ataraxionlogs | twenty-eighth jump;

Entry tags:

twenty-eighth jump;

CHARACTERS: Any and all.
LOCATION: Gravity Couches and beyond.
WARNINGS: Maybe some swearing, or even some violence, and more than likely some implied (and possibly explicit) nakedness.
SUMMARY: Another month, another jump, another round of new faces.
NOTES: It could just be the standard sensation of air on wet skin, but if you bother to check, you might notice the steam rising from your body, barely there and gone within a minute. By the time you get to the showers, it will be clear that it's not just taking you time to adjust. The room is cold — colder than usual, but no worse than the last jump. While it's nothing dangerous, it's certainly motivation to hurry through the usual routine and get dressed quickly.

It's getting closer.

YOUR EYES ARE OPEN.

KEEP LOOKING.

You wake up in darkness.

There's a breathing tube jammed down your trachea, and you're suspended in a tube of clear blue fluid. Upon registering your level of consciousness, the gravity couch drains the fluid surrounding you and retracts the breathing apparatus; the doors in front of you open, and you're deposited on the floor of a stark, sterile medical bay.

You are not alone.
There are others who have come before you, others who are awakening beside you. Some may be familiar to you, perhaps even friends. Others have much less amiable plans. Some are merely alien and inexplicable, but there are always those who might mean you harm.

After you catch your breath and your vision returns, you notice a number on the inside of your forearm. Maybe it's a familiar number. Maybe it means something. Maybe it's just a number. But the number—completely unique to you—is a tattoo, and it does not come off.

If you enter the room adjacent to the medbay, you will find a small locker with your number on it, surrounded by rows upon rows of identical lockers. Inside, you will find a few of your personal items, a communications device, and a ship's uniform in your exact size. The comms device is fully powered and connects directly to the ship's network; it's your only means of communication beyond physical conversation. Upon turning the device on, a neutral, automated voice will say, "Please take the blue lift to the passenger quarters." Any other attempts at communicating with the rest of the network are met only with static.

This is your welcome party.

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Just as with the last jump, Harry tries to charm a towel to retain warmth, but it still doesn't work. He tries another quick spell and seems satisfied that at least the damage - if that's what it is - remains contained to temperature regulation. As he mulls over this development and dries his hair, he notices another young man standing at a locker nearby.

It's not. That couldn't be.

Then again, even if it is, at least it's not Peter again. Harry almost wants to laugh at the relief of it, but sobers quickly when he realizes that Riddle might one day appear on a jump. The war that should be over and is over, hasn't yet happened for most of the wizards he's met here.

Just in case, he should warn The Man Who Could Be Snape. It's a stupid, rash decision that will likely be seen as an intrusion or an insult, but Harry consoles himself that Snape's distain is probably a universal constant and he might as well make the universe happy.

"Er, I'm sorry. You look a bit like a man I know." He's put his wand away and moves to show that he's not armed and means no harm. "May I ask your name?"

Someone was bound to approach him sometime. He's considered it before, but charming a blinking 'BUGGER OFF' sign to hover about his head at all times only seems like a good idea when he's had a drink, and is likely even less of a good idea in wholly unknown territory.

His attention settles on the intruder before his gaze does in an odd precautionary measure familiar to those of a paranoid mindset, and when Severus does turn his head to look, it's with a brittle rebuke already coiled in his teeth--

--that dies immediately.

He doesn't look like he's seen a ghost. Ghosts are an ordinary nuisance. This is something else. Severus has the tensely morbid thought of that killing curse must have done a real number to make Potter's corpse shrink a foot before the rest of his mental process catches up to itself, stymied as it is by the shock of adaption. After a moment of cold silence, he turns back to the locker. Without saying a thing.

Severus pinches the bridge of his (substantial) nose, as if fighting off a migraine, eyes closed. He's tried waking himself up from a dream already two dozen times and expects nothing, but now - now! He's losing his mind. That's what's happening. He's losing his goddamned mind. He hasn't gotten enough sunlight or he's inhaled to many dungeon fumes or something, anything, one of the ten billion possibilities that exist within the expanse of his work and experiments and history of interests, has gone wrong, finally, and now he is hallucinating. The headmaster's description of the omen-bearing child rings in his head as it has many times before, sliding around to coil in his consciousness, mocking.

Edited (that was not the right word) 2014-02-08 06:30 (UTC)

Right then. Ever the optimist, Harry is rather pleased to note that he is neither hexed nor cursed. (Yet.)

"My name is Harry. If you want to come talk, I work on the flight deck or you can call me through the network here at 016-007. James and Sirius are here and they're children, but for now, that's it for wizards from our world. There are others from other times, like myself, or other worlds. There's no statute of secrecy." He's said his piece, but it doesn't lift the debt he feels that he owes Snape.

My name is Harry is all he needs to hear and the rest of the speech is halfway muted out. Of course his name is Harry. Of course this is what's happening. Severus gets his hand up in a 'halt' gesture, making a sharp movement when he realizes the words are continuing-- Stop! Stop. S t o p talking.

"I know who you are," he grinds out, almost over the end of what Harry's saying. He's still facing the locker. He is tempted to feel dizzy, but sets it aside. Severus finishes buttoning his shirt, tucks away his wand, and folds up the rest of his things into a neat pile. Then, finally, he turns back to-- Harry.

"How do you know who I am," is said alongside his index finger being held up, one, and two: "..Restart that."

Sorry, he couldn't hear you over the sound of his existential crisis.

"This ship or whatever controls it takes people from different times and places. From our world, I come from furthest along the timeline." Save Ginny and Hermione, they've also all been dead from Harry's particular point in time, but that's an issue for another day.

