0041: The Ten of Pentacles - Samantha Prescott
Friday's Sue... a rather mild one.
TITLE: The Ten of Pentacles
PERPETRATOR: Irony-chan
SUE-O-METER: (how bad is it?)
WRITING:
SUEAGE:
WRONGNESS:
FULL NAME: Samantha Ann Prescott
SPECIES: Human/Muggle
HAIR: "mousy hair," which she wears in a braid.
EYES: never described
MARKINGS: none
POSESSIONS: A bunch of stuff her wizard father gave her, including a Hufflepuff scarf, a bag of wizard coins, a thing of magical bubble bath, and a deck of talking tarot cards.
ORIGIN: Her parents are apparently divorced... her mother's a Muggle but her dad is a wizard, and she's sent to live with him after her mom dies in a car accident, thus allowing Miss Sue to go through several pages of nausea-inducing angst.
CONNECTIONS TO CANON: none
SPECIAL ABILITIES: Telling remarkably accurate fortunes with her tarot cards, despite their initially saying that they do not talk to Muggles.
NOTES: Did anybody else misread the title as 'The Pen of Tentacles'? Does anybody else find the fact that it can be misread as such fucking hysterical? Or am I just a sick little weirdo?
What really gets me about this one is the damned reviews. People were disappointed that Our Sueoine's Mysterious Father didn't turn out to be Professor Snape. That's right... the readers were disappointed that the character was not as Sue-ish as she might have been. Just shoot me.
SAMPLE:
A traffic accident, Officer Templeton explained. The woman in the other car had just come out of the pub. He hurriedly assured Sam that Ms. Prescott wasn’t dead... she was only in the hospital, and there was nothing whatsoever to worry about.
“When is she coming home?” asked Sam.
“I don’t know,” the policeman admitted. “You’d have to ask a doctor. Not tonight, though,” he added quickly. “I don’t think that would be a good idea tonight. Instead, what we’ll do is you can pack up some things, and you’re going to go stay with some of your mom’s tenants tonight. How’s that?”
They didn’t want her at the hospital, Sam thought dully. They didn’t want her to be there to watch her mother die. The urge to burst into tears had passed now and she felt very calm. The whole situation seemed distant, more like the memory of a dream than like anything happening in real life. She found she didn’t want to touch anything, for fear she’d discover it wasn’t really there.
“Miss Prescott?” asked Officer Templeton.
Sam nodded. “Not the Holcombs, right?”
“Er... no,” the policeman said. “With the Chapples. Just for a couple of nights. Is that all right?”
“Yes,” said Sam. “I’ll go get my stuff.”
The curious feeling of numb persisted as she stuffed a few days’ worth of clothing into her backpack. She gathered up a few other things she thought she might like to take and dug her violin case out from under the bed. A random urge made her clear off the shelf on which she kept the various gifts her father had given her over the past few years and back those up, as well, she still felt absolutely nothing. It would have frightened her, but she didn’t seem able to feel that, either. Her mother was going to die! Shouldn’t she be sad? Or scared? Or something?
“Got everything you need?” asked Officer Templeton.
Sam nodded, then remembered the cards. They were still spread out on the table, silent and still now. Perhaps they would only speak to their owner. Or maybe Sam was just going crazy, to think tarot cards could have been talking to her. For a moment, she considered taking them with her, but she changed her mind and left them on the table.
“Great,” the policeman nodded. “This way.”
They climbed two flights of stairs to the floor where the Chapple family lived, Sam still walking in an emotionless daze. Mrs. Chapple was standing in the doorway, waiting.
“Hi, Samantha,” she said gently. “Are you okay?”
It was like waking up. All of a sudden the world crystallized and began making horrible, horrible sense again. Hot tears welled up in Sam’s eyes, and began spilling down her cheeks.
“Oh, honey,” Mrs. Chapple said. “Come here.” She buried Sam in the kind of rib-crushing hug that would normally have left her complaining about being unable to breath. But instead, she just hugged back as tightly as she could and sobbed on the woman’s shoulder. “There there,” said Mrs. Chapple, somehow managing to infuse the trite words with meaning.
