Owl to Susan Sto Helit (closed RP for Susan and Charles Macaulay)

[charlesmacaulay]

((Backdated to just after Henry Winter and Camilla Macaulay's wedding.))

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[usethepoker]

Now that the wedding was over, Susan felt like she could let herself go a little. She'd been operating at something close to a fever pitch since Halloween, doing her (admittedly not very helpful) best to make things as easy for Camilla as she could, all the while trying to assimilate much of what had hit her on Halloween. Between that and her bouts of Dreamless Sleep-potion sedated unconsciousness, she was thankful indeed when Camilla and Henry were safely away, so she need do nothing at all.

Doing nothing at all was not something Susan was accustomed to, though, and as a result she was soon both bored and lonely, as well as tired. Charles's owl was a surprise, and definitely a welcome one--she'd liked him immensely, which was rare for her, and it occurred to her that with his sister away, perhaps he was as bored and lonely as she. So she dug out parchment and jotted an owl back:

Charles,

I like the sound of that. Where should we meet?

-Susan

[usethepoker]

At least Susan knew what television was, and what commercials were, or she would have been utterly lost. Cold cereal was not something she was really familiar with, but she could follow the thread, more or less. In any event, he'd made her laugh again, which was quite an achievement. "Crunchy marshmallows sound vaguely...wrong," she said, taking a seat. "I wonder if the real leprechauns did it on purpose." The table was no greasier than the counter at Biers--rather less so, in fact; Biers had to contend with all sorts of foreign substances unheard of even in the wizarding world.

"Yes, please," she said. "Not much, though--too much alcohol kills the chocolate." She found herself wondering why he would have quit drinking--her own tolerance being what it was, she couldn't understand most people's reactions (or likes and dislikes) concerning hard liquor. She just hoped she wouldn't make a massive inhumanity-caused flub, as she so often seemed to do. If she did, perhaps it could be blamed on alcoholic cocoa.

[charlesmacaulay]

Too much alcohol killed the chocolate? Too much alcohol killed a lot of things. That was the whole point of too much alcohol. Charles sauntered off to the bar, where the bartender -- as grizzled as the tables were greasy -- gave him the requested cocoa. He probably thought the doctored-up cocoa was for Charles and the straight stuff for the lady. In truth Charles wasn't finding it hard to refrain. He liked being in a bar, even when he couldn't drink, the same way he liked being around Camilla even when he couldn't touch her. Bars felt like home. Camilla felt like home

[usethepoker]

Bars were also home to Susan, in a way--well, one bar was, and this one was rather like it. At Biers she didn't have to try to be normal--at Hogwarts the idea of 'normal' was not nearly so onerous as in Ankh-Morpork, but there was still a standard. Here, her instinct told her she didn't have to try.

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.

[charlesmacaulay]

"Some time you're going to have to tell me your most alarming garnish story," Charles said. "For now, we've got marshmallow garnish, right?" Amiably he pushed his mug in her direction so she could drop mini-marshmallows into it

[usethepoker]

"Most alarming? I don't know, it might put you off your drink entirely," she said, dividing the minimarshmallows until both their cups were obscured by them.

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

[charlesmacaulay]

"Well, I don't have any objections to improper cocoa," Charles volleyed back, the sadness fading out of his smile (had it ever been there?) displaced by the sanguine good humor of which he was intermittently capable. "Cocoa that doesn't have to put up a front for anyone either."

[usethepoker]

Susan was fully aware that she herself often didn't stop to realize just what some of the things she said might sound like, and she thought that perhaps Charles did the same thing at times, too. Certainly he didn't look as though he'd meant it to come off as it had, and it made her smile.

"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.

[charlesmacaulay]

No, he was the very picture of well-meaning innocence, clear gray eyes empty of guile. It was why when he did say something that could be taken with double entendre, the remark could be so devastatingly effective. Did he mean it? Did he not? Did it matter? In truth, like his sister, Charles didn't have to try. The twins made their careless way through the world like a cat in a china shop: graceful, yet prone to wanton destruction

[usethepoker]

"Where is Vermont, exactly?" Camilla and Henry had both mentioned it in passing, and while Susan knew it was in America, that didn't tell her much. So far as America went, to her mind, it was a big blob of a continent across the ocean.

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."

(( part 1 of 2 ))

[charlesmacaulay]

Charles admired Susan's foresight in bringing a handkerchief to a tavern in which paper napkins would be as endangered and unthought-of as a panda in the taproom, and in which the patrons were by and large expected to wipe their mouths on their sleeves. He too had a handkerchief he would have offered if need be. However, a unique bonus of paper napkins was their ability to double as scratch paper for doodling, writing phone numbers, etc. "I'd draw you a map, if there were anything to draw on," he said, spreading his hands palm-up. "Don't know about Scotland, but in the States even in the worst dives there's usually paper napkins. Cardboard coasters with advertisements on the front, too, in some places. There's a Joni Mitchell song about it, even," he remembered randomly. "Afraid mental images aren't going to work well here -- no, wait. I've got it." He snapped his fingers, then pulled out the wand he'd bought with Camilla's money.

"Lumos," he muttered, and then something else that sounded vaguely Latinate, and the wand's

(( part 2 of 2 ))

[charlesmacaulay]

"I don't know anything that happened on Halloween," he answered her question belatedly, after a sip of his own cocoa, with no marshmallow mishaps whatsoever. "Hope no pranks went too far. It is a night for pranks, in the States anyway. Greece -- I'm not going to be able to draw that for you, I'm afraid, let alone where Mykonos is specifically. My iffy command of American geography pretty much relies on rote memorization they made us do in grade-school. Islands in the Mediterranean aren't really a priority of the American elementary curriculum." He shrugged one-shouldered. (Another of Camilla's gestures. Which of the twins started doing this first, which copied the other? Did they both absorb it independently, from one of their uncles maybe

Re: (( part 2 of 2 ))

[usethepoker]

((Okay, I don't know WTF happened the first time I tried to post this, so here we go again))

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

[charlesmacaulay]

Charles downplayed it. "Modified Lumos. Do you have fireworks, where you come from? There's a kind called a sparkler. When we were kids we would draw our names with them in the air. The glow lasts a few seconds after the sparkler's moved on -- probably some trick of vision." The drawing he'd done in the air hadn't really stayed longer than a few seconds, for that matter: by the time he was pointing out Hampden, the squiggled coastline of the US had already faded to nothing. "I was just goofing around when I stumbled on a way to do the same thing magically. It doesn't have any practical applications."

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.

[usethepoker]

It was a clever little idea, and not one she would have thought of. It was certainly much more innocuous than her own experiments, which tended to either involve explosions or psychotropic drugs.

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."

[charlesmacaulay]

"Taste? Camilla gets that from our Nana. Henry -- I don't know where he gets it from," said Charles. He had to balance this carefully. If Susan were going to be his friend, she would be able to tell fairly soon that he and Henry weren't exactly good chums, so he couldn't fake it. On the other hand, he couldn't let his outright hostility show, because that might get reported back to Camilla. "He's an odd duck," he settled on saying. Any other expression would be hidden by a fortuitous tip of his cocoa mug as he drank