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teddy_radiatorThis fic is written for and dedicated to the marvelous stgulik, my beta, my friend, my editor, my partner. When she challenged me to write this story, I had no earthy idea what to write about, until my dear Muse Dahlra told me. In a sense, they are both my partners, encouraging and inspiring me.
The characters in this story do not belong to me. They are the property of JK Rowling and Warner Brothers. I make no money from these stories.
I hope you enjoy this simple tale of what we do for love.
Overall Rating: NC-17 for language and sexual situations
Chapter One
Years of being the Head of House for a group of cunning, patronising, privileged youth had taught Severus Snape one important rule. At night, when the darkness blanketed everything, they were all the same: male, female, first or seventh year, pretty or ugly, rich or poor.
Night reduced everyone down to children, and many of those in his charge had either haunted his nights with urgent taps on his door, reeling from nightmares of their own tense home lives (‘Sir, Miranda Dovekeep has done it again!’) or earning his scorn by getting caught out in cold, dark corridors without permission, doing things best done in the confines of Slytherin’s dungeons. (‘Blaylock, if you are going to spend your misbegotten youth with your hand down Leaderley’s trousers, for sweet sucking sake, don’t do it where you know you’ll get caught. Mr. Filch is getting old, boy; his heart can only take so much.’)
Years of interrupted nights had conditioned Severus. He would awaken unbidden, almost before the knock sounded, his inner antennae calibrated to its highest sensitivity setting. At times, his sensors were so well attuned, he could almost predict the messenger’s identity before he even opened his eyes.
In the years after Tom Riddle’s return, sleep became an even more elusive lover. If his House members weren’t waking him, his own dark hopelessness took up the slack. During those last years, right before the war and the end of Voldemort, Severus fancied that he never really slept at all; he just idled. Even now, with his Hogwarts teaching days long behind him, the slightest movement out of the ordinary had his body on the move before it even knew it was awake. The night was no respecter of house, sex or blood, which was why he often felt more at home in the dark than the light.
Tonight’s interruption was just a dream, and not even his dream at that. The dream had made her call out softly, a low, mournful sound. He rolled onto his side, and looked into the face of his sleeping wife, and with the worst of things behind them, a measure of cautious calm stole into his heart. Her hair, like baby Devil’s Snare, had finally grown back, and the tumble of curls around her heart-shaped face gave her the look of a naughty cherub sleeping off a night on the tiles. A faint line of worry creased the smooth skin between her brows, and he wished with all his magical ability to remove it.
She was the one thing in his life that he could call a blessing, and he cherished her more than anything else on this earth. For a man who had spent much of his life a hated, bitter enemy, he had somehow been given the chance to be a good husband to a wonderful witch, and the very sight of her made him want to be a better man.
Severus resisted the urge to caress her lovely face in case he woke her. It had been late when they had gone to bed, and she had been so tired. Even a year after both Muggle doctors and Mediwitches proclaimed her in top health, Hermione still tired more easily. The potions he brewed for her had gone a long way to restoring her stamina, but he was loathe to risk anything that might cause a setback.
Even as he lay there, still and contemplating, her large amber eyes opened, and she took a deep, tired breath. “’S everything okay?” she asked, still more asleep than awake.
“It’s fine,” he whispered. “Sleep, pet.” With a soft sigh, she snuggled closer, and he enveloped her in his arms, so carved up with the love he felt for her, it threatened to stop his heart.
-o0o-
Severus Snape had been tenuously hanging on to life the day his former pupil blithely walked in and took it over. More out of a sense of obligation than anything else at first, she had visited him daily at St. Mungo’s during his long, painful recuperation from his near-fatal meeting with Tom Riddle’s familiar. In those first weeks, nearly demented with pain, heartsick with the knowledge he had survived when so many other good witches and wizards had not, he had treated her abominably.
She had been full of forced-cheery Gryffindor bravado at first. “Good morning, Professor! How are you feeling today?”
“What do you think, you silly fool? I feel like shite,” he retorted, his voice ragged and pebbled from the venom damage. “Now kindly fuck off and let me enjoy my agony in peace.”
