who seemed to be making introductions, if the way Granger was smiling and Weasley giving a cringingly awkward wave was any indication. Asteria sort of twitched at them. Well, she could be cringingly awkward too, even if she was enormously good-looking and of much better breeding than the Weasel.

They didn’t linger long after these first hellos, but headed off down the street. Potter still kept herself between Asteria and the others, as if providing a shield.

Still edged behind the street-lamp, Draco reached up and touched the brooch he always wore on his lapel since his mother had given it to him - a Black family heirloom that activated a concealment spell with the right trigger. A quick check in a dusty shop window showed a nondescript wizard, not suspiciously plain, but unremarkable, standing in his place.

Off he went after them. They stopped one street over and, after a brief pause in which Potter traded looks with her cronies, headed into a dingy building that Draco recognized from his third year, but had never ventured near since.

The Hog’s Head?

He almost turned to make a very dignified exit in a very opposite direction . . . but he reminded himself that the barman wouldn’t recognize him like this; his mother did not pass on useless trinkets. And besides, if Potter and cronies were about to get tossed out on their ears, he wanted to see.

The bar was the same as he remembered: filthy, low-class, poorly lit. The same candles stuck to the dirt-encrusted tables in their own wax; the same bay windows that probably hadn’t been cleaned since the goblin rebellion of 1612; the same floor you couldn’t see for all the grime and sawdust. The same bartender. . .

You are not Draco Malfoy; you are a gormless nobody named Deacon Pines.

He took a seat at the bar. The barman glanced at him with a sardonic gleam in his eye.

“Firewhiskey sour,” said Draco, with an accent that made him sound like Potter.

The barman stared at him a moment longer with a gimlet eye, but made the drink and shoved it over. Draco held a single sip in his mouth, trying not to cringe. How his father could drink these. . .

Potter was sitting in a corner, easily visible from his seat at the bar, talking in low tones with Granger and the Weasel. Asteria sat at her side, content to be ignored, but looking round the room. He had actually never had call to observe her this closely or at leisure: she almost always faded from notice, and she seldom spent time in places around loads of other people. But shielded from notice beside Potter, she didn’t seem as jittery as usual.

Then her eyes widened. Draco couldn’t help looking over his shoulder, and almost spat out his mouthful of whiskey.

A whole troop of people were marching across the threshold. The barman even dropped his scowl of suspicion to gape at the amount of Hogwarts students now cluttering up his taproom. Draco hunkered down at his spot at the bar – he wasn’t Asteria, shaken up by somebody looking in his mere direction, but he didn’t fancy being noticed by this crowd of Slytherin-haters when he was alone and unallied.

He glanced up; Potter had come to the other end of the bar, and was leaning over it like she wanted to brain herself on the edge. Asteria was patting her on the back. Granger and Weasley seemed to be attempting some pep talk.

Draco suddenly had a vision of himself having a minor wig-out in the corner, and Crabbe and Goyle trying to offer advice while Pansy rubbed his shoulders. He almost swallowed a burning mouthful of his rancid drink. As if Crabbe and Goyle would care enough to think of something to say – or be able to, even if they did. As if Pansy would be able to get over herself long enough to be soothing.

He couldn’t hear the conversation, but after a moment Potter straightened up, face resigned, and turned back to the slack-brained crowd. What was she nervous about?

“Er,” she said eloquently.

All right, so maybe she was nervous because she had the public speaking skills of a puffskein.

She darted a look at Granger, who moved up next to her.

“Thank you for. Coming,” said Granger in that stop-start way she had these days. “Well, we – put together this meeting for – people with concerns and – questions about. . . some recent things.” She swallowed; Potter, arms folded, shifted her stance a bit so that her shoulder was touching Granger’s. Granger’s chin came up a little.

“And because we need to learn Defense and certainly there’s no – proper teacher this year – ”

“Hear, hear!” said one of the heinous Weasley twins. A titter went through the group.

“I take it you’re worried about passing your O.W.L.s too?” asked one of the Ravenclaw swots. Behind Granger and Potter, Weasley rolled his eyes. Draco would never agree with the Weasel, who was barely literate, but Merlin’s beard, did Ravenclaws ever shut up about grades?

Granger was answering that question when a blond Hufflepuff from their Quidditch team – Zanius or something – interrupted her with a nasally voice:

“I have a question.”

Potter raised her eyebrows at his tone, but said, “Yeah?”

“Why’d you bring her here?” He pointed behind her – at Asteria, who went bright red. “Everyone’s seen you palling around with a Slytherin, but to just waltz in here together – how do you know she’s not a spy for that Umbridge?”

