If You Have Time, I'd Love More Insight Into Harry's Thought Process Related To These Lines In "pick

If you have time, I'd love more insight into Harry's thought process related to these lines in "pick it up": "Is that as bad as it looks? he wants to ask. Only the truth is, a large part of him just doesn’t want to know." "He hasn’t really thought about what she meant by everything. Hasn’t particularly wanted to." Do you think his not wanting to know was related to what was going on at that point in time or that it's more on an ongoing thing?

One of the things that has been interesting to play with in the ArmisticeSeries is the ways people approach and react to trauma–both their own and thatof the people around them. Harry and Ginny in particular make a really starkpoint of contrast when it comes to this.

First, when it comes to trauma that they themselves have experienced, theypretty much have the exact opposite reaction. Take, for example, Harry at theForbidden Forest. Just weeks after having to walk into that forest and faceVoldemort, after dying and having one of the most traumatic experiences of hislife, what does he do? He volunteers to help Hagrid go back in there andpossibly track down a giant.

On the edge of the Forest, Harry feels a trickle of coldsweat work its way down his neck, and has to wonder if partly he just wanted toprove that he could. 

–pick it up, chapter 5

That very same chapter, Ginny is faced with going back into the castle whereshe suffered an entire year of trauma, all capped off by losing a brother andfriends and watching people die and nearly dying herself. She tries, but shejust can’t.

“Keep going,” she whispers to herself, thinking of her family in there. Thepeople who need her. Need her to be stronger than this. But, Merlin, there isalso this sharp, hot panic swelling in her chest, the feeling that the stonesthemselves are closing on her and she knows she can’t do it.

She can’t walk in there.

–pick it up, chapter 5

Harry reacts to his personal trauma by almost immediately throwing himselfback into those places and situations, almost as if to prove to himself thathe’s not scared, that he is still brave. Think about the Boggarts, how horriblythey affected him. But his first reaction was to get training to be able todefeat them or hold them off and not let them affect him anymore. This is a guywho runs towards danger. Ginny, on the other hand, is more likely to avoid thethings that have traumatized her. She takes space and time and has to processeverything before she can possibly face the castle again, and even then, ittakes her months to reconcile with it—or just find a way to cope.

Even their job choices in Armistice reflects this. Harry decides on theDepartment of Mysteries—a place that is home to arguably some of his mosttraumatic experiences—fighting Death Eaters, nearly getting his friends killed,and watching Sirius dying.

Down on the ninth floor, Harry steps out into the dark hall. He eyes thestairwell that he knows from far too much personal experience leads down to thedungeon courtrooms used by the Wizengamot.

But he isn’t going to think about that today.

Unfortunately the long dark hallway ahead of him holds more troublingmemories. His throat is thick with it for a moment, that frantic night runningdown the hallways, rushing off to save Sirius, wondering if he’s managed todamn his friends with his stupid mistake. Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and the otherswith Death Eater wands at their throats.

It’s possible this was a really terrible idea.

–in my head we do everythingright, chapter 5

Yet, Harry still does it. And part of that is proving that he can. He’s bigger than his traumas. (And,yes, the discussion of healthy processing of trauma is an entirely differentcan of worms.)

Ginny, despite having a highly developed set of skills that might set her upwith a lot of varying careers where she could make real impact, chooses insteadto distance herself from those things she associated with her personal trauma.She chooses Quidditch. Specifically because it’s safe.

Ginny catches her fingers, squeezing tight. “It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s allbehind me now. It’s over.” The DA, the things she learned and did. It’s alldone. Over. And she doesn’t have to find some way to use all that.

She can just be safe.

–in my head we do everything right, chapter 5

Now what is interesting is the flip side of this, how the two of them dealwith the trauma of others around them. The books spend a lot of time on thefact that in many ways love is Harry’s greatest strength, both the love peoplehave felt for him (Lily) and the general goodness and protectiveness he feelsfor people around him, what a good heart he has. Not to mention his willingnessto sacrifice himself for others—which Dumbledore might call an act of love,just like Lily’s. What is interesting though, is that Harry is not anempathetic person. That is not to say that he doesn’t care about people. He iswilling to throw down for them without hesitation. But he has a hard timeconnecting with people, particularly on a deep, emotional level. With hisbackground and experiences, that’s really not all that surprising. Emotionalliteracy is a real thing, y’all, and you have to learn it. Most people get thatby experiencing the empathy of people around them, but Harry had no role modelfor this. Not really. So he’s not great at empathy. Other people’s strongemotions can make him feel really uncomfortable as we see over and over againin the books, and not just his inability to understand Cho. He hates emotional conflict. (And I willargue until I am blue in the face that this is not simply ‘boys don’t doemotional empathy.’ Bullshit. It in no way has to be like that, and I willargue that RON of all of them, is the most empathetic and he develops this overthe course of the books so very clearly. So miss me with that girls are just inherently more empathetic thing.)