"And I know who you are because I've worked with the version of you that..." This is why he never took any of those higher year temporal arithmancy courses. He's never been able to wrap his tongue around the terminology. Scowling at his own inadequacy, he decides to just stick to names and avoid anything more complicated. "At Dumbledore's request, a man named Severus Snape trained me in certain spells."

There's a hot, sick flop of feeling in his stomach as Harry realizes that the information he'd tried to push on the Marauders would be welcomed by Snape. If anyone could be entrusted with it, to make sure that the horcruxes are destroyed and to prevent the second war, he's sure Snape would do it.

The impulse to deny all of this as hallucination is a strong one, but it's one he knows is cowardly, too. His subconscious demons would surely manifest Lily's son, but not the rest of this, full of metal and machinery he's never so much as imagined, faces he's never even seen in a crowd. The information this boy is spitting up is frustratingly sensible, if only so because of the ludicrous context. He has to face this and accept it and not bury his head in the sand.

"As my student." There is something slightly mystified about his tone. Genuinely, he is surprised to hear he may live even that long.

"Alright." Severus rubs a hand over his forehead and pushes his hair back - which is clean and almost tidy, at the moment, freshly scrubbed free of life support sludge. He seems torn between weary and wary. "You said Black is here."

"Yes, both for class and tutorial." Not his finest hour, but he might as well be upfront about it. "And he is, so's James, they're young though. Sixteen? Maybe seventeen. There've been others, but they've gone home since."

No one is entirely sure what 'going home' means in this context and so it's more a euphemism than a fact, but Harry is sure Snape can figure that out on his own. He also doesn't want to get into the fact that Lily was here, alive and well, and she'd gone back. "He's gotten himself a job with the security team here."

It feels a bit like a betrayal to tell Snape anything about Sirius' life here, but it's a necessary thing.

Security.

That's almost funny.

"Why is Black alive?"

He doesn't care how young they are. He doesn't care if this might not be real, or that there might be consequences for executing a teenager in this place. Sirius Black betrayed Lily to the Dark Lord, something this boy must surely know - he sees the scar on his forehead, he can sense the tiredness in him instinctively - why, then, is the thing that offered up his parents to a monster still breathing?

"He was framed. I know, I know it sounds as mad as the rest of this place, but it was Pettigrew and no one..." Harry trails off for a moment, his fairly dispassionate recounting of facts fails and he needs to regroup. "No one questioned it."

He still can't understand why that was allowed to happen.

"What?"

His snapped inquiry is obviously not a request for Harry to repeat what he just said, but explain; Severus glares, attempting to piece this together but simply not having enough to do so. The only thing that no one questioned was Black's guilt, something that he might have found viciously satisfying if it had been another incident. It's funny, in an awful way, that the worst Snape has gotten since his return to Hogwarts is a few people wondering about Dumbledore's sanity but no one - no one - questioned that Sirius Black defected to the Dark Lord. That cruel, violent child succumbing to the weakness of his defective inbred bloodline was a disappointment to many but a surprise to none.

Harry launches into a somewhat abridged version of events. Explaining that Pettigrew was made secret keeper, his defection, the fight, and his long years hidden as a rat. He doesn't go into too much detail, trusting that Snape will ask whatever questions he deems pertinent and then he can elaborate on those matters.

"If you need proof, I don't have a pensive, but I should still be able to share the memory with you." He really, truly does not want to offer that and it's clear from his expression, but it's important that he's able to back up his words with action.

Throughout his explanation, Severus stares at Harry, unblinking. The younger man's eyes are unnerving a little, more a ghost than the rest of him, but that isn't what's important at the moment. What he's saying is, and not only is what he's saying making an awful lot of sense, it's all ringing true.

At the offer, he finally shifts his gaze away, breaking eyecontact for the first time since he began.

"That won't be necessary."

(It's not Legilimency, not by far, but something more innate; it's always been difficult to lie to him, simply because he's so good at lying himself. Like recognizes like.)

The trust this boy is offering him is strange, almost too strange to process. He doesn't like it. He's not sure if this brief meeting means that Harry is more like Lily or James, and he doesn't like that thought either. Part of him is reeling but he refuses to indulge in the emotion, instead remaining steadfast through willpower alone. It does make sense. Pettigrew was pathetic, remains pathetic if what Potter says is true, and as much as Severus would be loathe to admit it, makes an even more likely candidate for defection than Black. He understands well the sick desire the weak have for power, though in this case, he has absolutely no sympathy.

If they'd met when Harry first arrived on the Tranquility, he would've been pleased to think that he reminded those around him of his parents. Now, he's older, he's actually met, spoken to, and argued with them, he's glad to grow into his own man. He still cares for his family and the idea of family deeply, but remaining mired in the petty arguments of the past are less than useless.

"Thank you." Harry knows what Legilimency feels like, and Snape's particular sort quite well, so he chalks the acceptance up to the other man's innate Snapeishness. "I should probably get a move on and check in with a few others. Like I said, you can call me at 016-007, anytime, for anything."

Great. Fine. Fantastic. There's a sort of relief at Harry saying he should go, because as useful as this sudden infodump is, Severus doesn't want to spend any more time with him. The chances of him ever contacting him are slim, but surely Potter knows that already and is just being thorough. (Why.) Severus does not offer his own number in return - assumes it's the one on his arm and locker, probably related to that thing set in with his belongings - but if Harry really wants to know, he can look.

Severus just nods. Very well, off with you. No thank-yous, no further inquiries or even confirmation of his name. This is enough.

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twenty-eighth jump;

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