hh_mirror | Sock: Henry and Susan discuss...stuff.

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Henry needed air.

He’d spoken to Francis about what was on his mind, and now that he’d reached a mental decision, he needed some time to think about it. So he went for a walk.

Fall had hit the grounds with a vengeance, turning the trees in the Forbidden Forest into so many deciduous fireballs of color. The lawns were still green, but the vine maple around the greenhouses had turned to a riot of yellow and orange and brilliant red. The forest was almost nothing like the woods in Vermont, but it was beautiful nonetheless--and perhaps it was better that they were nothing alike, really. His life here was not the life he had had before. What Camilla had decided--what she had realized here--was not something that had existed before.

Even yet, it surprised him that she would think such a thing. None of their little group had ever really discussed marriage, except to decry it, as in the instance of Francis’s mother. He knew that she had turned Richard down once, when he himself had been dead, and that it was Richard’s second proposal that made her reconsider the idea in the abstract. But that talking to Ryder, of all people, had made her think so--but then, Camilla could be unfathomable like that. Henry couldn’t ever predict what she would do in a given situation with anything like accuracy, and he knew well enough that it was one of the things he loved about her. She was, in many ways, everything he was not--impulsive, sometimes careless, with a certain freedom of nature that he could never be capable of in a million years.

Unfortunately, that unpredictability could be a terrible thing, as he well knew. Just because she was open to the concept--just because she had tacitly committed herself to him, in a way--didn’t mean she’d greet his proposal as he hoped. And if she refused him…well. If she refused, even the fact that he had asked would change things between them, and almost certainly not in a good way. He knew he wanted to do it; what he didn’t know was where, or when--especially when.

This was not the first time Henry had thought of Camilla in this context, though it was the first time he’d contemplated it with anything like seriousness. He had thought, back before everything went to utter hell in Hampden, that he might one day marry Camilla for financial reasons--he would want to ensure she was provided for, should anything ever happen to him. It had been too soon to know where she stood with him, and then his suicide had effectively put the kibosh on that idea.

So he walked, and he was somewhat surprised to find, as he approached Greenhouse Three, Susan. The greenhouse was otherwise deserted, and Susan herself was kneeling beside a row of some plant even Henry couldn’t identify, snipping buds with--and here he raised an eyebrow--a miniature scythe. Well, he supposed, it was just as effective as hedge trimmers--just a little more…novel.

She looked up as he approached, tossing more buds into the wooden bucket beside her. “Hello,” she said, standing and dusting off her hands. Her ever-present herd of cats eyed him, and a few came over to sniff his shoes before deciding he was uninteresting.

“Hello,” he returned. He was rather surprised, in a detached way, that the plants she picked didn’t wither and die at her touch. “What are those for?” he asked, nodding at her bucket.

“An experiment,” Susan said simply, as Henry took out a cigarette and lit it. The sulfur of the match hung sharp in the cool autumn air. “It’s for science,” she added, as though there could be any chance it might be for some other reason.

Henry raised an eyebrow. She was so very different, which was why he could bear to be around her--she was not the same woman who had slept with Camilla at all. Her presence, though somewhat eerie, was also extremely calm, and that was very likely why he said what he said next. “I’m thinking of asking Camilla to marry me.”

It was sentence apropos of absolutely nothing, but Susan was so constantly bewildered by the human race that it did not throw her for a complete loop, like it had Francis. She set down her tiny scythe and beckoned him toward a nearby garden bench.

“Are you?” she asked, as he sat down beside her. She pulled her own pack of cigarettes out of her skirt pocket, lighting it with the end of her wand. “When?”

Henry looked at her. That was what he liked about her, in this particular state--she didn’t bother with silly questions like ‘Why?’ Then again, he supposed, she wouldn’t understand the explanation even if she asked for one.

He took a thoughtful drag off his cigarette. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s something I’ve been considering since I gave her the ring after the tent village, but when I should ask, and how, I don’t know.” He paused for a very long moment, but the silence that stretched between them was not, to his surprise, uncomfortable. “I can’t be sure she’ll say yes.”

Now it was Susan who was silent. “Why wouldn’t she?” she asked, her brow furrowing in honest confusion. “You love her, don’t you? And she loves you?” She flicked ash onto the velvet lawn. “If so, why should she say no?”

