*deep breath* Oh my god. I wish I were better at analytical thinking and literary criticism, if only to give you the discerning feedback you deserve. Instead you get my rambling, flaily commentary. If at any point I sound like a blithering idiot, I opine that it is ALL YOUR FAULT.
So. I started this when I was rather exhausted, brain slow on the uptake. I got a few pages in and just stopped. The gorgeously evocative language you write with, so nuanced and thick with imagery, I decided, deserved my full faculties (such as they are). Fluff I feel comfortable trusting my sluggish eyes to, but this, well, if fluff is cotton candy, this was chocolate with an impossibly high cacao content—bitter and seductive and meant to be savoured. I could also already tell that your story would wring me dry.
And it did.
It got utterly under my skin and captivated me as literally as a spell. I found it both difficult to read and difficult to stop reading. I wanted to know how it would end and yet never have it end. God. I fell unassailably in love with your Snape. So many details—how he threw things simply to see them break (but never books!); the vulnerability of him, his almost prosaic appearance in a dressing gown; "Even choking on my own blood, I’d still find the means to tell you what I think"; his dialogue and his obstinacy and his sacrifices—fleshed him out wonderfully.
And Harry. I'm an Every(wo)man myself, so while I love Snape to pieces, I usually empathise with Harry. But Harry, here, was not going to be canonised any time soon—he was deeply flawed, paradoxically both difficult and easy to sympthise with, tangled up with the past—and as much as I wish he could realistically be as well-adjusted as he appeared in canon, this portrayal rang infinitely truer. I struggled (and I mean this as a compliment) watching him genuinely grow up here as he didn't in DH.
The secondary characters were no less vivid or emotionally essential. My heart positively ached for Ron and no less for George; him spending most of his time with whatever was left of his brother—gah, even if he seemed happy, I found it tragically sad. You even brought OCs into the fold without turning them into flimsy two-dimensional cut-outs; and with only a few phrases you sketched and coloured each of them so I could not only picture them clearly but also get a sense of their personalities. (I especially loved your description of Adrian, shyly "stuck halfway inside a Disillusionment charm"(!))
There were so many other things I admired and loved and ruminated over. How you treated the concepts of beauty and music and their interweave, for example, or the haunting way you established themes, like notes that recur in a composition in a minor key, throughout the story, or the scorchingly erotic sex that was in-character and always served a purpose (how awesome are you for that?!)
But I'm a bit embarrassed by my unconstructive verbosity, heh. Sorry about that. Essentially I meant to thank you for an incredible read, so I'll shut up and say, honestly, thank you. :)