Chapter 11: Down at the Quidditch Pitch
I didn't really mean to not do this for a month. New television season, need to do more multi-tasking, yada yada. Enough excuses. Let's get back to it...
Chapter 11: Down at the Quidditch Pitch
1. He finally banged into the doorknob, but when he tried to turn it, his hand couldn't get a grip. He pulled out his wand, crying "Alohomora!" with a hoarse, shaking voice. The door opened a crack, but it was enough.
This becomes important later.
2. He looked around, feeling a little less disoriented, and realized that they had entered the Quidditch changing rooms. They were in the anteroom now, which led to separate spaces for male and female players to change and shower, and further down the corridor, separate common areas for two teams to have pre-game discussions or strategizing sessions.
JKR never really described the Quidditch changing rooms, so I took some liberty in sorting out what the facilities would be like.
3. They were stuck, he realized. We should have gone the other way; if we’d reached Hagrid's old cabin, we could have gone up to the castle using the school Floo network.
I'd originally thought they would in fact be stuck in Hagrid's old cabin, but then I realized that a certain ghost wouldn't be haunting it, and also that the Floo network would mean they wouldn't really be stuck there.
4. In a fit of frustration, he said, "Incendio!"
"No, Harry! Don't set them on fire! We need them!" It was the most energetic Harry had seen her since they'd been out of the lake. They both stared at the towels that should have gone up in flames; a small wisp of smoke emanated from the pile before floating whitely up to the ceiling and evaporating. Harry stared at his wand.
"I--I guess I have no focus right now. Nothing's working."
I feel like JKR talked a lot about emotions affecting magic, but didn't show it a lot. (We heard about Merope, for instance, and how people in Azkaban were affected by the dementors.) So I wanted to show both the high emotion effect (Harry opening the door without his wand when he discovered Lily and Sirius) and the flip side.
5. I can do this, he thought. I can just hold her and we’ll keep each other warm and wait out the storm and that’s all that will happen.
Suuuure, Harry. Suuuure...
6. "Anyway," she said, trying to sound light, "it's like you said. First time. I've always heard the first time is supposed to be a sort of, um, practice run."
It's also not the most auspicious of circumstances to try to make the earth move. ;)
7. The windows seemed secure, but the draft could have come from the direction of the door. Harry turned to see whether Ginny had opened it, but instead he saw that a ghost had entered the room through the door. Harry's jaw dropped and he staggered backward, falling onto the couch with the Gryffindor banner still draped over it.
"Harry? What are you doing?"
A number of people guessed what was going on "down at the Quidditch pitch"--namely that James was haunting it. But a lot of other people put forth some really wild theories about it. My readers kept me amused!
8. "Her sacrifice put a kind of protective charm on me. Dumbledore called it the oldest, deepest magic. That's why the curse rebounded off me and hit him. If he hadn't done whatever strange things he did to make himself nearly immortal, it would have killed him."
And now we know it was the Horcruxes, but after GoF we didn't yet know that.
9. "So she had kind of broken up with him by treating him horribly, but not really, so he did it the rest of the way?"
This is revisited in The Lost Generation.
10. "If I told you it was heaven, I'm not sure you'd believe me. I'm not sure myself what it should be called, but since your mother was with me, I'm willing to call it heaven. If she were with me in hell, I'd probably call that heaven, too. When I was alive, I once heard hell defined as being thoroughly and irretrievably separated from God. Well, I was never very religious, which is why I was somewhat surprised by the afterlife... But I can legitimately say that being separated from your mother has been my hell."
I tried very hard for this not to sound like what Buffy told Spike about thinking that she was in heaven after she'd died.
11. "After you were pulled into the lake--I've decided it's too dangerous for us to be together. Dangerous for you. We can't be a couple; I won't have you targeted. It's over, Ginny. If you're to be safe--"
Unintentional foreshadowing for HBP? Not that others probably didn't have this idea in fics. I'm sure it appeared in many places well before the sixth book.
12. "She's getting me some potion," Ginny said, not looking at him.
I never said what kind of potion, but Harry took this to mean Prophylaxis Potion. I think a lot of people didn't get that that was how Harry interpreted this.
13. He froze; his mother had appeared in the doorway of his stepfather's bedroom, wearing his dressing gown, and, judging by the way she held it closed at the throat, nothing else but the dressing gown.
Poor Harry is so confused by the idea that his mother could be cheating on Sirius with her husband!
14. "Dad! Mr. Malfoy told you to do something too, didn't he? He told you to kill Charlie, didn't he?"
Voldemort likes to keep the killing of family members to one neat clique. ;)
15. "When we got out the storm was so bad I had to carry her. We tried to head for the castle, but when we banged into the Quidditch changing rooms, we took shelter in there. This morning, I summoned brooms for us and we came back to the castle."
