Steve/Tony Snow Queen, part VII (the last part)

[elspethdixon]

As with the previous installments, some content has been paraphrased & quoted from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen."

Story the First: The Steel Mirror
Story the Second: The Soldier and the Smith
Story the Third: Of the Library At the Young Woman's Who Understood Witchcraft
Story the Fourth: The Prince and the Princess
Story the Fifth:

Comments

[elspethdixon]

REVIEW YAY!

[elspethdixon]

Thanks for the review! I know - I wanted to give Clint a happy fairytale ending, too, but the crow/hawk's sweetheart dies in the original - it's actually why Clint got the role he did (well, that and the bird tie-in).

[kijikun]

Simply wonderful ending. This is truly one of my favorite adaptions of the Snow Queen.

[elspethdixon]

Thanks so much! I kind of ripped off Tam Lin with the shape-changing villain, since there's no actual confrontation with the Snow Queen in the original, and I thought Steve needed to get to throw down with her after coming all that way.

I also got rid of the cutesy little hymn about the baby Jesus and flowers at the end *grins* I love the original story, but that part just didn't seem to fit with Steve and Tony at all.

[garrideb]

Tony invented pi! Loved it! Especially the image of the smith kneeling on the large floor which he has almost covered with his numbers. And the metal woman morphing into various villains. And Steve's blood waking Tony from the enchantment. And of course Vision getting back to his lonely witch!

But mostly I'm going to remember this as the awesome retelling of my favorite fairy tale by a favorite author in which Tony invents pi. ;-)

[elspethdixon]

Yay, thanks! The shapechanging villain was yoinked straight from another fairytale (several actually) so that I could have an empty suit of Iron Man armor for the final bit where it goes clattering to the floor.

Tony invented pi!

I... actually just intended to have him cleverly realizing he could *use* Pi to cheat is way out of the metal woman's demand via semantics (she didn't say he had to finish calculating the amount, which would be impossible - she specifically told him to finish engraving it). Then, after I'd already finished the storhy, I looked Pi up and discovered that the symbol first came into use in the 1700s, as an abbreviation for perimeter - and since this is vaguely set in the mid 1600s (what with all the 30 Years War referencesand stuff), I basically do have Tony inventing it. Which was an accident, but it's cool enough that now I wish I'd been clever enough to do it on purpose.

[simmysim]

I was JUST thinking about this today! I was afraid it'd been abandoned with only one chapter left. That was a very, very satisfying and warming ending, after all the cold and misery of the battle. I love, love, love the visual of them together on the roof, happily ever after~ I actually sighed happily at The many clocks in the smith's workshop had wound down, but it took only a few minutes to set them all to rights again, until they were once more surrounded by the "tick, tick" of the clock pendulums and the faint whirring of gears. I'm gonna be thinking about this all day at work and it's gonna make it so much better x))

[elspethdixon]

I was JUST thinking about this today! I was afraid it'd been abandoned with only one chapter left.

Yeah, sorry about that. I write veeerrry slowly without seanchai to do half the work and poke me into doing the other half. The whole section was written in, like, 100 word segments over the course of weeks.

That was a very, very satisfying and warming ending, after all the cold and misery of the battle. I love, love, love the visual of them together on the roof, happily ever after~

Thanks so much! The two of them on the roof, surrounded by summer, is another bit that's straight out of Hans Christian Anderson's original, but the clock part is all mine *grins*