Fic: Leda's Daughters (PG)
Fic: Leda’s Daughters
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Ginny Weasley, Cho Chang, Susan Bones, Angelina Johnson, Alicia Spinnet, Katie Bell, Minerva McGonagall
Rating: PG-13
Words: 1804
Warnings: Only what you’d expect from the Battle of Hogwarts - spoilers included.
Notes: Beta-ed by alas_a_llama. McGonagall’s Quidditch-playing past is taken from Pottermore info.
Summary: In the midst of battle, the women of Hogwarts dream of flying.
They have all flown.
The Quidditch pitch is burning. Ginny sees it from the windows of Hogwarts’ seventh floor, and for a moment she is struck with wrongness like a lightning-bolt. She knows she should not be so unaccustomed to her school being suddenly so filled with the potential for death - even now, she still dreams of monsters in secret dark spaces - and yet. And yet. The Quidditch pitch of Hogwarts is where she found for the first time that she belonged to herself, that she could fly solo and not be found wanting. There, fifty feet above the ground, she is no longer Ron Weasley’s or Percy Weasley’s or Bill Weasley’s little sister, not Molly and Arthur Weasley’s baby daughter. Now she knows: she is no little girl.
And now it is burning and the little war she has been fighting all year has suddenly gone supernova, but she is not afraid. If she lies bleeding and motionless on a stone floor tonight, she will be no victim: she will bring her enemies down with her as she goes. She has already faced the violence of Tom Riddle once, and this time she will do it with a wand in her hand: like a soldier, not a child. Tonight everything will be finished, one way or another, and then there will be flying. She will be free again, one or way or another.
Ginny holds together through the first half of the battle on a potent mixture of adrenaline and anger - even when Tonks falls dead in front of her, even when Bellatrix disappears before Ginny’s sheer, soaring fury can avenge her friend. She holds it together right up until the battle lulls, in fact, until she sees her brother’s body lying far too still, under stars on Hogwarts’ stony floors. (She has never seen Fred be truly still before, and the sight is as wrong as that of a children’s Quidditch pitch in flames.) She has heard people say, on the death of a loved one, that they could not believe such a thing had happened, but she believes this death all too well. Ron clings to her in grief, but she barely feels him: the only thing she can see is the body of her brother on the floor, filling up her vision as it took both twins to do in life.
Is this the price? she wonders. Is this the price of being a woman, not a child? Is feeling like this the price of not lying insensible in the Chamber of Secrets? Her thoughts scramble themselves in front of her and she no longer thinks of flying, only of falling.
~*~
The Quidditch pitch is burning. Cho sees it from the top of the Astronomy Tower, sees the very moment that flames lick up the stands like a vicious puppy, and she clutches Susan Bones in shock even though she barely knows her.
“I know,” Susan says, hushed and startled. “I know.”
She knows it, but she can’t - she can’t possibly - know it as Cho does. Cho loves (loved? Is it over? She left Hogwarts a full year ago: her childhood is over, but can it all be finished so easily?) that Quidditch pitch as she loved her own home in Montrose, knew it so that her dreams of flight are perfect in every detail and are comforting, even this year which has been hectic with fear and with blood. After tonight - and in her mind she tramples firmly on the idea that there might not be an after, although logic dictates that there is a high possibility of it - there will be no more comforting dreams of flying. Not on this Quidditch pitch.
In the weeks after Cedric died Cho flew almost constantly, often not even setting foot on the ground to eat. On the ground you could be hurt, she realised when she tried to analyse what she was doing. In the air nothing could touch her, nothing at all. The next year in Hogwarts had felt like a prison, herself in tears and hating herself for it (in the air, tears fly away as if they’d never happened) and Cedric nowhere at all. It was for Cedric that she had joined Dumbledore’s Army, and ever since the little gold coin has been kept in her pocket as a sparkling little note of defiance. When the Weasley twins’ summons home had come, she hadn’t even needed to think about it.
Thinking of Cedric, she looks at the Hufflepuff beside her. Susan’s jaw is set, her shoulders squared and her grey eyes are dangerous with determination. They have both had people they loved murdered by - by Voldemort, Cho remembers, and somehow just thinking the bastard’s real name and thinking that he is a bastard is enough. At any rate, she thinks, it is something. She will not be startled into death, not tonight; she will fight for her murdered boy and her family and her friends.
“When this is over, we’re going flying,” she says firmly, and Susan looks at her and says “Yes.”