Asteria shrunk in on herself. Weasley scowled at that wart Zanius, but everyone else held their breath, as if waiting to see how Potter would handle this. They’d surely been wondering the same thing.

“Asteria is my friend,” said Potter coldly, but the look in her eye blazed, even in the smoke-stained light. “If you don’t trust your friends, that’s not my problem – nor is who I choose to be friends with any of your business. If you don’t like it, you know where the door is.”

Asteria looked up at her, and if those weren’t stars in her eyes, Draco wasn’t a Malfoy. Zanius’ mouth hung open a little, before he turned a dull read.

“It was just a question,” he muttered.

“Right,” said Potter, with sarcasm so good a Slytherin wouldn’t have been ashamed to use it. “Glad to answer it for you.

“So,” she continued into the weighted silence. Her nerves appeared to have been tempered in the fire of Gryffindor righteousness; she no longer looked like she wanted to leap over the tables and run out the door. “If anyone has any real questions – ones about blokes called Voldemort, or anything you actually came here for – now’s the time.”

The Weasley twins traded raised eyebrows. Several people looked impressed, a couple like it was their turn to want to scurry out the door. Draco certainly wouldn’t want Potter looking at him with that eye – it reminded him more than a little of the barkeep’s when he’d nabbed a third-year Draco asking for firewhiskey, or McGonagall’s when she found Crabbe doing unspeakable things to a mouse in class.

“Is You-Know-Who the one who hurt Hermione Granger?” asked a sweet, soft voice – Draco thought her name was Loony Lovegood. Pansy made fun of her sometimes. Pansy said she was a nutter; Draco thought dotty. Her earrings looked like orange radishes, making her an even worse dresser than Potter.

Potter looked at Loony in silence for a moment, that militant light dimmed. Granger put her hand on Potter’s arm.

“Yes,” she said simply. “Harriet saved my life.”

Murmurs shifted through the crowd like wind through the treetops. Draco looked down into his disgusting drink.

What would that be like… murmured a voice in his mind.

What, being captured by the Dark Lord? Granger’s a Mudblood, and she was only taken because she’s Potter’s best friend, so she made the best bait. Your family is loyal. . . you’ll be safe.

But Potter had gone to rescue her – somehow . . . and had gotten her out.

What would it be like. . . to have a friend like that?

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laventadorn · 1 year

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Chapter 15 is live!

enjoy~

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laventadorn · 2 years

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what in tarnation is an update

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laventadorn · 2 years

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old NJE cut scene

this isn't from chapter 14, but i was going through some scenes i'd cut from NJE ages ago and found this. in case anyone was interested in seeing alternate scenes/cuts, i thought i'd share it. i don't leave myself extensive notes and i'm kind of wondering why i cut this one out? it's got some bits i quite like!

this was from the chapter where snape, sirius, and harriet are going to sneak away from grimmauld place to rescue draco, who's gone missing in austria. it's just a scene of them prepping.

Sirius was very excited with this plan to run off to Austria to rescue Draco Malfoy. Harriet suspected he was eager to get out of Grimmauld Place and go abroad. His and Remus’ trip to the werewolves hadn’t exactly been a holiday. He’d come back after those long months with a scroungy beard and his hair matted and filthy: if not as bad as he’d been after escaping Azkaban, then at least a far cry from a guest anyone would want at their house party. Remus had once said that Sirius got antsy if stuck in one place for too long; from hearing Sirius talk, she also knew he had a thirst for adventure.

He was zealously applying himself to the business of planning, sneaking, packing, and disguising. In one of Grimmauld Place’s chipped bathrooms, he’d helped Harriet comb some magical paste through her hair that made it grow a foot in ten seconds (they’d overdone it and she’d wound up with hair enough for them to have dangled it out the window and climbed to the street), and then, after a judicious trim, had rubbed Sleekeazy’s in it until it was only wavy rather than a snarled mass.

“Where’d you learn how to do this?” she’d asked, staring at the girl with long, almost-straight hair and her face in the mirror.

“Your granddad invented this stuff. You didn’t know?” Sirius scrubbed his paste-sticky hand with a flannel. “For your grandmother -- that’s who that crazy hair comes from, and she always complained about it, how it wouldn’t behave itself any better than Prongs did. So he fixed up this stuff. It’s the only thing that can hold your, hah, in-hair-itance.”

“Painfully bad, Sirius.” Harriet’s hand hovered over her now-sleek hair, nervous that she’d undo all his work if she touched it and die strangled by her own hair as it came back to life like a Devil’s Snare, twice as angry as before. “Parvati tried some of this stuff on my hair at the Yule Ball, but I only ended up looking Medusa.”

“You’ve got to heat it a bit before you apply it. Your gran used to take a full hour at this -- wore these elaborate braids and jeweled pins like a duchess.”

