Amy Ponds of the 99% (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
allchildren) wrote2010-07-09 02:43 pm
allchildren) wrote2010-07-09 02:43 pm
Entry tags:
stories that might have been, version: harry potter
When I first entered fandom properly in early 2004, my focus was on Harry Potter. This lasted only a bit over a year, as after HBP came out in summer 2005 I realized I could not deal with that fandom anymore, but it was my formative fandom for better or worse (hint: worse), and also probably my most ambitious fandom ever. By which I mean, it was a fandom that made me think ambitiously, with such a big chewy world to work with. And check it: while working on mad theories (I mean, I was involved in Knight2King, guyz. The crackpot theory so convincing JKR had to compliment it even as she debunked it!) and vastly overestimating the narrative complexity of a series that was ultimately far more straightforward than I hoped it would be, I *also* managed to be a massive, if un-party-line-toeing Harry/Luna shipper.
If you didn't know because you're new to all this: Luna Lovegood is at times my favorite person ever in the universe. "Fictional" be damned!
So anyway, here are some HP stories that I never wrote, but I wanted to (all before book six came out):
1. The Disappearing Ground: This would be a chaptered concept fic taking a structural cue from Rilo Kiley's album The Execution of All Things. It's post-war; we open in Bulgaria, where Harry is staying with Hermione and Victor (marrieds!). He is not himself; he's lost large chunks of his memory (including the fact that he was with Luna) to a Pensieve in the war, and the fic is about him getting his memories back, and getting back with Luna, and something to do with Draco? IDEK ANYMORE. But it was quite cherished in my heart. Lol Rilo Kiley fic, what even.
2. Wizarding Mexico: Inspired by my 2004 summer study abroad in Mexico of Mesoamerican anthropology. IIRC my jumping off point was the legendary disappearance of the Toltec people, which could easily be explained by a wizarding society going underground from Muggle view, and could be spread a larger indigenous wizarding culture. This would tie Voldemort's snakiness to Quetzalcoatl and also the rumor that on the spring and autumn equinoxes there appears to be some... slithering. This would be an adventure fic journeying through wizarding Mexico and culminating at a Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Luna vs. Voldemort showdown at Kukulkan on the spring equinox. I'm very glad I DIDN'T write this fic, because the potential for fail is astronomical, but there were some interesting ideas there.
3. Luna's Teen Pregnancy: This was my rebellion against the general atmosphere of H/L, which was invariably short, fluffy, and plotless; frequently terrible; usually non-existent. After a time I just wanted to throw my OTP into a fucked-up unromantic situation and make Harry out to be an irresponsible asshole. It took place in sixth year and featured many Ravenclaws being extremely judgy. I started writing this and liked what I had (Lisa Turpin discovering Luna throwing up at 3 am) but never followed through, ALAS.
4. Luna's mother was a werewolf! ...that's all I got.
5. Post-war, Hermione visiting her fallen comrades in St. Mungo's (notably, of course, Luna - the Alice Longbottom of her generation) and something about an Order traitor. Hermione was always my war survivor for some reason.
6. Harry/Buffy: This should be first or last, because I actually joined fandom BECAUSE I wanted to write this story, only I never did and I don't want to reorder the rest of my list. But yeah, I think it says all you need to know about circa-2004 Tristopher that, repeat, I entered fandom because I desperately wanted Harry Potter/Buffy Summers fic. (And don't think I didn't eventually track down an entire HP/BtVS fic archive and read the shit out of it.)
7. House-elf massacre: I actually wrote ... wow! 1767 words of this, so I guess it's more accurate to say I just failed to finish it. In a typical act of overthinking, I thought the fact that House-elves could Apparate in Hogwarts was the perfect loophole for Death Eater security, and had them murdering kids in their beds at night. Meant to be both black comedy and also incorporate several of my wackier book six theories. Oddly, although I did kill Ginny in this fic (and I actually do quite like a version of Ginny that exists largely in my head, both during and post-canon, despite having zero love for Harry/Ginny as canonically presented and JKR's wonky writing where Ginny is concerned), Luna didn't feature at all. Unfortunately unfinished due to writerly insecurity. I just rounded it all up, though, and almost want to finish it since I do in fact have an ending plotted out... but, you know, definitely won't.
