2 August 2009
[Severus Snape’s diary]
When I saw you, I knew my messages hadn’t reached you. The humiliation, the pain, the blood, the sores—all in vain.
They Charmed off your hair.
Well.
That was to be expected.
They put you in those ridiculous Muggle things you used to wear. You look lost in them now. Like a child in the clothes of her mother.
You hesitated towards me, arms half-raised, hands almost reaching.
I expected you to babble (a deluge of your dear, excited burbling: “You’re not dead, you’re not dead!”). And tears, yes, of course I expected tears. Hysterical tears or quiet, desperate, blissful tears. Tears to kiss away with a grand gesture, whispering against your sweet lips, your soft cheeks, that I didn’t die, that I didn’t die, not in 1980, not in 1998.
That I will not—that I cannot die as long as you shall live .
But you did not cry.
You let your arms sink down.
You stood very still and looked at me.
Your eyes, your mind, an open book.
(Never mind what I told Potter; I could always see what you were thinking. Maybe because you never bothered to hide it—not when you wished for my approval as a child, not when you wanted my attention as a teenager, not when you offered your heart to me as an—before you ever had the chance to become an adult.)
But today you looked at me a woman grown.
A woman broken.
And you said, in a voice so hesitant and husky it couldn’t possibly be yours (I wouldn’t have recognised your voice without you standing before me, a misbegotten sparrow instead of Gryffindor’s most unruly lioness), you said:
“Your name is in the square below the window.”
“—the middle square, four out of seven—”
I saw the square.
There were ninety-one squares in your cell. Ninety of them the rough granite of Azkaban bedrock. One of them smooth and soft, from eleven long years of caresses.
Foolish, foolish girl.
“Your name,” I said, “is everywhere.”
And that is true; it seems to be my one weakness that while I cannot be courageous for myself, I can carry a torch for others to my death and beyond. First Lily, then Albus; now you.
We stared at each other.
“What now?” you asked.
Vehemently, I flung the Portkey into the grey-black floods of the North Sea.
“We fly,” I announced.
Finally the grand gesture I’d planned for (eleven years, too many months, weeks and days to contemplate).
Like all my grand gestures, it failed.
That it wasn’t fatal I have to thank you for. You, and your fear of flying.
And Fate, of course, who’s still not done with me.
(…or you, it seems, my poor little lynx.)
And the lighthouse keeper of Bound Skerry, who found us when we fell from the sky on Grunay, an uninhabited island in the Out Skerries group, the easternmost part of Shetland.
Nominally, at least, of Scotland.
…of home.
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.