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edenfallingSummary: "Chamber of Secrets" from Ginny's point of view. After Harry kills Tom and the basilisk, Ginny faces her complete failure to either solve her own problems or keep Harry safe. She does not cope well, but at least not everyone blames her for helping Tom. That's a good thing, right?
This chapter was a bitch and a half to write, partly because internal conflict (moral and emotional) is less obviously dramatic than external conflict, but mostly because I was, of necessity, drawing very, very heavily on my own experience with depression, guilt spirals, and in-the-box thought patterns. That is not a time of my life I enjoy revisiting for any reason. :-/
We open with Ginny regaining consciousness down in the Chamber, having missed the entire climactic fight scene of CoS (because this is her story, not Harry's story, and his victory is only relevant inasmuch as it enables hers). The dialogue in this scene is all taken directly from CoS, but broken up with bits of my own narration to try and make it fit with Ginny's character arc. Ginny is in shock, basically, and also drowning in guilt.
Harry is kind of well-meaning but clueless, I think, though I did try to hint that he's also shaken and awkwardly unsure what to say to Ginny, particularly after my betas told me he came off kind of creepily flat and unemotional in the second draft. Rowling could get away with skipping over most of the emotional repercussions since CoS is such a tightly written book and its conflict is mostly external, but I couldn't since my story is both longer and heavily internal in nature; ALL the important characters must therefore at least give the illusion of an inner life.
When they meet Ron, I used a little bit of business from the British edition of CoS that for some inexplicable reason isn't in the American edition: Ron trying to hug Ginny and her pushing his arms away. It's a blatant hint that Ginny is really, really not all right, and I wish it hadn't been cut from the American text.
Ginny doesn't say a damn thing through this whole scene after she and Harry leave the Chamber, but she THINKS a hell of a lot, and most of it is related to guilt. The crying is kind of... a broken dam, I guess, that had been holding back all her stress and pain and anger and guilt for the whole year, and now all those buried emotional reactions are flooding out at once. Harry has no idea how to cope with this and is grimly focusing on practicalities, like getting everyone back up into the castle. Ron also has no idea how to cope. He tries a joke about Ginny's crush on Harry, which falls flat; that's canon. Then once they're all following Fawkes to McGonagall's office, I put in my first bit of non-canonical dialogue with Ron telling Ginny it'll be all right, that she survived and that's the important thing. Ginny thinks he doesn't understand anything, but she reaches up to take his hand.
The next scene is a little weird since Rowling skimmed almost all the dialogue -- Harry retelling the plot of CoS -- in a couple paragraphs of summary. I had to actually write some of it out, since Ginny (unlike the readers of CoS) doesn't know everything at this point. But I did skim some of it via Ginny tuning out at various points, because I didn't want to write a twenty-minute speech on the plot of CoS, particularly not when my presumed readers would already know all of it. I also broke it up a bit with interjections from other characters, for realism and narrative interest.
Then we come to the important part: Dumbledore's revelation that Tom Riddle and Lord Voldemort are the same person. This throws Ginny for a massive emotional loop. For her, Voldemort is the boogeyman under the bed, not a real person. Tom was her friend, and then her very personal enemy; he is probably the person who has been most real to her this past year. They don't connect well.
Dumbledore and Harry explain the diary, and Ginny confesses that she's been writing in it. Mr. Weasley gets upset, and Ginny gets angry at him for expecting her to have realized it was full of Dark magic when he hadn't shown her how to determine where an enchanted object (like, oh, say, a portrait or a suit of armor...) keeps its brain. She doesn't say that, though, because canon. *grumpy* I also took the liberty of changing her dialogue tags to "said" instead of "sobbed," because seriously, J. K. Rowling? Seriously? That is so demeaning.
Finally, Ginny is taken aback by Dumbledore's calm insistence that she is not at fault, will not be punished, and should be considered a victim. I added a little exchange after his statement that there has been no lasting harm done:
"There could have been," she whispered.
"But there was not. Remember that."
Because this is still Ginny's story. Her agency matters.
I skipped right over all the rest of the conversation in the office because Ginny has gone to the hospital wing and it's irrelevant to her story anyway. I also skipped right over the restoration of the Petrified students and the celebration feast, because again, Ginny is in the hospital wing, sleeping the sleep of the completely exhausted.
