Commentary for "Flying"
Mar. 30th, 2007 01:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynneSo, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gehayi asked me to comment on three of my fics; since "Flying" was the shortest, I figured I'd do it first. :)
Wow, I wrote this almost exactly three years ago. I even still like it fairly well, which is not always the case with some of my older fics. *g* But considering how long ago it was, I don't remember what I was thinking as I was writing it, so I'll just give you what I think now.
Anyway, I wrote it as a drabble request, for James/Remus/Sirius with Quidditch. Except that most of my drabble requests end up being way too long to call them drabbles, because I don't know when to shut up. So, watch me ramble all over this fic. :p
Remus found few things as exhilarating as flying.
Well, there was having sex. But flying and sex couldn’t really be compared. The wind whipping your hair in all directions was nothing like sweat pasting it to your forehead. Yelling out in utter joy of flight was not like screaming out your orgasm. And riding a broom was nothing like riding your boyfriend.
Well. Boyfriends. Assuming neither of them laughed themselves silly at the idea. Which they were all too likely to do, especially as James still tried to say that he was straight and that it was just a matter of time until Lily went out with him (whenever James said this, Remus and Sirius just snorted and asked him what he was doing in bed with them then? James never really could answer them satisfactorily, only saying that a bloke would do anything for sex and didn’t they know that by now, being blokes themselves?).
Anyway. Back to flying. And why Remus was standing outside on the Quidditch pitch in the middle of the night with his broomstick, tapping his toes and looking at his watch every few minutes.
The tone really shifts here, from humorous to serious. That still sorta bothers me, especially considering that the fic ends up rather bittersweet. The first few paragraphs seem sorta out-of-place, but I think that I'd originally intended to write something humorous, and then things ran away with me and they just didn't end up that funny. But I can blame some of it on POV, since Remus is about to do something he loves and isn't thinking about its effects on James and Sirius.
When the two figures appeared, he hissed, "You’re late," and made to get on his broom and just take off, but Sirius grabbed the collar of his robes to make sure he didn’t go anywhere, and James grinned and put down the box he was carrying.
"Patience, Moony," James teased, kneeling down to open the box.
"Stuff patience," Remus said succinctly, "I’ve been waiting for you for fifteen minutes. At least you brought it."
James sniffed. "Course we did. You asked for it, didn’t you? And we told you we’d bring it, didn’t we?"
Remus half-smiled, almost mollified. "Take you awhile to get it out of Hooch’s office, did it?" he asked, and James nodded.
"Took us awhile to find it, and then we saw Mrs Norris and had to double back out of the way so Filch wouldn’t find us," James explained.
"Well, all right then," Remus said grudgingly, then brightened. "Let’s see it."
James held up a finger. "You know that if we lose this, we’ll all be crucified, don’t you?" Remus nodded eagerly, and James sighed, then reached into the box and pulled out a golden ball with fluttering wings, straining to escape against James’s hand. "You sure you can catch it?" James asked, raising an eyebrow.
Remus nodded excitedly. "Yes James, I’m quite sure. Now let it loose…?"
I like that, how impatient he sounds, and how obvious this conversation makes it that he really wants to chase the Snitch, and loves it. The parts of the fic that explain why Remus loves it so much seem a bit exposition-heavy to me, and rather more telling than showing. Prettily-worded telling, but still. And while dialogue can be just as exposition-heavy as prose, I think this conversation illustrates Remus's love just as well, if not better, than my long paragraphs with James's and Sirius's observations.
James smiled and opened his hand, and in an instant Remus shook Sirius’s hand off his robes and pushed up off the ground, zipping into the air with a whoop. He flitted around the air above the field, chasing something that neither James nor Sirius could see, but that Remus apparently could.
I'm not too fond of the POV shifts in this fic. I do think that they're fairly smooth and that you can tell who's thinking what, but I'd never write a fic that way, now. It's not quite omniscient, and it's not quite limited, so it bugs me. If I had to rewrite this fic right now, I'd probably do it entirely from Sirius's POV.
After a moment of watching him, James turned to Sirius and said, "You’re awfully quiet tonight." Not quite a question, but apparent enough that James was asking him something.
Sirius glanced at him, then looked up at the sky again, where Remus, in his black robes and hood, could barely be made out against the backdrop of stars. "He’s beautiful, isn’t he?" Sirius asked quietly. "And it’s obvious that he loves this at least as much as we do. I know I wouldn’t be able to see the Snitch in the dark, but he can."
