Four Funerals and a Wedding, Part 4
Aug. 29th, 2014 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainFinally got back to this (not coincidentally, I'm teaching R&J at the moment and feeling the need to give them a happy ending). Prior installments of the Half-Blood Prince of Denmark saga are here.
Dialogue is from Act 5, Scene 3 of Romeo and Juliet, except where it isn't. Also, Romeo totally needs a sassy lesbian friend.
Act Four: Graves, Yawn and Yield Your Dead
There were two men fighting in the churchyard, and Helena arrived just in time to see one of them fall. “O,” he cried, “I am slain!”
Helena doubted this, since she had never known anyone who was actually slain to be able to say “O, I am slain!” Still, she rushed to the fallen man’s side, and Summoned her bag of remedies.
In another moment, Severus and Rosaline had joined her. “I cannot believe that Romeo slew Paris!” Rosaline was saying, much too loudly. “Why should he do that?”
“Romeo?” said Severus. “I thought Romeo was in Mantua.”
“He ought to be. But he’s here. There he is, going into the tomb.”
Helena glanced up, registered the shadow of a man entering the Capulets’ monument, and turned her attention back to her patient. His wounds were very serious; he would have bled to death in a matter of minutes if she had not been there.
* * *
“Let’s follow him,” said Severus.
“We ought rather to call the watch.” Rosaline chewed on her lower lip. “But if we do, they will kill him. ‘Tis death for him to return to Verona.”
“Exactly. We don’t need the watch. Let’s handle this ourselves.”
“But if he kills us, as he killed Paris?”
“He won’t.”
Luckily, Rosaline didn’t ask Severus how he knew, because he would have been forced to admit that he didn’t.
* * *
Wordlessly, Severus cast a light Lumos spell, no brighter than the moonlight outside. He knew he really shouldn’t have done it in front of Rosaline, but the tomb would have been pitch black otherwise. Anyway, Rosaline didn’t seem surprised by the flood of light into the shadows. Perhaps she was past being surprised by anything.
“O,” said a voice within the tomb, “how may I call this a lightning? O my love, my wife!”
“Married?” said Rosaline. “To Juliet? But when – how?”
She was still talking too loudly, and Severus trod heavily on her foot, but luckily Romeo didn’t seem to notice. “Arms, take your last embrace, and lips, O you the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death...”
Great, thought Severus. Apparently the Montagues’ heir was not just an amateur poet, but a necrophiliac to boot.
In the dim light they saw Romeo press his mouth to the corpse, and then take a small bottle from his pocket and raise it to his lips. “Come, bitter conduct; come, unsavory guide!”
“What dost thou?” Rosaline exclaimed. “What, what, what dost thou?”
Severus was going to step on her foot again, but she had already rushed to Romeo’s side. He seemed oblivious of her presence.
“Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on the dashing rocks thy seasick weary barque! Here’s to my love!”
“What, what, what drink’st thou?” Rosaline knocked the bottle out of his hand.
Romeo uttered a sharp cry, and dived for it. “‘Tis life to me, not death; I follow her.”
Severus summoned the bottle and what remained of the liquid before Romeo could drain it. “She’s not dead, you fool!”
“Nay,” said Romeo with a sigh, “e’en death cannot ravish one so fair; she rather doth enthrall and ravish him. Yea, as Proserpina was queen of Dis, my lady shall be queen in after-times.”
Severus grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Will you stop trying to be a poet, come to your senses, and look at her?”
There was a clatter at the mouth of the tomb. “St. Francis be my speed!” said a voice. “How oft tonight have my old feet stumbled at graves. Who’s there?”
“Friar Laurence!” called Rosaline. “Come here and speak to Romeo; he is desperate, and hath need of good counsel.”
“Yeah,” said Severus, “come and clean up the mess you made before someone ends up dead. It’s no thanks to you that they aren’t already.”
“You ought not to speak to the friar in such wise,” said Rosaline. “‘Tis not respectful!”
