Open RP: Evil Missions and the Great Pie Hunt

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Susan and Shaun had been cobbling together a guidebook to Hogwarts when the WART broadcasted. The idea was to put together something that would help ease Liz’s transition, whenever she arrived; both of them knew that Liz was definitely not the sort of person who would take some of the weird shit here easily.

“Well, theme music,” Shaun said, looking up. Composition was not his strong point--like many people who are erudite enough in speech, he had a hard time when it came to setting it down on paper, and the carpet around his chair was littered with discarded balls of crumpled parchment. “That’s a bit of all right.”

Susan, who didn’t recognize a single song, nevertheless nodded. “I still don’t fully understand this ‘Halloween’ thing,” she said. Though she’d been at Hogwarts last Halloween, she couldn’t remember it now, and thus the point and significance of the holiday were lost on her. Shaun had tried to explain it, but why something that was more or less the Day of the Dead should inspire people to dress up and get drunk, she didn’t know. Then again, in her experience quite a lot of people would use almost anything as an excuse to dress up and get drunk, so…

Shaun didn’t get a chance to try to explain again. Something odd was going on in his head--something he’d never really felt before, or at least not in this magnitude. The adrenaline-fueled desperation he’d experienced when they’d been besieged in the Winchester slammed back full-force, but this time the fear had been replaced with…something else. Memory of him threatening to gut David with a broken bottle if the man came any nearer his dying mum overtook him--the sheer rage he’d felt in that moment, only now it was amplified tenfold. Shaun was not a violent man--at least, not if you weren’t a zombie--but something in him suddenly wanted to be.

He looked at Susan, who had gone very still herself. A change seemed to ripple over her features--her already pale skin whitened to near transparency, her hair coiling down into something limp and passive, and when she looked up at him her eyes would have scared the life out of him, if he hadn’t been so changed already himself.

They were black--solid black, unbroken save for a tiny, remote pinprick of arctic blue at the center. She smiled, and her teeth seemed…sharper, somehow; sharper, and a good deal more sinister than any smile Shaun had ever seen on her.

They looked at one another. Both suddenly had an inexplicable urge to go do something very unpleasant to someone else, but the two of them were allies--there was an unspoken understanding that they’d do nothing awful to one another.

…LET’S PLAY, Susan said, and the Voice had taken on strange harmonics it had never before held--there was a note of malevolence beneath it, a gleeful, vicious sort of malice that promised all sorts of unpleasant things. She paused. AND THEN LET’S GET PIE.

Shaun picked up his bat, flipping it from hand to hand. He returned her rather disturbing smile. “Play, then pie,” he said. “Gotcha. Shall we?”

They didn’t even bother to use the door--Susan just grabbed his hand as she went straight through the wall, taking him along with her. Neither one knew where they were going, or what they would do when they got there, but both were in silent agreement as to the type and amount of damage they wanted to do along the way. Odd thoughts of dominance were firing through Susan’s brain--the need to overpower, to crush, to overwhelm. Shaun, whose mindset was echoing that, was more than willing to help--they’d get rid of any and all zombies once and for all, intelligent or not.

And then there would be pie. Because dude, every evil would-be villain needs pie, dammit.

((NWS warning: Stephen and Susan's thread eventually devolves into attempted murder, and thence into smut. Yeah, we don't really know, either :P))

Comments

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AS EASY AS THAT, she agreed, still smiling her small, strange smile. The power of Death was addictive--the nightmare she had become knew that quite well--and in large measure that addiction was the scythe itself. Susan knew next to nothing about the Napoleonic wars--how and where they were fought, just who was involved, etc.--but she did know that everything fell to the scythe. Everything. Stephen wanted to overthrow this Napoleon, but it would be better still to replace him. They could do it all so much better.

TRY IT, she said, offering the weapon. THINK WHAT WE COULD DO. The strange reverberation in her voice was now comprised of so many different elements it was almost impossible to read--amusement, hunger, and malice all at once, overlain with all the persuasion she could muster. Susan had never seen nor heard of a mortal using the scythe, and, quite frankly, she wanted to know what would happen.

She wanted to know what he'd become.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

He held out the demiglobe to her, quid pro quo, in exchange for the scythe.

