Dark and Fearsome by chantefable (PG-13)

[perverse-idyll.livejournal.com]

Fandom: HARRY POTTER
Pairing: Walburga Black/Minerva McGonagall
Length: ~3,400
Author on LJ: chantefable
Author Website: None that I know of
Why this must be read:
My previous rec was thoroughly Gryffindor in spirit, and this is the Slytherin contrast to that, a manifesto of love and revulsion from a pureblood's heart. Darkness suffuses Walburga Black's soul, a sense of pessimism and magical violence that makes her both magnificent and intransigent, unable to make choices she feels are false or pandering. It dictates her outlook on life, her attitude toward fate, her desire, her disdain. All faith, all softness is doomed to failure. This is a first-person POV, and the voice is opulent, scornful, consuming, the voice of a woman who believes that life is pitiless, that goodness is weak, that there are monsters on both sides of the divide, that destruction is truth, and that love accords no one special rights. The voice is rational one moment, feverish the next, hot then cold, and it's easy to see how someone so passionate yet already so bitter could end up as the shrieking portrait familiar to readers.

It took me a couple of paragraphs to immerse myself in the rhythms of chantefable's prose, because I wasn't expecting such a lyrical and epigrammatic style. The language is highly colored and almost flamboyant, with a cool, fierce undercurrent. Minerva here is glimpsed secondhand, at a distance, caught in fragments of poetry, of rejections addressed to her Gryffindor self-deceit. There are flashes of sensuality, too, of yearning that almost resembles a change of heart before turning to rend its own delusional impulses. Mostly Walburga cries out in isolation, trapped inside an unshakeable, aristocratic vision of a corrupt universe. She is her own song of despair. If this were a sermon, she would rage against a fallen world. If it were an opera, Walburga would be played by Maria Callas and her passion for Minerva would bring down the house. It's a bleak and mesmerizing and darkly beautiful little fic, with a unique take on the way even the proudest of dark wizards can be victims of their own merciless beliefs.

~~#~~
Life is monotonous and austere, and I am aware of my own prison. Yet one cannot control the ebb and flow of one's thoughts: even when I step out in my garden, rich and lush and brimming with life, and raise my head to watch the tree branches twist and twirl and cover the sky above; even when, despite the cool air, my skin burns hot, aware of the rough tree trunks that stand close together, like the bars of a wild animal's cage; even then I cannot help recalling exactly what circumstances brought me to my current situation, a wife and a mother on the brink of a gruesome, revolting war.

Perhaps I like to torture myself. It would be a trait worthy of a Black.

When one's senses are dulled by the day-to-day rush of loathing that spills out of one's own soul and mouth; when one's heart is hardened by abiding by the rules that one detests with one's very core, yet forces oneself to observe with a rigour that could be mistaken for veneration – picking old wounds and watching them ooze fire and blood is nothing but a proof of life.

Minerva, of course, would disagree.

Dark and Fearsome