a sucker for surveillance

All right, so I said I was going to post about where my very first all lower case letter-titled fic came from. Not that, as I said before, I explain my writing, but this one's a good candidate for some consideration of source material.

I told penwiper26 that I'd written this fic before, which is an exaggeration mounted in truth. I was writing about language dancing in the air more than ten years ago:

The words shifted, tumbled about, formed themselves into hoops and dived through each other, hung in glittering chains in the air like Christmas lights, made towers and poems and sentences that burned themselves into Snape's brain: profound, eternal truths that he was certain he would never forget and that he knew quite well would soon vanish without trace, like that perfect moment in a dream that can never be recalled afterwards, leaving you longing for it the rest of your life. (from "No Great Magic")

And, a little more profoundly, in "In Time of Pestilence":

"To the bonds of kinship," said her father, "that yoke us one to the other, no matter how many the years that fall between." Again, he let the Dutch color the tone of the translation, though now it was neither heavy nor fishy, but liquid-sweet and charming as the blue-and-white of Delft pottery, and the ties he evoked seemed light enough to carry. All experience to the contrary.

"How do you do that?" Snape blurted out.

"How do I do what?" said Hieronymus, winking. "We shall discuss it when next you visit. When you will have fewer worries and all the time one could wish." Snape nodded, trusting for the moment in the divination of hope.

Before he could turn to go, Artemis slipped ahead and fetched his coat, a last act of service. She put it around his shoulders and whispered a Latin phrase in his ear. And when he spoke in response, in thanks and in farewell, he could hear the words in Dutch and in English and in a language that was older than both and as new as syllables meeting the air for the first time; and they went up like a cloud lifting darkness from the heart, and they came down like the snow swirling around the towers of Hogwarts, brightness falling from the air, to settle silently in the soft, drifting, joyful deeps of winter.

That story's a crossover with my original universe, in which language doesn't do magical tricks; it is, however, an essential part of the interactions my characters engage in around the world. Someday, someone will ask me if my novels are wish-fulfillment, in that snarky way that means "and you really want to fuck George Merrill, don't you?" and I will say that yes, they are, and what they're giving me that I can't have in real life is, most deeply, the ability to run a learning program and come out of it speaking another language, which is something I don't do, though I have studied several.

( more words )

And that's quite enough words about where this story came from for now, though I could likely blather on more.

Subject line: oh, Mr. Finch. There really should be a "Person of Interest"/Vorkosiverse crossover, impossible as it is. It is a perfect thing to be watching when I can't get Simon out of my head.