The look of distress in her eyes didn’t make him feel as vindicated as he’d hoped.
She left, but something told him that although he’d sent her packing today, tomorrow she would stand on the other side of his hospital room door, square her small shoulders, push the door open and brave him again. And that was exactly what she did.
Now he squirmed inwardly as he recalled the horrible things he’d said to her during those first few visits.
“Back again, Granger? What, all the other charity cases have their full quota of house elves?”
“Gods, Granger, what are you wearing? Is Madam Malkin having her bi-annual prostitute sale early this year?”
“New perfume, Granger? I always did like garlic prawns.”
“Go away, Granger. I don’t want you here. I despised you as a student and I detest you now. You’re too boring to converse with and too ugly to fuck.”
She had the measure of him by the first week. Soon after, she just rolled her eyes at his insults. The last one made her laugh. No matter what he said, no matter how foul-tempered or cruel or insulting he was, she took it, gave it back, and kept returning. She was his only visitor besides the mediwitches, the Aurors, and Boy Potter, who had tried to give him his memories back. Severus flatly refused them. They had brought him grief enough trying to hold onto them; perhaps he could learn to make a different life for himself without them.
“Good morning, Professor! I’ve brought you a few things to read,” she said, sailing in one morning, six months into his recuperation. She was wearing a red scarf and matching hat, and her cheeks were pink from the cold. She was glowing, fresh and pretty. She smelled like baking cookies. As Severus took in these things, a swift, unwanted desire swept over him; it was not so much a desire for her, he told himself, but for the normality she seemed to represent.
She is just a witch, he told himself. Years later, he would think back to that and laugh ruefully. There was nothing ‘just a’ about Hermione Granger.
Plunking down in the chair beside his bed, she did her daily ritual. She looked over him carefully, especially his face, and seemed to run through some internal checklist in her head. She pressed her tiny, cool hand against his forehead.
He grudgingly allowed the liberty. In the first month of his recovery, she’d noticed something out of the ordinary, called his mediwitch in, and they’d barely saved him from a dangerous relapse. Had she not been there, had she not noticed the sudden, rapid rise in his temperature, he would have died.
Strange that he had proceeded to fight so hard to overcome death when it came knocking this time, when only weeks before he had been ready to welcome any release from life.
Now, satisfied that nothing was amiss, Hermione sat back, produced a ball of eye-wateringly ugly purple yarn, and started knitting. “How are you today, Professor?”
He looked at what appeared to be some wooly horror oozing from her knitting needles. “Bored, sick of your irritating presence, vaguely horny.” He leered at her with all the menace of a toothless tiger. “Care for a bunk up to get my heart started?”
She laughed. “Why, Professor Snape! I didn’t know you had a heart.”
“Ha bloody ha. Stop the presses.” He peered closer at her so-called knitting. “Gods, what is that hideous thing?”
She beamed and held up her handiwork for him to see. “I’m knitting you a scarf, see? Healer Blyte says you might be able to go outdoors soon, and I wouldn’t want you to catch cold. I’m going to make gloves to go with it as soon as I learn how.”
Severus looked at his ‘scarf’ with a sense of dismay. It was the most uneven mess he’d ever seen. “I wouldn’t bother, Granger. A blind Molly Weasley with Wizarding Palsy could make a better go of it. If that scarf is the only thing standing between me and pneumonia, I’ll take my chances if it’s all the same to you. Wearing that could cause death by humiliation.”
It was the most words he’d strung together in days, and the first that hadn’t insulted her physical shortcomings or requested her to fuck off. Suddenly she laughed, a pearly, sweet sound that was unaffected and endearing. “You must be feeling better. Your insults are becoming more inventive.” Challengingly, she said, “I’ll do you a deal, Professor. You let me walk you around in the fresh air, and I won’t make you wear this hideous scarf.”
Eventually he was on his feet, taking his first unsteady steps, hanging on to her when his legs grew shaky with sudden weariness, holding onto her shoulders when he grew too tired to go on. She was patient, and stubborn, and firm, and encouraging, and soon he was walking on his own.
