#aka trashmates

[mightbewriting]

A Season For Setting Fires is now COMPLETE!

Read the finale here!

Start from the beginning!

Thank you so much for going on this adventure with me! It’s hard to believe after a year of indulging in this chaos it’s finally come to an end! I have so appreciated every comment, kudos, tumblr ask, discord theory, art, and recommendation I’ve seen made for this story! These are the things that make posting a wip such a rewarding part of the fandom experience!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this story as much as I’ve enjoyed telling it! Thank you so much for reading!! I’ll see y’all next time! <3

[mightbewriting]

omg look at them. idiots playing pretend.

“There’s something I think I’d like for my birthday.” He fights off the urge to ball his fists. “If you’re feeling giving.”

“What’s that?” comes her quiet question.

“To pretend.”

A Season for Setting Fires by @mightbewriting Chapter 18 🥰

- -

Underwater wallpaper by snowhaze

Poses by wonderscotts, simmerberlin

[mightbewriting]

“Do you know what today is?” he asks, stepping around the low table in front of the loveseat, positioning himself in front of the windows.

Even when he’s not facing her, he feels Hermione’s eyes on him. He turns to her. His skin feels alive, suddenly manic.

She shakes her head.

“If I’ve been counting right, and I’m not sure I have, but—I think it’s my birthday.”

He’s going to be sick. Desperation practically spills from his pores, an unfortunate flood inside his chest, surging with a new tide.

She blinks. “It is?”

He nods. He has to turn away again. He can’t look at her when he says this. The blueish, pre-dawn glow isn’t enough cover. He can barely look at himself, a hinted reflection in the glass.

“There’s something I think I’d like for my birthday.” He fights off the urge to ball his fists. “If you’re feeling giving.”

“What’s that?” comes her quiet question.

“To pretend.”

Chapter eighteen is available to read on ao3!

[mightbewriting]

Hermione isn’t exactly dead.

She should be.

But she isn’t.

Confusion surfaces before her consciousness does, brain a being of questions before it’s a being of her.

Chapter thirty, the penultimate chapter, is available to read on ao3!

Catch the finale on March 4th at 6PM EST. There will be a live read on the Room of Requirement Discord shortly after the chapter drop; everyone is welcome! Thanks for going on this adventure with me! Can’t wait to share the last chapter with everyone!

[mightbewriting]

She’s still holding onto Draco with her other hand. Not just holding, but her fingers have entwined with his. He seems utterly unaware of the unearned intimacy in holding hands. And of the battle taking place inside Hermione’s chest between what feels too keenly like her past and her future.

And her, in the present, forced to bear the burdens of both.

She drops her hands—both of them—to her sides. Something unspools in her chest; she imagines it’s the rope, filling up whatever empty spaces the unease over Ron’s touch have carved inside her. In her periphery, she sees Ron back away, head shaking.

“Where—where are we? What’s a Wisteria Walk?” Draco asks, still facing the street beyond the wards, eyes locked on a street sign bent and twisted at a right angle. “What happened here?”

Chapter seventeen is posted! Read it on AO3!

[mightbewriting]

Hermione’s heartbeat lives on the surface of her skin now: buzzing, prickling, pumping. Each inhale warms her chest. Her bones melting.

And Draco Malfoy’s head has tilted, leaned against her thigh as his own heavy breathing washes over parts of her she’d had almost no intention of ever letting him near again.

Her limbs are slack and she can’t seem to muster the energy required to move them, to preserve a modesty she can’t pretend to have anymore.

Pretend.  

It had been nice. She fell into it easily because there’s something so intoxicating—more so than the liquor, she thinks, though the liquor probably played its own part—about the way it feels to not be so alone anymore.

Whatever this is, she and Draco are in it together, and that solidarity pulls her in like a siren at sea.

Chapter Nineteen is available to read on AO3!

[mightbewriting]

Hermione stops moving at the top of the stairs, just as they exit the cellars. For a moment, Draco assumes she needs rest. She smells like death, like the wretched stench of waste and rot and misery. She looks it too: hair matted, eyes sunken, skin ashen, stance unsteady. And yet, he’s never been so relieved to be in another person’s presence in all his life.

