Open RP: Evil Missions and the Great Pie Hunt

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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))

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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....

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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.

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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.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

When her legs buckled he went to her at once, first with the thought of helping her up into a chair, then -- when she started to cry -- gave up that plan quickly, instead kneeling before her and wrapping his arms about her for what little bare comfort he could give. "I know," he said. "Shhh. I know. I have no earthly idea what possessed me. I think perhaps I wanted you to use it." The scythe, he meant; and perhaps he had; perhaps he had wanted to provoke her. "Perhaps I simply wanted to see what would happen. The fault is none of yours, honey-lamb," talking to her the way he would have talked to Sophie, or Clarissa (who'd blown a man's head clean off once, after all), or his own daughter. "I am so very sorry," he repeated, not knowing what else to say, "for this, and for everything, and --" The words broke off because his throat was too dry to speak. He thought something inside him might have broken.

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Susan leaned into him, only half-conscious of his words, fully aware only of the agony where her heart was meant to be. Her tears were nearly silent, but all the more terrible for that, and she shook as though something inside her was tearing her apart. One hand gripped the front of his shirt, but the other remained over her face, and she wept with a contained intensity that was truly dreadful.

"I'm sorry," she said, the words half-muffled by her hand. "Gods, Stephen, I'm sorry--I didn't know--I--sweet Io, I didn't mean--I'm..." She couldn't even form a coherent sentence--every time she tried, something seemed to rise up and choke her. For once--no, for the second time in as many months--she could do nothing more than cry, and this time she was too exhausted to be horrified that she was doing so. She couldn't even wonder why he would have wanted her to use the scythe; she could only even half-wonder if he'd meant all he'd said. Just now, everything hurt too much to think.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

He did not attempt to shush her any more, even to soothe her. It had occurred to him that the tears might have a purgative effect, and he should let them run their course. All he could do was hold her and keep still -- more than he had done for her for a very long time; at least he could do this much now.

Dry-eyed and silent, he cradled her head against his shoulder, waiting it out. The waiting afforded him time to think, time much-needed and ill-afforded. No amnesia followed Fraser's spell; Stephen could remember everything that had passed over the last hour, with a clarity he at once craved and deplored. He needed to know absolutely and exactly what he had revealed by way of naval intelligence. He could have done without knowing the rest of what he had said.

To his discredit, he realized almost immediately that he could affect not to have told the truth about anything. Somewhat more to his credit, he decided just as immediately that he could not countenance such a pretense. What the spell had done was to strip away his inhibitions and scruples; but in and of himself, Stephen Maturin was nothing if not principled, sometimes too highly, sometimes to his own detriment. Miserably, as he stroked Susan's hair (half expecting it to play the boa constrictor), he tried to think how on earth he might begin piecing together everything he had broken.

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((Repost to kill the typo demon))

He had a long time to think; Susan's weeping went on for what seemed an eternity, ebbing only when her tears finally ran dry. Never in all her life had she known such inner torment--a torment that was half Stephen's fault, and half her own. The things he'd said to her--the sheer vicious cruelty of them--hit even deeper than her heart, but almost worse was the knowledge that, but for the intervention of Fate, he'd be dead by her hands right now. It hurt, in ways she could not have imagined possible, and this time there could be no escape from it; her inhumanity would not hide her now. It hurt, and she didn't know how to make it stop--it was, she thought dimly, the sort of pain that could drive you mad.

She was still for a long while after her crying stopped, still but for her breathing, which hitched unevenly in the closest thing to sobs she was capable of. Stephen's shirt was hot and wet beneath her cheek, soaked through with her tears, but she couldn't bring herself to move, or even to wipe her eyes. Maybe, if she stayed still long enough, merciful numbness would take her--maybe this nightmare would end. How much of this was her fault, and how much his? She too hadn't forgotten a thing--what she'd said about the nature of what she was, and what it meant, were still terribly fresh in her mind. There was a decent chance she'd brought all this on herself, by trying to be something she was not--perhaps, like the nightshade women of legend, she was poisonous.

