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secretkeeper13 · 1 month
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Conclusions
Ginny's run out of her good parchment and has been reduced to using something she dug out of the bottom of her trunk, hating the way her quill scratches over the rough surface. As though it isn’t punishment enough to be writing about History of Magic, she’s got to do it on this piece of rubbish. 
“Bloody, buggering fu–” she swears as the point of her quill pierces a hole straight through her conclusion. Apt, probably - it had been flimsy at best. There’s a metaphor here, somewhere.
“Revision going well, then?”
The wry voice startles her so much that she nearly upends her bottle of ink all over her weak – in more ways than one – essay. “Fuck, Harry, I’d no idea you were there.”
She blinks up at him in surprise and finds him smirking, standing at the table she’s claimed in a corner of the library, looking adorably entertained by her plight. His bookbag is slung carelessly over his shoulder, his hair mussed, his stupid face made more handsome by the teasing lilt of his smile. Her heart flutters a bit, because that’s just what it always does with him. She ignores it valiantly, and hates him for it, a little. 
“Sorry,” he says, though he sounds more amused than anything. “Mind if I sit?”
“Course,” she says, gesturing to the seat opposite. “Can’t guarantee there won’t be more swearing, though.” 
He eyes her holey essay as he sits, jerking his head questioningly toward the parchment. “What’re you working on?”
“Something for Binns.”
“Ah, I’d be swearing, too.”
“Fucking hell, eh?”
They share a smile, and Ginny reckons she’d be better off writing an essay about that - the way she knows exactly when he’ll find something funny; the way jokes fall a bit flat when the punchline isn’t his eyes seeking her out, green and piercing and flickering with amusement. She’d fill the parchment with ease. 
It’s easy to write about something you can’t stop reading into. 
Just like she’s madly reading into the way he’s shown up here - no Ron, no Hermione - and sought her out, like it’s normal, like they’ve been doing this for years even though they haven’t. It feels like they have, though. That’s the worst part of it.
“What’re you doing here?” she asks, like he might just come right out and say it - to see you.
He doesn’t. She pretends that she can’t be disappointed by what she expects. 
“Transfiguration,” he says darkly. 
“Where’re Ron and Hermione, then?” she prods, picking at it like a scab, like a masochist. I wanted to get you alone, she urges him to say. I’ve been trying to all week and I haven’t even been subtle about it.
“Dunno,” he shrugs. Scabs bleed when you pick them, incidentally. “I can survive an evening without them, you know.”
“Can you? I don’t reckon your track record is all that spectacular on that front, if I’m honest.”
“Hey, I haven’t died even once.”
“Right,” she jokes. “Angling for a new nickname? ‘The Boy Who Hasn’t Died, Even Once’?”
He lets out a soft chuckle. “Rolls right off the tongue, that.”
“I’ll owl Rita for you. We can workshop something”
They smile.
She wants to shake him until he admits to it, confesses, like this thing brewing between them is a crime. She wants to lay all the evidence out in front of him, the aspiring Auror, and see what he makes of it. He can’t quip his way around the smiles and the banter and the looks he gives her. See, she’ll say, don’t you see?
He’s got shit vision. 
They sit together for far longer than she’d planned to stay. At some point he adjusts in his seat, and his foot winds up touching hers, and he doesn’t even have the decency to move it. She fancies she can feel his warmth through their trainers, but no - it must be her own traitorous heart, frantically pumping warm blood to her foot like it’s the only part of her body that needs it, like the parts of her that aren’t touching him have ceased to matter because maybe they have. 
Maybe she’s been distilled to the edge of her foot.
They talk about strategies for the Quidditch final, and OWLs, and argue playfully about which of her mum’s mince pies is the best. Ginny’s always fancied herself good at impressions, but she surprises even herself with her impression of easy nonchalance. All the while it’s building - each look, each smile, each easy joke they set each other up for feels like a firework she’s adding to the heap in her chest, ready to explode with the slightest spark. 
You’ve got me alone, she tells him. Do something about it.
It’s nearly curfew. They start gathering their things, and still he hasn’t done anything. If he were any other boy, Ginny would cut through the bullshit herself, but something holds her back. She can’t fully articulate, unravel, why, but she needs him to be the one to admit it. She needs him to decide she’s worth the risk. He’s meant to be brave, isn’t he?
As she’s packing it away, Ginny remembers her abandoned essay, still punctured pathetically. She sighs, holds it up for Harry’s evaluation. “Think Binns’ll even notice?”