He kept rubbing the flannel over his fingers, his gaze far away, and compassion filled Harriet’s throat. She’d always longed for stories like these, but she hadn’t known them the way Sirius did. That made it a different kind of pain.

“Anyway.” His gaze refocused and he smiled, lopsided. “Let’s put it under a scarf or something so nobody knows how we’ve changed it -- it’ll spoil the disguise if they all know about it before we make our great escape. You can tell everyone you’re straightening it. I doubt anyone in this house will have any clue.”

Snape did give her a funny look when she reappeared wearing a beryl-green scarf around her head, but then he returned to his default expression of probably wishing to shove a bradawl between Sirius’ ears.

“I’ve got the Polyjuice,” he said, like he was sad it wasn’t poison.

“You can’t have made it just now,” Harriet said, remembering the ages it had taken when Hermione had brewed it up in second year. “D’you just carry it around?”

“It would hardly help me be prepared if I left it at home.”

“Hairs, too?” she asked curiously.

“I can’t go raiding the heads of passerby whenever I need to disappear, can I?”

Harriet brushed off his sarcasm. She remembered the stranger he’d become last summer at the World Cup; it would be interesting to watch the transformation from the other side. Plus, it was deeply intriguing to know that Snape apparently carried around everything he needed to maintain a disguise at any given moment. She’d always thought he was more of a hiding-in-plain-sight spy.

A yell came from downstairs, followed by sounds of an angry gong and a crash. Sirius nipped out Regulus’ bedroom door and then back in again a moment later.

“Moony’s got it,” he said, shutting the door with a snap. “That old grandfather clock started spitting bolts when they tried to move it. But that means we should split up.” He grimaced in reply to Harriet’s curious look. “Moony always knows when I’m scheming.”

“He’s had ample opportunity to develop the sense,” Snape said snidely, and got a rude gesture in reply.

“Should I go help them?” Harriet asked.

“You should use the distraction to pack,” Sirius said, steering her toward the door. “While everyone’s downstairs. I’ll go help.”

Harriet wanted to ask, ‘What if Snape sneaks off without us?’ Snape didn’t look to be in any shape to make it very far without them, but he did look better. What if that was all it took? He was bloody-minded enough to try.

She took the stairs two at a time, cast a quick gander around the room to make sure it was Ginny-free, and then tossed open her trunk and grabbed some clothes at random. It wasn’t like she had a great variety to choose from, but a bit of everything would cover any weather eventualities. The Invisibility Cloak and her wand mattered more. She tied it all up in one of her dresses, stuck her head in the hall to make sure the coast was clear, and was back in Regulus’ room in time to hear Sirius proposing that they should escape across the rooftops.

“If that was something you wanted to do in your ill-advised youth,” Snape said, “you’ve missed your chance. I am not hieing across the bloody rooftops when I can walk out the front door.”

“Killjoy. Why am I not surprised? That was fast,” he said in surprise as Harriet handed him her bundle. “You’re made for this getting the heck outta dodge. What do you say to escaping over the rooftops, ey?”

“How’d we get down to street-level?” she asked, smiling, while Snape rolled his eyes so hard that it was a wonder they didn’t stick backwards in his head.

“Scale the fire escape,” Sirius said promptly.

“I think we should save that for when we really need it.”

“I think you can never have too many rooftop escapes, but I see I’m outvoted. What lousy curriculum are they teaching at Hogwarts these days?”

“We’ll wait until the others are asleep,” Snape said, ignoring him with a scathing air. “Then be off. We could probably slip out with all the racket they’re making--” They all paused to listen to a cacophony of clangs, twangs, and bangs, which sounded a lot like the grandfather clock plummeting down several flights of stairs. “--but we want the longest period of time possible before they notice we’ve gone.”

“Is Remus going to be okay without you?” Harriet asked Sirius. “Transforming, I mean.”

“Yeah. Like he said, that trip we took back in the spring solved it. He doesn’t need me or the Wolfsbane anymore.”

A/N: snape and sirius are BFF's and they dont even know it

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laventadorn · 2 years

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it lives!

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laventadorn · 2 years

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nje ch. 14 scene draft

by popular demand! skjsk

my disclaimer is that things can change a lot over time, parts be added and discarded, etc. etc. - so rather than a final form, this is more of a . . . gestation. who knows what it'll grow up to be! not me that’s for sure

here are two scenes with some slytherins:

Umbridge was . . . green. Definitely green. Her office was extremely pink, but she looked like she was sitting in the Slytherin common room under the lake. (More than once Draco had wondered if green wasn’t Slytherin’s official color because you couldn’t see anything else with all that lake water anyway.)

