February Recs Challenge, Day 24
Yesterday: humor. Today: a fic that breaks my heart. I'm reccing it not only because it's wonderful, but also because it gives me a chance to post this gorgeous poem, from which the title of the story is taken:
That the Science of Cartography is Limited
by Eavan Boland
-- and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
That the Science of Cartography is Limited by dorkorific
Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst
Summary: There is a part of Remus that not only believes, but knows, that Sirius will come back.
My Comments:
Many of the fics I've recced this month are ones that I go back to read again and again and again. This one is not one of those -- not because it's not worthy, but because it pretty much breaks me every time (and sends me immediately in search of my favorite Bring Back Black fics).
It's so difficult to write grief well, but dorkorific handles it exquisitely here. The fic shifts seamlessly between the aftermath of Sirius's death and Remus's flashbacks to the past, particularly to the days when the Marauders were working on drafting the map. The Marauder dynamic is perfect; Sirius and James's friendship is given the importance it has in canon, with Remus and Peter somewhat on the margins. (This is something many R/S writers neglect.)
The author also doesn't flinch away from the boys' flaws, particularly Sirius's occasional cruelty, and that's a good part of why this fic works so well -- the refusal to romanticize either Remus and Sirius's relationship, or Remus's grief after Sirius's death. There is nothing noble about Remus's suffering; it's just raw, ugly, even ordinary. And the ending is absolutely devastating.
Excerpt:
Remus has read plenty of novels in his lifetime. Big, fat ones, Muggle and magic alike, and all of them full of love and death and noble sacrifice, some of them quiet, some of them thunderous and agonizing. He’s read about lovers crippled by death, sobbing for weeks on the floor; and about men who dwindle, go dark behind the eyes, who stop feeling altogether.
But none of them, he realizes now, ever really got round to explaining the everyday weirdness of loss: the way things get quiet, and bright, and far away, and how everything is slightly out of focus, mis-timed--except when they aren't, sometimes, some things that make no sense. The enormity of his hands, up close, and the sharp lines on his fingers; and the sense, not that time is moving slower, but that he is somehow more strangely, distantly aware of every second that goes by. Every movement in his chest and stomach exhaling, inhaling. The soft muscles on his eyelids contracting. The shallow, rucked pattern on the sofa, tiny blue cross-stitch hairs rough against his cheek and huge close to the eye.
That the Science of Cartography is Limited
by Eavan Boland
-- and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
That the Science of Cartography is Limited by dorkorific
Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst
Summary: There is a part of Remus that not only believes, but knows, that Sirius will come back.
My Comments:
Many of the fics I've recced this month are ones that I go back to read again and again and again. This one is not one of those -- not because it's not worthy, but because it pretty much breaks me every time (and sends me immediately in search of my favorite Bring Back Black fics).
It's so difficult to write grief well, but dorkorific handles it exquisitely here. The fic shifts seamlessly between the aftermath of Sirius's death and Remus's flashbacks to the past, particularly to the days when the Marauders were working on drafting the map. The Marauder dynamic is perfect; Sirius and James's friendship is given the importance it has in canon, with Remus and Peter somewhat on the margins. (This is something many R/S writers neglect.)
The author also doesn't flinch away from the boys' flaws, particularly Sirius's occasional cruelty, and that's a good part of why this fic works so well -- the refusal to romanticize either Remus and Sirius's relationship, or Remus's grief after Sirius's death. There is nothing noble about Remus's suffering; it's just raw, ugly, even ordinary. And the ending is absolutely devastating.
Excerpt:
Remus has read plenty of novels in his lifetime. Big, fat ones, Muggle and magic alike, and all of them full of love and death and noble sacrifice, some of them quiet, some of them thunderous and agonizing. He’s read about lovers crippled by death, sobbing for weeks on the floor; and about men who dwindle, go dark behind the eyes, who stop feeling altogether.
But none of them, he realizes now, ever really got round to explaining the everyday weirdness of loss: the way things get quiet, and bright, and far away, and how everything is slightly out of focus, mis-timed--except when they aren't, sometimes, some things that make no sense. The enormity of his hands, up close, and the sharp lines on his fingers; and the sense, not that time is moving slower, but that he is somehow more strangely, distantly aware of every second that goes by. Every movement in his chest and stomach exhaling, inhaling. The soft muscles on his eyelids contracting. The shallow, rucked pattern on the sofa, tiny blue cross-stitch hairs rough against his cheek and huge close to the eye.