Charmbreaker

[orange_crushed]

If I say anything it'll come out wrong, and I'll be trying to explain this all day*, so instead without any ado whatsoever:

*(This was based on a challenge for remus_reads, #31- Remus is forced to leave school after the Prank. I feel this should be mentioned, and I encourage everyone to check out that community for other authors' work.)

Comments

[the_grynne]

*can't stop crying*

I feel like I've been put through a wringer, from the very first paragraph up to the very end. And what an ending. AU's just don't get any better.

You warned that it would be sad, and it is, but it's not so much the terrible tragedy of just being parted from your best friends; it's the accumulated injustices and loneliness of a lifetime, which is worse somehow because there is no relieving that, no solution. The reunion at the end is beautiful and so full of knowing and love, yet it is still so sad...

Yet you also made me laugh through the tears. The detail about the James' unwashed hair the day after the prank. The amazing backstory of Remus' lost years -- because they're not empty years; things happened to him, he didn't just die the moment he went away from Hogwarts. He went on being who he was, and it seems so right that he should be an unlicensed charmbreaker.

I loved the wonderful fleshing out of Remus' parents, his mother especially (every time she is made to say the Ministry, she spits like a superstitious fishwife. It is her only dirty habit. Remus secretly adores her for it.), and the proud, sardonic, single-minded Regulus Black. The brief interaction you captured between the Black brothers was so magnetic. Between one bottle of Ogden's Guilt and another, he's imagined himself binding Regulus's mind to a stone and hurling it into the ocean to rot, feeding his body to spiders, trapping him in a living death. It worried him, the detail of these fantasies. The imagery in that is so vivid and alive; dark magic and white magic inseparable and all of it bewitching.

[orange_crushed]

PSST James has scabies... always itchin' the crown, eh ?

I'm sorry I made you cry; but some part of me can't help but be pleased that it got under your skin. Bad me.

And you've got it, precisely. The real sadness comes from the wasted time, the years spent not actively hating, but not actively caring. I think James and Lily provide this for Remus, this window to what things are like when you connect yourself to somebody for better or worse.

And Remus comes across so strongly in the books and films as a man who did something with his time, however secretive he remains- there's this amazing collection of dark objects, his suitcases charmed to go, a kind of distance and wisdom that you can't imagine coming from somebody who spent twelve years sitting in a cluttered apartment.

Bless you for loving Remus's mother, because I do, oh, I do. Spitting !!! I'm glad you liked the brothers Black as well. I saw Sirius as having been the one to retreat more into himself, when he loses James and Remus, and has to suck it up and go back home. But Regulus is so fun to write- most noble and ancient, and not about to let you forget it. I thought about Draco, a Draco who's never had a fall from grace; but with Sirius as his moral compass.

Anyway. WHOOP ! It is done, and it is done, and it made you happy (just a little, hee) so my work here is complete. :)

[the_grynne]

I think James and Lily provide this for Remus, this window to what things are like when you connect yourself to somebody for better or worse.

A mixed blessing, really. I wonder if he wouldn't have been less unhappy without that link, speaking to him of somewhere he is strictedly forbidden. But friends are like that; they're about the shared pain as well as the summers and the bright laughter.

And Black!archness is always welcome.

there's this amazing collection of dark objects, his suitcases charmed to go, a kind of distance and wisdom that you can't imagine coming from somebody who spent twelve years sitting in a cluttered apartment.

You're utterly right, and it's this canon-but-not quality that makes a good AU for me; the more real it feels, the more grounded in the truth of the characters, the more powerful the story is. Sometimes of course, reality is what you create for yourself, but the cue comes from the text.

I keep thinking about this AU/crossover where Hermione's Headmistress portrait ends up travelling with the colonists, and winds up in the Tam household, where it lectures Simon on his sister's lack of discipline and how a solid personality doesn't grow out of being able to do everything without really applying any great effort. But the thought of writing Hermoine's voice terrifies me, to be honest.

[orange_crushed]

OOOH Do it, do it now, you're commanded. Hermione portrait-lecturing-Simon-yes. Okay, I have no authority on the internets so there is no commanding. ;) But I'd love to see you make it work (because I know you can- you have such a pitch-perfect grasp of the Serenity universe.)

And the friendships enduring shared pain comment, which you said above, how true. I think shared pain could even be the theme here, heh. The loss and sadness they felt, they felt pretty much only because they couldn't totally seperate themselves.

I want to know more about those things in Remus's office, the time he exposed a witch-doctor as a fraud in the jungle, the time he waited all night in the moor for a lock of bean sidhe hair.

But maybe we'll have to fill in that bit ourselves. ;)

[the_grynne]

I obey, my dear. It'll be my stuvac project -- I should be a good girl and study for my accounting exam, but I know by now from experience that what I'll really be doing is mostly avoid studying by practicing like crazy on my piano and writing fic.

And then there's my computer and new iPod arriving later in the week... I'm going to be SO DISTRACTED. XD

[super_pan]

Yeah, I also vote yes that you write this! It sounds really cool!

[the_grynne]

Hehe. Thank you for the random curiosity. Part 1 is completed and up.