The golden cord practically vibrates between them, thrumming with what feels like satisfaction, like safety.

They’re nowhere close to safe.

Chapter twenty-nine is live! Read it here!

Chapter thirty will post sometime in the next week.

And the finale, chapter thirty-one, will post March 4th around 6PM EST. 

[mightbewriting]

In an effort not to overwhelm everyone with updates on here, I’ve held off on making individual posts for what have effectively been mini chapters posting every few days. Now that our POV diversions are done, here’s a masterlist of the last several updates of A Season For Setting Fires:

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three (CW: Alcohol Dependency)

Chapter Twenty-Four (CW: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Extremely Disturbing Imagery, Minor Character Death)

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

[mightbewriting]

When the Patronus disappears, it’s as if this house full of idle, trapped people finally has purpose. There’s organizing, there’s packing, there’s debating—closer to arguing—over the use of a cave and the path to it just outside Hogsmeade as their apparition point.

Draco has little to pack, nothing to his name except his word, his family magic, and his wand, so he trails Hermione as she bustles around the house. She packs her own things, checks on the others, and argues with Weasley. She doesn’t stand still.

Not for a single moment as soon as Kingsley’s Patronus vanishes.

Chapter twenty is available to read on Ao3!

Now that I have the entire story fully drafted, updates will be much more frequent! We’re in the thick of it now, folks! Buckle up!

[mightbewriting]

Hermione wobbles as if the screams are a physical force knocking into her. She’s already gelatinous, a little unsteady, and it feels like something has slid into place behind her breastbone. If she focuses on that sensation, and not what just happened, what she just did, she might be able to function long enough to figure out what’s going on.

Stretched in too many directions, Hermione worries she’ll shred soon, leaving ragged bits behind. She’s already lost some. Her dignity. Her pride. Her inhibitions. Her knickers. And despite the fresh panic clawing its way up her throat, despite everything else: she feels warm and safe and whole in a way she hasn’t since Bellatrix Lestrange had her pinned to a drawing room floor.

In a moment that highlights the last few minutes of her life with painful irony, she shoves her ripped knickers in her pocket and breaks into a run. She crosses through the concessions corridor and onto the Quidditch pitch.

Mayhem awaits her.

Chapter fifteen has been posted on AO3!

[mightbewriting]

Earlier

A crack echoes through austere, old growth trees bordering the Malfoy estate. This time, Draco intended to land here, as opposed to when he’d frantically apparated himself and Granger after they were attacked outside the chemist.

That had been just a week before. Or had it been more? Time had a strange elasticity to it these days, stretching and contracting, reducing itself to singular sensations: fear, hunger, filth, boredom.

And now: a cleaved feeling in his chest. A pull to go back. A golden cord vanished.

He draws in a deep breath. He doesn’t think the air actually smells different; there’s nothing especially noteworthy about the air in Wiltshire. Nevertheless, familiarity swarms him. Something in his bloodstream, in his magic, recognizes this place as his home.

Draco looks around. He’d picked this particular clearing for a reason. It bears no evidence anymore, but he can still see so clearly in his mind’s eye the playfort he’d once built as a child. In the middle, he’d dug a shallow ditch, surrounded it with rocks, and willed himself to conjure fire before he had a wand or knew any spells. This is a hollow reunion, knowing how badly he’d once wanted to conjure a little fire here. He can conjure big ones now, terrible ones, ones Mr. Crabbe had taught him and Vincent and Greg how to produce the year before. Horrible, hateful fires that swallowed up every last thing they touched. Fires with fiendish names.

Chapter fourteen is up on AO3! Read it: here!

[mightbewriting]

Granger’s head lands against his chest and it steals his ability to breathe.

“I thought you were gone. I thought you were gone. I thought you were gone.” She repeats herself against his shirt. He feels filthy. He must smell, but she keeps burrowing her face into his chest. He holds her so tight he wonders if he might do damage.

How can he not do damage, being who he is?

Chapter thirteen is available on AO3!

[mightbewriting]

The Tale of the Three Lovers

There was once a grandfather, father, and son who lived in a large, lonely estate in the countryside...

Chapter sixteen, an interlude, is available to read on AO3!

