#lux aurumque

[mikrokosmos]

Eric Whitacre

( 2 January - )

Happy Birthday, Eric!

[saintsenara]

lux aurumque sirius black & james potter teen | 3.6k words

he's not james, who has the golden-snitch glitter of gryffindor righteousness in his marrow. he had to beg the sorting hat not to send him to slytherin - not to deck him in silver and green like his father and his father's father before him - and every day he has to wake up and keep trying to be worthy of the chance it gave him to live a life transformed.

seven dawns which change sirius black.

author's notes under the cut

this piece was written, like so many good things are, because i thought somebody was wrong on the internet.

which is to say, it was written in response to a take that sirius - spared azkaban after pettigrew was arrested for somewhat spurious reasons - would be unconcerned by james' death, and happy to leave harry to his own devices at the dursleys in order to reconnect with the pureblood world of his birth.

i'm really not a fan of what we might call dark aristocrat sirius - a wizengamot-seat-touting posho who misses the patrician world of his birth, is proud of being pureblood and thinks it makes him more important than people like lily, believes his parents' insistence that to be a black makes you "practically royal" isn't eye-rolling pretension with no basis in reality but true, and thinks of his relationship with james as no more significant to him than his relationship with any of the pureblood friends and relations of his childhood.

this is a portrayal of sirius which is just as removed from his canon character as the tiny giggling pixie of the marauders fandom. and, in particular, it completely overlooks one of sirius' most significant roles within the harry potter series: to illustrate the value of choice.

sirius' entire narrative purpose is to show harry that - in an astonishingly lineage-based society, where your name and background dictate almost everything about your life - you should still choose to defy your family if standing against them is the right thing to do.

he explicitly rejects his parents and cousins' blood-supremacy, he rejects the idea that his family line is owed inherent loyalty, he rejects the idea that blood purity is ontologically meaningful. while he almost certainly misses aspects of his childhood and regrets what he's been made to do in order to take a stand against blood-supremacist terror - including, as he notes in lux aurumque, the fact that he's aware that many of the death eaters he's fighting to kill are his own flesh and blood - he's utterly rejected the overarching social structures which defined his early life. he may struggle with his decision sometimes, but it is a decision he chooses - every single day - to make and re-make.

[hence my longstanding headcanon that - like his godson - he asks the sorting hat not to put him in slytherin.]

sirius' initial defiant choice is triggered - as we see in snape's memories [DH 33] - by his introduction to the defining relationship of his life: james.

james is a fascinating figure within the series' theme of choice, because he's clearly someone for whom the option to be "good" [as the text understands goodness, that is] is easily accessible. all his family have been in gryffindor, he's instinctively opposed to blood-supremacy and everyone he knows is the same, he faces none of the social or familial pressures [to find a pureblood wife, to socialise exclusively with pureblood friends] that sirius does.

[which is why him still being a bully despite these conditions is also fascinating.]

and he's clearly someone whose presence upends sirius' world to a significant enough extent that he changes the course of his entire life to stay close to him.

i have my theory as to why. all the evidence of the text - not least the fact that sirius' narrative mirror is snape, himself in love with the other half of james and lily - is that sirius' love for james isn't purely platonic... although he'd rather die than upset james [and lily] by articulating this.

[so he vows to die - if necessary - to let him live happily instead.]

the profundity of sirius' choices stand out the more starkly when we deep that all the evidence of canon is that voldemort is winning the first war. lux aurumque deals with the struggle of opting to keep fighting in the face of an overwhelming feeling of futility - opting to keep hoping and trying and loving each other as the bodies pile up and the streets run with blood.

and it also deals with realising that others may be making different choices.

reading between the lines of prisoner of azkaban, it's clear that dumbledore suspected that sirius was the spy in the order before october 1981. it's also clear that lupin suspected the same thing.