She also had a sort of sheen to her. Draco hoped she wouldn’t die while he and Pansy were in the room; murder accusations would just be awkward.

“Professor, you don’t look well,” said Pansy, sucking up. This was just as well, because Draco wasn’t in the mood, but his father would have his hair if he was rude to someone so influential.

“Just a trifle under the weather, Miss Parkinson.” Umbridge looked more like she was ready to be under the ground. She had a quilt on her lap and was clutching a mug of something steamy. Her upper lip was sweaty. Oh no, she wasn’t going to throw up, was she? Draco had been so thankful nobody had puked in any of his classes; when other people were sick, he had to fight not to be sick too.

“But that’s why I’ve called you two here today. You’re two of my best students, and you’re so responsible and clever . . . I need a little assistance while I’m – not up to par. Keeping things in order, observing the Hogwarts milieu – you understand, don’t you?”

They both did. She’d been sent to spy, only now she looked like she was about to hurl and die, so she needed help.

“Of course, Professor,” said Pansy, sitting a little forward on her chair. “Whatever you need. Draco and I aren’t Slytherin Prefects for nothing.”

“Wonderful. I knew I could count on you.” Umbridge tried to smile, then wiped it off her face, as if that had been too much movement. Draco braced himself to jump up and run out of the room if she started to heave.

But after a precarious moment, she got it under control. “On the table there . . . you see the pins, Miss Parkinson? One for you, one for Mr. Malfoy.”

Pansy eagerly fetched them. The pin was a silver ‘i.’ Draco wordlessly pinned it to the breast of his robe.

“I would be ever so grateful if you’d sound out some others in your year – who else would be responsible and . . .focused enough for this responsibility. Bring me a list tomorrow – could you do that?”

“Absolutely, Professor. Draco and I will take care of it for you.”

“I’m so glad.” Umbridge’s mug trembled in her shaky hand. She swallowed audibly. “You’ll have the ability to take points, of course – no more than 5 at a time, but I believe it will help solidify your authority. Here are some guidelines on what to keep in mind . . . ”

Pansy took the pink parchment scroll, tied with a little lace bow, with a look of reverence.

“Did Dumbledore really approve this?” Tracey asked, sounding bored, but then she always sounded bored. She was sitting next to Daphne on the common room sofa, also as usual; Daphne was reading Umbridge’s scroll.

“She’s personally appointed by the Minister to oversee Dumbledore,” said Theo Nott. “Dumbledore can approve or disapprove, it won’t make any difference.”

“Well, I’m not joining up,” said Blaise.

“Everyone knows you’re too lazy,” said Pansy waspishly.

Criticism and truth rolled off Blaise equally easily. He didn’t even look up from buffing his nails. “I prefer to let someone else do the work.”

“Theo?” Pansy looked to him.

“No, I’ll be staying out of it.” Everyone knew Theo had an information network; he probably didn’t want to compromise it by being involved in something public like the Inquisitors. Hard to get people to tell you good info later when you’d taken points off them before.

“I’ll join too.” Daphne rolled up the scroll. “I’d like to make a copy of this first.”

Pansy shrugged. “Sure, it’s not mine.”

“Crabbe and Goyle will do it,” Draco added, since they weren’t there. (McGonagall had given them detention for smashing a first years’ head into a puddle of mud.)

Daphne wrote down their names like she was taking minutes in a meeting, because she kept track of things like that and Pansy felt she was too important for paperwork. Then Pansy collected her girls and went off. Blaise had already ditched them some time before, looking for his nail cream made from crushed diamonds (the same kind Draco’s mother used), which left Draco alone with Theo.

“You might want to watch out,” said Theo, pretending to read a Muggle comic. He could get away with things like that and nobody ever said a word. (Pansy had tried once, a long time ago, and Theo had just given her a look. She’d never brought it up again.) “Pansy will have it in for Potter, and that will be a bad idea.”

“Like I can make Pansy do anything.” Draco frowned. “Why is that bad? Umbridge has got it in for Potter. It can only make her like Pansy more.”

Theo turned a page, his expression perfectly bland. “Umbridge isn’t the one you need to worry about.”

“But you said Dumbledore didn’t matter.”

“He doesn’t.” Theo flipped his comic closed with a light sigh. “Oh, I’ve reached the end. I wonder where I put volume two.”

Then he got up and sauntered off, leaving Draco to puzzle that out – unsuccessfully.

If not Umbridge – who had the power, even if she looked like she could barely keep her lunch down long enough to use it – or Dumbledore, who championed Potter – then who could possibly matter?

