#IT’S THE TIME OF YEAR FOR THE BEST STORY EVER!

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Andulka

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@shallallaa
#IT’S THE TIME OF YEAR FOR THE BEST STORY EVER!
be christ-like this christmas. gather a crowd and inspire them to anarchism. beat a politician with a whip. help out your local sex workers. preach equality.
So cute when someone knows you’re asleep and they text you a long paragraph about how they feel so that’s the first thing you read in the AM.
its almost like kids learn prejudice
This is kind of a rant that I really needed to let out. I hear this all the time and I’m so tired of it. SO tired.
-“Oh, so you just hang around people with the same opinion as you?” -“So you’re going to censor people who disagree with you?” -“You’re living in a echo chamber. You just can’t handle someone having different opinions from yours.”
I don’t fucking understand how people can say things like this as if opinions can’t affect marginalized people’s livelihood. Opinions aren’t just opinions. They have real consequences, especially from people in positions of power.
Someone working in the real estate/housing industry can withhold housing availability to PoC if they hold racist opinions. Politicians holding anti-LGBT+ opinions can create oppressive laws against the LGBT+ community. People who hold xenophobic opinions regarding undocumented immigrants can separate families and get them deported. Misogynists working in the judicial system can shield rapists from getting proper sentencing. Cops holding anti-black opinions can kill a Black person for no other reason than them being Black. This isn’t fucking rocket science, it’s just fucking reality. Opinions affect people’s livelihoods. Bigoted opinions make the lives of marginalized people change from just “living,” to surviving, because your “opinions” harm and kill us. We deal with “different opinions” every single day of our lives by just fucking existing and most of those so called opinions directly shit upon our identities and basic humanity. Even though we go through all this, we’re still surviving, so you can fuck off with that bullshit rhetoric. Stop acting like opinions are always harmless.
[Submit your experiences here]
some of y'all: science has more evidencial support than religion, and it is the more reliable and believable truth. in the ancient contest between empiricial science and religion, modern achievements have declared science as more accurate and the better source of truth.
the truth: Scientific empiricism and religion aim to understand different kinds of truths, and they have never truly been at odds. Science gives the mechanical explanation of the world. Religion gives a philosophical explanation. Both are inexorably intertwined, but each have their own realm of study. In the last 3000 years, men of science have typically also been men of religion. Much of modern science today relies upon the accomplishments and theories of men who were religious. Further, if you devote serious time to the study of either the sciences OR religions and philosophy, you will discover that there are very few discrepancies and they actually correspond to one another. The real problem comes when science attempts to make a philosophical observation, or when religion attempts to make a mechanical observation. Religion’s role is not to explain how clouds form, how cells function, or how light travels. Science’s role is not to explain the meaning of life, whether or not God exists, and what morality is. All in all, each are good and legitimate areas of study.
that’s how you can be both, kids
Has OP ever heard of creationists and biblical literalists?
Obviously, and they spoke out against them in the post. You can have both.
“Religion’s role is not to explain how clouds form, how cells function, or how light travels.”
That’s where the problem arises
I used to carry candy bars in my backpack because it always worked out for children in stories to befriend strange beings with offers of chocolate. I figured, hey, I might not meet a dragon with a sweet tooth on my way to school, but I might need to symbolically break bread with a stranger, and chocolate seems like a safe bet.
The habit never really left me - I filled my coat pockets with Halloween candy, just in case. While studying abroad in Morocco, I came laden with chewing gum and chocolate pieces. Offering some to strangers in tense or awkward situations warmed them to me instantly. I consider a small store of “decent candy” to be a traveling essential. You never know who might experience a blood sugar crash or a Dementor attack, and chocolate can be a good substitute for charisma when you need a stranger to like you.
I feel like I’ve been warned before, like… A lot, not to take candy from strangers.
Yeah, but nobody warned you not to offer it, did they?
The hollow eyed strangers who refuse the candy—now they might be reason enough to keep offering it.