“My mother’s going to die!” wailed Sam.
“You don’t know that,” said Mrs. Chapple. “She’s just hurt... your mom’s a strong lady, I’m sure she’d going to be just fine! Come inside and I’ll make you a cup of tea. That’ll make you feel better, won’t it?”
Sam didn’t answer. It wouldn’t help... how could it help? How could anything help? Her mother was going to die.
---
The Chapple family’s flat didn’t have a spare room. Instead, Mrs. Chapple had her daughters make up the hide-a-bed in the living room, and Sam slept there. She dreamed that the figures of the tarot had climbed out of their cards and were dancing madly all over the flat, gibbering like monkeys, while Mr. Abercrombie stood in the middle of the sitting room and laughed at her.
“I told you so!” he crowed. “It says in Shakespeare that tarot cards are tools of the devil! If you’d listened in class, you would have known!”
“Shut up!” Sam screamed, and screamed and screamed and screamed, and wondered why she was wasting her time. No amount of screaming was going to change anything. Her mother was going to die.
Sam woke up in tears, feeling so sick to her stomach that for a moment she really thought she might throw up. Fortunately, she didn’t, but her throat was full of salt from crying in her sleep, and her head ached. Perhaps if she claimed she was sick, she could get out of having to go to school this week. School seemed like part of a bad dream, itself... how could Sam possibly walk into Mr. Abercrombie’s literature class on Monday morning, knowing that he’d been right about the cards.
The only clock in this room was the one on the VCR. Sam retrieved her glasses and sat up to see it; it was 2:30 in the morning. She sighed and curled up on the uncomfortable hide-a-bed, hugging a couch coushin against her middle and wishing she had a teddy bear or some other big stuffed animal to hold onto. Her father had given her a plush owl once, when she was very little. She wished she knew what had happened to it. Probably it had become so old and worn her mother had thrown it away.
After lying awake a while longer, Sam decided that she didn’t want to go back to sleep. If she went to sleep again she might have more dreams, or even worse, she might forget what had happened that day, which meant that when she woke up, she would have to remember it. Given those options, she’d prefer to be awake and exhausted.
She turned the light on and hugged her knees against her chest. Why had her father sent her those cards? The impression she’d always gotten of him from what her mother said was that he was absent-minded and absorbed in his work, but basically a good man. He normally had an uncanny talent for picking out presents that Sam loved... it didn’t seem like him to send her something malicious. More likely, she thought, he’d chosen the cards because they were pretty, and hadn’t known any better than Sam herself had what they were really for.
Her backpack was leaning against the coffee table, which had been against the wall to make room for Sam to sleep. She retrieved the bag and dumped its contents out on the bed, pushing the clothes and schoolbooks out of the way to find the things her father had given her.
Last Christmas, he’d sent the shell of a nautilus. Sam opened the cloth-lined box it had come in and held it up. The shell was bigger than her hand, a neat, off-white spiral dotted with brown flecks, and textured with hundreds of tiny grooves, and it was somehow very satisfying to hold, despite the fact that it weighed almost nothing. Nobody who would give her something so beautiful and perfect would send those tarot cards on purpose.
She set the shell carefully back in its box and put it back in her bag. For her twelfth birthday, her father had sent an absolutely fascinating bottle, made of dribbly-looking glass that was dark blue at the top and leached out to transparent at the bottom, as if it had been carved out of an icicle. It had come with a note explaining that it was full of bubble bath, which would smell like anything Sam wanted it to. She hadn’t used it more than once... Sam preferred showers to baths, and she’d been quite disappointed the first time she opened the bottle to find that its contents actually had no scent at all.
Now she unscrewed the cap and took an experimental sniff, and to her surprise it did smell, just slightly. The scene was a bit floral, like lavender, but there was a sharper tang behind it... it smelled the way her mothers clothes often did before they went into the laundry, all permeated with perfume and cigarette smoke. Sam quickly recapped the bottle and pushed it aside as tears rose in her eyes again.