~*~
The Quidditch pitch is burning. The three of them smell it before they see it, tasting the ash in their mouths and knowing that it signals the fall of their favourite old haunt. None of them have seen each other in over a year, but now that they are reunited they have not bothered to exchange the customary cheery informalities of old schoolfriends come back together. It doesn’t matter, after all. What they have been doing doesn’t matter, only that they have called Hogwarts and its Quidditch pitch home for seven years, and have called each other family.
They are at one of Hogwarts’ innumerable little side-doors, waiting to be led into the grounds. Angelina hears the roar of a giant, somewhere far off, and something she remembers old Grubbly-Plank telling her class once flicks into her mind as if Summoned there.
“Did you girls happen to bring your brooms?” she asks thoughtfully, and Alicia looks puzzled but Katie looks faintly shifty.
“In here,” says the latter, improbably producing a Nimbus 2000 from a moke-skin travelling bag that must have cost her a good month’s wages. “I don’t know why,” she admits confusedly. “It just seemed ... comforting to have it, somehow.”
“I did the same,” says Angelina, patting the rucksack she carries over one shoulder. “Well, ‘Licia? What about you?”
“I should be able to Summon it from Hogsmeade from here,” Alicia answers, though she still looks somewhat bemused. “But why, Ange?”
Katie, too, is looking at her expectantly. Angelina fiddles with the beads decorating the ends of her long braids, taking a moment to collect her thoughts. On a Quidditch pitch she needs nothing but instinct, but here she cannot risk a loss. She thinks of the Muggleborn uncle she never knew, killed in the last war, and of her mother’s sadness on his birthday and of her own terror as a known halfblood at You-Know-Who’s return.
“Professor Grubbly-Plank always reckoned that the best way to subdue a giant was from the air.” She pauses, letting the idea hang in the air like a Snitch. “How’s about it, ladies?”
The other two are silent. Alicia, she knows, has lost her Muggleborn father to the Snatchers, but Katie’s only experience of this war has been torture and near-murder in an attempt on Dumbledore’s life. Angelina has known this war’s violence only in the abstract, and cannot imagine what seeing it close up can do.
“We won the House Cup on that bloody Quidditch pitch,” Katie finally growls. “I say we scorch ‘em.”
Unexpectedly, Alicia laughs, sounding reckless. “I’ve had enough of reading the Prophet and doing nothing. I’m in.”
Angelina turns her face into the breeze, feeling it pull gently at her hair and letting the sensation of tense excitement which she has always associated with the moments before a Quidditch match build inside her. Katie’s words have made her think again of the Quidditch cup final; winning this one match is all that matters, she realises. Lose, and nothing else they’ve ever done will matter. It sounds like a challenge, and she loves challenges.
“Well, girls,” she says, and surprises herself by smiling. Whatever happens tonight, it will be of their own doing. Whatever happens tonight, they will have flown together again. “Isn’t it a beautiful night for flying?”
~*~
The Quidditch pitch is burning. Minerva does not need to see it to know; she is headmistress now, and the school tells her. That sounds like the sort of thing Sybill would say, and she would disapprove tremendously of such woolly thinking if she didn’t know quite clearly that it was true.
She has seen a Quidditch pitch burn before, when Death Eaters attacked the World Cup Final with Fiendfyre in their wake. It sickened her then and it sickens her now; she is almost nauseous with sheer fury that they should dare to attack her school. That they should dare...
She has flown over that Quidditch pitch so many times in her youth, flying high and dangerous and surprising those who saw only a serious pale face and hair in strict regulation plaits, who saw only a gleaming Prefect badge and forgot the pin behind it. Even after her fall, when they lost the Cup and she couldn’t bear to return (she knew how stupid it was, how childish, but Merlin help her she couldn’t) it was still there, waiting for her if she needed it. Even in her life between school and teaching, Hogwarts was waiting for her to come home, and now it crumbles around her and the Quidditch pitch lies aflame.
It would be a good night for flying, she thinks. She is perhaps too old and certainly too dignified, but nevertheless. It could have been a beautiful night.
She stands at the lectern at the head of her school and surveys the battle, bringing down retribution everywhere she can. She has lost too many of her children to a psychopathic manchild, and she refuses to lose any more. Hogwarts has been her home for sixty years, her solace and her rock. She has fought three wars for this school, and she is damned if she’ll be fighting another. One way or another, this will end tonight.
All these children, she thinks. All her children, her pupils old and young. Tonight there will be an end to all the wrong things that they have seen. After tonight, she swears, there will be an open sky and a school to teach new children to fly five hundred feet above the ground, to test themselves and know if they find themselves wanting.
Tonight there will be an end, and a beginning.
