5 August 2009
[Severus Snape’s diary]
Even as a bearded hermit in his exile, Draco has proven the name of Malfoy inescapably linked with decadence.
There is only one bed; but it is situated on the sixth floor of the lighthouse. At least ten feet wide and ten feet long it doesn’t take up room—it is the room. The view of the islands is magnificent: scattered crags and cliffs frame flecks of grey, green, brown. The sea (that I always heard but never saw through the window-hole high in the wall of my cell) is enormous.
And the sky is immense.
On low ledges under the windows, thick white candles circle the bed. From the ladder leading to the topmost floor, where the beacon is housed, white valances of mosquito nets drift to form the bed-head.
When I saw it first, revulsion rose in me. I was about to scoff at this pleasure-dome Draco created, to scorn his hedonism, his sybaritic abandon (here, at the end of the world), when I saw his face.
When I saw him (here, in this bed), night upon moonlit, candlelit night.
Alone.
I experienced a strange sense of kinship with him then. Many nights in many years I, too, lay in a large, lonely bed, yearning for green eyes long dead and gone.
What sets us apart is his treasure of green eyes closing against the onslaught of orgasm.
What sets us apart is his burden of green eyes closing against a flood of blood.
Lily never belonged to me; neither in life, nor in death.
…last night I watched you, as you lay down. Rail-thin, with nothing but brown stubble on a knobby head, you’re a stick-figure-drawing of the witch you were. Adrift in the sea of Draco’s sheets and Draco’s blankets, you floated away from me. While your whisperings washed over me in waves (Professor Babbling, Katie Bell, Regulus Black, Sirius Black, Amelia Bones, Susan Bones, Terry Boot, Lavender Brown…), I, too, withdrew, and was gone before you reached Cho Chang.
I went to bed in our small white house, in the bedroom above the back-garden with its grassy lawn and apple trees. I donned the sage-green nightshirt you bought for me, (now soft from many nights of sex, and many days of sunshine—billowing freshly laundered in the breeze). I spooned your full figure and buried my face in your spicy curls.
Sighing, you reached for me. Soon your nightgown joined my shirt on the ground. After years of marriage, I know your skin, your flesh, your depths as my own. When we moaned and moved as one, sensations swelled, ripened to lust. Pain and pleasure mingled, and I stilled within you, ready to burst—
and I shoved into you, hard, into your tight, hot cunt, held your hands, cradled your brittle body, inhaled your sweat, sour from years of prison-dirt—
and the most fucking-sweet pressure on my prostate pushed me, propelled me, threw me forwards—
We cannot stay here.
Tomorrow Draco will take us to Hogsmeade.
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.