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laventadorn · 4 years

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handholding ficlet is finally almost done!! i’ve finished the first complete draft; after that will come the revisions/edits, and then and then, COMPLETION. this took me at least a month wtf

this thing was a lot harder to write than i’d initially envisioned lmao. i think it was gonna be like 1k to start? if that? now it’s almost 5k because of all the Actual Writing that got involved r i p

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laventadorn · 4 years

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*shows up two months late to quarantine with an update*

i also reuse my own jokes

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laventadorn · 4 years

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Part 1/2 I was wondering if you had any ideas/headcanons wrt Eileen/Tobias? JK doesn't really go into how they met, but given the little info he gives us its pretty clear the type of marriage they had. But, I was wondering why Tobias acted the way he did. Not that he needs a reason, but I love backstories. Do u have one for the Snapes? Personally, I sawa bit of parallel with how Seamus described how his muggle dad didn't know his mom was a which until after the wedding. I can sort of see...

I wrote one for my first HP fic, in fact! Heavily influenced by Jane Austen lmao

I would change some aspects of this now, but this was the version I dug up from my Ancient Writings:

(readmore, y u no work)

Eileen’s parents’ marriage was arranged, as many pure-blood marriages are. The Princes were a very old, distinguished line, but impoverished, while her mother’s family was relatively new, in a pure-blood sense, but wealthy. Her parents set up the marriage with Mr. Prince, who was rather older than their daughter, but she agreed to it. However, within a short time she was unhappy, since her husband, raised to frugality, was rather miserly and she was spendthrift; and being younger, she wanted to do a great many things that it was not in his temperament to agree to. When Eileen was about five or six, her mother ran away, abandoning her child and her marriage, eloping to Europe with a lover. Her husband was so humiliated and enraged that he forbade anyone in the household to speak her name ever again. He destroyed all evidence of her existence in the house—the possessions she had left behind, the paintings they’d had commissioned, even renouncing her personal house-elf. Even when he learned, three years later, that she’d died in conditions of poverty and hardship, it didn’t soften him toward her; instead, he only believed she had got what she deserved.

When Eileen was seven, he remarried, this time to a widow, one of the Blacks, who had endured a childless marriage of some fifteen years until her husband was killed rather stupidly trying to learn how to ride a dragon. She had no wealth, but Mr. Prince still had his wife’s fortune, and Mrs. Black’s impeccable bloodline meant more to him in any case. She and Mr. Prince were rather meant for each other, however: both were nip-farthings, both joyless and cruel, and both rigidly traditional. They believed in duty, propriety, and unstinting obedience from their children.

Mrs. Black, now Mrs. Prince, thought worse of the former Mrs. Prince than even her husband did. To her, a woman’s infidelity was the worst of vile sins, and she pitied her new husband for having married such a filthy whore. She was sorry that the former Mrs. Prince had left behind a little girl, since naturally the daughter of such a whore would turn out just like her.

But Mrs. Prince was determined to do her duty by Eileen. She raised her to be a proper pure-blood wife—dutiful, obedient, graceful and silent. She beat into her the importance of propriety, telling Eileen how vital it was that she give no one any cause to say how like her mother she was, however much she would surely have the same sort of base, wicked urges as that slut. She also impressed upon Eileen the necessity of marrying into a pure-blood family of stature, since her mother was a fine example of the rubbish that rose to the surface of bad blood.

Within a few short years, the new Mrs. Prince had rewarded her second husband with twin sons. These boys had the benefit firstly of being boys, always a plus in pure-blood families, as well as the added bonus of not having a piece of trash for a mother. The practice of favoring the sons over the daughters was standard in pure-blood families, but the sins of Eileen’s mother worsened her lot. Nothing Eileen ever did was right enough or good enough or proper enough in the eyes of her family; and at school she had no friends, since the pure-blood daughters of Slytherin were fully aware of her mother’s story and had been forbidden from associating with her. Eileen was not pretty, and her home life was too miserable to make her good enough company to compensate for her other defects. Her father pretended she did not exist, her brothers teased and tormented her, and her stepmother ruled her whole life with a fist of iron.

Eileen retreated into her schoolwork, into books and knowledge. In second year she did make one friend, a Ravenclaw named Constance Marlowe. Constance was a very tranquil person. Her mother was Muggle-born, and she would tell Eileen about her Muggle grandparents. Eileen had never met Muggles. Her father and stepfather loathed them, but they loathed Eileen, too, and loved her brothers and the pure-blood families who treated Eileen as if their cruelty was simply preempting every nasty thing they suspected she would ever do.

Then in fifth year, while visiting the sea shore on summer holiday, Constance drowned. Eileen went to her funeral, to which many of Constance’s Muggle relatives had come. They looked like regular people, although they dressed funny. After that, Eileen hated the ocean, but realized that Muggles were capable of human thought and speech, which her family had always led her to believe they weren’t.