Her Christmas present the year she’d turned twelve had been a little bag full of wonderful foreign coins. The day after Boxing Day she’d taken them with her to the library and found a coin collector’s atlas so she could look them all up. Some funny-looking square ones and a few with holes in the middle had turned out to be from various places in Asia, while most of the rest were European but very, very old. According to the atlas, one of them was from ancient Rome, and very, very valuable. There were only three of the coins that she hadn’t eventually been able to put names to; a thick gold one with an owl on it, a tarnished silver one bearing a crescent moon symbol, and a tiny bronze one which had, of all things, a toad on the back.
She let the coins run through her fingers, then put them back in their bag and set it aside, next to the bottle of bubble bath. The year she’d turned eleven was the only one when she could remember her birthday present actually arriving early. It had been a black and yellow scarf, somewhat faded and missing two tassels at one end. The note had said that it was her father’s old school scarf and he hoped she’d be able to use it... which she had; that had been a particularly cold winter.
She hadn’t worn it in a long time, though. Whenever she did, she’d kept getting the impression that people were staring at her. Not all people, just the odd one or two, who would turn their heads to watch her as she walked by. It was probably all in her imagination, but had been unnerving enough to make her put the scarf away.
As Sam sat fiddling with the fringe of the scarf, she heard the click of a light switch, then the floor creaking under a pair of feet. “Samantha?” Mrs. Chapple’s voice asked sleepily.
“Yes?” asked Sam.
Mrs. Chapple looked in the doorway at her, squinting against the light of the lamp. “Are you all right?” she asked.
What kind of a question was that? Of course Sam wasn’t all right... her mother was going to die! But all she said was, “I’m fine.”
“All right,” Mrs. Chapple nodded. “Go back to sleep,” she said. “It’s much easier to be optimistic when you’re not tired.”
Sam had no intention of doing so, but she didn’t want to argue, so she simply nodded. Mrs. Chapple waited in the doorway a moment, then sighed. “Well, good night,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
After she’d gone, Sam turned the light off but didn’t change her mind about going back to sleep. Instead, she put a CD in her Discman and lay there listening to the music and thinking as time crawled by at a snail’s pace. If she did fall asleep again, she was unaware of it... with nothing happening to mark the hours, it didn’t matter anyway so long as she didn’t dream.
At a quarter to five, the telephone rang. Sam was not asleep when that happened; if she had been, the ring would have awoken her. As it was, it only startled her. She sat up as it began to ring again, then was cut off as somebody picked up.
“Hello?” she dimly heard Mr. Chapple’s sleepy voice say.
Sam put her ear to the wall and listened.
“Yes, this is Dennis Chapple,” he said. “May I ask who’s speaking?”
There was a short pause. “Oh? What news?”
It was the hospital, Sam thought, the sick feeling her stomach rising afresh. It was the hospital calling to say that her mother was dead.
A long silence followed as Mr. Chapple listened to whatever it was the caller had to say. “I see,” he said finally. “Yes. Thank you, I’m sure you did. Good day.” A soft click signified him putting the receiver back in its cradle.
“Who was that?” Mrs. Chapple asked.
“Cavendish,” her husband replied wearily. “Rose just died.”
And the fact that Sam had known, just as surely as she knew the sky was blue, that he was going to say that, didn't make it any easier to hear.
Later, she wished she’d tried to contain herself... the only thing Sam accomplished by bursting into tears was letting them know she’d been eavesdropping, but she also knew that there was no way she could have helped herself. She picked up her father’s scarf, buried her face in it, and bawled.
The living room light came on as Mr. and Mrs. Chapple both hurried into the room. For a moment some small part of Sam wondered if they were going to take her to task for listening when she should have been asleep, but Mrs. Chapple only sat down on the hide-a-bed and hugged her.
“Oh, Samantha,” she said. “Oh, Sam, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
For the second time in less than a day, Sam laid her head on Mrs. Chapple’s shoulder and cried until her head ached and her eyes stung, and she wondered if she would ever be able to stop... and why should she be? Why should anybody be able to stop themselves from crying when their mother was dead?