Harry edited out quite a bit of their activities, naturally...
16. His parents were silent; his mother drained her tea mug and stood, pacing. "Whatever is necessary...whatever is necessary..." she mumbled, wringing her hands while she walked back and forth.
A lot of readers recognized this as Lily still being under Imperius, which was well-spotted.
17. "If they disappear, can't we just contact Mr. Malfoy and claim to have killed them? Say that we covered our tracks really well, no one will ever find the bodies?"
His father was grim. "I'll consider all our options. If we say that--that we killed them--and they turn up perfectly healthy and alive--"
Which is what happens, of course.
18. "Dumbledore! But--but I heard you left the school years ago!"
Dumbledore nodded in a bored fashion, helping himself to a scone and some clotted cream. "Yes, yes. That was the impression we wished to give. But I have been here all along." He narrowed his eyes, looking at Draco more directly. "I have quite a file on you, Mr. Malfoy."
Ha! Does he ever. :D
19. "My daughter? Harry, you've let him near Jamie?"
"Stepdaughter!" Draco exclaimed defensively, shrinking into his chair and appearing far more afraid now of Harry's stepfather than he was of Voldemort during the initiation.
"Whatever!" Severus Snape bellowed, looking like he was going to hex Draco into the middle of next week.
Severus Snape really does think of Jamie as his daughter. This is part of why Harry likes him as a stepfather.
20. "We're to go into hiding? Just like that? Because of the General Strike?" He turned to face Harry angrily. "This is all your fault! It was your idea to have me head up the strike! And now look where it's got me; with a price on my head!"
The plan DID rather backfire...
21. "Yes," Dumbledore assured him. "Slytherins. Spies. In these troubled times, Ron, we need to stop basing our expectations of people on archaic criteria such as their Hogwarts house."
Or so I thought, when JKR revealed that Snape was a spy in GoF. A pity we didn't see more of this in the canon books.
22. To Stuart Snape's father and brother--
If you want to see him alive again, you know what you must do.
Brief and to the point. More effective than threatening the people who are to do certain things--threatening their loved ones.
23. "Potter!" he shouted in Harry's face. "Did you shag my sister?"
Harry looked at him helplessly and moved his jaw, but nothing came out. There was no graceful way around this. Ginny pushed between them and shoved Ron backward, as though she’d done this many times in her life (and maybe she had). She stood in front of Harry, reaching behind her to pull his hands forward and wrap them around her waist. She held them there, so that Harry had to stand against her back and look at the others over her shoulder, his Ginny-shield.
"I'll have you know," she said proudly, her chin lifted into the air, "that I seduced him."
Not exactly the best time to reveal this information...
24. "You can't ask me to not tell my mother that Ron and Ginny are all right--you just can't!" Charlie looked the most distraught Harry had ever seen him.
Molly would certainly not be happy that Dumbledore was proposing to keep her in the dark this way.
25. He broke the kiss and pulled her to him even more closely, pressing his face into her hair, trying not to cry. He pulled back and looked at her, his hands framing her face. "I love you, Ginny. I love you so much..."
She nodded. "I love you, too," she whispered hoarsely; she sounded as if her throat were too constricted to function. She started crying first; he tasted the saltiness as he lavished kisses on her forehead, her cheeks, the orbits beneath her brows, her chin, her nose... Finally, he realized that he had to make her go, before he started to weep as well. We'll be together again, he told himself. We will.
But only in another life...
I took it easy on my readers this time and didn't end the chapter, for once, with a cliffhanger, though I do think that Ron and Ginny having to go into hiding isn't exactly an ending that's all sweetness and light.
In other HP news, JKR certainly had fun today with her riddle! My thought: Now that I know what it says, I think that it's either one of two things or it's both. The two possible things are: 1) Some narration from the Fabulous Beasts script, and 2) The opening line of a book about Newt Scamander that is basically a novelization of the script (though I wouldn't be surprised if she'd written the prose first and turned it into a script afterward, though she might have found the reverse process a refreshing change).
Because honestly, how could she not produce a book version of her script? Even the most ridiculous of action films has a book tie-in ghosted by a writer toiling away in obscurity somewhere, and when you've got JK Rowling writing the script because she wants creative control of the story, you KNOW she's also going to do the novel version herself. So even though people are clamoring periodically (okay, I know some people who never let up) for a continuation of Harry's life story or a next-gen series, I'd be quite happy with a trilogy of books to go with the trilogy of Fabulous Beast movies.
