obsidianpen

[obsidianpen]

Empty your mind.

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[obsidianpen]

Me when OP leaves a 🤐

When OP leaves a 👀🤐

🥒

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SOOOOOO EXCITED to see more of Bellatrix and Snape!! I was super sick for the last 48 hours or so lol and I spent most of it just thinking about NG

❤️❤️❤️ I’m about 6k words in so hopefully will finish it soon!

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Tinfoil hat NG essay below, please enjoy!

I'm going to posit -- on incredibly thin and circumstantial evidence -- that out of all of the NG cast we've been exposed to so far, I think the yellow-aura healer is most likely to be Horace Slughorn, although I'd be lying if I said I felt good about it.

There are several reasons for this, but first we have to start with what we know about the yellow-aura healer:

[1] The aura color. Yellow, specifically pale, is a distinct shade that has only shown up one other time in the book (Chpt. 47, Umbridge, specifically as a result of Voldemort torturing her while under the elixar).

[2] Friendly towards Harry (Chpt. 59).

[3] Familiar with healing, but not explicitly a healer.

[4] Someone Voldemort would approach in a crisis (Chpt. 39, particularly in his heightened state, post-Ruination).

[5] Someone Voldemort is comfortable exposing to the Riddle House, and therefore risking being linked to Tom Riddle. (Chpt. 39)

[6] Someone Voldemort is comfortable allowing to handle the Elixar of Life and Harry while he's not present. (Chpt. 59)

To proceed further, we must thus engage in the process of elimination.

We can immediately discount basically all of the Deatheater cast, based on the fact that Voldemort didn't trust Bellatrix enough after Ruination to let her know what really happened (contradicting [4]). Voldemort thinks very little of his own minions, so there's no reality in which he trusts "one of [his] many soldiers" (Chpt. 49) more than the literal general of his army. If such a person existed, we would have likely already met them (or heard mention) in the story, but the only two DEs Voldemort canonically trusted by the end of the Second Wizarding War were Bellatrix and Snape, making such a possibility unlikely.

We must also discount supernatural presences, such as ghosts and the like. The reason for this is simple -- Severus Snape, our current benchmark for ghostly business, appears to have no magical aura (contradicting point [1]). Therefore, we can extrapolate that the person must be tangible and alive. Furthermore, OP has confirmed that Harry and the horcrux are totally fused, so there will be no Scarcrux shenanigans in this fic.

Point [4] is the most difficult to reconcile, but for this we can look to Voldemort's thinking during his most recent manipulation of getting Bellatrix to make an impossible vow (before he was willing to risk her learning Harry was a horcrux):

"...I would only trust very few people with the knowledge of what you are, Harry, and Bellatrix is not yet one of them… but now she will be." (Chpt. 55)

Voldemort, to the extent that he trusts anyone, requires that he have something over a person before he believes them "trustworthy". Goodwill, years of devotion, and words of praise are all deeply insufficient (which makes total sense, coming out of Snape's betrayal). Therefore, this needs to be a person that he already has something on (of a caliber of life or death), or someone that he can feel comfortable instantly threatening into the requisite magical pacts with effectively zero delay (considering that Harry was quite literally bleeding out at the time).

Point [5] implies that this must either be one of Voldemort's contemporaries (i.e. someone who knew him as Tom Riddle) or a trusted DE, but as we've already excluded the DEs by point [4], we can begin to age up our prospective candidates into a much older bracket. Otherwise, the potential exposure of the Riddle House (and in turn, his origins) reads as a potentially necessary risk, but one he would be loathe to take.

[3] and [6] are curious, because we don't actually know of that many characters who are competent healers in the story, and we know for a fact that he certainly didn't go to Narcissa or Draco for this. Traditionally, this would likely have fallen on Snape to address, but we can extrapolate from this a pattern of potions masters doubling as emergency healers. This thus makes Slughorn's case much stronger than, say, that of any random background character who might have picked up some battlefield medicine in the wars.

Similarly, this leads quite neatly into [6] as the question of who exactly has been brewing the Elixar of Life has gone unaddressed. Voldemort declines to say who exactly it is:

"Someone capable will be constantly brewing it for you after the initial batch that I have made is gone; it has already been arranged.” (Chpt. 47)

But the reality is that he wouldn't likely trust the one thing keeping his only horcrux alive to some random Unspeakable -- as with Bellatrix, he'd want a fair bit more security than that, and someone he knew well. For this reason, it's entirely probable to assume that the yellow-aura healer might very well be the same person brewing the Elixar, in which case Slughorn is an excellent candidate for both.

