Reviews for By Baker Street Station, I Sat Down and Wept
anyalove chapter 1 . 1/2
i sat down by river piedra to read this and weep
Guest chapter 142 . 12/22/2024
I just reread the story for the 3rd or 4th time. It's so funny and brilliant. I love where all the plot lines take you and don't mind at all the length or the sideways writing! Please do continue!
Guest chapter 65 . 10/24/2024
Dropped this story at the point where Petunia finds out that her sister took her to St. mungo's without her permission, impregnated her with a random guy's kid without her permission, and then obliviated her. Then doctors who did the procedure later befriended Petunia but never once told her about it? And Petunia hand-waves it all away, saying it's okay because she wanted a kid? No. Just...no. This is so disgusting and out of character for the story that I thought it was a joke at first.
Temple Cloud chapter 25 . 10/8/2024
Sirius is infuriating. I'm glad he's free and at least has the opportunity to seek medical treatment (even if he isn't willing to do so yet), and that Petunia and the others were trying to give him some support, but ultimately, I don't blame Petunia for putting her foot down. Still, if she even managed to get him to listen to her occasionally, and sometimes very briefly try to behave better (after all, he does agree to 'include' Dudley, even if that mainly means including him on illicit flying-motorbike rides), she's achieving far, far more than most people ever could.
Temple Cloud chapter 22 . 10/5/2024
I like the idea of Harry's Patronus being a mongoose, as it's an expression of his own personality rather than based on an idealised view of his father.
Temple Cloud chapter 21 . 10/5/2024
'Petunia knew him well enough to know that he wasn't really bored at all, this time.' She's catching on!

'I wonder what *his* worst feelings are. He may be quite different under that studied air of benevolent superiority. You don't reach that age without some horrendous mistakes being made, and intelligence is not always a shield against them.' She's catching on about Dumbledore, too. He has much more in common with Snape than he's willing to let anyone - especially Snape himself - find out. And, weirdly, that makes him both more and less sympathetic to Snape than he might otherwise be - on the one hand, he recognises that teenagers can make mistakes that have fatal consequences, but on the other hand, he projects his feelings of anger at himself, for getting into a fight that caused his sister's death, onto Snape. And if it ever occurred to him (not that we know of) to apologise to Snape for having been horrible to him at times when he was already at some of the worst times of his life, Snape wouldn't register that, because as far as he is concerned, 'Albus Dumbledore hates me and regards me as disgusting and contemptible but he just employs me because I'm useful' is an unalterable fact.
Temple Cloud chapter 20 . 10/5/2024
"But we couldn't abduct a competent one, Tante! They would have stopped us!" This is such a funny line, and so right for the way Harry thinks.

'"Didn't he get a trial?"
'As it turned out, he didn't, and Snape seemed uninterested in why that was.'

He should be thinking about it. After all, if Dumbledore hadn't decided to speak up for Snape, his own fate would have been the same - so he should have been wondering WHY Dumbledore, the person who had kept Snape out of Azkaban, the only person who, back in the 1930s, had even considered the possibility that Hagrid might not have been the person who unleashed a monster that had murdered students - hadn't bothered to make sure that Sirius Black got a fair trial. After all, Sirius, like Snape, was a member of the Order of the Phoenix (and, also like Snape, a troubled boy from a bad family background), and Dumbledore had a responsibility to protect him.

Some readers assume that Dumbledore is blindly pro-Gryffindor, considers that Gryffindors can do no wrong, and regards the lives of Slytherins as worthless. But in view of his failure to protect James, Lily or Sirius, along with his recklessness in leaving baby Harry on his aunt's doorstep in the middle of the night, I get the impression that he is just generally irresponsible in protecting the people who work for him, and their families.
Temple Cloud chapter 19 . 10/5/2024
Yes, it makes sense that someone would have noticed that Lockhart was dangerous - but maybe, in the canonical timeline, nobody in Britain had? After all, he seems to have travelled widely, and if all his crimes had been committed in widely scattered countries, none of them close to home, it might have been a while before a healer in, say, Albania talked to one in Venezuela and said, 'You had a patient who lost their entire memory just after they'd been visited by a British wizard with curly blond hair who claimed to be an expert hunter of Dark creatures? And had your patient been a notable hunter of Dark creatures before their collapse? That's interesting, one of mine had exactly the same experience...'