So in the context of that, we see the quotes you have from Harry’s internalthoughts in pick it up. Which come up again in later chapters.

Ron leans into Harry, voice low as their friends once again start laughingand talking. “Do you ever feel like we’re missing something? When they get totalking about that year?”

“Yeah,” Harry says. But maybe, he considers, noticing the way Dean iswatching Seamus, they’re better off not knowing.

–in my head we do everythingright, chapter 6

Harry shies away from hearing about other people’s trauma. Part of this ishis struggle to deal with other people’s emotions and personal traumas,especially when he is already so heavily burdened with his own like in pick it up. But also, I have to thinkthe experience of reading Skeeter’s book about Dumbledore has really impactedhim. Having everything he thought he knew about Dumbledore undermined andchallenged really threw him for a huge loop, and even though he reconciled withit in the end, I think part of him still thinks he would have been better offnever knowing any of that. (He struggles with moral ambiguity, as we haveseen.)

Now, compare that to Ginny. She is in a very different place, not justbecause she is more empathetic but because being empathetic becomes her armor.It becomes the one thing that keeps her from feeling like a monster. When sheis training as a Legilimens, Snape over and over again encourages her to remove empathy from the equation. Shefeels herself slipping towards very dangerous places when she does that, andgets pulled back by people like Hannah who reminds her that she needs people, she needs to care. So Ginny finally perseveres by humanizing the verypeople Snape declares she needs to objectify. It’s horribly painful for her,and I think she probably doesn’t see it as salvation as much as the painfulpunishment she deserves for wielding this skill, the cost of the thing. As muchas Ginny runs from her own trauma, she is continually opening herself to theexperiences and feelings of others—both through the things she takes frompeople through Legilimens and the emotional labor she does as a leader invarious spaces.

Ginny moves furtherinto the room, moving from person to person, hearing about their experiences,their losses. Collects them all up and stitches them together like a cloakshe’ll never really be able to take off.

–The Changeling, chapter 10

She does this because she cares, but also because, in many ways, she feelslike it’s her job to carry it all. She’s being necessary. And without it, she might wonder just how much humanity she has left.

Hi Annerb! Thanks for the Lucky series, and all your other Slytherin!Ginny work, which has been a delight and also helped me understand some things about myself. You mentioned using D/D alignment charts for Hogwarts houses. Could you please expand a bit on that, if that's alright?

Okay, so the D&D alignment charts have two main axes: lawful/neutral/chaotic and good/neutral/evil. (And full disclosure up front that I am not an expert at this at all. I just used it as guidelines and a starting point to help me think about the houses and formulate my general approach for writing The Changeling.)

Let’s look at the first. We can break it down very simplistically to these two ideas:

Lawful – creatures of habit Chaotic – unpredictable

Hufflepuffs and Slytherin are both creatures of habit, more tied to convention, tradition, and law. Gryffindors and Ravenclaw are not bound by tradition, and can be unpredictable, they are more likely to follow their whims.

Now, the second set is where things got a bit more sticky: good versus evil. Which I will admit, I refused to put any house in evil. That was kind of the whole point of The Changeling. I guess for me, individual action will be what puts someone in the evil category. But I still looked at Good versus Neutral.

Good – altruism, respect for all life, personal sacrifice for greater good Neutral – “have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships.” (from this wiki)

To me, Hufflepuffs and Gryffindor both fall into ‘good.’ They put altruism above all things and support of ‘the good’ as a broad concept. Ravenclaw and Slytherin, while not being evil or against ‘good,’ do not necessarily see the same ‘greater good’ that the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff might. Their commitment is shaped by something else, in this case, personal relationships or webs of exchange. (Though I might argue that Ravenclaw are shaped by pursuit of knowledge/understanding above all else.) They are both more driven by ambition than altruism.