The day he left St. Mungo’s, he wore the purple scarf. Even wrapped several times around his thin neck, it still reached the ground. She never did find time to make the gloves. For that, he was fond of saying, he was very grateful.
Later, when Severus was placed under house arrest, Hermione came every day, bringing tempting dishes to entice him to eat, brewing Strengthening potions to help regain his stamina, and making sure reporters and gawkers left him alone. The Daily Prophet snapped a photo of her leaving his house early one morning and the public had a field day with the darling of the Golden Trio ‘sneaking out of Snape’s Spinner’s End love nest.’
No one had bothered to discover that he’d been ill that day, and that she wouldn’t leave him until his fever broke. Mundanities, Rita Skeeter declared in court, do not sell papers.
During his trial, Hermione had attended every day, and sat with him, holding his hand, daring Rita Skeeter and her ilk to harass him. By then, Severus was no longer deluding himself. He had fallen in love with Hermione Granger, and she with him, and he held onto her as fervently as she to him.
The night following his acquittal and subsequent awarding of the Order of Merlin, he took her back to Spinner’s End, and they made love for the first time. It had been glorious. They were married six months later. He pestered her until she said yes.
Three years on, Severus and Hermione had made their peace with the Wizarding world, and had settled in relative obscurity in a little Muggle community south of Hogsmeade. They brewed mail-order potions, and Hermione was working on a commissioned edition of Hogwarts: A History. They loved one another with equal parts fire and honey, passion and tenderness. Severus cherished his wife very much, and she adored her husband. They had ignored the rumour mills, the well-meaning warnings of friends and colleagues, and had proven the nay-sayers wrong time and again. They were two people for whom loyalty and courage were as important to a marriage as desire and duty.
Soon they seriously discussed starting a family. Their business was strong, their reputations had swung the pendulum from notorious to stellar and back to normal, and they felt it was time. Life had turned out better than he would have ever expected, and Severus had thought his luck might be on the upswing.
That was when Hermione was diagnosed with cancer.
She had come home from her pre-pregnancy consultation with St. Mungo’s shaking and terrified. The Healers were adamant: it had been caught in time, and they could eradicate it.
The treatment, though, would be aggressive and costly. Sitting in the uncomfortable chairs in Healer Blyte’s office, Severus had glared at the young man and quietly said, “Don’t worry about the money, Blyte. Concentrate on healing my wife. Do whatever it takes. Cost is no object.”
Hermione had placed a hand on his arm. “But Severus—”
“No. Object, Hermione,” he’d hissed, trying to stem the rising fear roiling in his gut. He fixed Blyte with a stare that would freeze water. “When can we start?”
They sold everything they could sell and still have a roof over their heads. Hermione put her foot down against selling some of his precious books, but he sold them anyway. She cried a little at that, but did not ask him to keep anything else. He ruthlessly flogged everything that wasn’t nailed down, not caring. Hermione needed it more than he did.
It still wasn’t enough.
So he had gone, cap in hand, to Lucius Malfoy, the only wizard he knew who had managed to keep any modicum of wealth, and called in his life debt for Draco. The Malfoys had contributed as much as they could, which was enough to start the first round of treatments.
Watching Hermione struggle each day was torture, especially as the days went by and the Malfoys’ funds dwindled. The treatments were indeed aggressive, painful, and humiliating. Hermione’s wild hair fell out. Severus kept it all in a small box, unable to part with it. She lost weight, she was sick. Every day brought small triumphs and setbacks in equal measure, but still, she all but wasted away.
Severus never left her side. He held her as she wept in misery and shame as basic functions failed and her body fought the treatments almost as much as the disease. He presented a brave, stoic face each day as the one important person in his life struggled and battled with her Muggle body. At night he wept alone, railing at his helplessness. Each morning, they saluted the day together, vowing to beat it, and each evening they congratulated one another on getting through it.
