ataraxionlogs | everything i love is out to sea

Severus should probably - okay, probably definitely - already be out of the old genetics labs and moved on, and for the most part, he is. Anything worth saving has been dragged out, the major damage inspected and documented in an effort half work and half curiosity bu him and Charles, but there's so much more than that in there. Getting to see how the Tranquility tears through magic like shredding paper up close and personal has proven to be rare; that it's his magic just means he knows intimately what the margin for difference is.

So it's difficult to pull himself away from it, but he does. That has to be secondary to the venture beginning shortly, and after he texts Lupin the brusque outline of the issue (Problem with the old lab area. Moving immediately, be down here to look at 07:00.) he's back in the science labs, moving papers into his office. Well. The area he's decided is his office. 'Office'. In space. Whatever.

Remus doesn't answer the message, but his silence is consent—rebellious consent, maybe, because Lily is here, one of the several wounds that bleeds anew whenever Remus talks to Sirius has been finally and properly stitched up and set to mend, and Remus needs Severus that much less.

Not yet not at all, though. He shows up on time.

"Hello, Severus," he says, tired and concerned and incessantly pleasant, stopped politely beyond the boundaries of what seems to be his space. "What sort of problem?"

He isn't thinking about Lily. As far as Severus is concerned, he won't see her again at all on the ship except for fleeting, incidental glimpses in the medbay during jumps-- and that is the best option. The lot of them (that Granger girl's abrupt tirade against 'bullying' aside) could decide at any time he needs to go. It's an entirely likely possibility and at this point, Severus isn't sure he'd fight back. Albus isn't here. Maybe there's no reason to try with them.

Barring that, he has work to do, and will continue doing it until he's no longer able. Or, in this case, until Lupin tells him he's changed his mind and doesn't want his help after all. Severus isn't sure if he'd fight that, either.

"The ship changed several hallways during the jump," he says, not looking up from sorting a large messy stack of papers with notes scratched all over them, "at least that appears to be the issue. It snapped the wards straight through. I could rebuild it but the damage from the spellwork rebounding in an attempt to hold is going to make it too volatile to bother doing if I want something complete before the next cycle."

Edited (maybe i should put my glasses on there'd be fewer typos) 2014-06-10 20:23 (UTC)

"We," Remus corrects mildly. It's half an offer—he really never intended to make Snape to take on any of this alone—and half an assertion, a minor point he wouldn't have bothered pressing last cycle, when he was more lost and more desperate and his sense of dignity and autonomy was of tertiary importance at best. Now it's at least secondary.

He looks in the general direction of the old labs and considers asking if he can see. Curiosity, not relevance, and the memory of Snape's face in the medbay is enough to keep him from being an intentional nuisance for a little while. He doesn't ask.

"Are you sure you'll have time at all? I can try to take more of the recon work."

"Can you cast a complete parietegmal ward without severing your wand arm off?" is asked, only slightly irritable. "I work faster alone. If you want to watch--" he gestures with one hand, a jerky, whatever movement. Just don't get in his way, is the implication. Severus doesn't need help, genuinely, but even if he did he wouldn't ask Remus for it. He doesn't want to spend any more time with him than necessary, and he doesn't understand why the other man wouldn't want to avoid that, too.

They aren't friends. They aren't even colleagues. And if the plan Severus has to secure the Wolfsbane potion recipe works out, their contact will be stripped down to minimal.

"You're the one who asked me to do it," Severus points out, looking up from his organizing, which is almost done. He moves his hand over the stacks of papers and they shimmy together neatly of their own accord. "I assume by the lack of hysteria that Black's been exonerated, so if you'd prefer to go back to whatever his plan was, tell me now." So he doesn't waste his time.

"I could give it a shot."—that would be a joke, interjected quietly and with no apparent expectation that he'll be acknowledged at all. Otherwise he's quiet. He's fine with being treated like an idiot, really, and he's never had anything to prove to anyone except himself and the N.E.W.T. examination board, but he habitually stands guard—armed only with especially forceful smiles and a refusal to stop offering his hand to shake no matter how many times it's ignored—at the line between being treated like an idiot and being treated like an animal.

So he'd like a say, now and then, even if anything else would mean being in the way. He leans back against a worktop opposite Snape, watching the papers move with unfocused interest.