You’re followed. Every day. It doesn’t make you special. Little swirls of creatures in the hollow of snowy footprints, mounds of bark on tree branches that don’t sit quite right, darker squares of brick than you remember your apartment having. We’re all followed, one way or another, and it’s rare for things to get attached.
Rare, but not unheard of, especially when your feet carry you far from home and your soul doesn’t reach into the earth below you, rebuffed by the new and strange around you.
That’s when you first saw the hollow-eyed stranger that follows you. Abroad. Alone. Anchor-less. With your pockets stuffed with chocolate sweeter than you can find in this country, your life savings burning a hole in your wallet, and your hair sleep-mussed from a train ride that just feels too long for how far you got.
They’re standing on the corner ahead of you, under the pale yellow glow of an upstairs window, leaning against the next bus stop. They’re wearing a long tunic over black pants, something you’re used to over here, but the baseball hat on their head is very Western. You know that that doesn’t mean anything—clothing doesn’t exist in a vaccuum—but it makes your shoulders a little looser than they were walking down a foreign street at night.
The baseball cap is what brings you within five feet of the stranger, feet crunching on broken glass and crumpled newspaper in a language you can’t read. The stranger turns, the brim of their hat shielding their eyes with shadow, but there’s something about the way they do that brings you up short.
Like a weather vane, you’ll realize later. Their head turns on their neck like a weather vane, as if it was drawn to you on a wire, all the way until the gears clicked into place.
“Hello,” you say. Your hands go to the straps of your back, thumbs hooking between the canvas and the soft cotton of your shirt. Comforting. “Pretty warm out tonight.”
They don’t say anything. There’s a glimmer of something where their eyes are, but you can’t say for sure whether that’s the reflection of light off their eyes or something else entirely.
“Bus?” You try. You clear your throat, embarrassed to have reduced your question to one word. It’s rude of you, like a parrot. Or so your mom says. “Hafila?”
The stranger leans onto the balls of their feet. That’s when the first wave of ice crawls up your spine. When they lean towards you and their long hair swings out from behind their shoulders, bringing the scent of dust and allspice with it.
You take a step back, stopping yourself from taking another. They haven’t done anything, just leaned forward, and you don’t want to spend this entire trip afraid of everyone. “Autobus?”
The stranger continues to watch you, hands hanging loosely at their sides beneath the bus sign. It suddenly occurs to you that they could do anything right now—the air is so much thinner than you think and it’d take no effort for them to just fall forward and onto you. Or leap forward and into you.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” you mutter to yourself. You force yourself to smile and look up, hands nervously dropping to your pockets. Another bad habit your mother discouraged—it ruined your posture. But, now, you find your salvation there. “Oh!”
The stranger doesn’t react to your exclamation, but you get the sense that they’re watching as you pull a bright, colored lump of foil from your pocket. You unwrap the kiss with fingers that tremble and pop it into your mouth. The burst of sweet is more comforting than distance ever could be and you feel a little more stable. A little more in control. A little more able to be who you want to be this trip.
You fish in your pocket for another kiss and hold it out on the palm of your hand. “Want one?”
The stranger doesn’t move for a long, long moment. Then, very slowly, they ease back so that they’re no longer leaning towards you.
You think that they might not understand. You point to your mouth where the first chocolate is dissolving and then to the wrapped one in your hand. “It’s chocolate. Here, I’m giving it to you.” You take a step forward, hand still outstretched, and grin on your face. “Take it.”
The stranger lifts one hand and, for a moment, you think they understood. You think that they’re going to take the candy and the icy chill wracking your body will dissipate under the taste of shared chocolate. But, instead, their wrist flips, hand rising until they are holding it out in the universal stop gesture. No thank you.
Something possesses you then. You need them to take the candy. You don’t know why, but they need to take it from you and they need to eat it because if they don’t…you don’t know. maybe it’s the desire to vanquish the ice in your spine, but they need to accept it now. You take a step forward, eyebrows raised to indicate your non-aggression. “Have it. It’s delicious.”
