Missed the previous installment? Here it is.
Pumpkin treats and Harry Potter seem to go together, don’t they? I suppose. I mean, the recipes do show up when you search for Harry Potter-inspired foods. So in continuing my self-imposed pumpkin purgatory, I’m giving pumpkin cookies a try.
MuggleNet offers a variety of recipes for your cooking pleasure. Among them are delectable pumpkin cookies. I’m not exaggerating. These are excellent cookies. It was the first thing I made for Brainpie that my husband was willing to try, and he enjoyed them.
But my batch didn’t turn out like the one pictured in the small photo on the original recipe page. You’ll notice that Mugglenet’s photo shows a plate of perfectly knobby cookies. Mine, however, turned out smooth. I also didn’t use the teaspoon as stated in the recipe, instead opting for a cookie dough scoop to drop the dough onto the sheet. Come to think of it, maybe the copper baking sheet contributed to the texture. (Those sheets are my little helpers when it comes to easy cleanups.)
They’re very cakey and moist. The mouthfeel is reminiscent of a bran muffin, the kind that you can instantly tell will fill you up once it touches the insides of your cheeks. There’s a hint of natural pumpkin and spice, but it doesn’t taste like a pumpkin pie. Mild but pleasant.
I wanted to try something. See, measuring cups come in two different forms: wet and dry. Pumpkin is a wet ingredient, so you need a liquid measuring cup. I thought a full cup of the stuff made the cookies cakey and moist. So the next batch I made was with pure pumpkin measured in a dry cup.
There’s a faint difference. The one-cup-wet (just go with it) pumpkin cookies were super moist and the one-cup-dry pumpkin cookies weren’t as moist and the edges were slightly crispy. The latter batch doesn’t have much of a pumpkin flavor to them; in fact, you can taste the cinnamon and vanilla more. So I’m guessing the equipment I used made the cookies smooth.
Oh, well, it was fun experimenting. Let’s help ourselves to a plate of these cookies as we pick up from the action-packed chapter.
Chapter 8: Malfoy Blood
We open the chapter with Harry waking up… and bound in bed… Oh, come on! You ended the last chapter with Draco confronting his own father, and you couldn’t pick up from that, Clare?
*sigh* Anyway, Harry wakes up, bound in bed once again, suffering through a headache that’s apparently worse than losing half his blood. Who should show up but Narcissa Holding a “large, bone handled saw.”
But Narcissa is on the side of good. She cuts the binds, all the while letting her eyes twitch “from side to side in that weird little tic Harry was beginning to get used to.” I get used to odd things the first time I hear about them, too. Seriously, I searched the document and I couldn’t find anywhere else this tic was mentioned.
Once freed, Harry asks Narcissa what happened to Hermione, even mentioning her real name. Whether Narcissa now knows the truth or didn’t pick up on that small detail is never brought up. She informs her not-son that Hermoine was taken to the dungeons to room with Sirius, adding that Lucius had performed the Cruciatus Curse on her.
Sickened but emboldened, Harry asks what else happened. We get a brief recap of Draco-as-Harry throwing off the Invisibility Cloak before getting hauled off by the Death Eaters. Harry puts his hands on Narcissa’s, feeling their iciness and noticing that she’s “still holding the knife” that used to be a saw not seven paragraphs ago. He asks if “Harry” is all right and where he was taken. Once he learns that his body double is in the fencing room, he dashes off.
Mean-damn-while, Hermione is dreaming of going socks shopping with Harry in Diagon Alley. Harry seems to show up in a lot of Hermione’s dreams, “usually looking a lot better than he did in real life” (ow…) “and sometimes wearing nothing but socks” (uh…). Dream Harry is in incredible pain as there’s a knife sticking out of his ribs and blood ruining his clothes. “The knife,” he says. “It’s not mine, you know. It’s Draco’s.”
Cue the obligatory scream from Hermione. From the sight of gore or the declaration that the knife actually belongs to Draco, I don’t know.
Sirius wakes Hermione up with an enervate. It’s the wrong word to use, but I can’t blame Clare for getting this one wrong, as this was J.K. Rowling’s mistake. The original word means “to weaken.” Realizing this, Rowling renamed the spell to reennervate, “to revive or energize” in subsequent reprints of The Goblet of Fire.
Hermoine realizes that she’s not alone.
SIRIUS: Yo.
He apologizes for yelling at her, but as he had no wand, he had to… wait a minute, if you don’t need a wand to perform a spell, then you’re better than most wizards. If that’s the case, he could perform a spell to get himself out of that cell.
Never mind. Hermoine fills Sirius in on all the evening’s events (even Lucius’s attempts in the study?). Hermoine dreads that Harry is dead, but Sirius knows better. The Death Eaters will need him for Voldemort’s plan, after all, which you’d think Hermoine would have remembered. Lucius did go in full detail about it, after all. But enough of that, Harry could be in danger at this very moment.