"I'm trying to be helpful, Severus," he says, all saintly patience, which doesn't exactly answer the question. Remus isn't sure what he wants or what he's ready to rely on Sirius for. He hasn't pressed against the weak points hard enough to know if they'll hold. "Anyway, I asked you because you can do a better job of it than I can, but you might not be here next time."

Sirius might not be here next time, either. Remus would rather not think about that, or the fact that his lunar cycle is out of sync with the days in a jump cycle. Someday he might wake up and only have a few days to spare.

"If anything you do isn't entirely beyond me, I'd like to know how to do it." A pause, a concession: "Watching will be fine, if you'll narrate."

If Lupin would stop acting like an idiot, Severus would be more inclined to stop treating him like one - but as the other man continues to do things like whining 'Oh are we stiiiiiill going on about me nearly eating people as a werewolf', he remains an idiot. An idiot whose indecision practically radiates off of him, by the way, and it just makes Severus more annoyed.

It's perfectly reasonable to want to know how to do it himself. But Severus just feels like he's being used.

As always.

"Narration is one thing. I don't have the time to break everything down to you or teach you how to do it. I expect my first years to catch on after one demonstration and you should certainly be able to."

Severus Snape is a horrifying teacher, news at 11. He's also done putting his notes away. There's a file box, not full of files, but he just picks it up and puts it on his desk in the other room. "We have to find another location," he calls from said room, "I've heard tell of cargo holds but I don't know how I feel about being so close to the shuttle bay." He keeps talking as he walks back into the main area. "Every external threat has come through there."

"Of course," Remus says, agreeable and maybe a little amused—at the thought of Severus Snape with first years, obviously, but also at himself, and his ability after three bloody and terrifying years to suddenly find himself feeling like a schoolboy.

Anyway, he'll keep up. Probably.

He stays where he is, hands braced behind him on the worktop, until Snape reemerges, then rolls up onto his feet. "We could look. Or I could ask where they did it before," he says, just to place the option on the table. "Or I don't mind if we need to involve someone else, to find out if another department has space that's well enough out of the way."

See also: he does mind, but he'll deal with it.

He's grown, and with his growth has come an odd number of new things; guilt, darkness, but also his presence. As a schoolboy he was angry and impossible to take seriously unless he was given the opportunity to do so, but now Severus seems to loom even when he's sitting down. His first years behave.

(The older ones, the ones who were his underclassmen before he graduated, are the ones that make it awkward.)

"I mind," he says, and there's finality in his voice. No one else needs to be involved. "I've been working on an observation unit for another lycanthrope, no shipping containers involved. I'm not sure about hallways, seeing as how they move and how doorways tend to appear in them." Imagine someone wandering in through a door that used to go to a kitchen. Bloody hell. "The science labs go on for-- acres, it seems like. It's a matter of finding a place that's the least likely to change."

The look Remus gives him is relieved, not quite grateful—he doesn't need another lecture on how nothing is for his benefit or comfort or whatever it is Snape thinks Remus is ever thanking him for, other than not allowing him to hurt anyone. "All right," he says. "Do you know if the ship leaves any sort of imprint when it rearranges?"

"It doesn't." It only did in the genetics lab because of his wards, he thinks; it looks catastrophic but only because magic tends to look very big when it goes wrong. He suspects it would be hardly - if at all - noticeable otherwise. "It isn't like Hogwarts. You can walk down a straight hallway for hours and find yourself looping. Maddening things like that."

Truth be told, Severus is getting more usual data out of observing the problem than he was out of it behaving normally. But let's not mention that. Instead, let's go. Out. Severus walks away, obviously expecting Lupin to follow him. Down a hall, throughout the varying doors and lab windows and workspaces. "This was made to employ thousands of people," he says absently, passing a door with a ward spray-painted on it. (Don't ask.) "Discounting medical and agriculture, the overall science department has five people working in it."

... There's plenty of room.

"So I can have my own floor?" Remus prompts from one pace behind him, peering into a lab as they pass and thinking about thousands of missing people—a disquieting idea for any number of reasons, beginning and ending with manticores—and also about shipping crates. It might not be a terrible idea to use something divorced from the architecture. It might also come humiliatingly close to being in a cage, but he can't have everything.