TITLE: The Ten of Pentacles
PERPETRATOR: Irony-chan
SUE-O-METER: (how bad is it?)
WRITING:
SUEAGE:
WRONGNESS:
FULL NAME: Samantha Ann Prescott
SPECIES: Human/Muggle
HAIR: "mousy hair," which she wears in a braid.
EYES: never described
MARKINGS: none
POSESSIONS: A bunch of stuff her wizard father gave her, including a Hufflepuff scarf, a bag of wizard coins, a thing of magical bubble bath, and a deck of talking tarot cards.
ORIGIN: Her parents are apparently divorced... her mother's a Muggle but her dad is a wizard, and she's sent to live with him after her mom dies in a car accident, thus allowing Miss Sue to go through several pages of nausea-inducing angst.
CONNECTIONS TO CANON: none
SPECIAL ABILITIES: Telling remarkably accurate fortunes with her tarot cards, despite their initially saying that they do not talk to Muggles.
NOTES: Did anybody else misread the title as 'The Pen of Tentacles'? Does anybody else find the fact that it can be misread as such fucking hysterical? Or am I just a sick little weirdo?
What really gets me about this one is the damned reviews. People were disappointed that Our Sueoine's Mysterious Father didn't turn out to be Professor Snape. That's right... the readers were disappointed that the character was not as Sue-ish as she might have been. Just shoot me.
SAMPLE:
A traffic accident, Officer Templeton explained. The woman in the other car had just come out of the pub. He hurriedly assured Sam that Ms. Prescott wasn’t dead... she was only in the hospital, and there was nothing whatsoever to worry about.
“When is she coming home?” asked Sam.
“I don’t know,” the policeman admitted. “You’d have to ask a doctor. Not tonight, though,” he added quickly. “I don’t think that would be a good idea tonight. Instead, what we’ll do is you can pack up some things, and you’re going to go stay with some of your mom’s tenants tonight. How’s that?”
They didn’t want her at the hospital, Sam thought dully. They didn’t want her to be there to watch her mother die. The urge to burst into tears had passed now and she felt very calm. The whole situation seemed distant, more like the memory of a dream than like anything happening in real life. She found she didn’t want to touch anything, for fear she’d discover it wasn’t really there.
“Miss Prescott?” asked Officer Templeton.
Sam nodded. “Not the Holcombs, right?”
“Er... no,” the policeman said. “With the Chapples. Just for a couple of nights. Is that all right?”
“Yes,” said Sam. “I’ll go get my stuff.”
The curious feeling of numb persisted as she stuffed a few days’ worth of clothing into her backpack. She gathered up a few other things she thought she might like to take and dug her violin case out from under the bed. A random urge made her clear off the shelf on which she kept the various gifts her father had given her over the past few years and back those up, as well, she still felt absolutely nothing. It would have frightened her, but she didn’t seem able to feel that, either. Her mother was going to die! Shouldn’t she be sad? Or scared? Or something?
“Got everything you need?” asked Officer Templeton.
Sam nodded, then remembered the cards. They were still spread out on the table, silent and still now. Perhaps they would only speak to their owner. Or maybe Sam was just going crazy, to think tarot cards could have been talking to her. For a moment, she considered taking them with her, but she changed her mind and left them on the table.
“Great,” the policeman nodded. “This way.”
They climbed two flights of stairs to the floor where the Chapple family lived, Sam still walking in an emotionless daze. Mrs. Chapple was standing in the doorway, waiting.
“Hi, Samantha,” she said gently. “Are you okay?”
It was like waking up. All of a sudden the world crystallized and began making horrible, horrible sense again. Hot tears welled up in Sam’s eyes, and began spilling down her cheeks.
“Oh, honey,” Mrs. Chapple said. “Come here.” She buried Sam in the kind of rib-crushing hug that would normally have left her complaining about being unable to breath. But instead, she just hugged back as tightly as she could and sobbed on the woman’s shoulder. “There there,” said Mrs. Chapple, somehow managing to infuse the trite words with meaning.