This means that the bulk of chapter 13, all of chapter 14, and the bulk of chapter 15 take place in one and three quarter pages at the tail end of CoS. Rowling, having resolved the fight against the basilisk and Harry's wibbles over shock! horror! sharing a few traits with the person who killed his family, doesn't give a good goddamn about the end of classes or Ginny's recovery, which she blithely dismisses thusly: On the other hand, Ginny Weasley was perfectly happy again.
To which I say, BULLSHIT. And I proceeded to ignore canon until the Hogwarts Express, though I did include a scene in chapter 14 that shows how Harry could get such a wrongheaded idea of Ginny's recovery.
The rest of chapter 13 is basically Ginny wrestling with the problem of how to claim agency for herself -- to say that she wasn't a passive, helpless victim, to say that she fought back long and hard -- without also claiming responsibility and guilt for things that were not actually her fault.
The first scene is Ginny and Mrs. Weasley in the infirmary at breakfast. Mrs. Weasley tries to comfort her daughter and also wonders why she didn't ask for help. (She is feeling kind of guilty and helpless herself, obviously.) If it was Voldemort in the diary, she says, then obviously none of this was Ginny's fault; there was nothing Ginny could have done to stop him. Ginny KNOWS that is wrong; people can always do something to fight. In her view, the problem is that she did the wrong things; she is therefore a failure, not a hero like Harry or Dumbledore. This culminates in a screaming fit and then another crying jag, with Mrs. Weasley hugging Ginny but nothing really resolved.
The entire Weasley family (except Bill and Charlie, obviously) then has a picnic lunch. Ginny is uncomfortable with the constant attention and wishes everything could go back to normal (even though she's been wishing for her brothers' attention several times through the year). Percy, unexpectedly, is the one who catches on, perhaps because he also often wants to escape the family's concentrated attention. He also points out that since Ginny initially thought Tom was her friend, she had no reason to suspect him of being a dark wizard; that is not how friendship works. Then he provides an excuse for her to get back into the castle and out from their parents' scrutiny.
Ron takes Ginny to see Harry and Hermione, and Hermione shooes the boys away so she and Ginny can talk privately. She asks Ginny what possession felt like; Ginny tells her, then apologizes again for Hermione's Petrification. Hermione waves this off, saying that she had her mirror out but without Ginny's verbal warning, she might not have had the chance to use it. Then they talk a bit about the Chamber, and Ginny has a little... not quite panic attack, but some kind of aftershock. Harry rushes into things without thinking, but it WORKS for him; so why didn't it work for her? Is she really that useless? Hermione points out that Harry rushed in, sure, but he wasn't alone; he had Ron and Fawkes and the Sorting Hat to help, whereas Ginny fought Tom basically on her own. The situations aren't comparable, and even so, she held him to a draw for months.
Ginny goes to hide in her bed, but the other first year girls come in and Apple asks for an explanation: Ginny must have been working with the Heir (per Colin's testimony), but she was also kidnapped and nearly killed (per Harry and Ron's testimony). So was she tricked or was she possessed? Both, Ginny says, and explains a little about the diary (though not about Tom being Voldemort). Susan is still hostile and notes that Ginny hasn't apologized for being unpleasant in non-Heir-related contexts, but Jia-li and Gwen believe her, and express admiration and sympathy. Ginny finds this hard to cope with.
The next day Ginny is excused from classes. She thinks about going after all, and does go down to breakfast, but she dislikes the way people give her sympathetic looks, and Apple reminds her that Snape and Daphne are not likely to be kind, so she skips Double Potions after all and goes to see Sir Vladislav instead. It turns out he's been frozen -- Tom has been putting spells on him all year -- and Ginny tells him what's been going on the past couple days. She pours out her turmoil, and Sir Vladislav uses the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to make a point about honor, choices, and learning from mistakes. He also tries to make a point about how to be a good person in general, not just by fighting huge and obvious evils. Ginny is annoyed and prickly, but she decides that she has to face her life and the consequences of her choices, and head for History of Magic to apologize to Colin.
...
Not a fun chapter in any sense of the word, but a very, very necessary one. As is chapter 14, which is more of the same though with flashes of sunshine through the enveloping murk.
This stuff is, in some ways, the real point of the story. It's my way of saying, not all battles are grand external clashes of magic. Some of the most important ones are fought inside a single person's mind and heart, and in small interpersonal interactions. It's not enough just to save a life. You have to make that life worth living.
