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edenfallingI've decided, since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be published in less than two months, to officially give up on finishing two HP stories that I essentially abandoned last year. I'm posting the fragments here; if, for some reason, anyone is interested in continuing either of them, be my guest.
"Aphrodisia" is a Ginny/Neville story I started writing before HBP was released. (That explains any canon inconsistencies; I honestly don't remember if Neville made it into Advanced Potions or not, and since I'm not going to finish the story, I don't much care.)
I don't really remember where I was going with this -- maybe something about Neville having undiscovered side-effects from the incident when he was a baby... maybe he'd been put under Cruciatus too, and no one noticed, but it affected his nervous system? I think I had something like that in mind. Anyway, it was meant to be a friendship story as much as a romance, with Neville finding some social self-confidence and Ginny getting over Harry after her relationship with him imploded, and Ginny and Neville negotiating how to have a relationship when Neville had, effectively, no sex drive.
(ETA, 1/24/2010: Looking back at "Aphrodesia," I think one reason I drifted away from it was because I had conceived of Neville's asexuality as a result of actual neurological damage, which started to bug me after a while. Someday I may try rewriting it without that problematic background; possibly I could even finish that story.)
-----------------------------------------
Aphrodisia
-----------------------------------------
The war ended in late March.
Despite the chaos, Professor McGonagall decided it would be best to restore as much a sense of normality as possible, and so lessons continued, although the OWLs and NEWTs were rescheduled for the middle of July.
In Neville's opinion, this reprieve wasn't nearly long enough. Herbology would be easy, of course, and he could probably transfer his work with battle hexes and healing to any classes involving wandwork, but Potions was a different story. He'd squeaked into Advanced Potions by the skin of his teeth (he'd decided, upon receving his unexpectedly high OWL results, that there was no way he'd let Snape terrify him into quitting), and despite his progress under Professor Slughorn in sixth year, spending most of seventh year trying to kill people before they killed him hadn't leave him much time to study ingredient reactions. He was convinced he'd flub his NEWTs.
At first he used most of his free time chopping ingredients, stirring cauldrons, and trying to bludgeon lists of reaction types into his brain. By May, though, he grew philosophical. If he passed, he passed, and if he failed, he failed. He could be an herbalist either way, and nobody particularly cared if war heroes were also potions experts.
He was also a bit tired of Hermione pointing him out to Harry and Ron as an example of good study habits, though he wouldn't ever tell her that.
So Neville turned to experimentation. Snape had spent years telling him that he could wring ludicrous results out of any potion, and he'd noticed that most of his accidents still did something -- unlike most botched potions, they weren't magically inert -- so he thought he might as well toss a jumble of things together and see what happened. It wasn't as though anyone would mind if he blew up some of the nastier side dungeons, and if, after the war, he couldn't shield himself from a measley potions accident, he deserved whatever strange things it did to him.
He kept a few rats around for testing purposes; if nothing happened to them, he poured his creations onto the snake plants he kept in the dungeon window. Neville figured that rats and snake plants were nearly impossible to kill -- therefore, they made the best test subjects. And if a few transfigured, dyed, or floating rats started running around the castle, or the snake plants grew legs and scurried away, well, Hogwarts had seen stranger things.
Besides, he was due a bit of trouble-making.
Things percolated along innocuously until one experiment made a snake plant burst into luxuriant golden flowers -- particularly odd, since snake plants didn't bloom -- and release a sweet, heavy perfume into the dungeon air. The rats immediately pounced on each other and started trying to increase their population in front of Neville's horrified gaze.
He dropped his spare cleaning rag over the plant and muttered, "Scourgify," clearing the air.
The rats uncoupled, snapped half-heartedly at each other, and retreated to their makeshift dens in their wire cages.
"Hmm."
Neville uncovered the plant. The rats scurried out and pounced, squeaking in excitement. Another bud burst into bloom, wafting its heavy scent through the room, and the cages began to rattle to their occupants' motion.
Neville sniffed experimentally, and sneezed.
"Bugger."