Here's what I had for that last one. Warning for implicit violence and widespread character death.
It wasn't Hermione's fault, but right around the time the house-elves of Dark Wizarding families started killing off the student body of Hogwarts, attitudes towards Miss Granger nonetheless became increasingly frosty. 'Ah, yes,' survivors would mutter amongst themselves, glowering prominently just in case she was nearby, 'more rights for house-elves! That should right this rocking boat in a jiff! Brilliant, no, truly. Oops, late for Parvati's burial - catch you after dinner?'
Actually, it made much more sense to curse the builders of Hogwarts for having constructed anti-Apparition wards that had no effect on house-elf magic, or Dumbledore for not being able to construct specialized wards that wouldn't interfere with the staff elves, but Hermione was the one who'd cluttered the common room with warty hats and extorted S.P.E.W. membership dues from her friends, so she was the one who got the glares. To her credit, she refused to let her peers' anger sway her from her principles. "You see," she whispered heatedly to Harry, because he was the only person still talking to her, "this is exactly why house-elves should be freed, not kept as family slaves! It's not their fault they're murderers. They only follow the orders of the twisted people who own them. If they had their freedom they wouldn't do us any harm at all."
Harry now glared at her as well. "How can you say that, remembering what Kreacher did to Sirius? And me? I'm sure it's really easy, ISN'T IT, HERMIONE, to ignore the fact that some creatures are just evil, when YOUR family is safe and alive and blissfully ignorant. WELL, I'M NOT THAT LUCKY," he snarled. Harry had really mastered the art of the controlled rage in these trying times.
Hermione, still, would not budge in her convictions. "House-elves don't kill people," she insisted. "People kill people."
The people killed before Dumbledore put up the anti-elf-Apparation shield numbered in the dozens. For the first few days nobody could figure out how or why Muggleborns and half-bloods were being brutally eviscerated in their sleep, just that every morning children would wake up and find another roommate dead with his or her heart cut out. None of the portraits had seen anything and nobody had woken up during an attack, forcing Harry to consider, yet again, what a load of pony was Hogwarts's reputation as the safest place in Wizarding Britain. Certainly you couldn't just stroll up to the castle and ask a receptionist where you might find Stephen Cornfoot's bed, but apparently all it took to get in was a slightly unusual quality like being an Animagus or a house-elf, because why of course would an enemy ever employ any creativity in battle that might require guarding against? He glumly awaited the day when Tonks would take the form of Professor Trelawney and frolic on into the supposed fortress for a spot of tea and perhaps a few off-colour jokes. Voldemort had a snake, everybody and their daft dead mother had a homicidal house-elf, and Barty Crouch, Jr. wasn't the only Death Eater capable of brewing Polyjuice. At least Tonks was on their side, and presumably would not cause catastrophe if she did choose to cross school boundaries.
Supposedly.
The Hogwarts elves, all employed without pay by Albus Dumbledore, were also supposedly on the side of good, loyal to their master and unquestioning in their obedience. Yet a three and a half days after the fourth night of the massacres, Justin Finch-Fletchley woke up, or rather failed to, resoundingly dead, which un-solved the problem pretty thoroughly, as far as most students were concerned. Orla Quirke had been awake that fourth night, and although she was far too terrified (uncharitable people said "cowardly") to stop a muttering house-elf with damp-in-odd-places trousers tied as a cape around his neck from stabbing Yoshiko Tamagata with a rusty bread knife, she'd been able to report what she'd seen. Dumbledore seemed unusually hesitant to cut off all house-elf Apparation, leading to rampant speculation as to why, but did do it within a day. Ever since, the crowds in the halls, briefly whittled by the loss of student life, increased threefold due to the sheer number of house-elves now walking through the castle, carrying things and bowing constantly. Dinner was much slower and life had become rather inconvenient with the help all mucking about for people to trip over, but that would have been a price worthy of safety. Justin seemed to prove otherwise.
"What was that you said about house-elves not killing people, Hermione?" said Harry, who was trying very hard to not add to the casualty rate.
