Chapter 12: All Through the Night
Chapter 12: All Through the Night
1. He brandished his wand lazily at the ground near the lakeshore; the snow melted and the liquid sank into the magically-warmed ground, revealing a bag that appeared to be made of water weed, tatted in a complicated pattern, and containing a large dark object. His gift from the merpeople!
A lot of people wanted to know about this at the end of the previous chapter; well, I did have a plan for Harry to re-find this, I just didn't think it worked very well with the events that came after Harry and Ginny emerged from the lake.
2. An "expert" in magical creatures came from the Ministry and found some human bones in the Forbidden Forest and declared them to be Ginny's and Ron's. Harry suspected that they probably had something to do with Aragog, and were very likely quite old. Harry was not happy about this. If someone really had disappeared, is this what would happen? Would some pencil-pusher from the Ministry come up to the school to feed everyone propaganda and give easy answers?
This seemed to me to be EXACTLY like something the Ministry would do.
3. Harry stood with his arm around Jamie's shoulder while she twisted her robes in her fingers; Simon sat by his twin's bedside, very grim, and their mother sat on Stuart's other side, holding his hand gently, to avoid touching the sunburn. Their dad talked in low tones to Madam Pomfrey, about potions, it seemed, and Harry never thought time had moved more slowly than during the vigil in that infirmary.
This was incredibly hard to write; my own kids were seven and nine at the time, and a bedside vigil like this is the sort of thing every parent dreads.
4. And then--she started singing. He hadn't heard her sing for ages, it seemed, and he hadn't heard her sing this since the twins were very small. Her voice echoed off the hard surfaces in the infirmary, clear as a bell. He couldn't stop the tears rolling down his face, but he made no move to dry them so she wouldn't know he was awake. He listened to her sing to her youngest child, tears streaming down her own cheeks.
And then--All Through the Night. Is there a sadder lullaby anywhere? Well, okay, there's that and Suogan, which I also used. What is it about Welsh lullabies?
5. Harry had imagined many things about having a family, in his other life; he’d pictured his parents being able to raise him, he'd wondered what it would be like to have siblings. Something he'd never imagined was what it would be like to bury a little brother.
I've never been completely certain that my hankie warnings for this chapter were adequate. It was hard enough for me to write it, as I was doing a bit of crying of my own.
6. But those Longbottoms didn't care that Patty and I were orphaned by Grindelwald; they cut down her and Sallustius as if they was vermin contaminatin' the airth. Witnesses said so, but it didn't matter. The Aurors was 'just doin' thair job.'"
"What?" Harry breathed, after he took care to swallow his own butterbeer. "Longbottoms?"
Yes, I gave my own explanation for Snape's mistreatment of Neville. I honestly don't think JKR ever gave one, short of, "He's just grouchy in general." He really did seem to target Neville, and it seemed to me to warrant a backstory. Harry also remembers the night they came for Remus, to take him to the werewolf camp. And of course, Harry will soon be encountering the Longbottoms in another setting.
7. "Wail, yer mum and you went ter visit Severus at the castle, and while ye were there, the bairn decided to come. Yer sister, ye understand. He helped with the midwifin'. Afterward, she asked him to marry her. He said maybe; the next day he said he’d marry her on one condition: if they was to wed, she could no longer be an Auror. She agreed, and the raist, as they say, is history."
Or, you know--backstory. More AU missing years fic fodder!
8. Gingerly, Harry reached out and picked up the amulet, which was silver-colored metal in the shape of a basilisk. There was even a small green stone that had been incorporated into the metal when it was still molten, perfectly positioned to serve as one of the eyes of the creature in profile. In fact, if Harry didn’t know better, he'd say it was the exact same basilisk amulet that Ginny had given him for a fifteenth birthday gift in his other life.
It is indeed! I think no one saw this coming--let alone the backstory for the amulet that is told in the latter chapters of The Triangle Prophecy.
9. "How do you know?" Draco said.
"What are you, a broken record?" Harry groaned at him, even though it was Jamie who had asked before. Jamie and Draco both looked at each other, perplexed.
"What's a broken record?" they said together.
Ha! Actually, a lot of kids today might say the same thing. But Harry heard his mother saying this; she's the right generation, and grew up as a Muggle.
10. Basilisk. Ginny. Basilisk. Ginny. for some reason he felt sure that he was close to a solution, to a way for fixing the timelines. Voldemort will never agree, he thought. Then, Maybe he doesn't have to.
He looked at Draco and he had it; he knew how it could be done! It can work, it really can; I feel sure of it! Yet--he looked up at his sister and best friend. He would need for someone else to make a sacrifice. It was suicide.
I don't think anyone made the diary connection yet. I didn't see anything about this in old comments on this chapter.
11. He put his face close to Harry's, hissing between his teeth. "Too bad you didn't kill me when you had the chance, Potter, because now I am going to kill you."
Ron Weasley was angrier than Harry had ever seen him.
Ron's temper again! It causes so many problems.
12. "I just carried my little brother's coffin into a mausoleum because I refused to kill you and my dad refused to kill your brother."
"And because of that I'm not supposed to care that you've got Ginny pregnant?"
"Try caring about this," he said, seething and pointing at the nearly-frozen Professor Binns. "Binns is a Death Eater."
