a meme from Sharon
Nov. 13th, 2007 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thirty2flavors... in celebration of successfully finishing an essay due in a week. It is kind of shitty, I need to cut at least 70 words (which is going to be hard because it's already very... brief) and I need to check some citations, but WHOO ROUGH DRAFTTT I'm so done for right now. Lol.
The meme*: Post segments of all the fanfic you have yet to finish.
I am not going to do all because we will literally be here all day, but I do have lots of unfinished crap so I guess I'm game.
I think I'll start with more recent -- stuff on my laptop -- and venture back in time to some horrible experiments or what-have-you-.
From something called "dorea/charlus.doc" which I think I started before Crossing the T's? But I'm not sure:
There was something knocking on her window.
There was something knocking on her window, but there was nothing outside her window.
Even for a girl as deeply vested in magic as Dorea Black, that was a rather odd occurrence.
She rose from the bed slowly, one hand drifting to the top of the dresser where her wand lay. Technically, she was not of age, and so theoretically the wand was useless, but the Trace wasn’t that specific, her family wasn’t around to see, and surely anything invisible that knocked on windows at half midnight was something that might be cause for self-defense.
She reached the window in two quiet steps – best not to wake her parents at this time of night – and peered left and right as best she could. There was no one there in any which way, not so much as a tree branch to scratch the glass. With a resigned sigh, she flicked the latch and shoved the window open.
I actually do remember where I was going with that, but then I think we started Crossing the T's and I figured I'd save the material for potential use there. Anyhoo. Man Dorea/Charlus FTW.
Oh man here's something I had completely no recollection of writing! Harry/Ginny, wtf?
“I think,” said Ginny, studying Sirius’ room with her hands on her hips, “we’re going to have to do something about this one.”
Harry folded his arms and leaned against the doorframe, grinning. “Oh really?”
“Really.” She turned to look at him and gestured vaguely at the walls. “I think I’ve let it slide for long enough. Hypothetically, when we’ve got kids –“
He arched an eyebrow. “Hypothetically?”
“—hypothetically, when we’ve got kids, what are we supposed to tell them? ‘Mummy, why does that room have so many pictures of half-naked Muggle women?’ What do we say? ‘Well, son, it’s because your father’s teenage godfather was quite an endorser of the bikini-clad Muggle girl poster industry, and also he just generally enjoyed raising all hell, please do not follow in this example’?”
Harry laughed – he was dreadfully unhelpful sometimes, Ginny thought, as she tried for the millionth time to pry up the corners of one of the posters.
“I’d say that sounds like a reasonable answer, actually. Solid parenting in the end, there, Gin. You’re all set.”
She did her best to muster up a glare. “Look. Harry. Preserving memories is one thing; preserving 1970s pin-up girls is another thing entirely, and not a thing I am a fan of, personally.”
LAWL second time I ever wrote anything Harry/Ginny.
Oh, and this! My half-hatched idea that I never quite finished off, partially because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
afterthree magically recced something that was ... similar enough and partially because the writing style sort of bugged me, I couldn't get it the way I wanted it. I cut off abit of the begining because I disliked it. La la la.
He staggered toward them barely aware of his own feet. It had been a long – far too long – time since he’d seen them, and he thought whatever had happened must have been worth it, to lead to this reunion.
“Lily…” Even as he said it he drank in her appearance, amazed by her vivid red hair and her eyes so like Harry’s and thinking inwardly, regretfully, that his memories were not perfect, not as vibrant as the woman standing before him.
He looked at the man standing to her left and found that his voice had died somewhere in his throat; he could not seem to vocalize anything at all that might begin to explain how much he’d missed them –
“James,” he said finally, smiling, staggering another step closer to them.
It was then that he realized, with a shock like cold water, that they were neither smiling nor holding out their arms in a gesture of welcome.
Instead, they looked furious.
“How could you?” James demanded at once, his eyes narrowing fiercely behind his glasses. “How could you?”
The world seemed to go hazier in a manner entirely unrelated to the strange circumstance Sirius found himself in. His eyes widened in terror, but even as he croaked “what?” he was certain he knew what was coming. It had played over and over in his mind in Azkaban --
“You killed us,” snapped James, his voice dripping with hatred and revulsion. “Too fucking cowardly to protect us yourself you throw Peter in the way –“
The words were as effective as a slap; Sirius felt as though some of the air had been stolen from his lungs. “No!“ That misunderstanding was too grave for him to let it slide. “No – that’s not why – I –“
“ – convince us it’ll be for the better, play it off as some sort of bluff to hide your cowardice, the perfect scheme – so fond of your own life you leave ours in the hands of a Death Eater –“
“I—I didn’t know,” he stammered, quailing under the look of unadulterated hatred in James’ face. “Please – James – I didn’t –“
“We’d have lived, you know, if it weren’t for you.” There was calm anger in Lily’s voice, as though she was past the point of shrieking, a chilling contrast to her husband’s. “We’d have been fine if you hadn’t persuaded us to switch Secret Keepers. If you had only protected us as you’d promised – if you had only died for us as you said you were willing to – we’d have become our own Secret Keepers and we’d have been able to raise our son.”