James and Sirius are really being very selfless here--they also love flying and Quidditch, but they're letting Remus have his moment.
James shrugged. "His night vision’s always been a good thing for us," James pointed out, and Sirius nodded.
"I wish he’d try out for Seeker," Sirius said quietly. "He’s made for it, and look how much fun he’s having up there." Above them, Remus had just caught the Snitch, raising the fist with the fluttering golden ball above his head before letting it loose again and taking after it with an exuberant laugh.
"You know why he won’t," James replied just as quietly, and Sirius nodded. They both knew why Remus would never try out for Seeker, though Remus himself had never told them—he hadn’t needed to. It wasn’t necessarily that he was afraid the full moon could possibly come while he was flying. No, James as Captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team as well as Head Boy could always make sure that Gryffindor’s matches were scheduled well away from the full moon, and that if any ever did manage to last that long, reserves would be expected to be brought in eventually. No one would ever find out from Quidditch that Remus Lupin was a werewolf.
That paragraph was a deliberate refutation of a bit of fanon that I was constantly coming across. It seemed that almost everyone agreed that Remus didn't particularly care for flying and Quidditch, but that even if he did, being a werewolf would prevent him playing in case a match ran over the full moon. That just didn't make sense to me, for the reasons I detailed above, so, typical of me, I used fic to illustrate why I didn't agree with that bit of fanon.
But up there, up among the stars and the night breezes, Remus was free. He could chase something that wouldn’t be hurt if he caught it, and he wouldn’t hurt anyone else in the pursuit of it. With no one else in the air, Remus could dash to and fro wherever he wanted, and he didn’t have to worry about anyone else. He could let go, completely and totally, and give himself up to the wind and the air and the golden Snitch, and no one would stop him. In the middle of the night on a nearly deserted Quidditch pitch, there were no opposing teams trying to stop him, no people to dodge around, no winning or losing anything except altitude and speed.
Up in the air with no one else there, Remus could just be himself. He could go as fast as he wanted, indulge himself in a bloodless hunt, and still taste sweet victory when he caught his quarry. He had no one to call him to task for letting himself loose.
This isn't the first time Quidditch has been written as a form of sublimation--I remembercopperbadge's fic "Sublimation and the Snitch", which even included Remus as its "author"--but there's more to Quidditch than the sexual subtext. I have come across other fics that spell out directly that sports are outlets for human instincts not necessarily socially acceptable, like stalking and hunting, but I guess I was a bit more subtle here. At the time, I think I was proud of myself for my insight. :p
Looking up at him, James felt an unidentifiable pang in his chest, one he didn’t care to try and examine too closely. Remus was really alive up there. He didn’t need anyone else. Glancing at his best friend, James saw that Sirius had closed his eyes, an expression of intense longing on his face. Sirius had come to this conclusion long ago, James suddenly realized. But what it was that Sirius was longing for, James didn’t know. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to. One major revelation about one of his best friends was enough for this night.
Sirius opened his eyes again almost painfully. He wasn’t sure what he was longing for either, but he couldn’t look away from Remus, not anymore. Not when Remus’s elation was so palpable, even as far away as he was. And Remus was still there, still chasing that golden ball, and Sirius couldn’t stop watching, even though he felt sure that any moment his heart was going to burst free of his chest, it was beating so hard. But Remus’s utter grace in the air and fierce joy when flying, hidden from everyone else and shown only to James and Sirius, was impossible to look away from. Nothing made him so happy as this, and Sirius knew it. Now James knew it too. Sirius wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
There are things about Remus that Sirius just doesn't want to share, whether it's Remus's love or Sirius's own knowledge about part of Remus. Especially considering that James still professes love for Lily--indeed, does love Lily, however much he also cares about Sirius and Remus--and therefore his investment in their little trio is somewhat less than Sirius's. Sirius still enjoys that trio, but there's some definite OTP underlying the OT3 here--just as one would probably expect from me. :p
Eventually Remus caught the Snitch again and decided to land, drifting down almost sedately towards the ground, the winged ball in his fist struggling to get free. As he came closer and closer to where James and Sirius were standing, they could see the grin on his face, the shine in his eyes, the way the wind had left his hair tangled and he didn’t seem to notice. His feet touched the ground and he swung his legs off the broom, and his hair obscured his face as he bent to put the Snitch back in the box, and when he straightened up again and looked at them both, Sirius was sure that this time his heart really would pound itself out of his chest, or at the least that Remus would hear it. He wished that he’d put that expression on Remus’s face. But seeing Remus, with his windblown hair and his ecstatic grin and his flushed cheeks and the shine in his eyes, Sirius knew it was only flying that could do this to him. Only flying.