So we end up with:

Hufflepuff – lawful good (though you might be able to argue neutral good, altruism above law)

Gryffindor – chaotic good

Ravenclaw – chaotic neutral

Slytherin – lawful neutral

What I love with this, ultimately, is that some of the houses share an element in common, they are just shaped slightly different by their other alignment. Such as, Hufflepuff and Gryffindors both focus on the greater good, but Hufflepuffs do it through the lens of law and tradition and stability, while Gryffindors approach it through chaotic disregard for any tradition or law that gets in their way. Similarly, Hufflepuff and Slytherin are both bound by tradition and law, but Hufflepuff focuses on the greater good, while Slytherin focuses on the relationships that bind people together (whether blood or other connection).

But then you have the houses aligned to opposite corners from each other. Like with Slytherin and Gryffindor, and you can almost see how they speak a different language entirely. To the Slytherin, the Gryffindor are chaotic and have no respect for tradition and convention and are completely out of control, and to the Gryffindor, Slytherin are staid and boring and have giant sticks up their arses. To a Gryffindor, they only see Slytherin not supporting their vision of the greater good, and miss the web of relationships that ground their morality, which might lend itself towards a view of them as ‘evil’. And for a Slytherin, this Gryffindor ‘friend to all’ might seem like a lack of conviction, a caprice that shows no true deep forging of any kind of true relationship ties. They seem like giant faking hypocrites.

You also have Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw similarly oriented. To a Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff seems to lack imagination, interests, or deep commitments. To Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw are unpredictable and cold, and frankly frightening.

Ultimately when writing these houses, it’s realizing that none of them are wrong, they just view the world through different lenses. But also understanding how much perception plays into the ways these houses interact. How much they are all primed to misunderstand each other. But also how much they are set up to help each other. This really is where my understanding of what a unified DA could be in the final year of the war. And helped guide me for all the interactions between the houses.

(As a side note for the Armistice Series, I think a great example of perceptions being shaped by alignments is from in my head we do everything right, specifically how Harry perceived Ginny’s actions during her inquiry. He saw them as self-sacrifice for the greater good (his own alignment), whereas having been in Ginny’s head during the events, we know she wasn’t thinking about the greater good or noble self-sacrifice. She wasn’t thinking about what was right and good, she was thinking about the DA/her friends (her in-group), and what she was not willing to let them be subjected to. How she would use law and convention to protect herself and them as well. She never once was like “Oh, I’ll just let myself get chucked in jail to prove a point.” But that is exactly what Harry sees (and what he would probably do). It’s a fun little look into the different ways they approach things, and how it can lead to misunderstandings sometimes, but also most importantly that their outcomes are aligned, even if their approaches are not.)

I'm re-reading The Changeling (for the umpteenth time, no less) and I'm once again struck by your particular take on Occlumency and Legilimency. Is this something you can talk more about? I'm interested to hear how you came about it since it's more or less unique when compared to other fics I've read. Also, will we see Ginny using her skills again in the Armistice series?

I honestly hadn’t seen much about Occlumency or Legilimency other than what little we see in the books, so I had a lot of room to come up with my own ideas. (Even Fantastic Beasts hadn’t come out yet, Queenie’s Legilimency clearly very different from how I portrayed it.) It seemed to me that there were only three people in canon that we saw or suspected had these skills–Dumbledore, Snape, and Voldemort. That’s quite a group. So I thought about those people and I thought about how they had to be skills with a high cost or difficulty or why wouldn’t everyone want to be able to read minds? Also, we saw how much Harry struggled with Occlumency, and I think that wasn’t all just because Snape was a horrid teacher. Harry is a pretty open, impulsive person over all, and I don’t really see him ever mastering shielding his thoughts and emotions. His emotions are what drive him, for better or worse.

While Voldemort is just straight up evil and wouldn’t care about invading people’s trust or privacy, Snape was rather more protective in his use of the skills, basically, he was most concerned with saving his own ass. I find Dumbledore’s rather casual use of it throughout the books more interesting. If every time Harry thinks it feels like Dumbledore can see into him is actually Dumbledore using Legilimency, that’s quite a lot. I think it fits with Dumbledore’s characterization though. He’s someone who honestly believes in the greater good, just as much as an adult as he did as a young man with Grindelwald. And his willingness to put the greater good first is his greatest Achilles Heel, in my opinion. He has a good heart and blind spots a mile wide. And I think that just like a level of detachment from the individual pieces is required to be a good mastermind (for him to be willing to raise Harry knowing that more than likely he’ll have to die to serve the greater good), Legilimency requires that sort of detachment too. Can you imagine seeing inside people and being empathetic? It would drive you crazy. I think Dumbledore’s use of Legilimency fits in with his tendency to forget the human in the individual. He saw them as pieces with potential and often just seemed to hope for the best.