“Give it here,” he says, and she hands it over. He pulls his wand from his robes and waves it wordlessly, the gaping tear sewing itself together so it might never have been there. Ginny doesn’t know why she hadn’t thought to do that herself. 
“Thanks. Only now, I’ve actually got to write a damn conclusion.”
He laughs and holds it back out to her. “You’re on your own.”
“Aren’t you meant to have a hero complex?” she quips, pushing the parchment back toward him. “Some useful saving-people thing? Have a go.”
To her immense surprise, he shoots her a wry smirk that sends a tingle through her stomach. “Alright.” He pulls out the quill he’d only just packed away, scrawls something at the bottom of her parchment, shielding it from view.  
She’s gone utterly daft. Her heart is hammering in her chest, beating a tattoo on her ribcage; she wonders if her fingers are trembling as they reach across to take her essay back, fully convinced she’ll find the words Go out with me scribbled there. 
In conclusion, he’d written, this essay is over.
She snorts, mostly at herself. She’s officially deluded. Cracked. What is wrong with her?
“Wow. Thanks for that,” she says drily. “How would Binns have known otherwise?”
He grins. “Anytime.”
“Totally unrelated, but do you offer refunds? Perhaps a voucher for another Harry Potter rescue at a later date?”
“Non-refundable. Sorry.”
“I’m going to be honest,” she lies. “I expected a better rescue than that.”
He shrugs. “You expect too much from The Boy Who Hasn’t Died, Even Once.”
She can’t help herself; she laughs. His eyes seek hers out - green, so green, twinkling with amusement and something that looks so fond. She’s going to set fire to the heap of fireworks in her chest, just to get it over with. She’ll explode in color, driven to madness by the boy who hadn’t died even once but who’d killed her, slowly, with smiles. 
In conclusion, she thinks, I’m utterly fucked.
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secretkeeper13 · 3 months
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I feel personally attacked.
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secretkeeper13 · 4 months
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beasts chapter 11 out now 🎇
‘I was trying to keep you alive!’ he bellows. ‘You aren’t listening to me!’ she bellows back. ‘People don’t like being locked up!’ [ hatch, verb.: (of an egg) to open and produce a young animal. ]
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secretkeeper13 · 4 months
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W22D update!
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Without Twenty-Two Days
Chapter 1 // Chapter 8 (now complete!)
“And without thinking, without planning it, without worrying about the fact that fifty people were watching, Harry-”
-almost kissed Ginny.
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secretkeeper13 · 4 months
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Someone's Mum
For @hinnymicrofic -Day 20 "Mom"
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The poster unfurled, a Quidditch star winked with sass and smile
“Lucky him,” they’d say in passing
She never cared what they said
But Albus was two and he didn’t speak
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“Are you miserable?” Words raw, a fear hidden, only uttered under the blanket of night.
“No,” she dared whisper, a confession in the dark. “When I’m there, I’m thinking about here. When I’m here, I’m thinking about there. Not miserable… mediocre. I never half-arsed anything that mattered and now I’m mediocre.”
Her fingers sought his, tangled in sheets.
“I catch a Quaffle and I miss the boys and I miss the hoop and I’m not crushed because my dream has become just another day with another Quaffle and another hoop and another number on another board and I miss miss miss when it mattered.”
Who was she without it?
Someone’s mum
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James turned the page
another and another and another
“Again!”
another and another and another
“And down once more, but not so fast- “ *
Her shoulder needed to be iced
“They’re on their way to bed at last- “
How many times did they have to hear this story?
“The day is done they say goodnight- “
How many times would they want to?
“And somebody turns off the light- “
How many nights until they were too old
and she would
miss miss miss when it mattered
“The moon is high- “
Albus was two and still didn’t speak
“The sea is deep- “
Thumb in mouth, his green eyes followed her finger tracing the words
“They rock- “
James nestled closer, elbow jabbing the Bludger-sized bruise on her hip
“And rock- “
It hurt
Her finger trembled as it traced
“And rock- “
Albus, two, not talking, lifted enormous green eyes to hers
“To sleep- “
Green eyes that spoke sonnets
His Mum
He grinned
She was the center of his world
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“What can I do?” Never one for words, he had long ago learned to ask. “What can I say?”
Sheets rustled as their fingers laced.
“What will you see, Harry?” She muttered. “I know what everyone else will see and I’ll pretend it won’t matter. But what will you see when you look at me?”
He rolled on top of her, cupping her face between his hands.
“The woman who bat-bogeys reporters and fought in a war and loves so fiercely her heart swells and splits and bleeds.”