-----------------------------------------
The war ended in late March. By mid-April, Ginny was thoroughly fed up with the professors' attempts to create an air of normality and to treat the students as children. Yes, technically she was only sixteen, but she was a soldier. She wasn't a child, and she didn't appreciate the sudden loss of status; she felt like people were trying to wrap her in cotton and smother her with kindness.
She also didn't appreciate the way Harry seemed to agree with the professors. Two weeks after Voldemort's death they had a spectacular fight, and she wasn't speaking to him anymore. He didn't try to apologize, either, just moped around the castle in fits of black depression.
He owed her something for her aggravation, Ginny decided, so she appropriated his Invisibility Cloak and took to skipping lessons, wandering around the castle at all hours of the day and night. She didn't need the cloak, of course -- they'd all learned concealment charms during the war -- but she liked the silky feel of the fabric and the air of innocent adventure that clung to it. She felt more like a girl and less like a spy when she wore it, but it didn't smother her the way the professors did.
"They want us to act like children," she told Hermione when her friend scolded her for avoiding the teachers and ignoring her work. "They shouldn't complain if I'm doing what they want."
Hermione folded her arms and gave Ginny a long, considering stare. "Fine. I won't say anything, but you have to give me three hours each Wednesday and Saturday to prove that you won't fail all your exams."
Six hours a week was a small price for freedom. Ginny agreed.
May found her firmly ensconced in Greenhouse Six most afternoons, tending her small patch of experimental hybrid Tentaculas, or simply relying on them to keep disturbances away while she read. It was easier than splitting her attention and holding a hex on the tip of her tongue, ready to cast. Professor Sprout had been skeptical of Ginny's ability to train Tentaculas as guards -- "They'll be as uncontrollable as the Whomping Willow, most likely," she'd said -- but was now making noises about planting seedlings in large flowerpots and selling them by owl order.
Going into business as an exotic plant breeder wasn't exactly what Ginny had planned to do with her life, but she supposed it made as much sense as opening a joke shop. And she wasn't about to turn away people who wanted to give her money for something she'd do anyway.
She was trying to piece together a hybridization potion to add flowers to her Tentaculas -- scribbling down ingredients and scratching them out again -- when a sweet, heavy scent wafted through the greenhouse.
"Mmmm..." It was like warm butterbeer sliding down her throat, or ice cream on a summer afternoon. It was like kissing Dean Thomas, the most creative of her boyfriends. It was like sinking into a bubblebath with Harry's strong fingers massaging her shoulders.
Ginny looked up lazily, and saw Neville trying to sneak over to Professor Sprout's personal work area. He held a covered pot in his hands. And what hands! Ginny was sure Neville could give a killer shoulder massage, and maybe... massage... other places while he was at it. His mouth was unremarkable, but she'd learned a lot from Dean; she could teach him, like she'd taught Harry.
All she had to do was stroll over and--
Ginny pinched her nose shut. Something was pushing against her mind -- she liked boys as much as the next person, but she wasn't that forward, and she'd never considered Neville that way -- and the only notable change in the area was that heavy, sweet perfume.
After ten seconds the languorous feeling ebbed. Definitely the perfume, then. And, judging by the timing, probably Neville's fault.
"Neville, please get rid of that smell before I do something we'll both regret," she said, still pinching her nose. "Then explain why you have a perfume that makes people want to have sex and seems to take after the Imperius curse."
Neville flinched. "Bugger."
"And watch your language," added Ginny, grinning.
-----------------------------------------
"I was hoping it only worked on rats, but if it affected you, I think I'm in trouble," Neville explained, trying not to look at Ginny. His plant had made her want to... to... with him, and taking over someone else's will was even worse than Cruciatus or Avada Kedavra. He'd prefer to die or go completely insane rather than let somebody use him as a puppet. It wasn't just memories of his parents that had made him sick in the fake Moody's class that one time. Floating in a blissful haze while he obeyed the professor's orders had been equally nauseating, once he came back to himself and was able to look rationally at what he'd done.
