( open ) show me how to lie

[darkart]

CHARACTERS: severus snape & a variety of people patient* enough to put up with his ass. (*maybe)
LOCATION: various.
WARNINGS: tba.
SUMMARY: open log for april.
NOTES: if you want to do something but can't think of an opener, feel free to send me a pm, i don't mind writing starters!


Maybe, Severus reflects as he stares down at his arm in the privacy of his small quarters, the whole department thing was a bad idea. SCI » 028 » 084. It inspires a kind of tired bitterness in him thinking about the advances muggles have made in science while wizardkind have hidden away and gotten very good at hovering in place. He remembers the American venture of Apollo 11, remembers the terror and wonder of it, nine years old and imagining if that's what these slow and dull creatures can do just think, just think, what's waiting for him in the world his mother comes from.

SCI. SEC. OPR. He imagines arrangements in three letters for other headings. For gravity management or temporal repair, for mysteries and healing. Science is such a lifeless word and here he is with it stamped next to another, older brand, both self-chosen in one way or another. Xenobiology is a joke and he knows it but his interest is real, and his determination is true - if he has to crowbar magic into this place with stubborn viciousness and arguments then so be it. He won't be trapped here otherwise and damn everyone who disbelieves or shrugs it off or rolls their eyes. They are incomplete people. They have to build machines to see just a fraction what he breathes and touches and manipulates. And he will not hide from them.

He works, both in the "safe" laboratory they've been shuffled to in accordance to security's fussing, and also up in the burned-out attic space of the forsaken genetics rooms. He senses the instability, but doesn't fear it. He cooks meals and occasionally tolerates company, he visits the gardens - for royalty or for his own version of hunting; he considers trying to plant things, has little aborted fantasies of potion-brewing, but doesn't go anywhere with it. He contemplates a dozen projects and, hell, maybe he'll do all of them. It's not like he's going anywhere anytime soon.

Comments

[forgodssake]

[ You shouldn't smoke in laboratories.

And yet.

And yet there's no one around to tell him he shouldn't, really. Maybe Severus will, after the man's been alerted to Charles' emergence from brief post-jump-and-bomb-threat hibernation with coming to work today, and if he does, he'll be catching the telepath red handed. A Bunsen burner positioned helpfully on work table acts as an elaborate lighter as Charles bends sideways in order to touch the tip of a new cigarette to blue-tinged flame and puff it to life.

Point of fact: you definitely shouldn't smoke on space ships at all. Two wrongs make up the mathematical equivalent of a right.

These are the "safe" laboratories, silver surfaces, glass, space, emptiness. Charles is the scientist and yet he doesn't quite match this space either. His brown shoes and his waistcoat and his neatly parted hair are all from another time and place, where computers were a lot bigger and also not a part of his daily working life, for all that he's never really had one of those either. ]

[darkart]

[ Severus doesn't have a clear idea of what all has gone on with Charles since the jump-- since a little before it, maybe. They aren't of the same world and no matter how 'close' they've become through exposure and alcohol, they are still relative strangers. It's not any of his business so he hasn't asked and hasn't gone snooping, either. His distant respect is displayed in companionable silence in response to that text, opting out of 'That's nice.'

It's not that he doesn't care. .. It's sort of that he doesn't care. But he might care if he thought he was permitted to, and as far as he knows, their friendship (or whatever) isn't like that. ]

If you didn't bring one of those to share, I will turn you into a lemur.

[ What has to be a familiar almost-drawl by now drifts in from the laboratory entrance. When Severus isn't tripping embarrassingly through the gardens, he moves with a very quiet grace. Today he exhibits that well, clad in his usual somber black, his teacher's robe transfigured into a light coat worn over his dress shirt weeks ago.

No one's ever told Severus you shouldn't smoke in laboratories, just that he's not allowed to do so at Hogwarts. And this isn't bloody Hogwarts. So cough one up, X. ]

[forgodssake]

[ Charles doesn't blink at that -- smirks a bit -- otherwise obediently digging out the already slightly bent cornered pack of Chesterfields from a pocket. Cursory observation will show that he hasn't spent much of its contents, still mostly full, as he shakes out one for Snape and reaches across countertop to provide.

His own is secured between fingers, like he's done this before. (He comes from the '60s, of course he has.) ]

Courtesy of the ship, of course. Indulge at your own risk.