Soft kisses to chin, cheek, eyelid.
“The effortlessly funny companion who can commentate two snails crossing the porch and have us all cheering the one with the hilariously tragic backstory.”
He lowered his forehead to hers.
“The girl who wrote in the diary who married the boy who slept in a cupboard. Neither of them have anything to prove, Gin.”
A tear escaped, rolling into her hairline.
“A Mum?”
She dared to whisper, a confession in the dark.
Irrelevant to the world
The world to three
“I’ll see you, Ginny. And I will love you until my last breath.”
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The day was done, the edges curled
The Quidditch star winked as the poster furled
*Excerpt from “The Going to Bed Book” by Sandra Boynton
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secretkeeper13 · 4 months
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‘Hermione, the attendees just survived a war,’ says Seamus impatiently. ‘I think they can survive a piss-up in a creepy old mansion.’ [ rear, verb.: (of an animal) to care for its young until fully grown ]
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secretkeeper13 · 5 months
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The Winners
Written for @thethreebroomsticksfic Weasley Week
Day 7: Ginny
“I want you to know,” Ginny said, surveying her teammates, “that I am proud of each and every one of you. I know- I know that we are going to go out there and clobber them. They think they can beat us? They won’t know what hit them.”
The rest of the team nodded, some more forcefully than others. A few were clutching their broomsticks so hard their knuckles were white.
“However,” said Ginny, “it’s not going to be easy. They’ve got some pretty good players on that team. Size-wise, most of them are bigger than us. A lot have more experience. They’ll be fast, and strong, and they won’t go easy on us because they want to win just as much as we do. I’m sure their captain is giving a very similar speech to them right now. I doubt it’s a speech as good as mine, but-”
A few of the girls snickered and one let out a whoop. Ginny grinned.
“But,” she continued, “we are fighting for the most important Quidditch victory in the country. We may be an all girls team, but we can play and win just as well as anyone. We’re going to catch every quaffle, beat every bludger and catch the snitch before the other team’s so-called captain even has a chance to look. Like I said in practice, we’re not just going to win, we’re going to…?”
“Dominate them Auntie Ginny!” screamed Rose, holding her broom aloft like a sword, red curls flying everywhere.
“Let’s kill them!” shouted Lily, jumping up beside her cousin in her Mum’s old Harpies jersey, the sleeves of which went past her elbows.
“I think kill is a bit of a strong word,” said Vic.
“No such thing,” said Roxie, who was busy painting green and black stripes under her eyes. “You’re all allowed to knock my dad off his broom if you want. He’ll be fine.”
Rose, Lily, Vic, and Dominique laughed. Angelina smirked at Ginny, who grinned back. 
“Same with my dad,” Lily said. “You’re allowed to hit bludgers at him. But I’m going to catch the Snitch first anyway, so you probably won’t need to.”
The rest of the girls cheered their agreement as they stomped and jumped and skipped and marched their way to the Burrow’s makeshift Quidditch pitch with the energy of a thousand bludgers. Ginny and Angelina hung back, watching them approach their fathers and brothers and shouting what was most likely some extremely cute trash talk.
“Your husband the captain better not go too easy on Lily,” Angelina muttered to Ginny with a grin. “She sounds like she means business.”
“Oh, he won’t,” said Ginny as they watched Harry talk to his daughter and nieces, an obviously proud smile on his face. “He knows she’ll forgive him for winning against her, but never for that.”
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secretkeeper13 · 5 months
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Last sentence game. What’s the last bit you wrote in a WIP?
Thanks for the tag @brightlybound 💕
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She’s six when she flies a broomstick for the first time, feels the intoxicating rush that taking to the sky brings. For nearly a decade after, she thinks that nothing more euphoric could exist. But then he kisses her in the common room, to the sound of breaking glass and giggling and a wolf whistle, and her world shifts on its axis— she knows then, and there’s no going back.
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Tagging @displayheartcode @whinlatter @narukoibito and @pocket-lilacs
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secretkeeper13 · 5 months
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Good Enough
100-Word Drabbles for Arthur and Ginny Weasley
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Fifteen drabbles written for @thethreebroomsticksfic Weasley Week, Oct 16th: Arthur Weasley. Read below or on AO3.
i.
“You’re joking.”
Molly chews back her smile, shakes her head coyly. The house isn’t quiet, per say, but in a rare stroke of luck the twins and Ronnie’s naps have aligned.
And he’s wedged around the bathroom sink with his wife, giggling like children over a potion that’s just changed color.
