A wee spinoff of my lapsed but not dead series, Reading Recs From Friends
The Waiting by @oknowkiss w/ art by @babooshkart [Drarry | E | 43k]
cw: substance abuse, depression, grief
It’s been almost ten years since Draco Malfoy disappeared during a routine Curse Breaker training exercise. Harry, his partner in more ways than one, is determined to figure out why. As the past resurfaces and the present fades into confusion, Harry discovers the only thing more unreliable than memory is love.
inspired by the fantastic song "this tornado loves you" by neko case.
One Sentence Recap: Everyone in Harry's life is trying desperately to drag him out of the past, away from the moment he lost Draco to the unknown, but what if the past is the only thing that will save them both?
"I have waited with a glacier's patience
Smashed every transformer with every trailer
'Til nothing was standing
65 miles wide
Still you are nowhere
Still you are nowhere
Nowhere in sight"
-Neko Case, This Tornado Loves You
This song is one of my absolute favorite songs of all time--it captures the raw emotion of frantic, seemingly-doomed, mutually destructive love in a way that doesn't deny its potential, all-consuming beauty. There's something painfully sweet about the music, the lyrics, and also this fic that @oknowkiss wrote based on a prompt I submitted for @hd-wireless 2023, and then GIFTED to me! Elaine and I share a deep love of complicated, plotty, twisty stories--I gaze up at them in awe every time I read something new by them because they are such a master of plot and narrative. This story is no exception--the characters are exceptionally imagined, the world is rich and unique, the mystery keeps you guessing in the best of ways, and the twist will absolutely take your damn breath away. I laughed, I cried actual tears, and I had to sit for a long time once I finished trying to figure out how to breathe again. Here are some specific things I loved about this story:
👨🏽🤝👨🏼 The Relationship Dynamics
This particular song certainly opens the door for angst and tension and HOO BOY does E deliver on that front. Harry's depression and grief over Draco's disappearance feels so palpable and relatable. At times I pitied him, felt real heartbreak for him, and wanted to give him a firm slap to the back of the head. Draco is ESPECIALLY magnificently realized in this story--he has every characteristic I love: sharp and witty, scared and desperate, arrogant but deeply unsure of himself. He is the perfect foil to a Harry who is unmoored and craving some sort of connection with someone or something. The tension between them crackles with unspoken resentment, fiery sexual attraction, and the sort of nihilistic self-importance that seems to saturate early adulthood. It makes for some INCREDIBLE smut--no spoilers but there is a scene that begins in a dive bar in Alaska that you will be thinking about probably for the rest of your life🔥🔥.
E also crafts some incredible relationships between Harry and the rest of the characters. The dynamics between him and Ron and Hermione are delicious as they worry for his very sanity and try their best to be good friends to him. E's OCs are spectacular--there is one in particular who has my whole heart, I don't even need to tell you which one you will absolutely know.
🌎 The World Building
Elaine takes a very cool approach to ministry training and curse breaking that I've never read before--their descriptions of the training camp are so vivid I could picture everything so well as it happened. This story takes us and the characters around the world, and E really takes the time to ground us sensorially and paint us an incredible picture of exactly what Harry is experiencing. His depression and grief come through in the environment that he's built for himself--there are little symbols that reappear throughout the fic that feel like gentle taps on the shoulder--remember this?. It's a really masterful way of making an expansive, potentially disjointed universe feel smaller, traversable, and knowable.
It can also be very challenging to describe brand new magical mechanics and theory in a way that a reader can understand, without bogging them down in detail--again, E does this beautifully. I felt totally sucked in to the world they crafted!=
📝 The Plot
Look, it is very hard to write a mystery story that doesn't alienate the reader but still holds back some twists and surprises. It's even HARDER to do all of those things when you're writing in not one, but TWO timelines, and E absolutely smashes it with this fic. I had so many (incorrect) theories about what the hell was happening as I was reading--it was so fun to take the little crumbs E was leaving and try to make sense of them while Harry also tried to make sense of them. I am so delighted that at the end, some of the things I speculated about came to pass, but there were many things that I didn't see coming!
🎨 Bonus: The Art
@babooshkart NEVER MISSES that is a truth universally acknowledged, one affirmed by the art they created for this story. Pictures, imagery, and the act of looking play such a vivid role in this story and Boo manages to capture so many of the little details Elaine uses to activate her narrative and her characters in a single, incredible image. Looking at Boo's art invites us to step into Harry's shoes, and lets us a little further into his world. The lighting in the photo feels close and intimate to the point of being lonely, the clutter Boo included in the scene echoes Harry's feeling of being crowded and overwhelmed by the case and by life, and as always Harry are (young) Draco are depicted beautifully.
Thank you for writing this story and gifting it to me!
More to read from @oknowkiss:
📚 a licence to kill [Drarry | M | 11k]
📚 Their microfic may 2022 series, jesus, etc. [Drarry | E | 3k]
📚 the complete idiot's guide to losing your entire mind [Drarry | E | 10k]
📚 Historians [Drarry | E | 30k]
More to look at from @babooshkart:
🎨 Boo's own Wireless 2023 contribution, Keep Driving [M]
🎨 The art they made for booktopus's Reverse Bang fic, A Convergence of Inks [G]
🎨 This steamy Dronarry they did for HP Triadfest 2022 [E]
🎨 Twenty five (25!!!!!!) drawings they did for 25 Days of Draco and Harry 2021
