i'm just eq-ing it.

A while back, I asked if there was any fic where people wanted to see a writer's commentary, but I guess what I should have been asking is whether anybody wanted an explanation of the horribly convoluted and unexplained plot of Cicadas. *facepalm* I hadn't realized that I'd been that bad about setting up the framework the story, and consequently, I have literally gotten at least half a dozen e-mails asking just what the fuck is going on.

In the interest of just clarifying things, here is the

The short version of it is: Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter used to fuck. Draco Malfoy has been sent to kill Harry Potter by his Death Eater family. He refuses to kill Harry Potter, as evidenced by the poison, garotte, etc, on the kitchen table, so he dies for it. A couple months later, Potter is dead too!

The long-ass explanation and the description of the story is:

The basic premise of the story is that the war is on and the Order has stashed Potter for the time being in an isolated cottage in Surrey. It's hot and dry; there's a drought on. Potter is saving the water in the well for the garden that he's keeping -- it's a symbol of the sort of emotion he's holding back because you have to be around to harvest a garden, etc, etc -- and in order to get water to drink, he takes regular trips to the local (Muggle) town, and he carries the stuff back down the road to the cottage by hand.

One afternoon, he's coming back, water jugs in both hands, and he sees Malfoy standing on his doorstep underneath an old rose plant that's stopped flowering. The whole cottage is actually going to pieces around Potter, who can only do so much to hold it goether, and Potter also doesn't ask Malfoy about where he's been or anything, really. The two of them roll around in the muck and have a glorious romantic summer idyll full of boysex and completely stupid "these aren't real boys" melodrama:

Fireflies turn on. Cicadas call in the bushes, and Draco's hand creeps into Harry's. There isn't any standing water to be had for miles, so there are no mosquitoes, not even gnats. This unnatural summer -- when dusk is blue on their skins, Draco rolls over, straddles Harry's hips and kisses him. He doesn't pin Harry's hands above his head, doesn't even rest his whole weight on Harry.

I was trying to convey from the intensity of the relationship that there was a relationship of previous standing between them, and consequently, when Potter asks Malfoy how he got away, I wanted to suggest that (in Potter's eyes at least), they had been forcibly separated. Malfoy doesn't tell Potter the details, though, and I'm not sure, myself, whether their first separation was voluntary or involuntary. The idea thatI'd sort of been carrying in my head was that Malfoy got freaked out by their relationship and ran to the nice, safe, Death Eater approved training camps or whatever, but that he's subsequently come back to Potter of his own accord. It works either way, though, and in the end, Malfoy just tells him Potter he doesn't want to know, and [insert more sex]

Days are supposed to pass. The drought worsens and deepens. Potter is somewhat suspicious of Malfoy suddenly reappearing in his life, but he's so glad to have Malfoy back that he doesn't question beyond that. He also keeps a watch on the inside of Malfoy's forearm to see if Malfoy has the Dark Mark, but he doesn't see anything, and Potter eventually concludes that Malfoy is just there of his own will. Even though the war is going on, Malfoy truly loves him or something like that. He came back all on his own!

Consequently, there's a link in Potter's head between Malfoy loving him and Malfoy coming back to be with him, but one afternoon, Potter goes out to the garden one afternoon to see if he can save any of the vegetables (hope! pro-active Potter!), and When he comes back, Malfoy is gone. Malfoy had, in fact, never unpacked, and instead:

. . . sitting on the kitchen table is Draco's wand, broken in two. There's a bottle of poison, two bottles and a little tiny glass ampoule, a garotte made out of spider steel, and a little container of ashes that moves around on the table all on its own. Also, a bottle of cosmetic paint, the exact color of Draco's skin.