The heft of it spoke of solidity belying the weapon's evanescent appearance. He turned the shaft this way and that in his hands. "Terminus est," he murmured. In Latin, this is the end. And it was. It could end everything. New growth would spring up cleaner.

Of course, he had to test it. It would be a shame to pass up such a chance; it was a greater shame he had no live subjects, but that could not be helped. Organic material at least could be had. Neatly, with the same precision he'd use with any weapon, he halved a pomegranate that sat in a dish on his desk. He halved the dish too.

Then, not without a certain reluctance, he offered the scythe back to its owner. As he looked at her, she seemed very like the scythe, or else it seemed like her: something dangerous, an edge that could make you bleed before you'd quite noticed.

He didn't think he needed to tell her what he thought of it.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Susan took the pieces of the globe, watching with a certain dark delight. There was perhaps something wrong with the fact that Stephen, a mortal, should take to the scythe so readily, but in her current state it pleased her greatly. Her smile as she took the scythe back was approving, bright as a diamond and just as sharp--approving, though not, given what she knew of Stephen, surprised.

YOU SEE, she said, and it was a statement, not a question. YOU SEE WHAT WE COULD DO TOGETHER. Susan would not be content to simply get rid of Napoleon; something would have to take his place, after all. They could put in place whatever they wanted, could do whatever they wanted.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Stephen had no interest in taking Napoleon's place. (Being evil did not necessarily confer a desire for political power. Political power would be immensely tedious and preclude any number of interesting scientific undertakings.) In his current state, however, Stephen also had no concern over what kind of person or administration would replace Napoleon. He simply wished to destroy the man and all his works.

"I do see," he said thoughtfully. "Rather, I am beginning to see." Their roads would diverge at that point, after Napoleon had been deposed. Until then, they could be of much use to one another.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

NOW, Susan asked, again holding the scythe like something infinitely precious, WHERE DO WE GO? She touched half of the smooth-sliced globe, the surface cool beneath her fingers. HOW DO WE START?

She had once told her grandfather that a wise man said you felt most alive just before you died. The statement had puzzled Death greatly; by his reckoning, all of life was something that happened just before you died, so shouldn't you feel most alive all the time? There was a flaw in his logic, as there almost always was in the logic Death tried to apply to mortals, but in her current state Susan could see the sense of it. She needed nothing to concentrate her senses, her focus--ironically, she was more alive as Death than she was as Susan. She was alive, and sooner or later tonight someone else wouldn't be--sooner or later, someone's skin would be as smooth and cool and lifeless as the sundered globe.

And she could not share it. No mere human could possibly know or understand--they would live and die and never really know.

DO YOU KNOW HOW ALIVE YOU ARE? she asked, apropos of absolutely nothing. DO YOU TRULY KNOW IT? WOULD THIS NAPOLEON DO AS HE DOES, IF HE REALIZED HOW VERY EASY IT IS TO DIE?

Yes. Evil!Susan was getting philosohphical. It really was a character flaw.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

"On the contrary, I think he acts as he does because he knows how very easy it is to die," Stephen replied seriously. "His empire is a hedge against his own mortality. I too know how easy it is to die." He showed her his hands -- scarred by the French interrogators, still missing a few nails that would never grow back. His face was grim, now, the unsettling grin gone as if it had never been there, unimaginable with his jaw set as it was; something too cold and too patient to be anger lurked behind those pale eyes of his. "I knew it before; I learned it in the dissection rooms and the operation theatres of Paris; but it was on Minorca that I truly came to feel how thin that veil could be."

A thin veil indeed, and one that for Susan must be as immaterial as the walls through which she'd easily led him. His gaze lingered on her pale perfect hands, her fingers against the scythe.

"What I should ask," he mused, more quietly still, "is whether you know how alive you are."

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

((Repost to make a sentence actually make sense. ^_^))

His question turned her smile very...odd. I AM MORE ALIVE THAN ANY HUMAN CAN KNOW, she said, her tone almost regretful. ALIVE IN A WAY I CANNOT SHARE...YOU THINK YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS TO SEE, TO HEAR, TO FEEL, BUT YOUR FIVE SENSES...ARE NOT ENOUGH.

