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RWatHT - Chapter 8: Broken Hearts

They had just finished the last D.A meeting before the holiday break. Cho was a bit disappointed to not have learned to see that Cedric had yet to show up to another meeting. Ever since he’d become a Champion it was becoming exceedingly difficult to get a moment alone between the two of them, she knew how apparently difficult the training was, she even saw some bruises on Ron Weasley’s face in the mornings that he would try to hide with the hood of his robes.

Luna Lovegood, who Cho had always been on formal terms in unlike the rest of their house, would come to dinner waving her wand under the table while muttering a spell again and again, she looked incredibly serious and the daydreaming look that always overtook her face seemed to be gone and replaced now with a face similar to Roger Davies’s during any Quidditch Match. It was unsettling to see someone who she saw as perpetually cheerful so unlike herself.

Daphne Greengrass was the odd one out, she heard almost nothing about the younger Slytherin other than the fact she was in Harry’s year and was apparently quite smart, second only behind Hermione. She had always kept quiet ever since she arrived at Hogwarts never bringing any sort of attention to herself. To say Cho had been surprised she had been chosen would be an understatement, she was of course one of the best students in her year, but nothing that Cho could say outstanding compared to Harry or Hermione.

And now there was nothing discernible that anyone could say about her behavior, she would finish her classes, go to wherever she went by the lake, disappear with her founder and appear the next morning at breakfast as if nothing had happened.

She understood that Cedric had now a burden of responsibilities, on top of being a Champion again, he was also the new Head Boy and the Captain of the Hufflepuff Quidditch team. She understood, but she also wanted to snog her boyfriend, especially when he got all rough on her.

Lately, Cedric had gotten this more primal side of him during their private time, snogging the daylights out of her and leaving her very much dazed and quite happy. He held her waist close to him, he bit her lower lip almost hard for it to bleed, he whispered possessive sweet nothings into her ear while his hands seemed to roam more and more south. To everyone else he was sweet and innocent Cedric Diggory, and she liked it that way.

Now, she was walking through the halls of Hogwarts heading towards the Ravenclaw Tower to pack for the holidays. She had planned to invite Cedric, but she hadn’t found the time or place to do so. As she made a list in her mind about every little thing she might have missed she bumped into some as she rounded the corner, she fell on her bum and as she looked up to see who she had run into she came face to face with her boyfriend.

He looked spent, just like he did after his Quidditch training with the team, he had sweat all over him, he breathed heavily as he looked down at Cho. His normally well combed hair was in disarray, his eyes sparkled when they met with Cho’s, he had some Quidditch gloves on, but she knew that Hufflepuff had practice tomorrow. The corners of his mouth lifted as he saw Cho. Wordlessly, he picked up his girlfriend and took her hand leading them inside the castle into an empty classroom. Cedric casted a Silencing Charm and a Locking Charm on the door.

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Potters Look Quite Like Gingers Nowadays

Can't believe someone actually asked, but I'm happy to respond.

This one is a One-Shot Crack Fic I'm working on from book 2 to the final book.

Basically, Snape finds out about the whole Malfoy calling Hermione a mudblood incident in Chamber of Secrets, but instead of being angry at Malfoy for saying mudblood he projects himself onto him, and basically tries to set them up.

He fails because Hermione finds Malfoy repulsive and Malfoy really doesn't want to date Hermione, but still does what Snape tells him to because he's scared of his unstable Potions Professor.

Snape also begins to let go of his hatred for Harry and begins concentrating it on Ron, that's where the title comes from. I've just written a couple of paragraphs, but I hope it will turn out okay.

Here's little snippet:

Snape stared at Malfoy with such hatred, such repulsion and anger. That when Draco Malfoy finally raised his head, he realized he was looking into himself. The young Malfoy's grey eyes reflected his own dark and slumping figure, and there he realized they were one in the same. Two poor souls, unable to...

To be with the one they loved…

Yes, poor Malfoy truly had screwed it up. He had screwed it up far earlier than he had. With the exact same horrible word that had cost him his Lily. And then the disappointed came in, this world was so wretched that it could never let two tortured souls be with the one they love.