They have all flown. They will all fly again.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Ginny Weasley, Cho Chang, Susan Bones, Angelina Johnson, Alicia Spinnet, Katie Bell, Minerva McGonagall
Rating: PG-13
Words: 1804
Warnings: Only what you’d expect from the Battle of Hogwarts - spoilers included.
Notes: Beta-ed by alas_a_llama. McGonagall’s Quidditch-playing past is taken from Pottermore info.
Summary: In the midst of battle, the women of Hogwarts dream of flying.
They have all flown.
The Quidditch pitch is burning. Ginny sees it from the windows of Hogwarts’ seventh floor, and for a moment she is struck with wrongness like a lightning-bolt. She knows she should not be so unaccustomed to her school being suddenly so filled with the potential for death - even now, she still dreams of monsters in secret dark spaces - and yet. And yet. The Quidditch pitch of Hogwarts is where she found for the first time that she belonged to herself, that she could fly solo and not be found wanting. There, fifty feet above the ground, she is no longer Ron Weasley’s or Percy Weasley’s or Bill Weasley’s little sister, not Molly and Arthur Weasley’s baby daughter. Now she knows: she is no little girl.
And now it is burning and the little war she has been fighting all year has suddenly gone supernova, but she is not afraid. If she lies bleeding and motionless on a stone floor tonight, she will be no victim: she will bring her enemies down with her as she goes. She has already faced the violence of Tom Riddle once, and this time she will do it with a wand in her hand: like a soldier, not a child. Tonight everything will be finished, one way or another, and then there will be flying. She will be free again, one or way or another.
Ginny holds together through the first half of the battle on a potent mixture of adrenaline and anger - even when Tonks falls dead in front of her, even when Bellatrix disappears before Ginny’s sheer, soaring fury can avenge her friend. She holds it together right up until the battle lulls, in fact, until she sees her brother’s body lying far too still, under stars on Hogwarts’ stony floors. (She has never seen Fred be truly still before, and the sight is as wrong as that of a children’s Quidditch pitch in flames.) She has heard people say, on the death of a loved one, that they could not believe such a thing had happened, but she believes this death all too well. Ron clings to her in grief, but she barely feels him: the only thing she can see is the body of her brother on the floor, filling up her vision as it took both twins to do in life.
Is this the price? she wonders. Is this the price of being a woman, not a child? Is feeling like this the price of not lying insensible in the Chamber of Secrets? Her thoughts scramble themselves in front of her and she no longer thinks of flying, only of falling.
~*~
The Quidditch pitch is burning. Cho sees it from the top of the Astronomy Tower, sees the very moment that flames lick up the stands like a vicious puppy, and she clutches Susan Bones in shock even though she barely knows her.
“I know,” Susan says, hushed and startled. “I know.”
She knows it, but she can’t - she can’t possibly - know it as Cho does. Cho loves (loved? Is it over? She left Hogwarts a full year ago: her childhood is over, but can it all be finished so easily?) that Quidditch pitch as she loved her own home in Montrose, knew it so that her dreams of flight are perfect in every detail and are comforting, even this year which has been hectic with fear and with blood. After tonight - and in her mind she tramples firmly on the idea that there might not be an after, although logic dictates that there is a high possibility of it - there will be no more comforting dreams of flying. Not on this Quidditch pitch.
In the weeks after Cedric died Cho flew almost constantly, often not even setting foot on the ground to eat. On the ground you could be hurt, she realised when she tried to analyse what she was doing. In the air nothing could touch her, nothing at all. The next year in Hogwarts had felt like a prison, herself in tears and hating herself for it (in the air, tears fly away as if they’d never happened) and Cedric nowhere at all. It was for Cedric that she had joined Dumbledore’s Army, and ever since the little gold coin has been kept in her pocket as a sparkling little note of defiance. When the Weasley twins’ summons home had come, she hadn’t even needed to think about it.
Thinking of Cedric, she looks at the Hufflepuff beside her. Susan’s jaw is set, her shoulders squared and her grey eyes are dangerous with determination. They have both had people they loved murdered by - by Voldemort, Cho remembers, and somehow just thinking the bastard’s real name and thinking that he is a bastard is enough. At any rate, she thinks, it is something. She will not be startled into death, not tonight; she will fight for her murdered boy and her family and her friends.
“When this is over, we’re going flying,” she says firmly, and Susan looks at her and says “Yes.”