Slughorn also comes with the advantage of already knowing about Voldemort's horcruxes by default. There's very little (aside from the rape) that Voldemort needs to worry about him knowing, and realistically, having horcruxes is a much more tangible threat to Voldemort himself than being known as a rapist of 17 year-old boys. Being a rapist is bad, but one of these is much more likely to just get him killed outright.

Lastly, point [2] -- the healer's friendly attitude towards Harry -- is quite revealing. Note: this is friendliness, not pity. To the extent that auras reveal a person's true emotions, then the healer must be either a very kind person or someone who already has some pre-existing acquaintance with Harry. To be frank, it seems unlikely that anyone that kind would be mixed up with Voldemort and still be trustworthy and calm enough to cover points [4], [5], and [6]. It thus makes sense to assume that this is someone who's friendly to Harry because they know him, which narrows our search quite helpfully (and away from the possibility of an OC or similar).

The biggest potential contradiction against Slughorn is in point [1]; namely, that Harry has seen Slughorn with his aura-sight during his trial and did not immediately connect it with the healer's aura. However, there are potential ways to reconcile this.

Firstly, Slughorn's aura is never named by color during the trial sequence, and we never see him afterwards, either. This is important, because we know for a fact that auras can drastically shift coloration while under stress or duress, such as with the initial scenes with Narcissa. While most people do tend to have some form of dominant color, it's not impossible that during a period of extended stress (such as Slughorn assisting during the trial) that his aura would fluctuate enough for Harry not to recognize it later.

Why would Slughorn be more stressed during the trial than when he would be (presumably) dragged out of his home in the evening or the night to go tend to an unconscious, recently raped Harry? Well, he likely wouldn't, but it's useful to remember that Harry only sees brief, barely-a-few-seconds snippets of the healer's aura. It's entirely possible that we're watching brief flashes of bedside manner, something that would be deeply necessary when managing a panicked and guilt-ridden Dark Lord. Whatever panicking he did before or after doesn't necessarily indicate that he wouldn't have pulled himself together during the actual treatment phase, especially once the worst of the danger had passed.

Slughorn has years of experience riding the waves of dangerous people in dangerous situations and, correspondingly, managing their emotions. It's what makes him so quintessentially slytherin, and the reality is that without bringing Dumbledore back from the dead I think you'd struggle to find someone truly unflappable enough to take Voldemort's rape of Harry in stride. Slughorn, at the very least, can fake it for some amount of time.

Beyond all the literal evidence, there's something very poignantly emotional to me about the image of Voldemort coming back to his old head of house, all these years later, to ask for help in fixing what he did. It's basically the opposite of what happened with Myrtle and Voldemort's first horcrux, which I think has some very juicy character implications and parallels there.

Similarly, Slughorn clearly likes and respects Harry and feels pretty fucking awful for his part in what went down at the trial. Last we see him, he's basically dripping guilt all over the ministry floors while Harry reams him out for flipping to the winning side and allowing Voldemort to imply that Lily was a rapist. They didn't part on good terms, but the animosity was never on Slughorn's side: that came from Harry's own standards, and the inability of Slughorn to reach them while still protecting his students. I like the idea of Harry being forced to confront the ugliness of his own terrible compromises with Voldemort, potentially shifting his earlier snap judgement of Slughorn in the courtroom as he comes to sympathize with being unable to escape an unwinnable situation.

Anyway, that's about all I have. I know this is a very loose theory so I'm fairly sure that I'm wrong, but I hope it was fun to read! Thank you again for the updates, and I can't wait for the next chapter.

this essay was indeed fun to read, I’m grinning quite widely. However, all I can give you - and I’m so sorry for this - is a 🤐

🫂

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is that the last we see of ginny in NG? Has she given up on her man so easily? (jk lol)

it was not

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pen! What are some of your fav tomione fics or any fics really on the HP universe?

ONE DAY I shall make a massive list of all of the fics I cherish and such. For now, with utmost laziness and in no particular order and with no desire to explain the plot or pairings, though I will tag authors if I know them offhand, I enjoyed:

Peremo by @virennias

The Warp and Weft by @dillpicklepanic

pretty much anything by @katsitting (I have a lot of catching up to do on her work but I already know it’s depraved and ill love it)

Wolfer by @peppershark (am in progress but not caught up on this one as well)

altered state by @ginnyruin (also in progress reading)

Bookbinding (inserted link because you would never find it otherwise)(this is shockingly fluffy but I loved it sm)

anything by the Fictionist

Tea and No Sympathy (I guess I’m linking now dammit)

shameful company

fire and ice

there are so many more but that’s what I have for now!