When school ended, she returned to live at her father’s house, since pure-blood women of her family’s stature did not get jobs; they got married. But with Eileen’s reputation, her looks, and her father’s desire to spend as little money on her dowry as possible, she received no offers. Her blood was not even decent enough, balanced as it was by her mother’s betrayal. So for more than ten years, Eileen lived in her father’s home, a companion to her stepmother, an object of mockery to her brothers and the children they went on to have.

By the time she was thirty, everyone, even she, was certain she would never marry. Her stepmother even came to relax her restrictions, since she had kept Eileen wrapped so tightly out of a duty to maidenly propriety. A thin, unattractive thirty-year-old witch was not likely to be prey to any lascivious attentions or whims. Uncaring now of the reputation she had so viciously guarded, Mrs. Prince let Eileen out of the house for longer periods of time … although she might not have, had she known Eileen was visiting Muggle haunts.

On one of these jaunts, when she was about thirty-one, Eileen met Tobias. She had gone, in fact, to the seaside town where Constance drowned, perhaps out of a morbid desire to torture herself. He was there, too, trying to get away from his life for a bit, since he’d just gotten divorced.

He had married young when his girlfriend got pregnant unexpectedly. He’d done his duty by her, quitting school and going to work at the mill, but a few months before the day he met Eileen, his wife had sat him down and said she’d fallen in love with some other bloke, but she wanted to do right by Tobias because he’d always done right by her. She and he weren’t in love, hadn’t been since the very early days, even if they’d rubbed along together easily enough, and he said as long as he could keep seeing his girl, they’d be all right. So they divorced amicably, and she married the other bloke, who was a bit older and balding and sort of fat, but a jolly sort, which Tobias had to admit he was not. Lorraine’s new husband looked a bit like Santa Claus to Tobias, and he knew his daughter would like her step-father, if she didn’t already. And although as a young man he’d agreed to the marriage of necessity and had never really been bitter about it, happy enough with his wife and daughter for company, he had wanted more from his life than he’d wound up with at thirty-five: divorced, uneducated, in a dreary, pointless job.

As she was talking with him, Eileen realized she wanted more than anything to get away from her family. She realized how purely she hated them, as if the hatred ran through her blood. She decided to scandalize them utterly: packed up her marriage chest and ran away, to live with Tobias without marrying him, hoping to drive her father and step-mother both to an apoplectic fit, but at least one or the other if she could manage it.

So she and Tobias simply lived together for a while, until Eileen got pregnant. She had been guarding against this, but the magical world had an old wives’ tale that wizarding babies wanted to be born so badly that sometimes, you couldn’t stop them. When she told Tobias, he wanted to get married, and although she didn’t really, she didn’t want her child to suffer the ignominy of being the bastard of a whore. So they were married, very quietly, only Tobias’ ex-wife in attendance with her family. Not wanting to give birth to a daughter that would live the life she’d had, Eileen mixed a very Dark potion to ensure the birth of a son.

So Severus was born. She put an ad in the Daily Prophet, hoping her family would see it, in case it would give them an aneurism.

Before Severus was born, but when she was close to due, Tobias asked her if the baby would have magic. Eileen said, “It is likely, but he may not.”

“What happens if he doesn’t?” Tobias asked.

Eileen shrugged. “Then he doesn’t.” She wanted her son to be a wizard, but she was no longer in the magical world; a Squib child would not matter to her now. She had brothers; she was not even the end of the line.

It was impossible to tell if babies had magic, so for several years after Severus’ birth it was a moot issue. Eileen continued to work spells, because Tobias said he didn’t mind, he actually thought it was pretty interesting. And then one day when Severus was about four or five, he worked magic, and out of nowhere Tobias blew up at the pair of them. Eileen was so shocked she actually flinched away, because although she knew Tobias had a temper, he’d never turned it on her. Severus burst into tears. And then Eileen pulled herself together and reacted, rage and hatred boiling up out of her through her wand, and she turned it on her husband, the way she’d always wanted to do to her brothers, her father, her step-mother, the children at school, and she blasted him across the room and into the bookshelf.

Severus screamed. Eileen stood frozen, looking at Tobias’ unconscious body slumped under an array of books. She blasted them off him and found he was bleeding from cuts all over his front. She hastily flooed them all to St. Mungo’s, where he was swiftly patched up. Although the Healers gave her funny looks, they did nothing to her because she was a witch and he was only a Muggle, and there weren’t legal protections in those days for the Muggle spouses of wizards and witches.

