dolorous_ett | Commentary: House of Flying Artichokes (Reply)

Here's a commentary on "House of Flying Artichokes", as requested by a_t_rain, snorkackcatcher and aerama. It's rather long, so I've put it under a cut.

The link to the orginal story is here.

House of Flying Artichokes

The title was the last thing I wrote for this story. Right up until the eleventh hour it was going to be something lame like "Dining with Dolts" or "Supper with Snobs". If a colleague hadn’t persuaded me to watch that most ridiculous of films, House of Flying Daggers, I would have had to have gone with "Supper with Snobs".

She had been kept standing outside the gates for over an hour before she even made it to the Great House, shivering as dew seeped into the hem of her expensive velvet evening gown and her carefully styled hair reverted to its usual sorry frizz in the evening damp, while the servants and master of the house disarmed the anti-Muggle wards on the borders of the Malfoy property.

Not everyone liked the way Hermione is regarded as a Muggle throughout - and thinks of herself as one too. I didn’t think it through properly till afterwards, but I still think this plausible - at such a dinner party I’d probably rather think of myself as Muggle than as one of them. And I’m sure people like the Malfoys have only the haziest idea of the difference between Muggles and Mudbloods - they’d never meet either socially.

There she had met Geraint Rodway, handsome only child of the Hampshire Rodways: thirty years old, Level Three curse-breaker, tall and tanned, with a shock of floppy blond hair, a flashing white smile and a cut-glass accent. It had not been love at first sight.

In some ways Geraint is a complete Gary Stu - a romantic hero straight from Central Casting. On the other hand, the poor man was only brought into being so that he and all he stands for could ultimately be found wanting. He was inspired by the sort of public schoolboy I used to know at Cambridge - who go on to succeed because they've been trained to since birth, not through any great natural inclination.

The day after she arrived at her parents' house in Bicester, a little gilt supper invitation from Pansy Malfoy had arrived, clasped in the talons of a haughty, well-groomed eagle owl. Her father, an enthusiastic member of the RSPB, had been in raptures over the creature, which had hissed and snapped at his fingers before leaving through the kitchen window with a contemptuous swoosh.

I enjoyed picking the most prosaic middle-class Muggle place and hobbies I could think of - and trying to make even the Malfoy owls sniffy about it.

There were going to be six of them, it appeared: Hermione, the Malfoys, Crabbe, Blaise Zabini and Professor Snape. As they proceeded down the hall, Hermione realised that she and Pansy were the only two women there.

I toned down the idea of women avoiding Hermione as not suitable company for a nice lady, as a lot of people on FAP threads thought it this was something Purebloods would never do. I’ve always wondered how they knew… but no-one’s given me a hard time over my final version so it looks like I got the balance just about OK.

The table was laid with elegant silver, fine china and damask napkins, with an elegant Runic place card for each guest. Draco and the guests took their seats (Hermione thanked her lucky stars that she had insisted on studying Ancient Runes at Hogwarts)
, [look, kids! Languages are important! Even unusual ones!] but Pansy remained by the door, where a tense, hissed conversation was taking place with someone on the far side. Finally, with a muttered "Have it your own way," she sat down, and majicked away one of the place settings with a flick of her wand.

Another woman absenting herself… this is a far more restrained version of my original idea for Narcissa, which involved her doing her best to sabotage the evening. Or else sticking her head round the door at intervals, shrieking in horror and running away.

…she abruptly remembered a clipping from the scandal pages of the
Daily Prophet Ron had sent her with his last owl, a scurrilous piece about how Professor Snape's highborn fiancée had eloped with a spotty youth who worked as a conductor on the Knight Bus…

Cheap, I know. But who could resist?

Hermione did her best to put matters right. She complimented Snape on his latest monographs on combining anti-analgesics and emetics, and met only with surly silence. She enquired politely after his Hogwarts colleagues, to learn that, after a series of incidents ("foolish mollycoddling: potion-making is simply not a suitable occupation for the cowardly and incompetent"), he had been offered the choice between a compulsory sabbatical in Tibet studying meditation techniques, or instant expulsion. He had taken the sabbatical, but with ill grace; and Hermione's account of how much good Harry's spell in the lamasery had done his post-traumatic stress disorder was not kindly received.

Thanks to Snorkack Catcher for noticing that Snape’s reseach involves a combination of Vomiting Potions and antidotes to painkillers!