Malfoy stared up at him, and Snape then realized he so hope. Desperation. Fear. A thousand emotions that swam in his eyes. Surely, it was hope for Snape to fix this situation. Desperation for him and his lovely muggle-born Gryffindor to belong together. Fear of losing her forever.

"Mr. Malfoy," he said in his normal stern voice. He gulped, the poor boy he truly was scared of losing his Lil–Hermione. "Do not worry."

And then his previous frown became a slow smirk that overtook his features.

"You are not losing her," Snape continued. "I'll do everything in my power to get you and Ms. Granger together."

The poor boy, he was so excited he became almost petrified.

What’s she listening to? 🌙

Hermione and her two red cats

Thoughts on Ron and Hermione as a ship?

thank you very much for the ask, @thesilverstarling!

i’ll state my position straight away: book ron and hermione are the best of the canon couples.

they will have a long and extremely happy marriage made rich by great and stalwart love, lust, fun, and faithfulness, rather than held together by duty and couples’ therapy like so many readers and authors (including jkr, who seems to have decided to spend the years since the conclusion of the series failing to understand anything about her own characters) tend to think.

i will state another position straight away: lest i seem like i’m just a fan with blinkers on, i think this even though hermione is, by far, my least favourite member of the trio. if she were real i would detest her, and i dislike how she is treated by the narrative as always justified in her negative characteristics. i like fanon hermione - perfect and preternaturally good - even less.

as a result, i think that it’s ridiculous that jkr has said that she thought ron needed to ‘become worthy’ of hermione. they belong together as equals - which is what they’re set up in the narrative as being from the off - and i hate seeing that undermined.

because ronald weasley? he’s an icon. and he doesn’t get anywhere near the respect he deserves in fandom.

there are multiple reasons for this - ron’s narrative purpose is to be the everyman sidekick, and so he is able to be less special than harry or hermione (the helper-figure); the amount of aristocracy wank in this fandom means that the weasleys’ ordinariness is less appealing to writers than making harry have twenty different lordships and call himself hadrian; the narrative interrogates ron’s flaws - especially his capacity for jealousy - much more intensively than it interrogates either hermione’s (cruel, inflexible, meddling) or harry’s (reckless, self-absorbed, judgemental) - but one i feel is particularly significant is that ron is such a british character that many of his traits are not understood as intended by non-british readers.

in particular - as is outlined in this excellent meta by @whinlatter - ron’s sense of humour isn’t indicative of immaturity or a lack of seriousness, but is, in fact, evidence that he’s the most emotionally aware of the trio.

ron is shown throughout the series to understand how both harry and hermione need to have their emotions approached - and i think there is no piece of writing which says this better than crocodile heart by @floreatcastellumposts:

That was what she liked most about Ron, she thought vaguely. He was very good at being suitably outraged on your behalf. For Harry, for her, for Neville. That sort of thing mattered, when you were hurt or embarrassed or wronged in some way. You needed to have someone else on your side, to be as emotional as you felt, maybe even more so, so that you might feel a bit more normal. It was very decent of him, and she was not sure he realised he did it.

ron’s inherent emotional awareness is an enormous source of comfort to other people. he does the work which isn’t flashy or special - he makes tea and tells jokes and is just there - but which is needed in healthy human relationships far more frequently than a willingness to fight to the death for the other person.

