perverse-idyll (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
perverse-idyll.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
crack_van2011-02-15 01:02 am
perverse-idyll.livejournal.com) wrote in crack_van2011-02-15 01:02 am
Entry tags:
In Memory of Sigmund Freud by Atdelphi (NC-17)
Fandom: HARRY POTTER
Pairing: Minerva McGonagall/Severus Snape, Alastor Moody/Severus Snape
Length: ~20,000
Author on LJ:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
atdelphi
Author Website: Delphi's journal on Dreamwidth (I linked to her re-post because the conversation I had with her about this fic may be of interest)
Why this must be read:
I've got a list of what might be called "fics of the heart," works that inspire in me a sense of awe and love, not to mention the belief that I'm lucky to be in a fandom that lures such brilliant writers to it.atdelphi has no fewer than three fics on that list, and this is one of them, a character study that provokes such complex emotions it's hard for me to put them into words.
This is Snape after his first year teaching at Hogwarts, invited by McGonagall to summer on her island property, where Alastor Moody is recuperating from a disastrous ambush in the field. The focus stays on Snape, who is young and desolate, and in the depths of his detachment a borderline sociopath. Through his stunted, unsocialized, and intelligent POV, we're given tantalizing glimpses of his housemates. It's a summer of coming to terms. All three are self-possessed people, reticent and riven with mysteries, tragedies, some only hinted at, others played out in the erotic tensions that spring up between Snape and his older companions. Moody is gruff and violent, McGonagall enigmatic and sexually self-assured. Snape's encounters with her are an education, those with Moody a self-punishment, a form of second-hand reconciliation with a parental figure that changes nothing—at least for him. There's a definite Oedipal subtext to this tale, which adds a disturbing but also slightly heartbreaking luster. In all three, pain and a capacity for cruelty moves under the skin, but Snape is the most unregenerate, the most divorced from his own soul, the one whom self-knowledge can neither solace nor cure.
This portrait is one of the most perceptive, psychologically intense and perversely delicate tales ever written about this doomed child of Slytherin house. Delphi's a master of subtlety and sympathy, but she's not in the least sentimental, which means she can make you ache for Snape, as for someone too damaged to be saved. Hers is a compassionate verdict, but a very canon one.
There's also a ghost here, and poetry and sex and Snape's curiously deadpan sense of humor. It's an exquisite story, and I get more out of it each time I read it. I'd call it magical, although the magic here is mostly literary, not a matter of wands but of souls laid bare and then carefully wrapped up and made 'decent' again, the better to get on with things.
Give this story a chance. It's phenomenal, and reading it is like being laid under a spell.
~~*~~
Long after the summer of 1982, it would occur to him that had Minerva McGonagall issued her invitation on any other day and at any other moment, he would have assuredly declined. Furthermore, he would wonder if there weren't just enough slyness mixed in with her sensibility for her to be aware of this fact. But no, he supposed even she could not have suspected that on the evening of the Leaving Feast, he was idly weighing the merits of various methods of self-murder as he picked over his roast dinner.
Circumstances had conspired and he was on the other side of the looking glass again. Never mind the dodgy physics of the metaphor; that was the only way to describe the inside-out and backwards wrongness of marking final exams rather than sitting them, of looking out across the Great Hall from the raised dais of the head table, of finding himself twenty-two years old and still alive. His mother had written last week from his grandfather's house in Lancashire asking for money. He had heard through channels he was no longer supposed to have that Igor Karkaroff had been released from Azkaban.
"Pardon me?" he finally said, ceasing his study of the sharpness of his knife and using it to dissect a Yorkshire pudding instead.
Professor McGonagal—Minerva, he reminded himself for the thousandth time—did not bat an eye at the lengthy pause. She merely cut a pearl onion in half with geometric precision and ate a portion before repeating herself. "I said if you haven't any other plans, you should come stay the summer."
"With you," he said, rather blankly.
One of her eyebrows arched sharply, and her mouth moved for an instant as though it wished to say something like, 'No, with the Deputy Head of Magical Transportation.' Then it relented, softening. "With me. I have a house near Portree. There's enough space that we'd have no trouble staying out of each other's way."
