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snarrymod (snarrymod) wrote in snarry_games,
@ 2008-05-20 19:12:00

Entry tags:

entry, perverse_idyll, team phoenix

TEAM PHOENIX ENTRY: Perverse Idyll "When the Rose and the Fire Are One"
Title: When the Rose and the Fire Are One
Author: perverse_idyll
Team: Phoenix!
Genre(s): Alternate Universe *Hover/Click for Games Definition of Alternate Universe*
Prompt(s): Flesh Memory, Spilling Fire
Rating/Warnings/Kinks: *(HBP but not DH-compliant) Violence, rough sex, character death (not Snape or Harry)*
Word Count: 81,000+
Summary: Harry's haunted by guilt. Snape's warded by roses. Each must free the other in order to free himself.
A/N: First, thank you to the mods for creating the Games in the first place and for having the patience of saints. leela_cat did a phenomenal job with this in a ridiculously short time. Whatever coherence the fic has is due to her heroic efforts and hand-holding. Also thanks to Team Phoenix for putting up with my fumbling captaincy and for helping to make this an enjoyable ride. Lastly, many thanks to my beloved rinsbane for talking me through to the images I needed. I wish this were a better first offering, my dear.

*With gratitude to leela_cat and apologies to T. S. Eliot.

"When the Rose and the Fire Are One by Perverse Idyll"

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(Anonymous)
2008-05-22 09:19 am UTC (link)

I read this basically without stopping which has the disadvantage of lack of thinking through the imagery. But you write so vividly that your fic had a definite impact. The way grief and guilt as ghosts seperated Harry from nearly everyone else,the unexpected beauty of Severus' blood roses, the difficult stairway that makes you struggle to reach a goal that lies not where you anticipated it. I am not quite sure, I must admit, how to interpret the rose wards, but I was definitely able to picture them clearly in my mind. That is another strength of the story. You describe some tableaus so skillfully that I have a detailed picture of it in my head, like Severus sitting on his porch, motionless and covered in roses.

If I have one little point of criticism it is that the ending, for me, felt a little bit rushed. First there is all this apparating back and forth from one life threatening situation to another, followed by the need to completely confront and accept their emotions. Then Severus takes all of Harry's ghosts into himself, a sacrifice that increases in meaning when we realize that he knew exactly what he was dealing with. That was another punch in the gut, that Severus had to deal with the same plight as Harry for years and years. And lastly, we learn that for Severus this sacrifice was more an act of creation, which is on the one hand heart wrenching but on the other raises questions about the way he sees Harry (a person, a lover, all of his sins as he says in the end?). So we have a lot of psychological dynamite but nothing of it is really addressed, since Harry's cleansing makes everything else unimportant for him in that moment. This fundamental change in Harry left me a bit unsatisfied, since up to this point the development of Harry's emotions and opinions were executed so slowly, believably and in reaction to all the big and little things that happened around him. I missed that in the ending.

Regardless, I really enjoyed getting lost in your world. It is one of the few fics I read that manages to impart the feeling of a post-war world, where everyone still deals with the aftermath and needs their own time to move on.

Thank you for the wonderful read.
Best wishes,
Krabat

(Reply to this) (Thread)

perverse_idyll
2008-05-23 06:36 am UTC (link)

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.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

(Anonymous)
2008-05-23 01:34 pm UTC (link)

Thank you for the interesting insights. To the point of Snape not being a very trusting person (I forgot to address some thoughts on their relationship in my first at least equally rambly post): through (nearly) the whole fic I wondered about one aspect not being discussed, and that is that at no point Harry and Severus were close to being equals in their relationship (the "stronger" position alternating depending on which aspect one looks at). I would have thought that Snape has a very hard time being so thoroughly at Harry's mercy and that that would result in a screaming row when Harry started his "I love you"s. But then I realized that it somehow felt right. This comes back to the tight point of view you use. Snape has nothing to gain by broadcasting his feelings on the matter to Harry. It is one aspect that shows how far they really are from a healthy relationship. And this brings me to a facet of the ending I liked (after grousing so much in the previous post): that Snape leaves the possibility of a shared future open. For me that was a poignant moment, because I think that Snape realizes all those issues of equality far better than Harry. He must be aware of how complex his view of Harry is, that he is not simply a person but also a project, a bad reminder, an ex-student, someone who holds power over him, an ideal and so on. Throw this together with all the issue Snape carries in himself and a content relationship seems impossible. But perhaps Snape allows himself at last (at least in this one moment of parting) to dream of possibilities.

Again: it was a pleasure reading your story.
Best wishes,
Heike

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	(Anonymous) 2008-05-23 01:39 pm UTC (link)
	I never get used to this online names. Perhaps I should get a journal, too, so I don't have to worry about it. Of course I meant: Best wishes, Krabat (Reply to this) (Parent)

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