His stammered protestations faltered at that, because he knew – had always known – that she was right. For a minute he opened and closed his mouth wordlessly, uselessly, aware all the while that his eyes were beginning to burn.
“I – I’m sorry.”
The glare did not fall from James’ face; rather, it seemed to intensify.
“Expect that to redeem you, do you? You figure that’s good enough? You think you can just apologize and erase the fact that you lead us to our deaths, after all we’d done for you?”
Sirius looked frantically from James to Lily, searching for some sign of atonement, but their faces remained stony and he dropped his gaze to the floor. Everything was blurry, now, even the pair of them, but Sirius was certain that had less to do with where they were and everything to do with the tears of guilt and shame manifesting themselves in his eyes.
They were not saying anything he had not already known, but to hear it from them – in their words, in their voices – made him dizzy with regret.
“It was a mistake to think we could trust you,” snarled James; his tone was so sharp that Sirius flinched as though struck by a whip. “You, the should-have-been Slytherin, the embarrassment of both the Blacks and Gryffindor… I did so much for you, Sirius. I offered you shelter and care when your own blood wouldn’t, I acted as family when you had none, and you repay me by denying me help when I need it most? You pass me on to someone else?”
It hurt – it hurt to the point of a near-physical ache, the words – the truth – tearing into him, an agony worthy of the Cruciatus – and he wondered if this was how he would spend eternity,
“I’m sorry,” he said again, shaking his head as though a simple action could dislodge the guilt from his mind. He stumbled backward but they moved with him, closing the gap. “I’m sorry – I’m so sorry – I never meant to – I only wanted to help –“
“What’s more,” said Lily, her voice the same cold tone as before, “you left Harry. Not only did you kill us, Sirius, you left our son to be raised by people who would never love him properly – left him to spend his childhood in a cupboard under the stairs – when we had expressly asked you to take care of him. You denied us your help, then condemned our son to loneliness and misery merely because Hagrid suggested it.”
“I know – I know – I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking, I was –“
“As bad a godfather as you were best friend,” finished James.
Finally unable to swallow the lump that had been swelling in his throat, Sirius gave a choked sob and put his arms over his head, his hands clutching desperately at his hair.
“Lily – James – please,” he begged (for it was begging, now, between the sobs, and scarcely anything more), “please, I – I tried – I was wrong, I made mistakes, I – I’m sorry, I – I’m so sorry, you have no idea –“
“It’s quite a shame ignorance is not a valid excuse, or you’d be absolved of almost everything, wouldn’t you? You even tried to turn us against Remus – Remus, who has been nothing but kind, who would undoubtedly have done what you didn’t and given us real protection –“
In desperation he slid his hands from his hair to cover his ears – he could not face it, he could not accept it – but their voices seemed impossible to muffle.
“You were family to us, Sirius,” said Lily sadly, “but then, I suppose family has never meant very much to you.”
Well there are definitely like 1000000 more on my other computer but it's getting late so I am stopping with those. If anyone's curious I guess I can post others later. Or something. La la.
*(also? we learnt what a meme is in psych and now that word makes a lot more sense than I ever thought it did before, LIRL)
ETA -
Admittedly they're all still pretty recent. Because the truly old stuff is mostly lost to the abyss of dead hard-drives. But hey. Whatevs.
Zomg angsty Remus/Tonks I am so original =|
In perfect honesty what had always worried him about Dora was her likeness to them – them as they had been, he as he used to be.
He went so far as to try to explain it once, but she hadn’t understood. Of course she hadn’t.
--
“You’re just… you’re just too young, Dora, to understand!”
That only infuriated her. “Oh, for the love of God, Remus, this argument again? At least do me the honour of thinking up a new one! You aren’t even forty, but to listen to the way you talk you’d think you’d lived longer than Dumbledore! What, is there some sort of epiphany you reach at thirty – the turning point of all wisdom and omniscience – that you’ve well surpassed and I’ve not?”
He clenched his teeth. “You know full well, Nymphadora, exactly what I mean. You weren’t involved last time—“
“So?” she shrieked, indignant.
“So you cannot possibly understand --- you are exactly how we were, Dora, and look where it got us!”
She froze, watching him, and even as she did, he noticed that some of her anger and frustration melted away into something like sympathy. She always looked like that, if he mentioned them, and while sometimes it was endearing, other times – like now – it did nothing but highlight her incomprehension.
“And how is that, Remus?” she asked, her voice level, a forced calm.
