Closed: Shaun and Susan

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

In which Shaun and Susan do some drug research.

((Sockfest o' Doom, here we come. Worksafe, if really, really bizarre))




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Susan had been thinking.

It was a dangerous thing, when an incarnation of Death thought too much--her grandfather had pulled some real wowzers while in the midst of unusual cogitation. It was even more dangerous when said incarnation of Death was thinking what Susan was currently thinking. Creativity and inhumanity are very rarely a good combination.

She’d gone to tea with Camilla, and over the course of their conversation had gotten it in her head to wonder if one could translate something from an immortal to a mortal. Specifically, she wanted to see if she couldn’t make a normal human see and hear and sense the world the way she did.

There were, of course, no ready-made spells that could do such a thing, nor were there even really several that she could cobble together. In order to know such a transfer of senses had worked, she’d have to be able to check on it herself, and that left only one option: Legilimency. If she could first project everything into a volunteer’s head, so they would know what she saw, and she would know they knew, then she could try to duplicate the results with a potion of some sort. The comparison between Legilimency-given memory and the results of the potion would tell them if they were on the right track.

Susan only knew one person she could dragoon into this experiment--only one who was both human and who wouldn’t be able to run screaming for the hills. Shaun might not want to volunteer, but that wasn’t going to stop her from making him. It was unlikely anything she could do would unduly damage him, and even if it did--well, that was what the hospital wing was for. For Death!Susan, ‘empathy’ was a word as devoid of meaning as an empty rubbish bin.

Accordingly, she’d taken out every book on Legilimency the library had to offer, and had plowed through them all in three days--having the memory of Death was an advantage when it came to speed-reading and actually maintaining what you’d read. Now, half an hour before dawn, she’d dragged a sleepy and bewildered Shaun up onto the roof, ignoring his protests.

“You’re not still on about this sight-sharing thing, are you?” Shaun asked, yawning. He’d been dragged from his room in pyjamas, ancient slippers, and a bathrobe Liz had tried to throw away three times, only to have him sneak it back out of the bin. His hair was indescribable, and he was still so tired he could hardly walk straight.

“Of course I am.” Susan pressed a Thermos full of hot coffee into his hands, unpacking her assorted props and laying them neatly on a small folding table she’d brought for that very purpose. The chilly greyness of pre-dawn was the best time to try such an experiment--on the Discworld, the edge between night and day was a powerful time, and something of that thought was behind everything she did now. “Come on, it can’t hurt you. Much.” The thought that these might not be encouraging words did not occur to her.

Shaun, swilling coffee, watched her blearily. He still couldn’t reconcile the deep-sea change that had come over her with the popcorning of her grandfather. Susan had always seemed weird to him, but it was an acceptable weird--the sort of weird he could deal with, even if he couldn’t understand it. Now…well, those arctic, inhuman eyes frightened the life out of him, and they were only even weirder when contrasted with the odd, selective naiveté that seemed to have found her with the advent of her immortality. Even the way she moved was different--before, her motions had been neat, economical, and while they still were, there was an eerie fluidity to her every movement that had not been there before. She was, to put it bluntly, creepy.

“Oh, yeah, because that makes me feel better,” he muttered, scrubbing a hand over his face. “How will we know if this works, anyway?”

Susan took a seat opposite him, all her small accoutrements neatly arranged. “We’ll know,” she said. Behind her, the sky had lightened from grey to pink-streaked silver, the few clouds on the horizon gilded pale gold. It was now or never, and since ‘never’ was not a concept Susan readily accepted, she didn’t waste any time indulging Shaun’s doubts. LOOK AT ME, she said, the Voice brooking no disobedience.

Shaun didn’t know what was happening until he found himself being sucked relentlessly down into the icy, depthless pool of her gaze. He’d read enough about Legilimency to know that it was easiest to accomplish with eye contact, but he hadn’t expected this. Susan had all but told him she didn’t really know how this would work, but he didn’t have any time to be really afraid--thought and rationality faded in a heartbeat, leaving only a cool, endless blue tunnel.

It hit him all at once--a rush of sensation so overwhelming that it nearly knocked him senseless. His consciousness snapped back to the forefront with an almost audible crash, and when he blinked his eyes open he found he’d fallen out of his chair, the stone of the roof cold even through all his clothes. He blinked again, his eyes focusing on Susan, who was looking at him curiously.

