You know what I want ((Closed RP))

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

With a parting admonishment and a vote, Claire had been set loose on the halls of Hogwarts. Outside the small stone room there were stone hallways, stone stairs, and even more stone rooms. She felt lost in a maze of hard slabs and blocks. When she noticed a tiny maiden in a picture waving to her, she waved back, and asked for directions. That was how she found herself in Hufflepuff, in an empty room, sitting on a mattress that was now hers.


The detachment that she'd worn around herself like her jacket was beginning to wear off, and now she was cold, lonely, and confused. She hadn't been whisked away to endless delights or damnations. She wasn't at the mercy of forces beyond her control. Everything was back in her hands, now, and with no parties, no pills, and no entertainment, she found the idea of being in charge of this life as uncomfortable as it had been in her last one.

She tried sleeping, but was as unsuccessful at it now as she'd always had been. It was late, and the hallway was quiet outside of her door. If this was her new life, Claire wanted to start it with something. She wanted to be numb again, rushing from one experience to the next. But if she had to feel something, it wasn't going to be this restlessness and helplessness that she felt as she tossed and turned on the bed.

There was a card in the pocket of her jacket. Claire read it over once again, then left it and the jacket on her bed. She wandered the hallways, but it was too late for dinner, maybe even too late for drinks. The ambient light from the torches gleamed on her bare shoulders and gold dress. The portrait people were very helpful again, directing her down to the dungeons. A few more questions, and she found herself at the right door. Without hesitation, she knocked and waited for it to open. She had always slept better in somebody else's bed.

Comments

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

Reilly opened the door, and his eyes widened in surprise. "Mlle. Tourneur," he greeted her, and opened the door to let her in.

He gave every appearance of a man ready for bed, scrubbed and barefoot, clad in pajama bottoms and a thin brown silk dressing-gown. He ran a hand through loose, pomade-free hair.

"This is a surprise. Have you been sorted into Slytherin, then?"

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

"No," she said, brushing his robe as she walked past him into the room. "I am a Hufflepuff. It is a nice little place. Cheaper than a flat in Paris." She didn't apologize for interrupting him, or bothering him so late at night.

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

"Yes, it is," he agreed, watching her survey his quarters. So far from the bare room Claire had found in Hufflepuff, Reilly had spent some months feathering his nest in Slytherin to a tasteful sumptuousness. "Welcome to Hogwarts, then. I've no champagne, but I do have the last of some good brandy waiting for a special occasion..."

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

Claire found a chair and made herself right at home. When she pulled off her flats and curled her legs up under her, she didn't mind that her short dress was riding up. "Are you out of cereal, too? You don't have much on hand for late night visitors!" All could be forgiven, though. She held out her hand. "But if you have another cigarette, that might make do."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

He moved to a side table and opened an inlaid wooden box atop it. He passed her a cigarette from a top tray; beneath the tray a pistol and a small velvet drawstring bag were visible in the bottom of the box. Then he approached her with a gold lighter in hand.

"I wasn't really expecting to entertain." he replied, and opened the lighter for her. "At least, not quite so soon. I had planned to lay in a supply of caviar first thing in the morning."

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

She took the cigarette, hesitated before she let him light it. She could continue the playful banter. She was enjoying it quite a bit. But caviar and kind words weren't what she had come for.

"I didn't want to spend my first night alone," she said, head down. Claire brushed her black bangs out of her eyes and looked up at him. "And I didn't think I would have to."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

Reilly met her eyes, then scanned the rest of her, his face carefully blank.

"You're welcome to stay here with me, of course. More than welcome." The corner of his mouth twitched. "And my damned past pretensions to gentlemanliness compel me to add - under any terms you wish."

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

She blew her smoke out away from him, still looking at his eyes, even if her weren't looking at hers. "Past pretensions? Not current?"

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

He shrugged and fiddled with his lighter. "It hasn't seemed to matter much since I arrived here," he explained. "Reputation seems far less crucial for women in this day and age than I remember. And the small degree to which I ever gave a damn what anyone thought of me seems to have vanished since..."