In Memory of Sigmund Freud
Pairing: Minerva McGonagall/Severus Snape, Alastor Moody/Severus Snape
Length: ~20,000
Author on LJ:
atdelphiAuthor Website: Delphi's journal on Dreamwidth (I linked to her re-post because the conversation I had with her about this fic may be of interest)
Why this must be read:
I've got a list of what might be called "fics of the heart," works that inspire in me a sense of awe and love, not to mention the belief that I'm lucky to be in a fandom that lures such brilliant writers to it.
atdelphi has no fewer than three fics on that list, and this is one of them, a character study that provokes such complex emotions it's hard for me to put them into words. This is Snape after his first year teaching at Hogwarts, invited by McGonagall to summer on her island property, where Alastor Moody is recuperating from a disastrous ambush in the field. The focus stays on Snape, who is young and desolate, and in the depths of his detachment a borderline sociopath. Through his stunted, unsocialized, and intelligent POV, we're given tantalizing glimpses of his housemates. It's a summer of coming to terms. All three are self-possessed people, reticent and riven with mysteries, tragedies, some only hinted at, others played out in the erotic tensions that spring up between Snape and his older companions. Moody is gruff and violent, McGonagall enigmatic and sexually self-assured. Snape's encounters with her are an education, those with Moody a self-punishment, a form of second-hand reconciliation with a parental figure that changes nothing—at least for him. There's a definite Oedipal subtext to this tale, which adds a disturbing but also slightly heartbreaking luster. In all three, pain and a capacity for cruelty moves under the skin, but Snape is the most unregenerate, the most divorced from his own soul, the one whom self-knowledge can neither solace nor cure.
This portrait is one of the most perceptive, psychologically intense and perversely delicate tales ever written about this doomed child of Slytherin house. Delphi's a master of subtlety and sympathy, but she's not in the least sentimental, which means she can make you ache for Snape, as for someone too damaged to be saved. Hers is a compassionate verdict, but a very canon one.
There's also a ghost here, and poetry and sex and Snape's curiously deadpan sense of humor. It's an exquisite story, and I get more out of it each time I read it. I'd call it magical, although the magic here is mostly literary, not a matter of wands but of souls laid bare and then carefully wrapped up and made 'decent' again, the better to get on with things.
Give this story a chance. It's phenomenal, and reading it is like being laid under a spell.
Long after the summer of 1982, it would occur to him that had Minerva McGonagall issued her invitation on any other day and at any other moment, he would have assuredly declined. Furthermore, he would wonder if there weren't just enough slyness mixed in with her sensibility for her to be aware of this fact. But no, he supposed even she could not have suspected that on the evening of the Leaving Feast, he was idly weighing the merits of various methods of self-murder as he picked over his roast dinner.
Circumstances had conspired and he was on the other side of the looking glass again. Never mind the dodgy physics of the metaphor; that was the only way to describe the inside-out and backwards wrongness of marking final exams rather than sitting them, of looking out across the Great Hall from the raised dais of the head table, of finding himself twenty-two years old and still alive. His mother had written last week from his grandfather's house in Lancashire asking for money. He had heard through channels he was no longer supposed to have that Igor Karkaroff had been released from Azkaban.
"Pardon me?" he finally said, ceasing his study of the sharpness of his knife and using it to dissect a Yorkshire pudding instead.
Professor McGonagal—Minerva, he reminded himself for the thousandth time—did not bat an eye at the lengthy pause. She merely cut a pearl onion in half with geometric precision and ate a portion before repeating herself. "I said if you haven't any other plans, you should come stay the summer."
"With you," he said, rather blankly.
One of her eyebrows arched sharply, and her mouth moved for an instant as though it wished to say something like, 'No, with the Deputy Head of Magical Transportation.' Then it relented, softening. "With me. I have a house near Portree. There's enough space that we'd have no trouble staying out of each other's way."
In Memory of Sigmund Freud