"Stephen, I'm sorry," she whispered, the words hoarse and broken. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry--I shouldn't have done this to you. I'm sorry I am what I am, and I'm sorry I dragged you into it, conscious or no, and--" Her voice broke again, momentarily silenced by a throat nearly too raw to speak. "Gods, Stephen, I'm so sorry for everything." She couldn't address anything he'd actually said, not yet--she didn't think she could stand to know how much of it he really meant. Not knowing just what had been done to them, she had no idea just how deliberate or unthinking that cruelty had been. All she knew was that the entire world had narrowed down to a focal point of pain that seemed to nail her where she sat.

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He could give her drugs, he thought, while she wept and he stared over the top of her head at the wall. He could make her sleep, and everything would go away. Laudanum had done that for him many a time in years past. Wizarding medicine knew better drugs than laudanum.

Incongruously, in the way disjointed thoughts will come unbidden, he thought of a folk tale he'd heard once: a poisoned apple or a poisoned needle, the sleep of a thousand years. She could sleep, defended by a hedge of thorns, until the right person came to kiss away the last of the pain. He knew he was not the one for that.

His heightened senses registered every shudder of her shaking frame, every hitching breath, and her tears seeped like acid through the thin fabric of his shirt. He did not flinch from any of it. When her hair showed no sign of violence, he ran his scarred fingers through it, and kissed the crown of her head. Strands of her hair sprang coarse against his face, a disconnected memory of verse springing to mind in answer: If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. / I have seen roses damask'd, red and white ... He had so much time to think, nothing but time. All the while he felt time move the same way he had told her it moved, burning through his body in a way he could not describe, because he did not know words like entropy.

Her breath came slower after a while, but ragged, and he held her through that too. Then she wanted to say words, and he let her speak, as best she could. Her voice had a charge to it he couldn't register with human ears and it almost hurt his head to try sorting note from note; he thought a dog could perhaps hear it. He had to push these fragmentary scraps of sensory input aside or away, so that he could be here in one piece for her, because he owed her something. Doggedly he tried.

"Honey," he said, collecting himself, hoping he sounded steadier than he felt. "Honey-lamb, precious, I wish you would stop saying that." I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, and peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere, and the shimmering stone of the walls and the shimmering light of the oil lamp ... he shut his eyes tight and buried his face in the sweetness of her hair, which he had forgotten to fear. "Let me think, and presently I will say something, if I can."

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Susan stopped, as bidden--stopped saying it aloud, at any rate; jumbled apologies still ran through her head like a horribly confused mantra. She should have known better, though what she should have known better than, even she wasn't sure. Than to try to be human, maybe; to try to pretend she was something she wasn't. That realization of how truly alone she was had not left her--even now, though she held on to Stephen like a life preserver, she was alone, and barred by her parentage from ever being otherwise. She had always known, in an abstract way, that this was so, but never until now had she realized the full extent and enormity of just what that meant.

Stephen's voice might be steady, but she knew that he himself was not--that the senses she had pushed on him must now be making this terrible for him. Once upon a time, she might have taken bitter satisfaction from that, but not now. This pain was her own, and though he had certainly helped bring it about, that would not have been possible but for her.

The universe has no mercy for accidents. She didn't know where she'd heard that, but it was coming home to her now in a way that was near to unbearable. Really, the universe had no mercy on anyone, but humanity at least could hang together against it, and by sheer numbers defy it to create things like mercy, and justice, and love. They were not things intrinsic of themselves; humanity had made them, tending and perfecting them over thousands of years, to the extent that most now took it for granted that they had always been. They were the birthright of every human being--to give and to receive, to handle or misuse, but to have, no matter what, unparted until death.

But Susan wasn't human.

She wasn't. Not really. She wasn't, and as such she had no right to those things everyone else possessed without a thought. She knew that now, and that knowledge was nearly enough to tear her apart. What she'd had, had been stolen--the universe had caught on, and had taken back all that she had not been meant to have. She knew that, too, and the pain it caused was almost physical; an ache, not just in her heart but in her entire being, and one that might never, ever go away.