One morning, the mediwitches unceremoniously chivvied him out of her room so they could prepare Hermione for the second round of treatments. She had suffered through a particularly bad night and he hadn’t wanted to leave her, but the cursed healers had been adamant.
“Please try to get some rest, Mr. Snape,” one of the officious hags had urged. “Mrs. Snape is in good hands. You don’t want to tire yourself out when she needs you most, do you?”
Resigned, Severus had been aimlessly wandering the halls when a familiar voice called out, “Severus? Is that you?”
He turned and found himself face to face with Remus Lupin.
The characters in this story do not belong to me. They are the property of JK Rowling and Warner Brothers. I make no money from these stories.
I hope you enjoy this simple tale of what we do for love.
Overall Rating: NC-17 for language and sexual situations
Chapter One
Years of being the Head of House for a group of cunning, patronising, privileged youth had taught Severus Snape one important rule. At night, when the darkness blanketed everything, they were all the same: male, female, first or seventh year, pretty or ugly, rich or poor.
Night reduced everyone down to children, and many of those in his charge had either haunted his nights with urgent taps on his door, reeling from nightmares of their own tense home lives (‘Sir, Miranda Dovekeep has done it again!’) or earning his scorn by getting caught out in cold, dark corridors without permission, doing things best done in the confines of Slytherin’s dungeons. (‘Blaylock, if you are going to spend your misbegotten youth with your hand down Leaderley’s trousers, for sweet sucking sake, don’t do it where you know you’ll get caught. Mr. Filch is getting old, boy; his heart can only take so much.’)
Years of interrupted nights had conditioned Severus. He would awaken unbidden, almost before the knock sounded, his inner antennae calibrated to its highest sensitivity setting. At times, his sensors were so well attuned, he could almost predict the messenger’s identity before he even opened his eyes.
In the years after Tom Riddle’s return, sleep became an even more elusive lover. If his House members weren’t waking him, his own dark hopelessness took up the slack. During those last years, right before the war and the end of Voldemort, Severus fancied that he never really slept at all; he just idled. Even now, with his Hogwarts teaching days long behind him, the slightest movement out of the ordinary had his body on the move before it even knew it was awake. The night was no respecter of house, sex or blood, which was why he often felt more at home in the dark than the light.
Tonight’s interruption was just a dream, and not even his dream at that. The dream had made her call out softly, a low, mournful sound. He rolled onto his side, and looked into the face of his sleeping wife, and with the worst of things behind them, a measure of cautious calm stole into his heart. Her hair, like baby Devil’s Snare, had finally grown back, and the tumble of curls around her heart-shaped face gave her the look of a naughty cherub sleeping off a night on the tiles. A faint line of worry creased the smooth skin between her brows, and he wished with all his magical ability to remove it.
She was the one thing in his life that he could call a blessing, and he cherished her more than anything else on this earth. For a man who had spent much of his life a hated, bitter enemy, he had somehow been given the chance to be a good husband to a wonderful witch, and the very sight of her made him want to be a better man.
Severus resisted the urge to caress her lovely face in case he woke her. It had been late when they had gone to bed, and she had been so tired. Even a year after both Muggle doctors and Mediwitches proclaimed her in top health, Hermione still tired more easily. The potions he brewed for her had gone a long way to restoring her stamina, but he was loathe to risk anything that might cause a setback.
Even as he lay there, still and contemplating, her large amber eyes opened, and she took a deep, tired breath. “’S everything okay?” she asked, still more asleep than awake.
“It’s fine,” he whispered. “Sleep, pet.” With a soft sigh, she snuggled closer, and he enveloped her in his arms, so carved up with the love he felt for her, it threatened to stop his heart.
-o0o-
Severus Snape had been tenuously hanging on to life the day his former pupil blithely walked in and took it over. More out of a sense of obligation than anything else at first, she had visited him daily at St. Mungo’s during his long, painful recuperation from his near-fatal meeting with Tom Riddle’s familiar. In those first weeks, nearly demented with pain, heartsick with the knowledge he had survived when so many other good witches and wizards had not, he had treated her abominably.