The stranger takes a step back, away from you, and then another, putting the distance you wanted between you.
With the distance comes awareness—you don’t know why you wanted them to have it so badly and you think you may have crossed a cultural line. Your hand wavers, dropping an inch or so with the kiss still sitting innocuously in your palm. “I’m so—“
Yellow light cuts across the dark, streaming from behind you. You can hear the bus now, easing to a crawl as it approaches, but, more importantly, you can see their face.
The stranger’s impassive, impassive face, looks as if it were carved from wax. Their lips are the same color as their cheeks, the same color as their chin, but their eyes—their eyes are black. Completely, soullessly black with no sclera or iris or light. The high beams of the bus, flooding the area with light, seems to vanish into the depths of those pupilless eyes and the cold overtakes you completely.
Not human, you think. You know it’s not human, whatever it is. This stranger. And you know, without a doubt, that whatever it is cant accept what you’ve offered, that it wants to take something that no entity on this planet can even ask for.
“Take it,” your numb lips say as the bus pulls up beside you.
The hollow-eyed stranger’s nothing mouth almost seems to curl. Then, without word or indication, they turn their back on you and, with no sound, walk across the broken glass and into the dark alley lying just ahead.
Your clammy hand closes around the cold chocolate. Your mouth is dry as you turn to get on the bus and, you notice, the bus driver won’t meet your eyes as he accepts your payment.
“What—“
He shakes his head, looking straight forward. “No English.”
Don’t ask.
You swallow as best you can around your dry mouth and go to sit down. You don’t know what it was—don’t know what power prompted you to try and give what you tried to give—but you know two things.
One, you won’t be eating this piece of chocolate. No one will if you can help it.
Two, you will always wonder about those who refuse. Why they refuse. And you know, in your heart, that you will never be able to stop looking at their eyes, wondering and wondering and wondering.
Wondering.
The bus pulls away and you very carefully don’t look into the dark alley. You very carefully don’t see movement out of the corner of your eye. You very carefully never do again.
not to be That girl but sometimes it’s nice when people invest time and emotion into you the same way you do for them. just a thought
Therapists aren’t people who you “pay to pretend to care about you”, therapists are people you pay to teach you how to care for yourself
Me: I am violently depressed.
Therapist: Oh! Sounds like you need to do YOGA! That will help!
Me: *signs up for yoga*
Me: *is violently depressed in Downward Dog*
Me: I hate myself and only see my flaws
Therapist: ok lets refocus on things you like about yourself. This week i want you to try and journal about good things you’ve for yourself and others.
Me: *does the homework* yeah but i still hate myself but feel bad cause i shouldn’t
Therapist: feeling like you shouldn’t hate yourself is a step in the right direction. Mental health is complex and isn’t something that will ~magically~ improve. We have a lot of hard work head of us but I’ll be here to help you.
TL;DR stop perpetuating the idea that therapy is unhelpful because the results are not instantaneous.
FUCKING THIS.
As a psychologist the amount of bullshit on this site, the amount of fucking dangerous bullshit on this site about how therapy is neurotypical bullshit and isn’t worth it and how exercise is pointless and good diet is pointless and that therapy homework is pointless DRIVES ME UP THE FUCKING WALL
Exercise is fucking important. good diet is fucking important therapy is fucking important. WHY???
because pills alone don’t help. they improve the hormonal imbalance (as does exercise and good diet which ALSO are a form of very real self care as your physical being is sorta connected to your mental one but go fucking figure right?), but guess what? the suicidal thoughts, the thoughts of harm, the thoughts of hating yourself, they’re still there. suicides actually increase when medicated. why? because suddenly you have the energy to fulfill thoughts of harming yourself. which is why you NEED therapy alongside pills.
it has taken you years, or decades to create your maladaptive thought processes and behaviours. that shit doesn’t disappear overnight. core beliefs don’t change overnight. these are the very fucking core of your personhood, your being and personality. THAT TAKES TIME TO CHANGE
STOP ACTING LIKE THERAPY IS SHIT IF IT DOESNT WORK IN TWO SESSIONS
^This!!!!!