[trouvaille]

The conversations that Ilde has had, to date, with Severus Snape-- well, they haven't exactly bonded very closely. Yuri called it making friends, when she said she'd sung for him, but she's relatively sure that she'd be obliged to take a picture of whatever expression suggesting that to Severus would produce because it'd be amazing. They aren't friends. Or even particularly friendly, much of their acquaintance.

But he does seem to know a thing or two about-- things, fairly specific things, and she doesn't really want to deal with someone who might experience empathy and want to talk about her feelings or some kind of similarly insipid and useless bullshit. She just wants someone to make the world make sense, and he seems like her best bet; she knows two wizards, but only one of them is enough of a prick to remain indifferent to how she might be impacted by what she's asking about, she's pretty sure. Sirius seems to actually like her. He might ask stupid questions like 'are you all right'.

And that would be terrible.

So, shortly after the jump, he gets a message on his comm device:

"What would make blood intoxicating? For a vampire. If the person whose blood it is was completely sober."

...no context? No context.

[darkart]

Severus has other things to do in life aside from sit at his device and wait for messages, so he's not immediately on hand when Ilde leaves her inquiry. It's a good two hours or so before she gets a response, and it's text:

Completely sober is relative. Routine medication (allergy pills, psychiatric rxs, etc) that has no impact on one person may cause any number of reactions in another via blood. Extreme hormonal differences or blood disease may also be a factor.

Alternatively: cursed, charmed/enchanted, inhuman. The list could be infinite given differences in realities.

And it's not until ten minutes after that:

Why?

[trouvaille]

This is not a very comforting answer, given how many of the suggestions on that list she's pretty sure she can comfortably rule out. The options she's left with don't really thrill her, and it takes her a while to answer. She's already had the actual-feelings portion of this experience near Ward - and that mostly consisted of insisting she was completely fine, anyway - but it just feels awkward and bizarre to try and explain again.

Eventually--

Something weird happened after the jump.

[treasonista]

Odessa doesn't know when it happened, but she woke up to find the marking on her arm now comes with an extra three letters: SCI. Whatever urge there may have been to rub her thumb over her skin to see if she might smear it is ignored, classified as moronic at best. She's read through the archives enough to know this isn't some sort of phenomenon specific to her.

What she does is take it as leave to show up for work. She's dressed in her Tranquillity-issued jumpsuit, as the dress she arrived with is not exactly work appropriate. Yellow chiffon and a black bustier are not the first impression she wants to make. (Not that the one she's made over the network is the greatest either.) The thigh-high patent leather boots are given a pass because they're mostly covered by the jumpsuit. The spike heels are just a statement, and she lets them announce her arrival with sure, confident steps.

"I'm hired," is greeting by way of echo. Snape had rightfully predicted it, after all. Not that there was much doubt on Odessa's part. The chances of being refused work in the department, considering the circumstances, were fairly slim. She doesn't bother properly introducing herself, because she expects that a department so small already knows to expect a new arrival, and who she is. "Where should I begin?"

[darkart]

And of course it's just Severus in here when she makes her grand entrance. Alone at a table towards the back of the lab, engaged by large sheets of paper with runes drawn on them, he looks up when she addresses him. This must be Odessa, he thinks, because as far as he knows there haven't been any other bites from Petrelli's recruitment drive. For a moment he just looks at her, expression unreadable, neither intense enough to be properly scrutinizing or off-kilter enough to be startled.

Does she know it's him? Well, probably. Charles and Nuala have both shown their faces on the network and he certainly doesn't look like a Wendy. Also giving him away is the noticeable lack of genetics stuff around him; if Severus has decided to help spearhead a branch of scientific research on a space ship just so he can privately cultivate his own Department of Mysteries, that's between him and Xavier.

After a long moment of silence, he does the only appropriate thing he can think of: he shrugs at her, and then looks back down at his work.

[treasonista]

That settles any doubt she may have had about who she's talking to. "You're Snape, then." There aren't any ruffled feathers here. It wouldn't be the first time Odessa's been shrugged off, and it certainly won't be the last.

"Good to put a face to the name," would sound pleasant from possibly literally anybody else, but she's not approaching this like someone bubbly and determined to make friends. There's a vague edge to the statement. Not threatening, but definitely not sweetness either.

She wastes no time getting acquainted with her surroundings, and has to frown at the lack of anything to actually go on. So she makes her way over to his end of the laboratory, standing a safe polite distance away and peering (less politely) at his papers. "What are you working on?"

