Rose - A Harry Potter Fanfic; Chapter Two

[This is a work of ‘fanfiction’, essentially a tribute to the world created by JK Rowling. No infringement of copyright is intended, and neither is any commercial exploitation.]

Previous Chapters:

Chapter 1

Chapter  2

Intrusions

Rose stopped where she was, looking at the pair begin the easy climb up the hill. The tree cover was behind her; she could not follow them further without coming out into the open and being seen. The snowfall had almost covered the mouth of the cave as well, with only a tiny brown ledge marking the entrance. They were surrounded by trees on all sides, which meant this was quite an isolated place. Rose backed behind a large pine, cursing softly to herself as she realised that Neville and his companion were now out of earshot. She did not have any illusions about being able to cast an invisibility charm on herself – her magical prowess was rather limited by ability and a lack of academic rigour. No, what the situation demanded was an invisibility cloak, and the only one in Hogwarts she was aware of, belonged to – and was often used by – her cousin James Potter.

The woman, Parvati, had now taken off her cap and Rose caught sight of her face as she laughed at some remark that Neville had passed. Rose thought she looked vaguely familiar, but couldn't place her exactly.

‘May have visited our home sometime,’ she thought. ‘Though I don’t quite remember that happening either.’

The duo continued towards the cave, soon reaching almost to the entrance where they stopped and took a look around. Rose wondered what they were about, when the silence around her was shattered by a loud CRACK. She had heard it often enough to know someone had apparated and darted backwards into the trees, hoping the person had not appeared too close to her. A series of similar sounds followed, leading Rose to take to her heels in fright. She kept running until she was sure she was too far to be easily seen and then dived behind a small elevation. At least half-a-dozen people had joined Neville and Parvati – she couldn't see them clearly, but the flash of red hair was definitely her Aunt Ginny – no one else she knew had quite that shade of hair! ‘The man accompanying her must be Uncle Harry,’ she reasoned. ‘What are they doing here?’

Then she caught a glimpse of what looked like a very loud tablecloth in shades of orange and yellow and couldn't help emitting a small groan.

“Dad!” she muttered. No one else she knew had such an astoundingly terrible taste in clothes, except perhaps her grandfather Arthur on those all-too-frequent occasions when he chose to wear Muggle clothing.

Her mind was flying at a furious pace. ‘What are they doing here? They must all be here, the old gang of Dad and Mom and Uncle Harry. No doubt the others included the usual suspects from all those years ago. Mrs. Katie Strang, Mr. and Mrs. Jordan from the radio show– and that girl with Uncle Neville must be Parvati Patil, Mom's old friend who became a model.’

She began to edge further backwards as more figures apparated in the clearing. It wasn't as though she felt she was doing anything wrong, but somehow Rose didn't feel like being 'found' eavesdropping – or even peeking – at a gathering that included her mother. In fact she decidedly had a strong dislike to being found so far from Hogwarts even on a Hogsmeade weekend. She was rather too close to the edge of the Forbidden Forest and given her mother's outlook on rule-breaking, Rose had no intention of being spotted there. ‘Which is rather hypocritical,’ she thought, when you consider how many she must've broken in her time.’

She was too far and moreover, at the lower end of a gradient, which meant she could no longer even see the gathering. There seemed to be no way to know what was going on unless she got closer and this she had no intention of doing. Rose shook her head dejectedly and turned to walk back towards the village when her eye caught sight of the unmistakable sight of a broomstick above her. She quickly dived near the roots of a nearby tree, hoping to be concealed. The ruse seemed to work, because the rider continued on his or her course without a break.

‘Probably one of them who still hasn't quite got the hang of apparation,’ she reasoned, and stepped cautiously back into the open. To her surprise, the flier had stopped well short of the cave. She could see her – it was evidently a 'her' – silhouette quite clearly as she dismounted the broomstick and shook some flakes of ice off her robes. She was of about medium height, with long black hair. Rose retreated cautiously behind the tree and peered out. Then something happened that made her drop her jaw in alarm. The woman who had landed changed before Rose's very eyes into the splitting image of her Uncle George!

‘What the hell is going on here! Polyjuice? No, I didn't see her drink anything. Or is Uncle George disguising himself as a woman? No, that's ridiculous, besides, he can Apparate perfectly well. This woman is an impostor. Is she a Metamorphagus like Teddy Lupin?’

Rose stamped her foot in frustration as the woman passed over the edge of the slope and out of sight. For a moment she considered running on ahead and trying to warn her family by shouting, but dismissed the thought. ‘I'd have to run past that woman, and if she is dangerous, which I'm pretty sure she must be, she'd AK me without a second thought before I could get a word out of my mouth. She's here to spy on...damn it, of course! D.A! Parvati said she hadn't met anyone from the D.A. in over 3 years. That stands for Dumbledore's Army – Mom and Dad and Uncle Harry started it back when they were in Hogwarts and fighting Lord Voldemort.’

 Rose knew that after Voldemort's defeat the D.A. had officially disbanded, but there were rumours that they still met and acted as an unofficial safekeeping force. Rumours strong enough to lead to her being asked, several times, by her schoolmates whether those legends of the Battle of Hogwarts still assembled at her home. Rose always answered in the negative, but she had never been quite sure. Until now, that is.

She looked around, a sense of desperation creeping over her. Then her eye fell upon the branches of the tree behind which she was hiding. It had been years since she had tried anything of the sort, but she figured one never quite forgot how to climb a tree. If she could get high enough, she might at least be able to see what was going on, even if she couldn't hear any of it.

Without thinking too much about it, she slipped out of her jacket, dropping it at the foot of the tree. Finding a foothold was the work of a moment – Rose was about fifteen feet up the tree in a matter of seconds. She could see the group well enough now. The imposter George Weasley had joined the rest and seemed to be exchanging pleasantries with them. She could make out nearly fifteen different figures. She craned her neck forward, trying to get a better glimpse – and then, to her great disappointment, Rose saw the figures disappear as, one by one, they entered the cave – first her father, taking his monstrous coat with him, then her mother with her busy gait, then the ever graceful Aunt Ginny closely followed by the measured step of Uncle Harry. ‘Damn, damn, damn! What's the point of scratching my hands and scraping my knees to get all the way up here if they are going to –‘

“I say, Weasley, trying to get back to your simian roots?”

The clear voice broke into her consciousness like the sound of shattering glass. The startled girl lost her grip and then her balance, falling freely onto the soft snow beneath. She raised herself to her knees with some difficulty, relieved to find nothing seemed to be much hurt and looked up to stare into a familiar pair of steel grey eyes.

“Malfoy!” she said in a muffled growl. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“I...err.” For a moment the boy seemed to be facing an internal struggle. Then, he spoke as one who has just made up his mind about something. “I was following you.”

“And why, in the name of all that's rotten, were you following me, you...you stalker!”

“It's not like that!” Scorpius Malfoy said hastily, “I was hanging around outside Weasleys' shop you know, thinking of this and that when I saw you coming out. So, well, I remembered I had something to give you so I followed but you were going too fast for me to catch up...”

“Give me what? Not a rose I hope – like you tried last year on Valentine's Day?”

“What? No! You made it pretty clear you didn't want me to get upto 'any of that nonsense' as you put it.”

“And why didn't you just call out instead of following me? Would've saved you a lot of time.”

“I didn't want to draw attention, Rose! I just wanted to give you your cousin James' invisibility cloak!”

“What are you doing with it?”

“He dropped it in the Astronomy tower last night,” said the boy resentfully, “I happened to pick it up, that's all. Oh, and before you ask me why I don't return to him directly, you know that neither of the Potter brothers would let me come within twenty feet of them without hexing me from here to Newcastle.”

“You do have a point there,” said Rose, sympathetically. “Well, hand it over!”

Scorpius reached into his satchel and pulled out the shimmering fabric.

“Quid pro quo, Weasley...I want something in return.”

“Don't be an ass, Malfoy. I'm not going to kiss you,” said Rose, impatient and irritated by now. ‘How long will this idiot dilly-dally? I need that cloak now! Who knows what will have happened back there while I've been pow-wowing with this pain in the arse?’

“I never said that's what I wanted, Weasley! Just a...date? Maybe?”

“Don't be ridiculous either. Hand it over and go away.”

“Rose!” he said in a pleading tone, but he pushed the cloak towards her.

“No.”

