Re: dead, she's the realest Lily ever
Seriously, this is the sort of feedback to make a writer's pulse race with joy.
I admit, I started this almost in defiance of my own mixed feelings about Lily. It always seemed to me that JKR pushed Lily's saintliness and specialness in our faces, while the evidence in the books merely argued in favor of a pretty, popular, and fairly predictable young woman. But then I started to wonder why Snape was so attached to her. And what was the connection on her side? The strands of her relationship with him are what drew her out of the realm of cardboard for me. For a while, in the beginning, I even worried that the emotional core of Lily/Snape would overshadow the Snarry. But then the threads all started to dance around and interweave, and it seemed only natural that the poor grotesque baby be involved, and then the race to persuade Lily to choose a future, first for Harry's sake, and finally, generously for Severus - umm, I don't know where that sentence thinks it's going. *sheepish grin* But Lily's personality blossomed once I had the emotional triangle firmly in place.
It was cathartic to write in opposition to all the things that drove me mad about DH. And apart from the fact that it's much more compelling to read about characters who are both flawed and likable, it's even more noteworthy that, as a writer, it's far more fun to write them. It's so much more satisfying to make characters grow and change when they have an ounce or two of nuance to help them out. Yes, I saw Lily as very young and self-absorbed (I regretted having to cut the sentences: Being special was something James took for granted. So, for that matter, did Lily. At home, she was the pretty one, the smart one, her father’s favourite. If anyone was going to grow up magical, it stood to reason it would be her.) But she's also warm-hearted and tartly self-aware. As a background to that, I never wanted to lose sight of the fact that she had every reason in the world to hate Severus and would be absolutely within her rights to never forgive him. What, if anything, would it take to overcome a betrayal of that magnitude?
Then - I'm probably blithering too much, sorry - I had the most amazing connection to this fic. Because the more I concentrated on Severus, with Lily as the prism, the more the muse started presenting me with these pristine, intensely pure moments - intense for me, I mean - around which the fic started to organize itself. My unconscious kept lighting upon these images - Severus holding his own hand is one - that encapsulated what the fic meant to me, and what I ultimately wanted Snape's fate, or his existence, to represent for the other characters. I think the quality that distinguishes these moments is tenderness. I don't mean that Snape himself is tender, but that the scenes containing these moments strive toward a really distilled point of warmth, of understanding. Flora singled out another: the image of Snape lying on his stomach reading, with his feet kicked up in the air. For all that the plot presented an interesting technical challenge, these were the moments that absolutely possessed and drove me and that I felt contained the story's heart. These moments, I sometimes think, are why this story exists.
Truly, I'm overjoyed that you got so much out of it. In the thick of writing, I can never tell how much is actually coming across the way I intend it, so this is both a huge relief and a mirror held up to show me the face of the White Road, so I can see how it really looks. Thank you so much for the amazing comment, and apologies for nattering on in response!