“I’ll speak to him any way I bloody well want to speak to him,” said Severus. “This is his fault. He knows why.”
It was then that Juliet began to stir. “O comfortable friar!” She groped at Severus’s clothing.
Severus yelped and moved away. “I’m not the friar! He’s out there in the graveyard, and he’s got a lot to answer for.”
“Where is my Romeo?”
Romeo seemed, belatedly, to notice his surroundings. “‘Tis my lady’s voice! Her angry ghost returns to mock me, that I tarry here.” He grappled for the bottle of poison, which Severus refused to surrender.
“Romeo! Husband!”
Friar Laurence’s voice rose from the passage. “The watch! Stay not, for the watch is coming!”
Rosaline seized Romeo by the arm. “You are banished – you must not be seen here, or they will kill you.”
Romeo, dazed and apparently still suicidal, made no move to save himself. Rosaline, Severus, and Juliet looked at each other and swung into swift and frantic action. They stripped off Juliet’s wedding dress and veil, forced them onto Romeo as best they could, and made him lie down in the coffin. He didn’t resist. Juliet, dressed only in her shift, stood shivering in the vault as the watch entered with their torches.
“Grave robbers! Go, tell the prince – raise up the Capulets! Run to the Montagues, for this may be some of their villainy!”
A number of the watch obeyed, raising a clamor in the streets, and the others moved to arrest the trespassers. “Here’s the friar – with a mattock and a spade, a great suspicion upon him!” They dragged Friar Laurence into the vault, gibbering and shaking, and began to bind his hands.
“Here’s a stranger! Stay him, too.” Another of the watch laid hands on Severus.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” said Severus, leveling as nasty a hex as he dared at the watchman, who dropped his torch and tried to beat off the cloud of bats that had become entangled with his hair.
“Here’s a woman!” cried someone else.
“A whore, no doubt,” pronounced the head watchman, “for no respectable girl would be out at this hour of the night. There’s no villainy in Verona, but trash such as this hath some hand in it.”
Rosaline stepped calmly forward into the light. “‘Tis only I – Rosaline. There are no grave robbers here. I came to put flowers on my cousin’s tomb, and I found they had buried her – alive! I ran to the friar and this Englishman for help. The Englishman is a guest of my father’s, and very clever. I would that you let them both go their ways, and look to my cousin.”
“Oh.” The watchman who had been trying to arrest her looked abashed. “I ask your pardon, Lady Rosaline, but you must admit that the circumstances looked – suspicious.” He swung his torch around, and the light fell on Juliet. “Lady Juliet! I am overjoyed to see you living!”
Another set of footsteps were entering the tomb. In the torchlight, Severus recognized the prince of Verona and his entourage. “What misadventure is so early up, that calls our person from our morning’s rest?”
Severus decided at once that he disliked people who spoke in the royal plural. King Hamlet almost never did.
“No misadventure at all. Everything’s under control. Go back to sleep. Er, your majesty.” His sixteenth-century friends would have added a “will’t please my lord” or two, but he simply could not bring himself to do so.
“Who’s there?” demanded the prince. “What art thou, that speakst so insolently?”
Severus was saved from answering by the arrival of the remaining members of the Capulet family, accompanied by their guests and servants.
“What should it be, that they so shriek abroad?” demanded Lord Capulet.
“Good news, my lord,” cried one of the watch. “Your only daughter lives! Here she is.”
There was a great deal of fuss over Juliet; everyone kissed her, and Lady Capulet and most of the servants burst into tears. The nurse, who seemed to be the only one capable of doing anything practical, finally draped Juliet in her own cloak and ushered her out of the tomb, just in time for Lord Montague and his nephew Benvolio to arrive.
“Alas, my liege, my wife is dead tonight,” announced Lord Montague. “Grief of my son’s exile hath stopped her heart!”
Montague was plainly hoping that this would make him the center of attention, but he was out of luck. Romeo, who had been playing dead quite effectively up until this point, twitched and stifled a cry at the news of his mother’s death.
