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My Halloween HPfic might not make deadline because it's hit a nonlethal snag of the progress kind. I know where I want to end up, and I know I like where I started from, but I'm not sure the phrasing I ought to use to connect the two. Two roads lie before me, and all I must do is choose.
While I engage in mental Eenie Meenie Minie Mo, an excerpt:
He knows he should get rid of the scarf. It is faded and tattered, its scarlet-and-gold grandeur reduced to blood and straw by the pernicious hands of time. Even Hermione, with her prodigious talent and encyclopedic knowledge of spells, can no longer mend it, a fact which grates on her pride and fills Ron with surreptitious glee and a heady relief that she is not infallible, after all.
And yet he cannot bring himself to part with it. It smells of must and wool and old sweat and the crisp, fresh-paper scent of cold, and below all of that is the indefinable, unmistakable perfume of him, an indelible record of his days and nights. His skin is woven into the stitch of the wool, and his breath gathers and pools in its folds with every exhalation. It is his tether and his dreamcatcher, and it reminds him of a time when his eyes had still known the light.
He can still remember the night it came to him with all its promise, draped over his trunk in the Gryffindor boys' first-year dormitory. The other boys had simply accepted it as part and parcel of entering Hogwarts. Why not? Most of them had known of this day for eleven years, played Hogwarts with their brothers and sisters on the moors and around the hearth. It was a rite of passage every wizard knew. But for him, the scarf and the school robes to which it belonged had been the first articles of clothing-or indeed, any material possession whatsoever-that he could truly call his own, and it had represented a Portkey to limitless possibilities.
And so, while the others had tossed their scarves aside in favor of a game of Exploding Snap or Gobstones, he had curled in the window casement with his threaded through his disbelieving, giddy fingers and watched the snow drift in powdered sugar dunes over the castle grounds. Smoke had curled from Hagrid's cabin down by the lake, a gingerbread cottage from a saner child's fancy, and the pristine snow had blotted out the past in a blanket of white. Goodbye, Harry-who-was-an-ingrate-burden-on-his-blameless-relatives-who-so-graciously-took-him-in, and hello, Harry-just-Harry. Whoever he was. Liberation in Scottish wool.
It is as yet unbetaed and very rough, but it is breathing. There is still hope for a miraculous Halloween finish, but if not, it will likely make its debut here in the first week of November.
Welcome,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teawithvoldy, to the flist.
While I engage in mental Eenie Meenie Minie Mo, an excerpt:
He knows he should get rid of the scarf. It is faded and tattered, its scarlet-and-gold grandeur reduced to blood and straw by the pernicious hands of time. Even Hermione, with her prodigious talent and encyclopedic knowledge of spells, can no longer mend it, a fact which grates on her pride and fills Ron with surreptitious glee and a heady relief that she is not infallible, after all.
And yet he cannot bring himself to part with it. It smells of must and wool and old sweat and the crisp, fresh-paper scent of cold, and below all of that is the indefinable, unmistakable perfume of him, an indelible record of his days and nights. His skin is woven into the stitch of the wool, and his breath gathers and pools in its folds with every exhalation. It is his tether and his dreamcatcher, and it reminds him of a time when his eyes had still known the light.
He can still remember the night it came to him with all its promise, draped over his trunk in the Gryffindor boys' first-year dormitory. The other boys had simply accepted it as part and parcel of entering Hogwarts. Why not? Most of them had known of this day for eleven years, played Hogwarts with their brothers and sisters on the moors and around the hearth. It was a rite of passage every wizard knew. But for him, the scarf and the school robes to which it belonged had been the first articles of clothing-or indeed, any material possession whatsoever-that he could truly call his own, and it had represented a Portkey to limitless possibilities.
And so, while the others had tossed their scarves aside in favor of a game of Exploding Snap or Gobstones, he had curled in the window casement with his threaded through his disbelieving, giddy fingers and watched the snow drift in powdered sugar dunes over the castle grounds. Smoke had curled from Hagrid's cabin down by the lake, a gingerbread cottage from a saner child's fancy, and the pristine snow had blotted out the past in a blanket of white. Goodbye, Harry-who-was-an-ingrate-burden-on-his-blameless-relatives-who-so-graciously-took-him-in, and hello, Harry-just-Harry. Whoever he was. Liberation in Scottish wool.
It is as yet unbetaed and very rough, but it is breathing. There is still hope for a miraculous Halloween finish, but if not, it will likely make its debut here in the first week of November.
Welcome,
teawithvoldy, to the flist.Tags: