I'm glad the fic had an impact. I agree, I may have overplayed my hand by piling on the intensity. I wrote myself into a corner and basically had to blast my way out. Also, heh, it's probably better that you read straight through because the imagery isn't as coherent as I'd intended to make it. I'm not sure it would support close scrutiny.
You're right about the ending, of course. I can't blame it all on deadline factors, but the entire ending, plus the great big honkin' sex scene (as I referred to it as time went by and it kept not getting written), were produced in a kind of sleep-deprivation delirium over the course of two nights and two days. Those sections (and several others) hit the mods' inbox entirely unedited and unrevised (24 hours post-deadline). If I hadn't been racing against time and flying high with a kind of reckless determination, I've no doubt the ending would have taken a different shape.
I don't think Harry's cleansing makes what happened to Snape unimportant to him, but I do agree that the magnitude and meaning of Snape's choice - what it means to him, not Harry - gets lost in all the hustle-bustle. It should have been more poignant. It should have been given its due.
Part of the reason for that is that Snape, in my version, never really trusts Harry. Not even at the end. Snape's not a trusting person, and Harry's done him a lot of harm. That's why, even though Harry says, "I love you," out loud more than once, Snape never reciprocates and never acknowledges it. Well, tight 3rd-person POV has something to do with it, too. We're not privy to Snape's inner monologue. But what I hope to do with the ending, assuming I can bear to roll up my sleeves and tackle a rewrite, is make Snape's actions a declaration in themselves. Frankly, I think Snape's got it bad. He lets Harry fuck him, and he absolves Harry of guilt. He wouldn't be capable of that if he didn't love rather profoundly.
This is pushed into the background, though, since it's filtered through Harry's viewpoint. There's another layer, too: the form of love that's evolved between them. It's possessive and rather claustrophobic, one might say imprisoning. Thus the need to be free of each other for a while. One underlying image that I ended up not using, because I couldn't find a way to do it artfully, involved the sympathetic-magical parallel between Snape, Harry, and the roses. In a sense the rose wards act as Harry's surrogate in relation to Snape, punishing him and refusing to let him go. The Severus rose is obvious, as well as the key to walking unharmed through the wards. But it works both ways. I wrote and deleted a scene in which Snape compares himself to the wards: thorny, bristling, inaccessible inside his defenses, utterly burnt-out. And Harry to the Severus rose: more innocent, more open, redolent of hope. More beautiful. And Harry retorts that Snape's blood runs in that rose; it clearly represents him.
But I didn't do that. I did compare Harry's longing to the regenerated wards. For the rest? Too overtly symbolic, so I cut it.
Actually, there's one more thing I tried to layer in at the end, but since no one's mentioned it I have to conclude that I failed. I wanted it to be subtle, to let the readers make up their minds, but apparently I out-subtled myself.
I hope you don't mind the rambly response to your comments. This may be far more than you wanted to know. *g* But useful concrit is a boon, and at this point I'm too close to the fic to have a handle on what worked and what didn't. Also, I'm still walking around feeling astonished that the ending works at all, considering the conditions in which it was written and what an utter disaster I was courting.
Re: the postwar world. I absolutely despised JKR's way of concluding the series. You would never know that the war changed anything or had much of an impact at all. At the very least, death leaves permanent scars.
Apologies for using your lovely comment as a sounding board for articulating to myself all the things that I didn't do in my fic! And thank you very much for reading and for giving me so much to think about.