If Snow White literally had “lips red as a rose, hair black as ebony, and skin white as snow,” she’d look like a walking nightmare.
honestly this sounds like the description of a vampire. Which would also explain how she convinced seven dwarves to let her stay with them. How she could control some animals to do her bidding. How she could sleep for a long time without aging. Why the hunter betrayed the queen for her, and why the queen wanted her heart, so she could be sure she was killed properly.
Shit, THIS is a retelling I want to read.
gentle reminder
you don’t need a reason to treat yourself or to do something special; take a bubble bath, bake muffins, go out for the day, read that book, anything that you’re able to, if you’d like to - you deserve it
kids are fucking fragile, ok? when you have no life experience you have nothing to compare your troubles to and many things ARE, in fact, the worst thing to ever happen to you.
i’m 20. and i had a rough week this week. and one of the reasons it wasn’t as rough as it could have been is because i have had worse. i have been in more pain than this before and it was really helpful to be able to say to myself, yes, ok, i’m feeling like a massive pile of shit right now, but i remember how i felt when thing x happened y years ago and that was objectively more horrible and if i got through that then i’m going to survive this.
when i was 16 i couldn’t do that because thing x was in fact the worst thing to ever happen to me. because when you haven’t lived very long some of the things that happen WILL be the worst things to ever happen to you and you’re fucking allowed to be angry and upset and so on. there is no age you have to reach before you’re allowed to feel bad. i can’t believe this discourse tbh.
kids are fragile and they’re dismissed all the time for having feelings because shitty ass adults are so selfish that they can’t wrap their minds around the idea that MAYBE their feelings aren’t more important than a child’s. seriously fuck off maybe if someone had taken me seriously as a kid i’d be a functional adult
My mother was one of those shitty ass adults, and can I just say as a 40-year-old damaged deeply by that shit, FUCKING SIGNED.
If you ever feel like you must be the most unobservant person in the world, remember: I once spent half a year failing to notice that my new favourite restaurant was a money-laundering front for the Ukrainian mafia.
(I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but in retrospect, the fact that it was always dead no matter the time of day - I think the busiest I ever saw it was five people, myself included - well, that should have been a tipoff. Also, the waitstaff kept calling me “Mr. Prokopetz”, which I had assumed was just part of the restaurant’s gimmick, but given that “Prokopetz” is a Ukrainian surname, I’m now force to wonder whether they’d thought I was, you know, in the business. I just liked the pierogi!)
What I need to know is how on earth did OP finally realize his favorite restaurant was a money-laundering front for the mafia.
I’d like to say I put together the clues, but in reality, I just showed up one day to find that the place had been indefinitely shut down, and later learned it was because the managers had all been arrested.
What I really want to know is how good the food was?
Excellent, if your tastes run to the “heavy cream and too much garlic” end of the spectrum.
Every crime front I’ve ever eaten at has had completely amazing food, honestly. I am pretty convinced that if you want to open a front, you don’t choose “restaurant” as your front-business unless you have a relative who loves to cook.
It tickles me that this is evidently a sufficiently common experience that people find it relatable. (Seriously, check the notes!) We should write reviews or something.
did I just read the line “every crime front I’ve ever eaten at” with my own two eyes
Look, I went to college and lived my early adulthood in a town whose entire thing was import/export, and we had a lot of restaurants that were suspiciously empty except when they were closed and filled with very serious men in nice clothes.
They were usually run by someone who was about the right age to be some adult’s parents or grandparents, and in the case of the two Korean restaurants matching this description, they didn’t speak English. Universally though, they were very pleased to see customers, very proud of their cooking, and very very interested in keeping us far away from the aforementioned serious men in nice clothes. And despite having huge dining rooms and never having more than a couple customers, they never went out of business.
