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edenfallingSummary: "Chamber of Secrets" from Ginny's point of view. Ginny attempts to make amends and regain something approximating a normal life, with varying degrees of success. If you pretend hard enough, can you make something true?
The title of this chapter is a callback to Chapter 5: Making It Work. That was about Ginny finding a routine at Hogwarts, tacitly accepting some parts of her life that she didn't like and leaning on Tom as her main source of emotional support. This chapter is about Ginny attempting to resume some of that routine while discarding the toxic parts and finding a better emotional footing.
Or in other words, more aftermath and repercussions, because trauma doesn't disappear overnight.
Scene One: Ginny lurks outside the History of Magic classroom, waiting for her fellow Gryffindors to emerge so she can apologize to Colin. Danny and Susan don't want to let Colin go off alone with her, so she makes the apology in public -- both for letting Tom use her to Petrify him, and for sending him out in the night when she knew Harry would just get annoyed and maybe yell at him. She ends up explaining about Tom draining her life and magic again, and also issues a more general apology to the first years for jumping to conclusions all year (though she makes an explicit point of NOT apologizing for calling them idiots when they all jumped to conclusions about Harry). Susan, Danny, and Jasper are still disgruntled (Jasper less so), but Colin forgives her and makes his own point of asking her to be his friend, and getting her to help him catch up in Herbology. At this point Jasper and Danny decide to let bygones be bygones, which leaves Susan as the only Gryffindor first year still actively pissed off at Ginny.
Ginny's new tentative friendship with Colin (and her detante with Apple) may not amount to much in the future, but here and now it's a good step. (She feels better for having taken it, too.)
Scene Two: Ginny, Apple, and Colin have an impromptu study session in the library. After Colin leaves, Apple apologizes to Ginny for not noticing something was wrong with her earlier in the year. Ginny says she probably wouldn't have listened even if Apple had tried to help, and asks her to talk to Daphne so Ginny can call a full truce in their ongoing rivalry. (Note that she is not planning to apologize at this point.) Apple says it will take a couple days, but agrees.
Scene Three: After dinner, the twins have a heart-to-heart with Ginny on a staircase. Or at least as much of a heart-to-heart as the twins are ever comfortable having with anyone -- it's more a bunch of teasing and stupid jokes with flashes of sincerity. They offer to listen if she needs to talk, soothe her through a bout of hysterical laughter, and remind her that people can save each other; nobody has to fight alone. Ginny is relieved by their joking, finding comfort that the twins are still the twins. The world hasn't been turned upside down by her private turmoil. Which means maybe she can get back to being Ginny Weasley instead of being Tom's dupe.
(That scene was completely unplanned, by the way, but the twins insisted they needed a turn to talk to their sister. I think it turned out pretty well. *grin*)
Scene Four: The next morning, Xanthe confronts Ginny during Herbology. She's pissed off that Ginny didn't tell her what was going on, or ask for her help -- Ginny's her friend and she could have died, and didn't she realize that would hurt a lot of other people? Ginny agrees that trying to fight all on her own was stupid, but she's not sorry she kept Xanthe out, because she didn't want Xanthe to get hurt. She also tells Xanthe that her family story about Rosalind Winterbourne was probably what saved her, by making one of Tom's lies obvious. She gets a little carried away explaining Tom's version of the story, and how she let him into her mind and heart, and admits that she's still feeling screwed up and stressed and has no idea what to do. Xanthe tries to logic her into admitting she's not solely at fault -- other people should have realized something was wrong, or pushed harder; and what about the person who gave her the diary in the first place? -- and they start to get into an argument about the nature of guilt and responsibility before Sprout interrupts by resuming her lecture.
Scene Five: Ginny gets out of continuing her argument by going to talk to Professor Sprout directly after class. (I freely admit this is because I couldn't make the argument resolve, and also it was getting kind of ridiculous and abstract for two twelve/thirteen-year-old girls.) Sprout ALSO apologizes for not noticing that something was wrong, to which Ginny responds by apologizing for getting into the Restricted Section under false pretenses. Sprout asks why Ginny didn't ask her for help, and when Ginny tries to explain what she was thinking, she realizes that her thought process did not make sense. Her conclusions seemed logical at the time, but in retrospect they were weirdly deformed. She feels stupid. Sprout cuts that train of thought off and says that nobody thinks clearly under chronic stress, and that Ginny chose options that let her survive, even if they weren't the best options from an outside perspective. She also says that if Ginny needs some activity to take her mind off her problems, she is welcome to help Sprout and Hagrid take care of the Hogwarts grounds.
