FIC: When Father Was Away (Draco)

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Happy Birthday, Draco! Here's another never-posted fic from the archives.

Title: When Father Was Away (June 2003) (Web version)
Pairing: Draco gen. Harry/Draco if you squint.
Rating: R
Length: ~3,000 words
Warnings: None
Summary: Malfoy Manor, the summer after Fifth Year.
A/N: I wrote this the week after OOTP came out, but never finished it

Comments

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Wow, thank you so much for your super-insightful comments! I can't thank you enough for taking the time to read and then giving me such a careful, thoughtful reading. I tend to be a very muse-driven writer -- I just write down what the characters tell me to -- so your comments really helped me to understand my own fic better. :D

And how flattered am I that you remembered back when I posted this as a fragment? ♥

Anyway, I really like your reading of the Manor ... to me it is sentient but not really conscious, if that makes any sense. It doesn't think, it just responds to whatever the natural magical order of things may be. So it recognizes Draco as the heir not because it decides to do so, but because it couldn't do otherwise.

I think. Hmmm. It's funny because this kind of magical dwelling is a fetish of mine (it pops up in some other fics I'm working on as well), and yet I've never thought it through to this extent. :D (BTW, you might also like the prequel to this Tie Me To the Length of That, because the Manor also plays a critical role there as well.

the wonder is the way you stay mostly outside of Draco’s emotions, but objectify what must be going on at the reptile level in his brain, through the charged, unnaturally significant behavior of Manor around him. It’s like a lucid hallucination.

Oh, wow. This is ... perfect. the charged, unnaturally significant behavior of Manor around him ... I do rely (probably too much) on a character's perceptions of their physical surroundings as a way to portray their emotions, and I'm really glad it worked well here.

The puzzle turns on Draco’s invocation of “home” -- what or where, exactly, is home?

Yes, and the idea that for the first time in Draco's life, the place where he has always lived has finally welcomed him ... it's finally become home.

your baroque imagination is a joy: the crups with their tails cropped so they can’t fly, the wonderful, ghoulish, “To Serve Man”-style pun on “Muggle Furniture.”

Yeah, I'm far too fond of the gruesome stuff -- there's a lot of it in the Sirius/Bellatrix as well. And glad you liked the "Muggle Furniture" pun ... the most embarrassing thing about that is that I didn't even realize it would read as a pun until I was in the final edit. Too much time spent in Draco's emphatically non-Muggle headspace, I guess! ;)

I loved the sweeter stuff, too: the brief moment of excitement in Harry’s eyes when Draco wakes him up,

:D He was dreaming of Sirius. I mean, that's not in the story, but that's what I was thinking, anyway. :D

and finally the way Harry feels and smells (the first real human thing Draco feels in the story?)?

You know, I hadn't thought about that before, but now that you mention it, it does make sense that once Draco is finally liberated from this setting where he has been oppressed most of his life, he's able to feel and have empathy for the first time.

And that's cool that you came up with an alternative, slightly less hopeful reading ... it's such a great feeling when folks come up with very different interpretations from what I originally intended, because it makes me feel as if the story is a living, breathing thing and not just some random shit I threw on the page. *loves*

Thank you, thank you, thank you again for taking the time to write all this for me -- I appreciate it so much, and it's given me so much food for thought! ♥

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It is fun to have your feedback to feedback, too! Though I promise I will not go on and on to absurdity. :) A treat, though, to have the chance to hear an author's own take on their story in a meta sense.

I'm intrigued by what you say about being a muse-led author, going first with intuitions about the characters and allowing for ambiguity, breathing room, in the story that emerges. That is food for thought for me, though perhaps more obvious to others. I think my tendencies to analysis, which serve me well in some areas, are one of the reasons my own fic attempts have not worked -- I am too quick with the pin and killing jar, my scenarios have felt dead on the page, right from the conception. I want to think about this more; it's very suggestive.

Thank you for the link to "Tie Me to the Length . . . " It is another story where the emotional progression is clear, the sense of acceptance at the end is a wonderful lightening of the previous tension, of Lucius' fussy anxiety, but still continues the atmosphere of weirdness, uncanniness. Tossing snowballs back! -- your Manor is an odd duck, with its mix of menace and dorkiness. :)

I again found multiple ways to read the "Tie Me" backstory, but the most likely seemed to be that Draco was concieved as a girl, and altered with Snape's assistance to meet Lucius' need for an heir. But the Manor itself needs convincing before it is prepared to entirely buy in to that. Hence the super-strenuous, masculinizing exercises, proving good faith, and over the top as only Lucius can make them. And, of course, the propitiatory blood offerings cannot hurt the campaign. :) If I am even close to being correct, then that adds even more pleasantly disorienting spin to Draco's evolution in "When Father Was Away."

I have also now read your Sirius/Bellatrix, and want to reread and think before feedbacking, but I liked it a lot!

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I think my tendencies to analysis, which serve me well in some areas, are one of the reasons my own fic attempts have not worked -- I am too quick with the pin and killing jar, my scenarios have felt dead on the page, right from the conception. I want to think about this more; it's very suggestive.

I am, by nature, a very analytic thinker as well, and so it's a huge challenge for me to suspend that write straight from the unconscious. But Olympia M once said something very wise to me: "Your characters know more than you do." Which means I need to trust them to tell me what I need to know rather than try to figure it out for myself. It's a huge leap of faith for me, especially as I have a tendency to edit-as-I-go rather than just spit up a huge first draft and then edit down. Stephen King has a similar theory about writing as well, if you're curious about learning more. If I start getting theoretical too quickly, I have the same problem as you do -- the characters stop feeling like living, breathing creatures and turn flat.

Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts so much on both of these fics ... I was really intrigued by your reading of the end of Tie Me To The Length Of That, because I saw it as so despairing and hopeless. (The house isn't tossing back -- it's hurling back ... poor Draco, even the Manor is against him and won't permit even the slightest rebellion!) But your reading is totally valid ... that fic was a particularly painful one for me to write, and so I hardly ever go back and reread it. I couldn't even tell you what the backstory is ... I wrote it during such a bleak time in my life so it came straight from the Id! ;)

Thanks again for your insightful readings, and I look forward to your thoughts on the Sirius/Bellatrix whenever you get a chance. ♥