Outporing of Admiration, Part the First
This. This is the reason that Beholder is the best fest of all -- because it produces fic as staggeringly good as this.
I'd say I was speechless with the joy of this superbly-written and imagined story, but I'd be lying, because I'm going to say a great deal. Still, I am having a little trouble shaping my thoughts into anything coherent, because I feel just the way Ollivander did after sex -- outside of my body a bit, feeling the remains of the story's magic, not quite able to process it all just yet, but still awash with the power of it.
I love Muriel, and this fic does her such justice that it's now my personal canon. This IS Muriel. Full stop. And Ollivander is wonderful, easily her equal. You set the stage so well -- the atmosphere, the details of things, the full and IC way you develop all the Weasleys, the motifs of light and dark, the perfect use you make of wands and magic and wood. And the ending is such perfection: after what is easily one of the best-written, hottest, most character-revealing sex scenes I have ever read, you return to the real world and to the realities of their characters in inspired fashion. Muriel on self-pity and orgasm. I just don't have words for how inspired a line that is.
The whole story is like a perfectly-made wand, case and core fusing and bonding into a complete unity. There's a wonderful inevitability to ti, like Ollivander's blocks of wood; it couldn't have been anything else.
And now I am going to quote line after line after line that I loved.
Definitely not a magpie, but a woman who keeps tokens of meaning, indicators of a life well lived.
"Not afraid to disagree with your hostess. I like that in a guest." And I adore this in a line.
Ollivander has lost his magic. He knows it will come back – these things don’t just disappear – but he was too long in the Malfoys’ cellar and has been too long away from the lathe and the smell of wood curing. For now, at least, his magic is quite gone. Wonderful description, so IC for the Ollivander you've created -- poignant, understated, matter-of-fact. And it makes such sense.