Rare Pair Shorts

Dearest MA, what a wonderful story you wrote. Your summary had me enthralled already, radiating tension but also a fleeting sort of melancholy (and there are only a few people who can drag me in already like that with only a summary…)

God, it was beautiful, and I read it slowly, wanting to taste every sentence. It felt so very dreamy and atmospheric, and there was a subdued sadness over it like a blanket, nothing too heavy, but also omnipresent, seeping into every corner and angle of their past, present, and future.

I love how you tell us only snippets, sentences that create a lot of suggestion but not really explaining. And you don’t need to, since you’re drawing heavily from canon and embed your story within existing story lines, which works so perfectly here. I love how you gave your own spin to canon in how Sirius lives, explaining how Sirius escaped the veil, but not going deeply into the technicalities, only mentioning it so you can focus on the atmosphere and their emotions and character yet again. The veil reminds me of the peacefulness within the scene of Dumbledore and Harry at the train station, the blissful calm, but coming at the price of sacrificing the ability to change something in the world of the living. Having the choice.

I also love the balance between hope and sadness, how you don’t erase the effect the war has had on Sirius and Harry. I think all the things in life are ultimately shades of grey, and I think you execute that perfectly well here. How attractive the veil is, how double it is for Sirius to come back: how he sacrifices a ‘life’ without responsibilities, pain or suffering for Harry, for finishing what has been started in PoA. I just reread PoA and I could barely read the passages with Sirius because I knew I would fall in love with him all over again, only to have JKR killing him off some books later. You give me what I longed for so much, namely Sirius being alive, being a godfather to Harry, but at the same time you subtly but resolutely shove reality in my face: namely that neither of them are undamaged, the past of Sirius and the effects of that on his character, on the way he sees the world, his memories and his sleepless nights. And for Harry, having his godfather back, but also the post-war nightmares, the confrontation with all the people who aren’t there anymore, how to build a relationship with his godfather. Them gliding into a sexual relationship, probably born out of comfort, out of memories, out of understanding each other without words since they’ve been through so much, it makes perfect sense. To me, it also worked really well you only write a few sentences about it, so I could fill in the details myself, and imagine myself how this works, how they work together. It’s smattered with grey shades again, I’m happy for them that they find comfort with one another, but you also gently break my heart a little when I think of what makes them want each other: not only attraction, but also (mainly) all the memories, the shared nightmares, the mutual need to have someone who understands what they’re going through.

I also think the loss of Padfoot is brilliant: it adds to the bleakness imho, the inability to escape, another way to show us what Sirius has sacrificed, and how they both have to make do after the war, the dreamy sadness contrasting with the dreamy ignorance of the Veil. But there’s still some hope, in that they have each other, and seem to understand each other, and seem to be able to give each other what they need. I think you wrote a brilliant little story, MA. It felt dreamy, atmospheric, like a soap bubble so fragile I couldn’t really grasp or it would pop in my hand, with a perfect balance between realistic post-war sadness, and hope. Really amazing <333