(closed RP for Henry Winter and Stephen Maturin)

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Stephen had rather wanted to talk with Henry Winter at length, if for no other reason than to cement his hopeful deduction that Henry's recent wedding had well and truly laid to rest the remnants of old animosity concerning the woman who was now Mrs. Winter. Unfortunately, there had simply been no time for conversation. Stephen had brought little Rose Casson to the wedding, which meant he'd been kept busy with such important activities as eating icing with his fingers; and Henry had been kept busy with other matters (the brief abortive dust-up with Bunny had not escaped Stephen's watchful eye, though his primary concern had been to keep Rose away from whatever might happen). Then the bride and groom had gone off on some trip somewhere, or some such thing. Even if they had not, Stephen would not have dreamed of inquiring after either of them. He knew very well what it was to desire absolute peace, absolute and complete absence of any interruption.

As it happened, he did not see Winter again until an odd chance meeting out on the windswept grounds. Stephen was scouting out potential locations for test explosions of anti-clown ordnance. Henry, immaculately dressed in suit and somber black overcoat, appeared to be pushing a very large weird chunk of stone in a wheelbarrow.

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Susan didn't bother smothering her smile this time--there was no way he would notice. Opening her notebook, she wrote Watching Stephen really does put me in mind of watching a child take his first steps out into the big wide world. The way he stares at the sunset would make you think he'd never seen one in his life before--are humans really as blind as all that? I have a hard time fathoming it, but it appears they must be. Certainly, at the moment Stephen seems to be completely entranced.

She shut the book, watching him watch the sunset, and eventually sat beside him on the step in companionable silence. In a way, she thought, he was appreciating all of this even more than she was, because for him it was completely new.

Not until the sun had all but sank below the horizon did she speak. "Pretty, isn't it?" she asked, knowing full well what an understatement that must be.

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Oh, Stephen had seen many a sunset, some of them spectacular. He'd just never seen one like this before. Had he been a child of a different century, he might have seen something like this at a planetarium to the accompaniment of Pink Floyd.

(Now if only someone irreverent and blessed with magic-converted technology would come by with a boombox playing Dark Side of the Moon ...)

Dazzled, he recalled himself only when Susan's voice jarred him into self-awareness. Pulling his own notebook from his knapsack, he wrote very quickly and messily, his eyes on the sky rather than the page before him.

"Lovely," he said absently.

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Shaun had actually introduced Susan to Pink Floyd, but it would never have occurred to her to use it as background-music for someone blissing out on a sensory-enhanced sunset. (It really was a good thing she had far too many scruples to just distribute this potion at will. She'd put any and all drug lords out of business within a fortnight.)

She let him sit and write and stare, wrapping her cloak tighter about herself as it began to snow. Even yet, she herself had to marvel at the quieting power of snow--how it could muffle the world in soft white. The flakes drifted in silence, a few at first and then a torrent, swirling and dancing on the faint breeze. A small smile crossed her face as she stretched out a hand, watching the snow settle on her sleeve--this was something she knew he would never, ever have seen before.

"Stephen." She took his wrist in her hand, and snapped her fingers. All around them Time shuddered to a halt, leaving the snow hanging in the air like a curtain. The air stilled, and even the cold seemed to leech out of the air--it was cool, in these strange loops of Time, but never truly cold. "Stephen, try this."

Susan reached out again, poking a stationary flake with her fingertip. It exploded in a minute blue flash, like a small star gone nova. A very faint tingle of electricity zapped across her skin--barely noticible, but there nonetheless. She smiled at him, wholly and unreservedly. "See?"

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He couldn't have been very good company like this. Later he'd realize it: what she wanted was for someone to see the world the way she did all the time, surely; someone to understand exactly what it was she felt. It might have been fascinating to watch him experience these things, the way it had been amusing for Jack to debauch with grog the sloth Stephen had brought aboard the Surprise once, but an intoxicated sloth was not the same as a messmate, and a human blissed out on a potion could not be the same as a peer for Susan.

At the moment he was incapable of such concern. He was eminently distractible, and Susan's hand on his wrist made him blink and start. "What? Oh. --"

She wore gloves, and the fabric of his coat and his sweater added to the protective barrier between his skin and hers, so that there was none of the electric surge he'd felt on Halloween, that pulse of blood palpable beneath the skin. This he did note, and thought maybe he should tell her it might help her to wear gloves all the time, to shield herself from the world --

then a different electricity, frozen time and frozen snow, a zap as she touched a suspended snowflake, and he realized belatedly what it was she'd done. He'd seen her suspend time before, of course, only he had been too distracted to realize it until now --

"You cannot touch it without destroying it, then?" A pity; he would have liked to regard its structure. He peered through the gloom to find a snowflake, and careful not to touch it, contorted a little to see it better.

