Re: Another Brilliant Work!
Oh, I'm now re-reading your story, and just had to acknowledge some moments of pure writerly beauty:
"Shadows – the spoonfuls pooling like rainwater in his collarbone, the fingertip streaks along his sides – give hints of definition. She's seen his body with Harry. She knows that it won't develop much beyond these hints; he'll never really deviate from this early blueprint of tension and neglect. The milky tenderness that shines here will fade over time. He's already set on course to become that lean shank of a man, Severus Snape, a whitened shinbone with a dark and bitter marrow. A Death Eater."
"The meagre bit of cash he realizes from the sale enables him to buy a grey-stone, dilapidated cottage in the Scottish Highlands, tucked between braes where the water crashes and foams over rocks. Barren scarp felted with sheep-grazed foothills, boobytrapped in odd patches by grimpen mires straight out of Conan Doyle (oh, the memory comes back: how her dad had loved Holmes), meet in a lee that helps to isolate and wind-break the house. A poorly-maintained track leads down to a village straggling along the trainline." Such an amazing description of desolate isolation. In addition to the Hound of the Baskervilles, reference, I was looking up grimpen on the internet--couldn't find it on dictionary.com, but then found it as an obscure word for a marshy area, then found that Grimpen Mire is also the name of a British metal band...
"As they sink deeper into their erotic rapport, Harry makes a soft sound, like a startled bird, and Lily becomes aware of a third presence in the room with them. Not fused between them, as it had seemed that night in the restaurant, a barrier as much as a conducting medium. No, it's all around them now, surrounds them, filling the air. Each clap of its wings exalts and destroys, thundering and exquisitely silent. It's the angel, invisible and undeniable, hanging over them. They've brought it into being, and Snape's bedroom rings with it, the embodiment of passion." The Passion Angel--gorgeous idea and description.
And the Vengeance Angel: The light in the room is suddenly muted, both luminous and dark, like the underside of a raincloud. It's that divinity between them, that sublime force perhaps only Lily can see, kindling out of nowhere. She suspects that if it were to take shape, incarnate, it would possess not merely wings, but a sword. It hovers over them, the dark side of all that is transcendent about them, merciless, terrible in its wrath."
And finally, the tenderness: "Snape brushes his grotesquely aquiline nose over the top of Harry's head, inhaling the smell of home. "You are always Harry," he whispers, his voice soft and violent. Mimicking the finger to the lips, he pets the tense curve of Harry's mouth, and Harry engulfs the finger, sucking it in. "But it's not something I wish to bandy about, to use constantly, until it loses all significance. I prefer to save it for the right moment." Harry looks at him narrowly, still sucking, and Snape rolls his eyes, giving in. "Yes, yes, all right. Harry."