Thirteen -- action (Claire Bennet & Severus Snape)

[facesdeath]

While there's a pool of blood outside the shop's front door, it's small compared to the one just inside it - spread beneath the dead body of one Regulus Black. He's been sprawled there for some time on his side how he fell; dead before he even hit the ground

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[adamantined]

Claire comes in the back way, for once - mainly because she wants to leave the plate of turnovers she made last night somewhere she's sure Severus will see them - and keeps her head down until she's hung her coat up. After that she goes through routine, though it's strange because normally Regulus has lit lamps and pulled things out of places, on and on, by this time.

Eventually she makes her way into the front, heels clicking - because she likes heeled boots - and turns to start opening the register. It's nice outside and she'd rather be outside and there's only so much that -

Claire is moving before she realizes, exactly, what's going on or what could have possibly happened. She knows nothing about taking care of anything like this - why would she? She doesn't have these problems - and even if she's seen a body like this before, she still drops her phone because her hands get too tense to hold onto it. She can't pull something out of his head and recharge his battery, like she did with Peter, so she doesn't know what to do.

She hopes she isn't crying when she checks for a pulse, doesn't find one, and retrieves her phone to ping Severus through the network. She doesn't want to call her dad or Zach on this one.

[eduronox]

It's a matter of luck, really, that he's at the network when she tries to contact him. He's rarely on the thing.

Her messages are not anything that he could have predicted.

Most people will become enraged at such a situation. Severus is not most people. He has a temper, yes, and he's easily set off - but in truly dire situations he becomes cold. Efficient. He Apparates directly inside the shop, loud crack and reside of black smoke - from the spell or the potions he was working on - heralding his arrival. He sees Claire without looking at her and kneels immediately at Regulus' side, pale hands going out to rest rigor mortis and twist at his body. He needs to know how it happened.

[adamantined]

Claire gets out of the way. Regulus is already dead so it's not as if she's capable of helping him in any capacity - would that even work? - and since she doesn't know what else to do other than sit back and hold her breath, she moves.

Or, rather, she word vomits.

"I just came in and he was like this. I didn't even look - I'm sorry - I didn't know anyone else to get ahold of." She says a few other things that are utterly meaningless but mostly just watches Severus move Regulus. Her stomach feels sick, the way it did when she saw Jackie, and she has to swallow to stop herself from saying anything else too inane for this situation.

[eduronox]

Before he responds he conjures a black sheet to cover Regulus with. His face is drawn, expression unreadable. When he finally does look up at her, the only hint at his mood is the fact that his the hand holding his wand is drawn tight enough to make the skin over his knuckles even more pale than usual.

"He'll have been here a bit before you arrived," he says, his voice quiet. He stands, and ushers her to the back room, not wanting her to stare at it any longer.

[adamantined]

Claire sits at the small table she set the turnovers down on and folds her hands, calm. For whatever reason, she's barely thinking of Regulus - her mind is stuck on that moment in the Petrelli hose when she pulled the glass out of Peter's head.

She almost asks him if he's hungry but then says instead, "So... now what? We can't just leave him out there." They're both calm, though it seems that Severus is calmer. Part of her envies that while the other part of her just wants to throw up.

[eduronox]

"He'll be taken care of."

He's moving through the little room, tea kettle coming together at his fingertips. He meets her eyes as he passes a warm cup into her hands, and sits down across from her. "My first inclination, Miss Bennet, is to send you home," he says, his voice still quiet. "I will inform the authorities after I have investigated the scene myself."

He doesn't say that he's intimately familiar with murder, that Regulus is a damn good duelist as any Death Eater would be and to get a knife in him would have to be something extraordinary, that he's livid.

Severus just sits for a moment, his own cup between his hands, gaze unfocused and toward the door leading to the front room and the corpse of what amounts to his only friend. Regulus is already dead. There is no cause for mourning. He'll come back, no worse for wear (on the outside, at least). Severus didn't mourn the first time. There was no room for it in his heart, as there isn't now.

But it weighs on him.

[adamantined]

She hates that phrase. It's not that she's heard it a thousand times, though she's heard it often enough. Taken care of. Like the person in question is nothing more than a sandbag or something insubstantial. It's usually the part where people stop becoming people and start becoming bodies.

Rather than commenting on this, though, she just takes the tea as offered and drinks it once, moving on auto-pilot. She's responsive enough, doesn't feel like she's in shock, doesn't even feel like she's going to cry. But she's happy not to have to look into the front room. "When you find out who did it," she starts, because it's not a question of if so much as it is a question of when, "I want to know, too."