"My God, Harry, what does a single renegade house-elf have to do with anything?" Hermione was indignant, and, apparently, also quite jealous that Ron was hanging out with Padma Patil these days. "And what does he want with her?"
"They both lost sisters, didn't they," he observed. Harry had a world-weary manner of resignation about him, as if nothing could surprise him anymore, and even less could break through his icy disdain for the whole sordid procedure of a war that, in some absurd way, rested in his hands, crap defense or not.
He lost that stability of disgust the morning Draco Malfoy was reported to have been found cold in his bed, a bloody cavity where his heart had, by all reasonable assumption, once beaten on a regular basis.
*
"Those bastards," was all Ron had to say after the annoucement of Draco's death, and in his opinion it was damned gentlemanly of him. Not a single Slytherin would so much as sigh if he turned up butchered one morning, but he was bigger and better than that, or at least tried to be when he remembered. He couldn't give Hermione the cold shoulder forever and it wouldn't do at all to start talking to her again only to have her call him an insensitive ogre, or something.
Harry, for his part, was shaken. Malfoy's spineless taunting was ultimately negligible crap in the scheme of things, but it was a constant, like Dudley's obesity growing with every meal, Snape's emotional problems taken out on Potions essays, and Hagrid's harebrained plots to eventually feed the whole of Britain to some really sweet and harmless ourobori. But Dudley had steadily been losing weight since Aunt Petunia's death, Snape was turning out to be a much better Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, and Hagrid was Elsewhere.
Now Malfoy was dead, too, and though it hadn't for quite a while, Harry couldn't help but be struck by how nothing made any sense at all.
"It doesn't make sense, though," said Hermione, who was pale and had taken a break from defending house-elves who, by the looks of things, really didn't need it. "Why would they kill Draco? He's as pureblooded as they come."
Ron's voice was thin and sharp when he broke his Hermione-ward silence. "So was Ginny."
She gnawed on her lip as though trying to eat the words in her mouth before they escaped. "But, Ron, there's a pattern here, and I could fit Ginny into it. Draco is an aberration."
"Is that really what you're thinking about now?" asked Ron, his face flushing urgent red. "First the poor murdering elves and now how do the deaths fit in a graph? People are dying." And left.
Harry, though somewhat inclined to agree with Ron's implication that Hermione was, in fact, the insensitive ogre of the lot of them, stayed. For a war being headed by the so-called two greatest wizards of all time, it seemed pretty routine by now for sixteen-year-olds to take the lead in strategy and defense, and when evil ferrets weren't safe, clearly the time for action was past due. Also, camping out in the Great Hall was just annoying.
*
Left to their own devices in the wake of Ron's departure, Harry and Hermione wasted no time in proving his disgust well-warranted by creating a detailed chart of the slaughtered students, their bloodlines, and any other information that could be deemed relevant. For Ginny to have been killed meant that the masters of the elves were not simply fighting Muggleborn and half-blooded students, as any pureblood supremacist might, but actually taking the war straight to the Order itself. As the two of them collected parentage data of the victims, Hermione's grim silence spoke loudly of her understanding and, in a way, approval of the enemy's tacticts, and Harry, having lost both his innocence and his jadedness, wasn't arguing.
Ginny and Draco, it transpired, were not the only purebloods to have been killed. Also making that roster were Laetitia Prewett, first year, of Hufflepuff; Peredur Dearborn, third year, Ravenclaw; and Madeleine Jones, seventh, of Gryffindor. Order children all, but one mystery remained: Blaise Zabini, year six, Slytherin.
Nobody in Slytherin would talk to the person asking questions.
"Honestly, Harry, couldn't you be a little less glowery?" snapped Hermione after he returned from his fruitless quest. "This wouldn't be so difficult if you didn't alienate everybody." Oblivious as ever of her own hypocrisy, she'd given up on trying to appease Harry by not playing into his worst qualities, and as such, pinpointed the problem with her usual accuracy.
"No, I guess I can't," he retorted, glowering at her significantly. "Why don't you try, then? How could we not already know this, anyways?"
"I will, thanks," she replied with dignity. "Don't do anything rash while I'm gone."
