(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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[usethepoker]

Susan had also been out in the garden, though much closer to the Forbidden Forest. All previous experience notwithstanding, she'd been trying (yet again) to meditate, and yet again had failed. She wanted to think that failure was the fault of the cold, which was...well, pretty damn cold, but that excuse didn't hold up even to herself.

She squelched over the damp lawn, her footsteps crunching in the still-frozen bits in the shadows of the trees. Over the last weeks she'd tried meditation, square breathing, yoga, and even (far out in the forest), primal scream therapy, and while she'd felt no hint of that murderous rage that had gripped her on Halloween, she still didn't feel closer to anything resembling actual peace. And that, to put it plainly, frustrated the living hell out of her.

Being cold and wet, as well as frustrated, she stopped by her room to put on dry clothes and footwear that wasn't soggy. Her jars of tea held no allure, and even the idea of a hot bath just didn't quite do it. As had been so often the case since Halloween, her thoughts were in a hopeless tangle--she'd tried writing them out in her journal, with some success, but right now her restlessness wouldn't let her sit.

"Bugger it." Susan didn't even bother putting on proper shoes--instead she stuffed her feet into a pair of fuzzy slippers and headed for Stephen's office. Perhaps the only visible difference Halloween had left her with was in her walk--she didn't stalk, now; her movements were slower, more thoughtful, her air of tensely coiled energy gone.

Padding through the dungeons, she stopped outside Stephen's door and rapped on it with her knuckles. "Stephen?" she called. "Are you busy?"

[estebanmd]

"What would you call busy?" Stephen muttered. He was annotating an elementary potions textbook, mostly with exasperated little marginalia like this lesson's impracticality is not ameliorated by the stupidity of its phrasing. "Never in life. Come in, come in," he called through the door.

[usethepoker]

Susan opened the door and padded in on her slippered feet. "It's extremely damn cold outside," she said, apropos of nothing. "And damp. Do you think that might affect trying to meditate, or is it just me?"

She took a seat in the fat armchair across from his desk, most uncharacteristically hugging her legs and resting her chin on her knees. "Henry thinks I'm just not cut out for it, which is...somewhat annoying, really."

It was an odd sort of greeting, but Susan was in an odd sort of mood. Much like her grandfather, it was rarely a good thing when she got introspective. "How have you been?" she asked, abruptly changing tacks, and added in a burst of complete and utter honesty, "I've been worried."

[estebanmd]

Stephen closed the offending textbook with a resounding thump and, his spectacles still on, looked up from the desk to Susan's face. "I see no compelling reason an innate disinclination toward meditation should cause you to worry, unless you have taken to some Eastern religion unbeknownst to me. I knew some quite friendly monks in Java, who lived in perfect harmony with giant apes, and forbade hunting throughout the entirety of the sacred valley where their monastery was situated. Ah, that was a friendly ape, their friend Muong, forest-dweller and guide extraordinaire." He curbed his digression. "It is entirely probable that the chill and damp might seep into a person's bones and predispose their physical frame against the positioning required by certain forms of meditation. Do you require a painkiller?"

[usethepoker]

That actually elicited a quiet laugh from Susan. Stephen really could be terrifically clueless, at times--in anyone else it would have been irritating, but she always had regarded it with fond amusement. It was such a contrast to his normal competence in...well, everything.

"I meant I've been worried about you," she said. "About the whole...well, Halloween thing. Incidentally, I found out what caused it--it was a spell sent out over the WART broadcast. Everyone who heard it had the same symptoms we did; we were hardly the only ones. It just lasted longer for everyone else." Somehow, knowing what had done it was both a comfort and a source of annoyance; it was such a stupid little thing, yet it had turned them both into monsters, and had almost cost Stephen his life. If she ever found out just who had cast it...but damn, she was trying to get away from all that. Maybe she could hire Shaun to beat him up, whoever he was.

[estebanmd]

The notion of Susan worrying about him seemed to Stephen rather an odd one. Properly it was his place to do the worrying, particularly given her tendency to leap before looking. To do him some credit, he refrained from any expression of incredulity, listening patiently to the rest of what she had to say.

"It does not at all surprise me the phenomenon should have affected many people. As I may have mentioned, there have been previous such episodes, though none with the same effect as this one; rather, there have been outbreaks of love-enchantments, bodyswapping, and the like; some of these had nothing to do with contaminated food, but took place by an unidentified means of transmission. Who knows but that WART might not have been a vector for mental disease in these past instances as well? at least, those which occurred after the inception of the radio station."

He took off his spectacles and pinched the hem of his shirt between thumb and forefinger to wipe the lenses. "I am given to understand there were also persons wholly unaffected by the phenomenon. We know Shaun was affected; I am told Henry and Camilla were not. I confess I have not felt inclined to inquire as to who else might or might not have been involved ..." The sentence trailed off, and he looked down at the glasses he held, which by now needed no further polishing.