As for Tibet… I have the professional Orientalist’s horror of the kind of person who thinks that Tibet has the answer to everything. Poor old Snape - wishy-washy mysticism was good enough for Harry Potter, so why not him too? I really wasn’t nice to Snape in this story.

…listening to Draco Malfoy speaking with great authority and at some length about Quidditch, Quidditch brooms, Quidditch tactics and the Holyhead Harpies - who, in his view, had been good for nothing since they first allowed women to get involved. Hermione, who was fond of Quidditch, attempted a few questions, which he answered in an indulgently absentminded way, in a voice more suitable for a small child. Hermione wondered whether she should be offended, until she noticed that his manner with Pansy was not so very different. Come to that, he was not particularly civil to Crabbe, either … her efforts were not in vain: after several questions about the famous victory Slytherin had won over Hufflepuff in their seventh year, she was rewarded with a faint, thin smile, before he turned to tug Zabini's sleeve and direct his attention to the
hysterical sight of a house-elf who had become entangled while attempting to carry away the remains of the Devil's Snare.

Malfoy is horrible. Neither he nor Zabini get any fangirling from me - ghastly spoilt brats, the pair of them.

"Now here's something you'll never get with those M- I mean, here's a real treat for you, Hermione!" said Pansy brightly, as a house-elf swept off the cover with a flourish, to reveal a mouth-watering roast, studded with cloves, star anise and some other spice that gave the surface a strange, oily, rainbow-coloured sheen.

Pansy, on the other hand, is genuinely trying to overlook Hermione’s unfortunate background - which in some ways is worse.

It was fun making all the weird food mouthwatering!

As they munched their way through enough roast hippogriff to feed a family of twenty in Nubia, Zabini kept up a running series of questions in an ingratiating, solicitous voice, black eyes lively in his smooth, handsome face. He appeared to be genuinely captivated by her story of their love snatched from the doors of death, and equally fascinated by all that she could tell him of Muggle life ("So your parents are
dentists? How utterly fascinating. Is it true they use drills and hammers?").

I didn’t mean Zabini to be so nasty - but he took on a life of his own.

The nice thing about this description is that it doesn’t actually contradict any of JKR’s description of him. Pure luck - this predates HBP by some months.

Across the table, Crabbe cleared his throat.

"'Scuse me," he said though a mouthful of Hippogriff and caramelised parsnip. "Did you say your pa liked the owl? I thought Muggles hated owls."

Crabbe, on the other hand, I quite like. Anyone with the patience to train owls can’t be all bad. He’s also the only one who treats Hermione just as another person (to whom he can talk about owls all evening). And for the record, his owls have won many prizes, and are now in some demand in discerning circles.

…"Wild 'uns are a lot harder to train but they don't try to mate with your head in spring."

This is actually quoted verbatim from a man who breeds owls (hopefully not with his own head…)

By this time, the food was starting to bother her. The exotic nature of the dishes was not a problem - when she was trapped in the pyramid with Geraint, they had been hungry enough at one point to give serious consideration to eating a six-thousand-year-old mummified crocodile; besides, no curse-breaker who was squeamish about what they ate managed to survive past their first meal at the Goblins' high table. But Nubia was a poor and barren country: Hermione's usual supper consisted of flatbread, chickpeas, lentils and goat's milk, and the rich food was beginning to have an effect on her insides.

After all that time in China, where the most unpromising things can be made delicious, I have no sense of what’s disgusting food any more. But I can’t abide waste!

The artichoke appeared to flinch out of the path of the fork, and rolled unharmed to the side of her plate. Hermione blinked, attempted to regain her composure, and stabbed down with her fork at the prone vegetable.

The artichoke let out a shrill wail, rolled out of the path of the fork, snapped upwards, and Hermione felt many sharp, pointed little teeth meet in the fleshy part of her palm. She shrieked, and dropped her fork.

Without Fiction Alley Park there would have been no Aggressive Artichoke. I asked for social horrors for an awful dinner party, and someone suggested the correct way to eat an artichoke (I had to start another thread to find out what this was - thanks, After The Rain). I realised that artichokes (at least the artichoke hearts in olive oil my Mum likes) are sort of hedgehog shaped, and the Aggressive Artichoke was born.

I have a very soft spot for the Artichoke. Initially, Hermione was going to go through with it, and hate herself. I couldn’t bear to write it! So the Artichoke got a reprieve.

