Application: Charles Macaulay, "The Secret History"

[chas_macaulay]

A tall, lean man in faded jeans, a well-worn white button-down shirt, a loose tan suede jacket and a pair of steel-toed Wolverines that had seen better days appears in the Sorting Room. He looks around and runs a hand through his scruffy blond hair in puzzlement, and then his blue eyes fall upon the table of application forms. He ambles over, picks

Comments

[c_macaulay]

Charles.

Camilla hasn't seen him since he went off to rehab on Francis's dime. Hasn't seen him in the flesh, that is. She saw him in Galadriel's mirror. Sometimes she wishes she hadn't. Repulsed by the way he lives. The choices he's made, if you can call them choices, that easy slippage ever further into dissolution -- the very opposite of Henry's rigor.

He's a mess, by her lights. He's as beautiful as he always was, in spite of all the hard living. He's ... well, he's her twin.

She hesitates in the door of the Sorting Room. She wants to run far away, fast. But her eyes take him in, thirsty.

[chas_macaulay]

Busy talking to the cute blonde girl and the Japanese lady, it took a minute before Charles looked up to spot a familiar figure hanging back. Almost the last person he'd ever want to see again (the very last is not currently living, to his certain knowledge, and he likes it that way).

He debates not speaking to her, pretending he didn't see her. If she'd left, he wouldn't have called her back.

But she doesn't leave.

"...Camilla?"

[c_macaulay]

She watches him talking to people. She really ought to go ... tell? warn? complain to? Henry. It's not like she's going to be able to hide them from one another, and she rather doubts she's going to be able to play peacemaker. So Henry might as well know sooner rather than later.

Something like dread seeps through her at the thought of telling Henry about this particular arrival. It seems almost less terrible to tell Charles that Henry's come back from the dead.

For a moment, Camilla considers the possibility of leaving Hogwarts altogether. Leave the both of them. But where would she go? And she'd miss Henry. That's why she came here in the first place.

And in the meantime, while she's wasting time on these thoughts, Charles notices she's there.

He calls her Camilla rather than Milly. That's a blessing, isn't it?

"Charles," she says. Her own voice sounds both flat and hollow to her, somehow, when she says it. "How did you wind up here?"

[chas_macaulay]

"...It is you, then." There's a hollow note in his own voice. He'd half-hoped he'd mistaken someone else for her, or hallucinated her altogether.

He shrugs. "Beats me. I don't even know where 'here' is. Sure doesn't look like anyplace I remember us ever staying, not Virginia or Vermont." A thought suddenly pops into his head. "Say. I wouldn't happen to be dreaming all this, would I? I mean, unusual setting, strange questions, you...Freud would have a field day."

[busty_robin]

Steph honed in on one thing, and one thing only in the very good looking older man's application.

"Pepper. Jack. Cheeseburgers. They are godly. You bite into one, and angels sing. Good choice."

[chas_macaulay]

Charles grinned. Good kid, here. "I think so. Don't know where they'd been all my life. Waiting for me to get to Texas to find them, I guess."

[busty_robin]

"I've never been to Texas, so I'll have to take your word that they have good cheeseburgers. But why wouldn't they? Nothing out there but cattle! Oh, and tumbleweed! I hear there's tumbleweed!" Steph wasn’t city-biased, not in the least!

[chas_macaulay]

"Beef and spices. Oh, and chili. I've got a buddy who likes to say you can't get real chili anywhere outside the state."

He laughs. "Some parts of it there are, I've lived in those. Traded up to an exurb outside Austin at the moment, so I've kind of got the best of both worlds. Small towns at my back and a big city in front of me."

[rkuchiki]

It was refreshing to get a seemingly normal, regular human applicant without any severe emotional problems and/or incurable homicidal tendencies. They were becoming rare at Hogwarts.

"What's your notebook half full of?"

[chas_macaulay]

Charles shrugged and flipped a few pages. "Umm. Grocery lists, to-do lists, phone numbers, quotes from books I liked, margin doodles, odds and ends like that. Nothing very exciting, sorry. You're welcome to rip 'em out if you want the notebook."

[getoffmydesk]

Provenza walked into the sorting room in the unhurried way he did almost everything. After reading the application, he raised his eyebrows and looked at the man with a mixture of weariness and disgust.

"You don't kill these days like you don't drink," he said. "That mean you used to kill, though, dunnit?"

[chas_macaulay]

Oh, this guy has cop written all over him. Charles got to know the native flora and fauna of police stations quite well over the months he represented Julian's class to the authorities after Bunny's - disappearance.

"Figuratively speaking," he says with a light, charming grin. "Let's just say I know what it's like to have murder in my heart, shall we? That and the drinking, they're kind of related."

[getoffmydesk]

Provenza couldn't have had cop written all over him more if he'd been attacked by a Sharpie.

"Yeah, yeah, murder in your heart, darkness in your soul, and all that bullshit," Provenza said, waiving his hand dismissively. Charles' charm had no effect on him. "Thing is, there ain't no 'figurative' when it comes to dead. You either are, or you're not. I think you're full of shit, and there ain't not figurative about it."

[chas_macaulay]

"Oh, I'm only emo when I'm really, really drunk, Inspector," he says, all lighthearted clowning. "Do I look dead to you? I didn't last time I checked. Maybe I need a shave?"

[onewinteryday]

((OOC: as per Prima's email))

It takes a lot to stun Henry Winter, but Charles' arrival has managed it. A million insults that he can think up--none are more damning than the fact Charles now works at a bar.

He crosses his arms, not looking a day older. Charles should stay away from Camilla if he knows what's good for him. But he almost never did. None of them did.

He has the advantage of being dead. 'Hello,' he eventually says in his cultured voice. 'How many years has it been, Charles? I'm curious.'

[chas_macaulay]

For a moment Charles is the perfect portrait of shock and horror. You're dead. I wanted you dead and then you were.

Then he remembers Camilla's sly look, closed off from their connection, and it all becomes sickeningly clear. Goêteusis. A different approach. Henry or Henry's ghost, here.

Still, here is the very last person he'd ever want to see again standing before him. Isn't there something that's nagged at him all this time, an answer that Henry took to his grave? He clears his throat and finally croaks out the question.

"Why, Henry?"

[onewinteryday]

'A very philosophical question--'why',' he declares, thin fingers tapping the side of his face. 'Why are we here? Why do people believe in God? Why does sin exist? Well, it's because of the loss of control--the answer to all three. People come into being because of loss of control. They believe in God to attempt to regain some control. And sin--'

Here he smiles, a little, though he is reeling from the shock of seeing Charles here--a curse upon whichever house he ends up in--because that means Camilla will be pulled to someone who is not Henry. It was always better when there were just the two of them.

'Sin happens because loss of control is almost irresistable. That is why.'

Henry hopes he's answered the question. Not.

[chas_macaulay]

"Not when the sin is suicide, Henry. That's the ultimate act of control," he says numbly. "Very you, in some ways, stealing the power of death from the Gods."

The scene flashes before him again as it has a million times since: himself, incapacitated by Henry; Richard's voice, I've been shot, as if from a thousand miles away; hotel security or police or God knows who pounding at the door; Henry's I love you to Camilla, with a kiss; and then the impossibly loud roar of the gun.

"Why did you do it, Henry." He's not sure he wants to know. But he has to ask.