Uhm. Thanks. :D As a one-shot I can use it as a background for several stories, not just one.

Thank you! :)

This is so sweet, it just made my day. I'm glad you liked it. :)

Thank you! I hated it, too. With a different Lily and a different backstory I could have bought the Snily love, but not like this.

Thank you, I'm glad you liked it. We need the hope. :)

Thank you.  :) Our greasy git lives forever. I will stay in AU land for most of my fics from now on. A

I'm glad that most of your fics will be in AU land, because I'm going to do all of my reading in AU land. Besides, how much can you do with a dead Snape? Or do that's any fun?

Uhm. I have a very ambitious plot bunny that would involve this, but I don't know yet if I can pull it off. And I know from one other person who has a very, very interesting plot outline. Interesting stories can be written with all kinds of Snapes. Alive, ghost, portrait, in the afterlife... :) And who says what the afterlife is really like? These little glimpses  we saw don't tell much.

I guess those other Snapes can be interesting, but I prefer a Snape I can touch. Perhaps a dead but taxidermied Snape? He could be mine....forever.

ROFLMAO! I like how your mind works, I think. But you scare me, too... ;)

Actually, Severus is the one who should be scared.

Severus scared? No way. But since he lives in my head, I am. (shuffling off, hoping I didn't put any new ideas in your head).

If I taxidermied your head, you couldn't write. So as long as you write stuff I like, you're safe.

Oh dear! Gulp.

Yes, consider yourself warned. Btw I love your "worried (frightened?) writer" icon.

The icon is from the TPP site, when you click on the smily in the response window.

= 

My response window doesn't have a smiley face. Perhaps only the authors' response windows have them. I can't read what frowning face is saying - the writing is too small.

I wasn't aware of that. I use the potions master layout for the site, a kind of antique pink with a glaring Severus on top. I've received reviews with these icons before, so it can't only be an author thing. It must be somewhere in the settings, or dependent on the layout.

The frowning face is Severus who says, "50 points from Gryffindor."

I've seen nothing with a glaring Severus. When I enter this site I see a plot bunny patronus. I do get the message that my browser doesn't have the cookies to view the site and I should change my font, which I haven't figured out how to do. I haven't been too worried about this as I can still read the fics.

Ok. You have the patronus skin. I have the professor skin (he's writing, not really glaring). This can be set through 'your account - personal information - skins'. However, I set mine back to Patronus, and here the smiley face is at the bottom of the response window as well. There's a bunch of icons, for bold, italic, and other formatting things. And the smiley. It may be a browser-related problem, not a skin/layout related one. But you usually can say everything with ASCII icons, too.

I have webtv, now msntv. The short instruction manual that came with it is dated 1999. There is a lot of stuff I can't access. But it's free because I belong to a survey panel.

Thank you for that wonderful review, and with me, you can rant all you want. I have a lj community (dunno if it is ok to mention that here, but why not?) called snapedom, where you'll find a lot of other people who think quite similar.

This fic will be a starting point for future fics. I'll have to finish my WIP though, last time where I write a twinkling Dumbledore.