→ cesare

[darkart]

Severus isn't much of a drinker. He knows a little about top shelf hard alcohol due to his time spent amongst people with more money (and better tolerances) than him, and he knows a little about ammonia-tasting well drinks watered down in dingy bars or in between paychecks thanks to his childhood. Mostly he knows about how to use wine and occasionally vodka in cooking, though, and that's where he chooses to use it instead of imbibing. He's too paranoid to find being drunk an escape.

'Space wine'. Is it synthetic? Severus has no idea. One bottle after another, most of them dust-covered, get hauled out from storage in an abandoned bar on a passenger level, neatly lined up on the countertop by hand. He recognizes words and pictures on the labels but only sometimes; he's convinced some of them are printed out in pure gibberish. Merlin only knows what the years mean. One of the bottles is so dust-caked it slips from his grip and snaps down onto the tile floor, cracking. "Shit," he says to himself, picking it up - not shattered into a million pieces, but definitely leaking. He dumps the whole thing unceremoniously into the nearest empty ice-well.

[naytheist]

Cesare is not a drunk, although some people of a particularly modern attitude could perhaps reason otherwise. Under the mantra of little and often being good for the soul, getting through two bottles a day is not unusual for the Borgia and, as such, he has had a lot of opportunity to test and trial the Tranquility's surprisingly well-stocked wine racks. To call him a connoisseur of the ship's alcoholic beverages would be a stretch but he is certainly seasoned.

When he makes his way to his current haunt and source of booze, he does not expect to see another person there, fumbling with the wines, though Cesare is entirely undeterred. He saunters past the man, reaching up and high for a drink that he's previously deciphered as malbec and grasps it by its neck as he turns and eyes the leaking bottle in the ice well.

"Ice and merlot do not mix, my friend," he says with a small smirk.

He knows well enough that the bottle isn't in there to keep it chilled, but that won't stop him from acting otherwise.

[hadninelives]

[The duties of Wendy's new position in the science department are pretty vague, but she feels like she should be doing something. Besides, she's getting bored sitting around her room with nothing to do.

She and Snape had spoken of investigating the gardens, and that seems like a good place to start. She has a good working knowledge of the magical uses of plants and herbs. It remains to be seen if any of that knowledge from Earth will transfer over to the plants on the ship.

She sends a message to Snape, letting him know her plans and inviting him to join her if he's free. Before she leaves her room, she picks up her family grimoire and packs it in a bag she's fashioned from some castoff clothing.


When Wendy arrives at the gardens, she spends a few minutes just staring in amazement. She's not sure what she was expecting, but it wasn't this overwhelming space. She wanders a few of the aisles, looking at the various plants. Some she can identify, some look vaguely familiar, and some are like nothing she has ever seen.

Eventually she sits down with her grimoire and a few samples, trying to identify some of the familiar ones.]

[darkart]

[ That's the nice thing about being in a department that does fuckall for the everyday maintenance of the ship. Severus has a list of things he'd like to try, but it's going to involve planning and coordination - with Wendy, seeing as she's the only other magic user that's signed on. But Severus isn't good at working with people like that and has no idea where to start. He's relieved when she asks about the gardens. Maybe he can figure this out.

Severus shows up not long after she does, looking out of place under the bright synthetic sun, but at least he knows his way around thanks to his frequent trips out to see Princess Nuala. ]

I've come to miss the weather in northern Scotland, if you can believe it. [ mildly, as he approaches. He'd murder somebody for snow in here, srsly. ]

[woodlander]

The gardens offered a vast space. It was easy to move around in them without running into anyone, which essentially meant that it was easy to hide here. In part Tauriel found that comforting because she was used to it, used to staying within the confines of other trees, in another world.

But in that world she had been restless, and as such, it came as little surprise to her that she craved a wider sphere here, too.

This boy, who wandered around with such intent that she was sure he must be looking for something, was not one she had come across before. His behaviour interested her. Was he hunting for animals? Did he wish to tend the plants themselves?

In the end, she made her way over to him. Her green and brown uniform provide excellent camouflage in the gardens, though her red hair did not. Still, her approach was quiet. Her arrows stayed undrawn, and though she looked curious, there was also the faintest of smiles on her face.

"You look as though you walk with purpose," she said softly, when she was not far from him. "Is there someone that you seek? If they are here, I would help you find them."