"I assure you there is no cause to worry for my well-being. There have not been ill effects," he said, folding the spectacles and laying them aside. He referred to what she'd done to him, not to what she'd almost done.

[usethepoker]

Susan wasn't at all sure he'd tell her even if it had affected him--she knew Stephen worried about her, too, and it was always possible he'd keep back something he thought unimportant enough to upset her with. Part of her found it slightly irritating, but she'd accepted long ago that that was just part of who Stephen was. She'd take him at his word, even if she knew he might well be hiding something. If it were of real importance, after all, he'd tell her, upsetting or no. She knew he did things to protect her, but she had no idea just how very many things there were to protect her from.

Susan had very vague memories of body-swapping, but the few times she'd brought it up in the past seemed to have alarmed him, so perhaps there was a reason those memories were vague. "If any of the others were as terrible as that one, I'm glad I don't remember," she said. "Camilla's told me she and Henry hadn't even known about it until I told them. They must either have been completely shut away, or just not paying attention."

Enough of that. She'd wanted to tell him where the spell had come from, but she didn't want to dwell on it. She had another issue--well, all right, several of them, but this one was forefront in her mind. "That potion of mine," she said slowly, "I know now that I shouldn't give it out to anyone else--Henry and Camilla had bad reactions to it, too--but...damn it, part of me wants to. I know humans just don't seem to be built to handle my senses, and that I've done none of you any favors, but I just...I wanted to share it." She paused, searching for the right words. "I guess I wanted all of you to know what it was like to be me, and none of you were really meant to."

She picked at a ragged thread at the end of her sleeve. "Is it very wrong, that part of me still wants to share it, even though I know it would be a truly terrible idea? I know it's the equivalent of mental poison, yet part of me...well. Part of me is completely insensible, apparently."

[estebanmd]

"I would say each episode was terrible in its own special way," said Stephen, remembering with unconcealed distaste his first Valentine's Day at Hogwarts, which had ended in same-sex marriage with a deranged (and not especially intelligent) Death Eater. "What happened to us could have been far, far worse. Do you know the saying that there are fates worse than death? I believe it to be true."

He imagined himself married to Shaun and the cricket bat.

Now was not the time for self-indulgent might-have-beens, he realized as Susan went on. Whatever her reasoning, her agitation was clear. "Henry told me a little of this," he said.

His nerves screeched at him not to let this opportunity slip. He forced himself to ignore the urge. "If you know, or feel reasonably certain, that your potion is harmful to the subjects who ingest it, what do you stand to gain from sharing it?" he made himself say.

[usethepoker]

Susan did indeed know the saying, though in her experience it was usually applied to a specific type of fate. "Well, yes, it most certainly could have been worse," she said, thinking of the damage they could have done, if they'd let themselves loose upon the school. What she and Shaun had done to Jaime Reyes had been bad enough in all conscience--she and Stephen could have taken the school apart. Possibly literally. "At least the castle is still standing."

She rested her chin on her knees again, staring thoughtfully over Stephen's head, her eyes unfocused. "Camilla told me a little, too, though nothing concrete," she said. "Only that it was...not pleasant. As to what I'd gain from it...." She didn't know how to phrase it, precisely; she knew what she wanted to say, just not how to articulate it. "Do you remember what I said, before the spell broke--what I said about being alone? That wasn't a delusion. So far as I know, I'm the only one who sees and hears and feels like that, and I...well, dammit, I didn't want to be alone in that. I couldn't--still can't--imagine what it must be like not to have these senses, and reasoned that the reverse must be true, too. Apparently it is, just a little more so than I'd thought."

[estebanmd]

"No, it was not a delusion," Stephen agreed. "Though you are human, you are perhaps a subspecies unto yourself, thanks to your grandfather; you are a sort of hybrid."

Vade retro, he told himself firmly, all the while.

"But you are to consider that even when you have given these senses to another person, by whatever means, potion or what you did to me, you are still alone, Susan. You can never make your test subject into a true match to your own experience, your own substance; you can only approximate for them what it might feel like to be such a thing. Their genes remain the same, their flesh unaltered. Throwing a man into the water does not make him a fish."

[usethepoker]

It was harsh, but what was perhaps worse was that he was right. It was something she'd known all along, too, though she hadn't let herself think about it. She couldn't really make anyone what she was, no matter how much she might want to--her senses, given to anyone else, were a lie. A fascinating lie, maybe, but a lie nonetheless.

"I know," she admitted, sadly but also almost grudgingly. "I don't want to know, but I do. I'd just dump the stuff and have done with it, except that I have to try to ease Shaun off it. He alone had a decent reaction, and I can't just cut him off, or he might well go mad. Liz told me about these patches Muggles use, to try to quit smoking--they give a dose of nicotine, and every two weeks the dose is reduced, thus easing away from the addiction. They don't always work, but I hope the idea will work in Shaun's case." She didn't know what the hell she'd do, if it didn't.