But when Remus put his arms around Sirius’s and James’s waists, it was hard to be jealous. When he pulled them closer to him and leaned his forehead against theirs, when he smiled at them and laughed quietly, it was hard to remember that they weren’t the center of his life. When he kissed them hungrily, and all three of them struggled out of their robes and sank to the ground on their makeshift blanket of black fabric, it was hard to think that he wasn’t made for this, for lying with them and kissing them and fitting with them. But when they were up in their room again, and Remus was asleep in his arms and Sirius was awake in the dark, it wasn’t so hard to remember that what Remus loved most in this world was flying.
This fic really did end up very bittersweet. There's this thing that Remus loves so much, that gives him a sense of freedom he gets pretty much nowhere else, and yet that love and that freedom keep hurting poor Sirius. We all know that James will eventually leave them for Lily, and that the Remus/Sirius pairing is just full of pain throughout the course of canon, so of course I had to add another thing that will make things even harder for them. It also doesn't have my characteristic happy/hopeful ending--the fic presents things as they are, and doesn't try to pretend that it'll get better--though alas for the days when the most Sirius had to despair over was that Remus loved flying more than him!
Anyway, it was really interesting to revisit this fic again, three years later. Thank you,gehayi, for requesting it!
gehayi asked me to comment on three of my fics; since "Flying" was the shortest, I figured I'd do it first. :)Wow, I wrote this almost exactly three years ago. I even still like it fairly well, which is not always the case with some of my older fics. *g* But considering how long ago it was, I don't remember what I was thinking as I was writing it, so I'll just give you what I think now.
Anyway, I wrote it as a drabble request, for James/Remus/Sirius with Quidditch. Except that most of my drabble requests end up being way too long to call them drabbles, because I don't know when to shut up. So, watch me ramble all over this fic. :p
Remus found few things as exhilarating as flying.
Well, there was having sex. But flying and sex couldn’t really be compared. The wind whipping your hair in all directions was nothing like sweat pasting it to your forehead. Yelling out in utter joy of flight was not like screaming out your orgasm. And riding a broom was nothing like riding your boyfriend.
Well. Boyfriends. Assuming neither of them laughed themselves silly at the idea. Which they were all too likely to do, especially as James still tried to say that he was straight and that it was just a matter of time until Lily went out with him (whenever James said this, Remus and Sirius just snorted and asked him what he was doing in bed with them then? James never really could answer them satisfactorily, only saying that a bloke would do anything for sex and didn’t they know that by now, being blokes themselves?).
Anyway. Back to flying. And why Remus was standing outside on the Quidditch pitch in the middle of the night with his broomstick, tapping his toes and looking at his watch every few minutes.
The tone really shifts here, from humorous to serious. That still sorta bothers me, especially considering that the fic ends up rather bittersweet. The first few paragraphs seem sorta out-of-place, but I think that I'd originally intended to write something humorous, and then things ran away with me and they just didn't end up that funny. But I can blame some of it on POV, since Remus is about to do something he loves and isn't thinking about its effects on James and Sirius.
When the two figures appeared, he hissed, "You’re late," and made to get on his broom and just take off, but Sirius grabbed the collar of his robes to make sure he didn’t go anywhere, and James grinned and put down the box he was carrying.
"Patience, Moony," James teased, kneeling down to open the box.
"Stuff patience," Remus said succinctly, "I’ve been waiting for you for fifteen minutes. At least you brought it."
James sniffed. "Course we did. You asked for it, didn’t you? And we told you we’d bring it, didn’t we?"
Remus half-smiled, almost mollified. "Take you awhile to get it out of Hooch’s office, did it?" he asked, and James nodded.
"Took us awhile to find it, and then we saw Mrs Norris and had to double back out of the way so Filch wouldn’t find us," James explained.
"Well, all right then," Remus said grudgingly, then brightened. "Let’s see it."
