[Fic] "Cast a Long Shadow (We All Meet in the End)" -- Harry Potter

[edenfalling]

Remix reveal day!

I wrote Cast a Long Shadow (We All Meet in the End): Lily left empty places behind her. A story about family, loss, memory, and the passage of time. Contains familial dysfunction, mention of war and related issues, and offscreen canon character deaths. [The final version is now posted here on AO3 and here on ff.net... but the livejournal version has better comments. *grin*]

(Now you know why I had Petunia and Lily [Rationalization], and adult!Dudley [Points of Division] on my mind this past month or so. *sigh* Obvious Liz is obvious.)

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Cast a Long Shadow (We All Meet in the End) is a remix of Points Where All Shadows Meet, by osmalic. The original story was written for snape_after_dh, which means it takes all DH canon about Snape's childhood acquaintance with Lily and Petunia into account... and then gives one other canon element the finger. In other words, Snape faked his death.

Aside from that element, "Cast a Long Shadow" meshes almost seamlessly with my previous stories about Petunia -- most specifically with Family and Falls the Shadow. I admit that this was semi-deliberate; I have a particular interpretation of Petunia and of the Evans family, and it's hard for me to hold another view in my mind strongly enough to write a story based on it. Using 'Maureen' as the name of Dudley's fiancée, on the other hand, was very deliberate, and was basically a sop to my compulsive need for tidy edges.

On a more random note, I have now created enough backstory for Petunia that I have a bizarre urge to write a semi-comedic romance wherein bank-teller!Petunia meets drill-salesman!Vernon, they flirt awkwardly, she introduces him to her disapproving parents, he introduces her to his unbearable sister, she wonders how to broach the topic of her little sister's magic, and everything is very cute and silly. Then Voldemort brutally murders Mr. and Mrs. Evans, Vernon is horrified by the revelation that magic is real, and Petunia thinks she's lost him... and then he comes back and they get engaged, the end. But I am not going to write that story.

Instead, I am going to talk about remixing. *grin*

You see, "Cast a Long Shadow" is not the story I meant to write. (Though I am quite fond of it nonetheless!) What I really, desperately wanted to do was a sort of backwards mirror version of osmalic's Sea Call Burn, which is a beautiful story about Ron Weasley visiting the Philippines for somber reasons that are only slowly revealed. That story is about grief and promises and letting go. It's also a love song to a particular place and culture, with a bonus theory about every region having its own system and 'flavor' of magic.

I wanted to write about Hermione searching the world for reasons that are revealed upfront (so as to connect the story back to osmalic's story); to have her come to Ithaca and visit Seneca Falls and talk to people and sit on on some classes at the Community School of Magic, Music, and Arts (CSMMA), and so on; to extend osmalic's idea of different magical systems (because America, I am convinced, has at least four or five all muddled together -- immigration and cultural erasure will do that to a country -- and she touched on American magic a little with her HP/Supernatural crossover Turning Pages for New Worlds); and to write a love song to America in general and the Finger Lakes region in particular.

But I was not sure if that idea would have enough connection to the original, and also I suck at real-world cultural intricacies, so I decided to remix "Points Where All Shadows Meet" instead, on the theory that that story, at least, I knew how to do justice. (I had hoped to then have time to attempt a remix of "Sea Call Burn" as well, but alas, it was not to be. Time management is not my friend.)

I think I did generally manage to do Petunia, Snape, and Lily justice. It just took me a lot more frustration and several more trashed outlines than I expected it to. Then I did not get the rough draft finished when I needed to, after which my computer crashed and I had a guest for the weekend, so I had to request an extension, write like a mad thing on Monday and Tuesday, edit on Wednesday (which, thank god, I had off from work), and make my sister do a thematic beta job over the telephone because she didn't have the password to get online from my parents' computer (she was in the NYC area for a work project while my parents were in France) -- but I got it done and I got it in. And while I think, in retrospect, I should have sharpened Petunia's edges more, I am fairly pleased with the final result.

(I am also so relieved I managed to think of a title other than "Four Weddings and a Funeral," because while that is probably the most literally accurate title I have ever thought of, it is so thematically distracting -- honestly, can you read "Four Weddings and a Funeral" without thinking of Hugh Grant and romantic comedy? -- that it would never have worked. "Cast a Long Shadow (We All Meet in the End)" refers to Lily's effect on Petunia and Snape and then to the way both Snape and Petunia end up in King's Cross watching Harry and his family... or at least this is how I handwave it to myself. *grin* It also keeps three words -- 'shadow,' 'meet,' and 'all' -- from osmalic's original title, which may be more immediately relevant.)

Comments

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

I'm really late to comment, but I just finished this fic, and wow. I adore the way you write Petunia, and seeing little bits from your other two stories just made the entire fic seem more coherent. ♥!!

[edenfalling]

Thank you!

Over the years I have come to prefer writing all my fanfic (for each given series) as parts of an internally consistent universe, if you will -- in other words, all my additions to, explanations of, and extrapolations from canon should form a new subcanon of their own. This means that I do not have to keep reinventing the wheel whenever I need to fill in certain gaps or create OCs. My Angel Sanctuary fanfic is probably the most extreme expression of that preference. My HP fanfic, on the other hand, has the most internal variability... probably because it's a preference I developed gradually as I wrote.

Anyway, I didn't start writing Petunia right off the bat, and I never wrote her very often, so while I didn't set out to make "Family" and "Falls the Shadow" work as part of the same continuity, they did share a basic interpretation of Petunia's character, and then as I began to like keeping an inter-story continuity, I made sure anything else I wrote about Petunia didn't blatantly contradict those two stories. I think that sort of inter-story connection is a nice bonus to people who have read all of them, without making any single story so obscure that it won't stand on its own. *grin*