Chapter Text
“[...] when all the moments come together, when all the songs meet up with one another, you get something whole and complete and wonderful, people you loved and people you hated and a fondness for them you may not be able to recapture but everything you remember about them being somehow more than they really were, because that's what remembering everything does. When I'm old, I think, I'll look back on this and I won't remember 'That time Sirius thought, if he lit a fart on fire, he could make a star come out of his arse' but I'll probably remember the stars themselves.”
--Remus Lupin, The Shoebox Project
Greetings, gentle reader--
You’ve stumbled upon a sort of strange thing in your travels across the Harry Potter fandom: a work of fanfiction of a work of fanfiction. While perhaps not an entirely unique thing (as mmolloy is a great fan of wendymarlowe’s Sherlock epistolary Dear John and the numerous works it has spawned in that fandom), we feel it necessary to give you a little background information before you dive right in to our little flea circus, here.
This particular work is inspired by and intended as a sort-of sequel to the inimitable The Shoebox Project by Lady Jaida and Rave, which can be found in its entirety in PDF form at http://shoebox.lomara.org/. It was originally published on LiveJournal beginning on June 26, 2004, and although is still technically designated as a Work in Progress, has not been updated with a new entry since late in 2008. The whole history of the project is recounted in more extensive detail at http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Shoebox_Project. It’s a really fascinating story, and we would encourage you to read about it if you’ve any interest at all in the complications of collaborative fiction or the perils of publishing on the Internet, especially back in those simpler early days (read: the early aughts).
We were first introduced to The Shoebox Project by our beautiful, talented, and infinitely cooler friend rennsuri, who had been a fan of Shoebox when it was being regularly updated, and who shared it with us each separately after we became friends in college.
How It Began (for mmolloy):
mmolloy was still sort of in the closet about just how much of a rabid, embarrassing fangirl she was (is) when she and rennsuri got to bonding about Harry Potter one day in the infancy of their friendship. mmolloy mentioned that she’d resorted to reading fanfiction (which she at that point still viewed as something to be sort of embarrassed about…) to fill the harrowing gap between Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which was, if you will recall, roughly eleventy-jillion years long. rennsuri, not one to get nearly so hung up about shit like “what other people think about the things I like”, recommended that mmolloy read Shoebox, so that they could talk about it. mmolloy tried, but, apparently being a twenty-year-old person who didn’t quite get the concept of multi-chapter works, only read the first entry out of upwards of twenty in the series and missed the rest at that point. Suffice it to say, she didn’t then really see what all the fuss was about.
It wasn’t until a few years later, when rennsuri introduced earthwitch to the story and earthwitch became mildly (or totally, if we’re being honest…) obsessed with it, that Shoebox crossed her radar again. This time, she had evolved enough to understand the concept of PDFs (truly though, earthwitch had to show her), and devoured the whole thing within a few weeks. She was enchanted by the opportunity to dive back into a long-form visit to Hogwarts, with characters who were both familiar and rendered in an entirely unique and three-dimensional way that made the experience of reading Shoebox as close an approximation to reading Harry Potter as she had had since the age of eighteen. It became a go-to geek out topic when mmolloy and earthwitch would talk on the phone, which lead to the inception of the thing that you’re about to begin reading (assuming you’ve made it this far into the “too much information” preface of the thing).
How It Began (for earthwitch):
In all honesty, earthwitch started out as one of those people who secretly read fanfic and then mercilessly teased her friends (read: mmolloy) for doing the same. Yup. She was one of those. Truly the worst type of nerd. Don’t worry, she has since evolved. Anyway, whenever earthwitch and rennsuri would talk about Harry Potter (which was all the time, let’s be real), rennsuri would insist that she did not buy any Remus/Tonks romance, because The Shoebox Project had ruined her forever. After years of this (earthwitch is always a bit late to the party - seriously, she still dresses like it’s 1994), earthwitch was finally ready to read this supposedly amazing fanfic. So, one August day, when she was feeling lonely and out of sorts, she Googled “The Shoebox Project”. Oh how her life would change. Never before had she shipped such a ship. But it didn’t just stop with mild - ok, severe - obsession. Reading Shoebox directly influenced earthwitch’s decision to break up with her boyfriend, question her sexuality, and spend months pining after rennsuri (well, that wasn’t really a decision). So, no big.
Suffice it to say, earthwitch had to retract her earlier mocking. Shoebox became a major talking point for earthwitch and rennsuri, and when earthwitch visited mmolloy later that year (and proved that Shoebox did indeed have more than one chapter), mmollloy joined in on the obsession as well. During one such conversation, earthwitch and mmolloy lamented, not for the first time, the lack of fanfare during the Shrieking Shack reunion in Prisoner of Azkaban. “What do you think Sirius’ and Remus’ relationship was like once they were reunited?” earthwitch wondered. “I have a partly written letter on my computer that is trying to answer that very question,” mmolloy said. “Send it to me, and I’ll write the response.” Thus, The Stars Themselves was born.
The Stars Themselves is a collaborative work, just like the original The Shoebox Project. The format of the thing was born of that initial conversation, and each of us just sort of fell into writing one of the two main characters naturally from then on. Sirius Black is written by earthwitch, and Remus Lupin is written by mmolloy. We toyed around with the idea of switching perspectives in the early days of writing this, but have since both gotten so deeply involved with our characters that one of us writing the character not her own is a weirdly uncomfortable idea to contemplate. It’s been a fascinating and exciting ongoing discovery process that has helped us remain close even though we live many time-zones apart. [Insert sappy observation about the power of stories here.] We really hope that you enjoy what you read as much as we enjoyed writing it, and we always welcome your comments! (Seriously, we’re super excited to hear what you think.)
Disclaimer:
This is a work of fanfiction. We do not own the characters, settings, or broad premises herein described, which are the original intellectual property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury Publishing. Much of the backstory and tiny details (such as wand woods and the history of Azkaban) come from information housed at Pottermore.com, which is also the intellectual property of J.K. Rowling. We seek no financial gain from the online publication of this work, which is for entertainment purposes only. We’re only playing around in the gazillion-gallon sandbox of which Jo Rowling is the reigning Queen forever.
In addition, the characterizations and some of the events alluded to in this work are based on those originally developed by Lady Jaida and Rave in their work The Shoebox Project. We seek no financial gain from the online publication of this work, and take no credit for ideas originally developed and published in that original work of fanfiction. If it looks like Shoebox, walks like Shoebox, or quacks like a witty, faithfully-characterized duck… er, Shoebox… then there’s probably a really good reason for that. Lady Jaida and Rave built this really awesome sandcastle in a tiny corner of the gazillion-gallon sandbox, and we’re just building on to it and trying not to break anything.
And finally, all characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. And also: if you are/know someone whose life is eerily similar to the events contained herein… 1) I’m so sorry and 2) let’s trade lives, because I could seriously use a little more magic in my world.
...are you still here? Wow, good for you! As a reward for slogging through that entire thing… go ahead and click that little “Next Chapter” arrow down in the corner. We hope that you enjoy yourself, and thanks for coming along on this ride.