Lady Capulet gasped. “O heavens! If Juliet is here, and living – who is that?”
“N-nothing, cousin,” said Rosaline. “Only a trick of the light.”
But the prince’s men had already stepped forward and started pulling off the grave-cloths before Severus could cast a Concealment Charm, and Romeo stood revealed in his wedding gown and veil. He made a rather pretty girl, Severus had to admit.
“‘Tis a hic-mulier! Or a haec-vir!”
“No,” said Lord Capulet, “‘tis a Montague, and a murderer banished on pain of death. He must die.”
“Such is our sentence, yes,” said the prince reluctantly.
“Nay, hear me,” said Rosaline, kneeling before him. “Am I not a Capulet? I say that he shall not die in my name.”
“Nor in mine,” said Diana promptly.
“Nor mine!” cried Juliet, who had torn herself from her nurse’s protective arms.
“Nay, nor mine neither,” added the nurse, “for he is a fair-faced gentleman, and a courteous one, and a most lovely, kind and virtuous one; moreover, he hath a good leg, and a well-shaped – foot, and moreover, he’s my young lady’s husband, and I say that if she had married my lord’s kinsman Paris, she could not have had a better one –”
“Hold thy peace, old woman,” snapped the prince, “thou art not a Capulet, only a servant, and we did not give thee leave to speak – Didst say, thy young lady’s husband?”
The nurse, obediently but entirely uncharacteristically, said nothing.
“Answer me, woman, for the love of God! Do I understand thee to say that Juliet is married to this man?”
Juliet lifted a tear-stained face. “I am married to him, my lord. And if you sentence him to death, you sentence me.”
Prince Escalus looked for a moment as if he gladly would have sentenced the whole pack of them to death. After that his ruler’s instincts took over, and he seized upon the convenient political moment. “Well! Lord Capulet, we felicitate you upon your daughter’s marriage. Embrace your son-in-law, and you, Montague, embrace your daughter. I trust that we will hear no more of this feud, now that the two families are united.”
Lord Capulet and Lord Montague were clearly disinclined to do anything of the sort. They looked only too relieved when another diversion arrived, in the form of Helena, accompanied by a very pale and limping Paris.
Paris looked dazed. Severus nudged Helena. “Did you Memory Charm him?”
“Yes. I thought it better, lest he blame the Montague lad for trying to kill him. Think’st thou I did right?”
“Yes. We don’t need accusations of attempted murder flying around. How the hell did I ever let you talk me into going to Verona?”
“I did no such thing. The accursed carpet had a mind of its own, and I think I shall turn it into a – a tablecloth if we manage to leave Verona without being thrown into prison! What has been happening?”
“Lots of things. Romeo tried to kill himself, because he’s a fool, and then Rosaline saved him and disguised him as a corpse, and then we almost got arrested but Rosaline saved us from that too, and then it came out that Romeo and Juliet are married and the prince tried to order them all to stop feuding, only I don’t think it’ll work. Oh, and Lady Montague’s dead.”
“Why, how can she be dead? She was here not an hour since. She looked ... strange, and I think she was not well, but she did not look as if she were dying.”
“What do you mean, strange?”
Helena described her encounter with Lady Montague in the church. “I meant to follow her, but then Romeo began dueling with Paris, and she flew from my mind. Have I cost her life, in saving his?”
“I don’t know,” said Severus. “It’s possible.” He whispered something to her, and Helena’s hand flew to her mouth.
“Oh! How did I not see that?”
“You were distracted. But there might still be time. Go to the Montagues’ house. NOW!”
Helena vanished in a swirl of cloak. She was really all right, Severus thought, when she wasn’t trying to argue with him. Of course, she tried to argue with him more or less all the time ...
“Now,” the prince was saying, “let us all to our beds; ‘tis many hours past curfew, and there will be time to talk of all these wonders hereafter. ‘Tis enough that the griefs of both our families are turned to joy.”