Certainly not his own floor. If Snape takes that seriously, Remus is going to judge him for it.

"Why are you observing werewolves?"

A cage is perfectly fine from his perspective, but putting werewolves from different realities too close to each other, or in an area where people are coming and going is not. He's not even sure if the rumor is concrete, anyway, and he has more important and less suicidal things to do than go investigate.

So, he rolls his eyes. Whatever, about floors. He's not going to let him run around to that extent, how insanely stupid.

"Because I was asked for help." The deeper they go into the labs the more levels of doors and observation windows they go through. "Do you want anything specific outside of it?" He gestures absently to one of the areas they're passing; more offices connected by small anterooms. If Severus is seeming more cooperative than usual, it's not his good nature; he wants to be as clear as possible about all of this from the beginning so try and avoid more idiocy from the others. He doesn't have much hope it'll help at all, but he can make the attempt.

"I need somewhere to store clothes and the like," he says, looking where Snape gestures, "but I can move furniture or transfigure something. I might do better to put lesser wards on a cabinet or something inside the room, anyway. I had trouble last time." Leaving the room, he means. Precise spellwork is all well and good until he hasn't slept and his hands are shaking (or fractured and missing swaths of skin, as it were). But if he can get to clothes and bandages—maybe a blanket, if he's being ambitious—he doesn't mind waiting. "I'll figure it out."

He almost asks again about the other lycanthrope. The single degree of separation makes it that much stranger than he's hardly seen anything of the other werewolves on the ship. But Snape's reticence is what Remus would hope for if the situation were reversed, so he bites back the urge, stopping for a moment to stick his head through an open doorway.

"Are people still afraid of the Shrieking Shack?"

'Figure it out' is something he'll have to do and deal with it; even if it means sitting in there until he feels able to function, or waiting for someone to let him out. Severus would tailor the wards to let him in and out based on presence alone, but how much of the werewolf is Remus Lupin when he's the wolf itself? It can't be risked. Even if he thinks it might work, it's just a thought - very little study has been done on werewolves. And no matter how callous he is, Severus isn't going to suggest that they start playing lab rat about it.

"Of course. People still wear floor-length robes from the third century and think the way house elves are employed is an acceptable way to treat an entire species. As if a few years of relative quiet are going to dispel haunting rumors outside a castle that's got a ghost teaching history."

He could have probably just said yes.

But then he wouldn't get to be on the receiving look of the unguarded and gently intent look that Remus gives people—a lot of people, it's not uncommon, though never aimed in this particular direction—when instead of merely trying to survive a conversation with them, he's actually listening. Trying to understand them. Or, in this case, realizing that he might not know as much about them as he thought.

Not if Severus Snape gives even a fractional fuck about house elves.

He looks away quickly, back into the room he was examining, and when he steps back out of the doorway to resume their walk he keeps his hands in his pockets and his eyes straight ahead. A few seconds of silence are spent setting aside remarks on Lily's presence. Another few seconds thinking about ghosts and traditionalists—

"None of it gets better," he says, not asking, but wanting confirmation.

Severus Snape grew up poor. More than any of them realize - unless Lily told them, and maybe she did; maybe she sat in the Gryffindor common room in fifth year around congratulations that she'd done what she should have done years ago, and took her anger out on him by confirming every pathetic rumor. His hatred of the muggle world is independent from the other things he hates. He is perfectly capable of hating what is, in simplest terms, slavery perpetuated by bored rich purebloods, at the same time as hating people like his father. He is an exceptional multitasker and an exceptional hypocrite.

He is also not looking at Remus when he goes on his snippy little rant there, so he misses the way he's stared at after.

"What is 'better'?" Of course it's only better by degrees. Of course most of it is the same stupidity and hollowness, re-arranged to give survivors peace of mind and let the responsible parties get out of having to deal with any consequences. He doesn't bother hiding his resentment: "If better is a lack of cities being invaded by giants and whole families being murdered in their homes fortnightly, then yes, it gets better. If better is any kind of noteworthy political or social reform to prevent any of this shit from happening again, then no."