She doesn't have a car to run into a wall but she still has an insatiable need to know the truth of what happens to the people she cares about. That might be selfish, and she feels like she needs to amend it in some way. "Will you be okay?"

Claire doesn't particularly care if Severus is the type of person to shrug something like that off. She cares about him, too, after all.

[eduronox]

He looks at her as he takes a sip of his tea, not tasting it. Anger is beginning to boil inside of him - anger at being here, anger at this happening. His mind is racing. He'll need to do his own work and be done before he alerts the police.

Severus doesn't speak, but gives her a single nod. He'd be a hypocrite for telling her no, for saying it wasn't proper for a girl her age. He'd been her age when he began a career of murdering. She'd found Regulus' body. It was only fair.

Her question catches him off-guard, however. He still isn't used to her friendliness, her concern. He is slow to answer, but he does.

"I am unhappy. Less for my own state of mind and more over Regulus. He has done things in his life that dictate he shall never be an innocent. But he is not guilty of any crime here that would ever warrant such a thing. I am angry that it happened, and here, of all places. I am disgusted at it."

[adamantined]

Though she's unsure whether or not it's the tea that actually makes her feel better or his response to her request, she does feel better. Claire still keeps her eyes dead center and away from the other room, but that's made easier because he's directly in front of her. He might still intimidate her sometimes, but she's not afraid to look him in the eye, especially over something like this.

His honesty - and she knows it's honesty, if only because it's so adequately blunt - actually makes her smile. "I know he died for a cause," Claire replies softly, staring into her cup. "I know that he had kind of a warped view on things in the beginning but did the right thing in the end." She stops talking for another drink and thinks of her father. "Bad things happen to good people, and it's never right. I'm sorry. It shouldn't have happened to him."

And she knows, on some level, that he'll take care of it.

[eduronox]

"Men like he and I were meant to be as we were. Wars are not won by shining knights on white horses, but by the cobblestones that hold them up as they ride."

It's a bleak statement, but true. He does think highly of what he's done and who he is because of it, but it's overpowered by self-loathing and bitterness. Severus knows that Regulus would never have been able to cope with the way the war went. He could never do what he'd done himself. Regulus was and is not a solider.

"If it can be righted, it shall."

[adamantined]

"That's why heroes in fairy tales always look like complete idiots," she says. Claire is past the point of believing that there's a prince out there for every little girl. She's found that she's more content with cobblestones anyway. "They aren't smart enough to figure out the dirty work that no one wants to do."

She takes her phone out of her bag on the floor and just stares at it, halfway to texting or calling someone. Claire puts it on the table, though, pink and obnoxious considering the situation.

[eduronox]

He smiles a little at that - it's a sad smile, but it's his appreciation for her assertion. He remembers calling himself a prince - the dual meaning suiting his dreary thoughts in childhood; delusions of grandeur and fantasy.

Childish things taken away.

Severus looks away for a moment, struck by the thought - struck too deeply for his liking. He stares at her phone. It's a device he doesn't understand and finds comical, but sees the sleek efficiency in it. Muggles making due without magic and never realizing they're without.

He wants Regulus to have childish things like dreams and girlfriends and laughter and security. Things so fragile, like flakes of plastic inside a snowglobe. Things Severus is incapable of processing. For Regulus, this is a second chance. He is young in his heart, and his death was his one grand mission.

It's for those reasons that Severus is the most angry. He relaxes his grip on his teacup, threatening to crack in his hands.

"...I will put in a call to the police, and arrange for Mr. Smith to escort you home."

[adamantined]

Claire appreciates the smile, just as she appreciates a lot of little things about people that others tend to overlook - she appreciates the way her mother smells and the calluses on her father's hands and the way Lyle's face turns red when he eats too much hot sauce. The stickers on the back of Zach's video camera and how Regulus sometimes does this weird thing with his face when he laughs. Little things. She always notices them. They make her smile, too, though now they just make her somewhat sad.

She looks up - she hadn't even realized she was staring at the table still or again - just before Severus speaks, catching the tension in his hands, catching him looking hard at her pink phone on the table. It's such an insubstantial piece of plastic in this kind of a situation and its presence actually leaves her feeling exposed.

"Okay." Claire nods after what feels like a long time. She doesn't know what else to say. "Thank you for being so nice. And for the tea." It comes out all wrong, but that's all Claire has.