“Wait,” said Severus. “One last thing. I arrest you, Lord Montague, for poisoning your wife.” Discreetly, he cast the Full-Body Bind, and Montague fell face-down on the ground.
“Iknfess,” he said.
Prince Escalus rolled him over. “Did I understand you to say that you confess?”
Montague blinked and spat out some dirt. “I am guilty. I am in th’ arrest of a stricter officer than you, my Lord; God has punished me by striking me with an apoplexy.”
Apoplexy? thought Severus, and then realized that this was how a Muggle might easily interpret the spell’s effect. It had been a lucky hit. He hadn’t been absolutely sure, but Montague had just made a full confession in front of witnesses, and he’d have a hard time weaseling out of it later. For a moment he regretted that Helena hadn’t been there to witness his coup, and then he recalled that he’d just been telling her that the last thing they needed was accusations of murder flying about. Just as well that she wasn’t there to twit him about that. He had, of course, meant that if they were going to have accusations of murder, he wanted to be the one making them.
He released Montague from the spell, but the elderly lord made no attempt to get up. Two of the prince’s officers carried him away.
Dialogue is from Act 5, Scene 3 of Romeo and Juliet, except where it isn't. Also, Romeo totally needs a sassy lesbian friend.
Act Four: Graves, Yawn and Yield Your Dead
There were two men fighting in the churchyard, and Helena arrived just in time to see one of them fall. “O,” he cried, “I am slain!”
Helena doubted this, since she had never known anyone who was actually slain to be able to say “O, I am slain!” Still, she rushed to the fallen man’s side, and Summoned her bag of remedies.
In another moment, Severus and Rosaline had joined her. “I cannot believe that Romeo slew Paris!” Rosaline was saying, much too loudly. “Why should he do that?”
“Romeo?” said Severus. “I thought Romeo was in Mantua.”
“He ought to be. But he’s here. There he is, going into the tomb.”
Helena glanced up, registered the shadow of a man entering the Capulets’ monument, and turned her attention back to her patient. His wounds were very serious; he would have bled to death in a matter of minutes if she had not been there.
* * *
“Let’s follow him,” said Severus.
“We ought rather to call the watch.” Rosaline chewed on her lower lip. “But if we do, they will kill him. ‘Tis death for him to return to Verona.”
“Exactly. We don’t need the watch. Let’s handle this ourselves.”
“But if he kills us, as he killed Paris?”
“He won’t.”
Luckily, Rosaline didn’t ask Severus how he knew, because he would have been forced to admit that he didn’t.
* * *
Wordlessly, Severus cast a light Lumos spell, no brighter than the moonlight outside. He knew he really shouldn’t have done it in front of Rosaline, but the tomb would have been pitch black otherwise. Anyway, Rosaline didn’t seem surprised by the flood of light into the shadows. Perhaps she was past being surprised by anything.
“O,” said a voice within the tomb, “how may I call this a lightning? O my love, my wife!”
“Married?” said Rosaline. “To Juliet? But when – how?”
She was still talking too loudly, and Severus trod heavily on her foot, but luckily Romeo didn’t seem to notice. “Arms, take your last embrace, and lips, O you the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death...”
Great, thought Severus. Apparently the Montagues’ heir was not just an amateur poet, but a necrophiliac to boot.
In the dim light they saw Romeo press his mouth to the corpse, and then take a small bottle from his pocket and raise it to his lips. “Come, bitter conduct; come, unsavory guide!”
“What dost thou?” Rosaline exclaimed. “What, what, what dost thou?”
Severus was going to step on her foot again, but she had already rushed to Romeo’s side. He seemed oblivious of her presence.
“Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on the dashing rocks thy seasick weary barque! Here’s to my love!”
“What, what, what drink’st thou?” Rosaline knocked the bottle out of his hand.
Romeo uttered a sharp cry, and dived for it. “‘Tis life to me, not death; I follow her.”
Severus summoned the bottle and what remained of the liquid before Romeo could drain it. “She’s not dead, you fool!”