She wanted to say something--anything--wanted to at least try to put words around all this, as though by speaking it aloud she could negate it, but words would not come. It was too huge, too overwhelming, even for her. Had she known what Stephen was thinking, Susan would have found the prospect of going to sleep for a thousand years a mercy.

But she didn't know, and all she could do was sit, curled up like a child with her face pressed against his shoulder, unable to take more than token comfort. Against this new and terrible knowledge she had no defense, so she hid, and cried without tears.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Cogitatione, verbo et opere. Inhale, exhale. Lungs like hollow balloons, rising and floating away. The hot-air balloon Diana had ridden in Sweden. Sweden, the tower, falling.

The weight of Susan in his arms was an anchor. He'd pulled her into his lap by now, knees long since displeased with kneeling. She kept him from spiraling away.

Her breathing made a trail to follow into slowness. Erratic, weaving, but a slow trail and clearly-marked. He followed it down. He anchored himself around the small hard stone of her. There he found a resting place where he could breathe too. Less dizzy now, grounded, he gathered thoughts around that core.

"I cannot think why I spoke as I did before," he admitted to her, or rather to her hair, because he was talking into it. "I cannot say what came over me, or over you. What I will say is that I did not lie to you, and I told you more than I should have." Carefully he extracted one of her hands from the small miserable bundle she'd become, and aligned her straight fingers along his maimed ones. "I told you things that are a danger to me if known; things that are not my right to tell. Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, Christ said, meaning something very different by it, may He forgive me for the slight."

Whether she understood or cared how much it cost him not to lie about this -- how much he wanted to pass off all his ravings about Napoleon and Minorca and interrogation and revolution as the mere fabrications of a temporary madness -- he could not know, or conjecture. It could be the undoing of him yet. Hell hath no fury, &c.

"Nor will I say any more about those things," he was careful to add. "Those are not yours to know and there is a dear friend who would have my hide for saying even that much." Sir Joseph was more than a superior. "But I will admit they are true; that indeed everything I said was true, and that perhaps that is the only time I have been utterly truthful with you on a matter concerning myself."

He took a deep, deep breath. Chill air spread through his chest. "Everything was true. I loved Diana and she died. I loved you and I stopped loving you and I do not know why I stopped any more than I know why I love you now. You have tried to kill me now and I am not afraid of you. What can I say to force any semblance of logic upon this utter mess I have disgorged? I can give you drugs if you like, and I can take them myself, and we can sleep for a time and forget any of this was ever said or done. Would that be the choice of a craven, or of a wise man? I can call your friends and ask them to take you away, if you wish it. I can do anything you want," he said, with effort, and it was true when he said it.

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His words did not at first make sense. Susan might not have supernaturally heightened senses to contend with, but she did have overload of another sort, just as bewildering. Slowly, though, one piece at a time, they gained coherence--things she had always wondered seemed at least partially explained, and there was more that she'd never dreamed of. She had been right in her assessment that she had not known him at all--while she had always known there were things he kept back (and rightly so, since there were things about herself she had never shared), what she had not realized was just how very many things there were. His scars, several odd, cryptic remarks he'd made over the time Susan had known him--they made sense, now, and even in the midst of her own heartache part of her grieved for him. Gods knew she'd seen humanity at its worst, at times, during the brief stints in which she'd replaced her grandfather; she could imagine all too well what might have happened to him, physically and mentally. Stephen had his own pain, and though it was different than hers, that made it no less real.

"I would never share your secrets," she said, her voice sandpaper-rough. "Never." She might have come within a hair's breadth of killing him, but murder was different than betrayal, somehow. A different form of betrayal, at the very least, and one that somehow seemed the less horrible. She opened her eyes, looking at her fingers, small and straight and white against his long, scarred ones, wondering if all this was real or some half-terrible, half-beautiful, wholly accursed madness. That he said he loved her--it brought its own pain, sweet and bitter all at once, adding so much to the intensity of all she already felt that she wouldn't be surprised if it really did tear her apart.