She had been full of forced-cheery Gryffindor bravado at first. “Good morning, Professor! How are you feeling today?”
“What do you think, you silly fool? I feel like shite,” he retorted, his voice ragged and pebbled from the venom damage. “Now kindly fuck off and let me enjoy my agony in peace.”
The look of distress in her eyes didn’t make him feel as vindicated as he’d hoped.
She left, but something told him that although he’d sent her packing today, tomorrow she would stand on the other side of his hospital room door, square her small shoulders, push the door open and brave him again. And that was exactly what she did.
Now he squirmed inwardly as he recalled the horrible things he’d said to her during those first few visits.
“Back again, Granger? What, all the other charity cases have their full quota of house elves?”
“Gods, Granger, what are you wearing? Is Madam Malkin having her bi-annual prostitute sale early this year?”
“New perfume, Granger? I always did like garlic prawns.”
“Go away, Granger. I don’t want you here. I despised you as a student and I detest you now. You’re too boring to converse with and too ugly to fuck.”
She had the measure of him by the first week. Soon after, she just rolled her eyes at his insults. The last one made her laugh. No matter what he said, no matter how foul-tempered or cruel or insulting he was, she took it, gave it back, and kept returning. She was his only visitor besides the mediwitches, the Aurors, and Boy Potter, who had tried to give him his memories back. Severus flatly refused them. They had brought him grief enough trying to hold onto them; perhaps he could learn to make a different life for himself without them.
“Good morning, Professor! I’ve brought you a few things to read,” she said, sailing in one morning, six months into his recuperation. She was wearing a red scarf and matching hat, and her cheeks were pink from the cold. She was glowing, fresh and pretty. She smelled like baking cookies. As Severus took in these things, a swift, unwanted desire swept over him; it was not so much a desire for her, he told himself, but for the normality she seemed to represent.
She is just a witch, he told himself. Years later, he would think back to that and laugh ruefully. There was nothing ‘just a’ about Hermione Granger.
Plunking down in the chair beside his bed, she did her daily ritual. She looked over him carefully, especially his face, and seemed to run through some internal checklist in her head. She pressed her tiny, cool hand against his forehead.
He grudgingly allowed the liberty. In the first month of his recovery, she’d noticed something out of the ordinary, called his mediwitch in, and they’d barely saved him from a dangerous relapse. Had she not been there, had she not noticed the sudden, rapid rise in his temperature, he would have died.
Strange that he had proceeded to fight so hard to overcome death when it came knocking this time, when only weeks before he had been ready to welcome any release from life.
Now, satisfied that nothing was amiss, Hermione sat back, produced a ball of eye-wateringly ugly purple yarn, and started knitting. “How are you today, Professor?”
He looked at what appeared to be some wooly horror oozing from her knitting needles. “Bored, sick of your irritating presence, vaguely horny.” He leered at her with all the menace of a toothless tiger. “Care for a bunk up to get my heart started?”
She laughed. “Why, Professor Snape! I didn’t know you had a heart.”
“Ha bloody ha. Stop the presses.” He peered closer at her so-called knitting. “Gods, what is that hideous thing?”
She beamed and held up her handiwork for him to see. “I’m knitting you a scarf, see? Healer Blyte says you might be able to go outdoors soon, and I wouldn’t want you to catch cold. I’m going to make gloves to go with it as soon as I learn how.”
Severus looked at his ‘scarf’ with a sense of dismay. It was the most uneven mess he’d ever seen. “I wouldn’t bother, Granger. A blind Molly Weasley with Wizarding Palsy could make a better go of it. If that scarf is the only thing standing between me and pneumonia, I’ll take my chances if it’s all the same to you. Wearing that could cause death by humiliation.”
It was the most words he’d strung together in days, and the first that hadn’t insulted her physical shortcomings or requested her to fuck off. Suddenly she laughed, a pearly, sweet sound that was unaffected and endearing. “You must be feeling better. Your insults are becoming more inventive.” Challengingly, she said, “I’ll do you a deal, Professor. You let me walk you around in the fresh air, and I won’t make you wear this hideous scarf.”
