31 August 2009
[Hermione Snape’s diary]
After we left the Ministry of Magic with our papers properly signed and sealed, we went to Diagon Alley. It is much bigger, noisier, and dirtier than I remember. We found a stationery—Quill, Book, and Candle—and bought a set of new quills, two pots with indigo coloured ink.
We Apparated home after that. At the moment each step of wandering around Diagon Alley still means missing names, dead faces, painful reminders. I expect we’ll go back in a few weeks or months. We’ve become used to the new Hogsmeade, after all. Eventually, we’ll feel at home in Diagon Alley again, too.
Now we’re sitting at the kitchen table, with the open ink pots standing at the centre, the quills spread out to choose from.
The ink smells of alcohol and almonds, with the bitter-sharp aftertaste of resin scraping the roof of my mouth. Inhaling the dusty, feathery scent of the new quills makes me sneeze.
Our blood-quills have been destroyed this morning. Before our eyes. The quills will never draw blood from our veins again. We don’t have to write another word in these diaries. I know Severus will not continue his diary. But I haven’t decided yet.
Vile as they were—I do not believe them wholly evil.
Within the blood-drenched lines of our entries we couldn’t hide from the pain. And we could not conceal our agony. Our pain poured onto those pages along with our blood.
And somehow…now…my memories, my fears, my hopes: everything that was before, everything that will never be again—does not torture me the way it did.
When I look at all that blood now, at the list of the dead that I squeezed on the last page and the inside of the cover at the very back of the diary, when I think of my cell, of all those squares and lines, of the long years of silence, it is very strange.
I still feel strangled. That painful pressure still stabs through my forehead. Nausea still makes my stomach twist and churn. My eyes are still burning.
But…I can feel my heart beating. And I can breathe through my tears.
Writing our daily entry has become a ritual.
We have reminded each other to write. We have woken each other to write. We have held each other while we wrote, whispered words to each other when there was nothing left to write.
To sit down now, with our own quills and our own ink, to write about today not because we must, but because we want—
This is power.
Magic.
Severus hasn’t picked up a quill yet. He is watching me as I write this. His black eyes sparkle and his short black hair is tousled. A slight smile softens the harsh lines that ravage his features. That painful tension has drained out of him. He is truly just sitting there and watching me as I write, not imagining another world with a different me, not preparing desperate back-up plans…
He pretends to be angry at Draco for the risks he took when Draco went to Lucius and made that deal with him.
But even Severus cannot argue the results.
(Especially now that the Wizengamot have signed Draco’s pardon.)
I believe Draco has saved four lives with his bravery.
Lucius is not the wizard I remember, and most certainly not the Minister for Magic I expected him to be. Not arrogant or proud, or even just regal. Instead he seems rather…burdened. Emaciated. Almost…humble.
He, too, has had to live with Voldemort’s victory for eleven years.
And with the guilt of not knowing if he killed his own son.
I know that Draco had to hide, at least while Voldemort was alive. But his self-imposed exile in the lighthouse on Bound Skerry was more than that. In a way, he built his own prison there. He was his own judge and jury and executed the sentence without mercy.
Harry would never have wanted that.
Never.
It wasn’t his fault that Harry was killed.
That day… The chapter title in “Hogwarts, A Revised History” calls it “The Final Battle”. But it was not a battle. It was a carnage. Curses firing off every which way, rebounding, ricocheting…By the time we ended up barricading ourselves in the Shrieking Shack it was all over.
None of us expected to survive. None of us believed that we would be able to escape. Certainly none of us imagined that Voldemort would begin his reign as “Lord Protector of Magic” with “Acts of Magical Mercy” (as the chapter following the account of “The Final Battle” is titled).
But he did. At least he did not kill us. He allowed us to…continue to exist. If not to live.
And now?
Now He is dead.
We are alive. We are in love. We are free.
We have won.
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.