Owl to Susan Sto Helit (closed RP for Susan and Charles Macaulay)
((Backdated to just after Henry Winter and Camilla Macaulay's wedding.))
( Just before our love got lost you told me, 'I am as constant as the northern star.' / And I said, 'Constantly in the darkness? Where's that at? / If you want me I'll be in the bar.' )
( Just before our love got lost you told me, 'I am as constant as the northern star.' / And I said, 'Constantly in the darkness? Where's that at? / If you want me I'll be in the bar.' )
"This one's yours," he said as he placed a mug in front of Susan. "A middling shot of peppermint schnapps is in it. I'm reasonably sure it really is peppermint schnapps and not, say, mouthwash." And may Susan never learn that Charles actually had drunk mouthwash a time or two. "When you drink in a place like this," he explained once he'd sat down across from her with his own cocoa and could lean across the table to speak in a near-whisper, "you're serious about your liquor. And about not being cheated."
He was pretty sure Milly would have complained to her friend about her drunken reprobate of a brother. May as well get it all up front.
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She laughed as Charles gave her her drink. "I know," she said, just as quietly. "This place reminds me of my favorite pub back home. In Biers, it always paid to order something clear, because Igor--that was the barman--would stick almost anything on the end of a cocktail stick." Occasionaly the regulars would place bets as to what disgusting thing they'd find next.
Susan herself was not one to talk of being a drunk--some of the stupider things she'd done here had been done under the influence of quite a lot of alcohol, not to speak of how much she'd drank when Stephen had been most pointedly Not Speaking to her. Both Shaun and Liz had been rather appalled, even knowing her tolerance.
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"What I really like about a place like this is no questions asked. You have the money to pay, you have the sense to keep from getting in fights, you can stay as long as you want. No one cares where you came from. No one cares why you're here." He spoke with a kind of measured calm, a little lighter than words like that might be expected to sound -- almost as though he were talking about someone else and not himself. Maybe he was. He'd hit rock-bottom in Texas and he was building himself back up, wasn't he? For Camilla. And to show her and Henry both who was really the better man. He'd been self-disciplined for quite a few months now, with only a couple of trivial exceptions marring his recent record. He'd done this once before, after Henry Winter had died and the twins had gone back to Virginia. But Camilla hadn't made it worth his while in the end. She'd been too cold. He'd needed warmth from somewhere.
He was stronger now. He could make enough warmth for himself and his sister both; he'd warm her too, melt her.
"I'm glad you remembered the marshmallows," he said, looking up from his cocoa to meet Susan's eyes with a candid sad smile. I'm glad you're here.
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Charles might as well have been describing Biers itself. "Exactly," she said. "Everyone will leave you alone--you don't have to put up a front for anyone." Once in a blue moon she had to deal with a bogeyman who was new in town, and thus didn't know any better (at which point they learned better, pretty damn quick), but beyond that she could enjoy her drink and her time in peace. Susan herself had hit rock-bottom on Halloween, when she'd actually degenerated into near-murder, and while she felt no need to quit drinking, she could, if she'd known, understand the sentiment quite well.
She knew nothing of Charles's thoughts concerning his sister, but, much like Camilla, his smile was infectious--it was warmer than Camilla's, too, without the strange aloof quality that infused so many of Camilla's. "Of course I did," she said. "I've discovered that cocoa isn't proper cocoa without them." It really was an odd thing, that she could feel so comfortable around him when she'd really only just met him--she hadn't really realized that it was because many of Charles's unconscious mannerisms were very much like Camilla's. It gave the impression that she'd known him much longer than she actually had.
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"No, indeed it does not," she said, with a gravity that was somewhat betrayed by the undeniable amusement in her eyes. "It's its own excuse, really. Normally I only drink cocoa when I'm extremely out of sorts--it's nice to have it when I'm not, for once." Well, all right, that was a lie, but it was a white lie, and therefore all right. In a sense she was putting up a front, just not in the way she ordinarily felt compelled to do--though she didn't know it, it was much the same sort of front as Charles himself often projected.
