(closed RP for Henry Winter and Stephen Maturin)

[estebanmd]

Stephen had rather wanted to talk with Henry Winter at length, if for no other reason than to cement his hopeful deduction that Henry's recent wedding had well and truly laid to rest the remnants of old animosity concerning the woman who was now Mrs. Winter. Unfortunately, there had simply been no time for conversation. Stephen had brought little

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[h_m_winter]

Henry considered this, and very nearly snorted. No, there had been no argument or pleading, though the persuasion had been, in a sense (even if it had only been because I want you to). "Interminable waiting for an answer?" he echoed. "Interminable, no; waiting, yes. She asked for time to consider, so I went to America with Dax and Dr. Silvey--I'm not sure if you've met her--in search of the magical lieopleurodon. It wasn't until I came home that she said yes." That had been one of the most anxious times of his entire life, even distracted as he had been by random bat-attacks and Dax's driving.

"It wasn't unexpected, though--I knew there was a very good chance she'd ask for time, and that perhaps she'd put off her answer for months. If anything, I was surprised at how relatively quickly she gave me an answer."

He shook his head. "Francis thought I was insane for wanting to be married to begin with--Francis is a friend of mine, whose own marriage was not at all a happy thing--" mainly because not only was Francis gay, his wife was a vapid imbecile of a woman "--and Susan had no idea why Camilla would say no, or why the possibility of her refusal was so terrible. Neither of them know Camilla as well as I do--not even Francis, who went to school with us. Even he couldn't really understand just what a monumental thing I was asking of her--I knew all along that it wasn't simply a matter of loving her, or her loving me. Marriage isn't something either of us would ever dream of taking lightly." Which made Camilla's acceptance all the more meaningful, when she finally gave it.

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Now it was Stephen who almost snorted. "I am tolerably well-acquainted with Dr Silvey, yes," he allowed. "She had been a close friend of my erstwhile brother-in-law, now popcorn, God rest his soul," and again he crossed himself in that perfunctory way.

Come to think of it, there were ways in which Henry reminded Stephen a little of Simon Tam, even if only superficially: tall, dark, and deceptively quiet.

"I assume she has spoken with our colleague Grant on the matter of this liopleurodon. Have you met him? -- Doctor Grant, our professor of Care of Magical Creatures, a reasonably well-known paleontologist in the outside world before his arrival here. I understand he has done some rather controversial work on dinosaurs and related reptiles, and I believe he has a current interest in dragons." It was not so much a tangent as a related topic. Dragons, dinosaurs, and women had some things in common. They were unpredictable and perilous; also, sometimes, elusive.

"In any event, it sounds as though the demands of Dr Silvey's research came at a fortuitous time." Yet Diana would have waxed exceeding wroth at the notion of Stephen's gallivanting off to another continent with marriageable women not herself, even if she herself wanted nothing to do with him at the time. Stephen wondered why this had not been a problem for Henry with Camilla. "If the lady did not object to the excursion, which it sounds as though she must not have done?"

[h_m_winter]

Henry shook his head. "I haven't," he said. "Though once I've settled back down to research, I ought to. From what I understand, I'm hardly the only auxiliary aid Dr. Silvey and Professor Dax have acquired."

He sighed, steering the wheelbarrow down a slight incline. "It really was fortuitous timing," he said. "Camilla offered no objection out loud--honestly, I think she might have been as glad of my absence as I was, though she can be so inscrutable that I can't know for sure. She needed time to think uninterrupted, which would have been difficult if I'd remained, seeing as we live together, and I needed something to distract myself with while I waited for her reply." He paused, and smiled a dry smile. "Though even yet Camilla doesn't believe the reason for our trip--I think she's convinced we were all engaged in some kind of dangerous espionage, and that bats and chocolate factories are code-words for something more interesting. I've given up trying to disabuse her of the notion."

He didn't feel the need to mention that even his absence had been in some measure calculated--that he'd reasoned his lack of presence might make Camilla think a bit harder about it all. Some things did not need to be said aloud; Henry was reasonable certain Stephen could just infer that one. "When I did return, though, almost the first thing she said was 'yes'. Once Camilla does make up her mind, she makes it up with a vengeance." Camilla was often fickle, mercurial, but when she did set herself to something, she was immovable; it was a kind of strength very few people ever saw or divined in her.