With a war resting on his shoulders and innocent blood on his hands, Harry spent the next few minutes sulking. He wished that Ron would come back from snogging Padma, because at least he knew how to argue; besides, where did Hermione Granger get off giving lectures about not alienating one's peers?
Hermione sought out the one Slytherin with whom she'd always been able to conduct cordial relations, and even partnered with once in Potions after everybody started to die, wrecking the usual pairs. She found him engrossed in a hushed (by his part, anyway) conversation with one Vincent Crabbe and another, nearly indistinguishable, Gregory Goyle. He answered her question politely and waited until she was gone to resume speaking.
Strange, Hermione reflected, memorizing Blaise's Muggle mother's name as she made her way back to the Room of Requirement, where she and Harry had been meeting; she'd always thought Theodore Nott rather hated his fellow Slytherins.
And the answer:
Theodore Nott killed Draco. Narcissa, who is the head of the Malfoy family, has been waffling about her commitment to the Dark Lord due to concern over her son, so Bellatrix, who is trying to force a Black sister reunion, gets word to Nott Sr. to have Theodore kill Draco and make it look like a house-elf did it. Tonks, in the course of protecting her mum from Auntie Bella through various tricksy disguises, learns this and eventually takes the form of Trelawney, as per an earlier prediction of Harry's, to get into Hogwarts and warn him, but he is busy being attacked by the actual house-elf (quite possibly Winky) who killed Justin. After that's all worked out, Harry and Hermione get Dumbledore to alter the anti-Apparition wards so that house-elves can Apparate into a small area of Hogwarts, but not out of it, and they then proceed to force clothing onto all the murderous elves and free them, thereby depriving the DEs of their great weapon. This is the part that won't work because I'm pretty sure house-elves can't be freed by anybody BUT their master, but the elves can still be deprived of all their weapons and then are harmless like the useless demon in Buffy's "Fear Itself." And that's how Hermione Granger came to save wizardkind from the heinous threat of house-elfery, and thereafter only glared and muttered when people brought up her SPEW days.
Most of my best stories only ever reached "might have been." Oh, remember VM AU S2? Still my fav (no bus crash! no supervillainy that makes me die of hate forever and ever amen! canon Logan/Weevil!). And currently I'm working on a post-"Born to Run" SCC "movie" withmetalheart. It's a bizarre kind of life, this imaginary stories method. But maybe it's teaching me something anyway. Maybe someday I can pass the savings on... to you??
If you didn't know because you're new to all this: Luna Lovegood is at times my favorite person ever in the universe. "Fictional" be damned!
So anyway, here are some HP stories that I never wrote, but I wanted to (all before book six came out):
1. The Disappearing Ground: This would be a chaptered concept fic taking a structural cue from Rilo Kiley's album The Execution of All Things. It's post-war; we open in Bulgaria, where Harry is staying with Hermione and Victor (marrieds!). He is not himself; he's lost large chunks of his memory (including the fact that he was with Luna) to a Pensieve in the war, and the fic is about him getting his memories back, and getting back with Luna, and something to do with Draco? IDEK ANYMORE. But it was quite cherished in my heart. Lol Rilo Kiley fic, what even.
2. Wizarding Mexico: Inspired by my 2004 summer study abroad in Mexico of Mesoamerican anthropology. IIRC my jumping off point was the legendary disappearance of the Toltec people, which could easily be explained by a wizarding society going underground from Muggle view, and could be spread a larger indigenous wizarding culture. This would tie Voldemort's snakiness to Quetzalcoatl and also the rumor that on the spring and autumn equinoxes there appears to be some... slithering. This would be an adventure fic journeying through wizarding Mexico and culminating at a Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Luna vs. Voldemort showdown at Kukulkan on the spring equinox. I'm very glad I DIDN'T write this fic, because the potential for fail is astronomical, but there were some interesting ideas there.
3. Luna's Teen Pregnancy: This was my rebellion against the general atmosphere of H/L, which was invariably short, fluffy, and plotless; frequently terrible; usually non-existent. After a time I just wanted to throw my OTP into a fucked-up unromantic situation and make Harry out to be an irresponsible asshole. It took place in sixth year and featured many Ravenclaws being extremely judgy. I started writing this and liked what I had (Lisa Turpin discovering Luna throwing up at 3 am) but never followed through, ALAS.
