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"Conjure-Man," by Ishafel
By the time I was three paragraphs into this, I was pretty sure I would want to rec it.

But by the time I finished it, I knew. This is the sort of story that saves a ship from bad canon. For me.

Title: Conjure-Man
Author: ishafel
Pairing: Snape/Harry
Rating: NC 17
Warnings: Not really
Summary:Where else would you look for a ghost but in the city of the dead?

Review by Regan V

Harry learns that Snape might be in New Orleans, post-Katrina, and seeks him there. Normally, I'd shy back from a fic that used a recent RL tragedy as a backdrop (I've seen some using 9/11, or worse, the Holocaust that made me wince). But here, the setting works wonderfully well, in a spare and unsentimental fashion. After all, Harry and Snape ended in canon in a damaged, postwar society, and this setting maps that feeling---of a story continued amidst the ruins---on to the devastated streets of New Orleans.

Characterzation of both of them is note-perfect here. This is one of the most canon-compliant renditions of Snape and of a Snape/Harry relationship that I've ever read. And the prose style is something to savor slowly and reread again: understated, smooth, and supple.

"You're meant to be dead,” Harry says gracelessly.

“I'm sorry to be a disappointment to you.” Snape smiles like a death's head, and his black eyes burn. He is not dead, but he does not seem precisely alive, either.

“I didn't mean it like that,” Harry says. Somehow, ten minutes with Snape has caused him to regress to an angry, bitter thirteen year old. While he struggles to get his temper under control, Snape stands and shrugs his robes off, dropping them on the bed. Underneath, he wears a close fitting black coat, and he takes that off as well. His shirt is starched, very white, buttoned to the top and cuffed at the wrists. He undoes the top two buttons, rolls his sleeves up, and sits again.

Harry stares him, and Snape tilts his head to better reveal his ruined throat, his marked arm. He is beautiful in the way the city is beautiful, in the way ugly, broken things are beautiful, scars in plain sight on fair skin. Harry hates him, hates New Orleans, for their secrets and their lies and their pride. He owes Snape his life, and that's the last thing he wants

*******

I'll admit that I've been reading mostly gen lately, and gen that assumes that Snape died in May 1998. But this story is the sort of imagined ending that can get me past the death of Snape. It carries such conviction, such plausibility and is so compelling that I simply surrendered to its view of things. And where that took me was a much, much better place than where DH left me.

This? Is, you will come to agree, what we need much, much more of.