As for Ginny, she was already inclined toward Occlumency from her experience with Tom. She knows what it’s like to be a stranger in your own head. And she has the drive to never leave herself that vulnerable again. But I also wanted room to explore that our world often defaults to one way of viewing an approaching things, usually based on men’s views and histories. So I wanted there to be room for her to be different than Snape, but also realize that the one answer you are given in school is usually an incomplete one. Part of growing up is realizing how much of a constructed narrative you’ve been living in. So while building defensible barriers seemed a stereotypically masculine approach, I thought about how women are often forced to hide in plain sight, aren’t often given the right to openly fight and resist, and how blunt defense is not the only way to undermine. So the idea that Ginny might use her experience of compartmentalization to create an image of herself to please the intruder…that it might not even occur to the outsider to look for anything deeper, having had their assumptions so well fulfilled, well, isn’t that what women are trained to do all the time? To please and become a sight and an experience for others, while our true selves are hidden out of sight? There’s a cost though. Women often function as strangers to themselves. And they are never truly alone. Always performing. Even when completely alone.

As for Legilimency, again, I thought it had to have a high cost or people would just do it left and right, wouldn’t they? And I thought about what that cost would be. I like the idea that you can take, but you have to keep it. So, maybe you steal that bit of information from someone, but you also have to carry around their fears and wants and you will never be free of it. Dumbledore dealt with that by detaching himself, floating far above. Snape dealt with that by dehumanizing the people he used it on. If they were things, their feelings don’t matter. Ginny, again, subverting gender stereotypes, does neither. Which is fortunate, because I think she is in far too much danger of becoming the thing she fears (Tom) if she did that. Her tendency to shut down her emotions is when things fall apart the most for her. So Ginny’s refusal to dehumanize the people she takes from gives her a greater burden, but it keeps her human too. In fact, humanizing people is how she deals with it. But it’s also why she never uses it unless she absolutely has to.

As for her use of these things in the Armistice Series, I will say that she is rarely if ever not using Occlumency on some level (which is as much of a problem as it sounds like). She will consciously use Occlumency again. But we will only see her use Legilimency as a last resort. I don’t see that happening right away. But I doubt Harry will ever stay out of trouble long enough for her not to find it useful at some point. :)

Hinny Alt files? Im going through withdrawals until you post the next chapter and will take any Hinny you can give

Ah ha! Oh, this file. Honestly, you know that this one is? This is the indulgent file where I wrote a ton of alternate scenes for The Changeling and Armistice. Like a bunch of, ‘well, what if Harry and Ginny had gotten together at this point in the story? what would that have looked like?’ What if in the middle of their huge row in the cloister, Harry had given into that urge to just lean over and kiss her? Or, what if in that final scene the night before the trio left for Australia, Harry had just leaned in a little closer and Ginny had thrown all fear aside and kissed him? You know, those kind of things. Here, have one in all it’s half-completed glory. I doubt I’ll ever do anything with these anyway.

To be honest, Ginny still isn’t sure herself why Harry agreed to do this. But watching him with Reiko, the way he looks so comfortable talking about something he clearly loves, it reminds her of the DA. She wonders if maybe Harry is missing it too.

He really is a great teacher. He’s patient and never condescending, and even Reiko seems grudgingly willing to admit that she learned a lot in the short half hour they spend together.

“Thanks, Harry,” Reiko says when they’re done, shaking his hand.

“Sure,” Harry says, smiling at her.

Reiko heads up towards the castle, pausing when Ginny doesn’t immediately follow.

“I’ll catch up with you,” Ginny says, waving her on.

“Sure,” Reiko says, looking between the two of them. “See you later.”

Once Reiko is gone, Ginny turns and smiles at Harry. “That was…really great. Thanks so much for doing this.”

Harry’s staring down at his feet, suddenly looking awkward. “No problem,” he says.

She touches his arm. “Seriously. It means a lot.” On impulse, she leans in and gives him a quick kiss on the cheek. She pulls back, giving him an embarrassed smile. “See you later.”

