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Unfortunately for her, Susan was headed past the popcorn room at that very moment. Thanks to the memory loss (http://community.livejournal.com/hogwarts_hocus/1263611.html) she'd encountered after her time as a child, she no longer remembered even her own unpopping, let alone anything to do with Teatime's former existence. So she was wholly unprepared to round the corner and nearly slam right into him.

Oh...SHIT. She hopped backward, wishing she'd brought the poker or, failing that, a hammer.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she demanded. "You're dead!" Not that that stopped many people here, but still....

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...

Oh, my. Susan's lack of poker (or, indeed, hammer) was noticed by Teatime at ONCE, and his already improbably-wide smile broadened a hundredfold.

An unarmed Susan... Teatime grabbed Susan's wrist, twisting it, and pushed her back against the corridor wall ~~not like THAT, you perverts~~. Perhaps this WAS the afterlife...

"Susan!" he beamed. One eye twitched slightly. "How nice to see you so soon."

The point of a knife was pressing firmly against her side, not -quite- hard enough to pierce the skin.

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OW...well, resurrection to violence in five seconds. That had to be some kind of record.

"Soon?" she asked, stomping on his foot. "What do you mean, 'soon'? You've been dead for years! How did you get here without going through a Sorting, anyway?" She was debating the relative merits of kicking vs. punching, and finally compromised by thwacking him upside the head. "Now back off, you twat." What had she done to deserve this? It wasn't fair.

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Teatime was debating the merits of a quick stab vs a swipe across the throat; Susan had been HORRIFICALLY unkind to him, after all. But his surprise at her words and the force of the blow (she was rather strong, for a girl) combined to make him step back for just a moment, hand still tight around her wrist...

"Years? I'm afraid you're somewhat mistaken. I had the pleasure of your company only a few moments ago."

An explanation, THEN a quick stab? Hmm. Teatime thought for a moment and decided he didn't care enough, lunging in with knife upraised.

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Susan dodged--mostly; she felt the knife graze her ribs--and tried to pull her arm free, with a rather astounding lack of success. He was just a boy; he wasn't supposed to be that strong. Grr.

"No, you didn't," she snapped. "You've been dead almost six years, and will you let go of my bloody arm?" She yanked again, frustrated. "That happens here sometimes--people who were dead find themselves in the castle. They're usually in the Sorting Room, though." She scowled at him, as though the fact that he was here rather than there was the fault of some deficiency of his character.

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"... six years?" There was a clear trace of surprise in his sugar-fed voice. Almost as if to compensate, he slammed his arm up against Susan's throat, pushing her head back against the wall.

"Oh, well. I do hope I'm able to find someone else to explain," the Assassin said, and, in an odd half-turn movement, punched the knife viciously downwards into Susan's stomach.

But at least he'd let go of her arm. Teatime thought of himself as nothing if not polite.

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Susan winced, knocking his arm away from her throat. She looked at him, at the knife in her abdomen, and back at him. There was only one appropriate reaction, so she took it.

She slugged him. Hard.

"Ow ow ow! That hurt, you bloody bastard, and look--look at my shirt. You've ruined it!" She sounded more like a cranky governess than a stabbing victim, and the glare she leveled at him could have blistered paint. "I hope you're not planning to try that on everyone you meet here," she added severely.

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This time, Teatime really DID look surprised. He WAS fairly young, but he was also very good at what he did; someone who'd been stabbed like that shouldn't have been standing, never mind complaining about their shirt.

Susan's punch sent him staggering back a step or two. "Why do you have to be so contrary, Susan?" he complained. "You're supposed to DIE. And I have no real reason to do this to anyone else, unless I'm commissioned to do so. You are rather a special case." His eye twitched again. "Isn't that nice?"

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"I'm flattered," she snapped, wincing again--gods, why couldn't they have put a no-pain spell alongside the no-kill spell?

With a hissing grimace she pulled the knife out, eying the bloody blade with a mixture of disgust and sheer annoyance. Still leaning against the wall--mostly for support--she turned her glare back to him. "Oh, Teatime--" deliberate mispronunciation "--didn't you know? Nobody can die here," she said, somehow contriving to sound sweet and nasty all at once. "So you're rather out of a job." As was Granddad, but Granddad didn't seem to mind, whereas Teatime...likely would. It was probably wrong, that the thought gave her such satisfaction.

