Re: Damn it, I have to split this into pieces
I love the scene with Aganetha - awful and funny (I've known people exactly like that) and a glimpse into Snape's Muggle side. Into his stubborn loyalty. I love how the watch keeps sabotaging Harry, forcing him to betray Severus over and over, to abandon him, dangle hope in front of him and snatch it away. It's emotional torture, and yet it's a joyful thing to see him persist, to see Severus thaw into banter, to watch the shy infatuation break through the rude surface. His inexperience seems both inevitable and hopelessly endearing, because he had no idea. So of course sex, of course love, would be devastating. And Harry's blossoming obsession with returning to him, the ache of knowing that the story ends with Snape dead, since the watch is purely a retrospective sort of magic and history can't be changed; the fact that love grows up between them in tiny bursts despite a separation of months, years, is both a balm, a thing of beauty, and an ice pick to the chest. Because that love is another reason why Severus will enslave and sacrifice himself for Harry's sake, will live years of torment watching Harry grow up (as that opening scene proves, where Severus vomits uncontrollably). It seems destined only to make each man suffer the knowledge of what true love is while denying him any chance of ever having it.
And through it all runs the beauty of your prose, the unique observations, the gorgeous, delicate, blessed words that deal emotion and delight, play them against each other, and then reshuffle the deck. You have a marvelous visual gift, conjuring scenes and characters with wasting words. But even more spellbinding, because more rare, is the intensity and subtlety of your emotional descriptions. You've got a light touch, and it's no doubt due to the hints and silences and small breaths in between that the evolution of Severus and Harry's emotions seems so natural and yet miraculous and so deeply layered into their bones, their very beings, so that their absence in each other's lives has the impact of tragedy. You write them in such a way that they make each other whole. I could go on at great length about your writing style, my immersion in your prose and the way my own heart sometimes stopped at certain images and I felt I couldn't go forward until I'd absorbed my delirious pleasure or fist-clenching pain. Ordinarily I'd select lines to quote at you, but it would be a never-ending comment, and besides, I've already tried that and got so engrossed in re-reading that this comment languished for half an hour.
And there's so much more. I'm delighted by the subplot around Ginny and Harry's "rational" marriage and poor Ginny's unreciprocated feelings for Hermione. I found that oblique detail unexpectedly moving. Also, thank you for the moment in which Dumbledore is actually saddened to hear that Severus will die, because damn it, that grief is completely lacking in canon. I still shudder a little over the way Harry's first confession of love affected me - my God, the way you wrote that scene made me feel I couldn't take much more - I don't know what to call it, triumph, exaltation, the sense that Severus' world is about to shatter. He will never not know love again. I was also impressed by the shift from the focus on Severus' slow waking up, his being possessed by this love that will never leave him, that will inform who he is until the bitter end, the most magical, meaningful thing in his life - to the revelation (because that's what it was to me) that Harry shares the same kind of desperate, too-late, ineradicable experience of losing his heart. It shook me to see Harry as smitten and bereft and dedicated as Severus, as resigned to never loving anyone as much as he'd loved Snape. The unreformed romantic in me pretty much died and went to heaven.