"We're in trouble, Neville," said Ginny. "This is too interesting for me to ignore."
Neville looked up, startled, and Ginny smiled at him. She was like sunshine, he thought, and he couldn't understand why Harry was being such an idiot and throwing her away.
"The obvious thing would be to burn the plant and destroy your notes," Ginny continued, "but once somebody discovers a spell or potion, it has a tendency to get rediscovered no matter how hard you try to stamp it out. So I figure it's better to study this and see if we can find counters."
"Right," said Neville. "Erm. What I know so far is that the potion works on snake plants, and the flowers work on rats and on you. But the flowers don't seem to do anything to me, which doesn't make sense."
Ginny shrugged. "It could just be that I'm a girl, or maybe you're better at pushing aside some suggestions than you think you are. After all, I noticed something was wrong before I did anything, and I'm no great shakes at keeping people out of my head."
Neville wondered if she was talking about Voldemort's diary, which he'd learned about in bits and pieces over the years. If she was, well, he thought she had things backwards. She'd had the strength to throw the Horcrux away after several months of its influence, and it had taken a whole year for the fragment of Voldemort's soul to overpower her and drag her down to the Chamber of Secrets. He was absolutely sure he wouldn't have lasted half as long in the same situation. He didn't have that kind of willpower.
He tried to explain that.
Ginny shook her head and cut him off. "Trust me, the only reason I lasted that long was because Tom thought I was amusing, and because he didn't want to shut down Hogwarts before he'd lured Harry down to face him. Don't sell yourself short, Neville. You're a lot stronger than you think you are."
Neville flushed and looked down at the problematic flowers, now safely encased in an airtight bubble. "I suppose so. But that still doesn't explain why I'm not affected." The golden flowers swayed gently as he nudged the pot, and a light dusting of pollen drifted around the bubble like glitter in the Muggle snowglobe Hermione had given him one Christmas.
"Well," said Ginny, standing up and clapping her hands briskly, "that's what experiments are for. Let's start by looking over your ingredient and brewing process notes."
-----------------------------------------
End of Fragment
"Aphrodisia" is a Ginny/Neville story I started writing before HBP was released. (That explains any canon inconsistencies; I honestly don't remember if Neville made it into Advanced Potions or not, and since I'm not going to finish the story, I don't much care.)
I don't really remember where I was going with this -- maybe something about Neville having undiscovered side-effects from the incident when he was a baby... maybe he'd been put under Cruciatus too, and no one noticed, but it affected his nervous system? I think I had something like that in mind. Anyway, it was meant to be a friendship story as much as a romance, with Neville finding some social self-confidence and Ginny getting over Harry after her relationship with him imploded, and Ginny and Neville negotiating how to have a relationship when Neville had, effectively, no sex drive.
(ETA, 1/24/2010: Looking back at "Aphrodesia," I think one reason I drifted away from it was because I had conceived of Neville's asexuality as a result of actual neurological damage, which started to bug me after a while. Someday I may try rewriting it without that problematic background; possibly I could even finish that story.)
-----------------------------------------
Aphrodisia
-----------------------------------------
The war ended in late March.
Despite the chaos, Professor McGonagall decided it would be best to restore as much a sense of normality as possible, and so lessons continued, although the OWLs and NEWTs were rescheduled for the middle of July.
In Neville's opinion, this reprieve wasn't nearly long enough. Herbology would be easy, of course, and he could probably transfer his work with battle hexes and healing to any classes involving wandwork, but Potions was a different story. He'd squeaked into Advanced Potions by the skin of his teeth (he'd decided, upon receving his unexpectedly high OWL results, that there was no way he'd let Snape terrify him into quitting), and despite his progress under Professor Slughorn in sixth year, spending most of seventh year trying to kill people before they killed him hadn't leave him much time to study ingredient reactions. He was convinced he'd flub his NEWTs.