“You’re…. you’re young, just like we were, naïve, foolish, oblivious to the dangers of –“
Her sympathy was not enough to stem the anger in her voice when she cried, “Oblivious! In case you’ve forgotten in your old age, Remus, I’m an Auror, a fully trained Auror, I’m not oblivious to danger, I know full well how dangerous it is out there—“
“You don’t! You don’t get it – you can’t get it until it strikes you, Dora, don’t you see? Until the danger hits home – until you’ve actually lost someone – you just blindly assume that it’ll only hurt other people, other people’s spouses and children and friends, that somehow, through sheer willpower or luck or young immortality, those you hold dear will be spared and in some near future you’ll be able to look back and reflect on how lucky you were—“
“Stop treating me like I’m an idiot, Remus! Just because this is the first war I’ve fought in --- fought in, I remind you, not lived through, I know you seem to be a little confused about timelines ---“
“I know because I was exactly the same, alright? Of course I knew You-Know-Who was terrible, Dora, of course I was afraid, but never, never did I expect to lose everything that meant anything to me!”
She didn’t retort. On the contrary, she reached for his arm, and he didn’t quite back away. Instead he lowered his voice and continued his plight, determined beyond all rationale to make her understand.
“It was the same for Lily and James and Sirius, Dora,” he continued. “They – they were just like you, we all were, determined and dedicated and scared, yes, but convinced, somewhere, that everything would turn out fine in the end for no reason other than it had to.” He lowered his gaze for a moment, hesitating, before – “Do you really think you’ll die, Dora? Honestly?”
Her second’s hesitation answered the question well enough, but nonetheless she said, “I---well, no, Remus, I can’t say I expect to, but I know that I could, and I don’t see why you’ve got to be so cynical about—“
“Cynicism and realism are different things.”
“Says the pessimist.”
Hahaa and some Snape/Lily I started writing for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
nest_of_spiders and never finished. Too bad, I had a nice nasty line all thought up for Lily and everything. ("Oh? And where's your white steed, Severus? Lend it to Voldemort for the weekend?") Even the Severus/Lily shipper in me is so perplexed when I try to write emo lovesick teen Snape. Wtf. O_0
Surprisingly – unsurprisingly – ironically – it was beneath the large beech tree by the lake that he finally managed to get her alone.
She had her nose in a book, her hair slung over one shoulder and her Gryffindor tie loose about her neck. She was chewing her lip subconsciously, as always, and against his will he thought of whose lips hers had been so very drawn to lately.
She didn’t look up when he approached, and at the thought something seemed to constrict in his stomach. It had been a year and a half, and he was sure that she had naturally forgotten what he had tried so hard not to remember.
He paused a few feet away, eyeing the lion emblazoned on her robes. It seemed to mock him with its bravery; he narrowed his eyes and took a breath to steel himself before he closed the gap between them.
“You can do better than him, Lily.”
She looked up at once, and the eyebrows that would have once risen in pleasant surprise instead furrowed in displeasure.
“You don’t want to start that discussion, Severus,” she answered coolly.
“Yes, I do, no one else is going to tell you how much better you deserve, they’re all too busy singing his praises and –“
She shut her book with a snap and stood, facing him. When she spoke, her tone clearly indicated the topic was closed for discussion. “James has changed. He is not fifteen anymore. He is a good person.”
Severus shook his head. “He hasn’t. And even if he had – Lily – you deserve better –“
“Better?” She laughed bitterly. “Like who, Severus? You?”
His heart seemed to miss a beat in its frantic allegro; it was a second before he found his voice. “No – that’s not what I –“
She shoved her book back into her bag roughly and tossed the strap over her shoulder. She was glaring fiercely, her eyes alight with anger, her hair falling forward. Severus had always privately thought that Potter must like how Lily looked when she was angry, the way he had always provoked her, but the attraction was not one Severus had ever been able to fathom. Anger didn’t suit her. She was made for gentler things.
“What do you want, then, Severus? What is so pressing that you’ve chosen to speak to me for the first time in a year and a half?”
He felt a twinge of annoyance. “I’ve tried – you’re the one who hasn’t spoken to me!” he yelped. “And you know what I wanted to tell you – you shouldn’t be with him, Lily. He’s not right for you. He’s not good enough.”
There was something agonizing in the way she rolled her eyes and said, “Honestly, Severus, if it were up to you, no one would be good enough for me.”
This was another fornest_of_spiders -- I think it was the "Mother, Summer, I" prompt. The only time I've written something Peter-centric other than a drabble... too bad it sort of fizzled out.
Peter always found it odd that he was the one with the summer birthday.
It wasn’t that he set much store by horoscopes or Divination or star charts. It was merely that when he looked at his friends, their birthdays didn’t seem to fit. James and Sirius were lively, rambunctious, laughing and outgoing and, as best Peter could tell, summer personified – yet their birthdays fell in cold, unremarkable months. Though Remus’ March birthday made more sense, perhaps, than James’, it still puzzled Peter that of the four of them, he was the one born in August, in the midst of summer, when nature was at its peak.