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And sometimes unwittingly goofy.
"Scotland in wintertime is enough to make any warm-blooded animal out of sorts," he joked. "I went to college in Vermont. I got to like any and all hot drinks. It's good one of us isn't out of sorts, anyway, at least. I'll admit that Camilla's wedding took a lot out of me." Which was true. "You know, like the day after Christmas. It's a bit of a letdown. All the excitement's over." Which was ... less true. He essayed a sip of his cocoa and found it not so hot as to be rendered undrinkable. "And I have to say I'm a little jealous --" which was true -- "they're soaking up comparatively more sun in Greece, whereas here I'm starting to wonder if the Hat has a spare stash of mittens and scarves anywhere around."
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She sipped at her cocoa, unwittingly giving herself a marshmallow mustache, which she wiped away somewhat sheepishly. "It was rather...draining, wasn't it? Especially coming so soon after Halloween--were you affected by Halloween, at all? Camilla and Henry didn't even know about it, but some of my friends and I most certainly did." Lucky them. "I hope they're enjoying Greece, at least, even if I don't really even know where that is, either."
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"Lumos," he muttered, and then something else that sounded vaguely Latinate, and the wand's tip glowed like a cigarette's.
"Right, okay, no one gives a damn if I do this," he said, angling a glance over to the unimpressed bartender and then back to Susan. In the air between them -- low, at their own eye-level, across the table -- he drew a jagged downward line. "The Eastern Seaboard," he said. His brows knit (echo of his sister) with the effort of thinking not only how the inlets and promontories should be placed, but how a mirror image should look. He had to draw it backward to himself, so that it'd be the right way for Susan who faced him. An after-trace of light lingered in the air.
"Now, down here --" roughly around the middle of the line -- "this is Virginia, and that's where Camilla and I grew up. It's part of the American South technically but as you see it's the more northerly reaches of that. Get up around here --" the wand traced a straight line toward the dog-head that was Maine -- "and it's going to be a lot colder. Vermont's here," jabbing the wand with restrained ill-will at an imagined Hampden. "Our college used to close for an extended winter break because of the weather. They say that in Hampden town, some winters, people would get snowed in for weeks. One of our friends stayed in town over the break one year and nearly froze to death."
A quiet counter-charm and the wand's light winked out. Charles tucked the length of pine away, into the inner lining of his jacket, where he'd had a kind of pocket improvised for it by a house-elf. "That probably didn't give you much of an idea of anything, sorry," he said with an apologetic little half-smile (again, so like his sister), "but at least maybe you've got an idea of relative distances involved."
He'd also shown her he knew his way around wandwork. And maybe she'd report it back to Milly, and maybe she wouldn't, but either way, it had to be a little interesting.
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"What matters is it's south of here, related to us, and therefore not so cold." He tried to keep bitterness out of his voice when he said, "I'm sure they are enjoying themselves." He could picture exactly how much. He could see it behind his eyes, Henry's hands on Camilla's bare white shoulders. The little freckle just below her left breast, a dot of nutmeg on pale cream, that no one was supposed to know about but Charles. "But my sister didn't share the itinerary. Too many wedding details."
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She'd thought the passageway between the Room of Requirement and the Hog's Head was a neat trick, but that definitely trumped it. Susan had never heard of a charm that could do something like that, though it didn't surprise her that there was one. Her eyes traced the lines, turning them into something like a map in her head (complete with a distance key, because she was Susan and therefore weird like that.) Some of the similarities that Charles and Camilla shared--similarities of expression, of mannerisms--were almost unnerving, and she found herself wondering again if it was a trait of all twins, or if they were unique.
"He nearly froze to death?" she asked, looking at the little bright area that was Vermont. "We get snow in Ankh-Morpork--that's the city I live in, back home--but it never usually amounts to more than a foot. People don't tend to freeze to death unless they drink too much and pass out in a back alley somewhere." Which was a fairly common occurrence, especially in the Shades.