Henry seriously doubted that Susan--in either form--realized just how mercurial and unpredictable Camilla could be. There was a very real chance, recent revelations notwithstanding, that she would refuse him, and if she did… Well. He could imagine all too well what might happen if she did. “Because,” he said, knowing exactly how to explain this at least in a way Susan could understand. “She is human. And humans, as you’ve said, are confusing.” Even to other humans was the unspoken end of that statement.

Susan kicked off her boots, sitting Indian-style on the bench. “What’s the worst that could happen? If she says no, she says no.” The human part of her would have realized just what terrible things could come from a refusal, but it was so deeply asleep that she truly had not a clue.

“If she says no, it might well be the end of everything,” Henry said bluntly. “And even if it was not, it would change things. I’m not sure it’s a good risk to take.”

He felt Susan’s piercing, unearthly eyes on his face, and when he turned to look at her he saw that she had an actual expression on her face--an unnervingly intense expression, such as might be seen on the face of a minor deity. “But you want to,” she said softly.

“But I want to,” he agreed levelly. He was so far out of his depth with this situation, it wasn’t even funny--for perhaps the first time in his life he found himself at a true impasse, and he did not like it in the slightest. Henry knew, deep down, that he would do it sooner or later--he was Henry, and he always did what he wanted to do, in the end. As with Francis, Susan was simply a sounding board, more or less, but a sounding board some part of him required. It was, after all, easily the biggest decision he had ever had to make in his life--and he included both Bunny’s murder and his own suicide into the equation.

Susan watched him, searching his face, though what she would find there he didn’t know. While her current inhumanity could not read Camilla at all, she had received the impression before now that Camilla could be cruel--not deliberately so, but the cruelty born of indifference. And that she could understand very, very well. “I think,” she said, “that it would not be wise to ignore that want. If you do, you will always wonder what would have come of it, if you had spoken--even if she refuses you, you’ll know. However painful it might be--even if it destroys you, it will be a different destruction than would come if you held your silence.”

She looked away, flicking the remains of her cigarette into a puddle that lingered in a low spot in the lawn. She immediately lit another, and when she turned back to him her face had gone blank and unreadable as a Sphinx. “Just don’t love her too much.” Her expression said clearly that queries as to her meaning would not be answered, but Henry would not have done so anyway. He could guess well enough.

Her advice, Henry knew, was not possible to take--for either Camilla or himself. As they had both realized in London, they already did love one another too much. It was not something he could do about, and he did not wish to try. He’d undertaken the bacchanal because part of him wanted to feel--to really feel--and what he had with Camilla was emotion with a vengeance. Even when she’d hurt him, he could never have left her, nor have changed his feelings for her. Susan was right in one thing--Camilla, alone of all people and things in the world, held the power to destroy him.

“What is your experiment attempting to achieve?” he asked, abruptly changing the subject.

Susan didn’t bat an eyelash at the non sequitur. “I want to give people my senses,” she said. “Let them see and hear and feel as I do. I tried it on Shaun, and he seems to find it both amazing and very dangerous. I can’t see why.”

Henry raised his other eyebrow. Susan wanted to give mortals the preternatural senses of an incarnation of Death? He could see why this Shaun would be wary, but at the same time the idea intrigued him. “I would,” he said, lighting another cigarette himself, “have to agree with Shaun, and advise you to be very, very careful who you would give such a gift to. I would not, however, say you should not do it.”

Susan considered this. That was more or less what both Shaun and Stephen had said--she’d thought it irrational, but with Henry’s opinion added, she began to think they might have a point.

“Very well,” she said. “I’ll be careful.” She stood, putting out her cigarette and pulling on her boots. Henry followed her as she returned to the garden and her pruning of the odd plants. Without a word, and heedless of his slacks, he knelt a little ways down from her, snapping off the downy seed-pods with as much care as he had ever given his roses. Gardening had always been a meditative act for him--he’d spent a great deal of time at work in his yard after Bunny’s murder. It gave him an excuse now to turn everything over in peace, his back-brain at work while his forebrain concentrated on the simple tasks at hand. He knew now what he had to do, and he had at least some idea when.

Current Mood: thoughtful

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