20 August 2009
[Hermione Snape’s diary]
I am—Oh, Merlin! I have no idea what to write! I—Oh, God! How can I feel happy and as if my heart is breaking at the same time? I am hysterical. I am laughing and crying. Severus just sits next to me, stunned, and keeps transfiguring leaves into tissues, so this entry won’t be completely unreadable.
Padma and Parvati must know! Why haven’t they told me—us?!?! How could they keep that from me???
…Severus says because they probably were afraid I’d react just the way I do.
I must concede he has a point. Bloody man, always so reasonable.
But I am supposed to write down what happened, not how I feel. (Given that I write with my blood and Veritaserum, that’s almost impossible, though. Even for Severus.)
Despite Severus’ misgivings, I set out for the western gatehouse this morning. (He only allowed me to go because I demonstrated several times that I can Apparate back to our cottage safely.) I used the Point Me spell to find my way and Limites Revelio to stay beyond the boundaries of Hogwarts. Padma said the wards are deadly now.
—It wasn’t easy. To approach Hogwarts, on the road that Harry, Ron, and I took all those Hogsmeade weekends—
…I…I cannot remember how many there were…
I left the road before the gate. Staying at least ten metres or 32.8 feet or 10.9 yards from the grounds, I turned left—west—and started walking. To my right—to the north—stretched the Forbidden Forest, the one corner on Hogwarts Grounds. Dark and gloomy in the rain. Fog obscured the hilltops and wavered in the wood. I kept my wand out and thought of Alastair Moody. “Constant vigilance!” he barked at me before the Final Battle, to cheer me up. The curse that killed him hit him right between the eyes.
Milly can’t remember that day clearly. It has faded into nightmares.
For me it happened yesterday.
The shed.
The snake.
How it—hesitated before it attacked Harry. How they stared at each other, how he shouted at it in Parseltongue…
…how it struck him. Ripped out his throat.
How he—how he tried to give us his memories—
I started counting my steps. Numbers are safe. Memories not. When I reached 3,936, the gatehouse lay before me. I was halfway up a hill, looking down. I checked and re-checked the wards, before I approached it. But everything was clear. The gatehouse doesn’t belong to Hogwarts anymore.
A house-elf opened the door.
Blue eyes, not green like Dobby’s. Dressed in immaculate emerald tartan. Including slippers. A free elf?
“Come in,” the elf chirped. “Annie Maddock has been expecting you.”
I followed the elf.
She led me into a cosy sitting room.
In a rocking chair in front of a bay window, completely immobile, a soft tartan blanket spread over her knees, sat Minerva McGonagall, staring vacantly off towards the hills.
She is paralysed and out of her mind.
But she is alive.
Well! I must say I’m impressed by this development. As unlikely as these things are to occur, this kind of upsprung friendship where there was only the opposite before can and does happen. You portrayed it quite nicely, and I’m also glad it’s a positive plot point. Good things happen even to people who are depressed and have gone through the mill. I hope this means there’s some hope!
Too bad the picture at the top of the chapter gave it away. Seeing Maggie Smith as McGonagall in the (admittedly nicely-done) artwork at the top took all the dramatic force away from the end of the chapter. Still a positive development, though, even if it wasn’t a surprise. I’m glad for Hermione, and by extension, for Severus.
Ah, Christ, I can feel you sharpening your knives for another gloom-fest. Only five more chapters left, and already I can feel you poking holes in whatever limited happiness or security they’ve found.
Amazing! A happy ending! I love it! See–hope isn’t so bad, is it? It does seem a trifle sudden, your ending. And we never did find out about the mystery woman. But I feel able to let our Hermione and Severus go, knowing that whatever further vicissitudes they face, they have each other on a more solid, saner basis. Thank you for your writing, and thank you for the hope you left our favorite couple (and us!) with.
I had wanted to delete the third review I left (“Ah, Christ…”), but I’ve been having problems with my computer, and it didn’t allow me to send my reasons back to you, so it (the deletion) could be done. I had read “Apprentice & Necromancer” first, and was deeply disturbed by how damaged so many of the characters had been at the end of that fic. I was therefore afraid that any positives that were about to jell in this story were all going to fall apart, instead. Once I came to the end of this and found it wasn’t going to end badly for them (yay!), I was sorry I’d been so negative in that third review. So I ask your pardon, and that you disregard that one. You really are quite a special writer, and even though I hated the fact my fictional friends suffered so badly by the finish of “A&N”, I must say your plotting is excellent, and so are your characterizations. I will come back to read more of your writing. Thank you for sharing your gifts with us!
Nice to see that you’re still reading!
One thing puzzles me: You must surely be aware that the characters in “Prisoners” are much, much more damaged than those in “Apprentice”.
Of course “Apprentice” leaves key-characters badly damaged … they have been to Death and back, after all. But that story has an ending that assures readers that yes, everything will be just fine one day, this is something we can cope with, eventually.
While in “Prisoners” the challenge of the plot is met, and superficially the characters and readers are rewarded with a fairly straightforward “happy ending”, the story is really much, much worse if you take a moment to think about it. There is no way back, no matter how much they heal. Hermione will for the rest of her life live under the compulsion of counting things. Severus will in times of crisis always drift off to his parallel world. They will always remain unable to live in an emotionally stable fashion without Draco anchoring them …
I don’t mind at all that you dislike or even “hate” the dark turns and twists of my story/stories. Some people like sweet milk chocolate, others like bitter dark chocolate, it’s as simple as that – different tastes and preferences.
Anyway, from your remarks I gather that you might be interested in hearing a bit about my motivation concerning my stories, so here are a few comments about that:
What I loathe in many fanfiction stories in various fandoms is how authors make light of consequences. People are tortured, traumatised, injured … and there are no consequences. Everyone is right as rain again in one and the same chapter. Personally, I find that not only ridiculous and boring, but somewhat despicable. It doesn’t work like that. As a reader, and therefore also as a writer, I’m simply not interested in fluffy lies, I’m in it for the hard-won happy ending, like the one I wrote for “Apprentice” … I prefer characters who have looked, heck, *jumped into* the abyss of despair and have crawled out of it again and persevered. I am interested in how characters will act when they are pushed far beyond their limits, and how that will change them, and how they will move on from there.
So if you’re looking for fluff, you will rarely find that kind of thing in my stories. But I do try to come up with interesting, twisty plots, and heroes who find the strength to go on no matter what.