Also, because I am very, very stupid and sometimes don’t think before I talk, I once said loudly, over the phone, while sitting in one of these places, “Hey! Yeah if you want to meet us, we’re eating at [place]. You know…[place]? You totally know it. The Front, on Warwick st!”
The looks I got from every single employee were amazing and then I left.
We had a corner store/deli-place near our apartment in college. Everyone knew they were in on something and no one cared because they looked out for their customers and their neighborhood as a whole.
They started stocking my favorites because I mentioned them within hearing range once, would tell their “vendors” to move out of the way if we stopped in. I walked a different route home and got harassed one night and they asked after me. When they found out what happened, they declared “Consider it taken care of, you should never be afraid around here.” Never happened again.
Everyone needs their friendly neighborhood crime lord.
This is both my favorite and makes me fondly remember home. Less of the eateries, more of the mysterious retail joints that never seem to close despite no one ever buying anything, though. Well. Aside from the juice bar. Didnt last, though.
Wow. My God
Relateable content
American gothic
Love it
im serious about that “stop saving things for special occasions” bit tho like. even if u aren’t in your 20s. thats for everyone. its one of the most useful things ive learned lately
stop! just stop. eat the special snack. drink the expensive hippie tea. use the incense or the bath bomb or whatever you paid way too much for because you were feeling really bad and retail therapy makes u feel alive
when we save things for special occasions/rainy days it contributes to us feeling like A.) our day to day existence is lackluster and B.) you have to be feeling a certain level of Bad, or have to reach a certain level of Socially Accepted Achievement, to enjoy things
just give yourself stuff. there are definitely sometimes reasons to withhold things from yourself - as motivation, if it’s something you consciously want to use sparingly, etc - but at least for me half the time it just turns into self-flagellation and also cool things and cool experiences and nice treats just collect dust while i wait for some fabled day when i convince myself i finally Deserve it
just fuckin give yourself stuff dude. life’s so mindblowingly short
my grandmother died having only used her china like twice in her life. during the year or so before her death, she was starting to package up and give things of hers to her kids, and gave mom the china while sighing “oh i wish i had used the china more!” and mom tried so hard to convince her to just keep it, then, and eat corny dogs off it if she wanted. she insisted she couldn’t possibly, you need a special reason to use the fine china. when nana died, we used her fine china as our everyday dishes for years. i was 18 when she died, and never really stopped having that in the back of my head. now, when i hear myself say “i wish i had a reason to wear/do/eat/use X!” i hear nana regretting never really using her china. and let me tell you a thing: spaghettios taste great when eaten from fine china.
I’ve seen this post making the rounds. Just wanted to add something to it that my sister-in-law once told me:
“A ‘special thing’ can make any occasion special.”
She told me this when I objected to her opening a really expensive bottle of champagne just to watch a movie. And you know, she was right. The champagne was amazing and while we always sit around and watch movies, that bottle made that night a really special occasion that I will always remember.
So, cut yourself a little slack and remember that an ordinary day can become special.
Brain teasers for egalitarians/equalists.
Say I’m 32 years old and you’re 22 years old.
In how many years will we be the same age?
…
Silly question, right? If you define aging as a process that stops at death, the only way we’ll ever be the same age is if I die first. If you don’t, then we’ll never be the same age. Every time you age a year, I also age a year. Since our ages increase at the same rate, you will never catch up to my head start. We have achieved a total equality of aging, but that does not change the permanent inequality of our age.
Okay, say I have a million dollars and you’re completely broke. If we both get a dollar a day, how long will it take you to catch up with me?
Now, this one’s even sillier, because if you have no other resources, your dollar a day is going to be eaten up by basic living expenses that it doesn’t quite meet, and I have an excess of money that can be spent on money-making opportunities that pay off far better than an additional $365 a year. I could literally burn the dollar I’m getting as part of our Totally Equal Income and still make more money in a year than you do just by sticking my money in the bank.
But still: both of us getting a dollar a day is totally equal, right? It means we’re being treated exactly the same.