“A girl…”
The day she’s born, Fabian is there. Peers over the bassinet for so long, Arthur wonders if he too is counting ten perfect pink toes.
“Shit,” he says to Arthur over a cigar that night, after talking war, “this world will never be good enough for her.”
ii.
It’s his turn tonight, when they hear little feet across the kitchen floor. He’s not surprised it’s her, face still blotchy, hair sticking up everywhere from this afternoon’s tantrum that left her knackered.
She whips around in the pantry doorway, eyes like saucers. “I’m hungry.”
After leftover stew from her yellow paisley bowl, he lays in bed with her. Grants her request for a story on the condition she doesn’t suck her thumb.
“Once upon a time, there was a witch named Ginny who lived in a deep, dark wood…”
“No, Daddy,” she whispers, eyes nearly closed. “I’m a dragon.”
iii.
Molly tells him she cried the whole way home from King’s Cross. By early afternoon, he can still tell— the aftershocks seem to surprise her, those gasping little breaths. 
“You know the best part of being the last one left,” he divulges over homemade strawberry ice cream that has yet to do the trick, “is that no one’s here to fight you for your pick of broomstick.”
The rest of her bowl melts on the porch swing. She’s out until it gets dark in the orchard, comes in for supper with leaves in her hair and the biggest jack-o-lantern grin. 
iv.
The day they bring her back home, he carries her trunk upstairs and sits beside her on the bed. Apologizes for ever blaming her, even for a second. 
She counters by saying something lifeless and self-loathing and broken. Eleven-year-old fingers pick at bruised nail beds— tiny, perfect hands. He still can’t fathom it.
That night, Molly brings her dinner and doesn’t come back down. When he heads up to bed, he sees they’ve clearly emptied all her shelves, stacked every novel and journal and textbook outside her door where they can’t hurt her. 
He’s never been angrier in his life.
v.
Since this morning, he’s meant to tell her he’s sorry— sorry they couldn’t offer her anything better on her birthday than this condemnable house-turned-war room. Sorry for the second-hand leather satchel wrapped in faded Christmas paper, even though she wanted a broom; sorry everyone’s thoughts are on tomorrow’s hearing.
After dinner he finally says it, out of Molly’s earshot. Sitting on the stairs leading from the kitchen, plates of fudgy cake in hand. 
“Don’t apologize.” She’s still smiling huge, bumps his shoulder. The Flatulence Fez the twins crowned her with slips down over one eye. “I really love the bag.”
vi.
It should’ve been the day that made them proudest as parents, marrying off their firstborn. It wasn’t. 
This morning, they boxed up centerpieces and charger plates in the shed, repaired all the furniture, met with the Order. His ears still ring. The house is eerie without those three. 
He finds them in her room. His wife is clutching their daughter as she sobs harder than he’s ever seen, inconsolable, wracking herself hoarse. He feels it like a sword to the chest.
In bed later, Molly shakes her head with that look he earns sometimes when he’s being thick. “She’s heartbroken.”
vii.
Friday before Easter, he changes from work robes into something Muggle and tweed and itchy. Platform 9¾ is packed with people avoiding eye contact, and the Express is late. It was late in December, too— arrived without Luna. He waits, terror tightening his throat.
He’s numb with relief when he sees her, one of the only kids lugging a trunk like he advised. She’s swimming in a jumper he’s sure is Ron’s, and that twinges a bit. There’s something different, he notices, walking to the entrance. Colder. Quiet. He doesn’t ask… can’t quite bear to.
Four days later, they flee.
viii.
She’s fighting him. Kicking, clawing.
He holds on with everything he has, arms clasped around her chest, and it’s like he can feel her breaking inside. But if he lets go, he’ll lose her, too. Like Fred. 
Like the body they’re all staring at, lifeless at Hagrid’s feet.
Weeks later, when the Boy Who Lived finds him in the shed one night, hedging, guiltier than anyone he’s ever seen, he already knows. For a moment he considers letting the kid squirm, like the father ought to do.
But then he remembers her first year, and wordlessly hands over a screwdriver. 
ix.
“One more,” she tells their waitress, pointing at a coaster she’s put in the middle. “For my sixth brother.”
The table falls quiet. But then George chuckles and they all take his cue, except Molly.
Snow collects on the windows as the bangers and pies and chips are served. She laments early-morning practices to them all, pretends she’s already bored of all the travel.
“Knock it off,” Charlie snickers, grinning. “Rookies can’t complain. We know you’re having a blast.”
At the end of the night she beats everyone to the bar, pays their tab. Arthur suspects it’s her whole paycheck.
x.
