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thequibblah · 2 years

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can I get a directors cut on The AU of All Time, TMWYSL pls 👉👈

haha. all right i will talk about this

(sidenote i wrote a little bit about conceptualising this lily here and about "fuck, you're magic" here, so i will try not to fixate on those points again lest this response become... 900,000 words long)

update: word tells me this is nearly 5000 words long. i am so sorry. how dare i write a oneshot about my oneshot. fuck me

so i actually thought about this piece a lot before really sitting down to write the whole thing, and i had a timeline and a handful of snippets by then. some things were really fixed — i knew the ending, i knew véro and lily becoming friends, i knew james would comfort her, i knew the mulciber aftermath, i knew the bet you haven't kissed any boys scene, i knew that lily would come into 7th year already sort of having feelings for james — but i had a lot of floating bits to slot into the right place depending on how things felt. this ended up being a very fun surprise because some things wound up as important as i thought they'd be (like the cupped palm bit which has to be one of my favourite paragraphs i've written ever), but other things i totally made up on the spot while writing — which, when i sat down to properly do, i did in order — wound up having Thematic Significance. neat!

one example of this is right at the start, "Anything special must glitter, or better still, shine, and Lily Evans was — is — all of those things." i wasn't thinking of the pearl imagery throughout the story when i wrote that, because i hadn't yet written it! but there are two things this accomplishes that i like:

—one is that it hints at the pearl, but in different language, which to me kind of underscores the difference between snape and lily. they come from the same place, if different backgrounds; they are both undoubtedly looking for something magical. but "anything special must glitter" is hopefully reminiscent of "all that glitters is not gold," the first warning that lily isn't and won't be to him what he wants her to be. when lily thinks of the pearl later, she never describes it as "glittering," though she does think of it as having "shine." it's a very minor difference in word choice but i grew really attached to its implications — "glittering" giving the impression of something harder, something multifaceted and maybe deceptive ("glittering" appears in the scene where lily's dad dies), while shining or pearlescent feels softer. and lily's of course searching for softness! and the softness — the pearl! — comes from within her!

—the other is that it muddles up what the shine is referring to. is lily the thing that shines? is lily's secret the thing that shines? obviously lily's glitter fades for snape, in a sense — even if he doesn't stop loving her in whatever form he perceives to be love, she chooses someone else instead of him. but the pearl doesn't fade. is one truer than the other? this symbolic shifting, if you can call it that, is also something lily does with the hazel and the honeysuckle, more on that soon!

i wanted to start this off w snape because the first choice lily makes is about him — or is it? as much as this is a selfless choice at first glance it's also kind of not, it is a choice lily makes because of herself, not just because of her best friend, which is why i wanted immediately to bring in the petunia issue. [side note: the AU actually begins btw with "when she returns to the compartment where Severus waits for her she’s just as cheerful as before," because in "the prince's tale" lily is actually quite upset with snape even on that first train ride and tells him tuney hates me because of you, etc. etc. so technically speaking, it's almost less what if lily chose slytherin and more what if lily reacted differently to the circumstances leading up to her first day at hogwarts!]

one thing i loved doing in this fic is giving time a bit of circularity. this happened mostly organically, which was Wild™, but a lot of callbacks were very easy to work out. the first being of course, the flashforward to seventh year, and nestled within that, lily's throwback to 4th year charms, when james hits his head, and again with the 6th year cry. this is one of my faaaavourite things to do, establishing a future and then cutting back to the present, but i like that i got to establish three futures here, esp with the 4th year bit. i think most people who read it were like, right, that has to be james LOL but also i totally made that up on the fly and was really psyched when the whole fourth year arc sort of took off on its own

anyhoo, another thing that became very clear to me right off the bat is that this lily is lonely enough that she's romanticised her own sadgirl life to heights previously unknown. like, she won't really admit to herself she fancies him (until the train, as we know later), but holy hell is it obvious from the moment she gets his letter — hi. hi. hi. i threw up a bit writing that — and i loved the teen melodrama of it all. she puts down the letter in order to have the right music on while she reads it. truly the girl writes herself

(side note, was there symbolism in james's owl sneaking into her cage? u decide)

and now, to sad bits. i will resist the urge to admit how much of this comes from my own school life LMFAO but there are three big Things for me in "two: bravado." one is the setup for SWM, which i knew right away would still take place as in canon, but with the slightly different angle of...lily's much more aware of and more actively confronted by anti-muggleborn prejudice in this AU. lily's keenly aware of the m word right away, and snape actively protests that he doesn't see her that way — so it'll hit pretty damn hard when he does call her by it.