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Susan laughed, her breath hanging in the still air. "Unfortuantely, no," she said. "You really can't touch anything that's caught out of Time, but certainly if you don't touch it you might stare at it as long as you want."

She herself had never felt the urge to stare at them so much as to poke them. Stopping Time wasn't something she'd learned to do herself until she was nearly grown up, but of course her grandfather could do it, and she had a few memories of being very small, racing through a frozen snowstorm and exploding the flakes by the hundred. Of course Stephen would want to study at it, but Susan, uncharacteristically forgetful of adult dignity, left him to do so in peace. Depositing rucksack and notebook on the unyielding grass, she pulled off a glove and, wholly unselfconscious, ran out over the lawn and swatted at the hovering snowflakes. A succession of blue flashes surrounded her hand, and she laughed--this was far from the first time she'd done this, though nobody else had ever seen her do it before. Even the best-regulated mind needed a chance to be a complete and utter dork child, sometimes.

"When you've done with that one, try this," she called. "I can't even describe it...it's a silly little thing, but I've always loved doing it."

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Stephen looked up and started to laugh.

"They are like fireflies," he said, "only blue, and frozen ..."

He found he disliked the idea of breaking the snowflakes himself. It seemed somehow careless, wrong in its carelessness; these things were so beautiful, and to destroy them would surely be a waste. For Susan it was different. She was Death; it was her job.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Where Susan's hand had passed, the air was clear; she'd carved a pattern in the hanging curtain. "When I was very little, Granddad would take me out in the snow so I could do this," she said, now poking at them one at a time. Just now, for whatever reason, she was quite happy--probably because she had company. In this sense Stephen couldn't be her peer, but he could certainly be a companion; he could enjoy all the oddities of her senses and powers, even if not in precisely the same way she did. "He used to let me play his ribs like a xylophone, too," she added, almost parenthetically. "My parents hated all that. I don't wonder why they quit letting me see him, really."

She made her slow way back to him, still poking snowflakes at random. "I don't wonder why he wanted to share it, either," she said. "Oh, look there--I think it's an owl."

She pointed to a shape that had started to swoop down from a distant tree--a blob, nailed in place, that upon closer inspection did indeed prove to be an owl.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

FROZEN OWLS = TOTALLY AWESOME.

Stephen sprang up and ran through the snow to where he thought he saw the owl.

Cue his standing beneath that spot, peering upward, soundless, for a very long time.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Susan gave in and laughed outright, doubly cursing her lack of an iconograph box--that was a picture she'd like to preserve forever, if she could. She fished her wand out of her boot, and with a muttered "Lumos" cast a little light upon the hovering bird. She didn't have the faintest clue what kind of owl it might be, but she knew Stephen likely would, and could potentially geek out over it for ages. Anticipating this, she dug the Thermos out of her rucksack and poured out a capful of sweet hot tea, sipping it while Stephen stared up at the owl.

"Let me know if you need me to move the light," she said, adjusting her cloak and sitting cross-legged on the snow, the Thermos next to her feet. "What is it, exactly? Aside from an owl, I mean." She was still laughing--a laugh more delighted than anything else, without a trace of anything like mockery.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

"I should say with a reasonable degree of certainty that this is a short-eared owl (http://www.scottishraptorgroups.org/raptors/short-eared_owl.php)," Stephen replied, never looking away from the owl. "Are you ever tempted to abuse your time-stopping powers for the sake of birdwatching?"

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Of all the things she'd ever stopped Time to do, bird-watching had never been one of them. Her only real experience with birds was with Quoth the raven, and he was enough to turn anyone off the idea of bird-watching--insufferable little wretch, really, and entirely too preoccupied with eyeballs. She wondered what Stephen would make of him.

"No, I can't say that I am," she said, sipping more tea. "Though I'm starting to think it's a good thing you haven't got this particular power, or you might spend so much time watching birds and bugs and beasts that you'd forget to eat or sleep."

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

"Ah, but if I had, would it matter whether I ate or slept, given that time would have stopped? Perhaps I might continue indefinitely," said Stephen.

If he had such powers, he would be entirely too wrapped up in observation of flora and fauna to register such a thing as loneliness.