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GINNY AND TOM SOUNDS SOOOO FUN!!!!

Do you have any plans to write the ships ?

Plot bunny ?

well I did write one once, I’d have to dig it up but it was called calligraphy. It was a ‘what if Ginny had the diary in her fourth year’ fic. It was awful, because my writing was still very unpolished, but it would have ended up as a Ginny/tom/Harry situation. I don’t have plans to revisit it but it was super fun to write Ginny anon talking shit in the diary during her classes lol

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shall we expect a reunion of harry and voldemort in the next ng chapter 👀

mmm perhaps. Def a Bellatrix and a Snape reunion tho

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can i ask when you're gonna lock b&g?

I dont know if I am at all anymore because I don’t think there’s a point. I was mad about the whole AI scraping (who wasn’t), but I also heard from people who had their fics locked that theirs were scraped, too. Idk how true any of it is, but after thinking about it for a while - and I still think about it - I think there are more positives to be gained from having B&G public than private. So it’s staying public, at least for now.

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hi! love your fics!

i noticed an ask recently where you said you no longer have a preference between tom/hermione and tom/harry. i know from previous asks that you've said your favorite ship was tomarrymort so i'm very curious what aspects of writing tom/hermione bumped them up to equality. it's really interesting to see how writers and readers change ships over time like going from dramione to theomione to tomione etc so i'd like to hear your perspective on it.

it’s not an ‘equality’ thing really at all! And it’s actually a bit more nuanced, but I don’t always feel like writing a novel when explaining why I like what I like or write what I write. Like I said in that ask, i like both for different reasons. Perhaps strangely, i vastly prefer Harry/Voldemort if we’re talking canon universe setting, but when it comes to an AU featuring a Tom Riddle who’s the same age as the trio, who hasn’t heard any kind of prophecy or murdered tons of people or tried to take over the world (yet) or broken his soul a billion times (you know, foreplay), I lean more towards hermione/tom (or even Ginny/tom if I’m being honest, I just haven’t written or read that in forever!).

I think all pairings in any form are awesome and wonderful, but as a writer, that’s where my mindset is at. These days, anyway; I am the wind, I blow where I please. 😊 but on the whole, I’m still a harrymort girl at heart (lord help me)

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apple trend x tomarry

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Hi Op! In NG, we know that Voldemort is reluctantly fond of Harry (or even something more lol). My question is, is Harry reluctantly fond of him (ekhem Stockholm Syndrome)? We know he's jealous, we know he feels sorry for him because of his broken soul, but does he like him?

that is an excellent question

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In Enticed, I believe you had mentioned Morgan Le Fey being a Delta. Could that possibly mean that Merlin was an Omega given their rivalry and the way Male and Female Deltas are often at odds?

it is very possible!

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Hi! Big fan!

(Spoilers bc theories) (maybe kinda)

I noticed at the end of Ch. 44, that Harry refers to Binny as Benni Ailby? Is that a typo or his whole name?

Well… typo or not, it put me on a Binny rabbit hole and I think I may have figured some things out (while kinda trying not to spoil the new chapter for myself).

So… some theories are about to follow…

Ummm, okay…. So … if Binny was not appointed by LV to refer to Harry as Master, especially noting in ch.44 Binny couldn’t vanish the mirror without pre approval from Narcissa, I don’t think Harry is Master of Malfoy manor. Is it because he is MoD?

Harry just recently began to see Binny’s magic. Is Binny the one that healed him? I was thinking that Ch. 38 LV would be absolutely beside himself with idk fear, worry … so maybe he called for Binny to help so no one would know what happened. Bellatrix had specific instructions… and house elves are used by wizards for all kinds of very important stuff without anyone considering the strength and knowledge that kinda gives the elves.

Then… Harry’s thought of “who is the real master here?” When LV fell asleep on him at Riddle manor. And, of course future stuff that points to Harry being LV’s Master (hand wavy bc it’s a different definition than what is easier to assume, a very different kind of power)… so Mod Harry

So yeah …

Love your work! Thank you for sharing this fic and others!

LMAO that was absolutely a weird typo, hahahaha I fixed it, thank you, no idea what his full name is but it’s not that. Otherwise, no comment!!! ❤️❤️❤️

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🖤🖤🖤

WIP 🩸 a violent kiss

Alright Harry dear, birthday's over, back to suffering you go - i'm practicing still, voldemort is hard to draw.