“What about tea with my cousin Estelle Greengrass? I can be the uninvited guest.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Malfoy!” an exasperated Rose exclaimed. “Fine, I'll invite Estelle to join Martin, Elk and me for tea by the lake tomorrow. But don't hold me responsible if Albus shows up.”

“Deal!” said Scorpius, his face lighting up and relinquished his grip on the cloak.

She grabbed it from him, picked up her own coat and took off towards the cave.

Next Chapter

Rose - A Harry Potter Fanfic; Chapter One

[This is a work of ‘fanfiction’, essentially a tribute to the world created by JK Rowling. No infringement of copyright is intended, and neither is any commercial exploitation.]

Chapter 1

Voices

Rose Weasley normally liked Hogsmeade trips.

“Normally” being the operative word here, because today she was finding herself – to put it mildly – bored to death.

She was not the sort of girl who had a lot of friends. Rose had the sort of easy-going personality that meant she rarely rubbed anyone the wrong way, but apart from Albus Potter (who was also her cousin), Martin Lovegood and Elk Moose, she didn’t think there was anyone at Hogwarts she was particularly close to.

And all the three boys had ditched her today. Albus had managed to get himself a detention with Professor Flitwick, Martin Lovegood was down with a cold (for the fifth time that year) and Elk Moose, who was trying out for the Hogwarts Wizard Chess team, insisted he needed to practice his game against Nearly Headless Nick, the all-England Ghost Champion.

She kicked moodily at a Butterbeer cork that was lying on the road and pulled her cloak tighter around herself as she made her way from the Hogsmeade branch of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes (where she had dropped by to say hello to her Uncle George) towards the Shrieking Shack. It was a quiet road – few people voluntarily went in the direction of the Shack even in these peaceful times – and that suited her frame of mind rather well.

She scowled as a group of Hogwarts students – third year, she guessed – passed her going in the opposite direction. She did not know them, but it was one of those days when Rose felt like scowling at people on principle.

She walked on, with no particular idea of where she wanted to go, which she thought faintly ironic because she had no particular idea where she wanted to go in her life as well. She sighed as a gust of winter wind blew open her cloak again, and pulled it closer around herself, wondering why she even bothered going to Hogsmeade in the first place. Even if she thought about it, she never came up with a better answer than “Because I can”. She had the permission slip to go to Hogsmeade, so she went. At least it gave her some respite from the chattering first and second-years who took over the common room with the older students out of the way.

Her Aunt Ginny had told her she ‘brooded’ too much, and Rose thought that was not entirely untrue. She did tend to think too much about everything, except her studies, which meant she languished pretty much near the bottom of every class. That made life even harder, somehow. All the teachers had been ecstatic to see her when she had first made it to Hogwarts, close on five years earlier. She remembered the day well. Travelling in a compartment on the Hogwarts Express with the Potter brothers, being ferried to the castle in boats over the Great Lake and taken to the Entrance Hall. Then the sorting – the Sorting Hat had put her in Gryffindor almost instantaneously (as her father had predicted it would) and she had walked over to the first table on the left to loud cheering, where she joined the Potters and various Weasley cousins.

That was pretty much the high point of my school career, thought Rose grimly as she took a path that forked off from the road towards a little copse where she liked to sit and do her sketches. Rose was quite a gifted artist, drawing praise from Professor Longbottom (or ‘Uncle Neville’ as she always thought of him) who had compared her sketches favourably with the ones his friend Dean Thomas, now one of the most famous portrait artists in Europe used to do at her age. True, it seemed to be the only thing she was gifted at, which was the beginning of her trouble. For, as she found out in her first week at Hogwarts, she was not just Rose Weasley. She was Hermione Granger’s daughter, and that took some living up to.

Her mother was the most amazing woman Rose had ever known. She was also the most intimidating. Passionate, brilliant and ambitious, Hermione Granger-Weasley was already the youngest member of the Wizengamot, headed the Department for Co-operation with Magical Creatures and was seen as someone who would go on to even greater deeds. Which is all very well, groaned Rose as she found a tree-stump where she deposited a few pencils and rolled-up pieces of parchments, except that everyone expects me to be her clone. And I’m not – I’m not Hermione Granger-Weasley.

