Hey eq -- I've been meaning to rework my original emails to you into a proper review, but every time I try it just gets more pretentious and adds nothing. So, a long belated public post of some of the things I've said to you in private (mostly about sex!), on this really stunning story.

Your sex scenes are, indeed, all about the brain. I was fascinated by the way you had Draco begin his seduction of Harry by helping him eroticize himself in his own eyes, in the scene in front of the mirror. I love the head game, the roleplay game, that Draco plays with Harry when he induces him to come in his pants. And the sense of performing for themselves, as well as each other, and imagining themselves inside each others' heads has gotten thoroughly internalized by the end of the story -- for example when Harry comes while Draco is fucking him, and re-imagines what Draco must have felt with Harry inside him, someting he had not properly understood because Draco's impotence prevented him from showing it.

The "oblivion" sex, the violent and painful use of Draco's body, worked stunningly and gave me chills. You did a remarkable thing in the way the whole story set your reader up for a disinhibited response to extreme sex. Part of this was the sense of dislocation created by the gender games of part one; another part was the pervasive sense of mystery and disorientation that hung about the Manor throughout the story; and a third part was just the strength of the writing, a narrative voice that maintained a sense of enchantment and calm fascination with a world that threw one surprise after another at the reader. The result was that it was easy to accept that the rules of any erotic encounter between Harry and Draco could be rather arbitrary. Draco's impotence, for example, rather than being simply a disability, just provided an interesting and unusual playing field for the sex game between them, without being the least bit un-erotic.

In the "oblivion" scene itself, the pain, the outrage of branding, the loss of bowel control, retained their ability to shock on a literal level, but seemed more abstractly to code an erotic fascination with the texture and vulnerability of flesh, the violence of the urge to connect with another person, the mess of blurring physical boundaries. Pain is not my particular kink, but I found myself captivated, nodding and saying, "go for it, boys . . . do what works." At the same time, for those so inclined, it is also possible to read the total arc of the story in a more conventional and reassuring way, as the sexuality of "oblivion" gives way to a restoration of "normal" sexuality, once Draco gets rid of the physical drain of the curse and recovers his full function.

I think one interesting reaction that I saw in other comments, here and on your LJ, is people's need to distance themselves from any suggestion of enjoying the extreme sex. I thought one of the most radical things you did, was successfully make it possible to take the oblivion sex as sex, as erotic. And it took a lot of preparation, not to mention "negotiation," with your readers. I think you were explicitly negotiating with your readers in your A/N at the front, where you remind them that wizards can heal this stuff, no permanent damage. And I thought you were tacitly negotiating with them when you showed Harry hesitating about some of the things Draco wanted him to do. There is an intrinsic tension between Harry's fundamental desire, and vow, to go anywhere Draco needs to take him, and the more two-sided negotiation that is a necessary run-up to a kink encounter.

Lots more good stuff worth talking about, too -- about how successful this is as a sheer, compelling story, about the gradual tease of your characterizations of Fairfax and Poole, about the way you use letters and visits to the old Hogwarts gang to contrast with the otherworldly atmosphere of the manor, and on and on.