4. Luna's mother was a werewolf! ...that's all I got.
5. Post-war, Hermione visiting her fallen comrades in St. Mungo's (notably, of course, Luna - the Alice Longbottom of her generation) and something about an Order traitor. Hermione was always my war survivor for some reason.
6. Harry/Buffy: This should be first or last, because I actually joined fandom BECAUSE I wanted to write this story, only I never did and I don't want to reorder the rest of my list. But yeah, I think it says all you need to know about circa-2004 Tristopher that, repeat, I entered fandom because I desperately wanted Harry Potter/Buffy Summers fic. (And don't think I didn't eventually track down an entire HP/BtVS fic archive and read the shit out of it.)
7. House-elf massacre: I actually wrote ... wow! 1767 words of this, so I guess it's more accurate to say I just failed to finish it. In a typical act of overthinking, I thought the fact that House-elves could Apparate in Hogwarts was the perfect loophole for Death Eater security, and had them murdering kids in their beds at night. Meant to be both black comedy and also incorporate several of my wackier book six theories. Oddly, although I did kill Ginny in this fic (and I actually do quite like a version of Ginny that exists largely in my head, both during and post-canon, despite having zero love for Harry/Ginny as canonically presented and JKR's wonky writing where Ginny is concerned), Luna didn't feature at all. Unfortunately unfinished due to writerly insecurity. I just rounded it all up, though, and almost want to finish it since I do in fact have an ending plotted out... but, you know, definitely won't.
Here's what I had for that last one. Warning for implicit violence and widespread character death.
It wasn't Hermione's fault, but right around the time the house-elves of Dark Wizarding families started killing off the student body of Hogwarts, attitudes towards Miss Granger nonetheless became increasingly frosty. 'Ah, yes,' survivors would mutter amongst themselves, glowering prominently just in case she was nearby, 'more rights for house-elves! That should right this rocking boat in a jiff! Brilliant, no, truly. Oops, late for Parvati's burial - catch you after dinner?'
Actually, it made much more sense to curse the builders of Hogwarts for having constructed anti-Apparition wards that had no effect on house-elf magic, or Dumbledore for not being able to construct specialized wards that wouldn't interfere with the staff elves, but Hermione was the one who'd cluttered the common room with warty hats and extorted S.P.E.W. membership dues from her friends, so she was the one who got the glares. To her credit, she refused to let her peers' anger sway her from her principles. "You see," she whispered heatedly to Harry, because he was the only person still talking to her, "this is exactly why house-elves should be freed, not kept as family slaves! It's not their fault they're murderers. They only follow the orders of the twisted people who own them. If they had their freedom they wouldn't do us any harm at all."
Harry now glared at her as well. "How can you say that, remembering what Kreacher did to Sirius? And me? I'm sure it's really easy, ISN'T IT, HERMIONE, to ignore the fact that some creatures are just evil, when YOUR family is safe and alive and blissfully ignorant. WELL, I'M NOT THAT LUCKY," he snarled. Harry had really mastered the art of the controlled rage in these trying times.
Hermione, still, would not budge in her convictions. "House-elves don't kill people," she insisted. "People kill people."
The people killed before Dumbledore put up the anti-elf-Apparation shield numbered in the dozens. For the first few days nobody could figure out how or why Muggleborns and half-bloods were being brutally eviscerated in their sleep, just that every morning children would wake up and find another roommate dead with his or her heart cut out. None of the portraits had seen anything and nobody had woken up during an attack, forcing Harry to consider, yet again, what a load of pony was Hogwarts's reputation as the safest place in Wizarding Britain. Certainly you couldn't just stroll up to the castle and ask a receptionist where you might find Stephen Cornfoot's bed, but apparently all it took to get in was a slightly unusual quality like being an Animagus or a house-elf, because why of course would an enemy ever employ any creativity in battle that might require guarding against? He glumly awaited the day when Tonks would take the form of Professor Trelawney and frolic on into the supposed fortress for a spot of tea and perhaps a few off-colour jokes. Voldemort had a snake, everybody and their daft dead mother had a homicidal house-elf, and Barty Crouch, Jr. wasn't the only Death Eater capable of brewing Polyjuice. At least Tonks was on their side, and presumably would not cause catastrophe if she did choose to cross school boundaries.