He thought he would have been much better suited to March or November. He was the sort who could slip by unnoticed and morph seamlessly from season to season. Being born in August felt like some sort of obligation he couldn’t live up to –
This was eventually sort of.. condensed into a drabble. I'd forgotten about it. Anyway, I like the idea that Lily and Sirius were the ones suspicious of Remus, and James, being a Potter and therefore trusting to the point of idiocy, refuses to listen to them.
“You’re wrong.” James spoke with utmost conviction and shook his head in a manner that almost seemed to suggest pity. “You’re wrong, and quite possibly mad, too – how can you –“
“You’re not listening to me,” snapped Sirius, seething with frustration. “It’s got to be someone, James, even Dumbledore thinks so, and –“
“And you think it’s Remus? Remus? Remus, who would never even chastise us for fear of losing our friendship, Remus who can scarcely bring himself to be rude to people who’d rather shoot him, Remus who wrote you a three-foot-long panicked letter when he found out you’d run away, Remus who is undoubtedly the kindest person we know – that Remus? Are we talking about the same person?”
James’ voice had turned to something of a sneer and Sirius’ eyes narrowed in return. From her seat at the table, Lily gave a soft moan and buried her head in her hands.
“Do you think I’m bloody excited about it, James?” Sirius smirked. “You think I want to believe he’s been selling you – all of us – out? But it’s got to be someone, hasn’t it, and unless you suspect Peter or Dumbledore or me –“
James’ eyes narrowed, too; when he spoke is voice was cold. “You know full well I do not suspect any of you.”
“You trust me, then?”
“Of course I bloody well trust you, if I didn’t I wouldn’t be having this asinine discussion with you in the first pla-“
“And you trust Peter?”
James’ tone continued to be acidic. “We have been friends since we were five years old. I trust Peter.”
Sirius turned his palms skyward in frustration. “And it’s obviously not Dumbledore, which leaves Remus, James, it’s process of elimination!”
“You are my friends and though we seem to differ on this policy, Sirius, trust is a quality I look for in friendship.”
“For Christ’s sake, James, a madman wants to murder your entire family and you’re worried about being a bad friend? Your blind faith in people is going to get you killed, and Lily and Harry too!”
Sirius’ outburst was met with a silence even louder than the yells. Lily miserably studied the wood grain on her kitchen table, and James stood frozen, stricken.
“Forgive me,” he said at last, his voice cold, “for wanting to believe the best in the people I care about.”
A heavy, defeated sigh escaped Sirius and he turned to look at Lily. “Lily – Lily, help me.”
She cast a terrified glance from Sirius to James. What Sirius was saying made sense – he was right – how else could the Death Eaters have known each of their movements so precisely for the past year? But James… James would be furious at her for agreeing, and she had to admit, the thought of Remus being a traitor was painful, if not ludicrous…
“He’s – he’s got a point, James,” she said weakly, and James rolled his eyes, infuriated.
“You suspect him because he’s a werewolf – don’t look at me like that, either of you, you know it’s true. I thought by now you realized it didn’t matter? Or are Remus and I alone in our naïve belief?”
“It makes the most sense,” said Sirius through gritted teeth, clearly straining to make James understand. “Voldemort’s been recruiting them –“
“He’s been recruiting the rest of the Blacks, too, and yet somehow I still trust you.”
Sirius flinched as though James had brandished a whip; he sent a withering stare at the wall and fell silent. James continued to glare.
With a defeated sigh, Lily looked at James imploringly. “James. James, please. We’re not asking you to agree with us – we’re not asking you to believe it or like it – we just want to be careful. We don’t want to believe it any more than you do, but Sirius is trying to help, and he’s right. The Death Eaters wouldn’t know what they do if there wasn’t a spy. It might not be Remus, but it’s someone, and we’ve got to plan for it.”
James said nothing. Instead he turned the glare on her, momentarily – no doubt for consorting with Sirius rather than with him – before he turned his back to both of them, staring out the window into the garden.
“If,” said Sirius, watching James’ back, “when all is said and done, we find out you were right – that Remus is innocent – then I’ll take the blame and I’ll explain to him that you had complete faith in him. In the meantime, the fewer people who know what the two of you are doing, the better. Anyone who knows the two of you will figure I’m the Secret Keeper --
And this one was just for fun. I think I tried to get it down to 100 words to add it to Puzzle Pieces but I couldn't quite work it out. Anyhow it's forlexith and bernaner and derangedcalico who will probably never read it. But they are cool kids.
“Peter’s not scared of you, Padfoot.”
Sirius arched his eyebrows incredulously.
“—Alright, so he is,” amended James, “but it’s not – well, it’s sort of an awe-inspired fear, more than anything.”
Sirius’ eyebrows remained raised. “So you’re saying that if Peter were a tribe of natives, I’d be the volcano.”
“…Essentially, yes.”
Sirius stroked his chin pensively. “And you – you’d be the sun, you know, the God he worships, giver of life and all that.”
