I have been loving the buildup of the way Hermione has been steering the relationship. She does something that my husband and I have learned to do: fix the end goal first, no matter how impossible-seeming, and then work toward it. Snape has not done that until his marriage, tending more toward sweeping his eyes over the scene as it unfolds directly before him, and he is learning Hermione's way now. I noticed it last chapter and it snagged at my consciousness, but I said nothing. It was while Snape was approaching Voldemort after being summoned and he was having escapist fantasies about Life After with Hermione and I was actually worried for him -- no, no! don't break your concentration! in case Voldemort sees this! -- but I see now what you were developing. That this "place" where they are going to hide themselves is actually hope and mutual planning and permission to create imaginative spaces together. This will expand their minds just as the lovemaking has smoothed Snape's skin; they will grow more powerful this way. TBC...

Author's Response: I sort of approach answering such an insightful review the same way - I'm so blown away at the end, I scarcely know what to say - and I know whatever I add will be too inadequate! The theme of Lay Me Low has everything to do with the lyrics - that hope of hiding someone away where they can't be hurt. Now they are learning to do that, instead of just wishing it or longing for it.

What a glorious thing, the healing of the scars!!!!! I love that, I love that, I love that. Yes. That's how it would look if we could see the brain after love has made new connections to repair the old trauma. You have transfixed me with your imaginative explanation of the strangeness of the Australia/memory modification plot point. Oh, it reads PERFECTLY. I kind of can't believe it. It explains every single feeling about that plot point: the uneasy suspicion that JKR's assurance was put on when she said Hermione found them and reversed the charm. The grief when Hermione first told Harry about it, which was presented as her sorrow that they don't even know she exists...but that felt not quite right, or a little incomplete... Yes, it was covering something else. This is amazing.

That other person who didn't want Snape as Hermione does...did you mean that to be Lily? Because I read that completely as Bellatrix, read it as Snape having been her sexual partner for years, and read it as the two lovers being so in synch that they need explain neither whom they are discussing nor the fact that they have both moved past the discomfort of introducing the subject.