Oh god, after the new chapter I’m terrified of feeling hope! Thank you for updating!

more been waiting so long (still worth it) i just want to keep reading

holy crap. so glad severus is getting out of there but damnnnnn brutal isnt even the word. great chapter, keep writing!

Amazing story!  Excited for more!

Hope you can update soon!  

I came across this story about 4 days ago and i have not been able to put it do except to go the work it is amazing from the early parts where severus was eaning the lupins trust to the latter turmoal where everything seems to be turning on its head i can honestly say that i will be waiting egerly for the rest of this story as long as that my be you are on my personal watch list. hope this year is going ok for you take your time it is definetly worth the wait

Amazing story, I’m hooked, more please!

argh I bleedin love this story 😭 I need poor Sev to come home now though and for someone to hurt that awful healer!! Hope you can update soon ☺️

Ok, I’ll be honest, I haven’t read your update yet. I want to, but I really don’t want not to have a new chapter to read! Essentially, I’m so glad you are back! Please don’t stop! 

Hi, i love your story. It has been a long time since your last update!

Will Draco and Harry bond over this? How long will Severus stay with that deranged man? How long will the jars last? Will the house elves ballots be counted for? How far is the ministry corrupted? 

You left us hanging here!!!

I hope that your familly is better.

Please update soon.

I love this story so much that I created an account for this website just so I could leave you a review (I don't know if that is a personal setting or a site setting that you only take logged-in reviews, but I wish I could just review as anon. or guest.) 

This is an AMAZING story!  Epic!  I am soooooo in love with this story and I'm dying for more!  

You should totally post this story on ArchiveOfOurOwn dot org.  Everyone would love it so much! 

I have reread this story like 100 times I feel like. Still loving it!  Severus is strict yet so caring for Tedddy and Remus and it plays off his character so well. You're an amazing writer!

  Please update as soon as you are able!  I think I can speak for all readers that we are sitting on the edge of this cliffhanger you've had for the last couple chapters.  I'm dying to see Severus returned home early and in a somewhat healthy state, physically and mentally. 

Love you! Love this story!  Update soon! 

I read this a while back and have just sat down and re-read it all, including the new chapters. I'm not sure it's a good thing to be able to write such excellent torture scenes, but you can, so, er, well done. Other than a few Americanisms, this is very very good.

I did wonder about not telling the Ministry about Teddy. Of course I see Snape's pov, but surely as Harry is Teddy's god father, WIBNA would have a bit of a fight on their hands to take Teddy off for testing? But that is a minor query, and clearly hasn't stopped me reading 51 chapters!

Sorry to hear about your Dad. RL can be shit sometimes. SP

Now I think I've ended up with a review for ch 51 on ch 1.  Sorry.  Thus damned site seems to stick me on a different chapter every time I go onto it.

I think I may have accidentally stuck a review intended for ch 50 onto ch 51 because the website landed me on the wrong page after I registered, and I didn't notice.  Anyway, Remus is less cringe-making in this chapter than he was in the spurious sex scene in ch 50, but he still seems much colder than you would expect of someone whose lover is being horribly tortured.  Still, that could be necessary practicality - he can panic later, after he's done all he can - and also, the Remus of the books *is* rather shallow and callous.  He puts Harry's life in danger to save himself from embarrassment, tries to run out on his pregnant girlfriend, and physically attacks Harry when Harry calls him out on it, so sensitivity isn't really his thing.

This building you've put the Malfoys into isn't a manor house, which is a sort of glorified farmhouse and probably about half the size of the thing you've got Snape living in.  This is a stately home - but perhaps that's how they've showed it in the films, since Warners know nothing about British architecture and have protrayed Hogsmeade as a German village, and Hogwarts as either a genuinely Mediaeval but French or Austrian castle, or as a cod Mediaeval "Strawberry Hill Gothic" Victorian hotel.

I have mixed feelings about this story.  On the one hand, it's wonderfully well-written, well-paced, nice characterisations and addictively readable.  I've read the whole thing in about three days (didn't review before because I wasn't registered) and could hardly tear myself away from it.  The descriptions of potion-making in particular are wonderfully convincing.

I can live with the fact that it's based on the films rather than the books, meaning that these aren't the characters I know.  Book Snape grew up in the sort of house which has two bedrooms, a kitchen, a small sitting room and an outdoor lavatory in a shed in the yard, where the upstairs landing was probably 36" by 30" and the total footprint of the house about 15ft by 20ft, and you washed yourself at the kitchen sink or in a tin hip-bath on the hearthrug.  He seems never to have been a very enthusiastic Death Eater (Sirius, an Order member who hated and was obsessed with him, heard no rumour that he was one) and almost certainly never killed - or at least never murdered - any human before he killed Dumbledore.  He almost certainly didn't know Pettigrew was a Death Eater, he started work as a teacher before the end of the war, and the Longbottoms were attacked after the end of the war, and about a year after Snape switched sides. When he defected, Dumbledore treated him with brutal emotional cruelty and gaslighted him into becoming a spy.