She moves as if to go back up the castle, but his hand on her arm stops her. “Ginny.”

“Yeah?” she asks, turning back to look at him. There’s an expression on his face that inexplicably makes her want to squirm. She forces herself to stand still and wait.

“Hogsmeade,” he blurts.

“What about it?” The first trip is coming up in a few days.

“I thought maybe…”

Ginny leans forward, completely thrown to see Harry quite this flustered. “You thought?”

“You would like to go there. With me.” The words are kind of tumbled together, but she hears them distinctly all the same.

“With you,” she repeats.

He rubs at the back of his head. “Well, uh, yeah.”

“Like…a date?” she asks, just needing to be really clear on exactly what is happening, because her body feels a little funny.

His chin comes up, his shoulders squaring like he’s committing the idea. “Yeah.”

Ginny is so completely thrown by this that she does nothing more than stare at him for a long moment. She can feel her brain stuttering helplessly under the basic thought Harry wants to date me? Harry…likes me?

How has she missed this? How could she possibly have not noticed?

She doesn’t even get to consider her own feelings, because Harry pulls back away from her.

“It’s fine,” he says, giving her a brittle smile. “Forget I asked.”

And then he’s walking away from her.

She considers calling out after him, but honestly has no idea what she would say.

*     *    *

She doesn’t see Harry anywhere the next few days, like he has some secret way of knowing where she is at all times so he can avoid her. It’s disconcerting.

She uses the time to think it all through though, to consider the offer from all angles. To figure out what she would have said if he hadn’t walked off so quickly. It doesn’t take her that long, considering.

And Harry is still nowhere to be found.

Still, strategy has always been one of her strengths, so she settles in to wait.

On Saturday morning, she waits by the gates, stepping out on the path next to Harry as he passes. He nearly stumbles over his feet as he shoots her a comical look of surprise, and she really shouldn’t find that attractive, yet here she is.

“You never let me answer,” she says, as if their conversation has just been picked up after moments rather than days.

“I, uh,” he mumbles, giving Ron and Hermione panicked looks.

Ginny looks at her brother. “Do you think we could have a minute?”

They look at Harry and after a moment, he nods.

They walk off, Ron looking back at the multiple times. Ginny waits until they disappear around the corner.

“Like I said, you never let me answer.”

Harry has recovered himself, looking straight ahead with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. “I think your expression spoke for itself,” he says.

“Did it? What exactly did I look like?”

“Appalled.”

“Probably more like…shocked.”

He glances over at her. “Is that better?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t do well with surprises. It takes me a while to,” she gestures at her head, “work things out.”

He frowns.

“I honestly had no idea you thought about me…that way. I’m just Ron’s annoying little sister.”

“You aren’t annoying,” he says. 

She looks at him, amused by his automatic defense of her. “Really?”

He sighs, starting back down the path. “Well, I’m finding you annoying right now, that’s for sure.”

She jogs to catch up, stepping across him, and he has to stumble to a stop to narrowly avoid running into her.

She smiles at him. “You really are just…” She shakes her head, not really able to put this feeling in her chest into words. She thinks she may want to say adorable, but isn’t sure how he’d take that in his current mood.

He blows out a breath. “I guess it’s too much to hope you’d be kind enough to just forget I ever asked.”

“Don’t be stupid, Harry,” she says. “I’m rarely kind.”

With that, she starts down the path, looking back at him and waiting for him to follow.

They walk the rest of the way to the village in silence.

 …

She basically spends the rest of the day near him, talking with Neville and Luna, submitting herself to confused glances from Ron and something almost a little smug from Hermione.

At the end of the day, he walks her back up to the castle. When they near the gates, she turns to him. “This was fun.”

He still looks like has no idea what the hell just happened.

She thinks Harry is maybe one of those people who only gets it when he’s hit over the head with something. So she decides to kiss him. It’s little more than a brush of her lips against the corner of his mouth because he’s kind of tall and hard to reach.

He lets out a small sound of surprise, but she’s pulling back before he can react. He looks stunned, but also pleased, his hand lifting to touch where she kissed him.

“Yes, by the way,” she says back over her shoulder as she walks away.

“What?” he calls after her.

“My answer. It was yes.”

Smiling to herself, she heads back into the castle.

🤭

Ravenclaw: Are you two fighting ot flirting?

Slytherin and Gryffindor: Yes