Remus would like to be wry, detached, cynical, and able to say of course not. He's tired enough for it. He could probably get the tone right. But he was ready to die for this—he stopped seeing any other possible end to it, after a while, until the universe proved him wrong in the worst possible way. He is and always will be an idealist, the sort who cares about goblin rights when he's unemployed and disapproves of the Dementor's Kiss when his friends' murderer is on the loose, principled and hopeful and a little bit stupid. And he's twenty-two years old. He crunches over shattered glass and frowns at the middle distance like it's wronged him.

"Why the fuck not?"

Three years is the blink of an eye. Three years is a lifetime. Severus has had three years to rage against why he didn't die, why things happened the way they did. He hasn't let any of it go, but he hasn't had the luxury of being able to lay around being depressed about everything. He has to get up every morning and mentor a hundred children ravaged by war, he has to go out every night and study and search at the headmaster's behest. His feelings have been grounder under his own heel, made toxic and insidious.

"How can you ask that?" is duller than before. Tired, maybe. He knows Remus is closer, still standing in the smoldering impact of it. But to Severus it's obvious. It was even then. The very morning after with Ministry hacks shaping press releases and sighing with relief. "Do you really want to talk about this?"

With me? is unvoiced, but somehow still present.

Remus doesn't take his hands out of his pockets, spreading his arms at the elbows as he shrugs, but the gesture means the same thing. Who else? Sirius and Lily can't know. Harry's whole generation can probably only know a sliver, unless they had the time and tenacity to dig past what will be discussed in polite company. And Severus has been unexpectedly tolerable, if Remus looks past the issue of his entire personality, so—

"I thought things would change. I told them things would change." Them, the skittish werewolves Remus convinced—though nothing would make them throw in their lot with the Ministry—to sit out the fight, to wait and hope. "There would be a backlash, they'd keep their heads down, and then..." Something. Specific guarantees were never his to make, but his education, his demeanor, Albus Dumbledore sent me—everything about him was a promise. He didn't have to give any speeches. "I lied to them."

That's a long, indirect way of answering the first question, how can you ask that, but meant to be an answer nonetheless. He believed in what he was selling. He still wants to. He can't see what's so bloody complicated about being decent to people, or at the very least not kicking the ones you'd prefer not to turn around and bite you.

As if Severus finds Lupin's personality any more appealing.

"The Ministry was not in the process of making life better for anyone before it began," Severus says, and makes no effort to temper the unkindness in his voice. "None of us were authorized by the Ministry to make promises to anyone."

He's not sure, exactly, what the other man means, but he can guess. And that is why he finds such ignorance unbelievable: Lupin knows the Ministry's cruelty better than anyone, doesn't he? "What did you think was going to happen after? Dumbledore didn't become Minister."

"He should have." Remus drags one foot against the ground as he steps forward, like am emphatically irritated underline. He should have. Short of that—"I thought Bagnold might understand basic cause and effect."

"Bagnold? The woman who authorized the use of Unforgivables by Aurors? Who permitted mass celebrations by our kind in the presence of Muggles, because we had a 'right to party', choosing instead to send clean-up crews to Vanish or Obliviate the hundreds across the country who saw?" Severus grinds out a brief, low laugh. It's bitter. "Don't be a fool. The only thing that's changed is how many students at school are now orphans."

"Everyone was a bit mad in the end," Remus says, but quietly, more plaintive than combative. He isn't trying to argue. He isn't interested in defending the Ministry.

Defending his own hope, on the other hand, and his ability to go on hoping—it's what he has left.

So maybe he shouldn't ask. Maybe if he'd had another six months at home he would know better. But there were eleven-year-old werewolves in 1969 and eleven-year-old werewolves in 1971, and certainly a few in 1981, and Remus still wakes up half of the time feeling like the air has been knocked out of him, and he wants his loss—and his sick joke of a life—to matter for something. Anything.

Maybe it's selfish as well as stupid. But he asks.

"Are any of them werewolves?"

"No."

Severus did not warn Remus about discussing this - but he did ask. As good as, in his book. He's not going to try and comfort him or soften the edges. No one's ever pulled any punches for him.

"Greyback is the only association anyone has for werewolves. They are the Dark Lord's supporters who've died or gone into hiding, and that's all I've heard of it since the end of the war. I don't know where you are, either. Albus has never said."

everything i love is out to sea

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no, glasses off. your typos make me feel better about mine.

#_#

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