"Imagine, too, the potential for surgery," his thoughts raced on aloud. "Would the blood stop entirely, circulation cease, with all of time frozen, so that the surgeon might work with view unoccluded by the usual welling of blood in wounds or in the surgical incision itself? Does it cause harm to the fabric of the universe that you exercise this stopping of time, so that you would not wish to make use of it routinely? Were I to dissect this owl, and then stitch it up again, would it be whole at the end? No, the damage would still be done, as with those snowflakes ... Hm."

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Time-stopping was not nearly so much fun as Stephen seemed to think it might be. "It causes no harm to stop it, no, but you can't keep going indefinitely," she said, shifting the wand's light on the bird. "You can go like this for hours or days, but once you let Time come back, all that exhaustion hits you at once. There's a reason I don't do it very often." The really annoying thing about being half-and-half was that the supernatural powers were not designed to work around the human half of you.

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That made sense. "That is very like stories I heard as a child," he told her gravely, and then in little chunks (interrupted by marveling at the owl, or the glint of light off something shiny, or the crunch of icy ground under his feet, any number of distractions), he told her the story: Oisin and St. Patrick (http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/english/micsun/IrishResources/oisinpat.htm), the old hero telling the saint how he had spent hundreds of years in the Land of Youth, and how upon returning to Ireland the weight of those years had descended all at once, the moment he'd dismounted from his horse.

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Susan sometimes regretted that Earth's historical/mythological people were not, as it were, public figures, like they were back home--she'd very much like to talk to some of them. She wondered if this St. Patrick might still be around, somewhere, invisible to all humanity--if she were to go to Ireland (wherever that actually was), could she find him? It wasn't something she was willing to go so far from Hogwarts to find out.

"Yes, that sort of thing only really works if you're truly immortal," she said. "Otherwise it's a sort of uneasy mish-mash of effects. Then again, the History Monks make their living manipulating Time--or they did, at least. But the Discworld is in some ways so very much different from Earth."

She put the lid back on the Thermos, standing and circling the owl with her lighted wand. "Do you want me to let him move at all?" she asked.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

"No," decided Stephen. "No, leave him as he is, in his little bubble of a moment." He gave the owl one last long look, then wrenched his attention away to Susan.

"The Discworld does indeed sound to be extremely different from Earth. Perhaps part of your difficulty consists in this difference."

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That had not occurred to Susan. "You mean that being on Earth might affect...well, everything?" She hadn't noticed any difference, but that didn't mean she could dismiss it entirely. "I don't know. I've always had a temper--even as a child I liked to hit things. I was a holy terror in Sport at school; even the bigger girls avoided me when we played field hockey. As for the rest...well, here there's a much higher ratio of humans-to-non-humans than there was at home. There might not be anyone like me, but at least there are enough odd specimens that I don't stand out quite as much as I did back home." She might be very much alone in many respects, but at least she wasn't a complete freak, in comparison to some of the other denizens.

She sat again, glancing up at the frozen owl, and held out the Thermos in a silent offer. "I didn't tell you--I met an applicant in the Sorting Room who said he'd map out my genes for me. Apparently he comes from a thousand years in the future, and has equipment that can actually do that. I've no idea what he might find, but at least he'll find something."

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

"Indeed being on Earth might very well affect all manner of things," Stephen replied. "I am no astronomer, nor am I equipped to speculate profitably upon such matters as the magnetic poles of the planet, the operation of tides, et cetera; yet it seems to me manifestly obvious that the workings of a spheroid or even an ovoid planet should differ widely from those of a flat disc. Perhaps your thousand-years-hence acquaintance from that recent Sorting may contemplate this topic to greater effect than I possibly can do, thank you," this last remark meant for the tea, which he came to take from her hand, leaving the owl with reluctance.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

The idea that a planet could have a magnetic field was still a strange one to Susan; on the Discworld, the tides and things were affected not by the moon, but by the world's magical field. Compasses all pointed toward Cori Celesti, the home of the gods, because there the magnetic field was the strongest. There was no east or west, north or south; everything was either hubwards or windwards (the lack of the equivalent of the other two directions could make travel rather confusing, too). A magnetic field, combined with the fact that the Earth's sun always had the same orbit, was something Susan considered extremely weird. At least nobody needed to worry about falling off the edge, though.

"He works with people from all sorts of different planets, so he may well be able to," she said. "I gather the world is a very different place in a thousand years' time." It would probably be as different to the average Earth person of today as the present Earth seemed to her, when compared with the Discworld. Gods only knew what she herself would have made of it, had she seen it.