James held up a finger. "You know that if we lose this, we’ll all be crucified, don’t you?" Remus nodded eagerly, and James sighed, then reached into the box and pulled out a golden ball with fluttering wings, straining to escape against James’s hand. "You sure you can catch it?" James asked, raising an eyebrow.
Remus nodded excitedly. "Yes James, I’m quite sure. Now let it loose…?"
I like that, how impatient he sounds, and how obvious this conversation makes it that he really wants to chase the Snitch, and loves it. The parts of the fic that explain why Remus loves it so much seem a bit exposition-heavy to me, and rather more telling than showing. Prettily-worded telling, but still. And while dialogue can be just as exposition-heavy as prose, I think this conversation illustrates Remus's love just as well, if not better, than my long paragraphs with James's and Sirius's observations.
James smiled and opened his hand, and in an instant Remus shook Sirius’s hand off his robes and pushed up off the ground, zipping into the air with a whoop. He flitted around the air above the field, chasing something that neither James nor Sirius could see, but that Remus apparently could.
I'm not too fond of the POV shifts in this fic. I do think that they're fairly smooth and that you can tell who's thinking what, but I'd never write a fic that way, now. It's not quite omniscient, and it's not quite limited, so it bugs me. If I had to rewrite this fic right now, I'd probably do it entirely from Sirius's POV.
After a moment of watching him, James turned to Sirius and said, "You’re awfully quiet tonight." Not quite a question, but apparent enough that James was asking him something.
Sirius glanced at him, then looked up at the sky again, where Remus, in his black robes and hood, could barely be made out against the backdrop of stars. "He’s beautiful, isn’t he?" Sirius asked quietly. "And it’s obvious that he loves this at least as much as we do. I know I wouldn’t be able to see the Snitch in the dark, but he can."
James and Sirius are really being very selfless here--they also love flying and Quidditch, but they're letting Remus have his moment.
James shrugged. "His night vision’s always been a good thing for us," James pointed out, and Sirius nodded.
"I wish he’d try out for Seeker," Sirius said quietly. "He’s made for it, and look how much fun he’s having up there." Above them, Remus had just caught the Snitch, raising the fist with the fluttering golden ball above his head before letting it loose again and taking after it with an exuberant laugh.
"You know why he won’t," James replied just as quietly, and Sirius nodded. They both knew why Remus would never try out for Seeker, though Remus himself had never told them—he hadn’t needed to. It wasn’t necessarily that he was afraid the full moon could possibly come while he was flying. No, James as Captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team as well as Head Boy could always make sure that Gryffindor’s matches were scheduled well away from the full moon, and that if any ever did manage to last that long, reserves would be expected to be brought in eventually. No one would ever find out from Quidditch that Remus Lupin was a werewolf.
That paragraph was a deliberate refutation of a bit of fanon that I was constantly coming across. It seemed that almost everyone agreed that Remus didn't particularly care for flying and Quidditch, but that even if he did, being a werewolf would prevent him playing in case a match ran over the full moon. That just didn't make sense to me, for the reasons I detailed above, so, typical of me, I used fic to illustrate why I didn't agree with that bit of fanon.
But up there, up among the stars and the night breezes, Remus was free. He could chase something that wouldn’t be hurt if he caught it, and he wouldn’t hurt anyone else in the pursuit of it. With no one else in the air, Remus could dash to and fro wherever he wanted, and he didn’t have to worry about anyone else. He could let go, completely and totally, and give himself up to the wind and the air and the golden Snitch, and no one would stop him. In the middle of the night on a nearly deserted Quidditch pitch, there were no opposing teams trying to stop him, no people to dodge around, no winning or losing anything except altitude and speed.
Up in the air with no one else there, Remus could just be himself. He could go as fast as he wanted, indulge himself in a bloodless hunt, and still taste sweet victory when he caught his quarry. He had no one to call him to task for letting himself loose.
This isn't the first time Quidditch has been written as a form of sublimation--I remember
copperbadge's fic "Sublimation and the Snitch", which even included Remus as its "author"--but there's more to Quidditch than the sexual subtext. I have come across other fics that spell out directly that sports are outlets for human instincts not necessarily socially acceptable, like stalking and hunting, but I guess I was a bit more subtle here. At the time, I think I was proud of myself for my insight. :pLooking up at him, James felt an unidentifiable pang in his chest, one he didn’t care to try and examine too closely. Remus was really alive up there. He didn’t need anyone else. Glancing at his best friend, James saw that Sirius had closed his eyes, an expression of intense longing on his face. Sirius had come to this conclusion long ago, James suddenly realized. But what it was that Sirius was longing for, James didn’t know. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to. One major revelation about one of his best friends was enough for this night.