Eventually he was on his feet, taking his first unsteady steps, hanging on to her when his legs grew shaky with sudden weariness, holding onto her shoulders when he grew too tired to go on. She was patient, and stubborn, and firm, and encouraging, and soon he was walking on his own.
The day he left St. Mungo’s, he wore the purple scarf. Even wrapped several times around his thin neck, it still reached the ground. She never did find time to make the gloves. For that, he was fond of saying, he was very grateful.
Later, when Severus was placed under house arrest, Hermione came every day, bringing tempting dishes to entice him to eat, brewing Strengthening potions to help regain his stamina, and making sure reporters and gawkers left him alone. The Daily Prophet snapped a photo of her leaving his house early one morning and the public had a field day with the darling of the Golden Trio ‘sneaking out of Snape’s Spinner’s End love nest.’
No one had bothered to discover that he’d been ill that day, and that she wouldn’t leave him until his fever broke. Mundanities, Rita Skeeter declared in court, do not sell papers.
During his trial, Hermione had attended every day, and sat with him, holding his hand, daring Rita Skeeter and her ilk to harass him. By then, Severus was no longer deluding himself. He had fallen in love with Hermione Granger, and she with him, and he held onto her as fervently as she to him.
The night following his acquittal and subsequent awarding of the Order of Merlin, he took her back to Spinner’s End, and they made love for the first time. It had been glorious. They were married six months later. He pestered her until she said yes.
Three years on, Severus and Hermione had made their peace with the Wizarding world, and had settled in relative obscurity in a little Muggle community south of Hogsmeade. They brewed mail-order potions, and Hermione was working on a commissioned edition of Hogwarts: A History. They loved one another with equal parts fire and honey, passion and tenderness. Severus cherished his wife very much, and she adored her husband. They had ignored the rumour mills, the well-meaning warnings of friends and colleagues, and had proven the nay-sayers wrong time and again. They were two people for whom loyalty and courage were as important to a marriage as desire and duty.
Soon they seriously discussed starting a family. Their business was strong, their reputations had swung the pendulum from notorious to stellar and back to normal, and they felt it was time. Life had turned out better than he would have ever expected, and Severus had thought his luck might be on the upswing.
That was when Hermione was diagnosed with cancer.
She had come home from her pre-pregnancy consultation with St. Mungo’s shaking and terrified. The Healers were adamant: it had been caught in time, and they could eradicate it.
The treatment, though, would be aggressive and costly. Sitting in the uncomfortable chairs in Healer Blyte’s office, Severus had glared at the young man and quietly said, “Don’t worry about the money, Blyte. Concentrate on healing my wife. Do whatever it takes. Cost is no object.”
Hermione had placed a hand on his arm. “But Severus—”
“No. Object, Hermione,” he’d hissed, trying to stem the rising fear roiling in his gut. He fixed Blyte with a stare that would freeze water. “When can we start?”
They sold everything they could sell and still have a roof over their heads. Hermione put her foot down against selling some of his precious books, but he sold them anyway. She cried a little at that, but did not ask him to keep anything else. He ruthlessly flogged everything that wasn’t nailed down, not caring. Hermione needed it more than he did.
It still wasn’t enough.
So he had gone, cap in hand, to Lucius Malfoy, the only wizard he knew who had managed to keep any modicum of wealth, and called in his life debt for Draco. The Malfoys had contributed as much as they could, which was enough to start the first round of treatments.
Watching Hermione struggle each day was torture, especially as the days went by and the Malfoys’ funds dwindled. The treatments were indeed aggressive, painful, and humiliating. Hermione’s wild hair fell out. Severus kept it all in a small box, unable to part with it. She lost weight, she was sick. Every day brought small triumphs and setbacks in equal measure, but still, she all but wasted away.
Severus never left her side. He held her as she wept in misery and shame as basic functions failed and her body fought the treatments almost as much as the disease. He presented a brave, stoic face each day as the one important person in his life struggled and battled with her Muggle body. At night he wept alone, railing at his helplessness. Each morning, they saluted the day together, vowing to beat it, and each evening they congratulated one another on getting through it.