Supposedly.
The Hogwarts elves, all employed without pay by Albus Dumbledore, were also supposedly on the side of good, loyal to their master and unquestioning in their obedience. Yet a three and a half days after the fourth night of the massacres, Justin Finch-Fletchley woke up, or rather failed to, resoundingly dead, which un-solved the problem pretty thoroughly, as far as most students were concerned. Orla Quirke had been awake that fourth night, and although she was far too terrified (uncharitable people said "cowardly") to stop a muttering house-elf with damp-in-odd-places trousers tied as a cape around his neck from stabbing Yoshiko Tamagata with a rusty bread knife, she'd been able to report what she'd seen. Dumbledore seemed unusually hesitant to cut off all house-elf Apparation, leading to rampant speculation as to why, but did do it within a day. Ever since, the crowds in the halls, briefly whittled by the loss of student life, increased threefold due to the sheer number of house-elves now walking through the castle, carrying things and bowing constantly. Dinner was much slower and life had become rather inconvenient with the help all mucking about for people to trip over, but that would have been a price worthy of safety. Justin seemed to prove otherwise.
"What was that you said about house-elves not killing people, Hermione?" said Harry, who was trying very hard to not add to the casualty rate.
"My God, Harry, what does a single renegade house-elf have to do with anything?" Hermione was indignant, and, apparently, also quite jealous that Ron was hanging out with Padma Patil these days. "And what does he want with her?"
"They both lost sisters, didn't they," he observed. Harry had a world-weary manner of resignation about him, as if nothing could surprise him anymore, and even less could break through his icy disdain for the whole sordid procedure of a war that, in some absurd way, rested in his hands, crap defense or not.
He lost that stability of disgust the morning Draco Malfoy was reported to have been found cold in his bed, a bloody cavity where his heart had, by all reasonable assumption, once beaten on a regular basis.
*
"Those bastards," was all Ron had to say after the annoucement of Draco's death, and in his opinion it was damned gentlemanly of him. Not a single Slytherin would so much as sigh if he turned up butchered one morning, but he was bigger and better than that, or at least tried to be when he remembered. He couldn't give Hermione the cold shoulder forever and it wouldn't do at all to start talking to her again only to have her call him an insensitive ogre, or something.
Harry, for his part, was shaken. Malfoy's spineless taunting was ultimately negligible crap in the scheme of things, but it was a constant, like Dudley's obesity growing with every meal, Snape's emotional problems taken out on Potions essays, and Hagrid's harebrained plots to eventually feed the whole of Britain to some really sweet and harmless ourobori. But Dudley had steadily been losing weight since Aunt Petunia's death, Snape was turning out to be a much better Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, and Hagrid was Elsewhere.
Now Malfoy was dead, too, and though it hadn't for quite a while, Harry couldn't help but be struck by how nothing made any sense at all.
"It doesn't make sense, though," said Hermione, who was pale and had taken a break from defending house-elves who, by the looks of things, really didn't need it. "Why would they kill Draco? He's as pureblooded as they come."
Ron's voice was thin and sharp when he broke his Hermione-ward silence. "So was Ginny."
She gnawed on her lip as though trying to eat the words in her mouth before they escaped. "But, Ron, there's a pattern here, and I could fit Ginny into it. Draco is an aberration."
"Is that really what you're thinking about now?" asked Ron, his face flushing urgent red. "First the poor murdering elves and now how do the deaths fit in a graph? People are dying." And left.
Harry, though somewhat inclined to agree with Ron's implication that Hermione was, in fact, the insensitive ogre of the lot of them, stayed. For a war being headed by the so-called two greatest wizards of all time, it seemed pretty routine by now for sixteen-year-olds to take the lead in strategy and defense, and when evil ferrets weren't safe, clearly the time for action was past due. Also, camping out in the Great Hall was just annoying.