second is mcgonagall !! i knew i wanted her to play a significant role despite not being lily's head of house, and i loved trying to figure out how she'd be as a teacher to someone outside of gryffindor, which obviously we don't have a solid blueprint for in the main series. i think there's a lot more opportunity for misunderstanding ("Her mouth presses into a thin line, making her look more severe than ever. She’s disappointed in me, Lily realises." LILY HONEY OF COURSE SHE ISN'T!!!!), and i liked the feeling of wariness that lily brings to her interactions with mcg pretty much all the way through, though by the end of the story i'd say she trusts her more than she'd trust any other teacher p much. here i wanted her to be a sort of extra feature of the institutional discomfort that lily experiences — she's certainly well-meaning, and extends lily a helping hand, and lily starts to see her as someone she can be vulnerable around just as much as someone she has to impress, but what's one teacher in the face of [waves hand] everything? just like mary or james can't understand lily's hogwarts experience, neither can mcg

third is the bravado bit, which is really me trying to turn the abstract notion that lily and snape don't think alike into something more concrete. as ive said to some people, snape's advice isn't necessarily wrong on an objective level. his dad's abusive and he has an awful home life, he is naturally inclined to think "keep your head down, things will be fine" is a workable defence mechanism — much in the same way petunia is uppity and demands that lily act like a grown up to get over the sting of never having had magic (and magic is childish) and then to fit in to the kind of life she wants to build for herself. it's just...advice that isn't right for lily. it doesn't work in her situation and it doesn't work for who she is and how she thinks, and this is the start of why she and snape have a friendship that won't survive school

BUT the most important thing is the book shelving in detention. we'll come back to this >:)

another bit i had planned from the start was véro, because i wanted to write a set of slytherin girls in a way i hadn't gotten to with come together (regret of a lifetime). i loved getting to set them up a little bit separately from lily, who has them all at a remove (for understandable reasons) and to kind of get the impression that they're all changing and growing themselves behind her back, particularly véro and christa who stop being actively mean to her fairly soon. and also in regards to this being the soft tease, if you will, ha, as to this lily's sexuality — i wanted to write something a little more true to my experience, which was much less of a big realisation and less focused on the concept of coming out. i also tend to write hogwarts friendships that basically start from day one of school, so this was a fun chance, with lily and véro, to write something very different and also significantly more complicated...

so! now we arrive in fourth year, and james being james. i loved preserving the troublemaker-good student dynamic here, especially because it's not exactly what it seems like — lily also has her fair share of trouble, and james is no academic slouch. and liking him unwillingly (or is it) really starts right here, when she realises he pretends, like her, though slightly unlike her — that despite their many differences they are in some ways the same. he's faking it too!

now, coming to summer after 4th year: lily's been lonely a lot so far, but this is the first time she's actively alone, and i liked being able to establish this as also an uncomfortable state for her — she likes it, but she doesn't like it, just like with hogwarts, just like with slytherin. in a sense she likes it but would enjoy it more if she wasn't forced into it, which becomes clearer in 7th year. solitude is where she finds herself, and like any adolescent person, it's where she tries out different personas to see what suits her best. sometimes it works! sometimes its pretence! more on this later!

back to school and the differences between snape and lily are only getting bigger, as their concerns become so so very different. one big concern that only hit me when i was planning was that the two of them are now prefects together — so how to drive a wedge between them when they're spending that much time together? so the fellowship was a way to finagle some physical distance, while effectively two-birds-one-stone getting her close to remus. being in slytherin she possibly does see the targets of her rude classmates firsthand, aside from herself lol, but i love the lily and remus friendship in canon and i think an important think to preserve in terms of her kindness and open-mindedness was that no matter the universe she's adamant about treating him with the respect he deserves.

but i also didn't want to downplay the arguments between james and lily, because they couldn't take too many steps forward here considering they already have this layer of understanding from 4th year but the bulk of relationship progress was to happen later. despite the fact that they do think alike to some degree, they have their differences — and the differences are how they balance each other out. but so long as they aren't really invested in being nice to each other, the bickering isn't exactly productive. also: “Why are you so determined to convince me, anyway?”

take a wild guess, lily

the loop-back to third year was also to add more circularity, but also to flesh out some of that institutional disconnect. i was thinking especially of a writing project i did in college about women at my university — reading about the specific former college presidents, for instance, who didn't love the idea of allowing women into an educational institution, and then like passing by buildings named after those people, or photos of them in the hallway, is certainly...a time. and i can only imagine what kind of salazar slytherin legacy is easily found in the school library

another growing wedge between lily and snape here is his feelings for her, which i hadn't really dealt with in canon fic but i think a necessarily more wary/observant lily would've found this harder to ignore. i think a friend who has romantic feelings for you that you don't return is honestly one of the most painful, awkward situations to be in ever, and i realised while writing this that it really weighs very heavily on her. she doesn't want to hurt her friend but she knows she already is and eventually the facts will come out into the open!!! it's awful!!! it sucks!!!

now this “Yeah, well. I’m probably gonna regret not leaving him for dead in a few years.” everyone knows was me makin a sly comment about the canon future :")

remember lily finding herself when she's alone? we're finally possibly past the awkward stage of relentless self-reinvention, and the comforting thing in this summer isn't just finding what magic means to her outside of snape — it's also finding véro, and mary, and moving onto the year again, it's remus.

we circle back to the detention!!! remember in first year:

“It’s a mess,” says Potter, “we’ll need to take everything down and start from the beginning.”

there is no book reorganising this time around, because the "taking everything down and starting from the beginning" is happening with THEM! this is the soft reset! this is the halfway mark of the fic! this is the pearl growing!

“Why can’t Petunia find one of those blokes,” she mutters, “someone who tries harder?”

subtlety thy name is not suze

lily's breakdown! i rly wanted this to be about something small, the final paper cut that gets to her. to james this is like... at first shocking but then a big lesson learned — what knocks lily down isn't something big and difficult like bigotry, it's something tiny and personal as academic failure. and yet it's like — the classic crying about one thing when really you're crying about everything in the world, and you really can't be okay afterwards, even if some cries are satisfying. but i think what makes this one especially painful is like...it's so easy for james to comfort her. it's so easy for him to just be nice, even though they're really only cordial to each other at best at this point.

which begs the question: if this frenemy classmate of hers could have held her while she cried, why the fuck can't more people just be nice? why can't more people just be good? and this like, brings back the suppressed thing all the way from first year (when she told herself she couldn't cry at school anymore), which is, well is it me then? like, am i the problem here?

(and worst of all — oh no i like him in its most repressed form. one of the most fun things about this lily is how she won't even admit she fancies him but she's really getting ahead of herself on so many other counts, like, she's worrying about what sirius thinks of her? GET A CLUEEE)

Gryffindor wins the Quidditch Cup and Christa silently fumes for all of May. Lily wants to be sympathetic, but she’s not particularly invested in house Quidditch anyway. James is nauseatingly happy in lessons, all the way through to the end of term.

oh yes lily. these things are all sooooo unconnected

7th year time! now seems like a good spot to talk about some fun elemental symbolism that i'd been seeding through out but really comes to the forefront here. despite the similarity in thinking, which even lily is on some level aware of, she sees the difference in them very clearly, and this story is deep enough in her perspective that those differences are really heightened in metaphor. james is all fire and air — he's dynamic, he's angry, he's energetic, his room's in a tower, he's sunlight. lily is all water and earth — even when she's angry, it's more torrential than it is hot; she's cold where he's warm, etc. obviously the contrast is very in your face with the rooms. but there are some little bits where that consistent theme is interrupted, which i'll get to in a hot sec

circling back to lily and solitude:

Happy. Is it as easy as having a room of her own and enough distractions to draw her away from the dungeons?

like i said earlier, solitude kind of sucks when it's not by choice, and lily's learning here that she doesn't mind being alone when she still has her friends! she has her lil mermaid pal, she has véro and remus and mary and james (eyes emoji)

the kiss! it happened on halloween partly for the solitude purposes tee em, but also of course because i love pain and halloween is, you know, That Day. he is playing with a lighter because obviously, fire symbolism. but as much as she wants to be able to trust him openly and right away, she hasn't even really... told him she's into him, ha, and she's automatically defensive right after the kiss even though she's wanted this for six months easily. the trust, funnily enough, starts to be really consciously built only after they've kissed.

okay, now, his room — all fire (even in the stars!), all air, obviously, but "this weightless, wave-rocked sensation," and the glass of the window was supposed to be reminiscent of still water. boundaries, blurring! there will be more of that in her room, too, with the candles! (”Sun, near-summer, spilling and sighing across the clear glassy Lake,” anyone?)

the bit where she doesn't ask him to stay for christmas too is a very. i was saying this also in the discord, where this lily is so conscious and wary of being a taker in relationships despite being sooo blind to people she's let in who aren't going to give as much as she will. but her cute little holiday was also an extension of the solitude by choice — i also wanted to emphasise that despite her loneliness lily does find ways to make hogwarts more comfortable for her, her own way. she befriends the mermaid, which was this random silly idea i came up with for the prefect's bathroom scene and then got SO attached to, and she hangs out with hagrid, and this bit i really am so fond of because...she's still a kid, and despite everything she does get to enjoy being young and being silly without awful things happening

oh shoutout to my favourite lily line of dialogue:

“No, James,” she says, drily, “I was unexplored land before you.”

i love her

OH hello hazel and honeysuckle! so, this is a poem that routinely makes me want to scream and cry and go feral, because of the whole dying together theme, but what i liked about how i got to use it here was that symbol shifting thing i talked about at the start. like, in the poem itself hazel and honeysuckle are supposed to symbolise the lovers together, but lily thinks "maybe he doesn’t even need her for that" — maybe he's both on his own, like he's already whole enough without her. and through the course of the story allowing herself to 1. be more vulnerable 2. admit that she really does care for him 3. accept that the hardship she's endured is not her even if it defines her in many ways, finally leads her to that last moment — maybe she's honeysuckle

my favourite running thread btw:

She spends afternoons picking her way through the trees, fingers of sunlight filtering through the leaves to press new freckles across her arms and shoulders.

Potter’s eyes are sunlight through trees. They always manage to find her.

...for someone made of sunlight, flimsy and golden and always out of reach, he is surprisingly solid.

James is still laughing when he presses his mouth to her skin. Counting her freckles with his tongue. She can feel each one like a brand, suffused with second sunlight once he’s through with them.

Nothing lives in secret forever. Parts of it start to show, because sunlight finds everything, searing and truth-telling and shadow-scattering. James gives Mulciber a black eye...

hospital wing time! so, this seems like a good place to point out that james is injured multiple times through this fic and we see him convalescing, but we never see that with lily. this was sort of accidental — i didn't really think we'd gain much by seeing her after being, say, hexed by mulciber and avery — but also felt narratively consistent. like, lily is so preoccupied with projecting invulnerability that she'd rather not even consider the times she's hurt, that she'd rather reinvent herself in the city than roam the woods and address her grief, that even ducking into mcg's office feels like giving up.

also, one thing i love doing is having phrases loop through internal monologue and dialogue — part of it makes you wonder when this story is being told, if thoughts are then spoken aloud? but part of it is also the loveliest thing about growing close to someone, where you start to adopt their speech, so:

...two of his favourite words, sure and obviously, obvious to whom? Only to him...

at the very start versus here

“Yes! Obviously!” [...] He scoffs. “Obvious to whom?

and the way lily repeats back snape's advice re: ignoring and receives the same disbelief that she herself felt when she first heard it.. your honour theyre the same

and lily realises this to some extent, subconsciously — that she can't really tell him off for doing what she wishes she'd done, that she can't tell him to fight his nature when she knows how fruitless and painful and difficult that is. but she can tell him not to be an idiot when he fights back

After this interaction Lily excuses herself for the loo, and realises on the walk there that her hands are shaking. She presses them to her stomach, wondering what the fuck is wrong with her. They’re just his friends. She’s not even his anything, just — just his— Not even his anything.

the nervousness here btw was like... palpable to me while i was writing it — i could not have finished that sentence because lily refused to. this is the scariest part of admitting you're not aloof and above it all after so long pretending you could be: you really fuckin badly want to be liked!!!! ooomigod!!!!

but trust, again, continues to build. lily went from worrying he'd betray her confidence to worrying how he'd take the kiss to worrying that the people around him wouldn't accept her even if he has to now just...her anxiety can't convince her that something will go wrong!

also fun note: i did not realise this until after the pearl motif was well and truly in it, but the janis joplin album with "trust me" is in fact called. "pearl"!

ok "she leaves the path" was my more subtle quote from "chevrefoil" — it's the bit where the queen leaves, er, the path jdfghk to secretly meet tristan. but also of course the moment when lily goes full fuck it!

oh hey look:

“I’ll happily do penance,” he retorts, “just tell me where, when, and how.”

haha remember:

As if something’s going to happen, but she doesn’t know where or when or how.

jokes on u all i just repeat the same words and call it a callback

ok this is kind of a minor point but one thing i liked was in a very restrictive, stifling environment for lily trying to emphasise when things cross boundaries upwards or downwards, so here as they descend to the dungeons:

He sighs a happy sigh, directs it towards the high ceiling. Lily watches it float up, up, up.

but also her sighs wafting into the air in his room, etc

surely everyone and their mother noticed the orpheus and eurydice reference here so i won't belabour it, but i will say note the half-inversion — they're going down, as opposed to going up out of the underworld, but it's still "orpheus" taking "eurydice" to his home, so to speak?

ok so heRE i didn't want to describe james's room the first night she goes there — it gets a brief this-is-so-different but we quickly jump time. whereas i think this part might actually be the longest the story stays in one place temporally. this is like, it for lily, a pivotal moment wrapped up in belonging and acceptance and admission and vulnerability and love all at once.

with the you're sweet, which i mentioned in that ask about "fuck, you're magic," james was obviously delivering an extremely targeted compliment, but here in his excitement about the room again he's just...actually pretty hype! this is wild! as lily so astutely observes, he loves discovering hidden things, but it's the smallest and yet most rewarding thing ever when someone you care about reacts exactly the way you hope for when you show them something important to you — and this is what makes things finally click for lily, this tiny but utterly james moment that in his own way mirrors the way she sat by the glass on the first day she saw the room.

this final thing — knowing that she loves and trusts him — is what does away with her fear in this moment. i would say maybe more important than showing him the room or deciding to sleep with him (both of which she considers openly for a long time as likely possibilities) is the fact that she can find pleasure without fear the way she so badly wants — and is envious that he can manage — even though she does say hang on a couple of times.

also the "have you done it before" was a callback to the summer lily's dad died, when "She just shrugs and smiles, like she’s done it all a hundred times." it's just so Much for her to not just be able to not put walls up around him, but also to know he won't take her put-together, in-control aloofness for fact!

and now we're here. so. We Need to Talk About Véro.

the response to her was mostly as expected which i'm very pleased about jkdhfgkd a lot of "nooo i was rooting for her!!" so thank you guys for that. what i liked exploring with her was the ~evil~ of the bystander — she's not malicious, she's not spiteful, she just...stands by while lily's bullied, which okay maybe you can forgive a 12 year old for that, but when push comes to shove, at 17, véro just...doesn't push back, again. to me this moment isn't one in which she decides to out lily to her classmates — it's one in which she perhaps really did try to stop amabella, but didn't do enough.

véro does come from a very different world than lily — she's a bit of a cynic, she doesn't think things change by the willpower of teenage students, she's certainly not a blood purist but she doesn't know how to dismantle this thing that she's grown up with as an age-old institution. remember how christa mellowed out and became sort of decent to lily? things change without lily noticing. in a year where véro didn't have her only friend in the dorm with her, but did have a girl who strongly disliked her for very personal reasons, her life probably did get harder. as hard as lily's, those early years at school? probably not. but she can't make that comparison in her own head. maybe standing at lily's door she thought, well if i just let this happen and it seems like an accident then maybe amabella will leave me alone... there are plenty of things she could have (and maybe even should have) done better — but she's not that girl.

lily recognises that. and i think the big show of growth/maturity for her here is that she considers several different possibilities (hating véro for this, forgiving véro right away, blaming herself for having left the key out) and then decides you know what, not worth my energy right now. she faces a complex issue and instead of worrying it's her fault, she accepts that it's probably more complicated than véro secretly hating her, and also decides it's not something that can earn her immediate forgiveness.

right, i love you that was very nice, etc etc, now to slughorn and minnie! ha. this was actually one of the first things i came up with because i feel like i've never seen it in fics where james and lily get physical (though i'm sure it exists). they go to a traditional british boarding school; i'd imagine teachers would not exactly be thrilled to hear they're having sex. i toyed with several different outcomes here but finally decided to cut them some slack and have them get away with it lol — partly also because the violation of privacy with lily's room would have been so compounded if the girls had, like, seen james in there, and i decided what she did not need was another breakdown.

we arrive now at the end! thank you for reading this whole thing. dear god. i apologise.

#clare with no i #this has no right to be this long #tmwysl #director's cuts #ask me

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