“Remus would be the church built by missionaries,” supplied James. “Nifty looking and neat and all that, but he doesn’t really know what it’s for.”
WOO.
The meme*: Post segments of all the fanfic you have yet to finish.
I am not going to do all because we will literally be here all day, but I do have lots of unfinished crap so I guess I'm game.
I think I'll start with more recent -- stuff on my laptop -- and venture back in time to some horrible experiments or what-have-you-.
From something called "dorea/charlus.doc" which I think I started before Crossing the T's? But I'm not sure:
There was something knocking on her window.
There was something knocking on her window, but there was nothing outside her window.
Even for a girl as deeply vested in magic as Dorea Black, that was a rather odd occurrence.
She rose from the bed slowly, one hand drifting to the top of the dresser where her wand lay. Technically, she was not of age, and so theoretically the wand was useless, but the Trace wasn’t that specific, her family wasn’t around to see, and surely anything invisible that knocked on windows at half midnight was something that might be cause for self-defense.
She reached the window in two quiet steps – best not to wake her parents at this time of night – and peered left and right as best she could. There was no one there in any which way, not so much as a tree branch to scratch the glass. With a resigned sigh, she flicked the latch and shoved the window open.
I actually do remember where I was going with that, but then I think we started Crossing the T's and I figured I'd save the material for potential use there. Anyhoo. Man Dorea/Charlus FTW.
Oh man here's something I had completely no recollection of writing! Harry/Ginny, wtf?
“I think,” said Ginny, studying Sirius’ room with her hands on her hips, “we’re going to have to do something about this one.”
Harry folded his arms and leaned against the doorframe, grinning. “Oh really?”
“Really.” She turned to look at him and gestured vaguely at the walls. “I think I’ve let it slide for long enough. Hypothetically, when we’ve got kids –“
He arched an eyebrow. “Hypothetically?”
“—hypothetically, when we’ve got kids, what are we supposed to tell them? ‘Mummy, why does that room have so many pictures of half-naked Muggle women?’ What do we say? ‘Well, son, it’s because your father’s teenage godfather was quite an endorser of the bikini-clad Muggle girl poster industry, and also he just generally enjoyed raising all hell, please do not follow in this example’?”
Harry laughed – he was dreadfully unhelpful sometimes, Ginny thought, as she tried for the millionth time to pry up the corners of one of the posters.
“I’d say that sounds like a reasonable answer, actually. Solid parenting in the end, there, Gin. You’re all set.”
She did her best to muster up a glare. “Look. Harry. Preserving memories is one thing; preserving 1970s pin-up girls is another thing entirely, and not a thing I am a fan of, personally.”
LAWL second time I ever wrote anything Harry/Ginny.
Oh, and this! My half-hatched idea that I never quite finished off, partially because
afterthree magically recced something that was ... similar enough and partially because the writing style sort of bugged me, I couldn't get it the way I wanted it. I cut off abit of the begining because I disliked it. La la la.He staggered toward them barely aware of his own feet. It had been a long – far too long – time since he’d seen them, and he thought whatever had happened must have been worth it, to lead to this reunion.
“Lily…” Even as he said it he drank in her appearance, amazed by her vivid red hair and her eyes so like Harry’s and thinking inwardly, regretfully, that his memories were not perfect, not as vibrant as the woman standing before him.
He looked at the man standing to her left and found that his voice had died somewhere in his throat; he could not seem to vocalize anything at all that might begin to explain how much he’d missed them –
“James,” he said finally, smiling, staggering another step closer to them.
It was then that he realized, with a shock like cold water, that they were neither smiling nor holding out their arms in a gesture of welcome.
Instead, they looked furious.
“How could you?” James demanded at once, his eyes narrowing fiercely behind his glasses. “How could you?”
The world seemed to go hazier in a manner entirely unrelated to the strange circumstance Sirius found himself in. His eyes widened in terror, but even as he croaked “what?” he was certain he knew what was coming. It had played over and over in his mind in Azkaban --
“You killed us,” snapped James, his voice dripping with hatred and revulsion. “Too fucking cowardly to protect us yourself you throw Peter in the way –“
The words were as effective as a slap; Sirius felt as though some of the air had been stolen from his lungs. “No!“ That misunderstanding was too grave for him to let it slide. “No – that’s not why – I –“
“ – convince us it’ll be for the better, play it off as some sort of bluff to hide your cowardice, the perfect scheme – so fond of your own life you leave ours in the hands of a Death Eater –“
“I—I didn’t know,” he stammered, quailing under the look of unadulterated hatred in James’ face. “Please – James – I didn’t –“
“We’d have lived, you know, if it weren’t for you.” There was calm anger in Lily’s voice, as though she was past the point of shrieking, a chilling contrast to her husband’s. “We’d have been fine if you hadn’t persuaded us to switch Secret Keepers. If you had only protected us as you’d promised – if you had only died for us as you said you were willing to – we’d have become our own Secret Keepers and we’d have been able to raise our son.”