“My mother’s going to die!” wailed Sam.
“You don’t know that,” said Mrs. Chapple. “She’s just hurt... your mom’s a strong lady, I’m sure she’d going to be just fine! Come inside and I’ll make you a cup of tea. That’ll make you feel better, won’t it?”
Sam didn’t answer. It wouldn’t help... how could it help? How could anything help? Her mother was going to die.
---
The Chapple family’s flat didn’t have a spare room. Instead, Mrs. Chapple had her daughters make up the hide-a-bed in the living room, and Sam slept there. She dreamed that the figures of the tarot had climbed out of their cards and were dancing madly all over the flat, gibbering like monkeys, while Mr. Abercrombie stood in the middle of the sitting room and laughed at her.
“I told you so!” he crowed. “It says in Shakespeare that tarot cards are tools of the devil! If you’d listened in class, you would have known!”
“Shut up!” Sam screamed, and screamed and screamed and screamed, and wondered why she was wasting her time. No amount of screaming was going to change anything. Her mother was going to die.
Sam woke up in tears, feeling so sick to her stomach that for a moment she really thought she might throw up. Fortunately, she didn’t, but her throat was full of salt from crying in her sleep, and her head ached. Perhaps if she claimed she was sick, she could get out of having to go to school this week. School seemed like part of a bad dream, itself... how could Sam possibly walk into Mr. Abercrombie’s literature class on Monday morning, knowing that he’d been right about the cards.
The only clock in this room was the one on the VCR. Sam retrieved her glasses and sat up to see it; it was 2:30 in the morning. She sighed and curled up on the uncomfortable hide-a-bed, hugging a couch coushin against her middle and wishing she had a teddy bear or some other big stuffed animal to hold onto. Her father had given her a plush owl once, when she was very little. She wished she knew what had happened to it. Probably it had become so old and worn her mother had thrown it away.
After lying awake a while longer, Sam decided that she didn’t want to go back to sleep. If she went to sleep again she might have more dreams, or even worse, she might forget what had happened that day, which meant that when she woke up, she would have to remember it. Given those options, she’d prefer to be awake and exhausted.
She turned the light on and hugged her knees against her chest. Why had her father sent her those cards? The impression she’d always gotten of him from what her mother said was that he was absent-minded and absorbed in his work, but basically a good man. He normally had an uncanny talent for picking out presents that Sam loved... it didn’t seem like him to send her something malicious. More likely, she thought, he’d chosen the cards because they were pretty, and hadn’t known any better than Sam herself had what they were really for.
Her backpack was leaning against the coffee table, which had been against the wall to make room for Sam to sleep. She retrieved the bag and dumped its contents out on the bed, pushing the clothes and schoolbooks out of the way to find the things her father had given her.
Last Christmas, he’d sent the shell of a nautilus. Sam opened the cloth-lined box it had come in and held it up. The shell was bigger than her hand, a neat, off-white spiral dotted with brown flecks, and textured with hundreds of tiny grooves, and it was somehow very satisfying to hold, despite the fact that it weighed almost nothing. Nobody who would give her something so beautiful and perfect would send those tarot cards on purpose.
She set the shell carefully back in its box and put it back in her bag. For her twelfth birthday, her father had sent an absolutely fascinating bottle, made of dribbly-looking glass that was dark blue at the top and leached out to transparent at the bottom, as if it had been carved out of an icicle. It had come with a note explaining that it was full of bubble bath, which would smell like anything Sam wanted it to. She hadn’t used it more than once... Sam preferred showers to baths, and she’d been quite disappointed the first time she opened the bottle to find that its contents actually had no scent at all.
Now she unscrewed the cap and took an experimental sniff, and to her surprise it did smell, just slightly. The scene was a bit floral, like lavender, but there was a sharper tang behind it... it smelled the way her mothers clothes often did before they went into the laundry, all permeated with perfume and cigarette smoke. Sam quickly recapped the bottle and pushed it aside as tears rose in her eyes again.