One morning, the mediwitches unceremoniously chivvied him out of her room so they could prepare Hermione for the second round of treatments. She had suffered through a particularly bad night and he hadn’t wanted to leave her, but the cursed healers had been adamant.
“Please try to get some rest, Mr. Snape,” one of the officious hags had urged. “Mrs. Snape is in good hands. You don’t want to tire yourself out when she needs you most, do you?”
Resigned, Severus had been aimlessly wandering the halls when a familiar voice called out, “Severus? Is that you?”
He turned and found himself face to face with Remus Lupin.
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Date: 2013-06-03 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-03 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-03 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-03 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-03 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-03 11:22 pm (UTC)It's also that snowy blanket of protection, letting the earth rest for a time, hiding it away until it's ready to be reborn and grow and bloom and blossom again in spring
I hope this will make more sense as the story unfolds, but I think your interpretation is more poetic and lyrical than mine ;)
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Date: 2013-06-04 12:19 am (UTC)I especially love this: They were two people for whom loyalty and courage were as important to a marriage as desire and duty.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-04 04:18 am (UTC)AHAHAHA
That and about twenty other things in the beginning of this story made me laugh out loud. Especially the thought of Filch having a homophobic heart attack XD
But then the humor drained out of it and you killed me ;__;
Well done - I am fascinated by your take on Hermione. I like the symmetry of it- how they nursed each other at different points in their lives. Still trying to flesh out her character in my mind; thank you for adding another interesting dimension :)
no subject
Date: 2013-06-04 12:33 pm (UTC)It's a bit like the filter of Harry's mistrust and hatred through which we view Severus most of the time in the books - it's not the complete picture, but rather a very focused one.
And also, because they have been together for so long, I tend to view her through Severus' eyes in a kind of shorthand, as it were. You'll notice in future I have Severus give much more detail to others than actually to her, because she is more familiar and he doesn't need to 'process' her so much.
Gosh, I hope that makes sense! LOL
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Date: 2013-06-04 01:46 pm (UTC)Ugh, yes. I am struggling with this right now. In my current front-burner story I am trying to stay close to JKR's tone and it is driving me mad. When I was editing it with B she kept reminding me. Half the details regarding Severus (which are what make it such a pleasure for me to read) had to be pruned. I will have to find other ways to convey them - it is a good challenge for me though ;)
Yes I did pick up on the short hand but I figured that was the reason for it. Plus you are steeped in this ship - and your story already implies an established relationship. As a newbie I felt I needed more "convincing" but I don't think the story was written for that :p Still, I enjoy your interpretation and I think it's fascinating to explore what Hermione would do if confronted with this kind of experience.
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Date: 2013-06-04 08:54 pm (UTC)BTW... I LOVED the line "he never really slept at all; he just idled." Describes perfectly his sleeping patterns: more like the sleep of a new mother, keeping one ear alert for the cry of her newborn. Or so I've been told. I never had kids. I sleep like a freakin' rock.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-04 09:21 pm (UTC)Thank you for your lovely comment - that is a Dahlra special. Sometimes you just start typing and he takes over, and that's when I know it's going to work and ring true! :)
I sleep like a freakin' rock. You fill my heart with joy, you know that?
By the way, Trev bought me the Steampunk Tarot yesterday - what a lovely and inventive deck! I haven't had the chance to truly go through it in detail, but it's very lovely, and has a dark, mysterious undertone to the art that I find really appealing.
Looking through it, I felt an almost physical hunger to work on our Muse cards project. I don't know when we'll get to do it, but it is never far from my mind. I'm working on putting my Muse talk into a book form, and perhaps when that's done, we could get a bead on it, perhaps in the fall, which I think would be the perfect time to focus on the Muse, to the tune of Autumn leaves, woodsmoke and the waning year.
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Date: 2013-06-05 02:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-11 09:51 pm (UTC)I love the title too.
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Date: 2013-07-24 01:06 am (UTC)