(Okay, a television series about Lily, Snape and the Marauders in school is something I also wouldn't say no to. Because--DUH. But in the meantime I'll take the FB stuff.)
Chapter 11: Down at the Quidditch Pitch
1. He finally banged into the doorknob, but when he tried to turn it, his hand couldn't get a grip. He pulled out his wand, crying "Alohomora!" with a hoarse, shaking voice. The door opened a crack, but it was enough.
This becomes important later.
2. He looked around, feeling a little less disoriented, and realized that they had entered the Quidditch changing rooms. They were in the anteroom now, which led to separate spaces for male and female players to change and shower, and further down the corridor, separate common areas for two teams to have pre-game discussions or strategizing sessions.
JKR never really described the Quidditch changing rooms, so I took some liberty in sorting out what the facilities would be like.
3. They were stuck, he realized. We should have gone the other way; if we’d reached Hagrid's old cabin, we could have gone up to the castle using the school Floo network.
I'd originally thought they would in fact be stuck in Hagrid's old cabin, but then I realized that a certain ghost wouldn't be haunting it, and also that the Floo network would mean they wouldn't really be stuck there.
4. In a fit of frustration, he said, "Incendio!"
"No, Harry! Don't set them on fire! We need them!" It was the most energetic Harry had seen her since they'd been out of the lake. They both stared at the towels that should have gone up in flames; a small wisp of smoke emanated from the pile before floating whitely up to the ceiling and evaporating. Harry stared at his wand.
"I--I guess I have no focus right now. Nothing's working."
I feel like JKR talked a lot about emotions affecting magic, but didn't show it a lot. (We heard about Merope, for instance, and how people in Azkaban were affected by the dementors.) So I wanted to show both the high emotion effect (Harry opening the door without his wand when he discovered Lily and Sirius) and the flip side.
5. I can do this, he thought. I can just hold her and we’ll keep each other warm and wait out the storm and that’s all that will happen.
Suuuure, Harry. Suuuure...
6. "Anyway," she said, trying to sound light, "it's like you said. First time. I've always heard the first time is supposed to be a sort of, um, practice run."
It's also not the most auspicious of circumstances to try to make the earth move. ;)
7. The windows seemed secure, but the draft could have come from the direction of the door. Harry turned to see whether Ginny had opened it, but instead he saw that a ghost had entered the room through the door. Harry's jaw dropped and he staggered backward, falling onto the couch with the Gryffindor banner still draped over it.
"Harry? What are you doing?"
A number of people guessed what was going on "down at the Quidditch pitch"--namely that James was haunting it. But a lot of other people put forth some really wild theories about it. My readers kept me amused!
8. "Her sacrifice put a kind of protective charm on me. Dumbledore called it the oldest, deepest magic. That's why the curse rebounded off me and hit him. If he hadn't done whatever strange things he did to make himself nearly immortal, it would have killed him."
And now we know it was the Horcruxes, but after GoF we didn't yet know that.
9. "So she had kind of broken up with him by treating him horribly, but not really, so he did it the rest of the way?"
This is revisited in The Lost Generation.
10. "If I told you it was heaven, I'm not sure you'd believe me. I'm not sure myself what it should be called, but since your mother was with me, I'm willing to call it heaven. If she were with me in hell, I'd probably call that heaven, too. When I was alive, I once heard hell defined as being thoroughly and irretrievably separated from God. Well, I was never very religious, which is why I was somewhat surprised by the afterlife... But I can legitimately say that being separated from your mother has been my hell."
I tried very hard for this not to sound like what Buffy told Spike about thinking that she was in heaven after she'd died.
11. "After you were pulled into the lake--I've decided it's too dangerous for us to be together. Dangerous for you. We can't be a couple; I won't have you targeted. It's over, Ginny. If you're to be safe--"
Unintentional foreshadowing for HBP? Not that others probably didn't have this idea in fics. I'm sure it appeared in many places well before the sixth book.
12. "She's getting me some potion," Ginny said, not looking at him.
I never said what kind of potion, but Harry took this to mean Prophylaxis Potion. I think a lot of people didn't get that that was how Harry interpreted this.
13. He froze; his mother had appeared in the doorway of his stepfather's bedroom, wearing his dressing gown, and, judging by the way she held it closed at the throat, nothing else but the dressing gown.
Poor Harry is so confused by the idea that his mother could be cheating on Sirius with her husband!
14. "Dad! Mr. Malfoy told you to do something too, didn't he? He told you to kill Charlie, didn't he?"
Voldemort likes to keep the killing of family members to one neat clique. ;)
15. "When we got out the storm was so bad I had to carry her. We tried to head for the castle, but when we banged into the Quidditch changing rooms, we took shelter in there. This morning, I summoned brooms for us and we came back to the castle."