There’s so much to do in preparation for the Dark Lord’s arrival, after all. Floors swept, china polished, tapestries re-bloodied…
Hermoine has an outburst about how she hates Lucius. “He’s a freakish, evil, jewelry-wearing pervert who doesn’t even care about his own son.” Before you smirk at that odd bit, Sirius asks after the jewelry Lucius was wearing. Once it’s described, Sirius has an awful revelation.
Hermoine, you dumb-sel in distress, it’s obvious.
Long story short, Lucius took one of baby Draco’s teeth and transferred some life essence into it, creating a magical instant kill switch. One mistake or any backtalk from Narcissa, and crush goes the pendant. That explains why she put up with Lucius’s crap all these years, but not why she agreed to marry him. Unless it was a shotgun wedding. Or Dark Arts wand wedding. Whatever the wizard equivalent.
Mean-blaugh-while, Harry has found Draco in the fencing room, imprisoned in a small cell with bars made entirely out of light. Harry carefully approaches the powerful magic, seeing that Draco is lying flat on the floor. His friendly nemesis stirs and sees him.
HARRY: Yo.
Draco informs Harry that he’d be wasting his time trying to free him from the cage. It’s made from powerful magic that only a trained Auror can counteract. But he comes up with a plan: Just have Harry kill him.
“It’ll just be dying a little earlier than I will anyway when they get their hands on me,” he says. Once he’s turned into a Muggle killing machine, he’ll probably be sent after Hermoine first. After a moment of silence, he adds, “It’s really a pity we’re not related […] I bet your friend Sirius down in the dungeon could take the imprisonment charm off. He’s meant to be a really powerful wizard.”
As incongruent as these two statements are, it gives Harry an idea.
Without telling Draco what he has in store, Harry takes out a knife that he received from Sirius on his fourteenth birthday, grabs Draco’s hand, and slashes the other boy’s palm. They perform a blood brother ritual so Harry can enter the dungeons. Pleasant.
Well, I hope neither of you has a blood-borne disease—hey, wait a minute. Since when did Harry have that knife on his person?
Let’s backtrack here. After the Polyjuice Potion failed to wear off, the boys got into a fight that ended up with Harry-as-Draco getting knocked out and subsequently shipped off to Malfoy Manor. Unless Harry had that knife in his school uniform—which I doubt would have been allowed—and the boys switched into each other’s clothes, there’s no way that Harry could have carried that knife into the manor.
I searched the document. The knife was never brought up before this moment and it’s only mentioned a few more times after this in conversation and as a busying prop. Clare had written herself into a corner and threw in a device for the characters to get themselves out of it.
I can hear the defenders now. “This is fanfiction, it doesn’t have to be perfect! It’s for practice. It shouldn’t be held up to the same standards as published novels.”
Bull. I’ve read think pieces about how fanfic writers want to be recognized as serious writers. You can’t have it both ways. If you want to be taken seriously, no matter what you’re writing, keep track of your props and characters. If you write yourself into a corner, figure out how to get out of it using what you’ve already established in the story. Don’t pull miracles out of fat air.
Harry could have run down to the kitchen and fetched a knife. What about that ghost butler, Anton, who suggested that Harry-as-Draco climb up the flue and into a second-floor bedroom? The last we ever heard of Anton was when Lucius’s cronies are explaining to Lucius how they knew to go to Draco’s bedroom during the “honey, are you on drugs” conversation. Anton could have been summoned to take Harry to the kitchen to get a knife if he couldn’t carry one himself. How about that for getting oneself out of a corner?
Anyway…
PORTRAIT: *bellows like a walrus during the mating season*
No, he gets through without a hassle.
During his flight through the depths of the manor, Harry muses about how Draco—you know what, I don’t care about this whole “I must muse about how I owe my enemy and he owes me” bit right now, so let me skip to where he gets to the dungeon cell. He puts his hand on the lock which “[comes] away as if it had been made of spaghetti,” which makes me wonder why Lucius can’t create a more permanent lock. Don’t wizards trust keys?
Harry finds Sirius and Hermoine, the latter rightly concerned about Harry’s bloody hand (that’s actual blood, not the British swear word). He assures his maybe-girlfriend that Draco is still alive, but he’ll be used for Voldemort’s scheme soon. We end the scene with him asking Sirius if he knows anything about imprisonment spells. At this point, I’m sure said spells will be forgotten just like knives.
Meanwhile, Draco is lying in his own prison cell, blah blah, thinking about Hermoine, bleh bleh, falling in love, yech yech, Harry is a hero because sometimes you have to do the right thing, blech…
The doors to the fencing room open, revealing Lucius and a tall man in hooded robes and red gloves. Quite a daring color for Voldemort. Don’t be surprised, you were expecting him to show up right about now, too.
The cage of light vanishes with a “liberos” from Voldemort, who then peers right into Draco’s face. For someone who spent all of his life hearing stories about the Dark Lord and aspired to become a Death Eater, his horrified reaction at Voldy’s slit-nosed, moon-pale imitation of a human face is kind of surprising.
