We Burst at the Seams - Comments

This was wonderful.
I feel so bad for Remus. Sirius, too, but mostly Remus for not knowing the truth. I wish he would have gone to see Sirius before he was put in Azkaban.

'"Make sure he tells them Harry loves pureed apples. And jelly, although Lily doesn’t like to give it to him. Lime is his favourite flavour. James and I used to sneak it to him.” A tear runs down his cheek but he pretends not to notice.'

That was such a cute line, it made me want to cry, haha
Great work.

This is the most intense one-shot I've read in a while. Your writing is simply beautiful. This is seriously one of the most beautiful and one of the most heart-breaking pieces I've ever read. I love the depth it gives events that were only briefly recounted in the series at large. I feel like I'm closer to the characters and like I have a better, deeper perspective of events now. I'm not normally a fan of Remus and Sirius written as a couple, but you made it work for me in this. You made me feel everything you described in this. It was honestly quite gutting, but I like that. Every so often people need to get gutted by fiction.
Anyhow, I thoroughly enjoyed (if that's the right word for such a tragic tale) reading this. Very nice work, dear. :)

Sorry for two comments. Damn not being able to edit.

This title is absolutely superb in the way that it's an emotion put into an action. Puts an image to something non-concrete. Amazing.

This is amazing. At first the quote didn't make sense with the story to me and then I thought about it and something just clicked. It's said so angrily in the movie that it was hard for me to picture it in a bitter whisper, but that's exactly what it was to this story.

What I love is that this only shows that time period and doesn't go into after Remus knows the truth. This fits in perfectly as a part of the series in the way that it only shows a part of the whole, a part Rowling didn't give us.

I love how real the emotion is. You wrote more on it than I personally would have, but it was wonderful because it just flowed and flowed until you ceased to be reading the emotion and you were feeling it instead. Superb.

So, to make up for my lacking of story commenting, I’m hoping to make this a beneficial comment. First off, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I usually cannot STAND stories written in present tense. They just bother me, for the most part. But you make it work so well in your writing :) I love your style. You’re about the only present tense author that I really like!

The layout works nicely for this, considering that it all seems to take place during the night. And the stars are a great analogy to make with the banner and then your facts at the bottom. It really gives a subtle sense of ‘meant to be’ in regards to Remus/Sirius.

As for the story content, I’m in love with how you didn’t really make Remus in denial during this. Right from the get-go, he seems to take for a fact that it was Sirius who betrayed the Potters. Even though we all know that that wasn’t the case, it’s actually quite believable, at least from Remus’ (probably fucked that up grammatically, but whatever, haha) point of view that Sirius really was the one who did it.

Then there’s Sirius. As the other comment mentions, I love how you make his emotions more simple when he’s a dog. It goes right along with canon from the HP books and makes the story all that more believable. Actually, there’s nothing in the story that isn’t believable. Like Anto Wrestles Bears said, it feels like it could actually be part of the books.

I also love the way that you worked two points of view into this without having to add the obnoxious (So-and-so’s POV) tags that people usually put in stories. It just flowed and you knew who was talking the entire time.

Remus nods. At least Harry will be with family, with people who love him. I love this line because it just shows how into the moment this writing is. Nobody knows that the Dursley’s are horrible yet (except Dumbledore, who, from canon, we’re shown that he doesn’t let on), they all think it’s a good thing still, none of the characters know how badly he’ll be treated there (even though it technically is because it keeps Harry protected until his 17th, but still).

Grammar/technical/other

Dumbledore. For all the effort he put into protecting James and Lily, they are still dead. Re
mus finds he no longer cares about the war: everyone worth protecting is gone.
-Just a technical error here, but there's a paragraph break between 'Re' and 'mus' that you probably didn't notice.

The story mentions that Sirius' coat is gone when Remus goes back to their house, but earlier, it states that Sirius does not have a coat on. Just something that kind of bothered me a little.

tears run down his cheeks and he struggles to breathe properly. he wipes them away, but the laughter does not cease. -I don't know if you intended for both of these sentences to start with uncapitalized words, but if you didn't, I wanted to point them out to you :)

a magically expanded suitcase This just seems like I don't know, not rightly worded to me considering all the freaking Harry Potter that I read. Bahaha. I know, sorry, I'm being nit-picky, but I think it would go better if you incorporated an Undetectable Extension Charm in the suitcase description. Maybe He packs it all into a suitcase, the interior of which enlarged with an Undetectable Expansion Charm. Just a thought. Feel free to ignore the hell out of this one, hehe.

Anyway, my god, this comment is going into two pages in my word document 0-0 so, I’m going to stop here, but just know that I love this, and I’m glad that you originally commented on my story for the one-shot comment swap thread because I may have never found your page otherwise :)

I think that this was definitely a good "prequel" of sorts to the HP series. I loved the story, it seems to fit in so well with the books and could easily have been part of them. One part I specifically liked was the thought process of Sirius when he turned into a dog, because the way it was worded pretty much made sense for how a dog would "speak." If anything, I think there could be a slight bit more detail in the story but overall I think it was wonderful.