She looked again at the knife. "And I'm keeping this," she added, wiping the blade on her skirt.

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"There's no Death here!" Teatime heard Susan say, very distinctly. And why wouldn't it be distinct? It had only happened a few days ago - the sword, the Tooth Fairy's Castle, Susan ruining his assignment and saying all those AWFUL things about him...

Hadn't it?

"Well," he said, voice perfectly polite, eye twitching horribly. "Well. It's very nice that we only ever seem to meet in places that you can't be killed." A dementedly cheerful smile. "In theory, at least. There are always weaknesses, after all..." he cocked his head, looking at Susan's wound. "Where are we, exactly?"

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"Nice for me, certainly," she muttered, scowling more blackly than ever. "I'm rather attached to my life. As for weaknessess...trust me, if there actually were any, someone would have found them by now." Oh gods, why was she telling him this? Why was she even having this conversation?

She eyed the knife, and decided against it--for now, at least. "You're in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry," she said, her free hand picking irritably at the hole in her shirt--she was rubbish at mending charms; no matter what she did, the patch would surely show. "The fact that you've come out of the popcorn room means you've probably been here before. Don't you remember anything?" There was a great deal she had forgotten, she knew; further, quite a few people who unpopped suffered all kinds of memory loss.

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"I recall you skewering me through the chest quite clearly, thank you," Teatime replied, dancing backwards. His shattered mind was whirring, swiftly converting the information Susan was feeding him into the beginnings of some kind of warped, distorted jigsaw puzzle.

"Hogwarts? Some Hubland sister-school to the Unseen University, perhaps?" Not that he was silly enough to believe that they were still on the Disc; but it was always important to test out one's theories -somehow- or another.

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usethepoker.livejournal.com - Date: 2007-05-12 12:45 am (UTC) - Expand

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One might call it trouble. Stephen's expression did not soften into anything more amiable -- or easier to read -- even after Aloysius had finally taken Teatime off to the ward. However, he did drop the formal address.

"For all love, Susan, what got into you I cannot imagine," he muttered, tearing the linen of his own shirt to tie a neat bandage right around her middle, right over the cut shirt she wore. "That should bind you up enough to walk back to my office, though it'll be no fun for you, I am sure. Please tell me you would have come to me had I not happened by just now, rather than trying to stitch it up your own self again."

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She was in trouble. Damn.

"He started it," she said, grimacing as he tied the makeshift bandage. Even through the stabbing pain in her side she paused, realizing how dreadfully childish that sounded. "I mean, I was walking past the popcorn room and nearly ran right into him. Not two minutes later he stabbed me." There followed the implication that of course she had to stab him back. "I don't quite know how things degenerated so fast."

Her brow furrowed at his last words. "Stitch myself up?" she asked, confused. When had she done that, and why? It might well have something to do with the long scar not far from her present wound. She was rather glad she couldn't remember it, whatever it had been.

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He gave her a sympathetic look at the grimace. "I would have kept Aloysius by, so that he could fetch analgesic potions and you would not need to suffer more, had there not been a pressing need for someone to escort your assailant elsewhere. Believe me, my dear, if there were a charm for it, I would use it." He did not mean to punish her. She was her own keeper, and her own folly was punishment enough, in any case.

With a quick wand flick and a muttered incantation he cast a ward to protect them from any eavesdropping as they went; then, the wand tucked away again, he offered her an arm as support so they could make their slow way toward his office. "Never you mind about the stitchery. It is one of the things you will have forgotten, I suppose. What interests me is that Mister Teatime seems to have suffered a more drastic memory loss still. When you were unpopcorned, you remembered me; even after your recent bout with chocolates, you remembered me. It appeared not so with Teatime; and I very much doubt that was feigned."

Teatime might be nigh inscrutable, but Stephen had his ways of reading people (thanks to that cardsharp in Spain). Teatime did have one good eye, with a properly dilating pupil.

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Susan shook her head. "Believe me, I'm quite happy to be without him, if his going meant getting rid of Teatime." She didn't doubt Stephen would offer some form of painkiller, if it was possible. As it was...well, she wouldn't die of it. Though, if this kept on as it was, she might wish she would. Susan and pain were not strangers, and she was decent enough at hiding it, but this was more than a bit much even for her--most of her bumps and scrapes had been precisely that; knife-wounds were rather a new experience.