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The idea of spending time voluntarily being harangued by Chance Silvey struck Stephen as immensely bizarre and therefore amusing. "Were I not desirous to keep my head on my shoulders, and my eardrums unpunctured, I might inquire of Dr Silvey concerning the creature and the study thereof. You must indeed have wished most strongly to be free of Hogwarts for a time, to have volunteered for such an expedition."

Henry and Dax Stephen could imagine engaged in 'dangerous espionage', Henry under the guise of the introverted scholar he actually was (much like Stephen himself) and Dax under the guise of eternal intergalactic tourist-cum-researcher. Chance Silvey, not so. She did not seem to Stephen much talented in dissembling, nor inclined toward such. She did, however, seem the kind of woman whom Stephen might have imagined to appeal to Henry, had Stephen never met Camilla. She was gruff, and taciturn, and plain, and not given to wasting time. She was pretty well nigh the opposite of Camilla.

"You are perhaps fortunate to have been suspected of espionage rather than more mundane entanglements," Stephen noted, along this line. The remark was not without a certain ruefulness: Diana had once suspected Stephen of the reverse, suspected him of infidelity when in fact he had only given the appearance thereof due to the exigencies of espionage.

"Sure you must have been surprised, to return to such an abrupt and definite answer?"

[h_m_winter]

Henry raised an eyebrow. He had known nothing of any animosity between Chance and Stephen, though to be sure he'd never before mentioned one to the other. He did have a feeling that Chance was likely capable of making displeasure known in no uncertain terms, however.

"I was," he said. "I had to get away, for at least a little while--if it hadn't been to America, I would have found some other pretext. As to more mundane enanglements--" and he thought he knew quite well what that meant "--I don't think it would ever occur to Camilla. She really is much more likely to suspect me of some kind of top-secret mission." What said mission might be, and what its ultimate purpose, he couldn't even begin to guess.

They'd reached the garden, and Henry gently lowered the wheelbarrow, scouting out the lay of the beds in a search for the best possible place to put his little friend Xipe. "I was very surprised," he said, circling a pruned-back shrub. "Camilla, when confronted with something she doesn't want to deal with, can prevaricate endlessly--I was more than half afraid that she'd do so with me. It wouldn't be an outright refusal; it would just be a refusal to give any answer at all." He had no way of knowing that his question--that he himself--was too important to Camilla to be given such treatment.

[estebanmd]

Stephen stood back, waiting until Henry should find the right spot for the hideous grinning bloodthirsty pagan idol, at which point Stephen would offer assistance in moving it from wheelbarrow to ground.

(Personally, Stephen would not want to eat anything that had been grown in ground sanctified by the Flayed God of the Aztecs.)

He thought of the hundred little ways Diana had found to put off commitment, and the way he had hopelessly followed in her wake despite it all, and felt he understood exactly what Henry had been afraid would happen. "This would be why I wondered how you had secured her consent," he said, speculatively, half-squinting to try picturing Xipe Totec amid the autumn-dying plants.

[h_m_winter]

At last, he found what looked to be the perfect spot--a small mound near one of the now-mutilated shrubberies. "So far as that goes, I have to admit, I have very little idea," he said. "I knew what a huge, huge thing I was asking of her, and part of me is still amazed that she said yes. It had been unspoken between us for ages that nothing could control Camilla but Camilla herself, and that she was answerable to no one." Largely because of Charles, damn him. "For a long while she didn't understand why her actions should have any affect on me, and once she realized that they did, I think her thoughts on the matter began to change."

He tugged aside the sacking base he'd wrapped around the statue, eying it and the ground, wondering how far it would sink once he'd set it down. This was only a brief thaw; the ground was squishy in some places, but frozen beneath, and he didn't really need the statue to wind up locked into the earth next time the temperature dipped. "In the end, she did it because she wanted to," he said. "Which is the only reason she ever does anything. That I should be lucky enough that she should want to remains something of a source of wonder."

