Oh, you got my heartstrings with that scene in the beginning, when Snape is remembering throwing the pebbles at the window, then contemplates jumping from the tower. I liked how he never really made a decision about that summer, but folded when she made it for him. You taught me a new word I love--lacustrine.
That first time with Minerva was so endearingly awkward; your description was so gentle and perfect that I held my breath, waiting for the disaster or humiliation that never arrived. My heart broke a little when Severus realized her words for him to wash up were the same as Mulciber's after his first killing. What a great contrast--in a phrase--of that life and the one he's trying to learn to live now.
From the cadence of his scrapping and fumbling with Moody, to the beautifully narrated scene where he's reading poetry to Minerva in the library, you pulled me on. It was then that I noticed the shrinking scroll bar at the side of the browser, and wailed. Not yet...
Poor Moody, burying his bottles, Snape watching from the window...implacable, but unable to look away, then wanting to go down and see the look on his face. I think Moody wasn't the only one to bury something that summer. Funny, how Severus was doing a little pas de deux with both of them; it didn't seem odd at all, and you put a lump in my throat when he and Moody shared that fag.
The house, Snape's little trip down to the shore in the dead of night; his ruminations on dying by drowning, dying by freezing, your final paragraph, where in his bag, Severus has the 'stones', the souvenirs of his holiday to remember it by. Honestly, I don't think I've read anything this fest season that's appealed to me as much as this has, and of course, it was the story, and your characters, but it was the writing mostly, I think. You remind me of a French writer, Alain Fournier, who wrote an enchanting book (Le Grand Meaulnes): the style, the dreamy ambiance, the way Snape reflected about things, the characters almost pitted against a 'forbidding' natural setting--it all seemed so familiar to me, and now I have to go dig out that book and read it again. And I'm really anxious to see who you are, and what else you might've written.