The thought trailed off into another shrug.

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

She didn't bother prompting him to finish his sentence. "You would be doing me a favor. Isn't that what a gentleman is supposed to do?"

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

"Well, they're expected to do something or other for damsels in distress. Whether what we're proposing to do qualifies as a favor depends on one's point of view, I suppose. Though it's a point of view I quite like, I daresay."

He ran a hand through floppy brown hair and gave her a lopsided grin. "Just for tonight, with no strings? If you like, we can revise those terms later."

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

Clarie ran her hand through her own hair, except that it came off in her hand, revealing a massive mess of blonde curls pulled back in a bun. She pulled the bun out, and shook her head until her frizz enveloped her shoulders.

"That's a point of view I quite like, too, Mr. Reilly," she said. "No strings."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

Reilly raised an eyebrow appreciatively. The curls softened the shape of her face.

He held out a hand to her. "In the circumstances, I think we might graduate to 'Sidney' and 'Claire,' don't you?"

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

Later, in the pitch black night, Claire woke up thrashing, with a choked scream dying on her lips. She couldn't remember where she was, and she couldn't see enough to begin to tell her. As she took account of her limbs, the nightmare receded, and reality creeped back into her brain.

She was in bed with a man whose name was all she knew. She wasn't in Paris, or in Venice, but in a room in the dungeon of a castle. Why was she in a castle? Then Claire remembered. She was dead.

Even in death, the dream had followed her.

Claire wrapped herself in blanket and propped herself up on the headboard. It wasn't true. You couldn't sleep when you were dead.

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

Her flailing arm struck Reilly across the chest. Awakened, he lay in the dark and listened to her harsh breathing slow to normal.

When she shifted to a sitting position beside him, he stretched an arm to the nightstand for his wand. A muttered "Lumos" and a soft glow enveloped its tip.

"Claire?"

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

She didn't think much of the wand. It looked like a flashlight.

"Bad dreams," she said, pulling her hair away form her face. "I didn't mean to wake you."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

"Quite all right. I was dreaming of falling into a snowbank." He reached around her for his brandy snifter. "Your drink is within easy reach, if it will help."

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

"It only makes it worse," she said, reaching for the drink anyway. "There was no snow. Just falling." Miles and miles and miles of rushing air, the ground coming closer and closer. She shrugged off the dream.

"I was hoping that it would be different," she said after a long silence.

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

He took a sip of his own brandy, and rubbed her back lightly through the blanket. "This dream is an old friend of yours, then?"

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

"You could say that. We haven't known each other for very long, but it comes to me every time I close my eyes." She took another sip. "I don't sleep much. No, I didn't sleep much."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

That reminded him suddenly of Caryll Houselander. "You're not given to prophecy, are you?"

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

She snorted. "No, I can't say that I am."

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

He nodded. "I knew someone once who was, and she would say things like that. She was an artist, and when she had a vision she'd draw it over and over, like a needle stuck in a record. One or two were powerful enough to hang about her head for years." He thought of the framed sketch of his corpse in the Sparrow Hills, framed and hung on his wall.

"There is a thing called Dreamless Sleep potion they make here. Said to be addictive, but perhaps worth a try for temporary respite?"

[monde-finis.livejournal.com]

Claire buried her head between her knees, caught in a fit that was something between laughter and crying. When she could breathe without hiccuping, she dried her eyes on the sheet and sighed.

"I tried everything, Sidney. I don't have my sleeping pills anymore, or I would have tried them. What makes a potion so different?" She didn't know it now, but both her dreams and her addictions were not something to mess with.

[sidney-reilly.livejournal.com]

"Magic," he said, tapping her shoulder with his wand. "I know it's absurd, but they have access to some power here we don't have in the real world. Think of electricity - you can't see or feel it, but you trust absolutely that it's there. Stay a while and you'll come to rely on magic the same way."

He sighed. "I do get it, you know. I've been wrestling with dreams since I got here - the snowbank. Not every night, but near enough. But I know very well where my dream comes from and what it's about. Yours?"