dead, she's the realest Lily ever
Wow. Simply wow. I can't say everything this deserves at this point because I haven't stopped crying yet only just finished it, and I have to let all the million billion awesome things about this fic swirl around in dizzy happy confusion a while longer.
I love the way this fic brings together some of the weakest strands of canon - how Lily spurned teenage Severus in her complacent egocentrism and Gryffindor cliqueishness; what salvation existed for crippled-baby!Tom in King's Cross; how easily Dumbledore (among others) meddles from beyond the Veil; and not least, how hurt and even outraged so many readers were by the shallowness of DH's ending. I love the thought and reconciliation in this fic.
I didn't love the way the archive seems to have garbled so much of the punctuation - it's probably my Firefox, but it's done this with no other snarry_holidays fic, so obviously something wasn't uploaded right. But no matter, I read avidly even having to mentally work out how half the sentences were meant to read, if dashes or ellipses and first letters of words had been in place. It was that good. :D But I'll look forward to reading it again in corrected format before commenting more!
Favorite writing: When Lily's seen that Snape and Harry became lovers, and has just now been watching Snape as he was brought into St. Mungo's, where Ron and Hermione finally dragged Harry away from holding his hand for "three days straight."
She admits that she knows things she shouldn't and that some of them are things she will never give up.
But other kinds of knowledge break her heart. There are moments of privacy she wishes she could return untouched, and this, for some reason, is one of them: the way Sev holds his own hand when Harry's not there.
I love this Lily. She combines all the good and bad we see of her in canon: both snooping and sentimental, thoughtless and kind, greedy and callow but also sweet. I love how she takes up smoking again in her irritability, careless of the baby in her arms. She's as much the product of a working-class community as Snape, it seems! Here in the afterlife, Lily's finally growing, and learning to let go of those she can't own or didn't take care of - aided by the unstoppable meddling of Albus, of course (lol, would that ever change? Though it seems at the end, even Albus has had to also turn loose of Severus).
I love you, anonymous author (mpreg offspring of the Grinch and Ebeneezer Scrooge *g*), for writing with such courage and tenderness, for seeking honest resolution, for being unafraid (unlike the canon author) to confront the bad in each character with the good, and help them grow into a greater maturity. This makes them so much more real, more meaningful as characters. It's this kind of fic that completes what we hope for in canon. Thank you so much for going so far past short and cracky!