Her Christmas present the year she’d turned twelve had been a little bag full of wonderful foreign coins. The day after Boxing Day she’d taken them with her to the library and found a coin collector’s atlas so she could look them all up. Some funny-looking square ones and a few with holes in the middle had turned out to be from various places in Asia, while most of the rest were European but very, very old. According to the atlas, one of them was from ancient Rome, and very, very valuable. There were only three of the coins that she hadn’t eventually been able to put names to; a thick gold one with an owl on it, a tarnished silver one bearing a crescent moon symbol, and a tiny bronze one which had, of all things, a toad on the back.
She let the coins run through her fingers, then put them back in their bag and set it aside, next to the bottle of bubble bath. The year she’d turned eleven was the only one when she could remember her birthday present actually arriving early. It had been a black and yellow scarf, somewhat faded and missing two tassels at one end. The note had said that it was her father’s old school scarf and he hoped she’d be able to use it... which she had; that had been a particularly cold winter.
She hadn’t worn it in a long time, though. Whenever she did, she’d kept getting the impression that people were staring at her. Not all people, just the odd one or two, who would turn their heads to watch her as she walked by. It was probably all in her imagination, but had been unnerving enough to make her put the scarf away.
As Sam sat fiddling with the fringe of the scarf, she heard the click of a light switch, then the floor creaking under a pair of feet. “Samantha?” Mrs. Chapple’s voice asked sleepily.
“Yes?” asked Sam.
Mrs. Chapple looked in the doorway at her, squinting against the light of the lamp. “Are you all right?” she asked.
What kind of a question was that? Of course Sam wasn’t all right... her mother was going to die! But all she said was, “I’m fine.”
“All right,” Mrs. Chapple nodded. “Go back to sleep,” she said. “It’s much easier to be optimistic when you’re not tired.”
Sam had no intention of doing so, but she didn’t want to argue, so she simply nodded. Mrs. Chapple waited in the doorway a moment, then sighed. “Well, good night,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
After she’d gone, Sam turned the light off but didn’t change her mind about going back to sleep. Instead, she put a CD in her Discman and lay there listening to the music and thinking as time crawled by at a snail’s pace. If she did fall asleep again, she was unaware of it... with nothing happening to mark the hours, it didn’t matter anyway so long as she didn’t dream.
At a quarter to five, the telephone rang. Sam was not asleep when that happened; if she had been, the ring would have awoken her. As it was, it only startled her. She sat up as it began to ring again, then was cut off as somebody picked up.
“Hello?” she dimly heard Mr. Chapple’s sleepy voice say.
Sam put her ear to the wall and listened.
“Yes, this is Dennis Chapple,” he said. “May I ask who’s speaking?”
There was a short pause. “Oh? What news?”
It was the hospital, Sam thought, the sick feeling her stomach rising afresh. It was the hospital calling to say that her mother was dead.
A long silence followed as Mr. Chapple listened to whatever it was the caller had to say. “I see,” he said finally. “Yes. Thank you, I’m sure you did. Good day.” A soft click signified him putting the receiver back in its cradle.
“Who was that?” Mrs. Chapple asked.
“Cavendish,” her husband replied wearily. “Rose just died.”
And the fact that Sam had known, just as surely as she knew the sky was blue, that he was going to say that, didn't make it any easier to hear.
Later, she wished she’d tried to contain herself... the only thing Sam accomplished by bursting into tears was letting them know she’d been eavesdropping, but she also knew that there was no way she could have helped herself. She picked up her father’s scarf, buried her face in it, and bawled.
The living room light came on as Mr. and Mrs. Chapple both hurried into the room. For a moment some small part of Sam wondered if they were going to take her to task for listening when she should have been asleep, but Mrs. Chapple only sat down on the hide-a-bed and hugged her.
“Oh, Samantha,” she said. “Oh, Sam, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
For the second time in less than a day, Sam laid her head on Mrs. Chapple’s shoulder and cried until her head ached and her eyes stung, and she wondered if she would ever be able to stop... and why should she be? Why should anybody be able to stop themselves from crying when their mother was dead?