Tobias wasn’t the same after that. Eileen didn’t know whether it was the shock of her turning her magic on him, or Severus’ own magic manifesting, or even the trip to St. Mungo’s, because his face as he looked around the hospital as they left had been haunted. After that, he began to drink more. Although he’d always had a few on the weekends and even more on holidays, he was soon never seen without a drink in his hand or the scent of alcohol on his breath. He wouldn’t tell Eileen what was wrong, and it was impossible to get anything from the mind of a drunk person; even trying it made one disoriented.

She expected him to leave them; expected to wake up one morning and find him gone, but for some reason he never did. They settled into a life where Tobias would go for days avoiding her and Severus, hardly speaking to them when sober, muttering when inebriated, with occasional outbursts of temper that Eileen would sometimes curtail, but at others simply weather out. As a young child Severus was at first frightened, then hurt, and once he grew older, resentful.

Once, when Severus was about seven, she did wake up in the middle of the night and find Tobias in Severus’ room, watching him sleep. Tobias was just drunk enough to be honest. He looked up at her with haunted eyes and said, “Do you hate that I can’t do it?”

“Do what?” she asked, bewildered.

“What you can do. What he can do. Do you hate me because I can’t?”

Eileen just stared at him. “Is that why you act like this?” He didn’t say anything, just looked back at Severus. “No, I don’t hate you. That would be like hating the sky because it’s blue.”

When he spoke, she almost didn’t hear him. “Sometimes I hate you, though. Both of you.”

It took Eileen much longer than it should have to understand what Tobias was really telling her: that he hated them for being able to do something he never would. He hated them for having the power of magic when he was only a Muggle. That look on his face in St. Mungo’s had been shock at an entire world he’d never guessed existed; and now that he knew of it, he also knew he would only ever be on the outside looking in.

But she had not understood this in time. She resented his drinking; he resented her powers; they resented each other’s resentment. And at the heart of it, they came to hate the other for a second chance that had turned to ash, just as the first chance had.

Eventually Eileen realized that the same barrier that stood between her and Tobias had blocked him off from Severus, and she simply quit trying to bridge it. She drew Severus into the circle of her magic, eschewing any acknowledgment of the non-magical world he was half a part of. She had always meant Tobias to show him that part, and now Tobias would not. She taught Severus about his magical bloodline, the House of their family’s allegiance, the world he would enter once he was old enough, the powers he would wield. Although she punished him if he looked in her books without her permission, she taught him hexes and curses and spells that would get him respected among his Slytherin peers, that would receive him the notice of families he would need to impress in order to gain entrance into the society that should have been his—both of theirs, had her life gone much differently. She raised him more as she had been raised, in a manner typical for pure-blood daughters: with strictness and not much indulgence, because she’d loathed the men her brothers had become, alternately indulged and ruthlessly punished as they had been, as the beloved sons of two cruel, cold-hearted people.

In teaching Severus about the world she had left, sending him off into the future he ought to have, Eileen realized she had never been happy in the world of magic. She had known the truth of that, lived it all her life, but never articulated it to herself. But she was not happy in the Muggle world, either; she did not understand it, couldn’t navigate it. It was too vast and unfamiliar for her even to know where to start. As she prepared Severus for Hogwarts, Eileen realized the only time she had been anything close to happy was in that seaside town when she had met Tobias, and she had believed, for a handful of days, that the future would be different from the past.

But it hadn’t been. Now Tobias was gone, and only Severus was left. And even though she had tried her hardest to make it otherwise, she realized that Severus was just as out-of-place as she had ever been; she, the daughter of a whore, the pure-blood wife of a Muggle with a wizard for a son. Severus was the child of two people whose lives had been wasted for them by others; sent as hardly more than a baby into the world of pure-blood politics with such a tiny arsenal of anything they would see as promise, in love with a naïve Muggle-born Gryffindor. If Severus wanted the Muggle-born, he would cut all his chances of entering good society; and if he got the Muggle-born, he would find himself in the midst of people who regarded his magic with jealousy and suspicion.

That was the true curse of the half-blood, she thought. You were always trapped between worlds that didn’t know how to claim you.

*Snape doesn’t have those uncles anymore cuz they died off somehow, and he doesn’t have contact with his dad’s first family. He doesn’t strike me as someone who has a large extended family he pals around with, although I’m sure they exist. I have 1 jillion cousins I know absolutely nothing about, not even their names.