*
Left to their own devices in the wake of Ron's departure, Harry and Hermione wasted no time in proving his disgust well-warranted by creating a detailed chart of the slaughtered students, their bloodlines, and any other information that could be deemed relevant. For Ginny to have been killed meant that the masters of the elves were not simply fighting Muggleborn and half-blooded students, as any pureblood supremacist might, but actually taking the war straight to the Order itself. As the two of them collected parentage data of the victims, Hermione's grim silence spoke loudly of her understanding and, in a way, approval of the enemy's tacticts, and Harry, having lost both his innocence and his jadedness, wasn't arguing.
Ginny and Draco, it transpired, were not the only purebloods to have been killed. Also making that roster were Laetitia Prewett, first year, of Hufflepuff; Peredur Dearborn, third year, Ravenclaw; and Madeleine Jones, seventh, of Gryffindor. Order children all, but one mystery remained: Blaise Zabini, year six, Slytherin.
Nobody in Slytherin would talk to the person asking questions.
"Honestly, Harry, couldn't you be a little less glowery?" snapped Hermione after he returned from his fruitless quest. "This wouldn't be so difficult if you didn't alienate everybody." Oblivious as ever of her own hypocrisy, she'd given up on trying to appease Harry by not playing into his worst qualities, and as such, pinpointed the problem with her usual accuracy.
"No, I guess I can't," he retorted, glowering at her significantly. "Why don't you try, then? How could we not already know this, anyways?"
"I will, thanks," she replied with dignity. "Don't do anything rash while I'm gone."
With a war resting on his shoulders and innocent blood on his hands, Harry spent the next few minutes sulking. He wished that Ron would come back from snogging Padma, because at least he knew how to argue; besides, where did Hermione Granger get off giving lectures about not alienating one's peers?
Hermione sought out the one Slytherin with whom she'd always been able to conduct cordial relations, and even partnered with once in Potions after everybody started to die, wrecking the usual pairs. She found him engrossed in a hushed (by his part, anyway) conversation with one Vincent Crabbe and another, nearly indistinguishable, Gregory Goyle. He answered her question politely and waited until she was gone to resume speaking.
Strange, Hermione reflected, memorizing Blaise's Muggle mother's name as she made her way back to the Room of Requirement, where she and Harry had been meeting; she'd always thought Theodore Nott rather hated his fellow Slytherins.
And the answer:
Theodore Nott killed Draco. Narcissa, who is the head of the Malfoy family, has been waffling about her commitment to the Dark Lord due to concern over her son, so Bellatrix, who is trying to force a Black sister reunion, gets word to Nott Sr. to have Theodore kill Draco and make it look like a house-elf did it. Tonks, in the course of protecting her mum from Auntie Bella through various tricksy disguises, learns this and eventually takes the form of Trelawney, as per an earlier prediction of Harry's, to get into Hogwarts and warn him, but he is busy being attacked by the actual house-elf (quite possibly Winky) who killed Justin. After that's all worked out, Harry and Hermione get Dumbledore to alter the anti-Apparition wards so that house-elves can Apparate into a small area of Hogwarts, but not out of it, and they then proceed to force clothing onto all the murderous elves and free them, thereby depriving the DEs of their great weapon. This is the part that won't work because I'm pretty sure house-elves can't be freed by anybody BUT their master, but the elves can still be deprived of all their weapons and then are harmless like the useless demon in Buffy's "Fear Itself." And that's how Hermione Granger came to save wizardkind from the heinous threat of house-elfery, and thereafter only glared and muttered when people brought up her SPEW days.
Most of my best stories only ever reached "might have been." Oh, remember VM AU S2? Still my fav (no bus crash! no supervillainy that makes me die of hate forever and ever amen! canon Logan/Weevil!). And currently I'm working on a post-"Born to Run" SCC "movie" with
metalheart. It's a bizarre kind of life, this imaginary stories method. But maybe it's teaching me something anyway. Maybe someday I can pass the savings on... to you??
no subject
He lost that stability of disgust the morning Draco Malfoy was reported to have been found cold in his bed, a bloody cavity where his heart had, by all reasonable assumption, once beaten on a regular basis.
That is my favorite sentence! I love the thought of sinister house elves, and the dark humor of it.