At first he used most of his free time chopping ingredients, stirring cauldrons, and trying to bludgeon lists of reaction types into his brain. By May, though, he grew philosophical. If he passed, he passed, and if he failed, he failed. He could be an herbalist either way, and nobody particularly cared if war heroes were also potions experts.
He was also a bit tired of Hermione pointing him out to Harry and Ron as an example of good study habits, though he wouldn't ever tell her that.
So Neville turned to experimentation. Snape had spent years telling him that he could wring ludicrous results out of any potion, and he'd noticed that most of his accidents still did something -- unlike most botched potions, they weren't magically inert -- so he thought he might as well toss a jumble of things together and see what happened. It wasn't as though anyone would mind if he blew up some of the nastier side dungeons, and if, after the war, he couldn't shield himself from a measley potions accident, he deserved whatever strange things it did to him.
He kept a few rats around for testing purposes; if nothing happened to them, he poured his creations onto the snake plants he kept in the dungeon window. Neville figured that rats and snake plants were nearly impossible to kill -- therefore, they made the best test subjects. And if a few transfigured, dyed, or floating rats started running around the castle, or the snake plants grew legs and scurried away, well, Hogwarts had seen stranger things.
Besides, he was due a bit of trouble-making.
Things percolated along innocuously until one experiment made a snake plant burst into luxuriant golden flowers -- particularly odd, since snake plants didn't bloom -- and release a sweet, heavy perfume into the dungeon air. The rats immediately pounced on each other and started trying to increase their population in front of Neville's horrified gaze.
He dropped his spare cleaning rag over the plant and muttered, "Scourgify," clearing the air.
The rats uncoupled, snapped half-heartedly at each other, and retreated to their makeshift dens in their wire cages.
"Hmm."
Neville uncovered the plant. The rats scurried out and pounced, squeaking in excitement. Another bud burst into bloom, wafting its heavy scent through the room, and the cages began to rattle to their occupants' motion.
Neville sniffed experimentally, and sneezed.
"Bugger."
-----------------------------------------
The war ended in late March. By mid-April, Ginny was thoroughly fed up with the professors' attempts to create an air of normality and to treat the students as children. Yes, technically she was only sixteen, but she was a soldier. She wasn't a child, and she didn't appreciate the sudden loss of status; she felt like people were trying to wrap her in cotton and smother her with kindness.
She also didn't appreciate the way Harry seemed to agree with the professors. Two weeks after Voldemort's death they had a spectacular fight, and she wasn't speaking to him anymore. He didn't try to apologize, either, just moped around the castle in fits of black depression.
He owed her something for her aggravation, Ginny decided, so she appropriated his Invisibility Cloak and took to skipping lessons, wandering around the castle at all hours of the day and night. She didn't need the cloak, of course -- they'd all learned concealment charms during the war -- but she liked the silky feel of the fabric and the air of innocent adventure that clung to it. She felt more like a girl and less like a spy when she wore it, but it didn't smother her the way the professors did.
"They want us to act like children," she told Hermione when her friend scolded her for avoiding the teachers and ignoring her work. "They shouldn't complain if I'm doing what they want."
Hermione folded her arms and gave Ginny a long, considering stare. "Fine. I won't say anything, but you have to give me three hours each Wednesday and Saturday to prove that you won't fail all your exams."
Six hours a week was a small price for freedom. Ginny agreed.
May found her firmly ensconced in Greenhouse Six most afternoons, tending her small patch of experimental hybrid Tentaculas, or simply relying on them to keep disturbances away while she read. It was easier than splitting her attention and holding a hex on the tip of her tongue, ready to cast. Professor Sprout had been skeptical of Ginny's ability to train Tentaculas as guards -- "They'll be as uncontrollable as the Whomping Willow, most likely," she'd said -- but was now making noises about planting seedlings in large flowerpots and selling them by owl order.
Going into business as an exotic plant breeder wasn't exactly what Ginny had planned to do with her life, but she supposed it made as much sense as opening a joke shop. And she wasn't about to turn away people who wanted to give her money for something she'd do anyway.