[darkart]

Severus is getting better at not startling when he's sneaked up on by elves - partly because he knows that even if they're not trying to be sneaky, he's still going to have a very hard time hearing them. He notices the uncanny feeling of someone watching him a heartbeat before she speaks so instead of flinching, he just looks up at her. This is not one he's spoken to before, though she is familiar from viewing the network and from passing here and there with the princess.

"Not someone, at the moment." He's always on the quiet side, low-pitched voice suited for indoor venues (and forcing students to pay attention or miss their vital instructions). "Wondering at the diversity of what grows here, given the closed environment."

The overgrowth of the lower levels are interesting to him; he's not the best at stumbling through it, but it's fascinating to see what's managed to grow and cross-breed without the aid of birds or people importing seeds to plant. ... Sort of boring, possibly, but Severus also thinks spending a Friday night in at a library is super fun.

→ jax

[darkart]

There's not actually been much friendly team coordination for Shepard's exploration venture - yet. Severus has observed some chatter about it and lined up to be taught "computers" by a girl Shepard sent (girl, really, Darcy is older than you, Severus), but mostly he's been spending his time working on his own applicable skills. Not that he knows completely what might be applicable for something like this, but at the moment, it means running tests for himself about sending messages from one end of the ship to the other, summoning items, and Apparating.

He sends his patronus every which way, he attempts to conjure things through dead zones. Results vary. He tosses a stone down a hallway that seems endless, unwilling to venture further in himself, and later attempts to conjure it; two hours after half of it shows up on the table. Severus ends up in a bar on a nearly empty passenger floor with notes and a haphazard map in a bizarre number of dimensions spread out over several tables-- and has to abandon it abruptly when something else he summons suddenly shoots through the walls of the room and takes off down the passenger deck hallway quicker than he can even think about casting a counterspell. Damnit.

Severus returns twenty minutes later to what was an empty bar, having left his work and, stupidly, his communicator. He's carrying the remains of a coffee mug in a dish he's borrowed from a kitchen, and he looks decidedly annoyed.

[kutte]

The point is to stop being a trainwreck, find something to focus on that isn't losing Tara. He hasn't lost her, she's just not here. She's in Charming. It's--

He's allowed to fucking struggle with it, he thinks. Which is why he excuses himself from Gunnery and goes looking for a secluded bar to raid. Like drinking on his own is the best way to handle this shit. After getting scraped up off the floor and thrown in the showers, staying on his feet is the main goal. He can't crawl inside a bottle, but he can dip his toes in. He just wasn't looking for an audience, hadn't noticed the abandoned comm. What he'd assumed was someone got drunk and wandered off, not that someone had been sitting here stone cold sober.

"Well, shit." He says after a moment, straightening up where he's standing behind the bar, setting the bottle down with a thump. "I wasn't planning on company."

[circumitus]

Lately Rey has been trying not to close her eyes, and her sleeplessness starts to show. Not that she allows it to daunt her from her routine in any way. After patrols she still swings by one of the nearest bars for some respite, and afterwards makes her way back to the gardens to rest. She had, in more than one lifetime, survived several nights in warfare on one hour of sleep. Sleep was often seen as a luxury.

Well fed and hydrated, she travels from the paths of the garden. It's quiet here. Peaceful. And it's easy to lose sight of civilization. No wading through the throng of waking people in the medbay from one jump to the next. No patrolling corridor after corridor, waiting, expecting someone to come by eventually. No, she's made it this far because, before recent, she knew better than to stick her nose into business where it didn't belong.

So why was she only now getting involved...?

Rey needed to think. When she had to think, she meditated. But not in the way her father, a self-proclaimed Jainist, would have practiced. Rather, Rey settled in an enclosed area, surrounded by nature-like things. She likes nature things. They remind her of being alive. It's a rare moment she needs right now as she sits down cross-legged, her back to one of the trees as she pulls out a portable tape player from her travel pack. Putting the big headphones over her ears, Rey listens. The first act of Andrea Chénier begins to play.

In most cases, it's a soldier's habit to remain aware even during times of complete distraction. And she is. So very aware, even when she makes herself blind and deaf to the world with music and closed lids.

