Stilllife is simply stunning. What a powerful and magnificent story. Utterly riveting from beginning to end.
You are a master wordsmith. Your story-telling is subtle and sublime, flowing so beautifully from scene to scene. Your resonant prose was enthralling.
Such wonderful humor, tragic heartbreak, and stunning revelations throughout this story. So many memorable lines and unforgettable scenes. Too many, sadly, for me to include them all in this comment.
Death, apparently, only means that I can't brush the dandruff off of her shoulders and she can't owl me wee vials of shampoo.
Minerva's relationship with Snape is so amusing.
"Can you not do that? Act all startled when I show evidence I have a brain?"
::snerk::
"I am the essence of 'cool,' Mr. Potter."
::luffs:: Darn right!
I stopped right there. This is what death has done to me. I was imparting sexual advice to Harry Potter.
Oh. My. Gawd. ...Snape as Harry's Sex Education teacher…the mind, it boggles…
Because it was a pure and exalted love; like brother and sister.
::nods:: Yep, yep, totally agree with you.
Having lived a similar life of hard knocks, I knew only too well how something seems like it's exactly what you've been looking for. How it seems to answer all your prayers. At Potter's age, I was willing to sell myself to Voldemort cheaply. I doubt Potter was any less desperate; he was yearning for love and a family. When Albus chose Black over me and Lily abandoned me because I had one foot in the Death Eater camp, I whispered "Fuck you" to them both. I didn't need their love. What I thought I needed was recognition and validation. I got them, but at a price. More tears are shed over answered prayers. It was obvious what Potter prayed for in the dark silent part of the night.
Succinct and insightful. You channel Snape perfectly.
The hunter in the portrait in the library is lending me his gun. I am off to hunt lions and tigers and bears, oh my.”
::lol:: Zing! Another good line.
I'd coerce Minerva to let me commandeer detentioned students. To have miscreants under my thumb again. Oh happy day!
::roflol:: That's Snape for ya.
...“Yes, but by then the die was cast, our roles predetermined. It seems that both of us were acting in life's drama, of which the stage was decidedly Calvinistic in nature. You sinned and were not damned. I repented and was not saved. Alas. I find myself here, in limbo, unable to sleep, unable to die. I'm not even sure if I'm forgiven.”
::breathes deeply:: Harry finally confronting Portrait!Snape about the why of it all was a powerful, gripping scene. It left me bereft of words. You explained Snape with meticulous precision and verve, providing such aching clarity.
(Still hungry? Which was ludicrous because even if he was capable of speech, the child was sucking on that bottle like it was the Last Supper).
8D
Why was I, the least appropriate person on the face of this earth, giving morality lessons to Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter?
::snerk:: Irony perhaps?
"Why are you always right?" "It's a gift and a curse. Continue."
Win!
I understood now why I was here. Why my soul was trapped. His profound despair was only second to my own on his behalf. One look at that hand on mine: one look at the man he had become and how much we had all failed him, letting him face that madman by himself, his realization that he wanted men, his commitment to his children and his conflicted feelings toward his wife, and it became all too clear why I was still here.
To watch over him. For Lily. The final act of penance. The last genuflect. A generous and loving person, she would not have asked this of me. This purgatory was self-inflicted, my final offering to her. So that even as limited as I was, trapped in time and space, when I finally met her I could say: