Name: grownupron reviewed Fruition on May 11, 2011 09:15 am

I like how you kept Draco in canon, evil, cowardly and selfish but not as evil as his family or Voldemort.

Author's Response: One of my biggest battles when writing this was Draco's moral weakness - he'd have a watershed moment and then back away from it immediately because he wasn't brave enough to back it up. Glad to hear that all my wrestling paid off!

Name: Anise reviewed Fruition on Apr 29, 2011 06:42 pm

Another great chapter! All of the Slytherins are so believable, too (even though I personally have a soft spot for Vince and Greg and tend to write them in a way that's very OOC, really. ;) Those are the kind of idiotic jokes that they probably would have made in that situation. And canon was interwoven so well with your take on what was going on in Draco's head.

Now, about Ginny... I don't know if I have the most puppy-unicorn-rainbow POV on her, because I'm not sure how much I would really put past her, even though I do think she's on the side of "good." (But then, compared to Voldy, what really *isn't* going to be the side of "good"?) There's something about your Ginny that seems to me to be ruthless in some hard-to-define way. A good example is the way that Draco thinks about how Ginny got him to act against his own best interests and risk getting into a lot of trouble, and then, in his own words, "rewarded him handsomely" (ahem. The cat wasn't on the keyboard for that.) Draco almost does seem to be either on the verge of knowing what's going on here or of believing the worst, and the most fascinating part of all is that we don't really know if we can trust his take on things or not. Did Ginny actually "reward" him, or does she just love having sex with him because he's her boyfriend? Is his understanding of the situation due to his own cynicism, or because Ginny is more than a little manipulative? Is Ginny using Draco, even in a good cause? After all, she indeed didn't come back to school, and we don't know yet if she sent him any word about what actually happened to her. I definitely see Draco as being more dependent on Ginny than she is on him at this point, and yes, I do think, on the whole, that she's using him. Yet I don't think she can help using him, and I do think that she does care about him. The question is how much-- and how much depth of caring is she even capable of? Those questions very much remain to be answered.

Author's Response: Teenaged boys...so uncouth. I think C&G must have some redeeming traits (even though we don't see any here) for Draco to have suffered them for as long as he did. They were confidantes as well as henchmen...at least when they were twelve. Your perception of Ginny as ruthless interests me but doesn't surprise me. She was all (funny) business for the first half of the story and they've spent so much time as adversaries. The whole story up to the last couple of chapters has been them taking whatever they can from each other. I didn't realise that Draco was still coming off so cynical wrt Ginny. I was going for something a bit more tongue-in-cheek, like, "I'm forced to sex up my hot girlfriend on a regular basis, woe is me." Still, yes, I see the implications of what he said...am I putting stuff in subconsciously?? Now I'm pondering the philosophical questions you pose here: is Ginny using him to propagate her beliefs or giving him the freedom to act on his, and if she *is* using him, do the specifics of the situation exonerate her? What's that you say? I should've thought these things through BEFORE I started writing?

Name: Boogum reviewed Fruition on Apr 28, 2011 09:11 pm

Great chapter! Once again, you conveyed the emotions beautifully. I like how you used Greg and Vince to show the shift in power that Draco is going through.

Author's Response: Thank you! Not gonna lie, I found the dialogue on the train pretty revolting but I felt like it had been a while since we'd been able to evaluate how isolated Draco is. Ginny's become his personal retreat again, like she was last year.