10 August 2009
[Hermione Snape’s diary]
I have not dared to write down many details yet.
Spelling everything out in my blood and Veritaserum would make it real, wouldn’t it?
And that scares me. To find everything is real—only to have it snatched away when—if—we fail to fulfil the conditions of our probation—
But now…I shall attempt a list. Just three items.
1. Bathtime: A real toilet. With toilet-paper. A shower with magically unlimited hot water. Home-made soap frothing into soft foam. Clean underwear and fresh clothes. No fleas. No lice.
2. Breakfast: Two cups of hot tea. One egg, the yolk creamy. Three slices of warm toast without maggots, but slathered with yellow butter and sweet strawberry jam.
3. Severus: Alive.
—And scowling at the parchment Padma and Parvati gave us last night. An address and directions. The Lake House belongs to Natalie McDonald, who emigrated to America after the war. Now she wants to sell it. Padma and Parvati have promised it’s ours.
We set out right after breakfast. Just like yesterday, we left Hogsmeade behind. But today we turned left at the Shrieking Shack. A few minutes later, we passed the boat landing. I was relieved that mist obscured both landing and lake. The thought of Hogwarts hurts. When we reached Hogsmeade Station, the sun broke through white clouds, though the air remained humid with a promise of rain. We had to take a break there; we’re not used to walking anymore.
To our surprise we discovered that the Hogwarts Express runs four times every day now, stopping at several stations between Hogsmeade and London. While Padma and Parvati have told us much, they never mentioned such small changes, having long since grown accustomed to them. Yet those changes shock us.
It’s as if time stopped for us when the gates of Azkaban closed behind us on 3 May 1998, and only started again when those gates opened once more on 2 August 2009.
I know that eleven years or 135 months or 4,109 days or 98,616 hours have passed between those two dates.
But I cannot comprehend what that means.
A few yards behind the station, on the road to Hogwarts, a crooked wooden sign bid us turn right for the Lake House. We entered a narrow lane, sheltered by hedges left and right—hawthorn, hazel, furze, and rowan. The path led us northwards, onto the ness. Moments later, the track dipped down to a western cove.
Down by the water, nestled in a dell, its gardens surrounded by low field-stone walls, a white cottage waited for us.
Two windows (with 16 small rectangular panes each) frame a green door. From the slate roof three large dormer windows greet (with 48 little panes each). A shed with a separate entrance and three windows (four panes each, twelve panes altogether) is attached to the kitchen.
Inside, Natalie McDonald’s former house-keeper and a lawyer waited for us.
We paid with Draco’s money and signed with our blood.
We have a home now.
Well! I must say I’m impressed by this development. As unlikely as these things are to occur, this kind of upsprung friendship where there was only the opposite before can and does happen. You portrayed it quite nicely, and I’m also glad it’s a positive plot point. Good things happen even to people who are depressed and have gone through the mill. I hope this means there’s some hope!
Too bad the picture at the top of the chapter gave it away. Seeing Maggie Smith as McGonagall in the (admittedly nicely-done) artwork at the top took all the dramatic force away from the end of the chapter. Still a positive development, though, even if it wasn’t a surprise. I’m glad for Hermione, and by extension, for Severus.
Ah, Christ, I can feel you sharpening your knives for another gloom-fest. Only five more chapters left, and already I can feel you poking holes in whatever limited happiness or security they’ve found.
Amazing! A happy ending! I love it! See–hope isn’t so bad, is it? It does seem a trifle sudden, your ending. And we never did find out about the mystery woman. But I feel able to let our Hermione and Severus go, knowing that whatever further vicissitudes they face, they have each other on a more solid, saner basis. Thank you for your writing, and thank you for the hope you left our favorite couple (and us!) with.
I had wanted to delete the third review I left (“Ah, Christ…”), but I’ve been having problems with my computer, and it didn’t allow me to send my reasons back to you, so it (the deletion) could be done. I had read “Apprentice & Necromancer” first, and was deeply disturbed by how damaged so many of the characters had been at the end of that fic. I was therefore afraid that any positives that were about to jell in this story were all going to fall apart, instead. Once I came to the end of this and found it wasn’t going to end badly for them (yay!), I was sorry I’d been so negative in that third review. So I ask your pardon, and that you disregard that one. You really are quite a special writer, and even though I hated the fact my fictional friends suffered so badly by the finish of “A&N”, I must say your plotting is excellent, and so are your characterizations. I will come back to read more of your writing. Thank you for sharing your gifts with us!
Nice to see that you’re still reading!
One thing puzzles me: You must surely be aware that the characters in “Prisoners” are much, much more damaged than those in “Apprentice”.
Of course “Apprentice” leaves key-characters badly damaged … they have been to Death and back, after all. But that story has an ending that assures readers that yes, everything will be just fine one day, this is something we can cope with, eventually.
While in “Prisoners” the challenge of the plot is met, and superficially the characters and readers are rewarded with a fairly straightforward “happy ending”, the story is really much, much worse if you take a moment to think about it. There is no way back, no matter how much they heal. Hermione will for the rest of her life live under the compulsion of counting things. Severus will in times of crisis always drift off to his parallel world. They will always remain unable to live in an emotionally stable fashion without Draco anchoring them …
I don’t mind at all that you dislike or even “hate” the dark turns and twists of my story/stories. Some people like sweet milk chocolate, others like bitter dark chocolate, it’s as simple as that – different tastes and preferences.
Anyway, from your remarks I gather that you might be interested in hearing a bit about my motivation concerning my stories, so here are a few comments about that:
What I loathe in many fanfiction stories in various fandoms is how authors make light of consequences. People are tortured, traumatised, injured … and there are no consequences. Everyone is right as rain again in one and the same chapter. Personally, I find that not only ridiculous and boring, but somewhat despicable. It doesn’t work like that. As a reader, and therefore also as a writer, I’m simply not interested in fluffy lies, I’m in it for the hard-won happy ending, like the one I wrote for “Apprentice” … I prefer characters who have looked, heck, *jumped into* the abyss of despair and have crawled out of it again and persevered. I am interested in how characters will act when they are pushed far beyond their limits, and how that will change them, and how they will move on from there.
So if you’re looking for fluff, you will rarely find that kind of thing in my stories. But I do try to come up with interesting, twisty plots, and heroes who find the strength to go on no matter what.