“Nay,” said Romeo with a sigh, “e’en death cannot ravish one so fair; she rather doth enthrall and ravish him. Yea, as Proserpina was queen of Dis, my lady shall be queen in after-times.”
Severus grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Will you stop trying to be a poet, come to your senses, and look at her?”
There was a clatter at the mouth of the tomb. “St. Francis be my speed!” said a voice. “How oft tonight have my old feet stumbled at graves. Who’s there?”
“Friar Laurence!” called Rosaline. “Come here and speak to Romeo; he is desperate, and hath need of good counsel.”
“Yeah,” said Severus, “come and clean up the mess you made before someone ends up dead. It’s no thanks to you that they aren’t already.”
“You ought not to speak to the friar in such wise,” said Rosaline. “‘Tis not respectful!”
“I’ll speak to him any way I bloody well want to speak to him,” said Severus. “This is his fault. He knows why.”
It was then that Juliet began to stir. “O comfortable friar!” She groped at Severus’s clothing.
Severus yelped and moved away. “I’m not the friar! He’s out there in the graveyard, and he’s got a lot to answer for.”
“Where is my Romeo?”
Romeo seemed, belatedly, to notice his surroundings. “‘Tis my lady’s voice! Her angry ghost returns to mock me, that I tarry here.” He grappled for the bottle of poison, which Severus refused to surrender.
“Romeo! Husband!”
Friar Laurence’s voice rose from the passage. “The watch! Stay not, for the watch is coming!”
Rosaline seized Romeo by the arm. “You are banished – you must not be seen here, or they will kill you.”
Romeo, dazed and apparently still suicidal, made no move to save himself. Rosaline, Severus, and Juliet looked at each other and swung into swift and frantic action. They stripped off Juliet’s wedding dress and veil, forced them onto Romeo as best they could, and made him lie down in the coffin. He didn’t resist. Juliet, dressed only in her shift, stood shivering in the vault as the watch entered with their torches.
“Grave robbers! Go, tell the prince – raise up the Capulets! Run to the Montagues, for this may be some of their villainy!”
A number of the watch obeyed, raising a clamor in the streets, and the others moved to arrest the trespassers. “Here’s the friar – with a mattock and a spade, a great suspicion upon him!” They dragged Friar Laurence into the vault, gibbering and shaking, and began to bind his hands.
“Here’s a stranger! Stay him, too.” Another of the watch laid hands on Severus.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” said Severus, leveling as nasty a hex as he dared at the watchman, who dropped his torch and tried to beat off the cloud of bats that had become entangled with his hair.
“Here’s a woman!” cried someone else.
“A whore, no doubt,” pronounced the head watchman, “for no respectable girl would be out at this hour of the night. There’s no villainy in Verona, but trash such as this hath some hand in it.”
Rosaline stepped calmly forward into the light. “‘Tis only I – Rosaline. There are no grave robbers here. I came to put flowers on my cousin’s tomb, and I found they had buried her – alive! I ran to the friar and this Englishman for help. The Englishman is a guest of my father’s, and very clever. I would that you let them both go their ways, and look to my cousin.”
“Oh.” The watchman who had been trying to arrest her looked abashed. “I ask your pardon, Lady Rosaline, but you must admit that the circumstances looked – suspicious.” He swung his torch around, and the light fell on Juliet. “Lady Juliet! I am overjoyed to see you living!”
Another set of footsteps were entering the tomb. In the torchlight, Severus recognized the prince of Verona and his entourage. “What misadventure is so early up, that calls our person from our morning’s rest?”
Severus decided at once that he disliked people who spoke in the royal plural. King Hamlet almost never did.
“No misadventure at all. Everything’s under control. Go back to sleep. Er, your majesty.” His sixteenth-century friends would have added a “will’t please my lord” or two, but he simply could not bring himself to do so.
“Who’s there?” demanded the prince. “What art thou, that speakst so insolently?”
Severus was saved from answering by the arrival of the remaining members of the Capulet family, accompanied by their guests and servants.