“I definitely saw you cry,” she accuses. She’s graceful even in smugness, grinning something wicked over her lipstick-stained champagne flute.
He pretends to grumble, but he knows she knows. “Hard not to, with the bloody groom getting all choked up.”
The band calls them up soon after, and he pulls her close. “It’s okay,” she murmurs as her face starts to blur again, inches away. “Just admit you’ve gone soft, Dad. I won’t tell.” He tugs on her hand to spin her, chuckling.
They cut cake, and Harry whispers something that makes her laugh, and she lights up the room.
xi.
Predictably, the stadium loses it when she flies out with a new surname on her kit. Ron rolls his eyes as she lands on the pitch with a bit of swagger.
She flies well today, but he reckons she could miss every shot and the commentators would still talk of nothing else. In the stands, Harry laughs when Arthur leans over to ask how it feels to play second fiddle. 
“I’ll never be good enough for her,” he snorts over the rim of his pint. “But I’m sure you knew that.”
She scores twelve goals, and the Harpies clinch playoffs.
xii.
“I’d kill for a drink about now,” she mutters, leaning against the railing. He knows better than to say she probably shouldn’t be out here, either— the venue’s porch, serving as refuge for men who normally never smoke.
He takes a long drag as they watch her boys toddle after their dad on the lawn. “Nearly there, sweetheart.” Treading lightly with his words, lest he incur any of what Muriel’s other well-intended mourners did with their attempts at small talk (“Like a fucking whale, thanks for asking”).
“Hey,” she smirks, “maybe you and Mum can buy a beach cottage now.”
xiii.
The mug Molly poured when they arrived is tepid now, sitting on the table. Shadows lengthen like ghosts beneath his daughter’s eyes; he suspects they’re five days old.
The kids are all asleep, Molly updates them.
Her jaw tightens. At her temple, he notices a couple of gray strands. “I can’t—” she whispers. Squeezes her eyes shut; nothing else comes out. “They need their dad. I’m not good enough on my own.”
“He’ll come home safe, darling. Always does.” And he makes her promise to never say that again. 
He takes both of her hands in his, and they’re cold.
xiv.
They’re celebrating Ted and Vic beneath a canopy of fairy lights. Bill’s weepy toast prompts Fleur to frisk his brothers till she finds George’s flask.
She never realizes Ginny’s stowing the bottle. 
His children outlast their kids and spouses. It’s one of those nights he can’t let himself miss, tired as he is. 
His daughter points a wobbly finger. “Lils has a boyfriend, by the way. Doesn’t think we know. Harry’s going spare.”
He chuckles. “Now he gets it. Imagine trying to justify hating the Chosen One.”
She laughs, nearly tips her chair. “You should tell him that. Might help.”
xv.
It comes in waves. Feels like a lifetime has passed since yesterday; another before that. Molly— bless her— tried to prepare him for it. Tried to comfort him. Imagine.
It feels too big now, their little house on the beach. Perfect for two lives, cavernous with just one. 
She finds him in the garden before sunset. Small, warm hands enclose his. 
“Look, Dad.” 
It’s a delicate, fluttering thing with blue wings, bobbing on the wind. Molly’s favorite. 
“She’s found us again.”
He smiles and tucks a silver lock behind her ear, meeting her gaze— precisely the same shade of brown.
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secretkeeper13 · 6 months
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‘I keep thinking about that summer,’ she mutters. ‘The one when we all moved to Grimmauld. I thought we were the coolest family in the world. Like, there was going to be this big war, but we were on the right side, and it was going to be hard, and shit, but we’d live among these soldiers, and we’d learn to fight, and we’d win because we were the good ones'.
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🪶 read the author’s note for this chapter (coming soon!)
🐾 listen to the playlist
🪺 watch the trailer 
🦉 thoughts & questions? ask me anything!
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secretkeeper13 · 6 months
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What advice would you give 21 year old you?
Everything changes beyond absolute recognition
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secretkeeper13 · 6 months
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I need to know how you think Ginny or Hp characters in general reacted to the death of Princess Diana. She died right before Ginny left for Hogwarts her 6th year. I know wizards aren’t into muggle culture but Lady Di transcends cultural barriers. Plus that trio looking for the queens purse advert is definitely canon.
i did not expect this ask, and i regret to inform you my response to it was to write the following incredibly stupid ficlet about ginny and the death of princess diana. don't ask me why i did this because i don't know!