She shifted, resting her cheek against her knee now, and looked at him. "Shaun told me he hadn't thought it was possible to have a mid-life crisis at twenty-five. I told him I was almost twenty-six, and that he'd better stuff it. He has a point, though. I've never been unsure of myself in my life, that I can remember, and I'm discovering that it's...well, not very pleasant. I suppose it's how most people feel, at times, but I'm not used to it. I think I can see now how people could become drug addicts."

[estebanmd]

While Stephen had never heard the modern turn of phrase 'mid-life crisis', it seemed to him fairly self-explanatory in its significance. In truth Susan's malaise reminded him most of the time he'd endured in the immediate wake of Diana's death; only he could not discern what Susan might be mourning, except perhaps herself.

"I know what you mean," he said, and whether he really did know what she meant or not, there was conviction in the words; he thought he knew.

He was quiet for a long moment, then said, very low:

"I would take it, if you wished."

[usethepoker]

She didn't dismiss his words; Stephen, being older than her, might well actually know. While he wasn't what she was, a mid-life crisis, as explained to her by Shaun, was a mid-life crisis, and almost everyone went through them. It didn't occur to her that what she was feeling was a kind of mourning; the only other mourning she'd done in her life had been for her parents, and it had been a very different thing. For one thing, she'd been distracted by the Job, by being a bewildered sixteen-year-old trying to take on the mantle of Death. She had no such distraction now, and therein might lie the difference; she'd never felt the full effects of such grief before. Damn.

She looked up sharply when he said he'd take it. She thought she knew why he'd want it--Stephen hadn't gotten to go outside on Halloween, hadn't been able to look at the bugs and beetles and flowers he had wanted to see. Part of her really, really wanted to give it to him--to give him the chance to see all he wanted to see with her senses--but the rest of her knew just what a very, very bad idea that was. It really was a kind of mental poison, and however much he enjoyed it, it would still be hurting him. She'd already addicted Shaun; the last thing in the world she wanted to do was addict Stephen as well.

A very faint, very conflicted smile crossed her face. "You want to go look at your bugs, don't you?" she said. "I can't blame you. I can only imagine what the outside world would look like to you, if I gave you that, but Stephen, it really would be bad for you. I want you to see what I see, but I don't want to poison you. I don't want to do to you what I've done, with the best of intentions, to Shaun."

He wanted it. Of course he did. She'd seen Shaun, after all--seen how he reacted to it, and Stephen had only done so much more strongly. Logically she knew that the senses had not been tied in to the...well, the evil, and she had to consciously remind herself of that. He wouldn't destroy the school, if she gave it to him. He'd collect his plants, and watch the sun set, and hopefully not fall into any holes while wholly fascinated by some rare insect. He wanted it, and part of her desperately wanted to give it, and she was horribly, horribly torn.

[estebanmd]

Yes, he did want to go look at bugs. That was what he would have argued, had he approached her without invitation or conversational preface. It was not, however, the context in which she had framed the topic, her willingness to share the potion -- her desire, even, to share it. Caught between potential arguments -- for science vs. for you -- he could not offer an answer without somehow being stranded and exposed, high and dry atop a summit of selfishness. He wanted the potion for himself.

For her, though, too, if it made her feel better; why should it not benefit her in that way? That was what she claimed she wanted. He had explained, just now, how the logic of such comfort did not hold, how giving someone else a temporary approximation of her senses would not give her the company she craved, and she still wanted to do it all the same. So why should the proposition turn on him -- turn against him?

He opted to avoid, or defer, the question entirely, tackling instead another thing she had said. "It may be of some interest to discern exactly what it is that has befallen Shaun. Henry tells me Camilla has no desire whatsoever to take that potion again, having taken it once. Were the substance to induce a real physical dependence, that ought not to be possible for her."

[usethepoker]

His evasion of the question did not go unnoticed. It had not occurred to Susan that Stephen might offer to take it so she wouldn't be so lonely for a while, but she wondered now. It would be like him, she thought, to undertake the equivalent of poisoning himself for his friends (though the fact that said poison was attractively packaged as sensory enhancement did make it far from a terrible proposition).

She considered this, cheek still rested against her knee. Her skirt smelled of whatever fabric softener the house elves used--sweet, tumble-dried cotton. "You have a point," she said. "It could well be simply the sensory experience itself, rather than the potion, that is addictive. A psychological addiction." Kind of like marijuana, a drug Liz had had her try, and about which she'd been told quite a bit, too.

[estebanmd]

Modern psychological lingo was quite foreign to Stephen. The concept of psychology as a discipline had not yet come to fruition in his day. Thus he simply nodded at the words Susan had assembled. "If by psychological addiction you mean a dependence that is imagined rather than a dependence with direct anatomical consequence, then I might agree," he said. "That is not to say that such a dependence might not seem extraordinarily real and gripping to the person so dependent. It is only to say that you may not have done the physical harm you fear. I should like to ask Camilla more about her lack of desire to repeat the experience, except that such inquiry might be unwelcome, perhaps even indelicate. I am not her physician, after all."