Name: purrbecomesthenight reviewed Faces In The Firelight on Aug 07, 2010 03:14 pm

dammit! draco and ginny don't care about politics or family!!!!!!!! this is so heartbreaking....more!

Author's Response: Yeah, it's hard to deal with. They personally don't care, but their family alignments clash and their underlying belief systems aren't quite aligned. Plus, there's a war going on. It isn't a safe situation, and they're trying to go through it as best as they can. :( Glad you like the story, tho.

Name: Anise reviewed Faces In The Firelight on Aug 06, 2010 05:10 pm

Fascinating chapter. The contrast between the two couples works really well-- we can see both the similarities and the differences. Marcus knows that he would do anything he had to do to save Katie, for instance; I think that Draco has kind of convinced himself that he might not do the same for Ginny if he were actually put in that situation. But if it *did* happen, yes, I think that he would. And yet it also makes sense that *Ginny* would be the one who would owl Draco and attempt to break off the relationship because she thinks she's doing for his own good. It's hard to write Draco and Ginny so that they're completely believable according to canon and yet also believable as a couple at Hogwarts that seventh year (I don't know if I've seen anyone do it all that well), and the strange part is that it's not because it's hard to believe it would have happened. It could be because Harry's interest in what was happening to Ginny at Hogwarts during DH was either totally missing, focused on remembering the physical aspects, or very dismissive (laughing when he heard about her being punished for trying to steal the sword, for instance. That was pretty much it for me and Harry after that moment in DH.) That POV was so overwhelming that for me, anyway, it made it hard to imagine what Ginny actually might have been doing. But you're really pulling it off! :) (Katie and Marcus are easier in that way because we don't know anywhere near as much about them.)

Reading D/G as it is written here, we *know* there's a direction it could go in which would make the DH epilogue believable as an ending, which it certainly isn't at the end of the actual DH (pause for hisses and boos... oh, never mind.) But it would also be very sad, because it would mean that this Draco AND this Ginny decided not to grow as people. (In the actual DH, of course, this was sold as a fake happy ending, and-- slap slap slap. I'm better now...;) But the point is that we know and feel the divided loyalties that pull them in different directions. Good stuff. :)

Author's Response: Yeah, well, I'm one of those for whom the Epilogue doesn't exist. So yeah, if I were *completely* into sticking with canon, I could go that way. But HELL NO. (Prolly spoiling my ending, but OMG, that Epilogue is dead to me. DEAD. If I felt better about desecrating books I'd razor it out of my copy.) I've written a few different iterations of Katie and Marcus now, which is really easy to do because we have next to nothing about them in canon, but I'm really fond of this iteration, actually. They're much more grounded, I think. The D/G scenes in this chapter and the last were difficult for me to write because I was trying to keep them in character though this. (At least, what little we know about them as characters in DH, because Harry has no interest or interaction, really. That's another reason the Epilogue of Doom bugs me. Ginny goes from being badass DA member/leader to simpering housewife that obviously has no input into even her children's names? HELL NO. She's capable of more than that, and I really wanted that to come across in this story.