[as an aside, this normality - even though i think it is assumed rather than justified by the text - is also what ginny provides for harry. if you believe that hinny are a good couple but romione aren’t… i can’t help you.]

but let’s look at some specific reasons why ron and hermione belong together:

their communication styles mesh perfectly. ron is the only person hermione knows who feeds her love of being challenged and debated, and who is able to engage in this way of communicating without becoming irate when she refuses to back down. ron is good at picking his battles, but he’s also good at recognising that hermione’s tendency to argue isn’t intended to be confrontational a lot of the time - it’s just the way she works through feelings and problems. he’s far more easy-going about her tendency to nag, interrupt, try to provoke arguments, or speak condescendingly than he’s given credit for - and hermione evidently respects this, since when he does tell her not to push a situation (above all, when she’s trying to needle harry into talking about sirius), she listens to him.

that ron and hermione’s tendency to bicker is taken by fans to be a bad thing is because it’s something harry - from whose perspective the narrative is written - doesn’t understand. harry is extremely conflict-avoidant - he tends to take being pushed on views and opinions he has to be insulting; and he has a tendency to assume that he is right which is just as profound as hermione’s. he and ginny communicate not by debating, but by ginny having no time for his rigidity and refusing to indulge it - but ron and hermione bickering about everything is not a negative thing within their specific emotional dynamic.

[as another aside, this glaring chasm in communication styles is why harry and hermione would be a disaster as a couple.]

they each provide validation the other needs. it’s clear - reading between the lines - that hermione is a tremendously lonely person. the friendlessness of her initial few weeks at hogwarts seems to be a continuation of her experience as a child, and - outside of ron and harry - that friendlessness endures through her schooldays. i’m always struck, for example, by the fact that, when she falls out with ron in prisoner of azkaban, she has no-one else to spend time with, and that this is only avoided in half-blood prince because harry decides not to freeze her out. i don’t think her friendship with ginny is anywhere near as close as fanon seems to imply (ginny has no interest in being nagged either), nor do i think that she’s anywhere near as close to neville (not least because she is so condescending to him) as she’s often written to be.

and this loneliness seems to stretch beyond hogwarts. the absence of hermione’s parents’ from the narrative is - in a doylist sense - clearly just a device to maximise time with the trio all together, but the watsonian reading is that she doesn’t have a particularly good relationship with them. hermione’s obviously upper-middle-class background - the name! the skiing! the holidays in the south of france! - can be presumed, i think, to come with a series of expectations from her parents which she feels constantly that she’s not entirely meeting, particularly expectations attached to academic success.

[for example, the grangers - were she a muggle child - would undoubtedly have ambitions for her to attend an elite university and then go into a prestigious career. tertiary education of the type that they’re familiar with doesn’t seem to exist in the wizarding world - most careers seem to be taught by apprenticeship - and this, alongside all the other divides between the magical and muggle worlds which contribute to the distance between them, would be one very obvious area in which she felt the need to prove herself to them.]

ron, too, has quite a difficult relationship with his position in the family - voldemort’s locket is not wrong to point out that he seems to receive considerably less of his mother’s emotional attention than ginny or the rest of his brothers - and he too is constrained by expectations which he doesn’t know how to explain he has no interest in - above all, molly’s desire for her sons to achieve top grades and go into the ministry.

he also suffers while at hogwarts from being ‘harry potter’s best friend’, something which harry never appreciates. but hermione does. she recognises ron’s jealousy and never allows harry to minimise it (and she and ron are very much aligned on having no respect for harry’s saviour and martyr complexes). she appreciates ron’s strengths - above all his kindness and his sense of humour - and makes him feel as though he’s achieved things with them. and ron does the same for her; he is hugely observant when it comes to her, and he challenges and defends her.

the two of them clearly spend a lot of time together one-on-one while harry’s involved in his various shenanigans (including outside of school - hermione has often arrived at the burrow days or even weeks before harry, and they seem to write to each other frequently when apart). they do this within a relationship which is fundamentally equal. one issue with hinny is that, post-war, harry is going to have to get used to seeing ginny as a peer, rather than as someone he has to protect. but ron and hermione never have that issue - equality is baked into their relationship from the off.

because, to be quite frank, fandom overstates the role that jealousy plays in their relationship. it’s true that ron certainly doesn’t acquit himself brilliantly when it comes to hermione’s relationship with viktor krum (it’s because he’s bi and doesn’t know it yet), and a tendency to externalise his insecurity into trying to make others also feel insecure is one of his primary negative traits (hermione does this too, via her patented lofty voice when she’s trying to condescend to people). but this is often taken as the initial red flag for how the relationship would crash and burn, and ron’s toxic jealousy is often used in fan-fiction as the trigger for emotional and physical violence towards hermione which, frequently, seems to drive her into the arms of either draco malfoy or severus snape… who are, of course, the first people we think of when we hear the words ‘not prone to jealousy’...