Every teacher expected her to top their class “just like your mother used to”. They had all unfailingly said as much in the first class she had of each subject, and she had, just as unfailingly, managed to disappoint them. I suppose I do all right in Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures, thought Rose, unrolling a sketch she had made the previous week. She gazed at it speculatively for a moment. It was a sketch of a snowball fight that she had witnessed from the window of her dormitory in Gryffindor Tower. She made a few minor changes, wielding her pencil with the delicacy of a paintbrush. A few stray strands of brown hair fell over her forehead, which she brushed away. Completely uncontrollable hair had to be the one thing I inherited from her, she thought irritably. She looked more like her Muggle Grandma Jane than either of her parents, and was grateful for that, at least. Grandma Jane had been rather good-looking in her youth and even now was a handsome woman. Rose knew that her mother and grandmother did not get along as well as they should, but that had never affected the relations between her and the sprightly old woman.

Rose glanced up. She thought she heard voices – and not being the sort of person who generally heard voices in her head, she concluded that there were people around. She pushed herself to her feet and started putting away her pencils. She hated people seeing her work before it was finished. Who the hell could it be? I thought I was the only person who came to this place.

She had just about finished putting her parchments back into her cloak when she realised the voices were growing fainter, not louder. So someone was going past the copse, outside the village, towards the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Idle curiosity drove her to walk towards the sounds, wondering who it was going towards the Forest on this cold January evening. She had only walked a few minutes when she saw two figures ahead of her, one man and one woman, both dressed in warm woollen coats and fur caps. The man definitely looked familiar. She followed at a safe distance, though the snow on the ground meant that her footsteps were muffled enough to prevent her from being heard.

“Yes, it has been a while, hasn’t it,” she heard the man say. She allowed herself a little gasp – she knew that voice only too well.

What’s Uncle Neville doing here?

The duo walked slowly, making their way around the small birch trees that formed the periphery of the Forest. Though she couldn’t make out who was accompanying the Professor, she guessed it was a woman from the slim figure and the flashes of silky black hair that were visible under the thick cap.

Her curiosity, a powerful beast at the best of times, was piqued. Uncle Neville’s wife Hannah, she knew fully well, was a blonde. So what was he doing walking around in the snow with a strange black-haired woman?

“So it has…I don’t think I’ve seen you or Harry or anyone from the D.A. in more than three years now,” said Neville’s companion, her voice confirming Rose’s suspicion that she was a woman.

“Well, it’s been a peaceful few years -” shrugged Neville, “ - which is all the better for the world in general.”

“So what’s changed now?”

“I could tell you what I know, but it isn’t much. Better to wait until we reach the meeting point.”

“And who are we meeting exactly?”

“You’ll find out,” said Neville in an amused voice.

“You’re not going to tell me no matter what I say, are you?” said the woman.

“No, I’m not, but trust me, it will be worth it.”

They walked on a while longer in silence, Rose still following behind. Years of sneaking around the school corridors at night had taught her the art of moving without being heard. Of course, their nightly excursions usually ended with Elk erupting into an enormous sneeze which meant they had to scurry for the closest means of cover while Filch and Mrs. Norris marched up and down the hallways looking for the perpetrators of the villainy.

“So how’s things at the school then, Neville? Harry and Hermione’s kids must be at Hogwarts now, mustn’t they?”

“Them and everyone else’s,” agreed Neville. “Except people like us, of course.”

“At least you ARE married,” said the woman with a light, musical laugh, “and not a basket case like me!”

“Oh come on, Parvati, you’re anything but a basket case. You just chose a different lifestyle.”

“We’ve been thinking of adopting though,” said Parvati, in a more serious tone, “so that’s something to look forward to. Probably after I retire from the ramp.”

They continued to walk for a few minutes until they arrived at a small hillock. She had been too engrossed to notice where they were going, but as the pair ahead of her began climbing towards what looked like the opening to a cave, she realised that she was not far from the legendary cave where Sirius Black, at the time a notorious fugitive had hidden while her Uncle Harry had been a student at Hogwarts.

Next Chapter

Fanfiction and me – a selection from the autobiography of the Slacker.

Why Fanfic?

