(no subject)
I'll need some help.
First, a bit of background. Sorry for disappearing the way I did. I had written most the story before my kids were born and, while I knew they would take up a lot of my time, I had no idea just how much.
In addition to them not sleeping much, I had mentioned that both of them were in early intervention. At about 6 months, I started wondering if my one son was autistic. Everyone told me I was crazy, but I'm trained in behavior observation, and as time went on, his delays became more and more apparent. We started speech therapy as soon as he qualified because he had zero receptive language, and then he got a referral to a developmental pediatrician.
If you know anything about that process, it can take months, sometimes even a whole year. Since I'm stubborn, I called them every single day to see if there was a cancellation and he was diagnosed with autism at 17 months, and started therapy at 18 months.
My son was severely delayed. He couldn't understand any forms of communication, even pointing. I wanted to do everything I could, so I spent my time researching everything I could about autism and finding the best therapies. I trained myself on several therapies, and we enrolled in a few studies as well.
The early work paid off and my son is thriving. He doesn't even need an IEP anymore. When I look at how delayed he was when younger, sometimes I can't even believe it, even though I was there every step of the way.
But all that work put fandom on the backburner.
And it turns out, I'm autistic too. Harry Potter was my special interest. My son has scientific special interests, which benefits him, and he's a regular little professor. I wish my special interests were educational, but no, I become obsessed with tv shows/movies/etc.
When Harry Potter dropped as my special interest, I stopped thinking about it. I used to be obsessed with these characters and now they feel like strangers to me. Luckily, I had written most of the fic, otherwise, I don't think I would be able to finish it.
However, there's still a lot that I can't recover because my special interest moved on over a decade ago. A lot of it is little things, like Brit Picking. But there's also some big character things too.
I never wrote down my ending for RoS. I searched through all my google docs and, if I wrote it down, it's not there. I remember there was a twist, because I love them, but I don't remember what it was. I came up with a new ending, and maybe it was the ending I was originally working towards, but I'm pretty sure it's a new one. I can't remember the original, and that annoys me because that one would've been more true to the characters.
I read through the fic and it was like reading something that a stranger wrote. There were parts I found confusing and, based on the comments, I think you might've found them confusing too.
For example, Harry turning into Ben. Was Ben a Muggle or a coworker? In the chapter when Hermione recognizes that "Harry" is not Harry, I thought that meant Hermione knew it was Snape (as did many of you), but then it turned out that she just knew "Harry" wasn't Harry. But then wouldn't she know that???
I edited that chapter to make it clear that Hermione recognized that another person was playing Harry, but I'm still confused on Ben.
Is he a Muggle or a coworker? I don't remember. I think it was supposed to be a random muggle that they pay money to cut his hair, and then they made up a fake coworker for Harry to help him do his work in private and Harry takes advantage of that when he attends the parties. And then random people take turns either being Ben or Harry?
But that's a terrible idea. People could run into Ben on the street. So I need to do some rewriting to fix that part. I haven't yet decided how I'm going to fix it. Maybe they invented a form of polyjuice that allows you to turn into two people that are blended together??
When I read through it, it seems to me that Nik knows that Ben is Harry's disguise and that's not something that he should know, which implies to me that someone in the Auror department is working with the Knights, but that's not very twist worthy, especially with the Ben disguise so sloppy (although I don't think it was supposed to be??). Or maybe we're only supposed to think someone in the ministry sold Harry out?
Anyway, I'm hoping that one of you would be so kind as to be my beta for these last two chapters (which I may have to extend, but with my current ending, I can do it in two). There are a few other things which are sticking for me and I don't know if it was bad writing, bad communication, or plot threads that would be tied up later.
Chapter 17 has some phrases italics where Harry is remembering things Snape said and I genuinely have no idea if they are in Invictus/NoG or they were things I meant into the sex scene yesterday, but never did. I'm reading through Invictus to try to better capture Snape's mind because I honestly can't remember how dark he was at this point. I have an idea where current me wants him to be, but I want to be true to him as much as possible. I haven't been in his head in over a decade.
Sorry this is not the story as it was meant to be. I'm going to do it the best I can.
I'd love some help making sure that the story is tighter and that things written in these later chapters don't contradict things that are written earlier. I'm re-reading through Invictus as I upload it to ao3, but my memory isn't what it was since this is no longer my special interest.
Thank you all for your patience and understanding!!