"It may be you’ll regret what you’ve said, tomorrow,” she said. “And it may be I will regret it, too, but just now I don’t care. I never stopped loving you, Stephen--I thought I had, and I wanted to, but I would have had to cut out my own heart. You’re too much a part of me to let go of, whether I will or no." What I give, stays given. She was human enough to love, all the more unfortunate for her--she wondered if it was possible for normal people to make it go away, or if everyone was as effectively trapped as she. Stephen had said that everything died eventually--love, pain, fear--but he was wrong. It might dull, dimming with time and effort, but it never died. Time heals all wounds... That was complete and utter rot. Susan had met Time, after all, and he had a lot more on his mind than easing someone's pain. Hurt was hurt, and it couldn't be taken away--only given. Only given, and only if you knew how to let go.

She drew long, uneven breath, sitting still for a moment and listening to the steady beat of Stephen's heart. "I couldn't forget, you know," she said. "Drugs--sleep--I can't forget. Not on my own." The memories she'd lost had been taken by forces outside herself; she couldn't voluntarily do the same. "They can't make me forget, and they can't make it not hurt--not really."

Only now did she look at him, raising her eyes from their hands to meet his, still unearthly pale. Her head still rested on his shoulder, damp tendrils of hair sticking to the half-dried tracks of her tears. "You can't do what I want," she said, so softly as to be almost inaudible. "Nothing can. You can't change what I am, anymore than I can, and that's what I want." Her eyes were almost feverish, a flush burned across her face deep enough to make her birthmark stand out like a livid white scar. "Just...don't leave me right now. Please. If you need drugs, take them--do whatever you need--but please, please don't leave me alone." She couldn't explain it to him, not really--couldn't explain all she'd realized, all that had hit her so hard. If she couldn't be human she could pretend, for a while; and right now, she knew, if she were left to deal with all this by herself, she really would lose her mind.

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How could he explain that it was the human part of her, not the unearthly part, that had displeased him? He could scarcely form the thought himself. He had begun to entertain the thought of drilling a hole in his skull and stuffing cotton wool inside for insulation.

"Yes, we will both regret it tomorrow." That much swam clear through his buzzing consciousness. He would regret that he had said anything at all, and she would regret that she had made herself still more vulnerable. Still, it would be a good development, regret or not. They could be friendly again with the infection lanced. (Unwittingly he had lapsed back into medical metaphor.) There would be an easing of pressure. When pressure eased and infected matter drained, fever often abated.

"It is good to be capable of regret," he said, contrasting it with the remorseless thing he'd been only a scant hour earlier. "Do you not think so? It means one is not lost." As they had been lost, or seemed lost. The glisten of her drying tears fascinated his dazzled eyes, and he could not help but touch them, though his hand faltered. Everything was real. Everything burned to the touch, even things that were cold. She was a statue that lived. He was a helpless dumb animal.

He wondered whether the stars were out, and what they looked like with these eyes. He thought, on balance, that it would be best not to find out. They might sear his vision beyond repair. Just thinking of it made him shut his eyes protectively. When he opened them again, her eyes were looking at him, and her eyes were stars. He kissed her eyelids to make her close them. Then he kissed her forehead gravely.

"Perhaps we should compound regret," he said against her skin.

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He was right, in that; that it was good to be capable of regret. That thing she had been, for a short while--it did not know regret, or pain, or happiness. It knew nothing save the desire to hurt, to consume; it was a simple thing, and could never be otherwise. However much she hurt, Susan was grateful she was not that thing--if she could never be truly human, she could be alive, as hard as she could, and part of being alive was pain. She could take that pain, and make it her own, and in doing so could perhaps learn to transmute into something beautiful.

"It proves you're still human," she said quietly. "In a way." Had she known what he was thinking, she would have thought his metaphor quite apt--it's what she'd thought herself, when she'd broken down and returned to humanity. Bleed everything out, drain away the poison...her mistake had been believing she could accomplish such a thing by herself. Whatever happened, for good or ill Stephen was part of her, and in turn part of her was his; she couldn't work through it by herself because not all herself had been there.