this is interesting because both lupin and dumbledore are people whose stated belief in the power of choice exists in tension with the fact that they struggle not to consider certain faults innate. lupin is bogged down by the belief that his lycanthropy is an irredeemable flaw he cannot escape. dumbledore thinks that some people are just born bad [look at how he treats tom riddle when he's a child]. to both of them, sirius - with his brother and cousins paid up members of the death eaters - would plausibly be all too easily tempted. sirius thinks the same about lupin - who he imagines would want to seek protection under voldemort's wings because his insubstantiality can't stand up to the force of the war.

but some things are innate. and one of these is that sirius can be extremely impulsive when it comes to keeping the people he loves safe. much like harry, his desire to protect people can overwhelm him, making him leap before he looks.

in canon, sirius suggests that secret keeper swap was a spur of the moment decision. in lux aurumque we get a look at how this might have been triggered - i like the idea that the death eaters manipulate him into it to some extent, not least because this allows wormtail, who gets treated like a bit of a joke in canon, to be an evil little bastard who's actually quite useful to voldemort. i can imagine him chuckling as he sits down to teach the dark lord all about how to exploit his friends' emotional weaknesses - such as the fact that sirius may worry that james is too trusting, but would never, ever believe such a thing about himself...

and when it's all gone wrong, sirius makes another choice.

his decision to remain in azkaban confuses a lot of fans - particularly those who are angry with dumbledore for doing nothing to get him out of prison [which, to be frank, dumbledore can hardly be blamed for - sirius doesn't open his mouth to speak in his own defence at any point, and all the evidence without him doing that is that he was the secret keeper who'd betrayed the potters] - but it makes perfect sense for who he is as a character. he considers himself to have "as good as killed" james and lily [PoA 19], and he stays in azkaban because it's the only way he knows to try and atone for the greatest mistake of his life.

until a visit from the minister and a photo of a rat shows him another.

[two minor points: this piece also addresses the opposite of choice, which is chance - i am aware, before anyone points it out, that the line about voldemort "only having to be lucky once" is a quote from the ira, but it's a statement that both goes incredibly hard and is incredibly true; and its title is taken from the choral piece of the same name, by the composer eric whitacre - the lyrics - lux, calida gravisque pura velut aurum (light, warm and heavy as pure gold) - seemed very fitting for the transformative dawns of this piece, and for the choice sirius made to be on the side of the light.]

[musicainextenso]

Stay home! Stay safe! #5

[forever-plaid]

I sang this one song for my choir and it sounded exactly like the choir boy meme where he sucks in the helium to hit the note

[onceuponawildflower]

[witch-boy-666]

A N C I E N T A L I E N S Binge watching it has saved me from depressive episode so much while I’ve been down in this shit place

You know what. This sounds like a gr8 idea as long as I don’t have to like. Actually think about it or whatever

[theclassyclarinetist]

I’m debating on whether I like the band or choir version of Lux Aurumque by Eric Whitacre more... because they’re both absolutely beautiful in their own ways! But, I have a special place in my heart for the band version because I’ve performed it multiple times, including in Orchestra Hall, and it’s a piece that I personally connected with a lot... but now I’m also in choir and I really really appreciate the choral version, especially the soprano line because it is just so pure and gorgeous... ugh I can’t decide

[saintsenara]

author self-recommendation

thank you so much for the tag [quite a long time in the past...] @ashesandhackles!

when you get this, reply with your five favourite fics that you've written. then pass it on to five other writers. spread some self love.

did i laugh at self love? the answer is yes.

these are my five [and by five i mean six] favourite complete fics - obviously i’m sufficiently fond of my wips to keep coming back to them, no mean feat for someone with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder! - and i’m hyped to get to showcase them.

bookbinding

tom riddle/myrtle warren teen | 35k words

lord voldemort and moaning myrtle in a rom-com - and especially a rom-com with a happy ending - may not appear to be the instinctive response to a prompt from @ladiesofhpfest asking for heartthrobs and heartaches. and yet, when i started writing it i couldn’t stop.