She took one of his hands, guiding it around the scythe's handle. CAN YOU FEEL IT? she asked, though she knew he could not. CAN YOU FEEL THE ECHOES OF THE PULSE WHICH SENT THE SAP RUSHING THROUGH THE TREE FROM WHICH THIS WAS MADE? THE WORLD IS ALIVE IN MORE WAYS THAN MOST CAN IMAGINE, AND SO MANY DO NO MORE THAN SKATE ALONG THE VERY SURFACE, AFRAID TO OPEN THEIR EYES. Curiously, she tilted her head. BUT YOU ARE NOT AFRAID. This last half-statement, half-question.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Of course he couldn't feel what she felt. He could feel only the pull of the scythe's power, and the pull of her eyes, dark magnets riveting his attention.

"I am not afraid," he agreed with her. He had stopped caring, long ago, whether he lived or died. (Jack Aubrey had taught him to care again, and later, his daughter; but Jack was not here, and something had overcome Stephen tonight that he could not quantify or explain, bringing back the old indifference. There were two sides of it, a crippling acedia (http://www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Homiletic/Aug-Sept99/depression.html) and a wild rash daring, both of them conducive to sin.)

"I am not afraid, but I do not know how to see as you do."

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Susan did not know how to make him see, either, without Legilimency--and even in her present state, she knew he would not appreciate it if she tried to enter his mind. She might not have cared, save that the point would be moot if he didn't appreciate it.

LET ME TRY TO SHOW YOU, she said, watching him with her black, black eyes, her smile replaced by a worrying intensity.

She shut her eyes, bringing her other hand up to fold around his--her hands were small, and very white, and inhumanly smooth. She did not know if this would work, but she did her best to slip her senses beneath his very skin--to let them sink in by some weird osmosis. Even if she only half succeeded, it would be a victory; humans were so very, very blind--even she herself, in her normal state, was blind compared to this. Her senses would terrify some, but she knew that would not be the case with Stephen.

TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE, she said, the Voice almost soft. TELL ME WHAT YOU FEEL, WHAT YOU HEAR. And, unspoken, Tell me you are as alive as I.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Whether his Occlumency could shut out supernatural powers, he did not know. He had always hoped and gambled it could; he counted on the principle that this world's own magic would trump outside magics. What seeped into him now from Susan did not challenge those barriers -- did not even touch them. It worked more directly, suffusing him as though he'd been given a thousand subcutaneous injections all at once. It stung that way, too -- it hurt, at first. Human tissues resisted the infusion of superhuman energy.

He didn't mind. He didn't mind pain. And very quickly the pain eased, or rather transmuted into another sensation, a brisk sharp tingle, like the tingle of a limb waking up after it'd been numbed by pressure, except this was everywhere at once.

If Camilla had ever told him about the bacchanal, and the temporary gifts conferred upon her then, he might have recognized the weird wakefulness that came over him now, this too a divine gift. Only she had never told him -- some things too secret, and too hard to articulate anyway -- and so he had no analogy at all. He only knew everything seemed more vivid, almost achingly vivid, colors sharp and the outlines of everything in the room limned in a brighter light than they should be. He could hear Susan's breath, though it seemed wrong for her to be breathing. He almost thought he could hear the blood pulsing through the cold white hands that held his, not as cold as he thought they should be, and he knew he could feel that pulse. He could feel his own pulse too, and the tides of time ravaging every cell in his body; and he knew, in a sudden heartstopping way he'd never known before, that he was mortal. He knew the truth of it in his bones.

Susan had been right; it did not terrify him. It only made him reckless. He withdrew his scarred hands from her smooth ones, and stepped back, and looked at her. Around the impossibly dilated pupils of his eyes, the irises seemed almost ice-white.

"I see too much," he said, dry-mouthed. "I see you. Is that what you want me to see?"

She was beautiful and she burned like ice too.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Susan smiled, a satisfied smile. It had worked, after all--she'd felt that power transfer, felt it infuse his skin and one by one ensnare his senses. She was satisfied too that she'd been right about how it would affect him--Stephen was not the sort to be overwhelmed, even by the way she'd woken him up.

