Damn it, I have to split this into pieces
Jesus fucking God. I've been sitting here for ten minutes trying to pull myself together and not explode with flailing emotion all over this comment box. There is no way to get around saying, I LOVE THIS MORE THAN WORDS CAN TELL AND MY HEART JUST GREW FIVE TIMES ITS NORMAL SIZE, just so we're clear, but that doesn't even begin to express how I feel about this fic. And I have to admit, I made it almost all the way to the end without crying, my eyes just stinging now and then and my breath backing up in my chest, but no crying, because I am a stubborn bitch and because, damn it, it would have interfered with my ability to keep reading. And then I got to the end, and you pulled the rug out from under me by breaking the fourth wall and throwing this whole intense, private, unshakable demonstration of life-long, sacrificial love out of the fic's bounds and into the world, and I fucking lost it. *pauses to keep from bursting into tears again* Because yes, you earned that, this story earned the right to challenge canon's law and turn the whole interpretation back on itself, rewrite history, and save the unsalvageable, not just Snape's life but his whole bloody existence as a human being. You fucking broke my heart with a Severus who was damaged and careworn and bitterly defensive and deprived and still too young to completely understand why the world hurt so much and so touchingly vulnerable to the slightest hint that someone might - hell, not even love or want him, but not be repelled by him. Might think he was worth making breakfast for, OMG. I don't know how you did it, how you created a young Severus who seems a natural precursor to canon!Snape, whose traits are so recognizable but whose motives are so much deeper and more compelling and complex and heart-wrenching. (Well, yes, I do know, because I know who's the better writer. But.)
I'm sorry, I tend to fall into run-on sentences when I'm trembling with excitement. This is the sort of mow-you-down fic that sometimes happens in Snarry, that absolutely takes possession of the reader, and right now it's like every cell in my body's lit up and electrified by the sheer beauty of this fic. I mean, it's breathtaking. And one of the things that makes it unaccountably painful to read, painful because it's like the answer to a longing I've been carrying around forever and this fic is - not the antidote, but the embodiment of that longing - the thing that raises this fic into the realm of "I didn't know this was possible, how did she do that" is the way you portray the doomed, tentative, self-denying, inadmissible depth of love on both sides - both sides. Yes, it's worth repeating that. And you achieve it through the ravishes of language, of images that contain so much emotion and sorrow and humanity it's a wonder they don't burst. It make so much sense that these two young, lost souls would form a bond if allowed to meet each other on common ground. And both of them are exactly the kind of people who would give themselves, and once having given, not be able to take back, not be able to give up, not - at least in Severus' case, as the self-hating one - be able to give in. And each needs the other to save him from himself, for himself, whether he realizes it or not. My God, the whole fic sings like a cello, with its almost unbearable range of warmth and yearning. It's astonishing how you keep adding layer after layer to the heart-hammering tension between them, the tentative emotional duets - and oh, while I'm thinking about it, the sex scenes are astonishing for the way erotic discovery becomes a vehicle for such powerful interior transformation, such breaking and remolding, a physical act capable of touching their deepest beings - and without resorting to romance clichés. It rings absolutely true because of who they are and everything in their lives that has brought them to this point, which you lay bare for us with grace and economy, grit and judgment.