We know that it is possible for a wizard to modify or erase another wizard's memory of a specific event selectively without incapacitating them, because Snape does this to Mundungus Fletcher in Deathly Hallows, planting in his mind the idea of creating multiple decoys of Harry while causing him to forget that Snape had spoken to him. But from what we see in Chamber of Secrets, Lockhart either doesn't know how to do this or can't be bothered with it, so instead relies on a more general spell which removes all memory of magic - which, for a wizard who had grown up in wizarding culture, means obliterating his entire life. (Probably this spell was developed as a security measure to deal with Muggles who found out about the existence of wizards, where it would just delete their memory of one incident. To a Muggleborn wizard, or an orphaned wizard who had been brought up in Muggle society like Harry Potter or Tom Riddle, it would probably delete virtually everything from age 11 onwards, and the memories of a few odd inexplicable incidents when they were younger.)

Petunia is stereotyping wildly (no surprises there - just because she's a lot more intelligent in this story than canon Petunia doesn't mean she's always right) in assuming that, if Lockhart is a paeophile, then the fact that he is so effeminate must mean he is interested only in boys and is no threat to girls - and Snape is equally stereotyping in assuming that he would only be interested in good-looking students (though probably he is just saying this to Petunia as a put-down, without REALLY assuming that Harry won't be in any danger, because he knows Harry is a danger magnet). It should be obvious to both of them that Lockhart is interested in people who are famous or significant achievers, which Harry certainly is after the adventures of his first year, quite apart from having survived the Killing Curse as a baby.

Poor Snape - Petunia is just as unappreciative as Harry when he does anything to help her, even when she's asked for his help! And yes, he had noticed that there was something dodgy about Quirrell, but as Dumbledore (who had also noticed) wasn't willing to do anything about it beyond telling Snape to 'keep an eye on Quirrell, will you?' there was a limit to what Snape could do beyond blocking attempts at murder! And, Petunia, come on, Snape made some bad life decisions, yes, but that was when he was a teenager only a few years older than Harry and Dudley are now, and without a supportive family. Have you any idea what sort of person Dudley might have grown into, if he hadn't turned out to be a wizard and therefore more likely to side with Harry than with his own father, and if you'd entrusted his upbringing to Vernon or Marge?
Temple Cloud chapter 18 . 10/5/2024
Yes, Hogwarts is insanely dangerous - and more than it needs to be, when Dumbledore allows it to be used as a hiding-place for magical artefacts that Voldemort is searching for, in addition to the dangers of having a school full of magical teenagers and fierce House rivalries that frequently result in fights and dangerous injuries. But the trouble is that being magical is dangerous in itself, and being an untrained magic-user can be even more dangerous, likely to result in people either dying from the effort of suppressing their magic, or harming other people with bouts of uncontrolled magic.

'"I can hardly forget it, given that Slytherin House is infested with them." Snape scowled, but didn't interrupt.'

I can't blame him for being angry at that! He's the one who had been charged with 'keeping an eye on Quirrell' for the past year, and intervening in Quirrell's various attempts to assassinate Harry (so we know that Dumbledore had known that Quirrell was a threat, but allowed him to go on teaching anyway), in addition to all his usual duties as a full-time teacher, Head of House, and supplier of potions for the school infirmary. But, of course, Petunia hasn't been told about any of this (and Harry, who does know that Snape had been protecting him from Quirrell, isn't going to let that deter him from hating and distrusting Snape anyway).
Temple Cloud chapter 17 . 9/30/2024
Yes - Harry has had a different upbringing from in canon, but rather than having grown up with no-one caring about him (and therefore assuming he needs to solve all problems by himself because adults are useless), he has grown up seeing his loving adoptive mother being bullied by her husband (therefore is determined to be chivalrous and stand up for people who are being bullied). So in practice, we get the same result.

