Application for Emma Jean "Emmie" Silvey, Caitlin R. Kiernan's Daughter of Hounds

[emmie_silvey]

((Daughter of Hounds is the sequel to Low Red Moon, Chance Matthews Silvey's canon. This application posted with the permission of Chance-mun. WARNING: Contains spoilers for Threshold, Low Red Moon, and Daughter of Hounds.))“Shit

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[chance_silvey]

They talked about names, her and Deke. Talked about it a lot, mostly about girls' names because Chance was sure what she'd want to name a boy, no question about that: Joe after her grandfather. Girls' names she wasn't sure about. They had it narrowed down to two. Maybe they'd have settled on a final choice before the birth if everything hadn't descended on them like a fucking tsunami and never let them up again to breathe. As it was, there were two finalists. Elizabeth, or Emma Jean.

She looks Emma Jean Silvey in the eye now (yellow eyes? what the ...) and she tells herself there are enough coincidences in this crazy universe to make another girl with this name. Silvey's not a common name, but it's not unheard of, and Emma Jean ... all right, not the most common choice for a modern kid, but ... Chance has seen her child, she thinks. She thinks she was sure. Hazel eyes and mousey hair, child who comforted her through all the shit with Narcissa Snow before Halloween and the birth, ghost-child, vision-child.

Oh hell, Chance,

[emmie_silvey]

Emmie has seen the face of this lady in pictures many times, this tall lady with brown hair, broad shoulders, and eyes the same green of the shingles of the house two doors down on Angell Street, eyes just a shade or two off from the green of Deacon's eyes. But she has never heard her voice, and for some reason it's not what Emmie expects. Or maybe Emmie never really expected anything in particular, and it's just weird to finally have something specific to replace the non-voice in her head. The lady has a touch of a Southern accent, not quite the same as Deacon's, but discernible nonetheless

[chance_silvey]

Chance has started taking Hogwarts for granted. It's been almost a year she's lived here now, hard to believe but the time just slips by so fast. She's so gripped by her own reaction to Emmie, her own surprise, that she almost doesn't think about how strange this place must seem to the girl. Then Emmie's question stops her short.

"Yes. I'm Chance Silvey," she agrees, wondering how yellow-eyed Emmie who is not her dream-child knows this. But of course Deke must have shown her pictures, right? Must have talked about her, if he could bring himself to do it, and Chance wouldn't be half-surprised if he couldn't. "And I don't know whether you're dead. I'm not going to lie to you about that."

[emmie_silvey]

Chance is honest, and Emmie appreciates that. She much prefers honesty to nonsensical application questions.

"Well, I don't remember dying. Unless there was a nuclear bomb or something." Emmie had once read a book about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she was pretty sure the people who had died there didn't know what had hit them. But if a bomb had hit Providence, then Deacon would be dead, too, and wouldn't he then be there with Emmie? Along with all the other people who had died in the blast?

She decides the jury's still out on her death, so she'll just have to wait and see. There's nothing else she can do about it, anyway.

"So are you a paleontologist here, too?" Emmie finds it's hard to know what to say to Chance, but she also doesn't want to miss this opportunity to talk to her. She now knows the truth about Chance, about where she, Emmie, came from -- or, more importantly, where she didn't come from -- but that doesn't mean it's simple to cut her emotional ties to Chance, and she doesn't even know if she wants to. Chance is far

[bantersucks]

((Workninja for sanity's sake, will be slow, but I love this app so much and I haven't even read the books yet...))

The yellow eyes don't faze Jaime at all. Even before Hogwarts, he's seen and been weirder. Hey, girls with no eyes trump those with yellow eyes in terms of freakiness. So he doesn't even do the furtive surprised double take or the really really quick stare that some people do upon seeing somebody different and trying to cover up their surprise.

"That's... okay, that's gotta be the best description of Barney ever," he agrees, meaning every word of it. To this day he's still glad that Milagro became bored with that show in ten minutes flat and didn't argue when the purple dinosaur was banned from their house. "I don't get the questions either. Think they're just trying to gauge how good you are at putting up with nonsense."