Scene Six: Ginny skips Charms (she doesn't care about Flitwick's opinion the way she cares about Sprout's) and goes to see Hagrid. Another apology ensues; Hagrid waves it off and blames Tom. Ginny insists that she's allowed to feel sorry! She doesn't want people telling her what she should feel! That's what Tom did! Hagrid says people don't mean to make her feel trapped; they just want her to know they don't blame her for Tom's actions. A bunch of the professors knew him of old and remember how easily he could influence people. They have tea and talk about plants (specifically carnivorous ones; this is Hagrid after all!) and Ginny decides that she is glad to be alive, to have survived Tom. He's dead, she's not, and she's not going to let a memory beat her.
Scene Seven: A bunch of opening material, then a Transfiguration lesson. McGonagall sets Ginny to crash-tutor Colin in all the material he's missed since his Petrification. After the lesson she heads outside to enjoy the sunshine and runs into the Trio. They talk about summer plans and Ginny keeps trying out her smile -- she's been attempting the trick of using a smile to make yourself feel happy instead of using a feeling of happiness to make yourself smile -- and notices that it doesn't feel quite as fake anymore. Maybe she's starting to get better.
Unfortunately her smiles have the side effect of convincing Harry that she's 100% better and happy and back to herself -- see, I am making him an unreliable narrator in CoS! -- which then infuriates Ginny. But she doesn't contradict him, because she doesn't want her family to start smothering her with concern again. And she IS getting better, slowly.
Inch by inch, she's climbing out of the chasm.
...
I could probably subtitle this "The Apology Chapter," couldn't I? :-/ Oh well, they all needed to be said, even if they weren't always accepted gracefully. (The apologies given to Ginny are just as important as the ones she gives to others. In fact, I think Harry is the only person who doesn't apologize to her at some point after the Chamber! Which... is both good and bad, and makes me want to work that into chapter 15 somehow in relation to Ginny's continuing crush on him.)
Bechdel Test = PASS, multiple times!
And now I will move on to finishing chapter 15, since I have a better idea of what Ginny needs to hash out with Ron in particular.
The title of this chapter is a callback to Chapter 5: Making It Work. That was about Ginny finding a routine at Hogwarts, tacitly accepting some parts of her life that she didn't like and leaning on Tom as her main source of emotional support. This chapter is about Ginny attempting to resume some of that routine while discarding the toxic parts and finding a better emotional footing.
Or in other words, more aftermath and repercussions, because trauma doesn't disappear overnight.
Scene One: Ginny lurks outside the History of Magic classroom, waiting for her fellow Gryffindors to emerge so she can apologize to Colin. Danny and Susan don't want to let Colin go off alone with her, so she makes the apology in public -- both for letting Tom use her to Petrify him, and for sending him out in the night when she knew Harry would just get annoyed and maybe yell at him. She ends up explaining about Tom draining her life and magic again, and also issues a more general apology to the first years for jumping to conclusions all year (though she makes an explicit point of NOT apologizing for calling them idiots when they all jumped to conclusions about Harry). Susan, Danny, and Jasper are still disgruntled (Jasper less so), but Colin forgives her and makes his own point of asking her to be his friend, and getting her to help him catch up in Herbology. At this point Jasper and Danny decide to let bygones be bygones, which leaves Susan as the only Gryffindor first year still actively pissed off at Ginny.
Ginny's new tentative friendship with Colin (and her detante with Apple) may not amount to much in the future, but here and now it's a good step. (She feels better for having taken it, too.)
Scene Two: Ginny, Apple, and Colin have an impromptu study session in the library. After Colin leaves, Apple apologizes to Ginny for not noticing something was wrong with her earlier in the year. Ginny says she probably wouldn't have listened even if Apple had tried to help, and asks her to talk to Daphne so Ginny can call a full truce in their ongoing rivalry. (Note that she is not planning to apologize at this point.) Apple says it will take a couple days, but agrees.