but i think it’s important to point out several things in defence of ron’s jealousy over krum. firstly, hermione evidently regards his jealousy as ridiculous - she’s upset by it, yes, but her upset must be understood as being caused by the fact that she wanted him to ask her out. she doesn’t think he’s being possessive, she thinks he’s being stupid. secondly, hermione is equally as jealous over ron’s crush on fleur delacour and relationship with lavender brown. she behaves just as cruelly when it comes to lavender as ron does when it comes to krum - and the narrative only treats her actions as more sympathetic or justified both because harry dislikes lavender too, and because, by that point in the series, jkr has dispensed with any inclination to ever criticise her.

but, outside of this teenage pettiness, ron is never jealous of hermione over things which matter. he is never jealous of her intelligence or competence or ambition or success (indeed, he defends her constantly from attacks designed to undermine her in these areas). for someone who struggles with being overshadowed by harry, he is never upset at being overshadowed by her. he is clearly going to be happy to support her in any of the career ambitions she can be written as having post-war.

and, on this point, i think it’s worth interrogating why so many readers still seem to feel uncomfortable with the idea of ron and hermione having a dynamic where she is the more ‘powerful’ one. [it’s always a bit trite to say ‘but what if the genders were reversed?’, but actually that’s not irrelevant here]. if hermione ends up taking the ministry by storm and ron becomes a stay-at-home father or has a job which is just to pay the bills, what, precisely, is wrong with that? why, precisely, should hermione regard ron making that choice for himself as a negative thing? hermione so often seems to leave ron in fan-fiction because of a lack of ambition - something which seems to be particularly common in dramione - but, in canon, she is shown to not particularly care if ron and harry do the bare minimum when it comes to studying etc. she nags them to do their work so they don’t get in trouble. she doesn’t nag them to do it to the same standard that she would.

and, actually, i think that ron being less ambitious than hermione is something which is key to how well they work. because ron provides not only emotional support, but emotional clarity.

hermione is shown throughout canon to - just as harry does - have a tendency to become obsessive to the detriment of her own health. she is also often - as harry is - emotionally or intellectually inflexible, and finds it hard to move on when what she feels or believes is proven to be wrong. both she and harry are micro-thinkers, who lean towards knee-jerk assumptions and stubborn convictions (and, indeed, hermione has a remarkably hagrid-ish tendency towards blind loyalty).

ron is none of these things. ron is a big-picture thinker (it’s why he’s so good at chess). he’s a pragmatist. he’s the least righteous of the three. he understands that faith and loyalty are choices, and that sometimes these choices will lead to outcomes which are bad or hard. he is the one of the three most willing to own up to having made mistakes. he is the one least likely to act on gut instinct (and, therefore, the hardest to fool - i think it’s worth emphasising that he clocks that tom riddle is tricking harry immediately, the only one of the trio to do so). he understands that things are a marathon, not a sprint. he is the least obsessive.

and these traits contribute to aspects of his character which are underappreciated. ron worries about hermione making herself ill during exams, or when she is using the time-turner, and makes an effort to get her to set healthy boundaries and redirect her anxiety. ron stands on a broken leg in front of sirius or goes into the forest to fight aragog not out of righteousness, but out of choice. ron takes over the burden of preparing buckbeak’s defence when it is clear that hermione is approaching burnout. ron is completely right that harry hasn’t done any long-term planning for the horcrux hunt, and his anger does force harry to tighten up after he leaves the trio. ron has a clear head in the middle of battle. ron makes harry and hermione laugh. ron is unafraid of human emotion. ron arrests harry’s tendency to brood over the little things by looking at the bigger picture. ron will always come back.