[estebanmd]

"In your place," mused Stephen, "I should have been quite apprehensive -- I should have wondered whether she might change her mind, up to the very exchanging of vows, indeed perhaps even afterward. A woman of that kind can prove startlingly changeable." Diana, after all, had left him both before and after their marriage -- after both weddings, come to think of it. "Then, too, there is always the local strangeness to which Hogwarts is prone. There was something of a disturbance on All Hallows' Eve." That had been only days before the Winters' wedding.

[h_m_winter]

While admittedly Henry had been a little nervous, he also felt that, once her answer was given, Camilla would likely stick with it. She could be changeable, yes, but she could also hold to something with all the tenacity of super-glue when she wanted to--hardly a romantic metaphor, but apt nonetheless. Again, that strength that so few people ever saw.

He looked at Stephen, curious--he'd wondered if anything would be mentioned of Halloween. "I heard a very little about that," he said. "Camilla and I didn't notice a thing at the time, but Susan mentioned some sort of madness going around."

[estebanmd]

"Thank your stars you noticed nothing," said Stephen, a little sourly. "It was a monstrous thing, worse than most of the little madnesses that sweep this place."

[h_m_winter]

"So I was told. From what I inferred, it must have been rather terrible." Though he did not share Camilla's view that it had to have been utterly horrible. "I realize I have no right to ask, but what precisely was it? I could gather precious little from Susan; she seemed much more interested in figuring out why meditation didn't actually work."

[estebanmd]

Stephen regarded the savage face of Xipe Totec, who seemed viciously amused. "You are to consider there has not been much opportunity to compare notes with many persons afflicted. That being said, I believe the effect -- whatever its cause, I cannot say -- the effect was to strip its victims of all morality, every vestige and scrap of moral probity."

[h_m_winter]

Henry went quiet, thinking about this. He did not know either Stephen or Susan very well, but the thought of either of them stripped of all morality was...well. It sounded like the stuff Greek tragedies were made of. The rather unflattering fact that it might not have had any appreciable effect on himself and Camilla did not occur to him.

"If it did that to any number of people at all, it's just as well we have the Rule," he said, meditatively. "Was it widespread at all? I've heard nothing of it from anyone else, but then Camilla and I have been either occupied or away from the school entirely since then." Francis would have said something, if he'd been affected (though Henry still didn't know about what had happened to his friend's room), and if Charles had...well, they'd have known.

[estebanmd]

Having no way of knowing exactly what served Henry and Camilla for morality (or lack thereof), Stephen nodded grimly. "I should think the event occasioned all manner of personal misfortune for a good many people. Little wonder most have kept silent about it; thus I cannot estimate how many, or how few, were so unfortunate as to be affected, other than those I witnessed personally while myself afflicted, and at that time my own judgement would have been suspect. Subsequently my perceptions were further muddled by a sort of magnification lent by Susan, an experimental thing of hers."

[h_m_winter]

His last words made Henry wince. "Ah," he said. "That. I hope your experience wasn't as terrible as Camilla's and mine. I know Susan meant well, and she did warn me when she gave me the stuff, but there really is no kind of accurate warning for such a thing." It might not have been so terrible for them, if not for the precedence of the bacchanal; they'd both undergone such abandon before, with extremely unfortunate results. Even then, while under the potion's influence, they had feared nothing; it wasn't until after it had worn off that they had really frightened one another.

All things considered, Henry didn't consider it politic to admit he had reason to believe it hadn't been as horrible for Stephen as it had been for himself and Camilla--terrible or no, it was completely overwhelming, far more so than any normal human could stand. "I think she's thought better of the idea, now," he added. "Camilla and I both let her know it really wasn't something she ought to be sharing. Though I have to say that if that's how she experiences the world all the time...well. I'd go mad, myself, and I should think almost anyone else could say the same." Once upon a time he'd craved those semi-divine senses, but now, having experienced them (twice), he was quite happy to remain a dull plodding human.

[estebanmd]

"She can demonstrate extraordinarily poor judgement at times," Stephen said, quite keenly aware that he himself could be advanced as an example of her poor judgement.