*cartwheels* Thank you, thank you for the gift! It's perfectly delicious!
I love a good AU -there's about a hundred points in the books where you think, now wouldn't it have been nice if that had gone differently. It's fascinating to see how subtly different everyone is without having suffered through the second war and the intervening ten years. Snape is wonderful, very Snape and yet so much less high-strung without all those barrels of guilt he usually lugs around. It's ever so believable here that he might just throw his big flapping bat robes over a chair at the end of every school day and go do normal-bloke things like having adult conversations and visiting family and going to the movies and buying groceries and wearing clothes instead of black tents.
Wonderful how the absence of wartime high drama makes him and Harry manage to get on friendly terms with such ease. There's still some animosity to conquer, but nothing on the scale of you-killed-Sirius and you-snooped-around-in-my-pensieve. They're heart-warming together in a non-soppy fashion. It makes my heart ache for what might have been. When Snape talked about wishing he'd tried to get hold of Harry instead of leaving him with the Dursleys after Lily died... Awww god, I want to read that fic too.
Sirius turned out sort of pretty okay as an actual adult, which was a surprise, since I usually can't stand him either in fic or canon. I love Lucius, but he so deserves Aunty Mavis ;) And yeah, that's James, the conceited bastard! Don't understand what Lily ever saw in him. You made him just as perfectly self-centered as he was in school, and you made him very nearly choke on Sniv's final revenge and that's a beautiful, beautiful, whoah beautiful thing to behold, and I shall worship the name of Drachenmina forever!
Ah, vindication feels good. Love little details like Snape giving his potions book to Harry, and the silver clasp -it's a perfectly Snape way of confessing love without forcing out the actual word. And of course Viking stuff is just cool, too. It's good to see a different wizarding quarter than Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade. There must be others, those two are probably for the masses and the tourists while the more interesting spots and shops are tucked away somewhere else entirely.
Snape's belt... I have no words. *delighted shiver* Thank you!