She watched Stephen as he traced her tears. For now at least he was as alive as she, as aware as she; for now, if only for now, he had some understanding of what it was like to be her. What Susan wanted to do was indeed something she would regret later, but she already had so much to rue that adding more would hardly change anything. Besides, she knew she would regret it, and somehow knowing that now made it all right.

"Perhaps we should, at that," she said, her hand coming to rest over his heart. His shirt was soft beneath her fingertips, soft and warm, and she knew he would understand how well she could feel his hearbeat beneath her palm. If we're going to make an ending, we ought to make a real ending.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Stephen's thoughts did not echo Susan's. He did not think of making an ending, real or not, because he did not consider there to be a thing that needed ending: he had never undertaken an explicitly romantic or committed relationship with his friend, he had merely fallen in love with her and started taking her to bed. Then he had stopped doing those things, both the love and the bedding. It was as simple as anything else he had ever done, which admittedly was not saying much.

He had never fully fathomed how much it had all meant to her, or what its impact had been.

For his part, his thoughts ran thus: he would regret the present undertaking because of its brevity, and because of the messiness inherent in resuming however briefly an entanglement he had counted himself well rid of. His thoughts ran thus when they ran in anything like a coherent fashion at all. The smallest things could seize his attention, lamplight-flicker, a loose tendril of Susan's hair stirring faintly; farewell to logic, then, until he recollected himself.

It was not like being drugged in every way. He found himself quite capable of walking, in fact quite happy to move about, invigorated. There was none of the lethargy of drink or opium. He led Susan to his rooms, a place she might not have expected to see again, and there he did not take her to bed in the figurative sense, not right away, only in the literal sense. Part of him stayed watchful, despite everything, for signs of distress or fatigue. Whatever he had been through -- whatever he was going through now -- she'd just sustained quite a shock herself.

She was also entitled to change her mind.

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Susan still didn't know precisely what Stephen's feelings on the matter had been, but she at least had a better understanding now. She didn't know how, or when, or why her own feelings had grown as they had; it certainly wasn't something she'd done on purpose. Perhaps it was because of something she already knew--that when she who was normally cool and distant gave of herself, she gave wholly and unreservedly, and apparently took it on faith that others did the same. It was yet another odd human thing she didn't fully fathom, she supposed, but at least she was aware of it now.

And it would be all right, after everything. She could love Stephen and accept that there was no way it could work between them, in that sense--could love him and be his friend at the same time. At some point that line had blurred for her, without her really realizing it, but it was a line she knew she could draw again. While he needed no closure, she did, and it had rankled in some deep part of her until now. Once she received that closure, it could end for her, and she could be at peace. As at peace as Susan ever was, anyway.

These were dim realizations, though; ones she could only regard with any clarity later. They were clear enough that she felt no guilt over going with him, over having this last time in this way with him. She might regret it tomorrow, but she wouldn't feel guilty. She could save the guilt for what she had very nearly done, rather than what she was about to do.

For what seemed a long while she simply lay beside him, as the dull, cold horror she'd given herself in some measure seeped out. She needed this for that, too; to fully satisfy her half-bewildered mind that Stephen was really alive, and that she had not done the thing that was surely going to haunt her, possibly for the rest of her life. He might easily forgive her, but that was something for which she could never forgive herself.

Finally, she willed herself out of her own mind, back into the reality of the present. She touched his face, her eyes still unnaturally bright from the uncharacteristic tears she'd shed not long ago, and wondered how different her touch felt to him now, now that he had her senses. She'd complicated his life, and was for now complicating it further, but then it could be simple again, as it had before.

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Stephen's inner life had been so compartmentalized for so long he was almost incapable of giving anything unreservedly. It wasn't an odd human thing so much as an odd Stephen thing. It did not, however, exclude excesses of passion, or the capacity for genuine human feeling, and a little of all this had gone into what he'd once felt for Susan -- what he'd admitted, earlier, stripped of scruple by Fraser's spell, that he still felt for her in irregular fits and starts. When he'd toyed with her earlier, there had been cruelty in it, yes, and curiosity, but there had also been no small amount of desire. He'd wanted to touch her. Given these strange senses intensifying everything, he'd wanted to know firsthand what the smooth crescent of her cheek would feel like under his fingertips. He'd taken that much without hesitation. It had nearly cost him his life.