Ooohhh.. there's be more fics with this one as starting point! Whee! (doing little happy dance)As for ranting... where to start?!First of all, I never was a fan of the books. I disliked Harry from the first page of the first book, I'm afraid, but I became interested in the fandom about two years ago. You see, there was this discrepancy between what was said and what was shown. We were told that Gryffindors were brave and the good guys, but we were shown Peter Pettigrew, James the toerag Potter, Sirius effing Black and worst of all, the lemme-kill-the-bastids Weasley twins. We were told that the Slyths were ever so evil, but really, what did those kids *do* what made them so evil? Namecalling? Compared to the lying, the stealing, the blackmailing, the mutilating, the blackmailing and the asphyxiating what the Gryff kids got into, it seemed rather mild. Oh, yes, they were *prejudiced* against muggleborn kids, but then, the Gryffs were prejudiced against the Slyths so it seemed a case of thought-crime-that-wasn't to me...We were told that Snape was such a dreadful teacher and a mean nasty bully, but sorry, I don't see it. I've had several snapish teachers and they were the best teachers I've ever had. 'Bully'? 'Authoritarian'? A teacher *has* authority over his students, and the right to wield it. Frankly, Harry and Ron are simply every teacher's nightmare and Neville is a walking disaster who should thank Snape on bended knee for preventing his imminate demise every time he entered the Potions classroom.Did I tell you how much I hated Hermione? Hermione who is supposed to be 'the brightest witch or her age', but who is really, in the immortal words of Red Hen, a neurotic swot, desperate for acknowledgment. Hermione who lies, steals, blackmails and mutilates the face of a fellow schoolgirl for 'the greater good' (ie, for Harry's sake - wanna bet that Bellatrix was known in her day as 'the brightest witch of her age' and one of the first things she said to Voldemort was "you are a great wizard, Harry, uh, Lord Voldmort"?)We were told that Harry was so exceptional and so special, but he never *does* anything really special. Yes, he's brave and he's lucky, but that's about it. He's also a bigot. He gets told by virtual stranger Hagrid that all bad wizards are from Slytherin, Harry gets himself Sorted into Gryffindor, looks at the Slyth table and decides that 'they do look nasty'. That's how bigotry works! Yet Rowling said in interviews that she wanted kids to learn tolerance from her books. Whe a kid asked her why the WW didn't just put all Slytherins in Azkaban, she answered that Slytherin was necessary.So, I became intrigued. Was she setting the readers up? Was she-of-the-limited-prose preparing a world-wide alarm call?It had to be, I thought. Harry *has* to grow up in the last book, and see how the scapegoating of House Slytherin poisoned the Wizarding World. Slytherins of course had reacted by scapegoating muggleborns (I'm a historian; this is a classic reation) I was so convinced that the Trio would have to learn a couple of things before the end of book 7. Responsibility for one's actions, for one thing. Self-reflection for another.It was inevitable, I thought, that Harry would have to learn things about himself and his worldview that would enable him to be a true loving and worthy human being. The sort of human being that could defeat Voldemort and deserve praise.If Rowling had pulled that off, if she had said with her last book "haha, I fooled you all, that whole 'mudblood' thing was just a red herring. I got you all to believe that prejudiced crap about a quarter of the population being incorrigebly evil because a magical hat said so, and now you're caught with your pants down, you are just as bigotted as you thought the Slytherins were", if she had done that, I would've praised her to the sky, dodgy prose or not.Silly me.What Rowling meant with 'teaching the kids tolerance' was straight out of St Augustine's 'The City of God'. St.Augustine (354-430 AD) coined the phrases 'original sin' and 'just war'. He also coined the ideology of predestination (adopted, a thousand years later by Calvin) He didn't believe one should persecute jews, but that one should tolerate them because 'God had allowed the Jews to survive this dispersion as a warning to Christians, thus they were to be permitted to dwell in Christian lands'. So now we know why Slytherins are permitted to dwell in Hogwarts...This woman is scary! She actually believes that if only you had a magical hat, you could select the 'bad' kids from the 'good' kids. If you are stamped 'bad', you cannot ever become 'good', no matter how hard you try. If you are elected 'good' you can Crucio people, carve them up like a christmas ham, tattoo insults on their faces, lie, cheat and steal *and* mindrape your parents while you're at it, and still your soul stays squeaky clean.I might just throw up!And don't get me started on what she did to Snape!!!Well, I might type that on snapedom, which I joined (thank you for that tip) because I've been ranting here long enough :-)

You know, up until the release of DH I would have faught you tooth and claw, and defended JKR and her characters, all the while being convinced that they mature and all will be well after book seven (and I think I even did, we've had a couple encounters on lj).

How wrong I was. 

Sadly, now I think that everything you say is correct, and this saddens me horribly. Not because I always want to be right (Ido) but because it means that the book is bad, is pulling the old books down with it, is actually very qestionable in its morality, especially as a children's book.

She is scary, and I feel sick, too. 

I do like Hermione though, HG/SS is my OTP. She's one with ambition. She's one who changes. She could have understood Severus' wrong and right choices in life, since her own are rather questionable at times.

But alas, in canon she is a Gryffindor and always right, and Severus did everything he did for one reason alone, lurve of Lily. Gag!

Looking forward to your posts on snapedom.

Thank you! :)

Thank you. I don't care at all that it isn't original, IMO there can't be enough good rescue fics. And everyone who wants to, can take mine as a starter for future Snape fics. BTW, can you point me to where I find all these fics? I have a Snape community on lj, and want to make a list with links to this kind of fics.

This particular fic is a one-shot, but future stories will start from here, unless I have another rescue plan that fits the plot better. I suspect there will be a lot of AU Snape fics, but we need time to come to terms with DH and finish existing WIPs. I plan to write more, I have at least five plot bunnies. I know from others that they do, too. And there's time. No  more new cnon to mess things up. ;)

Honestly, I can't find all the Snape lives fic I've read, even in less than a month.  Some are more peripheral (or outlandish, if you're going for blievablitiy), and some are not rescue stories per say, but to name a few: Mortis Confuto (Mimiheart), Return to the Shrieking Shack (Celisnebula), and More Than a Dream (Olethros), all on OWL; as well as A Better Decision (Southern) here on TPP.  I think I remember one on fiction alley, but as the site is down I can't look it up.  There are also several rescue stories embedded in HGSS fics, but unfortunately the writing/plot seems to deteriorate quickly in some of them.  But at least some of them are worthwhile: Underground Gods (Poemomm, TPP) looks very promising, Destiny (Pearle, TPP) is based off a survival scenario (though it is explained in the past tense rather than shown), and Saving a Death Eater (Bambu, TPP & OWL) is a rather excellent one-shot.  You may very well have read all of those already, so apologies if none of them are new.  I agree that they are probably just the tip of the iceberg, as most of us still have lingering WIPs and pre-DH plot bunnies that need wrapping up.  Hopefully the list slightly helpful rather than annoying repetition.

I've read the one from Bambu, but not the others (as far as I remember). Your list is helpful, thanks a lot. I won't be able to do an accurate list of all fics with the theme, but I'd like to have a somewhat representative collection to give people ideas as to the many different ways he could have got out of there. Meaning: starting points to new Snape fic, without having to rescue him all the time in the beginning. Thanks for that.

Thank you, that makes me glad. And you-know-who: ROFL. That'll be a classic.