Harry edited out quite a bit of their activities, naturally...
16. His parents were silent; his mother drained her tea mug and stood, pacing. "Whatever is necessary...whatever is necessary..." she mumbled, wringing her hands while she walked back and forth.
A lot of readers recognized this as Lily still being under Imperius, which was well-spotted.
17. "If they disappear, can't we just contact Mr. Malfoy and claim to have killed them? Say that we covered our tracks really well, no one will ever find the bodies?"
His father was grim. "I'll consider all our options. If we say that--that we killed them--and they turn up perfectly healthy and alive--"
Which is what happens, of course.
18. "Dumbledore! But--but I heard you left the school years ago!"
Dumbledore nodded in a bored fashion, helping himself to a scone and some clotted cream. "Yes, yes. That was the impression we wished to give. But I have been here all along." He narrowed his eyes, looking at Draco more directly. "I have quite a file on you, Mr. Malfoy."
Ha! Does he ever. :D
19. "My daughter? Harry, you've let him near Jamie?"
"Stepdaughter!" Draco exclaimed defensively, shrinking into his chair and appearing far more afraid now of Harry's stepfather than he was of Voldemort during the initiation.
"Whatever!" Severus Snape bellowed, looking like he was going to hex Draco into the middle of next week.
Severus Snape really does think of Jamie as his daughter. This is part of why Harry likes him as a stepfather.
20. "We're to go into hiding? Just like that? Because of the General Strike?" He turned to face Harry angrily. "This is all your fault! It was your idea to have me head up the strike! And now look where it's got me; with a price on my head!"
The plan DID rather backfire...
21. "Yes," Dumbledore assured him. "Slytherins. Spies. In these troubled times, Ron, we need to stop basing our expectations of people on archaic criteria such as their Hogwarts house."
Or so I thought, when JKR revealed that Snape was a spy in GoF. A pity we didn't see more of this in the canon books.
22. To Stuart Snape's father and brother--
If you want to see him alive again, you know what you must do.
Brief and to the point. More effective than threatening the people who are to do certain things--threatening their loved ones.
23. "Potter!" he shouted in Harry's face. "Did you shag my sister?"
Harry looked at him helplessly and moved his jaw, but nothing came out. There was no graceful way around this. Ginny pushed between them and shoved Ron backward, as though she’d done this many times in her life (and maybe she had). She stood in front of Harry, reaching behind her to pull his hands forward and wrap them around her waist. She held them there, so that Harry had to stand against her back and look at the others over her shoulder, his Ginny-shield.
"I'll have you know," she said proudly, her chin lifted into the air, "that I seduced him."
Not exactly the best time to reveal this information...
24. "You can't ask me to not tell my mother that Ron and Ginny are all right--you just can't!" Charlie looked the most distraught Harry had ever seen him.
Molly would certainly not be happy that Dumbledore was proposing to keep her in the dark this way.
25. He broke the kiss and pulled her to him even more closely, pressing his face into her hair, trying not to cry. He pulled back and looked at her, his hands framing her face. "I love you, Ginny. I love you so much..."
She nodded. "I love you, too," she whispered hoarsely; she sounded as if her throat were too constricted to function. She started crying first; he tasted the saltiness as he lavished kisses on her forehead, her cheeks, the orbits beneath her brows, her chin, her nose... Finally, he realized that he had to make her go, before he started to weep as well. We'll be together again, he told himself. We will.
But only in another life...
I took it easy on my readers this time and didn't end the chapter, for once, with a cliffhanger, though I do think that Ron and Ginny having to go into hiding isn't exactly an ending that's all sweetness and light.
In other HP news, JKR certainly had fun today with her riddle! My thought: Now that I know what it says, I think that it's either one of two things or it's both. The two possible things are: 1) Some narration from the Fabulous Beasts script, and 2) The opening line of a book about Newt Scamander that is basically a novelization of the script (though I wouldn't be surprised if she'd written the prose first and turned it into a script afterward, though she might have found the reverse process a refreshing change).
Because honestly, how could she not produce a book version of her script? Even the most ridiculous of action films has a book tie-in ghosted by a writer toiling away in obscurity somewhere, and when you've got JK Rowling writing the script because she wants creative control of the story, you KNOW she's also going to do the novel version herself. So even though people are clamoring periodically (okay, I know some people who never let up) for a continuation of Harry's life story or a next-gen series, I'd be quite happy with a trilogy of books to go with the trilogy of Fabulous Beast movies.
(Okay, a television series about Lily, Snape and the Marauders in school is something I also wouldn't say no to. Because--DUH. But in the meantime I'll take the FB stuff.)