And now, final problem:
If we have a world that contains structural inequalities, systemic imbalances, disproportionate danger faced by some, and unequal access to resources and opportunities, is “treating everyone the same” really going to result in equality?
Show your work.
I may have reblogged this already but I don’t care it’s important.
Happy holidays! You write the most wonderful stories :D For the fic prompt... any thoughts on a genderbent Harry Potter?
oh, oh do i
you see, the thing is, everything would have been different if harry was a girl. do you know how i know?
lily potter.
harry didn’t do anything. he was a baby, they call him the boy who lived, because that’s all he did - he just didn’t die. and that’s not on him, that’s not because he was some extremely powerful one year old. no. it’s because of lily potter, because of her love, or something, because i very much doubt she was the first woman who loved her child enough to die for them. but whatever it is she did, that’s what killed the dark lord.
harry didn’t defeat voldemort. lily did.
and no one cared.
so when little harriet survives the killing curse, no one cares. because it wasn’t her, it wasn’t anything she did.
it was james potter!
james potter, who died, but saved his daughter and defeated the dark lord! and it doesn’t make any sense, but neither does lauding a baby as the defeater of darkness, so when has the wizarding world ever needed to make sense? harry survives, is marked as an equal, by voldemort, and no one cares.
but do you know what that means?
harry doesn’t go to live with dursleys, because why would voldemort ever be after her - she didn’t do anything, she was just there, it was all james potter. and maybe dumbledore knows better, and tries to put his foot down, but - no one cares. she’s james potter’s daughter, the daughter of the man who killed voldemort, she’s not going to be sent to live with some muggles!
and the next safest place is hogwarts, but none of the professors can raise a child, they’re all either too old or busy or snape, so who raises little harriet potter?
why, rubeus hagrid of course!
and people aren’t happy about this either, but it’s better than the muggles, and it seems right, to them, that the daughter of james potter grows up in hogwarts.
so hagrid builds an addition to his little cabin, a nursery that will one day be a bedroom, and harriet potter grows up. she knows the forbidden forest like the back of her hand, knows all those creatures in the forest as her best friends. firenzes somehow ends up babysitting her, multiple times, and he never knows how it happens. she rides unicorns and thestrals and hippogriffs, and is good friends with aragog, and all sorts of other creatures.
she grows up in the forbidden forest, really, and it knows her, it loves her
the kids adore her, and she has hundred and hundreds of older siblings. she’s james potter’s daughter, and a cute kid, and “i was playing with harriet!” is an excuse that works with almost all the professors for a large array of misdeeds. by the time she’s eight, she’s helping kids study for their owl and newts in care of magical creatures.
oh, and herbology, of course, because a forest is not just animals, it’s plants too. and she loves her forest, so she’s constantly getting underfoot with professor sprout. and all the other professors care for her too, and by the time she’s eleven they’re all internally fretting about what she’s going to do in class, because they’ve already taught her most of it.
she meets draco malfoy, and they should hate each other, they should. but draco understands what it’s like to grow up in your father’s shadow, to always be the child of someone instead of just your own person, and harriet can’t help but be friends with him, they become friends seemingly against both their wills.
and harriet’s in gryffindor, of course, with that reckless courage she can hardly go anywhere else. and she knows the weasleys of course, they’ve all been her friends, and she’s delighted now that she gets a weasley of her own. which is what she tells ron on the first day of classes, who was warned about her by all his brothers, and has in fact met her before on multiple occasions, so he just rolls with it.
and harriet adopts hermione and brings into the group, because just like her father, just like hagrid, she can’t stand someone being alone and upset without trying to help, that’s not who she is, it’s not how she was raised.
so she has her friends and her experiences, and she’s james potter’s daughter, which is fine, she likes her life, and her friends.
but nothing good can stay. voldemort returns, and he doesn’t even target her, why does he care for her, it was her father who did this (he was there and still he goes along with the narrative, it couldn’t have been lily, couldn’t have been harriet, no, it had to be james) but somehow harriet and her friends keep on foiling his plans, keep on getting in his way, and for the first time -
she’s not james potter’s daughter, not rubeus hagrid’s daughter -
she’s harriet potter, and she’s in voldemort’s way, and she’s not planning to move for him. she wasn’t raised to bend, and if that breaks her - so be it.