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The last day of August 1997, she comes downstairs in her dressing gown and finds Kingsley in the kitchen with a Muggle newspaper that says that Princess Diana is dead. ‘Car crash,’ he says, pushes the paper across the table. No-one’s shared news of any sort with her in weeks - the only child and non-Order member of the house, at best an irrelevance and at worse a nuisance for the crumbling wartime resistance - so she forgets about the kettle she's just boiled and sits down, snatches up the paper, reads hungrily. High speed car chase, it says, Diana and her boyfriend, in a tunnel in Paris, being chased down by paparazzi. ‘I met her once,’ says Kingsley, musingly, sipping his tea.
She looks up. ‘Really?’
‘Mmm. With the Muggle PM.’
‘What was she like?’
Kingsley thinks about it. ‘Funny,’ he says. ‘But sad.’ 
She hangs on to the paper. When she’s inevitably ousted from the kitchen by the arrival of yet more Order folk with important business and no trace of interest in her, she takes it up to her room, clears a space on the floor between the maps of the castle she's been memorising and her now dog-eared copy of The Dark Arts Outsmarted and flattens it out on the floor. The Muggle pictures of the princess, of course, don’t move. Yet Diana manages to always be in motion in the photographs, full of life, running and dancing and gallivanting, long legs stretching across roads or dangling off the end elf great boats, her speeding across ocean waves on what looks like a water motorbike or down steep snowy slopes on bits of wood with poles in her hands. She's forced to hoist Crookshanks up and out of the way when he tries to paw his way across the pull-out spread of Diana in her wedding dress. 'You used to live with Muggles sometimes, didn't you?’ she demands of a squirming Crookshanks. ‘Show a bit of respect.'
She’d known about the princess before, of course. Hard to avoid her, even among wizards. The Muggleborn girls had started it, tacking up endless pictures of her many outfits on their walls. Their better-blooded peers had followed, and she’d thought even the Slytherins would be unable to deny there was a magic, a magnetism, to Diana, in  fabulous dresses one day and the coolest of boyish suits the next, all draped off of her long, lean frame with an effortless elegance that most of the awkward adolescent girls of the castle could only dream of. There was a time, in the run-up to the Yule Ball, when you couldn’t move for pictures of that dress. ‘It’s her revenge dress,’ Lavender had informed her matter-of-factly at dinner, ‘because her husband cheated on her with a married woman he’d been in love with years before.’ An off-the-shoulder slinky black number with the chunky pearl necklace, the dress had been the envy of every witch in the castle. ‘I’d definitely pull Diggory if I had that dress,’ a sixth-year girl had  lamented to her mates over the sinks in the fifth-floor girls’ bathroom the next day.
That evening, her own dress from her mother had arrived. She’d sent for it, when Neville had asked her to the ball, bestowing upon her the dubious honour of being the second most pitying girl in all of Gryffindor. It’s an old one of Molly’s from the sixties. She’d always admired it on her mum in old photographs taken before she was hers, worn on nights out and parties from a past life that her mother only hints at, with a twinkle in her eye and a firmly zipped lip. Now, though, the dress looked all wrong - too chaste, too floral, not an ounce of sex appeal about it, throughly unmemorable and unlikely to catch a single eye, fresh-pickled toad-green or otherwise.
(In her bunk that night, she'd lain awake and taunted herself with cruel, self-flagellating fantasy. Imagined striding past the Boy Who Lived wearing that dress, the revenge one, making him regret he’d ever asked Cho Chang to the ball, making him forget all about her shiny hair and her pretty smile and her cool friends and her easy grace, making him notice someone else instead - his best mate’s feral little sister who is funny, actually, just not when he’s around, and whom he last seemed to have thought about when he’d hauled her off her own deathbed, and never since.)
As adolescence wore on, though, she’d soured on Diana. Too chic to be likeable, rich girl with a life of frocks and endless frolicking, intolerably poised and swan-like. The sight of her glimpsed on Muggle newsstand in the village stirred up the same feelings of eye-roll envy as her sister-in-law, which always boded ill. Looking at her now, though, she wonders if there wasn’t something she’d missed, something else to her. Diana’s set jaw looks more guarded than she remembered. The wide eyes ringed by thick smudgy black she’d once thought coquettish now look lost, full of reproach.