Groaning aloud, and rolling his eyes up to the ceiling, Professor Snape threw both his hands in the air in an exaggerated gesture of exasperation - a gesture that would have been much more effective had one of the heavy, trailing sleeves of his evening robe not caught on one of the ornamental protrusions on his goblet, upsetting it onto the snowy tablecloth.

Thanks, Snape - got me out of a jam there!

On her plate, Hermione's artichoke glared up at her, and gave a little shiver. Quick as thought, she palmed her wand, cast a Silencing Charm on the creature, wrapped it in a discarded napkin and thrust the small, struggling bundle into her embroidered evening bag. Then with the razor-sharp reflexes of a curse-breaker who had battled a thousand horrors in pyramids and tombs all over Africa, she immobilised all the remaining artichokes with a series of perfectly aimed Impedimenta curses, and Banished them neatly into the house-elves' waiting sack.

When I posted the first half of this story, people pointed out that Hermione was taking the horrors of the meal awfully meekly. This is what she can do when love isn’t addling her brain.

Pansy gave her a huge, strained smile.

"Well! Isn't this nice!" she said, skin taut around the cheeks. "Now we can have a lovely chat, just the two of us!"

Hermione looked at her tense, weary face, and managed to summon up a smile. "Lovely."

I’m no good at small talk - especially with people I don’t like. This sort of thing is always happening to me.

And my polite conversations also have a tendency to just peter out into long, embarrassing silences - as happens later on.

"Bloody awful people," said the voice, superficially cultured but with the underlying Yorkshire starting to show through. "Better to be alone... Cauldron m'only friend... subtle simmering friend... And then her too... Never would've thought it... Never. Not in a million years... Brightest girl in her year.... brave, gifted, pretty...that lummox Rodway... jumped-up streak of nowt... Turning herself into a clothes-horse. Bloody unbelievable..."

Ah, they all laughed at Drunken Yorkshireman!Out of Control!Snape at the time, but now…

Be very grateful you will never see my first draft of Snape’s conversation with Hermione here - it’s so bad it’s embarrassing. A classic example of why less is more.

A couple of people have asked if the hint of SS/HG is deliberate. The short answer is yes - but Snape as he is here would never have the gumption to do anything about it. If I ever write a sequel to this story, it will involve Snape making Hermione dissatisfied with a series of perfectly decent man friends, but never making a move, just lurking around in corners and making both of them miserable.

Tucked up in a warm bed in the Leaky Cauldron, dress robes Transfigured into soft flannel pyjamas, a warming pan at her feet, a generous mug of the Leaky Cauldron's special Chocolat Digestif in her hands, and the artichoke paddling around happily in a saucer of olive oil on the dresser, Hermione considered her evening with the Malfoys.

And so she should. Geraint is not really up to her level. Even if the only person to come right out and say it is a nasty, bitter man with a personal agenda, it’s still true. At the very least, Geraint should have been with her during this ghastly evening.

The saucer of oil is by way of being a sop to the Artichoke for nearly getting it horribly killed.

She thought of their days in the pyramids, terrifying at the time, but so delightful to her now: Geraint steadfast against her back as they fought for their lives, battling the ghosts of long-dead jackals in the burial chamber of an empress; Geraint's smile, dizzy with relief as she levitated gently out of a pit of spikes and cobras, unscratched; Geraint in the dusty darkness of a tomb, far from help, burning up with fever and calling her name... She remembered passionate quarrels that had enraged them both beyond reason, but which they had not been able to let alone until the day when, driven by some force beyond their control, they tumbled into each other's arms. She remembered sauntering arm in arm through the Wizards' bazaar at Luxor, haggling for goods, tasting heavily spiced, aromatic delicacies from stalls by the side of the road, and laughing with a carefree abandon she had not felt since she came to Hogwarts and befriended the boy whose destiny was to save the Wizarding world. She remembered Geraint's strong arms around her, and the thrill as his lips met hers.

… and he’s an utter Gary Stu, a walking mass of clichés. Wake up, Hermione!

…she found herself wondering idly if Professor Snape had made it home safely.

"I hope he bloody well splinched," she muttered crossly into her pillow

If it’s any consolation to poor Hermione, I imagine that he did.

___________

Well, I did warn you it was long. I'll try and make the others a bit shorter.