“What should it be, that they so shriek abroad?” demanded Lord Capulet.
“Good news, my lord,” cried one of the watch. “Your only daughter lives! Here she is.”
There was a great deal of fuss over Juliet; everyone kissed her, and Lady Capulet and most of the servants burst into tears. The nurse, who seemed to be the only one capable of doing anything practical, finally draped Juliet in her own cloak and ushered her out of the tomb, just in time for Lord Montague and his nephew Benvolio to arrive.
“Alas, my liege, my wife is dead tonight,” announced Lord Montague. “Grief of my son’s exile hath stopped her heart!”
Montague was plainly hoping that this would make him the center of attention, but he was out of luck. Romeo, who had been playing dead quite effectively up until this point, twitched and stifled a cry at the news of his mother’s death.
Lady Capulet gasped. “O heavens! If Juliet is here, and living – who is that?”
“N-nothing, cousin,” said Rosaline. “Only a trick of the light.”
But the prince’s men had already stepped forward and started pulling off the grave-cloths before Severus could cast a Concealment Charm, and Romeo stood revealed in his wedding gown and veil. He made a rather pretty girl, Severus had to admit.
“‘Tis a hic-mulier! Or a haec-vir!”
“No,” said Lord Capulet, “‘tis a Montague, and a murderer banished on pain of death. He must die.”
“Such is our sentence, yes,” said the prince reluctantly.
“Nay, hear me,” said Rosaline, kneeling before him. “Am I not a Capulet? I say that he shall not die in my name.”
“Nor in mine,” said Diana promptly.
“Nor mine!” cried Juliet, who had torn herself from her nurse’s protective arms.
“Nay, nor mine neither,” added the nurse, “for he is a fair-faced gentleman, and a courteous one, and a most lovely, kind and virtuous one; moreover, he hath a good leg, and a well-shaped – foot, and moreover, he’s my young lady’s husband, and I say that if she had married my lord’s kinsman Paris, she could not have had a better one –”
“Hold thy peace, old woman,” snapped the prince, “thou art not a Capulet, only a servant, and we did not give thee leave to speak – Didst say, thy young lady’s husband?”
The nurse, obediently but entirely uncharacteristically, said nothing.
“Answer me, woman, for the love of God! Do I understand thee to say that Juliet is married to this man?”
Juliet lifted a tear-stained face. “I am married to him, my lord. And if you sentence him to death, you sentence me.”
Prince Escalus looked for a moment as if he gladly would have sentenced the whole pack of them to death. After that his ruler’s instincts took over, and he seized upon the convenient political moment. “Well! Lord Capulet, we felicitate you upon your daughter’s marriage. Embrace your son-in-law, and you, Montague, embrace your daughter. I trust that we will hear no more of this feud, now that the two families are united.”
Lord Capulet and Lord Montague were clearly disinclined to do anything of the sort. They looked only too relieved when another diversion arrived, in the form of Helena, accompanied by a very pale and limping Paris.
Paris looked dazed. Severus nudged Helena. “Did you Memory Charm him?”
“Yes. I thought it better, lest he blame the Montague lad for trying to kill him. Think’st thou I did right?”
“Yes. We don’t need accusations of attempted murder flying around. How the hell did I ever let you talk me into going to Verona?”
“I did no such thing. The accursed carpet had a mind of its own, and I think I shall turn it into a – a tablecloth if we manage to leave Verona without being thrown into prison! What has been happening?”
“Lots of things. Romeo tried to kill himself, because he’s a fool, and then Rosaline saved him and disguised him as a corpse, and then we almost got arrested but Rosaline saved us from that too, and then it came out that Romeo and Juliet are married and the prince tried to order them all to stop feuding, only I don’t think it’ll work. Oh, and Lady Montague’s dead.”
“Why, how can she be dead? She was here not an hour since. She looked ... strange, and I think she was not well, but she did not look as if she were dying.”
“What do you mean, strange?”