His stammered protestations faltered at that, because he knew – had always known – that she was right. For a minute he opened and closed his mouth wordlessly, uselessly, aware all the while that his eyes were beginning to burn.
“I – I’m sorry.”
The glare did not fall from James’ face; rather, it seemed to intensify.
“Expect that to redeem you, do you? You figure that’s good enough? You think you can just apologize and erase the fact that you lead us to our deaths, after all we’d done for you?”
Sirius looked frantically from James to Lily, searching for some sign of atonement, but their faces remained stony and he dropped his gaze to the floor. Everything was blurry, now, even the pair of them, but Sirius was certain that had less to do with where they were and everything to do with the tears of guilt and shame manifesting themselves in his eyes.
They were not saying anything he had not already known, but to hear it from them – in their words, in their voices – made him dizzy with regret.
“It was a mistake to think we could trust you,” snarled James; his tone was so sharp that Sirius flinched as though struck by a whip. “You, the should-have-been Slytherin, the embarrassment of both the Blacks and Gryffindor… I did so much for you, Sirius. I offered you shelter and care when your own blood wouldn’t, I acted as family when you had none, and you repay me by denying me help when I need it most? You pass me on to someone else?”
It hurt – it hurt to the point of a near-physical ache, the words – the truth – tearing into him, an agony worthy of the Cruciatus – and he wondered if this was how he would spend eternity,
“I’m sorry,” he said again, shaking his head as though a simple action could dislodge the guilt from his mind. He stumbled backward but they moved with him, closing the gap. “I’m sorry – I’m so sorry – I never meant to – I only wanted to help –“
“What’s more,” said Lily, her voice the same cold tone as before, “you left Harry. Not only did you kill us, Sirius, you left our son to be raised by people who would never love him properly – left him to spend his childhood in a cupboard under the stairs – when we had expressly asked you to take care of him. You denied us your help, then condemned our son to loneliness and misery merely because Hagrid suggested it.”
“I know – I know – I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking, I was –“
“As bad a godfather as you were best friend,” finished James.
Finally unable to swallow the lump that had been swelling in his throat, Sirius gave a choked sob and put his arms over his head, his hands clutching desperately at his hair.
“Lily – James – please,” he begged (for it was begging, now, between the sobs, and scarcely anything more), “please, I – I tried – I was wrong, I made mistakes, I – I’m sorry, I – I’m so sorry, you have no idea –“
“It’s quite a shame ignorance is not a valid excuse, or you’d be absolved of almost everything, wouldn’t you? You even tried to turn us against Remus – Remus, who has been nothing but kind, who would undoubtedly have done what you didn’t and given us real protection –“
In desperation he slid his hands from his hair to cover his ears – he could not face it, he could not accept it – but their voices seemed impossible to muffle.
“You were family to us, Sirius,” said Lily sadly, “but then, I suppose family has never meant very much to you.”
Well there are definitely like 1000000 more on my other computer but it's getting late so I am stopping with those. If anyone's curious I guess I can post others later. Or something. La la.
*(also? we learnt what a meme is in psych and now that word makes a lot more sense than I ever thought it did before, LIRL)
ETA -
Admittedly they're all still pretty recent. Because the truly old stuff is mostly lost to the abyss of dead hard-drives. But hey. Whatevs.
Zomg angsty Remus/Tonks I am so original =|
In perfect honesty what had always worried him about Dora was her likeness to them – them as they had been, he as he used to be.
He went so far as to try to explain it once, but she hadn’t understood. Of course she hadn’t.
--
“You’re just… you’re just too young, Dora, to understand!”
That only infuriated her. “Oh, for the love of God, Remus, this argument again? At least do me the honour of thinking up a new one! You aren’t even forty, but to listen to the way you talk you’d think you’d lived longer than Dumbledore! What, is there some sort of epiphany you reach at thirty – the turning point of all wisdom and omniscience – that you’ve well surpassed and I’ve not?”
He clenched his teeth. “You know full well, Nymphadora, exactly what I mean. You weren’t involved last time—“
“So?” she shrieked, indignant.
“So you cannot possibly understand --- you are exactly how we were, Dora, and look where it got us!”
She froze, watching him, and even as she did, he noticed that some of her anger and frustration melted away into something like sympathy. She always looked like that, if he mentioned them, and while sometimes it was endearing, other times – like now – it did nothing but highlight her incomprehension.
“And how is that, Remus?” she asked, her voice level, a forced calm.
