11 August 2009
[Severus Snape’s diary]
It seems we have acquired…a domicile that should satisfy authorities in so far as the conditions of our probation are concerned.
It should…irk me that we had to depend on connections of the Patil chits to acquire a place of residence. It ought to…humiliate me that we had to take charity from Draco to pay for our home.
But—there is no vexation, no sense of degradation.
Perhaps a faint feeling of relief; maybe a slight touch of annoyance.
Possibly a hint of glee. After all—albeit in a round-about manner—the Minister for Magic himself (my dear old friend Lucius Malfoy) has paid for our house.
You stand and stare and count the window panes. Three times sixteen the dormer windows; two times sixteen the ground floor windows; three times four the ones in the shed where my potions lab will be.
You break my heart.
And I? I stare at this cottage that should be the house of my dreams—after Spinner’s End!—after Azkaban!—Merlin help me! And I compare it to the house of my delusions, of my hallucinations, that small white house where I have lived with you, where I have loved you, for more than eleven years now.
This house is situated on the north-western edge of the headland beyond Hogsmeade Station; a perfectly ridiculous place to build a house. We can just hope the midges-repelling-charms will hold. And both of us could do without that view.
My house was at the coast benefitting from the warmth of the Gulf Stream and the endless freedom of the Atlantic Ocean. There were no midges. Nor flea. Nor lice.
This house has a green door, and shutters.
Satin-green, you whisper.
But the door of my house was red. I painted it for you, the Muggle way. A Gryffindor door for my Gryffindor girl.
At least both houses are white.
There is no orchard here. In fact, there’s nothing left of the gardens at all but weeds. Long since they have succumbed to neglect. Gardens don’t take kindly to even a year of disregard. And from what the Patils told us, this land has been untended much longer.
I try to remember Natalie McDonald.
She was a child under my care; I ought to remember her.
But I don’t. The faces blur together—their flesh stripped away—their skulls glaring at me, accusing me—
I swore to protect them. All of them.
Suddenly you turn to me. You stare at me now, with those huge brown eyes of yours. As if you can hear what I think. (I wouldn’t put it past you.)
“Natalie lived,” you say.
For a moment panic grips me, and I hang suspended, helpless, between two worlds: a cottage at the lake, with a green door, satin-green shutters, and neglected gardens—and a small white house in a sheltered cove, with a bright red door, and an orchard of apple trees.
Then I’m falling, falling—
and when I open my eyes, I’m kissing you.
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.