Her hand met Stephen's as she passed him the Thermos, and even though they were both wearing gloves it sent a jolt up her arm. Her mouth quirked in a half rueful smile, and when he'd taken it she dug through her pocket and produced a pack of cigarettes. That might well prove annoying, if it didn't go away.

"From what I gather, he's quite used to dealing with non-humans, too. He's not really human himself, come to that, and though he's quite young he's almost unfortunately intelligent." She still hadn't quite grasped the whole twelf-level-intellect-vs.-sixth-level, but she understood it enough to realize that being around average people probably drove him to distraction much of the time.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

"I should very much like to meet him," said Stephen, "and I expect Dr Suresh should like to meet him as well." He poured a little of the tea into the cupped lid of the Thermos and drank, contemplative. "This could do with a little brandy, I might say, were I not hesitant as to the effect of alcohol on a system already overtaxed to extreme strain." Strain it was, truly; his hand shook almost imperceptibly, not enough to induce a spill, but the tremor was there nonetheless, a thing not of muscles but of raw nerves.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Susan wasn't sure she wanted to contemplate what alcohol might do to Stephen, in his current state; she wasn't sure how much of her own tolerance was tied in to her senses, and how much was just innately her. There was always the possibility that the enhanced senses would simply give him an enhanced hangover.

The slight tremor of his hand did not go unnoticed, and it almost relieved her; at least she wasn't the only one. In a way it helped her acknowledge it, and acknowleding it took away the awkwardness, even if it remained slightly annoying. She busied her own hands with lighting her cigarette. "He's also got this thing called a flight ring, which I would love to try sometime. Even if it would mean I'd have to break down and buy trousers." Susan had never ridden a broomstick, but from what she understood they could get quite uncomfortable after a while, which was not something she'd think a flight ring would cause. Binky could canter everywhere, but it just wasn't the same thing.

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Saints preserve us all from enhanced hangovers.

"One wonders whether a flight ring might not be to the air what a diving bell is to the water," Stephen mused, his fancy piqued by the notion. "Sure you are welcome to borrow an old pair of trousers," he offered magnanimously. To fly around in a skirt would be Unthinkably Indecent for a lady, even he realized.

He capped the thermos and held it out to Susan, careful not to brush her fingers as she took it from him.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

An ordinary person would have realized just how strange they would look, in trousers so much too big for them, but Susan, naturally, was oblivious. Stephen was not a tall man, and he was thin, but he was still a good deal taller than Susan. All she thought about was the need for a belt, and possibly some of those clever safety pins to help her roll up the ankles. She had plenty of warm shirts, and even a pair of sneakers she couldn't remember buying--not terribly aerodynamic, but whatever.

She took the Thermos, also careful not to touch his fingers. Even so, the hairs on her arm stood up, and she wondered just how long that was going to go on. Once upon a time they'd thought nothing of hauling one another around (concussed, even), but apparently it was going to take a while to return to that point. She found it rather peculiar that such a reaction could be possible even without the emotional mess, and it was a mark of how much Stephen's mindset had influenced her own, that her immediate reaction was to try to quantify it. Shaun had definitely been right in one respect, at least--she really was damn weird.

"I could see if he'd let you try one, as well," she said. "Of course, I've got to find out if he'll even let me have a go at it, first. He was offering them as bribes, but people can still be picky about those things, sometimes."

[estebanmd.livejournal.com]

Stephen chuckled. "First things first; I should meet the man and from this determine whether further discussion, scientific or otherwise, would be of mutual benefit or a mere nuisance."

He looked wistfully up at the sky again.

"The sun will not finish setting, will it, until you re-start time again? so we cannot see the stars."

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

No, indeed it would not. She peeled her glove off again and snapped her fingers, letting Time rush back with an almost palpable woosh. She wondered if there was a personification of Time on Earth--from what she had seen, there were no visible personifications of anything, unfortunately (she had never met any of the Endless).

The owl, no longer stuck in place, swooped over them, and the snow flurries continued. There were still scattered patches of clear sky, through which the stars would soon be visible--Susan wondered what they would look like to Stephen, as he saw them through her senses.

"All the constellations here stay the same," she mused, tugging her glove back on and unscrewing the lid of the Thermos once more. "It makes me wonder what on earth your astronomers have to do. They change on the Disc all the time--slowly, but they do change. Once they changed very quickly and very drastically, when Great A'Tuin went into a roll to avoid a meteor." She wondered what the earth would do, in the event of an approching meteor--it wouldn't be able to save itself, would it? How strange, being on a world without a mind of its own.