Sirius opened his eyes again almost painfully. He wasn’t sure what he was longing for either, but he couldn’t look away from Remus, not anymore. Not when Remus’s elation was so palpable, even as far away as he was. And Remus was still there, still chasing that golden ball, and Sirius couldn’t stop watching, even though he felt sure that any moment his heart was going to burst free of his chest, it was beating so hard. But Remus’s utter grace in the air and fierce joy when flying, hidden from everyone else and shown only to James and Sirius, was impossible to look away from. Nothing made him so happy as this, and Sirius knew it. Now James knew it too. Sirius wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
There are things about Remus that Sirius just doesn't want to share, whether it's Remus's love or Sirius's own knowledge about part of Remus. Especially considering that James still professes love for Lily--indeed, does love Lily, however much he also cares about Sirius and Remus--and therefore his investment in their little trio is somewhat less than Sirius's. Sirius still enjoys that trio, but there's some definite OTP underlying the OT3 here--just as one would probably expect from me. :p
Eventually Remus caught the Snitch again and decided to land, drifting down almost sedately towards the ground, the winged ball in his fist struggling to get free. As he came closer and closer to where James and Sirius were standing, they could see the grin on his face, the shine in his eyes, the way the wind had left his hair tangled and he didn’t seem to notice. His feet touched the ground and he swung his legs off the broom, and his hair obscured his face as he bent to put the Snitch back in the box, and when he straightened up again and looked at them both, Sirius was sure that this time his heart really would pound itself out of his chest, or at the least that Remus would hear it. He wished that he’d put that expression on Remus’s face. But seeing Remus, with his windblown hair and his ecstatic grin and his flushed cheeks and the shine in his eyes, Sirius knew it was only flying that could do this to him. Only flying.
But when Remus put his arms around Sirius’s and James’s waists, it was hard to be jealous. When he pulled them closer to him and leaned his forehead against theirs, when he smiled at them and laughed quietly, it was hard to remember that they weren’t the center of his life. When he kissed them hungrily, and all three of them struggled out of their robes and sank to the ground on their makeshift blanket of black fabric, it was hard to think that he wasn’t made for this, for lying with them and kissing them and fitting with them. But when they were up in their room again, and Remus was asleep in his arms and Sirius was awake in the dark, it wasn’t so hard to remember that what Remus loved most in this world was flying.
This fic really did end up very bittersweet. There's this thing that Remus loves so much, that gives him a sense of freedom he gets pretty much nowhere else, and yet that love and that freedom keep hurting poor Sirius. We all know that James will eventually leave them for Lily, and that the Remus/Sirius pairing is just full of pain throughout the course of canon, so of course I had to add another thing that will make things even harder for them. It also doesn't have my characteristic happy/hopeful ending--the fic presents things as they are, and doesn't try to pretend that it'll get better--though alas for the days when the most Sirius had to despair over was that Remus loved flying more than him!
Anyway, it was really interesting to revisit this fic again, three years later. Thank you,
gehayi, for requesting it!
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-01 04:45 pm (UTC)I remember this story. The "Remus hates flying and can't play Quidditch without being outed as a werewolf" motif was a common one at the Time. Yours was the first story I recall that contradicted it.
I think that anything that Remus loved which provided him with somethhing that Sirius couldn't would have been an issue for Sirius. It's not enough for this Sirius to be loved. He has to come first. And that's not possible here. Remus can't love Sirius more than independence or freedom. And Sirius knows that. But he wants it anyway.
I love the description, and the way that you communicate Remus's enthusiasm, and the terribly torn feeling that Sirius experiences--wanting Remus to be free and happy, but also wanting to be the one who makes him feel that way.
Outstanding job.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 09:32 am (UTC)Some bits of fanon I understand and don't mind perpetuating, but some of them just seem to come out of nowhere. I have no idea why so many people wrote Remus as hating to fly, and like I mentioned, the no-Quidditch-for-werewolves thing just didn't make sense to me, so I wanted to do something different.
I do feel sorry for Sirius here. He just feels so deeply, and takes things so much to heart, that he was bound to get hurt even before 1981 happened. Poor guy.
I'm glad you liked it! :)