She gave him a grateful look when he cast the warding charm; just because Teatime had followed Aloysius didn't necessarily mean he'd truly gone. She took his arm, and if she leaned rather more of her weight on him than she might have...well, oh well. Pain hurt. "If I truly did try to sew myself up, I think I'm glad I don't remember how, or why." Sweet merciful Io, walking was not fun. "As for Teatime, he has no idea what this place is, or that he was ever here before. Which is, I think, both a blessing and a curse." Susan didn't at all relish the thought of having to dodge a stab-happy Assassin, Rule or no Rule.

She fell silent. She would guess that she had kept some of her memories because they were good ones, important ones; Teatime, sociopath that he was, likely wouldn't have formed enough attachments to retain memory of them.

Gods, this hurt. Susan had, of course, no memory of her fight with Nny, so as far as she knew she'd never been stabbed before. Even if she had, it probably wouldn't have made the current situation any easier.

"You know, Stephen," she managed, grimacing. "I don't know how you could possibly have performed surgery on yourself." It was sheer stubbornness, rather than pride, that kept her from doing any more than grimace.

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"I will not pretend I took any great pleasure in it, sure. The chief reason to perform surgery on oneself is that one has no physician whom one trusts more. Call it hubris, if you like, but I am in one piece yet, which is more than I could have hoped had I yielded myself up to the saws and knives of certain colleagues." He stopped. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what sort of a great cretin am I?" Snapping his fingers, he summoned house-elves and directed them to bring "a great wheeled chair", which they did.

It was an armchair with wheels.

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The idea of having no choice but to perform self-surgery was...more than mildly appalling. Then again, most wounded in Ankh-Morpork would probably fare better taking care of their injuries than submitting to most of the city's doctors.

Susan had heard of wheelchairs, though she'd never seen one. However, she was fairly certain they weren't supposed to look like a great stuffed easy chair. She couldn't help but laugh on sight of it--laugh, and wince, and laugh again, her free hand holding her side.

"It looks...rather more comfortable than I'd imagine such a thing would normally be," she managed at last. "How would it steer, though?"

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Stephen helped his friend into the wheelchairish conglomeration. The wheels might or might not have come from bicycles. "I should think it cannot be steered. It is the fine mess of the world," he said with rueful amusement, "but at least it will be less an affliction than walking with a stab wound. Perhaps a modification of certain charms would permit -- hm." He appeared to be thinking very hard for a moment, which is to say, his strange pale eyes went alarmingly blank; then he whipped out the wand again and muttered a series of incantations.

"Now try to tell it where to go," he said, present again.

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Susan sat, wincing only slightly, trying not to laugh--laughing hurt, hard as it was to keep silent.

She recognized that look--it meant Stephen was cooking up an idea that might have some unforseen consequences. Then again, she was the one who'd come up with the brilliant plan to attack the Whomping Willow, and look how that had ended--she was hardly one to talk, in terms of oddball ideas. "...If you say so," she said gamely. "All right, chair, forward."

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The chair lurched forward, earning it a reproachful look from Stephen. "That is not what is needed," he said sharply to the chair, and then to Susan, apologetically, he added, "It will need some fine-tuning, to be sure."

Seemingly chastised, the chair rolled more smoothly.

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Susan bit her lip, the urge to snicker returning. To her annoyance it didn't dull the pain any--it just meant she had one more thing to concentrate on. Only Stephen, she reflected, would chastise a chair...well, all right, she might as well, but she didn't have to admit it.

"The fact that it listened is a good sign," she said, realizing what an odd picture they must make, moving through the hallway with what was so obviously a home-made contraption. At least they hadn't run into anyone, yet.

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If they were to run into anyone, and anyone dared insinuate this wheelchair was less than a good idea, they would get ~~the bitchplz icon~~ a piece of Stephen's mind.

"Properly speaking it ought not to be able to listen to anything, but perhaps it is responsive to my will as well as yours," Stephen theorised. "The enchantment was supposed to inspire it to do your bidding, so to speak; to take direction. In any event, we shall be able to get to my office much more quickly and with less inconvenience to your poor gut."

Much more quickly, he learned, as the chair took off in a sudden burst of enthusiasm.

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