Whiplashing back to our newly assembled trio, we find Harry having described to Sirius the glowing cage “several times.” You’d think “it’s glowing and only an Auror can break it” would have sufficed unless Sirius is hard of hearing or has a sudden affliction of attention defici—hey, there’s a little jumping spider over the dresser. Hey, little fella! You wanna be my roommate?
Right, fanfic.
Sirius will need his wand to take care of the cage. He did wake up Hermione without it earlier, but maybe that was a low-level spell. (I don’t know. I’ll make sense of stuff in this story when I want to.) He’d witnessed Lucius put the wand in a drawer in his study… I guess while he was being pummeled by his captors. (I refuse to make sense of this one.)
Sirius transmogrifies into a dog and dashes off, leaving Harry and Hermione to indulge in more relationship talk. Harry brings up Draco’s statement of “dying a little earlier,” which Hermione recalls as something Harry himself had said during their first year… which is partially accurate.
From chapter sixteen of The Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone (illustrated edition, if you’re wondering about the format):
Close. “A” for effort.
Now is a perfectly good time for Hermoine to bring up that she’d invited Draco over to her home over the summer. Harry scoffs, saying that he’ll turn her entire family into toads (nice callback). But Hermoine protests, saying that Draco would be the perfect guest. He’s read Hogwarts: A History, after all.
HERMIONE: I did make out with him for a bit, so, yes, I suppose.
Actually, that is more or less her answer. Expressing a desire to dig the knife deeper into his own heart, Harry asks her if she loves Draco. Could she love him?
Cue make-out session.
What is it with these tween/teen/young adult stories having the couple make out during moments when time is of the essence? Their friend/frenemy could be getting a weapon of mass genocide grafted onto his limb as they speak… or rather, don’t speak, but locking lips is apparently more important.
As they separate, Harry apologizes. Yes, apologizes. “I didn’t mean to do that. I’m really sorry.” The less we think about the uses of this phrase in other situations, the better.
You know what this long scene needs more of? Relationship talk. (I’m sure Voldemort will be understanding and let the kids catch up.) Kissing Hermione was great, but Harry isn’t doing it again because it’s “made a bigger mess of things.” He takes out his knife caked with blood and fiddles with it while the conversation goes on. I don’t know about you readers, but I’ve always been comforted by the sight of dried blood on weapons, especially when the person playing with them is fueled by hormones, emotions, and impulse, but especially when they’re within stabbing distance from me.
Instead of doing the sane thing and immediately scratching Harry out of the love triangle, Hermione demands to know how he feels about her. Let me save us all some time and summarize this page (yeah, that’s about how long this dialogue drags on) in script form.
HERMIONE: You’re crazy.
HARRY: I’ve given this a lot of thought.
HERMIONE: You don’t want to know what I think.
HARRY: I do.
HERMIONE: Say it.
HARRY: No.
HERMIONE: Say it.
HARRY: No.
HERMIONE: Say it.
HARRY: No.
HERMIONE: I’m done.
Hermoine has decided that the past six years spent agonizing over Harry have been a waste. Now she’s free, free to fulfill the ultimate damsel fantasy and redeem Draco through the power of contrived love. (Actually, the ultimate damsel fantasy in a Harry Potter fic would be to redeem Voldemort, but let’s deal with the more accessible and handsome bad guys first).
Checking back in with Sirius, we find him opening Lucius’s study in dog form, and popping back into human form when he spots Narcissa behind the desk and holding his wand. Suspecting no trap, he readily accepts it when it’s offered to him. But she refuses to tell him how to get to the fencing room.
Mean-YEARGH-while, Draco is coming to terms with having Voldemort’s face possibly haunting him for the rest of his natural life. Yet he feels brave in the literal face of evil. In fact, he feels pretty snarky, and God, is this gonna hurt.
Voldemort congratulates Lucius on doing a fine job…
Yes, if Draco has to die, he’s going to go out sarcastically. That’s not my observation; it pretty much says so in the text.
The Dark Lord then puts his hand on the forehead scar and asks if it hurts.
“It was evident that Voldemort didn’t have a sense of humor,” says the text. Neither do I where blatant attempts of using the tired “sarcasm = personality” formula.
Voldemort then demands that the boy take his hand.
My new favorite character grabs Draco’s hand, the very one that the real Harry had sliced open, testing a suspicion. Not getting answers from this or a confused Lucius, he casts a finite incantum. Draco is dealt bodily horror, “pain [tearing] through his nerves like a flight of tiny arrows… as if his own skin were being ripped away, his bones melted and reformed.” I don’t know about you, but I find this is cruelly satisfying.
Once it’s passed, Draco removes Harry’s glasses, which have now blurred his vision. Voldemort turns to his stunned follower.
This better not be a repeat of the last chapter where the next one opens with someone waking up.
Trust me, the Buffy speak gets thick in her original works, too.
Prep Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Cleanup
