(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

Comments

[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

[estebanmd]

"No, no, I have things," said Stephen very vaguely, getting up from his chair to shoulder a dusty knapsack that slumped against a back wall of the office. The bag contained a number of things he generally toted outside when he thought he might see interesting specimens of something or other: notebook, writing utensils, magnifying glass, a small collecting jar for insects. The rough canvas strap gritted against his coat, a sound almost unnoticeable normally, now magnified not in volume but in ... perceptibility?

"Lead on, Macduff," he quoted, prompted to randomness by giddy distraction. He allowed himself to be guided out of the castle with only minor stops to stare at the weave of a wall hanging, the cracks between the stones of the corridor floors, etc.

[usethepoker]

See, this was what she liked about giving out this potion. It was like watching a person who had been blind see the world for the first time; it made her happy beyond words. Not knowing Shakespeare, Stephen's quote was lost on her, but given his seemingly inordinate number of strange endearments, that might well just be another one of them

[estebanmd]

It floored him.

He sat down, heavily, on the steps, and just stared; eyes dilated, face blank.

[usethepoker]

Susan didn't bother smothering her smile this time--there was no way he would notice. Opening her notebook, she wrote Watching Stephen really does put me in mind of watching a child take his first steps out into the big wide world. The way he stares at the sunset would make you think he'd never seen one in his life before--are humans really as blind as all that? I have a hard time fathoming it, but it appears they must be. Certainly, at the moment Stephen seems to be completely entranced.

She shut the book, watching him watch the sunset, and eventually sat beside him on the step in companionable silence. In a way, she thought, he was appreciating all of this even more than she was, because for him it was completely new.

Not until the sun had all but sank below the horizon did she speak. "Pretty, isn't it?" she asked, knowing full well what an understatement that must be.

[estebanmd]

Oh, Stephen had seen many a sunset, some of them spectacular. He'd just never seen one like this before. Had he been a child of a different century, he might have seen something like this at a planetarium to the accompaniment of Pink Floyd.

(Now if only someone irreverent and blessed with magic-converted technology would come by with a boombox playing Dark Side of the Moon ...)

Dazzled, he recalled himself only when Susan's voice jarred him into self-awareness. Pulling his own notebook from his knapsack, he wrote very quickly and messily, his eyes on the sky rather than the page before him.

"Lovely," he said absently.

[usethepoker]

Shaun had actually introduced Susan to Pink Floyd, but it would never have occurred to her to use it as background-music for someone blissing out on a sensory-enhanced sunset. (It really was a good thing she had far too many scruples to just distribute this potion at will. She'd put any and all drug lords out of business within a fortnight.)

She let him sit and write and stare, wrapping her cloak tighter about herself as it began to snow. Even yet, she herself had to marvel at the quieting power of snow--how it could muffle the world in soft white. The flakes drifted in silence, a few at first and then a torrent, swirling and dancing on the faint breeze. A small smile crossed her face as she stretched out a hand, watching the snow settle on her sleeve--this was something she knew he would never, ever have seen before

[estebanmd]

He couldn't have been very good company like this. Later he'd realize it: what she wanted was for someone to see the world the way she did all the time, surely; someone to understand exactly what it was she felt. It might have been fascinating to watch him experience these things, the way it had been amusing for Jack to debauch with grog the sloth Stephen had brought aboard the Surprise once, but an intoxicated sloth was not the same as a messmate, and a human blissed out on a potion could not be the same as a peer for Susan.

At the moment he was incapable of such concern. He was eminently distractible, and Susan's hand on his wrist made him blink and start. "What? Oh.She wore gloves, and the fabric of his coat and his sweater added to the protective barrier between his skin and hers, so that there was none of the electric surge he'd felt on Halloween, that pulse of blood palpable beneath the skin. This he did note, and thought maybe he should tell her it might help her to wear gloves all the time, to shield herself from the

[usethepoker]

Susan laughed, her breath hanging in the still air. "Unfortuantely, no," she said. "You really can't touch anything that's caught out of Time, but certainly if you don't touch it you might stare at it as long as you want

[estebanmd]

Stephen looked up and started to laugh.

"They are like fireflies," he said, "only blue, and frozen ..."

He found he disliked the idea of breaking the snowflakes himself. It seemed somehow careless, wrong in its carelessness; these things were so beautiful, and to destroy them would surely be a waste. For Susan it was different. She was Death; it was her job.

[usethepoker]

Where Susan's hand had passed, the air was clear; she'd carved a pattern in the hanging curtain. "When I was very little, Granddad would take me out in the snow so I could do this," she said, now poking at them one at a time. Just now, for whatever reason, she was quite happy--probably because she had company. In this sense Stephen couldn't be her peer, but he could certainly be a companion; he could enjoy all the oddities of her senses and powers, even if not in precisely the same way she did. "He used to let me play his ribs like a xylophone, too," she added, almost parenthetically. "My parents hated all that. I don't wonder why they quit letting me see him, really."

She made her slow way back to him, still poking snowflakes at random. "I don't wonder why he wanted to share it, either," she said. "Oh, look there--I think it's an owl."

She pointed to a shape that had started to swoop down from a distant tree--a blob, nailed in place, that upon closer inspection did indeed prove to be an owl.

[estebanmd]

FROZEN OWLS = TOTALLY AWESOME.

Stephen sprang up and ran through the snow to where he thought he saw the owl.

Cue his standing beneath that spot, peering upward, soundless, for a very long time.

[usethepoker]

Susan gave in and laughed outright, doubly cursing her lack of an iconograph box--that was a picture she'd like to preserve forever, if she could. She fished her wand out of her boot, and with a muttered "Lumos" cast a little light upon the hovering bird. She didn't have the faintest clue what kind of owl it might be, but she knew Stephen likely would, and could potentially geek out over it for ages. Anticipating this, she dug the Thermos out of her rucksack and poured out a capful of sweet hot tea, sipping it while Stephen stared up at the owl.

"Let me know if you need me to move the light," she said, adjusting her cloak and sitting cross-legged on the snow, the Thermos next to her feet. "What is it, exactly? Aside from an owl, I mean." She was still laughing--a laugh more delighted than anything else, without a trace of anything like mockery.

[estebanmd]

"I should say with a reasonable degree of certainty that this is a short-eared owl," Stephen replied, never looking away from the owl. "Are you ever tempted to abuse your time-stopping powers for the sake of birdwatching?"

[usethepoker]

Of all the things she'd ever stopped Time to do, bird-watching had never been one of them. Her only real experience with birds was with Quoth the raven, and he was enough to turn anyone off the idea of bird-watching--insufferable little wretch, really, and entirely too preoccupied with eyeballs. She wondered what Stephen would make of him.

"No, I can't say that I am," she said, sipping more tea. "Though I'm starting to think it's a good thing you haven't got this particular power, or you might spend so much time watching birds and bugs and beasts that you'd forget to eat or sleep."

[estebanmd]

"Ah, but if I had, would it matter whether I ate or slept, given that time would have stopped? Perhaps I might continue indefinitely," said Stephen.

If he had such powers, he would be entirely too wrapped up in observation of flora and fauna to register such a thing as loneliness.

"Imagine, too, the potential for surgery," his thoughts raced on aloud. "Would the blood stop entirely, circulation cease, with all of time frozen, so that the surgeon might work with view unoccluded by the usual welling of blood in wounds or in the surgical incision itself? Does it cause harm to the fabric of the universe that you exercise this stopping of time, so that you would not wish to make use of it routinely? Were I to dissect this owl, and then stitch it up again, would it be whole at the end? No, the damage would still be done, as with those snowflakes ... Hm."