YOU CAN NEVER SEE TOO MUCH, she said, laying aside the scythe. TO SEE IS TO LIVE. ONLY THE DEAD ARE BLIND. She took his hand again, her fingers tracing lightly over the scars. ONLY THE DEAD DO NOT FEEL. He was alive as she was, now, and she knew it. I WANTED YOU TO SEE ME. I WANTED YOU TO KNOW WHAT I REALLY AM. Death incarnate, at once inhuman and more human than most mortals could ever be.

She raised her eyes from his hand, black meeting white, and tilted her head curiously. YOU SEE ME, AND YOU ARE NOT AFRAID. Her fingers were still exploring his hand, feeling the blood rushing through his veins, the quick butterfly beating of his heart beneath the warmth of his skin. WHY? WHY DO YOU HAVE NO FEAR OF DEATH?

Her fingers had moved to his wrist, stroking light over his pulse--so fragile, the human body, and yet in its own way also resilient.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

It was at once a strange question and the most natural question in the world. It was a question he could not answer, because he had no answer. When had he lost whatever ineffable quality should have made him afraid? There were diaries, more than one, close-written pages of script coded or otherwise opaque, most of them lost now, in which he'd set down the grand series of political and personal disappointments that comprised his early life. The failed Irish uprising, the loss of Mona, the disappointment at what the French Revolution made of a nation he'd loved, the death of his grandfather, the death of James Dillon, death upon death upon death. It was the senselessness of these losses that wore at him, he supposed; or so he'd written, at length; but the real malaise must have been concealed somewhere between the lines, something he'd always carried with him.

"I cannot say," he said, after a pause. "It may be some deficiency of spirit."

Another pause.

"I cannot say I much care, at present."

Self-diagnosis seemed a stupid waste of time, with this weird power surging under his skin. Life was a fatal disease and everyone was dying of it from the moment they were born. He wanted to do something; hurt something; destroy something, or else build; he wanted to move.

He wanted to live without thinking.

He watched her fingers caress his wrist, her skin whiter than bone. The movement kept him still for a moment as he focused with that supernatural vision she'd given him.

"You take everything apart." He was watching her hand but he was thinking of the scythe. He was thinking of dissection and the hidden insides of things. He knew she was pale on the surface but blood-red inside, warm as any animal, and he wondered whether she could see inside him with her stronger senses, down to where sinews knotted against one another, down to the finest net of capillaries. He knew she could not possibly have bestowed upon him the full strength of what she saw and felt and did. "I know what you are," he said, and he meant it as much as anyone could, and he was still unafraid.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Susan did not know all that was going through his mind--while she knew there was much he had never told her, even she did not know how much. She did know one thing, though.

IT IS NO DEFICIENCY, TO BE UNAFRAID OF DEATH, she said. WHILE I CANNOT SAY WHAT HAPPENS AFTERWARD, I CAN TELL YOU IT IS FAR FROM THE END. There were Rules about that sort of thing, and even in her present state she couldn't break them. I AM NOT THE END. She wasn't, her grandfather wasn't--no Death, on any world, was really the Ultimate Destroyer. Death itself did not destroy; it simply took away the results of destruction. While she could not see into his body or his mind she could, to some extent, understand what he meant--and she could see that he truly was not afraid. Part of her--even now--marveled at that.

Her fingers traced along his arm, pushing his sleeve back to follow the pale blue lines of his veins. YOU DO NOT FEAR DEATH BECAUSE YOU ARE TRULY ALIVE, she said. AND YOU ARE TRULY ALIVE BECAUSE YOU DO NOT FEAR DEATH. Living without thinking--she was incapable of it, in her normal state, but now it was not so difficult. It wasn't even so much living without thinking as living in the moment, and only in the moment--no past, no future, only now. HUMANS DREAM THEIR LIVES AWAY, UNABLE TO FULLY WAKE. YOU ARE AWAKE NOW--I HAVE GIVEN YOU THE ONLY GIFT I POSSESS. THE QUESTION NOW IS, WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH IT? Would he use it against this Napoleon, whoever he was? Would he destroy, or create? There was no precedent for what she'd done to him, and she couldn't even begin to guess where he would go from here.