But, OK, this is film Snape, so his past only loosely resembles that of book Snape.  It's disturbing, though, that American fen seem so class-obsessed that many seem to feel they can't love Snape as the working-class guttersnipe he's meant to be, and that he can only be a hero if he's from a superior class - and it loses that important dynamic with the Marauders where two posh thugs are picking on a poor boy from the bottom of the social heap.  Even if his clothes are shabby, to have Snape living in a huge house with a dining room and an orchard and multiple bedrooms very much changes the dynamic, and makes him a completely different sort of creature, socially equal with or even superior to the Marauders.  Money has very little bearing on social class here in the UK, but to have a house of that kind is a huge status thing, especially if it's been in the family a long time.  In the books, the Malfoy manor house probbly isn't anything like that big.

[It's a manor house, incidentally, not a manor and certainly not a manner!  A manor is a landed estate with tenant farms, while the manor house is the house belonging to the owner of the manor.]

I can live with the misunderstanding of the term "Potions Master", which is almost universal among American fen (a master is just a British term for a male schoolteacher, which is why the Headmaster is so-called).  I can just about live with the fact that every chapter contains words which are either misused or misspelled, although it's very distracting - poignantly used instead of pointedly, ark instead of arc, reign instead of rein, arising instead of arousing, allude repeatedly used to mean something it doesn't mean, things that aren't sweets being randomly described as sweets and so on in every chapter.  [If you need an editor I'm willing to pick my way through it again and mark them.]

But the fact that they all talk like Americans, use American expressions, eat specifically American food - what the hell is syrup in this context? - and seriously think it's possible for somebody to have rabies in a country which has been rabies-free since well before Snape was born is quite jarring, because it's a constant reminder that these are not after all Rowling's characters, not even the film versions.  Three newspapers for a population of at most ten thousand is high, although I suppose not impossible - but surely, surely in Britain there would already be a vocal mass movement (insofar as a community which would barely fill a small town can have a mass anything) protesting against slavery, at least from the Muggle-borns who know that the UK's unofficial second national anthem has a chorus which goes "Britons never never never shall be slaves"?  Slavery hasn't been legal on English soil for about a thousand years (unless you count press-ganged sailors or Mediaeval serfs) - think of how big a deal the arguments about abortion or gun rights are in the US, and multiply by about seventeen.  Muggle Britain invented the anti-slavery movement (and indeed mass social activism), and even handed Germany strategically important land in Europe in exchange for strategically unimportant land in Tanzania, just because we wanted to stop the slave trade there.

And even if they class the werewolves as beasts, Muggle Britain has extremely strong laws against ill-treating non-human animals, about which people feel passionately (Google the Brown Dog Riots if you don't believe me), so again the Muggle-borns, at least, ought to be up in arms about it. There ought to be, in a very real sense, rioting in the streets.

Nevertheless, and despite these problems, I was enjoying it tremendously until this last chapter, which to my mind strikes a completely false note.  Remus is somebody who's barely recovering from being abused and traumatised himself, he knows that the man he loves is currently being horribly tortured and probably raped, and instead of being overwhelmed by creeping horror at the situation, shaking and nauseated and eaten alive with grief and anxiety, reliving the torments he suffered himself and obsessively imagining every one of them happening to Severus and feeling queasy about the whole idea of sex, as you would expect from somebody in that position, he's taking time out to have a relaxing wank?  It makes him seem like he has the emotional depth of electro-plating, and that Severus would be much better off ditching him in favour of carpenter-guy.

Also, the story itself had seemed like a sensitive look at two abused people learning to love and trust, and you're one of the few people in the fandom who can write sex scenes which are fairly explicit but don't seem either gratuitous or boring.  And then suddenly we have this imo quite inappropriate bit of business which turns it into porn - possibly even verging on torture porn - because it just jams a sex scene in for the sake of having a sex scene, mixing eroticism in with horror, and it's really disappointing when the tone of the story had been (despite the misused words and the Americanisms) note-perfect up to that point.

I expect I shall go on reading until I see Severus rescued, but ch. 50 has really spoilt it for me so I'll probably give up on it after that point.  I can't really believe in this Remus as a good partner for Severus any more, or as a genuine abuse survivor.

I would expect somebody soon to suggest direct action.  Murdering Lanning might cause trouble, even if they made it look like an accident, but if they have access to the routes house-elves go somebody could break in, Imperio the guy for a couple of weeks and then give him some false memories.  He's so seriously evil that removing him permanently would be an obvious good, though, if they get Remus and Teddy safely to the Malfoy place in France first.

This is not what a psychopath is, incidentally, although the term is often misused in popular speech and Harry (or whoever it was who called Lanning that) might well misuse it in that way.  Really a psychopath is somebody whose brain is wired so that they have flatttened emotions and little or no social feelings or conscience.  The lack of a social conscience takes some of the behavioural brakes off and lets out whatever's inside, but they are no more likely to have anything really monstrous inside than anybody else is, and most are just loners and a bit cold and selfish.  They are rarely sadists, because they just aren't that interested in people.

I am so happy to see an update.  In your own time sweetie.