ron is bringing his politician wife regular cups of tea and making sure she doesn’t work all night. he is helping his lawyer wife to feel less upset over losing one case by reminding her that she’s won ten others. he is noticing stress creeping in and whirling her off for a dirty weekend, or even just a takeaway on the sofa. he is teaching his daughter to be proud of her ambition and his son to treat women as equals and both of his children that all you can do when you fuck up is apologise and try to do better. he is making hermione smile on the worst days of her life. he is helping her strategise her long-term goals when she gets stuck on the short-term ones. he is telling her straight when she needs to get it together. he is seeing a misogynistic head of department call hermione a ‘silly little girl’ and choosing to tell him exactly what he thinks of that.

ron is the ultimate wife guy. hermione is a very, very lucky lady.

RWaHT - Chapter 17: Secret Friends

For the first time in a long time, Daphne felt a bit unconfident. As she walked down the halls to the stadium she couldn’t help, but to rub her naked nape. For almost five months now had she worn Tom’s locket, she had grown accustomed to the comfort of the cold gold chain that hugged her skin, and now only 15 minutes without it, she felt as if she was about to go crazy. She looked down at the box that she held in her hands, for some reason she felt unsure about this. Never before had she felt unsure, in fact having Tom around only made her far more and more confident about herself, but now it was as if his comforting praises and words were the true source of her confidence.

She knew this was ridiculous, before she met Tom she was already aware of her own skills and capabilities. Tom was only a voice reminding her of how special she was, of how capable she was, she didn’t need him…

Daphne looked down at the box in her hands, feeling a heavy weight dropping on top of her.

That much… 

Entering the stadium she saw Diggory, Lovegood and Weasley engaged in a conversation. Weasley said something that made Diggory laugh, and Lovegood something that resembled laughter in somebody’s messed up book. Diggory clapped Weasley’s back, and calmed down enough to say something in return, which made Weasley laugh. Lovegood then said something that made both Diggory and Weasley stop laughing, they looked at each other before bursting into more laughter, Lovegood joining them good heartedly.  The three of them almost looked like friends, and a strange ache settled in Daphne’s chest.

Clearing her throat, she announced herself to the room. The three looked up, Weasley’s chipper mood faltering at her sight, Diggory’s smile lowered, and Lovegood’s small and simple smile remained as she walked over to them. In fact, it was Luna who had decided to greet her.

“Hello, Daphne Greengrass,” she said. “How are you today?”

“I’m good,” she said, simultaneously wincing at her quiet tone. Clearing her throat once more she spoke in a more loud voice. “How about you?”

“I’m very good,” she said with a smile. “Thanks for asking. Although, I’m not sure how happy you’ll be with us today, seeing as we stopped speaking as soon as you entered the room.”

Diggory and Weasley gave Luna a sharp look, after which Diggory quickly recovered and approached her.

“Sorry about that,” said Diggory. “We were just–”

“It doesn’t matter,” she cut him off, even though the words didn’t feel that honest. “I understand why you wouldn’t be so inclined to be on good terms with me–”

“Oh she understands now does she,” Ron muttered in a sarcastic tone. Ignoring him she continued.

“I came with gifts,” she said. “A token of my forgiveness, and my willingness for us to be…” As she saw the way they stared at her, Daphne’s mind blanked. “To be…” Her throat felt dry and she swallowed to no avail, “To be…” Sweet Salazar, why was it so hot inside the stadium?

“Friends?” Ron finished for her in a questioning tone.

“YES!” Daphne shouted, making them flinch before she swallowed down her relief and repeating herself. “Yes,” she said in a more calm manner now.

She turned the box in her hands, opening it and revealing to them three large, oval lockets of heavy gold. One with an almost feathery ‘R’ in blue sapphires, another with a simple ‘H’ in diamonds, and the last had a sharp ‘G’ in red rubies. As the three other Champions looked down at their gifts, they all, almost, simultaneously looked back up at Daphne, who could only offer what she hoped was a friendly smile.

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Always see “real women” posts so here’s one for the dudes.