She looked at him again, her black eyes fathoms-deep, inscrutable. Standing on her tiptoes, she kissed him, very lightly. WHATEVER YOU MAY CHOOSE, ALL I ASK IS THAT YOU DO NOT WASTE IT. TO BE LIKE THIS IS TO BE MORE ALONE THAN ANY HUMAN CAN IMAGINE--FOR NOW, THIS IS ALL YOU HAVE, SO USE IT WELL.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

What would he do with it? He could not even begin to contemplate that question. His brain buzzed with unaccustomed levels of sensory input. Distracted by a subsonic thrum in the Voice, he found himself hard-pressed even to follow the generalities Susan uttered. It had something to do with reassurance, empty reassurance.

He could expect no better. She was Death; she was not God. He did not expect her to comprehend the murky places inside his soul, or even to touch them. Death's work was cleaner and simpler than that.

"I'll not keep it," he said, almost gently if he were capable of gentleness; he had the vague notion it might disappoint her, if she were capable of disappointment. She seemed to think she had accomplished something great, yet he could feel the uneven shifting of power inside him, flaring and ebbing and flaring again, so he knew it would not last. "I wish I could." That was half a lie and half truer than he would have liked. It was like a drug in its way. "It is already wasted on me."

I cannot be what you are, however much you wish I could. And he understood the truth of what she had said, that she was truly alone. He did not feel sorry for her, because he did not feel sorry for anyone, even himself, but it made him feel akin to her in a way, because he was alone too. So he kissed her, and where her kiss had been light and almost impersonal, his was something too close to burning for him to bear.

He pulled back from that fire.

"Go kill something," he said, voice rough. "Go amuse yourself."

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

It did disappoint her, insofar as Susan was capable of being disappointed, in this state--it did not, however, surprise her. She realized now what she had not seen in all the time she'd been working on her potion: she had a gift to give, an amazing gift, and almost nobody would want it. No sane person would want to be what she was--even she didn't want to be what she was, half the time. She was the result of a personification who did not stop to consider the ramifications of what he did--an aberration, an accident. Creatures such as herself were not meant to exist--she realized that, too, in a way she had never before. It was no great wonder she was so alone; she was a race of one, neither one thing nor the other. Even Lobsang was not really like her--he had become Time, in the end, and so was not torn in half like her.

She looked at Stephen, searching his face. He was many things, even now, but he wasn't mad. Even she could see that there were things in him that tormented him--it was little wonder he would rather be blind, be half-asleep. It was not a luxury she had, and she envied him that choice; she could feel him make it even as he kissed her--could feel him fighting it, and when he stepped back she knew that he meant what he said. He didn't want it, wouldn't keep it, and she could not blame him.

Her black eyes held his. WHAT WILL YOU DO? she asked, her voice quiet and unearthly as wind whispering through a tomb. IF I LEAVE YOU, WHAT WILL YOU DO?

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Amazingly, he grinned at her, that unsettling grin again as before.

"I believe I shall watch things," he said, "small things, insects."

He would focus his awareness on things that were not himself. It was the same coping mechanism he had used most of his life, come to think of it.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

That was most certainly Stephen, in any state.

I WISH YOU JOY OF IT, she said, as softly as before, watching him with those unfathomable eyes. AND I WISH YOU THE MERCY OF MORTAL SLEEP. I'M SORRY FOR WHAT I'VE GIVEN YOU. Did she mean it? Could she be sorry, in this state? Not really, though she would regret it tomorrow with a vengeance. She'd regret many things tomorrow.

She picked up the scythe and paused, touching half the sundered globe. You take everything apart, he'd said, and he was right. She couldn't take apart the world, but she could take him apart--could wreck the school, if she wished, but somehow now she did not want to. Her head was too full of strange things, things that precluded all her original intentions.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

"No; do not apologize." The denial was immediate and firm. "I should have regretted deeply the missed opportunity had I refused this, and had I known what I was refusing; but I would not have refused it, you know."

True, he would not have refused it. This was a man who rarely turned down any mind-altering substance. More, he had not chosen deliberately to relinquish it. Susan was mistaken in that, had she but known. He felt it would pass, and he felt instinctively that it must pass, simply because his mortal frame could not contain it. He also knew he would crave that heightening of the senses when it had gone.

He had vague notions he might stave off the craving with coca leaves, when that happened.