my profound affection for dear old tom marvolo riddle is well known, but i’ve also always been very fond of myrtle, and i really dislike the way she’s treated in the canon narrative - especially, as i’ve said before, the fact that she is one of the worst victims of jkr’s tendency to use a lack of conventional physical attractiveness [and, in particular, fatness] to indicate characters the reader is not supposed to root for. 

i like the fact that the glimpses of myrtle we see in the series - when she’s not shrieking [behaviour, may i say, i find relatable] - show someone who has lots of admirable traits, which are only poorly expressed because she’s forever fourteen [can you imagine]. she’s kind, she’s perceptive, she’s strong-willed, she’s sensitive, she’s assertive. on the other hand, she’s clearly very lonely, she can be extremely clingy, she’s unhappy at hogwarts, she’s insecure. she’s also someone with a bit of a cruel streak, who clearly understands the impulse to externalise one’s own self-loathing onto other people.

in other words, she’s tom’s dream girl. once she’s worn him down a bit.

i loved writing this, i made myself chuckle self-indulgently on multiple occasions, i have teared up at dozens of the comments i have received about it [someone made a reddit post recommending it at exactly the moment i was leaving a horrendous day at work and i was on the train howling like myrtle in her u-bend], and i like to imagine the two of them are still happy nonagenarians in some universe somewhere.

everlasting ink

harry potter/ginny weasley teen | 6k words

this was a gift for @whinlatter, because she is a sweetie-pie. it was also a gift for me - not only because it was lovely to write, but because it enabled me to indulge in one of my favourite emotions: spite.

i am on the record as not being a fan of hinny. there are several reasons for this, some sillier than others, but one major one is that harry’s idealisation of ginny within the seven book canon into a place of comfort and safety is pretty fucking condescending. harry never acknowledges in the text that ginny spends deathly hallows as a resistance leader in her own right; he's constantly trying to direct her away from the fighting despite acknowledging generally that she's a talented duellist; he associates her primarily with the safe-space of the burrow; he breaks up with her "for her own protection" without offering her a choice in the matter; he doesn’t welcome her into his intensely co-dependent relationship with ron and hermione, and - and i think this really is the kicker - he's incredibly dismissive of her experience with tom riddle. indeed, harry separates the voldemort of canon out into two people: there’s tom, who is an orphan, and is hot, and whom harry pities; and there's voldemort, who has red eyes, no nose, and killed his parents. but ginny can’t have these two separate people in her head. the horror she experienced came at the hands of the pretty, charming, sympathetic voldemort - and harry really doesn’t get that. and sure, by the epilogue harry and ginny appear to have ended up in a happy, equal marriage. but the text never shows us how they get there, and i think it’s perfectly plausible to write stuff in which they don’t.

which is to say, i published an extremely tongue-in-cheek post saying this, and several hinny fans were amusingly passive-aggressive about it. undoubtedly they thought my position as a tomarry defender had scrambled my brain and i couldn’t see the beauty with which the complex parts of their favourite ship could be written.

so i did it. six thousand words on ginny and harry learning to function as a couple among the dust of war and grief, featuring ginny’s complicated feelings on how harry sees her, voldemort, being a daughter and a mother, relating to ron and hermione, heredity, love, and what being a family really means. i enjoyed writing it, and the chance it gave me to think from the other side about what hinny would need to work, how the characterisations of harry and ginny [and voldemort!] i typically write could be nuanced, and what trauma looks like in the immediate aftermath of the battle of hogwarts. and i also enjoyed writing it to prove that i could.

