the deep moans round with many voices

Summary: A week after Dumbledore is removed as Headmaster, Minerva McGonagall, Pomona Sprout, and Rolanda Hooch go drinking and debate ways to solve the crisis Hogwarts is laboring under. (1,800 words)

Note: This is a sidestory for Secrets, my retelling of CoS from Ginny's perspective. I'm not sure when I started writing it -- probably early 2003 -- but I stalled out after the first 200 or so words and posted that snippet in 2004 as what I expected to be a permanently unfinished fragment. The thing is, the universe lives to make me eat my words. When I opened the file to tidy it up and post it to AO3 as part of a collection of other HP fragments, I suddenly needed to finish it. So I did, ten years late. *wry*

I suspect, based on the title, that I originally meant to have the teachers focus on the peculiarities of Ginny's behavior, but McGonagall has no reason to think Ginny's in particular trouble compared to the rest of the school, so I ended with a more general story.

[ETA: The revised and extended final version is now up on AO3!]

( A Problem Like Ginevra )

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Ha, I win.

Oh, right, some notes! Notes are useful things. McGonagall was apparently born circa 1925, which means that in 1943, she could have been a sixth-year, a seventh-year, or one year out of school. I'm assuming she was a seventh-year. Madam Hooch doesn't have a canonical first name, but is apparently called Rolanda in a video game and fandom seems to have accepted this. (I still think Xiomara would be cooler, but I will reserve my pointless last stands for other trivia.) Similarly, Moaning Myrtle doesn't have a canonical last name. The one I gave her wasn't chosen completely at random -- it's kinda-sorta a word play on weeping willows -- but it's still pretty arbitrary.

And here we go!

Secrets 15: Open Doors: In which Ginny continues her string of awkward apologies before returning home and starting to reclaim her life. There are no magic solutions, no shortcuts to recovery, but sometimes happiness sneaks up and ambushes you when you least think you deserve it. (9,000 words) [ff.net version]

Please read it on AO3 if possible, since I had to mangle a section of Sir Vladislav's dialogue in the ff.net copy because ff.net does not allow strikethrough text formatting, grrr.

Thank you to pencildragon11 and nnozomi for beta-reading!

Two months is a much less ridiculous interchapter gap than a year and a half.

Chapter 13: Shattering. 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?

lasultrix and snaegl, thank you so much for beta-reading this! Scene 1 is probably still too awkward and melodramatic, but as you can see, it would have been much worse without your advice.

Now I just need to get back to work on ch. 14... Well, no, what I really need is to get some sleep. So I shall. *exit stage left, toothbrush in hand*


ETA: Oh. One thought. Does anyone know a good source of Egyptian mythology that explains what Isis was doing after Osiris went off to become king of the dead? Obviously she raised Horus for a while, but once Horus is grown and starts his vendetta against Set, Isis pretty much vanishes from all the versions of the legend I've found so far. I could probably work with that non-presence as a thematic point, but I am curious about alternate Isis-centric continuations of that story.

It's snowing in Ithaca, and has been off and on all day. Currently it's shifted to a lighter, fluffier snow -- earlier bouts have been much denser, faster, and verging on sleet -- but in an hour or so I'll most likely have to go back outside and shovel the sidewalk again. Bah.

In other news, I cannot get the final scene of "Secrets" ch. 13 to come out right. It's a conversation between Ginny and Sir Vladislav which currently has three purposes. 1) Ginny needs to talk to someone to start wrapping her head around a rather complex issue of responsibility, victimhood, blame, agency, and so on. 2) I wanted to retroactively explain why Sir Vladislav didn't notice Tom-in-Ginny's-body bringing the basilisk up from the Chamber for all the Petrifications, nor tell the professors that Ginny was NOT physically abducted and, in fact, vanished into Myrtle's bathroom of what appeared to be her own free will. (See, I do sometimes catch my own stupid plot holes. It just takes a while. *headdesk*) And 3) Ginny has to decide to go explain herself and/or apologize to Colin Creevey.

This is rather a lot to jam into one conversation, especially when one party can't talk and is forced to write his dialogue in very badly spelled English!

...

I dunno, maybe I can leave out some lecturing and stuff about other characters and just have Ginny reach point 3) on her own. That might work better, and would certainly be less hammer-in-the-face unsubtle on the moral message front. *makes face* Or maybe I'll just start on ch. 14 and see if I can work out, from how Ginny deals with Colin, what might have led her to approach him.

In an effort to comfort Ginny, Sir Vladislav has suddenly decided to start retelling the ending of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In very badly spelled and slightly awkwardly phrased English.

*stares at file*

Some days I really wonder about my subconscious mind.

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In real life news, PM has gone on vacation to the Caribbean, which leaves me holding the Pager of Doom. In other words, if something goes hideously wrong, I'm on call to fix it. Eeep.

Oh well, I managed last year; I'm sure I'll get by again.

Also, either both the light at the top of the stairs and the light at the bottom of the stairs burned out on the same day, or there's a blown fuse in my house. Last night, I had to climb the stairs and find the keyhole by the light of a little blue flashee-thingee I have on my keychain. I may very well have to repeat this for a day or two, until my landlords find the problem and fix it. (I informed them this afternoon.)