He did not mind that. While he did not quite feel he had deserved such a disproportionate reaction, he did not believe it had wholly been Susan's own reaction -- not wholly. There was indeed some of Susan in it, the rash bloodthirsty person from whom he'd found he needed to distance himself, and he would need to tell her that later, he thought. However, she must also have been affected by whatever influence had led him to act as he did in the first place. It had made them more themselves, only what it had intensified was everything bad about them; his coldness; her violence.

He did not think he had been deluded, either by that mysterious influence or by the intoxication of his enhanced senses, when he had looked at her and said he saw what she was, or when he had thought she was beautiful.

"You still are," he said, aloud; "that never changed." Her fingers skidded along the rough side of his face, where stubble had begun to break the surface after a long day, creating for him a weird friction that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. With great care he lifted a hand and allowed himself to touch her face again too; since she had taken that liberty she would not object if he did as well. This time there was all the tenderness in it that had been missing before.

"This changes nothing," he said, and in that there was sadness, but also acceptance, and a certain determination.

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She looked at him, curious, uncertain as to his meaning. She didn't ask, however; her hoarse throat was fast losing the capability for superfluous speech, and there was something that did require saying aloud.

"I know," she said softly. "I know, and it's all right." She wouldn't misread it, or think it meant anything other than it did. This was the end of all of that, and it really was all right. This entire affair might have stirred in her truly unprecedented depths of emotion, but at her core she was still Susan: however difficult a thing might be, she found a way to live with it, or around it. She always had, and it was this knowledge that told her she could face the private hell she was sure awaited her, sooner or later; the hell of her own devising, that had next to nothing to do with Stephen. She'd deal with it, as she'd always dealt with it, whatever 'it' happened to be at the time. She was Susan. She did that.

Her eyes shut at his touch, at the feel of his rough, scarred fingers against her cheek. She couldn't lie to herself; she'd miss this sort of affection, and it did not yet occur to her that she was fully capable of finding it elsewhere. Stephen would not grudge her that, any more than she would grudge him.

A fragment of song sprang to her mind, sudden and initially incongruous--something she'd heard on the radio while staying with Liz: Well, one more night I'd like to lie and hold you/to make you smile, I'd like to be there for you. It seemed strangely apt, she thought, in a disconnected way, and when she opened her eyes something of the sentiment showed in them, though Stephen might not be capable of noticing it in his present state.

"I know," she said again, and this time her hoarse voice was almost gentle, which, given that it was Susan, was little short of a miracle, altered mental state or no. "And that's as it should be." She shifted, sitting up enough to kiss his forehead, breathing in the clean scent of him.

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For Stephen's part, he would have been quite surprised it had not yet occurred to Susan she might seek affection of this sort elsewhere. Indeed, while he might never feel wholly enthusiastic about the prospect, some part of himself would be greatly relieved if and when she did find someone else. He would simply feel far more at ease if the lucky man happened to be a man of quality, not a man who thought a cricket bat made a respectable weapon and fashion accessory.

She was a beautiful woman, and intelligent, and lively; and, most of all, she was young. She needed some sort of happiness, some sort of companionship not hedged about with the endless caveats that a night like this one necessitated. He wanted that to happen for her, and he would have told her so had she asked. Right now, though, it was the farthest thing from his mind.

He could not divine whatever sentiments might lie behind the smooth depths of her eyes. Surfaces fascinated him, at present. The texture of her lips against his face felt like rain-sodden petals, wind-borne. Then it reminded him of something else. She had placed the kiss precisely where a priest would smear soft powdered ash every Ash Wednesday: dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return. He closed his eyes to savor it, then reached to take her face in his hands and draw her mouth to his.

When he finally undressed her, he did not think to himself this is the last time I will ever undress her. There might in future be some kind of medical emergency. Stephen had cut away too many uniforms to think of disrobing as solely a lover's prerogative.

