Progress Report 5/11

[lomonaaeren]

There are a lot of new ideas this time, so I’m dumping them here.



Providence- This will be finished on Thursday. I’m glad for the sake of having one of my WiPs off my hands, but I will miss this story.

Inter Vivos- This has five more parts to post, four for Chapter 30, “Snake,” and then an epilogue. The epilogue may actually do something to relieve the unremitting bleakness of this story in the last few chapters.

Viper- I’ll be posting the third chapter (of 8 or 9) tomorrow. And yes, I am now more disturbed by Harry than Draco; you were right, star_faerie.

Their Phoenix- I keep working away at this every evening, usually writing between 1000 and 2000 words on it. Still no way of telling how long it’ll be. I should be more disturbed by this than I am, but working on this story is fun.





“Penance Is the Play”: Draco is a good Auror, but every partner he works with gives up on him in despair because he’s so annoying. In desperation, Kingsley asks Harry to take him on. Harry, grumbling, does, and is astonished to find that Draco is perfectly charming. Was he playing at being annoying before? Or is his new behavior the game? And what in the world could he have to gain from it? (Probably you suspect what he has to gain from it. But Harry is focused on work in this story and not on Draco).

“Another Country”: Harry is brain-damaged by a Dark curse, which leaves him out of step with the world: seeing auras that no one else can, seeing futures that don’t happen, and having trouble with English words for common items even though he can speak Latin with increased fluency. Draco, who’s long been resentful of Harry’s “perfect” life, feels some pity for him now that he’ll never be normal again. And Draco, in this story (shut up, it’s my fic and I can do this) speaks perfect Latin, because his parents thought it would give him a head start on spells to learn Latin as one of his native languages. He’s the one who starts taking over Harry’s rehabilitation and introducing him to a new future, rather than trying to make him return to “normal,” as the Healers think he should.

“And A Little Love Before the Night”: The case is water-tight. The evidence all checks out. And to make matters sure, the criminal has confessed. Harry Potter is sentenced to the Dementor’s Kiss for the insanely brutal murders of three young men, who enraged him by refusing to become his lovers. But Draco is convinced, out of nothing more than sheer intuition, that Harry didn’t commit the crime. Instead, he’s protecting someone who should be dying for the murders instead. And Draco’s determined to find out who. This would be a colder fic than most of mine, almost noir in sensibility, since Harry is not pleased that Draco is investigating and Draco is a detached bastard who regards the world with cynical amusement.

Running to Paradise: A novel-length story about Harry and Draco slowly becoming partners through Auror training. I’ve seen many fics where they already are partners, but not many about how they got there. The process of learning is one that I often skip over in my own stories, for that matter. Well, RtP would be entirely focused on it. The title comes from the Yeats poem of the same name.

“Justifiable Homicide”: A crackfic, in which Draco is accused of killing Rita Skeeter by swallowing her in his bird Animagus form while she was a beetle. Draco insists on handling his own defense. Oh, dear.

“Company Manners”: Draco hasn’t seen Harry in several years due to being out of England, and then meets him at a Ministry party. To his shock, he finds that Harry has been groomed to become the public face of the new Ministry; it’s too dangerous for Harry to be a field Auror due to people eager to claim the credit for killing the Boy-Who-Lived, but he recruits new Aurors and tries to heal rifts between the various segments of wizarding society, since he’s the one person no one would dream of leaving off a guest list. Draco is deeply drawn to the new person Harry is in public: poised, confident, polite. Meanwhile, Harry thinks of that as just a façade he wears for reasons of politics, and of his real self as the one who attended Hogwarts and plays Quidditch and hangs out with Ron and Hermione. When he becomes aware of Draco’s interest, he regards any relationship between them as doomed, because Draco doesn’t know and wouldn’t like his real self. So the story is a comedy of manners, and takes up a different viewpoint than I usually use on matters of publicity and courtesy: that they have their place, and the person you are in company can be as real as the person you are in private.

“Where Dwell the Pure of Heart”: Harry works for a Ministry he’s increasingly tired of serving, since there’s bribery and corruption everywhere. And then he discovers that Draco’s been mistreated for years by the Aurors assigned to monitor him, and basically explodes. This is a simple story where Harry gets to be very, very Gryffindor and Draco gets to be pampered. Hey, I deserve to write a simple story once in a while.

“Anarchy as Art”: Draco is an accomplished thief who also teaches Dark magic to those who pay enough and sells illegal potions on the side. Harry is the best Auror in the Department, who keeps capturing all the Dark wizards Draco is setting up—but he hasn’t yet managed to catch Draco himself. Then his boss puts him exclusively on the case, and it becomes a cat-and-mouse game. With sexual attraction, of course.

Comments

[lomonaaeren.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And, well, that story would be pretty much hurt/comfort, so we'll see how you react.