And, considering Harry is already a broom-whisperer who has managed to tame a wild broom, of course he's on the Gryffindor team - and at least this time, as far as we know, he didn't get there by being rewarded for disobeying instructions. In one of my fanfics, with Slytherin!Harry, Snape's response to Harry flying after Draco when they had been ordered to stay on the ground is not to decide, 'Wow, you're such a good flyer, we've got to waive rules and put you in the quidditch team at once,' but to ground both boys for the rest of the year, because yes, Snape is competitive about house rivalry, but he's also far more concerned than McGonagall about keeping Harry safe, especially when there is reason to suspect that a member of the Hogwarts staff may be trying to assassinate him.
Temple Cloud chapter 15 . 9/25/2024
Severus is probably torn between wishing he didn't have to spend as much time with Harry and Dudley as he does when they're in Slytherin, feeling ashamed that he has failed to protect them just as the teachers in his adolescence failed to protect him (okay, nobody's tried to feed them to a werewolf yet, but they've only been here a few days), and thinking, 'Seriously, you think these kids are going to be safer if they're separated from each other and one of them is in Gryffindor, of all places? Gryffindor kids are lethal, and if you combine that with a Head of House who is perfectly willing to bar a child from knowing the password to his own common room when there's a deranged mass-murderer stalking the school - no, please, if you want them to be safe, either move them both to Hufflepuff, or, preferably, to a different school in a different country!'
Temple Cloud chapter 14 . 9/24/2024
"'Watch Tante and don't do what she does,' is what he lives by." Diana Wynne Jones said this was how she used her memories of her mother as a guide to parenting her own children.

"and frankly, we don't know if your family is a Squib line or not." Quite possibly this is the case for all Muggleborn wizards - it's just that, if the gene for magic, without the abiliity actually to do magic, has been passed down for many generations, the family won't remember that they had magical ancestors.

"But Severus will protect them, won't you, Severus?" Severus is probably thinking furiously at Dumbledore, 'And why didn't YOU protect Lily from getting killed? Why did you leave a toddler on a stranger's doorstep in the middle of the night? And why am I the only member of staff in this place who ever pays any attention to pupil safety and doesn't assume that, for example, taking eleven-year-olds into the Forbidden Forest at midnight to find whatever monster has been killing unicorns, is a good idea?'

"Do you expect me to tutor you in Potions?" In addition to a full teaching workload plus remedial classes for pupils who are falling behind, preparing lessons and marking homework, keeping the school infirmary stocked up with healing potions, patrolling the corridors at night in case of danger, and having quasi-parental pastoral responsibility for a quarter of the pupils in the school, many of whom have parents in prison and at least some of whom come from a bad family situation such as having a parent who is a serial spouse-murderer, and covertly keeping an eye on a colleague who Dumbledore suspects is a Death Eater but is still allowing to teach? I think Snape has more than enough to deal with.
Temple Cloud chapter 13 . 9/23/2024
'holly and unicorn hair for Harry' - I like the idea that the holly represents Harry's own personality, the person he is anyway, but that, since the horcrux in him had been exorcised in this timeline, there is no longer a link with Voldemort to cause the phoenix-and-holly wand to choose him. I wonder whom that wand does eventually choose (a distant relative of the Riddle family? Maybe Delphi Diggory, if she exists in this timeline?) or if it remains unclaimed in Ollivander's shop forever.

The Moonfleet reminds me of the Luggage in the Discworld books. (I'm currently re-reading Sourcery, and have just got to the point where the Luggage develops a crush on the same woman Rincewind is attracted to, and is so disappointed at discovering that relationships between women and wooden boxes don't work out that it goes to a tavern to get drunk.) But why should anyone be surprised that a broom can be sentient? After all, the wands clearly are, if they choose loyalty to a particular owner, so why not brooms?
Temple Cloud chapter 9 . 9/23/2024
"His theory was that a traumatic experience would trigger it." I suspect that it was probably the traumatic experience more than the surge in magic that caused people to go mad - it's amazing that Neville is as sane as he is, under the circumstances.
Temple Cloud chapter 6 . 9/18/2024
Why indeed wasn't there a wizard around to keep an eye on Harry? I wonder what would have happened if Severus Snape had decided, instead of becoming a teacher at Hogwarts, to move to Surrey so that he could make sure Harry was safe before he turned eleven, and in the holidays. After all, protecting him at school should theoretically be the job of all the Hogwarts staff anyway.
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