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Susan's senses might not be any keener than normal, but they still registered things differently, now; the combination of the spell she'd been under earlier, and the after-effects of her self-inflicted horror, conspired to make her oddly aware of things she had never before noticed especially. The warmth of Stephen's touch lingered on her skin in a way she could never remember it doing, and the softness of his shirt as she unbuttoned it seemed different, too, somehow. Perhaps the difference was in herself; perhaps this bizarre night had changed something in her.

In any case, her fingers lingered as they trailed over his shoulders, up his neck, slipping through his hair as she pulled him down to kiss him. He tasted…like Stephen, rich and alive, and she drank in the feel of him against her, one hand traveling down his back and tracing his scars. They too seemed different, now; now that she knew how he must have acquired them. Her fingers lingered over them, too, and she wished she could make them disappear--that she could take away the terrible things he’d carried for gods alone knew how long, and that he’d successfully hidden from her all the time she’d known him.

She couldn’t, though, any more than he could fix the pieces of her she considered fractured. Susan wasn’t and never had been a healer--she was not someone from whom it was easy to take comfort, because she didn’t really know how to give it. All she could do was touch him, and know that he was alive and she was alive and that now, if only for now, that was enough.

Her kiss was brief, though not hesitant, and when her mouth left his she kissed along his jaw, along his neck, breathing in the scent of him again, savoring every moment. He would never be hers again, but for this little while they belonged to each other, in their own way.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Almost dizzy with the unaccustomed sharpness of sensation, Stephen let her break off the kiss without protest. He allowed her to trace his skin with her lips, her fingers. Dimly he had to be aware of the attention paid to his scars, and dimly he had to be uncomfortable with the reminder that she now knew far more than she should, but any misgivings surely paled against the vivid richness of her touch, almost too rich and too bright for him to endure. To shut out at least one sense he extinguished the room's single light with a brief murmured spell, and turned back to Susan in the dungeon blackness. "There," he murmured, "now I can see you better."

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Susan smiled. While she could not properly see in the dark, she was very aware of Stephen's expression, and his unnaturally white eyes still shone through the blackness. She drew him down again, kissing him softly, her hands resuming their exploration. She no longer concentrated on his scars, but let her fingers rove over his back, his shoulders, his arms, gliding up to twine in his hair. Mindful even through her altered state that all these senses were alien to him, her touch was very gentle.

"Is it very strange for you, feeling like this?" she whispered, her hoarse voice rough and uneven. One hand came up to trace the side of his face, fingers lingering lightly along the line of his jaw. Is it very strange, being like me? Susan had always wanted Stephen to feel as she felt--to know just what it was he did to her, when he was with her. It seemed fitting that he should know now, this last time; that he should truly understand why it was she had craved his touch, why she had craved him in this way. It was a type of honesty she could not have shared, had she not also shared with him her senses. Somehow, he had seen her as she really was--knew now what she really was--and though he did not love her as he once had, he had nevertheless accepted her in spite of everything. Though she herself could not love him as she had before, for that she loved him still, in her own way, and always would. It would never work between them, but that didn't mean she couldn't love him, even if she was no longer precisely in love with him.

Not that Susan could really rationalize any of this with anything like real coherence--not with Stephen so warm and solid against her, with the shivering desire he stirred in her. That would come later, when she was no longer caught up in the living, immediate moment; when his presence no longer held the entirety of her consciousness. She kissed him again, less gently this time, drinking in the spicy-rich taste of him.

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"Yes," he answered, his own voice raw. "God, yes." Unpleasant it was not; strange, however, it most emphatically was.

Once, not long at all after Minorca, Stephen had been accidentally marooned on a small barren rock. It had no fresh water, only a puddle that caught old rainwater, and it had no vegetation. He had lived on the blood of birds that roosted on the rock, birds that roosted there in huge cacophonous numbers and knew no fear of man. This was not like that. This was like what happened when the ship came back for him and he had known he needed to take food and water sparingly, because surfeit could sicken him all the more after such long and severe deprivation.