“You’re…. you’re young, just like we were, naïve, foolish, oblivious to the dangers of –“
Her sympathy was not enough to stem the anger in her voice when she cried, “Oblivious! In case you’ve forgotten in your old age, Remus, I’m an Auror, a fully trained Auror, I’m not oblivious to danger, I know full well how dangerous it is out there—“
“You don’t! You don’t get it – you can’t get it until it strikes you, Dora, don’t you see? Until the danger hits home – until you’ve actually lost someone – you just blindly assume that it’ll only hurt other people, other people’s spouses and children and friends, that somehow, through sheer willpower or luck or young immortality, those you hold dear will be spared and in some near future you’ll be able to look back and reflect on how lucky you were—“
“Stop treating me like I’m an idiot, Remus! Just because this is the first war I’ve fought in --- fought in, I remind you, not lived through, I know you seem to be a little confused about timelines ---“
“I know because I was exactly the same, alright? Of course I knew You-Know-Who was terrible, Dora, of course I was afraid, but never, never did I expect to lose everything that meant anything to me!”
She didn’t retort. On the contrary, she reached for his arm, and he didn’t quite back away. Instead he lowered his voice and continued his plight, determined beyond all rationale to make her understand.
“It was the same for Lily and James and Sirius, Dora,” he continued. “They – they were just like you, we all were, determined and dedicated and scared, yes, but convinced, somewhere, that everything would turn out fine in the end for no reason other than it had to.” He lowered his gaze for a moment, hesitating, before – “Do you really think you’ll die, Dora? Honestly?”
Her second’s hesitation answered the question well enough, but nonetheless she said, “I---well, no, Remus, I can’t say I expect to, but I know that I could, and I don’t see why you’ve got to be so cynical about—“
“Cynicism and realism are different things.”
“Says the pessimist.”
Hahaa and some Snape/Lily I started writing for
nest_of_spiders and never finished. Too bad, I had a nice nasty line all thought up for Lily and everything. ("Oh? And where's your white steed, Severus? Lend it to Voldemort for the weekend?") Even the Severus/Lily shipper in me is so perplexed when I try to write emo lovesick teen Snape. Wtf. O_0Surprisingly – unsurprisingly – ironically – it was beneath the large beech tree by the lake that he finally managed to get her alone.
She had her nose in a book, her hair slung over one shoulder and her Gryffindor tie loose about her neck. She was chewing her lip subconsciously, as always, and against his will he thought of whose lips hers had been so very drawn to lately.
She didn’t look up when he approached, and at the thought something seemed to constrict in his stomach. It had been a year and a half, and he was sure that she had naturally forgotten what he had tried so hard not to remember.
He paused a few feet away, eyeing the lion emblazoned on her robes. It seemed to mock him with its bravery; he narrowed his eyes and took a breath to steel himself before he closed the gap between them.
“You can do better than him, Lily.”
She looked up at once, and the eyebrows that would have once risen in pleasant surprise instead furrowed in displeasure.
“You don’t want to start that discussion, Severus,” she answered coolly.
“Yes, I do, no one else is going to tell you how much better you deserve, they’re all too busy singing his praises and –“
She shut her book with a snap and stood, facing him. When she spoke, her tone clearly indicated the topic was closed for discussion. “James has changed. He is not fifteen anymore. He is a good person.”
Severus shook his head. “He hasn’t. And even if he had – Lily – you deserve better –“
“Better?” She laughed bitterly. “Like who, Severus? You?”
His heart seemed to miss a beat in its frantic allegro; it was a second before he found his voice. “No – that’s not what I –“
She shoved her book back into her bag roughly and tossed the strap over her shoulder. She was glaring fiercely, her eyes alight with anger, her hair falling forward. Severus had always privately thought that Potter must like how Lily looked when she was angry, the way he had always provoked her, but the attraction was not one Severus had ever been able to fathom. Anger didn’t suit her. She was made for gentler things.
“What do you want, then, Severus? What is so pressing that you’ve chosen to speak to me for the first time in a year and a half?”
He felt a twinge of annoyance. “I’ve tried – you’re the one who hasn’t spoken to me!” he yelped. “And you know what I wanted to tell you – you shouldn’t be with him, Lily. He’s not right for you. He’s not good enough.”
There was something agonizing in the way she rolled her eyes and said, “Honestly, Severus, if it were up to you, no one would be good enough for me.”
This was another for
nest_of_spiders -- I think it was the "Mother, Summer, I" prompt. The only time I've written something Peter-centric other than a drabble... too bad it sort of fizzled out.Peter always found it odd that he was the one with the summer birthday.
It wasn’t that he set much store by horoscopes or Divination or star charts. It was merely that when he looked at his friends, their birthdays didn’t seem to fit. James and Sirius were lively, rambunctious, laughing and outgoing and, as best Peter could tell, summer personified – yet their birthdays fell in cold, unremarkable months. Though Remus’ March birthday made more sense, perhaps, than James’, it still puzzled Peter that of the four of them, he was the one born in August, in the midst of summer, when nature was at its peak.