that i have received no reciprocal tomarry in return has been noted…

leather

nymphadora tonks/multiple explicit | 3k words

this was something which spiralled out of a conversation with @evesaintyves around the blind-spots many of us have as authors when thinking about sexuality and gender identity - and especially how those blind-spots become particularly pronounced when they come up against canon compliancy. initially, we were talking about hinny - and the fact that keeping them as end-game has absolutely no reason to prevent either of them identifying as queer, either of them exploring their sexuality or gender identity within their relationship, or, indeed, either of them still understanding themselves as cisgender by the time the epilogue takes place - but we then moved on to talking about tonks, and how the readably queer aspects of her canon characterisation [at least in order of the phoenix] are treated within many of the popular ships which feature her, and, in particular, how both her and lupin’s [potential] queerness is sometimes obscured within end-game remadora. there are numerous reasons for this, and the vast majority are - of course - the result of gentle, human fallibility rather than maliciousness, but it set me to thinking…

so here we have a canon-compliant look at tonks looking at herself, exploring her sexuality, becoming comfortable with her gender, and thinking about how her metamorphing would impact how she understands both of those things, shot through with the hedonistic paradise of the lesbian bar and the tight hold of leather. 

lux aurumque

sirius black & james potter teen | 3.5k words

sirius’ last days of normality, before he is betrayed by wormtail, haunt me. the idea of this poor lad, who is absolutely convinced he’s pulled a blinder which will keep the man he loves safe - even if it results in his own death - having that certainty pulled out from under him is just devastating. no wonder he couldn’t stop laughing at the grim absurdity of it all as they carried him off to azkaban.

one of the things i find most fascinating about sirius as a character is how he embodies the value of choice - and, above all, how he does so far more than james, whose brief appearances in canon set him up as someone with a much more self-righteous certainty about the path he will take than his best friend. sirius chose to leave his family, and fight, and protect the potters, and he also made a choice which would prove to be disastrous and lives with the consequences. 

so, here we have seven dawns which change sirius black - or, red and gold for the man who chose those colours and earned them several times over - featuring harry being a mashed potato fiend and maybe the tiniest bit of prongsfoot if you squint. 

there’s basically no lupin though, because he is - i fear - irrelevant.

nor all that glisters gold

sirius black & bellatrix lestrange teen | 9k words

i am definitely a committed james & sirius [or James/sirius] girly, but another dynamic i love to explore is sirius’ relationship with his cousins, bellatrix chief among them. in fact, i always think that sirius’ choices become all the more impressive when we consider that he’s - let’s be honest - quite a lot like his dear and deranged relative. they have a shared arrogance, a shared ruthlessness, a shared capacity for jealousy, a shared dogged loyalty, and a shared complicated relationship with their role in their family, which i can see leading to an incredibly intense and codependent friendship, despite their age gap, when sirius is a child.

but this, of course, is then utterly torn apart when sirius enters his teens. this piece asks why. is it just the inevitable drifting which happens when one of you is married and the other is in gryffindor? or is someone else the cause? the dark lord, perhaps?

remus lupin is once again irrelevant in this. sorry to him.

the shack at the end of the lane

merope gaunt & voldemort general | 4k words

death is something i think about a great deal. not because i’m unusually morbid - nor, at the risk of protesting too much, because i’m a killer - but because i’m a doctor, in a speciality where death - and often death in traumatic circumstances - is ever present. obviously, one way of coping with this involves quite a lot of dissociation from what’s in front of you, but another is trying to treat the dead with as much dignity as possible, which is often more dignity than they had when they were dying. the cadaver is a colleague, as one of my professors was fond of saying.

spending so much time trying to offer this fundamental dignity is the cause, i think, of my fondness for attempting to write meaningfully about people who are in no way the heroes of pieces. the violent, the sad, the lonely, and the unlikeable appeal to me far more than the good. our star, merope gaunt, and the combined forces of the horrifying things she did to tom riddle sr. and the horrifying things she endured herself within a world which didn’t give her the tools to know any better, is all four of those things. and i have built her an [after]life here where she can try to make up for what she did on earth by acting as the ferrywoman for a procession of other lost souls on the other side of the veil...

i have taken so long to bother doing this that i’m sure everyone’s done it. if not, please consider this a blanket tag.