[darkart]

Severus spends hours in the lower levels of the gardens. For a little while, lost in thought on his hands and knees in dirt and plants, his primary consciousness forgets that he is where he is. There are a few surreal, dreamy minutes where he's at Hogwarts behind the greenhouses, pulling out 'weeds' with barbed ends for personal projects and seventh year assignments. But his gloves are woven mesh instead of dragonhide, and the sun that filters through against the back of his neck is unnervingly consistent. He is far from home.

The idea of potionmaking is a comforting one, even if he's not sure he can do it here. Maybe he can make a cauldron, but the best ones are formed the old-fashioned way; forged. There's a forge here, yes, but it's not staffed by anyone he recognizes as having the right education for what he wants done and-- part of him is hesitant because he thinks it'll feel worse to have it and not be able to do anything with it.

You've been trying to quit since you were hired, he tells himself.

It doesn't really help.

Severus ends up along a path, jumpsuit pulled down and tied at his middle in concession to the heat leaving him in a black t-shirt - and still his left forearm is bandaged. A rare sight anyway. He carries with him a flat basket full of bits of borrowed leaves, roots, petals, samples of earth. When he sees a figure sitting ahead, he stops. Considers. After a moment he sets his basket down and himself alongside it. Hell with it. He's exhausted, and he's not risking Apparating or wandering too close to someone who might leap into action and try and take his head off for disturbing them. He can wait.

labs

[sorrycharles]

[ Loose metal shivers on racks and in drawers. In heavier components, resonant vibration murmurs end to end. Electric lighting flickers and dims.

A rolling chair spins slowly on its axis.

It’s some minutes before Erik arrives in the flesh. His footfalls are soft -- near silent. He creeps with collar rumpled and sleeves rolled, posture wary and eyes hard: an invasive, uninvited presence who touches at loose papers and is tempted by unlabeled switches. ]

[darkart]

[ The papers that have been left on the main table are not recognizable as genetics work - not Xavier's. Runes, words in Latin and older languages, diagrams, paragraphs of nearly indecipherable shorthand in thin, slanted writing. Some of the diagrams are of large shapes with little dots labeled 'gardens', 'labs', 'dead zone 1'.

No one is present.

Severus is upstairs. The jury-rigged lights don't reach that far (unless he turns the enchanted ones on), and he is invisible in the shadow of the second level overhangings, looking down past a catwalk to the main laboratory floor. Approximately fifty seconds before Erik walked in, he pushed every bit of debris and movable equipment furniture anything as far away from him as possible with a spell. He hadn't known what to expect when it started. Now he watches. ]

[pushfall]

Sometime in the early evening - can you really call it evening, in space? - Claire tries the door just down the hall from hers by knocking. She thinks about trying the labs first but decides against it, already armed with the knowledge of how out of place she feels in there, walking between streamlined, polished surfaces, lined and littered with machinery that she has only a passing familiarity with thanks to biology classes and science fiction. If anything, she would feel more at home in the sooty remains of the former genetics rooms, having already come to consider it some desecrated place that might yet hold answers to any questions she might manage to come up with. A verifiable, burnt-out, outer space magic 8 ball.

Better not tell you now.

Claire understands that it's ridiculous but having something to hold onto when gravity is a potential concern is grounding. She's always needed to have something to strive for, fight against, something to do. For all its insanity with the jump and every other crazy thing that happens on-board, there is a certain quality on the Tranquility of general acceptance. This is how you live, this is how you get by, day to day. The fact that there is even a day to day leaves her itching. Sometimes it's too quiet, and she finds herself hoping that something insane will happen so that she can concentrate more on that as opposed to the fact that her dead father is alive and probably not a serial killer hiding under his skin.

Someone passes by her in the hall and looks confused. Claire ignores them, leaning against the wall opposite and stretching her legs out in front of her, waiting to see if the door will open up across from her and what mood might greet her from the other side.

[darkart]

She ends up having to wait a few minutes, but not an eternity by any stretch. When the door opens, Severus is still buttoning the cuffs of his shirt around his wrist (over the ever-present bandage). He doesn't look like a zombie, but the slightly resigned look in his eyes and the fact that his collar's still screwed up suggest he was asleep.

He was without specific expectation about who'd be on the other side, but he isn't surprised when he sees Claire. She's the only person who's ever come by without explicit invitation - for brownie terrorism, before. (Now that he knows what he's looking for in Ilde, he thinks he would have noticed her approach.)

The silence is odd. Until:

"Are you well?"

It's almost Are you all right? but he coaches it elsewhere at the last minute. Something about her seems a little like a kite floating directionless, today.