“Fthzg,” he said. Coherent speech and motion both not being options at the moment, he shut his eyes again, swirling dizzily in the sudden whirlpool of awareness. He felt the roof beneath him like he’d never felt anything before--he’d known it was there, of course, but he hadn’t really been aware of it, of the subtle variations in its texture or the true chill that radiated from it. And as for what he was hearing…

Shaun’s hearing had always been average, neither good nor bad. Now, however, he could hear things he wouldn’t have thought could possibly be audible--the quiet rush of sap through trees; the subtle ticks and rattles of leaves that should have been motionless in that still air; the slightly hysterical pounding of his own heart. None of them were loud or intrusive, but they were so incredibly clear--he half thought he could even hear the collective breathing of the sleeping castle beneath him.

He opened his eyes again, staring up at the swiftly-lightening sky. Had he ever seen color like that before? It was as vivid as a child’s painting; so vivid that it was almost frightening, but looking at Susan didn’t help at all--it was worse, in fact, because it came as a total shock.

Various New Age-inspired friends had loaned him books about auras, and he supposed what he was seeing might well be called one. It wasn’t anything like the books described, though--it wasn’t, so he realized, even strictly visible, at least in any real sense of the word. It was something that hovered on the very edge of visibility, like the faintest blacklight after-image of a photo-flash. It wasn’t just around Susan, either--when he sat up and looked out over the grounds, he saw it everywhere. It lined the trees, hovering over the grass and the lake like a delicate, half-seen filigree.

“What the hell?” he said weakly. “Is this--is this how you see all the time?”

Susan looked at him, searching both his face and his mind. It had actually worked--that was something of a surprise. Seeing what she saw through his eyes made her realize something she had not thought of before, something that she would have to take into consideration when she found more test subjects: this was utterly and entirely alien to Shaun. She’d known it, but only in an abstract sense--even her normal senses were nothing like those of your average human, and she’d so taken them for granted that she hadn’t fully realized what a shock they were likely to be to someone who had never known them before.

She laid a hand on Shaun’s shoulder--he was half surprised it didn’t freeze him--and actually smiled. “It worked,” she said, which wasn’t really an answer. “It is, more or less. Your eyes won’t see exactly as mine do--all I can do is give them the ability to see what’s really there.” Most people, she knew, were much better at seeing things that weren’t there--really registering everything that was actually present was a rare talent indeed, if humanity in general was any indication.

“It’s…wow,” he said, the words half a croak. “It’s…man, it’s bloody beautiful.” Feeling things as he did now made his old senses seem like a photograph of a foothill compared to the reality of Ben Nevis. He could appreciate that beauty even more than Susan--Susan had, after all, been this way all her life, and so did not know what it was to be as stifled as he now knew he had been. Seeing and feeling and hearing as he did now was like taking a sudden deep breath of clear air after spending ages locked away in a musty room. It was the most wonderful damn thing he’d ever known, and--

“Wait,” he said, suddenly close to horrorstruck, “this isn’t going to go away again, is it?” Shaun couldn’t imagine how horrible it would be, if he lost this sudden clarity and had to be forced back into his old senses.

“That,” Susan said, seemingly impassive, “is why we’re making the potion. I don’t know how long the Legilimency-induced ability will last, but once we perfect a potion, you won’t need me to go into your head to give it back to you.”

Shaun swallowed, some of his tension ebbing. He could see only one problem--if they really did manage to produce a potion that could do this, it would make heroin look like gumdrops. Susan might almost take it for granted, but he knew there was no way in hell anyone else would. It would be a shock to the system of a sort Susan couldn’t even imagine--a good shock, but a shock nonetheless.

“So what now?” he asked, reaching for the Thermos. Its heat against his hand was more noticeable now, he realized, and he shook his head, wondering would he ever get used to it. These senses were nothing like he had expected--he’d been thinking comic-book-hero super-senses--but they were amazing nonetheless. They were subtle, but all the more powerful for that subtlety.

“Now we make the potion,” she said, pulling him to his feet. “We test it until we get it right with you, and then we call for volunteers.”

“And after that?”

She smiled again, and the smile was nothing like human. “Then we see who wants it.”