[emmie_silvey]

((Yay, thanks! :D "Haven't read the books yet," eh? *enables!!!* Caitlin R. Kiernan's a great writer, and her characters are full of win! *workninjas, too, but from home*))

Jaime is the second person Emmie's met here, and she wonders if he's dead, but decides not to ask, because that's a rude way to start a conversation. Maybe she would start that way anyway if he were the person who wrote the application, but obviously, he's not.

"Well, if that's the case," she replies, "then this place is probably full of nonsense, and so the application is a test to see if you can hack it or not." The events of the previous year were enough proof for Emmie that she can put up with whole worlds full of nonsense, but that doesn't mean that she wants to.

"What's your name?"

[bantersucks]

((They're on my huge List of Stuff I Have to Read Before the Semester Starts and Grad School Tries to Kill Me Again. *got topped by work but is home now*))

Jaime is pretty sure he's not dead. Oh, there are angels here, but it's not the afterlife. (For one thing, he doubts he'd have the peanut gallery in his head anymore.) "Yeah, pretty much. Every time I think I've seen everything here, I get proven wrong again. At least most of the crazy isn't the bad kind." Like the sort that tried to smash you to little bits or drink your best friend's blood. Being turned into a dentist was nothing compared to that.

He offered a hand to shake. "It's Jaime Reyes. Nice to meet you. Anyone try to explain this place yet, or do I get to sound completely loco?"

[emmie_silvey]

((For the record: Although the thread with Chance isn't finished yet, Chance will be filling Emmie in on her surroundings, so by now she knows. But at this moment it's not up there yet, and I'm trying to avoid good ol' fluid H_H time for this one. XD ))

Emmie doesn't know exactly what good crazy is, but Jaime's comments make her think about her prior suspicion that she's in some sort of mental hospital. She now knows that's not the case, but it's still really weird.

She extends her own hand to give his a firm shake. He seems friendly, and there are no mystical tattoos there, so there's no reason to snub him. "Nice to meet you, too. Yeah, I know I'm in a school for witchcraft and wizardry. My stepmother's a witch, and she does magick, but I don't know if it's the same kind they do here."

[mini_gps]

...Holy crap. Molly had never heard anyone so young swear quite so much--it was pretty impressive, though not as impressive as this girl's eyes. It only took a moment to see that they weren't contacts--her eyes really were yellow. Cool.

"This Deacon guy told you Barney makes you retarded?" Molly considered this a moment. "I'd believe it."

[emmie_silvey]

Emmie is used to people looking at her eyes, but it's nice that Molly doesn't say anything rude about them. Emmie appreciates that, especially because the kids in her old school were really mean about them, and the last time someone gave her a hard time in that regard, Emmie gave the kid two black eyes, knocked out a front tooth, and bit him on his face. But Molly seems much nicer than that.

"Yeah. I don't think he meant it literally, but I suppose it's possible. Especially if nurture is more important than nature." The nature-nurture debate had been covered at the beginning of the book on abnormal psychology in the school library.

Emmie truly is glad to see another girl her age there, and this one isn't strange and pushy in the way Pearl was, or at least she doesn't seem to be that way. "What's your name, and how old are you? I'm Emmie, and I'm nine. Almost nine and a quarter." These distinctions matter!

[mini_gps]

Molly had seen so much weird stuff in her short life that yellow eyes weren't going to faze her. Besides, she'd been raised to be polite.

"I'm Molly," she said. "I'm ten." The nature-nurture thing sounded like something that would be in one of Mohinder's books--not the one about the mutated-hero people like her, but some of the others. "Nice to meet you. Where did you come from? I was in New York, before I showed up here." She still wondered how Matt was getting on, without either her or Mohinder.

[emmie_silvey]

So they are almost the same age -- or at least assumingly so. Emmie has learned that sometimes age isn't what it seems.

"I'm from Providence, Rhode Island," she replies. "But my stepmother lives in New York City, and so I've been there a lot. Are you from there or from upstate New York?"

[daxtastic]

The last name on the application is one Dax recognizes, and as she reads over the answer to question four, a conversation springs to mind. One held almost a year ago, yes, but three centuries breeds the need for a strong memory.