She had to translate 'north' and 'south' into something approximating hubwards and windwards, and came to the conclusion that the average temperature might be comparable to that of Genua, even if the geography wasn't swampland. In that case, Camilla and Henry probably were living it up in Greece, especially compared to everyone still stuck in frozen Scotland.
"How did you do that, anyway?" she asked, sipping her cocoa. "I've never seen a charm like that." She wondered (because she'd fixated on it so long that she had to wonder) what such a thing would look like to someone who'd taken her potion. She was impressed, and impressing Susan was not an easy thing to do.
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Dammit. If she was going to ask him questions about magic, he couldn't get any news out of her about Milly. Patience was not Charles' strong suit.
"I've never been to Greece. Never been anywhere outside North America until I wound up here, by accident. Did Camilla happen to tell you anything about what they'd be doing there?"
He didn't realize Susan was sort of Henry's friend too, or else he'd have tried that angle.
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Camilla hadn't said a great deal, really, though there had been bits here and there. "Apparently, Henry's been to that island before, and he was going to show her around some of the historical sites," Susan said, adding more minimarshmallows. "And they'll probably eat at restaurants with unpronounceable dishes, and automatically know what wine will go with what--I'll tell you one thing, I grew up in the upper classes, but Camilla has more taste in her little finger than I could ever dream of." At times it made her envious (much like Camilla's apparently perfect serenity), but more often than not she just thought it must all be far too much work to remember. "Apparently they've rented some little cottage on the beach, away from the tourists, and they'll be there two weeks."
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"Yeah, Henry's been there before, if I remember correctly. He would have been there, oh, the summer before we met him. He was a sophomore when we were freshmen. Camilla and I never liked traveling, because of the way our parents died, so we'd never been anywhere like that. It sounded terribly exotic. Our teacher -- Julian -- had been almost everywhere in Europe from the sound of it, and other places too, and our friend Francis had been abroad too. So Henry was part of that, and we felt really provincial. Don't let them make you feel that way. They've never been where you're from either," he said warmly.
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She saw nothing amiss with hearing Henry referred to as 'an odd duck'; he really was unusual, and Susan fancied he could be as prickly as she herself, if he wanted. She herself hadn't spoken to him, after the Incident, but given the fact that he and Stephen had actually gone and shot one another (stupid silly boys), it wasn't hard to imagine why someone would call him such. Even yet she had no idea that, but for Stephen's nineteenth-century obstinacy, Henry would have shot her, too, but if someone told her, she'd believe it. She liked him, but he was strange, and not someone you really wanted set against you.
Charles's words made her smile, too--he had hit square on the head a nail she hadn't even properly been aware of. Susan might technically be nobility, and in terms of sheer geography she'd been far more places than the entirety of the Greek class combined, but she did not have--and knew she did not have--that air of distinction, of class. She felt, in a word, common, and not in the way she enjoyed. That Charles could understand that told her that he was rather more like her than them--but then, she'd already inferred that from several little things, particularly his choice of pub. Camilla wouldn't be caught dead in a place like the Hog's Head, if she could avoid it, but it was just the sort of place Susan liked, because it was safely anonymous.
"You know, I was terribly jealous of your sister, once upon a time," she said, not stopping to wonder why she was confiding something like this to a man she had, when all was said and done, just met the other day. "Complete misunderstanding, of course, but at one point I had cause to think I ought to be, and I really was. I eventually decided, once my misconceptions had been straightened out, that it was not her fault she was so attractive, and that she might be worth knowing in spite of it." She took a long sip of her cocoa, warming herself to the tips of her fingers. "It makes me laugh, thinking of that now, but it didn't seem funny at the time. I would never have guessed she'd wind up such a friend."
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"Why were you jealous of Milly?"
The pet name slipped out without thinking.
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