Dean’s mum, she remembers now, had loved her. ‘She won’t hear a bad word about her,’ he’d said, rolling his eyes. ‘Says she was the best thing that ever happened to that family.’ Ever her father’s daughter, she’d pestered him with endless questions, like she did all things Muggle: about the divorce, about the royals and succession and the Muggle press and the high drama of it all, until he’d got bored and suggested they go find a broom cupboard, get down to more serious business. Wonders how Dean’s mum must be feeling today. But then she remembers her son is, for all intents and purposes, Muggleborn in a new regime that wants him dead, and suddenly feels slightly sick. She puts the paper away, then, and gets back on with packing up her war room for the morning’s train journey out to the front.
Diana’s sons, the paper said, survive her. They’re called William, and Harry. Good names, in her book. She can't help but think of them as she packs, the boys - children, who woke up one morning to find themselves motherless.
‘It’s mayhem in London,’ says her father, that night, over dinner. ‘There’s hundreds of people outside the palace, leaving flowers and things. I’ve never seen anything like it. There'll be a big public funeral - all the royal family will have to be there, including the boys. They'll have no choice. The Muggles are heartbroken. I dread to think what would happen if there was an attack during that - Kingsley, we ought to talk more about that, actually...'
'Those poor children,' her mother whispers, though that’s nothing new, these days — she whispers that every night.
'Are they still in London?' she asks her dad, quietly, over the washing up. 'At Grimmauld? Have you heard anything?'
'No news, dear. I'd tell you if I knew.'
Lying awake that night with her trunk packed, she wonders if this has all passed them by - her brother and almost-sister and the boy who lived she knows she’s supposed to forget. She imagines them sat the table in that grungy basement kitchen, newspaper spread in front of them. Perhaps they, too, have been poring over Diana's finest outfits, in memoriam. Probably not, though — not with a murder to plot, a Dark Lord to kill, a Tom to hunt. Three child soldiers with a war to win.
Still, the thoughts persist as she tries to fall asleep. Thinks about being hunted, boys without mothers, a city full of mourners. Muggles with their tears and their flowers and their prams at the palace gates. It’s like it's the end of something, something fun and frivolous, dress-up and glamour and girlhood. One day, you're thirteen and looking at princesses in party dresses in the newspaper — and the next, you're sixteen, and the newspapers tell you that the parties are over and the princesses are dead. Something about the tragedy of the thing. The pointlessness, the waste.
artwork: diana and her nymphs hunting by paul de vos (1636)
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secretkeeper13 · 6 months
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Obsessed with your character ask responses - that Filch one was just *chef’s kiss*
2, 19, 47 for Lily Evans please!
thank you @alohaemora! troubling that i found filch easier to write than lily… but i love a challenge, so: lily evans! 🪷
2. A canon or headcanon hill I will die on
lily evans had a regional accent 100%. either like a midlands brummie/wolves accent, or like a nottingham midlands/northern lilt. petunia did too, for a while, and snape had a particularly pronounced one, reflecting his class position relative to the evans family. petunia and snape trained theirs out - petunia as a sign of class ascension, snape as a calculated way of people knowing as little about him as possible. lily stubbornly hung onto hers - it was part of the reason she viewed james (and sirius) with contempt for so long, hating posh boy drawl shtick. but the more she hung out with the marauders, the more her vowels started slipping, another sign of her growing distance from the life and the family she was from. (can you tell i care too much about regional representation in this series)
19. Vices/bad habits
actually love this question - saint lily is boring! let her have flaws! i could see lily enjoying a Big Night Out. i want lily evans stumbling drunk in the street with a kebab in one hand and her heels in the other trying to flag down the night bus. binge drinking ladette culture is a proud and noble tradition and at least one evans sister needs to uphold it
47. Dream job
this was so hard. lily headcanons are so hard! criminally underserved in canon to an intensely problematic extent. people writing lily in canon compliant fic deserve medals, honestly
i suppose the one thing we know of lily’s intellectual interests, other than that she was a gifted all rounder, as that she had an instinctual and impressive grasp of potions, and i like the idea of her having an interest in discovery, a real attention to detail but also a flexibility of thought, an inventiveness and a curiosity that could push her in a lot of different career directions. i also just love a girl with an ego - that one of the things that pissed her off about james was the sense of him as an academic rival. so maybe something in magical chemical research? there’s also a part of me that just likes the idea of her dreaming of travel and exploration, particularly in the last months of her life when she was confined to the house. the letter to sirius focussed on james, frustration at being sealed in and unable to go out under his cloak, but i think that could be lily expressing a frustration she shares with james but not wanting to sound like she herself was complaining. so yeah something that lets her think and roam and comes with some prestige, because she’s got a lot to prove and a muggleborn chip on her shoulder that means she’s determined to make a name for herself. as she should!
