( 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

[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.

[pushfall]

It isn't any longer than she was expecting to wait yet still longer than she feels like she should be waiting. He shouldn't have to fall prey to her own listlessness and it's obviously (probably) weight enough that she just shows up without any kind of an invitation, let alone five minute's notice. Still, that hardly discourages her, so she lingers in the hall, waiting to be let in with her legs angled out in front of her and her arms behind her back. Claire has at least had the decency not to wear the crew-issued jumpsuit as much anymore, and as a result looks much more comfortable and less action hero in jeans and a button-down that is slightly too large.

She looks up when the door opens and pushes herself off of the wall, crosses the hall like a normal person. His question catches her a little off-guard for its phrasing but not enough to put any hitch in her step or pause in her forward momentum. Whether or not his assessment is right is neither here nor there, and Claire says, "Well, I was starting to think that my cupcakes weren't as good as I thought they'd be, but then I realized that was ridiculous."

Claire can read between the lines by now and suss out some of the real material he's choosing not to express, but not enough to call him on it, and not enough that she would want to answer genuinely anyway. Instead, she asks, no longer sarcastic, "Did I wake you up?"

[darkart]

That is, in fact, ridiculous, so Severus doesn't respond do it and just gives her a flat look - the intensity of which is dulled by his current state (and possibly a lack of motivation to actually glare at her).

"Yes." Well. She did. "But I get headaches if I sleep for too long. I shouldn't have been."

So, you know. Call it even. Severus fixes his collar. He can wake up perfectly crystal-clear alert from a dead sleep in an instant, but his schedule's been off to an absurd degree on board the Tranquility. Without sunrise and sunset and classes and meetings, it's easy to get lost in work and realize what felt like an hour is actually forty-eight and he's exhausted. It's been happening too often.

And now there is awkward silence while he looks at her. What do you want?

[pushfall]

"Sorry," she says automatically, in some vain effort to fill up the empty spaces in the silence between them so that something awkward doesn't have room to sit down and stretch its legs. Apologies only ever make things more awkward, though, and immediately after saying it, Claire is left with wondering why she said it at all and, not for the first time, why she has the inherent and unconscious need to constantly be an awkward individual. She was never like this before. Maybe Jackie really did have all the answers.

"I didn't really have a reason for coming by," Claire admits, shrugging with a half-smile. "I just... wanted to see what you were up to." Which sounds about as intelligent as two-year-old trying to understand complex math, but she's not interested in coming right out and saying that she's directionless here and without the sort of guidance toward a path that she typically has.

She keeps waiting for something to happen, holding her breath until the next disaster comes around so that she can put herself in the middle of it, see a little bit more of what she's made of. Until that point, all that she has in her deck are cards with Nathan and Peter's faces on them and a distinct lack of an ability to discuss any of them with anyone. It wasn't until the most recent jump, where she found herself selfishly wishing that Gretchen might show up, too, that it occurred to her how much she actually missed having someone to talk to.

[darkart]

At least, he reflects absently, she just admits it. Awkward or not, Severus prefers just getting on with it. He gives her a look that seems blank from her end and is measuring from his; after a moment he turns to go back inside his quarters and leaves the door open.

"Work, as I can get it."

His bed is already neatly made, and if he has any personal items they're all shuffled away. The second bunk has been transfigured into a desk, upon which are papers and glass containers of sorted this-and-that from the oxygen gardens - things he hasn't been able to identify as from Earth.

"The xenobiology and genetics department isn't exactly overflowing with things to do."

Two men and two women in a large, empty lab doing whatever pet projects they like. Thrilling.