[mightbewriting]

Hold up... did I just hear this right? You're writing Shitty Soulmates without extensive, meticulous, painful planning?

You're actually telling me that this? That this MASTERPIECE is written spontaneously in whichever direction your fancy takes you?

I thought you were a literary genius before but you have transcended even those expectations. Your work is like poetry, it's so beautiful.

(Also, shitty soulmates is my new favorite genre and I wish more people would use it as a tag).

bahahaha oh goodness, anon. thank you! and yes, shitty soulmates has been something of an exercise in doing things in the opposite way im typically used to/comfortable with. best way to grow, right? the process for shitty soulmates looked something like this:

me to @heyjude19-writing and @niffizzle: hear me out. soulmates, but they hate it. like a lot.

them: do it

so i started writing the first chapter. totally off the cuff. and somewhere in the middle of it while figuring out the order of operations with wands that happened in canon vs what i was doing, i was like. omg what if this fucks up the trajectory of the war for canon? and like...voldemort wins the battle of hogwarts?

once i had soulmates smashed together with a voldemort wins scenario, i was a goner.

i then very roughly outlined the first 8 or so chapters and picked away at them for a couple months. i had a general idea of my ending, but i pointedly did not formally plan anything beyond those first 8 chapter outlines. when i finished drafting those initial chapters, i started posting the fic.

then i free wrote chapter by chapter (doggedly not writing any kind of outlines for myself at all because it was an ~experiment~ lol) up until chapter 17 or 18.

THEN i was like, i think i'm allowed to plan the rest of the fic now. so i outlined the rest of the fic. and then i wrote it. i dont remember when i finished drafting shitty soulmates but i think the whole process took almost exactly a year from start to finish, and posting it will have taken about 10 months.

i've had no writing schedule, no posting schedule, very little in the way of planning, and honestly??? it wasn't as bad as i would have pictured such a scenario before doing it. i like a plan, but the chaos has been pretty productive too.

[mightbewriting]

Hermione fights the impulse to sink into the earth. “He’s gone.”

“Fuck.”

“He—he said he wouldn’t. He couldn’t.” Hermione realizes she didn’t actually believe him until that very moment. Until he proved her wrong. Her diaphragm seizes, forcing out a strangled hiccup-turned-sob.

“We have to go.”

Her hand is still clapped over her breastbone when Hermione looks up at Ron. “What—no. We ca-can’t.” Her hands shake, voice too. Horror ravages her nerves.

“We have to leave, Hermione. Malfoy could be telling You Know Who where to find us right now.”

Read chapter twelve on AO3!

[mightbewriting]

Hi friend!!👋 I hope your Saturday is going swimmingly and you're doing something for yourself this weekend!

I don't know if you've ever answered this before (I'd be shocked if you hadn't) but my mind is drawing a blank on and answer so...

Where did the concept for Shitty Soulmates come from? When was your plot bunny first born? Was there a particular scene that first came to you and the story expanded from there (i have this VAGUE memory of you saying the manor scene, chapter 1...however I could be wrong)? Or did you have the idea of the story before a scene came to you?

I realize that much more than one question...

Thanks and sending virtual hugs and high fives your way because positivity is life! ❤

hiiiiiiiiiii friend!

im having a tough time pinning down the exact first bit of inspiration, i just know i was playing around with the idea of doing a soulmates au in dec 2020/jan 2021. and i think what happened is i was trying to figure out the mechanics of what i wanted my soulmate bond to be like (and you're right!) the drawing room torture scene came to mind as an option. then, my chaos gremlin brain went "oH YOU SHOULD SMASH DIFFERENT TROPES TOGETHER FOR FUN" since it seemed like a natural progression for a soulmates situation that begins with a torture scene to be a part of a larger voldemort wins au. i then yeeted my chaotic idea at @niffizzle and @heyjude19-writing and they were naturally the biggest enablers on the planet. i zero drafted like 10k in a couple days and that was that. the story had legs. while i've been writing this project primarily in a 'no plan just write' kind of fashion, i have had an idea of the ending since the very beginning. so i had my starting point and my ending point, everything in between has just been connecting the dots.

thanks for dropping in with a fun question! i hope you had a great weekend friend! <3