@necer0s added these fabulous tags to their reblog, and i adore them, they are op approved: in the last five minutes i have developed some very strong opinions about this au first of all harriet discovers adopts and is adopted by the basilisk at the age of five so jot that down second of all harriet discovers the weasleys through charlie weasley harriet and charlie and hagrid spend A Lot of time Talking About Dragons harriet’s life goal is to crossbreed dragons and basilisks hagrid and charlie are 100% supportive of this goal everyone else is 100% not third of all harriet inherits both hagrid’s cooking abilities and his lack of awareness re: said cooking abilities which wouldn’t be so bad if she weren’t so adorable that nobody can refuse her gifts fourth of all harriet becomes an animagus not for any of the obvious reasons (following in her father’s footsteps or for clandestine purposes or anything) she’s not even that advanced in transfiguration when it happens mcgonagall has no idea how she managed it (it was dumbledore. he thought it would be funny. he was right.) also i have no idea what her animagus form would be except that it would be Large and Terrifying and not a doe last of all harriet has no less than three (3) items of plant or animal detritus on her at all times usually it’s just sticks and leaves in her hair and poop on her shoes but fairly often it’s something super rare and expensive scales stuck on her robe could either basilisk dragon or common garden snake there’s just no telling
i was planning on letting this au lie, but these tags are great so
bill is the first weasley, right okay? and his first year of hogwarts is also the same year that harriet comes to live with hagrid. and he’s homesick and alone, the only weasley who will attend hogwarts without any of their siblings, except for ginny right at the end for seventh year. and he’s walking alone at night, because his dorm room is too quiet, he’s not used to quiet, and he hears a baby crying. that is a sound he’s used to. so he follows it to hagrid’s cabin and he looks in the window and sees hagrid waggling a rattle in the baby’s face and is like “you gotta rock her!” and hagrid panics because a first year is out of bed! but also he could use some help
bill is excellent help. he has six younger siblings, including a brother harriet’s age and a freshly born little sister. he’s got baby stuff On Lockdown. so bill is just, so ready to throw himself into helping take care of this baby, because it’s what he does at home, so why not? and hagrid is very grateful and lets bill get away with a ton of crap other students don’t, like being out after hours, and taking him on personal tours of the forest, and whenever bill gets detention, instead of doing boring work in the forest, he gets to hang out at hagrid’s hut and play with harriet.
so molly gets letters from hagrid, saying how much of a huge help bill is being, and she’s so charmed by it. and the thing is, bill becomes really attached to that baby? like his siblings have his parents, and each other, but harry only has hagrid! who is so gentle and good and loves her so much - but it’s not the same. and the summer comes and bill gets freaking separation anxiety, to the point that the first day back for his second year he runs down to hagrid’s hut and is like “can i see harry?” and his second year goes much the same way. you’d think this would make bill the mom friend, but outside of harriet he has no hesitation, no fear, and he gets a lot of detentions. he’s a Troublemaker, but he’s charming, and everyone loves him.
charlie starts his first year when bill starts his third, and harry is three at this point, she’s like a little person, and charlie thinks it’s hilarious how obsessed bill is with this kid. but pretty quickly he picks up on it, because he hangs out with his brother, and his brother spends a lot of time at hagrid’s cabin, so he does too. and already at three harriet is unphased by dangerous creatures and other such dangers. charlie really likes hagrid because he likes creatures, so he starts spending even more time around his cabin, and therefore around harriet.