Helena described her encounter with Lady Montague in the church. “I meant to follow her, but then Romeo began dueling with Paris, and she flew from my mind. Have I cost her life, in saving his?”
“I don’t know,” said Severus. “It’s possible.” He whispered something to her, and Helena’s hand flew to her mouth.
“Oh! How did I not see that?”
“You were distracted. But there might still be time. Go to the Montagues’ house. NOW!”
Helena vanished in a swirl of cloak. She was really all right, Severus thought, when she wasn’t trying to argue with him. Of course, she tried to argue with him more or less all the time ...
“Now,” the prince was saying, “let us all to our beds; ‘tis many hours past curfew, and there will be time to talk of all these wonders hereafter. ‘Tis enough that the griefs of both our families are turned to joy.”
“Wait,” said Severus. “One last thing. I arrest you, Lord Montague, for poisoning your wife.” Discreetly, he cast the Full-Body Bind, and Montague fell face-down on the ground.
“Iknfess,” he said.
Prince Escalus rolled him over. “Did I understand you to say that you confess?”
Montague blinked and spat out some dirt. “I am guilty. I am in th’ arrest of a stricter officer than you, my Lord; God has punished me by striking me with an apoplexy.”
Apoplexy? thought Severus, and then realized that this was how a Muggle might easily interpret the spell’s effect. It had been a lucky hit. He hadn’t been absolutely sure, but Montague had just made a full confession in front of witnesses, and he’d have a hard time weaseling out of it later. For a moment he regretted that Helena hadn’t been there to witness his coup, and then he recalled that he’d just been telling her that the last thing they needed was accusations of murder flying about. Just as well that she wasn’t there to twit him about that. He had, of course, meant that if they were going to have accusations of murder, he wanted to be the one making them.
He released Montague from the spell, but the elderly lord made no attempt to get up. Two of the prince’s officers carried him away.
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no subject
Date: 2014-08-30 03:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-30 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-30 05:46 pm (UTC)Poor Lady Montague. And Romeo comes across as so out of it. And Rosaline being terrible at stealth and good at taking charge of everything else. :D And the Prince just being... exasperated with everybody.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-30 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-08-30 06:09 pm (UTC)For a moment he regretted that Helena hadn’t been there to witness his coup, and then he recalled that he’d just been telling her that the last thing they needed was accusations of murder flying about. Just as well that she wasn’t there to twit him about that. He had, of course, meant that if they were going to have accusations of murder, he wanted to be the one making them.
no subject
Date: 2014-08-30 06:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-28 04:05 am (UTC)So anyway, about six years ago I developed a massive crush on Professor Lupin and started hunting down all the fanfiction that existed about him, but got pretty grumpy because most of it sucked. I'd had this werewolf fascination for ages, but the mild politeness of good old Remus just made it somehow CLICK, and then I discovered your stuff, and it was like you were seeing into my head with the way you interpreted him. I think I read "An Interesting Little Legal Problem" about eight times in those days.
Fast forward to now, and I'm in my last year of college, and my werewolf fascination never quite waned (ha ha) and now I've found myself writing a proper werewolf coming-of-age novel, which is a bit silly but definitely fun to write. (Not QUITE the same as they're interpreted in Harry Potter. But similar in a lot of ways.) And then just last week I suddenly remembered how much I'd loved your stories, and I headed over to FictionAlley and I've been reading them in my breaks at work (I work in a Scottish shop that sells kilts to the millions of tourists that come to the little tourist town that my college is in -- but there are only so many kilts you can sell without going insane, so reading about Charlie Weasley and vampire potions is a good way to kind of rest. Also, I adore Celia the magical ethicist. IF ONLY she were canon.)
Basically I just thought I should tell you that your writing is brilliant and you should really really really think about publishing something original, because I'd buy anything you wrote in a heartbeat. Sorry if this is an awkward out-of-the-blue comment. But it's true, so please keep writing.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-28 04:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-11-09 02:20 am (UTC)