People complained bitterly about how long I took to bring out this revelation. Some people were guessing Binns was the teacher DE, but almost everyone else from Sinistra to Vector to Sprout was mentioned as a possibility!
13. "And Weasley--it was, um, I mean--we were in pretty extreme circumstances. Ginny and I. It wasn't like I had any control over the weather. Anyway," he went on, squirming a little, "how have you and, um, Cho avoided this problem?"
Now it was Ron who seemed to squirm a bit. "She bought some Muggle stuff," he mumbled indistinctly. "At a chemist’s near her house."
Because Ron and Cho knew perfectly well that Prophylaxis Potion was illegal.
14. Harry walked down the corridor toward Dark Arts; when he'd gone as far as he could go and still see Binns' back in the doorway of the empty classroom, he aimed his wand at Binns, taking the spell off him and ducking behind a suit of armor. He peered down the corridor, looking under the suit's outstretched arm. He saw Binns walk into the classroom, then back out into the corridor, glancing back and forth. "I know what I saw," he heard the professor say clearly, before striding off in the opposite direction.
What Harry really should have done with Binns, of course, was to get his stepfather to put a foolproof memory charm on him. Perhaps it would also get some of the Goblin rebellions to fall out of his head and give his students some relief. ;)
15. There had to be a body or he wouldn't be believed. But if there was a body, wouldn't it be possible to trace a murder to him? Not that he was going to kill Ron; he'd been plenty hacked off at him the day before, the way he was talking about another one of his brothers dying, but he still wasn't willing to kill him. This, he thought, is how Voldemort wants to string me up; he knows from the other life what Ron is to me.
Exactly. And he knows that Harry remembers the other life.
16. ...before he left her office, his mother had had an expression on her face that he imagined she had worn when she had been an Auror. She seemed both determined and on guard, and quite formidable. It gave him a shiver up his spine, but it also made him feel that somehow, everything was going to be all right.
Harry has no idea. He's right to feel that shiver up his spine.
17. "The doctors said I would probably never have children. They told my mum. She lied to my dad, though. Said it would be all right."
"Why?"
Because he's "Lucius Eugenics Carry On the Freaking Family Line Malfoy", that's why. And now the readers know why Draco was with so many girls AND why none of them got pregnant.
18. He shook his head sadly. "But Ginny--why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you tell me?"
She still looked down. "I--I couldn't. And then I went into hiding with Ron. I just sort of thought of the motto of the Chudley Cannons. You know, Let's just keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best."
Best. Motto. Ever. I love JKR's sense of humor!
19. "What's wrong with doing what you said? You know, transfiguring a dead animal to look like Ron's corpse."
She gave him a hard glare. "Any wizard worth his salt will check for a transfiguration charm like that. I just said that to get the three of you up here."
Some people objected to this on the grounds that Dumbledore would also have known that this wouldn't fool anyone. However, that's assuming that Dumbledore wasn't conspiring with Lily on this--which he was. He knew that protecting Harry and keeping his cover, as well as Draco's, was of utmost importance, as two of the three people in the Prophecy. And no, he wasn't a great believer in Prophecies in either universe, but he knew that Voldemort put stock in it.
20. "If you don't want your best friend to suffer, kill Weasley," she said coldly, her green eyes glittering.
I enjoyed writing that because of the irony; Ron's being his best friend is why he DOESN'T want to kill Ron.
21. "If the person who cast the charm gives you a direct order and you refuse, you will drop down dead. If that person gives you a direct order and you agree to it, if it is at all possible, you will do it, or die in the attempt."
Harry doesn't get to see this in action in this universe with Voldemort himself--but he does get to see the effect with Tom Riddle.
22. "Mum, Mum," he muttered now, "the way you are now, so driven to protect me--it's because you're under Imperius. You have been, for years. But all you were told to do was to protect me at all costs. Which is only natural, it's a mother’s instinct, most of the time. Do you know what happens when someone under Imperius is told to do something they already want to do? It becomes almost impossible to resist, because the desire was already there. It reinforces it, brings it to the surface if the person was previously resisting."
So this comes up again. I didn't introduce this idea just to explain Hermione's actions in the previous fic--this is really where the concept of being told to do something that is NOT an alien thought becomes truly important in the PS universe.
23. "I have nothing against your father, Weasley. He's a good man. He's one of a kind. That's the problem; there's only one of him. And he is too trusting. You have no idea how many people work closely with him who should not be trusted. The Ministry is infested with Death Eaters. It's rotten to the core; there's no way to be safe if the Ministry arranges our going into hiding. We'll all be dead within a week."
There was also no adequate way to get this into the story before now, so it wasn't always clear how much of the wizarding world Voldemort was truly controlling. It wasn't so much obvious-Fascist-ethnic-cleansing-government as it was in DH, but people like Lily (and a lot of other folks) know what's really going on, though they are not supportive of that.
24. He stared and stared at her, willing her to brush her hair from where it lay across her face, or cry out or yell at him or whimper. An open, staring eye did not move. He waited for it to blink, or just close in pain. He saw that the cave wall bore a dark red glossy stain and he swallowed. He heard footsteps and felt more than saw Ron come to stand beside him, also gazing down at his mother.
Lily Evans was utterly still.
I think this was the biggest shock I delivered in this fic, even taking the time-change into account: I had Harry kill his mother.
And it's all truly downhill from here...