He had needed, too, simple fare then. Susan was something rarefied and exotic, the very austerity of her small delicate form somehow making her all the more lush by means of a paradox he could not unknot, and Stephen did not know if he could bear this much beauty, even with darkness shutting out one overcharged sense of the five. Desire surged through him, making him ravenous, yet he must restrain it at least to some extent. He made a low strangled sound with the effort of it. He wanted nothing more than to bury himself in her.

Later he would think he ought to caution Susan against dispensing her planned potion for sharing such intensification of the human senses, lest the entire school implode in a vast orgy worthy of Caligula, or else ravage the halls like Nero to try to get their hands on more of that potion. Stephen himself would be hard-pressed not to want this again, but he at least was forewarned: his long struggles with laudanum had taught him caution.

She was kissing him now, full on the mouth, and he returned the kiss with a sort of desperate drowning surrender. She was guiding him through this, teaching him something, perhaps -- he thought, he hoped. It was more than a farewell.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Her kiss might be hungry, but she took care that it would not be overwhelming. Stephen was traversing an alien land, with Susan as his only guide, walking what had to be a precarious tightrope between sensitivity and full sensory overload. It was something she'd never really known herself, being what she was--something she would have to treat with immense delicacy. She'd lead him well, if she could; lead him through the wilderness that was the senses she'd given him.

She wouldn't let him fall.

Slowly, kiss by kiss, touch by touch, she tried to help him sink deeper into the pull of all she'd given him. He wasn't fighting it anymore, and that helped; he could dive with her, without really drowning. He could learn to breathe here, to live here, if only for a time.

Only when she was certain he'd surrendered enough did Susan's kiss harden, her arms tightening around him as she finally let loose a measure of her own hunger. Stephen could give in to his own now, she was sure, at least in part; it shouldn't overwhelm him to stop holding it all in check. She wasn't half so careful, now; after all, Stephen was not the only one who craved.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Like any other drug, he'd have to ride this out. It was at once an ordeal and an indulgence. If making love had always been like this for Susan -- and sweet mother of God, he had been her first -- small wonder she had found it addictive; small wonder she had wanted him so keenly. Stephen followed her lead for a while, until things seemed to level out somewhat and he found something like balance, half-afraid a breath out of place would knock him reeling again.

His consciousness groped for analogues, templates, anything remotely similar he'd been through before. To his surprise he found one. "It is like when we were with her," he ventured, meaning Camilla by it. There was something dizzying about that woman, something disorienting about being with her -- some touch of the divine -- and this seemed a little like that, the difficulty of finding control. He knew the similarity to be only tangential, yet what similarity there was gave him comfort. With Camilla, each of the three partners had to divide their attention between two other people, a dilation that forced a certain equipoise. With Susan now, there were just the two partners, looping into one another like an ouroboros, and he thought he could easily get lost in her if he were not excruciatingly careful.

Being careful seemed nearly impossible. It was all he could do to stay coherent, forget careful.

"Susan," he said, half-amused by the sound, as if there could be a name for the entity she was; "Susan," tasting the sibilants again, and then tasting her skin, moving to pin her beneath him so his curious mouth could range across her body.

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Susan smiled in the darkness, almost feeling him gain that balance. She could see how it might be comparable to being with Camilla--though her own senses had been as keen then as now, she’d seen (quite well) the effect Camilla had on Stephen. It had been a fascinating thing to watch, as an outside observer, but she couldn’t watch him the same way now; she had surrendered nearly as much as he, by this point.

She’d known he’d want to explore these senses, once he’d grown accustomed to them (or as accustomed as he could, anyway), so Susan let him pin her, still smiling even as she shivered beneath him. This really was teaching, of a sort, though her higher though processes had shut down to a degree that she could no longer be certain just what was being taught. The careful watchfulness with which she’d touched him earlier had all but disappeared, borne away like smoke in the wind. Something that was half gasp and half rusty purr left her throat--she wanted to reach for him, but she knew Stephen well enough to realize he wouldn’t want her to just yet.

She shifted beneath him, unable to keep still or silent, though--instinctively mindful of his hearing--she was as quiet as she could be, biting her lip as Stephen’s questing touch roved over her.