[ryuuzaki]

This place has a bad effect on people, L thinks.

There's the obvious, surface way, the way not worth noting or describing except in the course of warning an unsuspecting new victim, the basic dangers, the anxiety about what might happen next. That tends to wear on the ones who last long enough, although there are a few who seem to be insouciant enough to shrug it off. They're careless, or they have the arrogance to believe that it won't apply to them.

Deeper consideration reveals other psychological pressures. When danger is constant, the tendency is to pick up an infantilized set of habits: don't stray from the path, don't become too ambitious. Do it, and you'll learn your lesson. You might not die -- many people hadn't, a few people had -- but as the situations on the Bridge and in Engineering had shown, you would be shown your place. "Isn't it better to do as I tell you?" Not enough carrots, too many sticks. People are resilient and break slowly, but he sees it all wearing on most of them, and is aware that he isn't immune to it.

What bothers him most is how helpless he feels, the way his scope has been diminished. He's always been angry about being trapped here, but it doesn't seethe anymore. The anger is a fact of daily life that he pays little attention to unless it rises enough that he has to work to repress it. He distracts himself with his work (mostly boring, but it occupies his time and places him well to take advantage of more interesting things that might come up), and with a series of small amusements. He knows that he's operating at an indescribably low volume of his actual capabilities, although he stretches his waking hours a little more than he really has to. He's still himself, but he's less than himself, a repressed and shrunken version of it.

That's dangerous, because he can see it going three ways: a continuation of his current flattened feeling, or further diminishment until he doesn't want to do much of anything at all, or possibly, an ill-advised attempt to expand his boundaries, which would probably be met by Smiley, or the hypothetical unidentified third party, with a firm redefinition of them. The status quo is bearable -- just. The restlessness and the pull towards apathy and inaction, which tend to come and go, are not.

Comms has a little bit more help this week than they've had since Q and Clara and several of the others disappeared. It's been normal for L to stay for eighteen hours, spinning the seat of his chair in circles when the boredom becomes almost punishing; that isn't necessary today. He excuses himself at the end of what was almost a normal shift, then heads to a kitchen. The ship itself has taken on an unrelenting sameness for him, relieved only when things get worse.

Someone else is in this kitchen, apparently cooking. L looks him over with a brief glance -- he's seen him before, briefly, probably at the jump -- and begins to note his appearance. On the thin side, dark hair, pallid, around L's own height or a bit taller.

At the same time, by way of covering the scrutiny and also because he'd had a reason for this stop, he says, "Excuse me. The cocoa -- it's in the cabinet just above your left shoulder. If you don't mind."

His accent is English, Winchester tutored to sound like London and then eroded and flattened with Americanizations. Mostly, he sounds like he's traveled. He doesn't smile, but his request is within the bounds of courtesy. He doesn't really care if the other man minds; he just wants some cocoa.

[OOC: and then I will wind up reusing those first few paragraphs as a log starter of my own, I'm sure of it. Anyway, pop me a line if there's anything I need to change!]

[darkart]

Severus doesn't look up when someone else enters the kitchen. The feeling on the back of his neck says nothing familiar, and the footsteps aren't plodding or careless enough to raise any 'this is about to annoy the shit out of me' alarms. He's not a chef, he doesn't dance around or do anything particularly impressive, but it's a band-aid of an activity in the absence of his true passion and so the results are always well-finished and competent. It smells nice. Something curried.

He turns his head at the unfamiliar voice, eyes meeting the other man's before he finishes the movement. His expression is closed, neither friendly nor hostile. Watchful, maybe. Definitely distant. A beat later and he turns back to the kitchen counter and the cabinets above it, reaching up to open one and select the requested tin. He hands it over wordlessly. A stranger, at least in theory. Severus doesn't expect everyone to use video or even voice; he wishes they wouldn't, sometimes. As convenient as that makes it to take notes on people, it gets tiring. Maybe someday he'll be on board long enough to begin to search for familiar faces at the jumps, then long enough after to drop the habit out of apathy. As it stands he hurries in and out, unwilling to tolerate the emotional claustrophobia that being around so many people in a vulnerable state gives him.

"Do you want the kettle?" Asked in a low voice with an accent that says educated, Severus has already looked away from the other man and returned to what he's doing. The appliance in question is in another cabinet near him.

[ ooc: Looks great to me! I enjoyed reading it o/ ]