Bechdel Test = PASS
This chapter was a bitch and a half to write, partly because internal conflict (moral and emotional) is less obviously dramatic than external conflict, but mostly because I was, of necessity, drawing very, very heavily on my own experience with depression, guilt spirals, and in-the-box thought patterns. That is not a time of my life I enjoy revisiting for any reason. :-/
We open with Ginny regaining consciousness down in the Chamber, having missed the entire climactic fight scene of CoS (because this is her story, not Harry's story, and his victory is only relevant inasmuch as it enables hers). The dialogue in this scene is all taken directly from CoS, but broken up with bits of my own narration to try and make it fit with Ginny's character arc. Ginny is in shock, basically, and also drowning in guilt.
Harry is kind of well-meaning but clueless, I think, though I did try to hint that he's also shaken and awkwardly unsure what to say to Ginny, particularly after my betas told me he came off kind of creepily flat and unemotional in the second draft. Rowling could get away with skipping over most of the emotional repercussions since CoS is such a tightly written book and its conflict is mostly external, but I couldn't since my story is both longer and heavily internal in nature; ALL the important characters must therefore at least give the illusion of an inner life.
When they meet Ron, I used a little bit of business from the British edition of CoS that for some inexplicable reason isn't in the American edition: Ron trying to hug Ginny and her pushing his arms away. It's a blatant hint that Ginny is really, really not all right, and I wish it hadn't been cut from the American text.
Ginny doesn't say a damn thing through this whole scene after she and Harry leave the Chamber, but she THINKS a hell of a lot, and most of it is related to guilt. The crying is kind of... a broken dam, I guess, that had been holding back all her stress and pain and anger and guilt for the whole year, and now all those buried emotional reactions are flooding out at once. Harry has no idea how to cope with this and is grimly focusing on practicalities, like getting everyone back up into the castle. Ron also has no idea how to cope. He tries a joke about Ginny's crush on Harry, which falls flat; that's canon. Then once they're all following Fawkes to McGonagall's office, I put in my first bit of non-canonical dialogue with Ron telling Ginny it'll be all right, that she survived and that's the important thing. Ginny thinks he doesn't understand anything, but she reaches up to take his hand.
The next scene is a little weird since Rowling skimmed almost all the dialogue -- Harry retelling the plot of CoS -- in a couple paragraphs of summary. I had to actually write some of it out, since Ginny (unlike the readers of CoS) doesn't know everything at this point. But I did skim some of it via Ginny tuning out at various points, because I didn't want to write a twenty-minute speech on the plot of CoS, particularly not when my presumed readers would already know all of it. I also broke it up a bit with interjections from other characters, for realism and narrative interest.
Then we come to the important part: Dumbledore's revelation that Tom Riddle and Lord Voldemort are the same person. This throws Ginny for a massive emotional loop. For her, Voldemort is the boogeyman under the bed, not a real person. Tom was her friend, and then her very personal enemy; he is probably the person who has been most real to her this past year. They don't connect well.
Dumbledore and Harry explain the diary, and Ginny confesses that she's been writing in it. Mr. Weasley gets upset, and Ginny gets angry at him for expecting her to have realized it was full of Dark magic when he hadn't shown her how to determine where an enchanted object (like, oh, say, a portrait or a suit of armor...) keeps its brain. She doesn't say that, though, because canon. *grumpy* I also took the liberty of changing her dialogue tags to "said" instead of "sobbed," because seriously, J. K. Rowling? Seriously? That is so demeaning.
Finally, Ginny is taken aback by Dumbledore's calm insistence that she is not at fault, will not be punished, and should be considered a victim. I added a little exchange after his statement that there has been no lasting harm done:
"There could have been," she whispered.
"But there was not. Remember that."
Because this is still Ginny's story. Her agency matters.
I skipped right over all the rest of the conversation in the office because Ginny has gone to the hospital wing and it's irrelevant to her story anyway. I also skipped right over the restoration of the Petrified students and the celebration feast, because again, Ginny is in the hospital wing, sleeping the sleep of the completely exhausted.
