InsaneJournal

Current mood:	impressed
Entry tags:	death eaters, fic recs, gen, regulus black, severus snape

fic rec: This Masterpiece of Nature (gen with a touch of Severus/Regulus, R)
This Masterpiece of Nature by anneline. Snape had friends; he still has them.

This ~6000-word piece is mostly gen, featuring a bunch of Death Eaters (Severus, Regulus, Bellatrix, Wilkes, Avery, etc), and has very slight Severus/Regulus content (a brief kiss and implied fellatio). It was posted in April of 2005 so is strictly neither HBP- nor DH-compliant, but aside from how Regulus died and some timeline niggles (e.g. Bellatrix would not have been at school with Regulus), it mostly still works very well indeed.

In any event, canon-compliance is not really the point with this one; it's the characters and the overall picture painted. This is a wonderfully delicately handled portrait of these people. Death Eater politics. Bellatrix before she was crazy. Regulus the agitant. Avery the sycophant. Rodolphus being annoyed with all the philosophical talk and just wanting to talk about Quidditch for once. ;) And of course, even the bad guys have feelings when things go pear-shaped for them.

Excerpt, after an opening scene with Severus dusting photographs he rarely touches:

"Severus! Rescue me, why don't you, my dear?" Bellatrix said, "I'm being ravished."

Severus smiled, "I'm no match for Lestrange."

Bellatrix shoved his head with her free hand, "Some friend you are."

Severus laughed and fell forward with exaggerated clumsiness. Really, Lestrange he could handle -- it was Bellatrix you had to watch -- fast as a snake-bite and utterly without mercy.

He rolled down the hill a little and then lay flat on his back in the grass staring straight up. The wide blue sky stretched out, a ribbon tied around the whole future which fate had gift-wrapped just for them -- for him and his friends.

There's no photo of that day.