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laventadorn · 6 years

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Out of both curiosity and my own edification--How fleshed out do you have an idea before you start writing the story? Like, do you start when you have a whole cast, setting, and significant plot figured out, or do you plunge in when you have a feeling and figure it out on the way?

i just go full steam ahead and figure it out along the way. the benefit to this approach is that you don’t put off the project indefinitely waiting for The Right Moment To Start. but the drawback is that you might reach a dead end with no idea how to get out…… speaking from experience ^^;

that being said:

i once had a creative writing professor whose wife spent actual years letting a story percolate before she started writing. i think the number he gave was “up to four.” by contrast, he would just start banging out words and about twenty minutes later say, “hm, we’re on a boat, i guess i should look up what that’s like.”

the thing is that each of these approaches worked for them. he didn’t jump in and then find himself in a barren idea wasteland because he didn’t know where he was going, and she didn’t let those years of brewing her story stop her from writing it entirely. either approach can fail, however, if it loses momentum.

(hello, experience, my old friend.)

i’ve read a lot of writing advice over the years - like all advice, some way more helpful than others - but one thing that stuck with me was “keep track of the core idea of your story.” so let’s say that i want to write a story about snape learning he has a heart. if i know nothing else about what i’ll be writing, that’s the idea i always need to make sure i come back to. if i know what is driving the story, then i can (hopefully) wait out the never-ending days when ideas don’t come easy and don’t come at all*.

so, however you start, or however long you want to take, find that core idea. then work it out into a story in whatever way makes you most comfortable. you might try both ways to see which one you’re most comfortable with. i’ve tried both approaches and the times i’ve done extensive pre-writing, i’ve pretty much never started the actual story. i have to write in order to think – and honestly, i have more fun that way – so i just get started; but some people need a plan or they can’t move. the most important (and most difficult?) thing is that you find a way that works for you ♥

*yeah, that’s from a meatloaf song :3

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laventadorn · 7 years

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Hullo! I have loved TNER for ages and have reread it countless times, and I wanted to say that you have inspired me to begin writing. One of the reasons why TNER tops my list of non-fiction works (published and unpublished) is because of the depth with which it portrays relations. I am particularly in awe of the powerful friendships between Harriet and Asteria and Harriet and Hermione, and since I suck at writing platonic relationships, I wanted to ask if you had any tips for me. Thank you

that’s marvelous, dear nonny!! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧♥♥♥

also, what a lovely comment ´･ᴗ･` it’s something i’ve never been asked before c: i’ll give it my best!

the quality of platonic relationships in media, particularly between women, is something i find very lacking. a lot of media – and HP canon is, i’m sad to say, not exempt from this – doesn’t place a great deal of importance on women’s relationships to each other. they’re hardly ever included in the story, and almost never central to it.

(this bugs me, both for its own sake and because of the inherently ancillary nature of women in most media that contributes to it.)

one of the things i love about jane austen is how vital women are to each other’s comfort and well-being. i learned a lot from studying her portrayal of female relationships, in fact. if you haven’t read her (i always recommend her, even though she’s not for everyone), i can still tell you what she does with women that was so formative for me c:

how to write ladies being friends (what i learned from jane austen):

✑ female relationships form a huge basis of women’s lives. they might not always be to the good (most, if not all, relationships aren’t, because people aren’t perfect). they can be sources of jealousy, loneliness, shared pain, and rivalry; they might even be superficial, dishonest, unbalanced, or even damaging. but that’s just the negative: they are also loving and tender, an unquestionable source of daily solace and happiness and even wisdom and growth. no matter what, they hugely affect the characters who are a part of them. one relationship can be a lot of these things in the course of time.

✑ both characters in the platonic relationship are “real.” they each have interior lives, motivations, feelings, etc. even when there are platonic relationships in media, often those relationships are based on the function of the friend – they’re there to be a mouthpiece for the action, a support system, the voice of reason or morality, etc. now, they can be these things at the same time they’re an Actual Character (like hermione in HP canon), but they can’t be just that. there has to be a give and take. if jane helps lizzy, then lizzy later has to help jane.

✑ the characters admire and respect each other. sometimes when presented with a romance, i’m wondering why these people love each other. i follow the same rule with a friendship. if i’m wondering why they’re friends in what’s supposed to be an important friendship, something’s up. now, i don’t sit down and think, “harriet likes asteria because of so-and-so, and asteria likes harriet because of this-and-that.” people don’t really work like that; there’s always something both ephemeral and concrete to relationships with people we care about. it’s an affinity of the spirit, because people are greater than the sum of all their parts; but you still notice things about them, things they do that you treasure.

anyway, that’s what i’ve got for now. this post is probably long enough to be going on with! i also suggest studying media both for what you do like and what you don’t. if i see a Good Friendship, i study it for things to model. if i see a Bad Friendship, i study it for things to avoid.

all in all, i think that good writing starts with character, and that writing i want to experience starts with characters appreciating each other. it’s a pretty simple formula. and i learn about my characters by writing them.

i hope i said something that can be useful to you ♥ make some magic!

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