He thought he would have been much better suited to March or November. He was the sort who could slip by unnoticed and morph seamlessly from season to season. Being born in August felt like some sort of obligation he couldn’t live up to –
This was eventually sort of.. condensed into a drabble. I'd forgotten about it. Anyway, I like the idea that Lily and Sirius were the ones suspicious of Remus, and James, being a Potter and therefore trusting to the point of idiocy, refuses to listen to them.
“You’re wrong.” James spoke with utmost conviction and shook his head in a manner that almost seemed to suggest pity. “You’re wrong, and quite possibly mad, too – how can you –“
“You’re not listening to me,” snapped Sirius, seething with frustration. “It’s got to be someone, James, even Dumbledore thinks so, and –“
“And you think it’s Remus? Remus? Remus, who would never even chastise us for fear of losing our friendship, Remus who can scarcely bring himself to be rude to people who’d rather shoot him, Remus who wrote you a three-foot-long panicked letter when he found out you’d run away, Remus who is undoubtedly the kindest person we know – that Remus? Are we talking about the same person?”
James’ voice had turned to something of a sneer and Sirius’ eyes narrowed in return. From her seat at the table, Lily gave a soft moan and buried her head in her hands.
“Do you think I’m bloody excited about it, James?” Sirius smirked. “You think I want to believe he’s been selling you – all of us – out? But it’s got to be someone, hasn’t it, and unless you suspect Peter or Dumbledore or me –“
James’ eyes narrowed, too; when he spoke is voice was cold. “You know full well I do not suspect any of you.”
“You trust me, then?”
“Of course I bloody well trust you, if I didn’t I wouldn’t be having this asinine discussion with you in the first pla-“
“And you trust Peter?”
James’ tone continued to be acidic. “We have been friends since we were five years old. I trust Peter.”
Sirius turned his palms skyward in frustration. “And it’s obviously not Dumbledore, which leaves Remus, James, it’s process of elimination!”
“You are my friends and though we seem to differ on this policy, Sirius, trust is a quality I look for in friendship.”
“For Christ’s sake, James, a madman wants to murder your entire family and you’re worried about being a bad friend? Your blind faith in people is going to get you killed, and Lily and Harry too!”
Sirius’ outburst was met with a silence even louder than the yells. Lily miserably studied the wood grain on her kitchen table, and James stood frozen, stricken.
“Forgive me,” he said at last, his voice cold, “for wanting to believe the best in the people I care about.”
A heavy, defeated sigh escaped Sirius and he turned to look at Lily. “Lily – Lily, help me.”
She cast a terrified glance from Sirius to James. What Sirius was saying made sense – he was right – how else could the Death Eaters have known each of their movements so precisely for the past year? But James… James would be furious at her for agreeing, and she had to admit, the thought of Remus being a traitor was painful, if not ludicrous…
“He’s – he’s got a point, James,” she said weakly, and James rolled his eyes, infuriated.
“You suspect him because he’s a werewolf – don’t look at me like that, either of you, you know it’s true. I thought by now you realized it didn’t matter? Or are Remus and I alone in our naïve belief?”
“It makes the most sense,” said Sirius through gritted teeth, clearly straining to make James understand. “Voldemort’s been recruiting them –“
“He’s been recruiting the rest of the Blacks, too, and yet somehow I still trust you.”
Sirius flinched as though James had brandished a whip; he sent a withering stare at the wall and fell silent. James continued to glare.
With a defeated sigh, Lily looked at James imploringly. “James. James, please. We’re not asking you to agree with us – we’re not asking you to believe it or like it – we just want to be careful. We don’t want to believe it any more than you do, but Sirius is trying to help, and he’s right. The Death Eaters wouldn’t know what they do if there wasn’t a spy. It might not be Remus, but it’s someone, and we’ve got to plan for it.”
James said nothing. Instead he turned the glare on her, momentarily – no doubt for consorting with Sirius rather than with him – before he turned his back to both of them, staring out the window into the garden.
“If,” said Sirius, watching James’ back, “when all is said and done, we find out you were right – that Remus is innocent – then I’ll take the blame and I’ll explain to him that you had complete faith in him. In the meantime, the fewer people who know what the two of you are doing, the better. Anyone who knows the two of you will figure I’m the Secret Keeper --
And this one was just for fun. I think I tried to get it down to 100 words to add it to Puzzle Pieces but I couldn't quite work it out. Anyhow it's for
lexith and bernaner and derangedcalico who will probably never read it. But they are cool kids.“Peter’s not scared of you, Padfoot.”
Sirius arched his eyebrows incredulously.
“—Alright, so he is,” amended James, “but it’s not – well, it’s sort of an awe-inspired fear, more than anything.”
Sirius’ eyebrows remained raised. “So you’re saying that if Peter were a tribe of natives, I’d be the volcano.”
“…Essentially, yes.”
Sirius stroked his chin pensively. “And you – you’d be the sun, you know, the God he worships, giver of life and all that.”
“Remus would be the church built by missionaries,” supplied James. “Nifty looking and neat and all that, but he doesn’t really know what it’s for.”
WOO.