Scene Three: After dinner, the twins have a heart-to-heart with Ginny on a staircase. Or at least as much of a heart-to-heart as the twins are ever comfortable having with anyone -- it's more a bunch of teasing and stupid jokes with flashes of sincerity. They offer to listen if she needs to talk, soothe her through a bout of hysterical laughter, and remind her that people can save each other; nobody has to fight alone. Ginny is relieved by their joking, finding comfort that the twins are still the twins. The world hasn't been turned upside down by her private turmoil. Which means maybe she can get back to being Ginny Weasley instead of being Tom's dupe.
(That scene was completely unplanned, by the way, but the twins insisted they needed a turn to talk to their sister. I think it turned out pretty well. *grin*)
Scene Four: The next morning, Xanthe confronts Ginny during Herbology. She's pissed off that Ginny didn't tell her what was going on, or ask for her help -- Ginny's her friend and she could have died, and didn't she realize that would hurt a lot of other people? Ginny agrees that trying to fight all on her own was stupid, but she's not sorry she kept Xanthe out, because she didn't want Xanthe to get hurt. She also tells Xanthe that her family story about Rosalind Winterbourne was probably what saved her, by making one of Tom's lies obvious. She gets a little carried away explaining Tom's version of the story, and how she let him into her mind and heart, and admits that she's still feeling screwed up and stressed and has no idea what to do. Xanthe tries to logic her into admitting she's not solely at fault -- other people should have realized something was wrong, or pushed harder; and what about the person who gave her the diary in the first place? -- and they start to get into an argument about the nature of guilt and responsibility before Sprout interrupts by resuming her lecture.
Scene Five: Ginny gets out of continuing her argument by going to talk to Professor Sprout directly after class. (I freely admit this is because I couldn't make the argument resolve, and also it was getting kind of ridiculous and abstract for two twelve/thirteen-year-old girls.) Sprout ALSO apologizes for not noticing that something was wrong, to which Ginny responds by apologizing for getting into the Restricted Section under false pretenses. Sprout asks why Ginny didn't ask her for help, and when Ginny tries to explain what she was thinking, she realizes that her thought process did not make sense. Her conclusions seemed logical at the time, but in retrospect they were weirdly deformed. She feels stupid. Sprout cuts that train of thought off and says that nobody thinks clearly under chronic stress, and that Ginny chose options that let her survive, even if they weren't the best options from an outside perspective. She also says that if Ginny needs some activity to take her mind off her problems, she is welcome to help Sprout and Hagrid take care of the Hogwarts grounds.
Scene Six: Ginny skips Charms (she doesn't care about Flitwick's opinion the way she cares about Sprout's) and goes to see Hagrid. Another apology ensues; Hagrid waves it off and blames Tom. Ginny insists that she's allowed to feel sorry! She doesn't want people telling her what she should feel! That's what Tom did! Hagrid says people don't mean to make her feel trapped; they just want her to know they don't blame her for Tom's actions. A bunch of the professors knew him of old and remember how easily he could influence people. They have tea and talk about plants (specifically carnivorous ones; this is Hagrid after all!) and Ginny decides that she is glad to be alive, to have survived Tom. He's dead, she's not, and she's not going to let a memory beat her.
Scene Seven: A bunch of opening material, then a Transfiguration lesson. McGonagall sets Ginny to crash-tutor Colin in all the material he's missed since his Petrification. After the lesson she heads outside to enjoy the sunshine and runs into the Trio. They talk about summer plans and Ginny keeps trying out her smile -- she's been attempting the trick of using a smile to make yourself feel happy instead of using a feeling of happiness to make yourself smile -- and notices that it doesn't feel quite as fake anymore. Maybe she's starting to get better.
Unfortunately her smiles have the side effect of convincing Harry that she's 100% better and happy and back to herself -- see, I am making him an unreliable narrator in CoS! -- which then infuriates Ginny. But she doesn't contradict him, because she doesn't want her family to start smothering her with concern again. And she IS getting better, slowly.
Inch by inch, she's climbing out of the chasm.
...
I could probably subtitle this "The Apology Chapter," couldn't I? :-/ Oh well, they all needed to be said, even if they weren't always accepted gracefully. (The apologies given to Ginny are just as important as the ones she gives to others. In fact, I think Harry is the only person who doesn't apologize to her at some point after the Chamber! Which... is both good and bad, and makes me want to work that into chapter 15 somehow in relation to Ginny's continuing crush on him.)
Bechdel Test = PASS, multiple times!
And now I will move on to finishing chapter 15, since I have a better idea of what Ginny needs to hash out with Ron in particular.