The idea is that the bottles and garotte and ashes are all assasain's tools. Malfoy was, indeed, taken away by the Death Eaters, and he was released on the terms that would come and kill Potter. Those are bottles and ampoules of poison, for one thing, and there's also the garotte just in case Malfoy wants to dirty his hands. The ashes that move around on their own are supposed to be some creepy way of killing Potter (possession by a malevolent, self-harming demon, maybe? ahaha, it is not an illusion or a parallel to the way that Potter ends up acting!), and it's all supposed to point to the fact that Malfoy had come to the cottage to kill Potter. The bottle of cosmetic paint, "the exact color of Draco's skin," is supposed to indicate how Malfoy kept his Dark Mark hidden and also stand for how the Death Eaters intended Malfoy to fuck his way back into Potter's good graces with his physical charms.

This is why Harry is so grim when Snape comes to pick him up: the Order finally heard about Malfoy coming to visit Potter, and that's why Snape is shaking with worry when he comes for Potter. He's terrified that Malfoy has already killed Potter or that something equally bad has happened.

Instead, Potter meets him on the pathway up to the house, and I wrote that scene to be a sort of a reversal of the scene where Malfoy meets Potter at the pathway. In fact, instead of greeting Snape with a symbol of love and instead of saying anything about being all right or being fine to Snape, Potter hands Snape the bottle of cosmetic paint, the symbol of Malfoy's deception. For Potter, this is what the whole visit has boiled down to: Malfoy was a Death Eater. Malfoy betrayed him. Malfoy couldn't have loved him.

Potter has thus more or less failed to grasp the message that Malfoy left for him on the kitchen table. Instead of thinking about how Malfoy has basically given up his life for one last chance to be with him or how Malfoy has just knowingly gone out to his death and made himself defenseless in face of Death Eater retribution rather than harm Potter, Potter is focused on the fact that Malfoy had been a Death Eater and had deceived him about it. He doesn't understand what Malfoy has done for him, and this is supposed to point to how his relationship with Malfoy broke down the first time around -- personality flaws in Potter and a failure at communication between the two.

By handing the bottle of cosmetic paint to Snape, Potter is turning his back on the idea of love and forgiveness. Potter meets Snape at the trellis that leads to the cottage, and there is a reference to how the roses on it have come into bloom. When Potter and Malfoy walked through the first time, it was barren and nothing but bare canes. Now, not even a week later and during the middle of a horrendous drought that's killing everything else, it's come into bloom. Nevertheless, even though he's standing underneath this visual symbol of the power of love (and able to stand underneath it because of the power of love), Potter chooses instead to just focus on the fact that he was betrayed and tricked.

Draco is already dead, murdered by Death Eaters even though he was defenseless, and thus, what with Potter turning his back on Malfoy and Malfoy being dead, the love that they had for each other is dead. It had been a love that protected Potter, and as a result, Potter himself is dead by the end of the summer. I didn't specify who, specifically killed Potter or who killed Malfoy (it was Narcissa Malfoy in the conservatory with a Avada Kedavara!) because I sort of wanted to emphasize the idea that it is the choices that people make that end up killing them. Draco chose to die rather than harm Potter; Potter chose to leave the cottage to fight against the Death Eaters who had made an attempt on his life.

In fact, I wanted to make all kinds of points in this story. It started out as H/D for sqeakyclean, but it ended up with me trying to talk about Potter's character (in addition to MANGLING Draco Malfoy augh, goddamn) and how I thought H/D can't work. The main thing that I wanted to do, though, was to describe how:

Love as expressed through Lily Potter's sacrifice or Draco's sacrifice = life
Turning your back on love = death.

It woudl probably have helped if I drew some more explicit comparisons between Malfoy and Lily Potter, and it would probably also have helped if I wasn't a GIANT RAGING PRETENTIOUS BITCH who was trying to write deep life philosophy into her stories of limp Brit cock. I tried to be all depp and suhtble about it, and it didn't work. I've given some thought to writing this story out more, but there's not really a point since I'm lame and since, well, really, I'm lame, and god, I am so embarassed by the dialogue.

Anyway. That's the long of my lameness. If you read all the way through to this or something, I'd like to offer you a prize, but I don't have anything that anybody would want, so, um, who wants a drabble or ficlet or something?