3 August 2009
[Hermione Snape’s diary]
Yesterday’s entry is complete gibberish, the handwriting nearly illegible.
But I did manage to write down what I did and where I am.
Seventeen minutes before midnight I jerked awake from a nightmare, fearing I had forgotten my daily entry. The pain that pulsed in my hands was bliss.
Then the thought struck me it was just a dream that I roused Severus long enough for him to write his entry. I stumbled from the sofa, tore off his blanket, grabbed his hands.
Only when I saw the bloody letters etched into his hands I collapsed, weeping hysterically.
I had barely fallen asleep again, when the conviction gripped me that I was still in my cell, that Severus was just a name in one of my squares, not the man holding me tightly.
I screamed and shrieked and babbled and only quieted when he told me that it cannot be a dream because no dream could possibly contain Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger, and Severus Snape in one and the same bed. Especially a Draco Malfoy with a sun-burnt, weather-withered face and a shaggy, unkempt beard as long as Albus Dumbledore’s used to be.
That made sense to me even in my unhinged state and I fell asleep once more.
This morning I am calm.
But I fear that the last eleven years have left me less than sane.
I keep counting the squares on the flagstone floor of Draco’s living room on the fourth floor of his lighthouse-home. The way they get cut off by the round walls bothers me. That there would be 256 of them without the stairs bothers me.
I keep thinking of the squares in my cell. There were not enough of them. My list of our dead held 95 names, including animals and magical creatures, and I only had 91 squares. I left out the animals in the end. I put them in the corners. But it pained me. Dear Fang. Brave Mrs Norris. Faithful Hedwig. And my Crooks. My poor Crooks…I can still hear the heel of Bellatrix’ boot grinding his skull into a pulp of brain, bone splinters and bits of blood-drenched fur.
With Severus and Draco alive, I would have had two more squares to fill with names.
But that would have left two corners empty.
It bothers me that there are no corners here.
We’ll stay here on Bound Skerry for a few days, though.
Draco says we need time to adjust after eleven years in Azkaban. He’ll bring us up to date concerning events in the Muggle and the wizarding world. And feed us properly; he promises he cooks a wicked fish stew.
That Severus doesn’t protest bothers me.
He withdraws into himself for long periods of time. One minute he’s talking to Draco—the next he’s staring off into space for an hour. It is Occlumency, and Severus insists it has kept him sane all this time.
But I have seen Draco look at him.
He, too, wonders: How sane?
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.