Dark Creatures was written for the Roughside Yahoo! group Slavefic Fest, with the challenge: Hooray, someone's created an artifact that countereffects lycanthropy: as long as Remus wears it, he won't become a werewolf each month. But the artifact has been made in the form of a collar, and that's a REALLY, REALLY loaded emotional issue for Remus. Why? (Challenge written by Amanuensis)
This story, like nearly all the stories I have written, morphed quite a bit from original conception to final execution. The bare bones were obvious to me once I selected the challenge: Snape gives the collar to Lupin thus binding him, multiple sexual encounters, culminating (climaxing, as it were!) in Lupin's unwanted and (to him) frightening arousal which would make him realize the freedom from lycanthropy wasn't worth it. Everything else grew organically within this framework.
I started out intending to set the story post-GoF, but soon realized that the collar would be more important if there were no other alternatives such as Wolfsbane, and moved the story to 1986. Comments by a beta that the setting wasn't quite clear led me to move it again, to 1983, which I ended up being very happy with because it's so close to Voldemort's first defeat. Snape and Lupin are still quite young; their friends have recently been either killed or imprisoned; they are each dealing with major personal baggage, Snape with his Death-Eater history and change of loyalties, Lupin with being a werewolf. In short, these are two messed-up young men. I see Snape as wanting to have Lupin as a real friend and lover, but being entirely unable to achieve this. His Slytherin friendships were constrained by power and status games, and at this point in his life that's all he knows how to do. Lupin is just not sophisticated enough to understand Snape at all. He can handle Snape when he can view him in a single light, but he can't cope with Snape's true complexity. The image of Snape-as-Dementor just popped into the story as I wrote it; the image of Snape-as-vampire came because I was reading Fabula Rasa's awesome Rats' Alley . Incidentally, the idea that a vampire can't enter a room unless invited comes from one of the many vampire legends. The "merewolf" came entirely from Lupin's head -- that's one of the cool things about writing, isn't it? The characters sometimes just think, say, and do things, and all you can do is write about it! At this point in writing the story, I realized it would mesh very well with another 1980s era Snape/Lupin I had on the backburner -- which was really, at this point, only a title, three paragraphs, and a vague theme. I stole the title, ditched the paragraphs, and incorporated the theme. "Dark Creatures" it would be. The first turning point had become obvious to me -- it would be the anniversary of the deaths of Snape's friends (an event mentioned in GoF). I considered and threw out several ideas for the second turning point before it again became obvious that it should involve the revelation to Lupin that Snape has more than one dimension to him, that he is a victim as well as an abuser. (And of course, it is a revelation to Snape in some sense, which is why his behavior changes on the next meeting.) The "aristocrat" is, of course, Lucius Malfoy. I have read several fics in which the werewolf changes several nights around the full, but I stuck to tradition to making it a single night. I checked length of night at the latitude of Scotland on a nifty web site I found via Google. The moon-rape imagery just kind of happened, but in retrospect it seems an obvious metaphor to me. The emotional freight of the collar, of course, is my own invention. Just as I got to the final sex scene, I went back and added the werewolf dream. I like things in threes, and I liked the idea of Snape as three different Dark Creatures. It also gave more weight to Lupin's excuse to Albus at the end (which I hadn't written yet but had planned out). I had not planned out that last sex scene other than to know that Lupin would finally become aroused, but when I got there I realized it had to be as intimate as possible. Earlier in the story, I seriously considered going back and changing the previous two sex scenes so that the overall rating could be R. For me, the whole point of explicit sex is to get the reader hot (well, works for me!) and since these scenes are from the POV of a guy who's not enjoying it much, they're not very sexy. But as the final sex scene started unfolding I realized that it was going to be NC17, thank you very much, and that it would be necessary to pull the reader along with Lupin. I don't think it would have had the same impact written less explicitly. Speaking of which, this is my first story written in first person POV, if you don't count Within These Pages which is told from the first-person POV of a book in the restricted section of the library. I usually find angsty first person POV excessively melodramatic, and I consciously tried to avoid going over the top here. (Not sure if I succeeded, but I did X-out most of the parts my beta rolled her eyes at…) The choice was made because this story is all about what's going on in Lupin's head, and the reader needs to be there. This is also my first story involving nonconsensual sex. As other people have pointed out in the Roughside group, on livejournal, and elsewhere, noncon stories are really about power. Poor Lupin has a lot of power-related issues and hang-ups, maybe because of the part of his brain that identifies with an animal which places great importance on pack position. Once he decides to interpret the rapes as giving him power -- he makes Snape lose control, make noises, orgasm -- he totally can't cope with having Snape cause him to lose control, because that gives Snape the power that Lupin was denying. By coming in Snape's mouth, Lupin submits utterly. The only way to return to equality is to get rid of the damn collar.