He picked up the other half of the globe and held it out to her. "You may have this back," he said. "It was yours before you gave it to me. That seems very long ago to me now; everything seems quite remote, and unbearably close all at once." He should record these sensations, the way once a friend of his had recorded the onset and progress of yellow fever before dying of it. "I loved you then," he remarked, from that mental distance/closeness, a place at once safe and precipitously baffling. "There are times I think I still do, but it passes. All things must pass."

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

It was perhaps a mercy Susan was what she was, just then, because even in her current state his words hit her. Hard--so hard they fairly knocked the breath out of her. Something flickered in her eyes, black though they were--some spark of human emotion even she could put no name to.

I THOUGHT YOU HAD, she said, the Voice breaking, "And then I thought you hadn't. I loved you more than anything, and I came to be sorry I had, and then I went away and came back and it...hurt so much, and then it didn't, and now I...understand, I think. Perhaps." The spell was still laid so strongly on her that even she couldn't make sense of what was going on in her head--emotions she couldn't actually feel, at present, but which were squirrel-caging around inside her nonetheless.

She shut her eyes a moment, wholly bewildered by the warring forces of the spell and herself. When she opened them again, though, she found she'd hit some kind of bizarre, dreamlike balance. "Keep it," she said softly, almost gently. "What I give stays given, no matter how much I might want to take it back. You say all things must pass, but some things never pass all the way."

She turned away from the ruined globe, scythe in hand, and started for the door. She paused halfway. "I'm sorry, Stephen," she said quietly. "For everything. Don't hold it against me forever."

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

For Stephen there was nothing like mercy, not now; he partook of none and he offered none. Later he would be appalled at what he himself had said -- not only concerning matters of the heart; there had been revelations concerning Minorca as well, and hints at activities he should never discuss with anyone outside Whitehall -- but not until the last dregs of Fraser's spell had drained away. He felt no need to soften anything or to spare anyone. Nor did he feel any guilt. His actions, past and present, needed no justification.

"You are Death," he said, just as quietly. "You of all people ought to know that everything dies in the end; even love; even hatred; even disappointment; even pain, especially pain. Time consumes them the way time is consuming me now. This room is nothing but a quiet space full of noise," this nonsensical remark an artifact of the weird superhuman senses with which she'd endowed him, "noise and ghosts. I am leaving. You should not be sorry for anything. In time you'll not hurt at all."

It was a terrible thing to say. That was why he liked saying it. He felt he was cutting right to the heart of things, exposing clean bone under the rot. It was a good feeling.

He thought he could push, just a little, and things could be even better. Everything would open up. He set down the demiglobe and crossed the room to where she stood.

"Do you feel pain now?" His eyes were bright and curious, the pupils still dilated with unearthly vision. "If I do this, what happens?" He reached to touch her cheek, the faintest brush but lingering along the fine line of her jaw.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Susan flinched back as though he'd struck her. Two desires were warring within her brain--half of her wanted to break his neck, and half of her wanted to die, and both were so strong that for a moment she could do nothing. She should be enraged--if she were truly herself, she probably would be--but she was currently so confused that rage was impossible.

"You know I do," she said, the words quiet, half-hissed. "You made sure I would. I don't know what precisely made you want to, but I had no idea you were so cruel. I think I see why, now, and I pity the next woman stupid enough to take my place." She looked at him, her eyes both pain-filled and deadly, though not as deadly as her voice--her voice, the voice of Susan rather than Death. "Someone will do it to you someday, Stephen. Someone will break your heart beyond repair, and I hope I'm there to see it--I want to see it shatter behind your eyes, and know that you know what it was you did to me."

She would regret these words, tomorrow--would regret this throwback to all she'd thought she'd gotten rid of when she returned to humanity. "And part of you will always love them, however deeply buried it may be, and unlike me you won't be able to escape it. You'll be stuck, forever, unless you are even more heartless than I think you are."

Her brief fury gave out, churning down as something else seeped up to take its place. She blinked, hard, and looked away, her white hands gone whiter where they gripped the scythe. She could kill him with it--she was sure she could, not knowing that even it couldn't obviate the Rule--but if she killed him, he could never know the pain she wished on him. "I wish I'd never met you, Stephen Maturin," she said, "and I hope you die alone."