She was trying to piece together a hybridization potion to add flowers to her Tentaculas -- scribbling down ingredients and scratching them out again -- when a sweet, heavy scent wafted through the greenhouse.
"Mmmm..." It was like warm butterbeer sliding down her throat, or ice cream on a summer afternoon. It was like kissing Dean Thomas, the most creative of her boyfriends. It was like sinking into a bubblebath with Harry's strong fingers massaging her shoulders.
Ginny looked up lazily, and saw Neville trying to sneak over to Professor Sprout's personal work area. He held a covered pot in his hands. And what hands! Ginny was sure Neville could give a killer shoulder massage, and maybe... massage... other places while he was at it. His mouth was unremarkable, but she'd learned a lot from Dean; she could teach him, like she'd taught Harry.
All she had to do was stroll over and--
Ginny pinched her nose shut. Something was pushing against her mind -- she liked boys as much as the next person, but she wasn't that forward, and she'd never considered Neville that way -- and the only notable change in the area was that heavy, sweet perfume.
After ten seconds the languorous feeling ebbed. Definitely the perfume, then. And, judging by the timing, probably Neville's fault.
"Neville, please get rid of that smell before I do something we'll both regret," she said, still pinching her nose. "Then explain why you have a perfume that makes people want to have sex and seems to take after the Imperius curse."
Neville flinched. "Bugger."
"And watch your language," added Ginny, grinning.
-----------------------------------------
"I was hoping it only worked on rats, but if it affected you, I think I'm in trouble," Neville explained, trying not to look at Ginny. His plant had made her want to... to... with him, and taking over someone else's will was even worse than Cruciatus or Avada Kedavra. He'd prefer to die or go completely insane rather than let somebody use him as a puppet. It wasn't just memories of his parents that had made him sick in the fake Moody's class that one time. Floating in a blissful haze while he obeyed the professor's orders had been equally nauseating, once he came back to himself and was able to look rationally at what he'd done.
"We're in trouble, Neville," said Ginny. "This is too interesting for me to ignore."
Neville looked up, startled, and Ginny smiled at him. She was like sunshine, he thought, and he couldn't understand why Harry was being such an idiot and throwing her away.
"The obvious thing would be to burn the plant and destroy your notes," Ginny continued, "but once somebody discovers a spell or potion, it has a tendency to get rediscovered no matter how hard you try to stamp it out. So I figure it's better to study this and see if we can find counters."
"Right," said Neville. "Erm. What I know so far is that the potion works on snake plants, and the flowers work on rats and on you. But the flowers don't seem to do anything to me, which doesn't make sense."
Ginny shrugged. "It could just be that I'm a girl, or maybe you're better at pushing aside some suggestions than you think you are. After all, I noticed something was wrong before I did anything, and I'm no great shakes at keeping people out of my head."
Neville wondered if she was talking about Voldemort's diary, which he'd learned about in bits and pieces over the years. If she was, well, he thought she had things backwards. She'd had the strength to throw the Horcrux away after several months of its influence, and it had taken a whole year for the fragment of Voldemort's soul to overpower her and drag her down to the Chamber of Secrets. He was absolutely sure he wouldn't have lasted half as long in the same situation. He didn't have that kind of willpower.
He tried to explain that.
Ginny shook her head and cut him off. "Trust me, the only reason I lasted that long was because Tom thought I was amusing, and because he didn't want to shut down Hogwarts before he'd lured Harry down to face him. Don't sell yourself short, Neville. You're a lot stronger than you think you are."
Neville flushed and looked down at the problematic flowers, now safely encased in an airtight bubble. "I suppose so. But that still doesn't explain why I'm not affected." The golden flowers swayed gently as he nudged the pot, and a light dusting of pollen drifted around the bubble like glitter in the Muggle snowglobe Hermione had given him one Christmas.
"Well," said Ginny, standing up and clapping her hands briskly, "that's what experiments are for. Let's start by looking over your ingredient and brewing process notes."
-----------------------------------------
End of Fragment
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Date: 2007-06-02 11:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-03 06:04 pm (UTC)