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secretkeeper13 · 6 months
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Actual lady partner in a law firm here. While I regret my career choice on an hourly basis, at least I can sleep well at night knowing I’m earning an honest living providing legal services and not profiting off of cosplaying Laura Ingalls Wilder and hawking glamorized trad wife nonsense to the masses who’ll never attain it because she married a millionaire and they didn’t
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secretkeeper13 · 7 months
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Scent
@hinnymicrofic
“When did you finally figure it out?” Ginny asks. Her hair is fanned out around her, the red a shocking contrast to the green of the Quidditch pitch. 
They’d been mucking about - flying, tossing a Quaffle, racing, perhaps brushing up against each other in the sky more than was strictly necessary for a casual scrimmage. They had finally headed for the ground as the sun made its lazy descent below the line of trees. Ginny had flopped down on the grass to watch it and Harry had joined her, the thrill of flying still singing in his chest. Or maybe that was just Ginny. 
“Hmm?” Harry hums contentedly, watching the sky transition to a brilliant orange. 
“When did you finally figure out that you fancied me?” Ginny asks, trailing her fingers through the grass. 
The question startles him, because it seems to him now that he must’ve always fancied her, at least a bit, even if he was too thick to realize or too wrapped up in other things to notice. He’s still thinking when he answers, “When I wanted to throttle Dean.” 
She laughs, which was what he’d intended. “Jealous, were you?”
“Mm,” he agrees, still mulling the question over. 
Looking back on it, there are a great many glaring signals that Harry hadn’t recognized for what they were at the time. The way he’d longed for his summer with her to stretch on, the twinge of regret as she walked away on the train…
“That first Potions lesson, you were what I smelled in the Amortentia,” he muses. “That probably should’ve been a clue…”
He’d been thinking out loud, and only after he’s said it does he realize that was perhaps a more vulnerable confession than he’d intended to make. That’s a bit much, probably, when they’ve only been together a week. 
“What?” Ginny says, and Harry wishes he could snatch the words back, wishes he could chew them up and swallow them to be buried somewhere deep in his gut where they belong. 
“Yeah,” he says, trying to sound nonchalant. 
Ginny rolls over and props herself up on her elbows, her expression a mixture of incredulity and mischievousness. “Did you really? What did it smell like?”
“A few things,” he says, unable to look at her and instead pretending to be utterly entranced with the sunset. “Treacle tart. Something that smelled like my Firebolt. And…”
He finally looks at her, and finds that her eyes are glowing brighter than the sun ever could. “You.”
She seems to be struck uncharacteristically speechless, and the moment hangs for several panicked heartbeats. Then, she shuffles closer and presses her sweet lips down to his urgently, and Harry reckons he can’t have mucked it up too badly, as she runs her fingers through his hair and presses herself against him. 
She pulls away suddenly and stares down at him, her eyes pressing him down into the earth, and then she lets out a bark of laughter.
“What?” he asks, smiling. 
“You–” she cuts herself off, rolling back over and letting out a loud breath that floats up into the darkening sky. “You can’t say shite like that to me.”
He has no idea what to say to that, but luckily she spares him by continuing. “You can’t, it isn’t fair. I already like you too much.”
Harry wonders whether the sun has set directly into his chest. “Well, me too. Clearly.”
Ginny snorts, and Harry reaches for her hand. He breathes in deeply, wanting to drink in the moment, and he thinks he catches the faint flowery scent of her lingering traitorously in the air.
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secretkeeper13 · 7 months
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What’s something about Ron Weasley as a character that you think is underrated?
That Ron is really, really funny, and and that his sense of humour isn't a sign of immaturity or gratuitous comic relief for the reader's sake, but an absolutely essential part of what both Harry and Hermione value in Ron as a character as an antidote to their own tendencies (moodiness and seriousness/anxiousness, respectively). Ron makes bad days bearable to get through for the people around him. I think people mistake Ron making jokes for a lack of emotional awareness, but I actually think it’s the opposite. By the series end Ron is literally the most emotionally well-adjusted of the central canon characters. That line about Peeves’ poem right at the end of DH when the war is won (“Really gives a feeling for the scope and tragedy of the thing, doesn't it?”) is a) brilliant and b) such a great manifesto for how Ron’s outlook on the world — not humour as emotional avoidance, but humour that sits within all the grief and pain and suffering, and makes it that bit more bearable. So yeah Ron Weasley’s love for chuckles is Important and Overlooked and I will keep saying it til I am blue in the face
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secretkeeper13 · 7 months
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love writing. writing is awesome. it’s a shame that it involves writing though
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