~*~
The Quidditch pitch is burning. The three of them smell it before they see it, tasting the ash in their mouths and knowing that it signals the fall of their favourite old haunt. None of them have seen each other in over a year, but now that they are reunited they have not bothered to exchange the customary cheery informalities of old schoolfriends come back together. It doesn’t matter, after all. What they have been doing doesn’t matter, only that they have called Hogwarts and its Quidditch pitch home for seven years, and have called each other family.
They are at one of Hogwarts’ innumerable little side-doors, waiting to be led into the grounds. Angelina hears the roar of a giant, somewhere far off, and something she remembers old Grubbly-Plank telling her class once flicks into her mind as if Summoned there.
“Did you girls happen to bring your brooms?” she asks thoughtfully, and Alicia looks puzzled but Katie looks faintly shifty.
“In here,” says the latter, improbably producing a Nimbus 2000 from a moke-skin travelling bag that must have cost her a good month’s wages. “I don’t know why,” she admits confusedly. “It just seemed ... comforting to have it, somehow.”
“I did the same,” says Angelina, patting the rucksack she carries over one shoulder. “Well, ‘Licia? What about you?”
“I should be able to Summon it from Hogsmeade from here,” Alicia answers, though she still looks somewhat bemused. “But why, Ange?”
Katie, too, is looking at her expectantly. Angelina fiddles with the beads decorating the ends of her long braids, taking a moment to collect her thoughts. On a Quidditch pitch she needs nothing but instinct, but here she cannot risk a loss. She thinks of the Muggleborn uncle she never knew, killed in the last war, and of her mother’s sadness on his birthday and of her own terror as a known halfblood at You-Know-Who’s return.
“Professor Grubbly-Plank always reckoned that the best way to subdue a giant was from the air.” She pauses, letting the idea hang in the air like a Snitch. “How’s about it, ladies?”
The other two are silent. Alicia, she knows, has lost her Muggleborn father to the Snatchers, but Katie’s only experience of this war has been torture and near-murder in an attempt on Dumbledore’s life. Angelina has known this war’s violence only in the abstract, and cannot imagine what seeing it close up can do.
“We won the House Cup on that bloody Quidditch pitch,” Katie finally growls. “I say we scorch ‘em.”
Unexpectedly, Alicia laughs, sounding reckless. “I’ve had enough of reading the Prophet and doing nothing. I’m in.”
Angelina turns her face into the breeze, feeling it pull gently at her hair and letting the sensation of tense excitement which she has always associated with the moments before a Quidditch match build inside her. Katie’s words have made her think again of the Quidditch cup final; winning this one match is all that matters, she realises. Lose, and nothing else they’ve ever done will matter. It sounds like a challenge, and she loves challenges.
“Well, girls,” she says, and surprises herself by smiling. Whatever happens tonight, it will be of their own doing. Whatever happens tonight, they will have flown together again. “Isn’t it a beautiful night for flying?”
~*~
The Quidditch pitch is burning. Minerva does not need to see it to know; she is headmistress now, and the school tells her. That sounds like the sort of thing Sybill would say, and she would disapprove tremendously of such woolly thinking if she didn’t know quite clearly that it was true.
She has seen a Quidditch pitch burn before, when Death Eaters attacked the World Cup Final with Fiendfyre in their wake. It sickened her then and it sickens her now; she is almost nauseous with sheer fury that they should dare to attack her school. That they should dare...
She has flown over that Quidditch pitch so many times in her youth, flying high and dangerous and surprising those who saw only a serious pale face and hair in strict regulation plaits, who saw only a gleaming Prefect badge and forgot the pin behind it. Even after her fall, when they lost the Cup and she couldn’t bear to return (she knew how stupid it was, how childish, but Merlin help her she couldn’t) it was still there, waiting for her if she needed it. Even in her life between school and teaching, Hogwarts was waiting for her to come home, and now it crumbles around her and the Quidditch pitch lies aflame.
It would be a good night for flying, she thinks. She is perhaps too old and certainly too dignified, but nevertheless. It could have been a beautiful night.
She stands at the lectern at the head of her school and surveys the battle, bringing down retribution everywhere she can. She has lost too many of her children to a psychopathic manchild, and she refuses to lose any more. Hogwarts has been her home for sixty years, her solace and her rock. She has fought three wars for this school, and she is damned if she’ll be fighting another. One way or another, this will end tonight.
All these children, she thinks. All her children, her pupils old and young. Tonight there will be an end to all the wrong things that they have seen. After tonight, she swears, there will be an open sky and a school to teach new children to fly five hundred feet above the ground, to test themselves and know if they find themselves wanting.
Tonight there will be an end, and a beginning.
They have all flown. They will all fly again.