8 August 2009
[Hermione Snape’s diary]
After breakfast we wanted to see the owner of one of the three houses we can afford.
Amrita Agan lives outside the village, at the lakeshore.
Hogsmeade has grown in the last eleven years or 135 months or 587 weeks or 4,115 days or 98,760 hours or—calculating minutes is futile and leaves me frantic, my heart racing. But time is fleeting. Only 23 days are left of our probation. Or 552 hours or—no. That way lies madness.
So—Hogsmeade has grown, but it has not flourished. Shops are closed. Rooms are for rent, houses for sale. When we left, Hannah broke up the first brawl of the day, throwing the louts out. Their marks proclaimed them half-blood and Mudblood. Their breakfast was a bottle, shared in a corner.
Hannah says they haven’t much to do besides drinking and fighting. Not many half-bloods still own a business; Mudbloods are not allowed to do so. Few employers are willing to hire half-bloods, or worse, Mudbloods. When we stepped outside, a beggar cowered in front of Honeydukes—the letters “MB” nearly hidden by an unkempt beard.
Who will give us a job? We may not be branded, but there’s no hiding the fresh incisions on our hands, marking us prisoners on probation. And some at least will still remember our names…
On the way to Amrita Agan’s house we passed the Shrieking Shack.
Where Voldemort seemingly—
one—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine…letters—
—the Shrieking Shack, where He triumphed, is now a memorial, a museum, a small café, a little shop. Postcards and souvenirs. Toy-snakes, child-sized Death Eater masks, buttons flashing the Dark Mark.
Severus had one of his episodes there. He froze and disappeared into himself, leaving only a shell behind. Almost an hour—58 minutes and 27 seconds—he just stood and stared. At what? I can’t tell, and he doesn’t say.
I remained at his side and pretended to be fascinated with the memorial stones. Marble markers bear the names of their fallen.
Our dead have a memorial only in my mind.
Middle column, third square from the window: Harry James Potter.
Next to Harry, of course: Ron Bilius Weasley.
When we reached the lake, it was my turn to freeze. In the distance Hogwarts beckoned. My first home in the wizarding world. Curious that Azkaban should be my second.
And my third?
I still don’t know. When we started down the path, something rustled in the high, dry grass to our left and right, like small animals running towards us, and the Patil twins jumped out of the reeds!
“You shouldn’t be here,” Parvati said.
“And you mustn’t go there,” Padma warned.
Suddenly a voluptuous woman (dark skin, black hair) glided down the path and stopped a few feet from the twins. With cold black eyes she stared at us.
“So your little protectors have found you already,” she whispered, her voice low and sibilant. “Heed them well.”
With that, she moved past us.
Severus shivered.
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.