It could be a coincidence. Silvey is a common enough name, and Chance never did mention a child. Still, the girl's demeanor, so very similar to Dax's friend, is more than enough to make her consider the possibility. After all, Hogwarts does not breed coincidence.

Magical liopleurodon, perhaps, but not coincidence.

"Are you of any relation to Chance Silvey?" She smiles warmly, but not like she's coddling the girl. "I apologize. For you, this is likely a stupid question."

[emmie_silvey]

There's something about this lady's face, something beautiful and striking and timeless, that reminds Emmie of Esmeribetheda, even though this lady's skin is not black as coal.

Unfortunately, her question is difficult for Emmie to answer, because of the things she now knows, the things she's known for almost a year now, but ultimately she nods, because if anyone were to ask her if Deacon were her father, she wouldn't think twice before saying yes.

"She's my mother." And when Emmie tries to be objective about it, she decides that from what she's seen of Chance and of Saben White, Chance is far more like a mother to her anyway. Saben did save her life once, but she also was creepy and weird, while Chance is more...motherly. Or at least not creepy and weird.

"And it's a much better question than whether I'd kill Barney or Carrottop first."

[daxtastic]

Jadzia nods slightly, not terribly surprised. It takes far more than a reunion to surprise Dax, no matter how happy the occasion.

"Well, Emmie, then I'm a friend of your mother's. My name is Jadzia, and it's wonderful to meet you." She means it, as she can't imagine the girl's appearance being anything less than fortunate for Chance. Awkward and frighting perhaps. But still, as someone who has lost children, she understands the inherent desire to have them back.

She doesn't understand, though, what it feels like to have one returned, though she is 200 years too old to be envious.

"I'm pleased that I did a bit better than the application. Your bribe's already been fulfilled, but do you mind if I ask if you've seen Chance yet?"

If not, Dax has an owl to send.

((Reposted for typos!))

[emmie_silvey]

Emmie suddenly finds herself very curious about Dax. Dax seems really different from Sadie's friends, like Hunter Fontana, the lesbian writer with dreadlocks who, like Sadie, is a witch. It's also interesting to think that Chance has made friends in this castle, at this school, all the while she and Deacon and Sadie were living their lives back in Providence and New York. She has always thought of Chance as frozen in time, because when people die, their lives stop. Or so she had thought before she came to this place. She still hasn't concluded whether Chance is somehow alive in this place or she, Emmie, has died, but the bottom line is that time doesn't stop here, and people move on. Emmie is curious about the ways in which Chance has done so

[buggy_genius]

A smart kid. Hodgins approves.

"You're right, kid. These are really stupid questions and I'm glad that you recognize that. But just wait until you see who's running this school, and it'll all make sense."

[emmie_silvey]

((Eek, sorry for the delay! Lamaze classes ate my weekend!))

Emmie would like for things to make sense, but she knows that sometimes the answers to things, the answers that turn nonsense into sense and explain everything, are something of a horrible truth.

Well, she may as well ask. Anything else would be delaying the inevitable, she supposes. And could it really be worse than some of the things she had found out about the world, and herself, last year?

First, though, she does what any smart kid approached by a stranger does.

"What's your name? I think I'd like to hear about who runs this school, but I also think it's best if you tell me your name first, so that you're not a stranger anymore. Or at least less of a stranger."

God, she hopes it's not those Hound things running the school. Or the Bailiff. Not that she ever met him -- not that she can recall, at least, although there's some weird sense of déjà vu when she thinks about that, but she can't quite put her finger on it -- but from what she did hear about him, he seems

[buggy_genius]

"Dr. Jack Hodgins. Call me Jack. Or Hodgins. You know, whatever."

[emmie_silvey]

"I'll call you Jack." Emmie has been on a first-name basis with most of the adults in her life, and she sees no reason to change that now, especially since the man has offered for her to call him by his first name. "It's nice to meet you, Jack."

Normally, Emmie is far more careful about strangers, but considering that she doesn't really have a choice but to get acquainted with them now, she has to bend the rules a bit. Besides, Chance has said it is safe in this place, and Emmie believes her. She figures Deacon would trust and believe her, too.

"Are you a medical doctor?"