This means that the bulk of chapter 13, all of chapter 14, and the bulk of chapter 15 take place in one and three quarter pages at the tail end of CoS. Rowling, having resolved the fight against the basilisk and Harry's wibbles over shock! horror! sharing a few traits with the person who killed his family, doesn't give a good goddamn about the end of classes or Ginny's recovery, which she blithely dismisses thusly: On the other hand, Ginny Weasley was perfectly happy again.
To which I say, BULLSHIT. And I proceeded to ignore canon until the Hogwarts Express, though I did include a scene in chapter 14 that shows how Harry could get such a wrongheaded idea of Ginny's recovery.
The rest of chapter 13 is basically Ginny wrestling with the problem of how to claim agency for herself -- to say that she wasn't a passive, helpless victim, to say that she fought back long and hard -- without also claiming responsibility and guilt for things that were not actually her fault.
The first scene is Ginny and Mrs. Weasley in the infirmary at breakfast. Mrs. Weasley tries to comfort her daughter and also wonders why she didn't ask for help. (She is feeling kind of guilty and helpless herself, obviously.) If it was Voldemort in the diary, she says, then obviously none of this was Ginny's fault; there was nothing Ginny could have done to stop him. Ginny KNOWS that is wrong; people can always do something to fight. In her view, the problem is that she did the wrong things; she is therefore a failure, not a hero like Harry or Dumbledore. This culminates in a screaming fit and then another crying jag, with Mrs. Weasley hugging Ginny but nothing really resolved.
The entire Weasley family (except Bill and Charlie, obviously) then has a picnic lunch. Ginny is uncomfortable with the constant attention and wishes everything could go back to normal (even though she's been wishing for her brothers' attention several times through the year). Percy, unexpectedly, is the one who catches on, perhaps because he also often wants to escape the family's concentrated attention. He also points out that since Ginny initially thought Tom was her friend, she had no reason to suspect him of being a dark wizard; that is not how friendship works. Then he provides an excuse for her to get back into the castle and out from their parents' scrutiny.
Ron takes Ginny to see Harry and Hermione, and Hermione shooes the boys away so she and Ginny can talk privately. She asks Ginny what possession felt like; Ginny tells her, then apologizes again for Hermione's Petrification. Hermione waves this off, saying that she had her mirror out but without Ginny's verbal warning, she might not have had the chance to use it. Then they talk a bit about the Chamber, and Ginny has a little... not quite panic attack, but some kind of aftershock. Harry rushes into things without thinking, but it WORKS for him; so why didn't it work for her? Is she really that useless? Hermione points out that Harry rushed in, sure, but he wasn't alone; he had Ron and Fawkes and the Sorting Hat to help, whereas Ginny fought Tom basically on her own. The situations aren't comparable, and even so, she held him to a draw for months.
Ginny goes to hide in her bed, but the other first year girls come in and Apple asks for an explanation: Ginny must have been working with the Heir (per Colin's testimony), but she was also kidnapped and nearly killed (per Harry and Ron's testimony). So was she tricked or was she possessed? Both, Ginny says, and explains a little about the diary (though not about Tom being Voldemort). Susan is still hostile and notes that Ginny hasn't apologized for being unpleasant in non-Heir-related contexts, but Jia-li and Gwen believe her, and express admiration and sympathy. Ginny finds this hard to cope with.
The next day Ginny is excused from classes. She thinks about going after all, and does go down to breakfast, but she dislikes the way people give her sympathetic looks, and Apple reminds her that Snape and Daphne are not likely to be kind, so she skips Double Potions after all and goes to see Sir Vladislav instead. It turns out he's been frozen -- Tom has been putting spells on him all year -- and Ginny tells him what's been going on the past couple days. She pours out her turmoil, and Sir Vladislav uses the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to make a point about honor, choices, and learning from mistakes. He also tries to make a point about how to be a good person in general, not just by fighting huge and obvious evils. Ginny is annoyed and prickly, but she decides that she has to face her life and the consequences of her choices, and head for History of Magic to apologize to Colin.
...
Not a fun chapter in any sense of the word, but a very, very necessary one. As is chapter 14, which is more of the same though with flashes of sunshine through the enveloping murk.
This stuff is, in some ways, the real point of the story. It's my way of saying, not all battles are grand external clashes of magic. Some of the most important ones are fought inside a single person's mind and heart, and in small interpersonal interactions. It's not enough just to save a life. You have to make that life worth living.
Bechdel Test = PASS