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Stephen listened, quite impassively -- if she cut him down where he stood, what did he have to lose? -- and waited until he thought she had finished.

When she had, he laughed. It was not a pleasant sound.

"It already happened, what you want; not my dying, obviously, but the rest of it has all already happened," he informed her. The words were even and measured and hollow. "She died. She died in a carriage accident. So, you see, in a way I have you to blame."

It amused him, in his current state. In reality Susan could not have had anything to do with it. She was another world's incarnation of Death -- no, not even that, the understudy for another world's incarnation of Death. The symmetry, though, was too good to pass up.

"I love her every minute of every day of every year, except for that odd space of time when I stopped loving her, and that I have never quite been able to explain," he mused parenthetically. "She broke me more than once and I loved her all the same."

It was why he understood Henry Winter, though he had never really explained that to Susan either.

"So, you see, you have been avenged without knowing it, pre-emptively. Does that please you, at all?"

The same curiosity as when he had asked her whether she felt pain -- horribly, he genuinely wanted to know.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Susan looked at him, sharply, all the rage she could not before summon suddenly crashing through her. Bugger it all--that was it. She drew back, sweeping the scythe up, ready to bring it around and end this once and for all--

--and something snapped. It was, prosaically, almost like the breaking of a rubber band, as in the space of a moment the spell shattered. The blackness bled out of her eyes, leaving them wide and horrified, and she froze, the scythe stilled mid-swing. What she'd said--what he'd said--what she'd been seconds away from doing--hit her with all the sudden, bone-smashing force of a freight train. Without even knowing what she was doing she dropped the scythe, staggering backward until she hit the door, unable to react or speak or even think. She'd almost killed him--she'd almost killed him, and--and--

She stared at him a long moment, horrified beyond all belief, her heart pounding like a jackhammer in her ears. She'd almost bloody killed him....

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Stephen could not say, later, why it was that Fraser's spell had ended so prematurely and so abruptly for the two of them. He suspected it had something to do with the fever-pitch at which Death-enhanced senses operated: perhaps they'd somehow metabolized the spell faster, something like the way Susan could put away alcohol at an inhumanly high tolerance. He could only wish it had ended either much sooner or much, much later.

Susan's gift had not worn off, only Fraser's spell, and Stephen stood reeling where a split second before he'd been braced for that final scythe-blow, spared like Sir Gawain at Midwinter. He did not even have the presence of mind to feel disappointed (how long had he wanted, secretly, to die?) He stared at Susan, just as she stared at him, he just as horrified as she.

"Oh God," he said. "Oh sweet mother of God." Vision still enhanced, he could see her more clearly than he ever had: the strain in her face, a look he'd seen before on patients in surgery, Stephen having practiced medicine before the invention of anesthesia. His curiosity had evaporated with the end of that spell and he realized with disgust it had been like nothing so much as a child turning a magnifying glass on some helpless crawling thing.

"Oh, dear heart, I am so very sorry," he said all in a rush, meaning it, the way he used to talk to her when she had been his friend; a warmth had bled into his voice, and color flooded his face. He could not bear to look at her, it hurt so much. He had to turn away.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Susan, her face even whiter than it had been, if that were at all possible, could not at first even think of saying a thing. She didn't know what the hell had happened to them, but...sweet merciful Io, if it hadn't broken when it did....

She managed to swallow, at least, but she didn't know what the burning in her eyes was until suddenly her vision blurred, fracturing the low light into a thousand dim-lit facets. She couldn't look away--she was still too riveted by the horror of what she'd come so very, very close to doing. A kind of roaring filled her ears--whether the rushing of her blood or simply the sudden after-shock of the spell's breaking, she didn't know--and without realizing she did it she sank to the floor, her legs unable to stand the strain of supporting her.

Still she stared at him, her eyes wide and half unseeing. Everything he'd said--the words that had stabbed into her heart and twisted--somehow managed to be secondary to the terrible shock she'd managed to give herself.

"Stephen," she said, her voice far away in her own ears, "Stephen, I--I almost--"

Finally she tore her eyes away, looking instead at the scythe on the floor, and it was that which broke her. She covered her face with her hands, the bitter salt of tears hot and wet against her palms.