Why not fanfic? I’ve heard it being denigrated, of course, or called ‘not real writing’, but that is an opinion that’s plain wrong. Fanfiction is writing, for the simple fact that it is words on paper. Now there’s degrees within Fanfic, of course. There’s work that is very original and work that is - well, not. There are fanfics of such brilliance that they make one wonder if the original might not have benefited from the treatment, and then there is ‘My Immortal’.

The point I am trying to make is that as a creative outlet, Fanfic is as legitimate a form as any other.

My personal journey into the world probably stems to my very early forays into writing, when my age was in single digits and I scrawled block letters into unused diaries trying to write about the Famous Five and the Hardy Boys, before moving on to my version of The Count of Monte Cristo where {SPOILER ALERT] Edmund Dantes dies a horrible death before driving M de Villefort’s wife to suicide. Naturally, all that was forgotten in the years that followed, and I pretty much put aside my pen as I went through college. When I did pick it up again (though it was a desktop keyboard by then) I was writing original stories – the Elver series that some of you have been kind enough to read. For those of you who haven’t, a couple of the stories written at the time are available here.

Then I got a job, and that’s where Fanfiction re-entered my life in a big way.

It went something like this - as a young Management Trainee, I was chucked into the world of finance (a week before the contracted joining date, as I shall curse to my dying day) into a team that was in flux. The international business division was being re-organised, nobody knew what they would be handling a month hence, and as such, were not particularly interested in finding work for a fresh-faced young fellow who, to be fair, was not actually pushing to be given something to do either.

Not actually a photo of the Slacker. My socks are less flashy.

So I had what can best be described as ‘vacant’ time. Time to sit at a desk and do nothing. I’d have liked to bring a novel to the office and peruse it, but even I was not thick enough to think I could get away with that without doing serious long-term damage to my career. Maybe if I could bring a management guru’s book to read, yes, but that was never going to happen.

So I was left with the alternative of peering into a computer screen and trying to find entertainment there, on a network that blocked all forms of social media.

That’s when fanfic came to my rescue. Those sites were not blocked. Schnoogle, FF.net, mugglenet – all displayed their wares, and I spent many a blissful hour reading the works hosted there. That there would be a slant towards Harry Potter was not surprising, the last book of the series was yet to come out, and for many people like me, fanfic was a way to seek an alternate ending, a resolution, to questions we still had. Looking back on it, as much as I enjoyed reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I must say that I can think of at least a couple of Fanfics that did a more convincing and satisfying job of closing the series.

Well, my idyll at the office did not last long, and pretty soon I was festooned in work but Fanfic remained my guilty pleasure, it was where I went to if I snatched a free half-hour at work. But two – maybe three – years into my life as corporate slave, I realised that my own writing had gone so completely on the back-burner that its prospects of ever coming to fruition were weaker than those of Birbal’s proverbial khichdi being cooked.

And yet, writing is a skill, and a skill needs to be practised. Or so I thought. Thinking up original content was virtually impossible at the end of a twelve-hour workday. But I did have an idea for a story that was essentially an extension of Rowling’s Harry Potter Universe. I wanted to explore the next-generation, and avoid the mistakes that other fanfic authors had made by caricaturising the children. If I could bring something of my own writing, my own style and characterisation to the HP universe, I thought I’d be doing a pretty good job of honing my own skills, while crafting a tale I hoped would be engaging.

I named it ‘The Name of the Rose’, which was stupid, in hindsight, but what did I know, right? I had a plot in mind, even if, like all pantsers, it was vague as to the specifics. But I had my characters well-mapped out in my head. They were real to me – Rose Weasley, Scorpius Malfoy, Albus Potter and even the elements from Indian mythology that I was trying to weave into it. For this was rapidly becoming my story.

There was also the Neria Fanfic, based off Dragon Age: Origins, an RPG that still stands up both graphically and in terms of gameplay and which I enjoyed re-imagining as the story of a slutty mage.

Flash forward to today.

While I am writing more original content now, what with Cats and other forms of fiction I still have neither forgotten, nor am I ashamed of, my foray into the world of Fanfiction. After all, if JK Rowling can put her name to ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’, which is essentially a fanfic, even if a good one, I’m pretty sure mine isn’t too bad either ;)

I shall be posting the opening Chapters from my Harry Potter Fanfic on this blog over the course of the next few days, and depending on the response, might put up the whole thing.

Happy Reading, and all that sort of thing.