next is percy, who’s prim and proper and actually really glad not to have little kids underfoot. but he gets roped into helping babysit, which he has plenty experience in, and harriet is six at this point, it’s impossible to overstate the amount of trouble she gets in all the time
she’s seven and bill’s graduating, he’s got a fabulous apprenticeship all set up in egypt. but he has a half dozen mental breakdowns that last semester, because - harriet’s his, just as much as of his other siblings, he’s helped raise her, he loves her, and now he’s leaving, and its not like his other siblings, it’s different, she’s part little sister part daughter and it’s all very messed up and confusing and he can’t deal with any it
he’s crying on graduation day, and he doesn’t want to be. harry’s arms go around his neck and she kisses his cheek and then she presses an envelope into his hand. he looks at it and it’s his name in a splotchy childish scrawl, and she says proudly, “daddy and aunt minnie’s been teaching me to write! so we can write each other.” she frowns, and asks a little watery, “you won’t forget about me, will you?” and that’s the stupidest question he’s ever heard. he picks her up and swings her around and presses kisses all over her face.
he does write her, always eagerly reading her simple, childish sentences that get better and more complex as she gets older. also his younger brothers send him harriet updates, because they know he’s a crazy person.
then the next year later come fred and george, and whoo boy, they love harriet, and they especially love how throwing this eight year old at a professor is almost a 100% guarantee to getting away what they were doing, so she starts getting involved in their pranking at first just so she’s there in case they get caught, but then just because they like her, she’s funny and knows all the hiding spots and has a great poker face
it’s with the twins she discovers the chamber of secrets, and the basilisk, and they both reach to cover her eyes, but strange hissing leaves her mouth and she looks that basilisk straight in the face and doesn’t die, because she’s a parseltongue and it’s closed it’s eyes for her.
they go to hagrid, of course, and harriet insists it’s just lonely, it doesn’t want to kill anyone, and hagrid discovers the truth of what happened so long ago, and how it wasn’t him, wasn’t anything he brought to this school, and he’s always known that, but has he, really? because that’s been his truth for so long, and now he knows it’s a lie, has the proof in the real slytherin’s monster
except it’s hagrid, so he agrees an ancient and powerful basilisk has to be protected, and also agrees that they can’t tell anyone because they’d kill it, and killing it would be wrong. so the twins do some research, and find out a way to blind the basilisk that can be reversed later. except none of them can cast it, obviously, so they go to charlie. who has a heart attack just hearing about, but agrees, because of course he does.
and the chamber just … ends up being this hangout place for he weasleys and harriet? it’s just this place? and they clean it up and make it some place they actually want to be, and the great basilisk is grateful to have people looking after it properly again. hagrid gets big things of real meat for it, so it doesn’t have to live on rats. and it only eats once every couple of months now that it has real food, instead of just constantly eating rats, and is a much happier snake. and now that hagrid knows harriet can talk to snakes, he gets her bunches and bunches of them. little corn snakes to keep in her pocket, and a ball python for her room, and giant boa constrictor that lives in the forbidden forest but is still hers. the basilisk is too intelligent and old to really belong to one little girl, except it totally does, it loves her.
the twins and charlie take bill aside when he visits the summer after and tell everything and he goes white and puts his head in his hands, and of course the second he’s gone she manages to start doing things even more worrying than riding the backs of giant spiders and climbing trees to the branches and jumping across them, until she’s faster in the trees than she is on the ground. this girl is going to turn him grey.
which is to say by the time ron arrives and harriet actually starts school, she’s been firmly adopted by the weasley clan, and has ten years worth of weasleys jumpers. ron knows her through all his brothers, and he’d been worried they wouldn’t get along, actually, that he’d be like percy who loved harriet but didn’t like her all that much. but he’s wrong, because they’re instant best friends, being her friend is the easiest thing in the world. and ginny comes along, and harriet is like yes! a girl! except she’s kind of awful at being a girly girl, even though she’d like to be, and ginny ends up teacher her and taking her under wing when it comes to that stuff, because merlin knows it’s not hermione’s specialty either
also harriet’s animagus form is a brown bear, and it’s cute when she’s younger, a little fluffy cub. but an adult female brown bear is like seven and half feet tall and three hundred pounds of claws and teeth and terror. so, you know, that’s fun