and let me tell you that i'm dreaming (OPEN)

[lightmagic]

CHARACTERS: Lily Potter AND YOU!!!
LOCATION: A mystery. (Miscellaneous!! Halls, elevators, media library, kitchen, take your pick.)
WARNINGS: TBA??
SUMMARY: A June catch-all post.
NOTES: Please feel free to start threads with whatever! I wish to rp all of the things and Lily is criminally approachable, so if you want to have someone bump into her or leave an opening for her to say hi, I'm down for whatever.


Lily doesn't leave her room often. It's ostensibly to rest and make sense of things, but she simply doesn't think to go anywhere. She lays in bed and tries to sleep, thinks better of it, and spends hour upon hour going through network archives instead. Being busy keeps her mind from drifting back home to where everything went wrong.

'Not often' is not 'never,' all the same - she has to leave to get things to eat and drink, do washing up, and eventually media library holds enough of a pull that she heads out to investigate it and returns to her room with too many things loaded into a data pad to be able to go over in days, though she's determined enough to try.

(One day she considers trying to relax by swimming but rethinks it at the last moment, does an about-face near the rec area and heading back toward her room.)

She doesn't linger long enough in the kitchens to make entire meals but she does snack while she makes up her tea before disappearing once more into the halls again.

She wanders them enough to get a general idea of the layout enough, and not just on her own floor. She doesn't stray far despite the elevators making things easier, but she likes to have a mental map at least. She's approachable enough even in her upset, quiet and maybe a little morose but who isn't, some days?

Comments

oh mai. also sorry if i'm slow i suck at tagging anymore ffft

[pushfall]

"Claire," she replies, automatic but not forced, her smile genuine and more than a little self-aware. Despite managing to come out of whatever shell she had constructed around herself both over the past few years and once she found herself on board the ship, Claire still manages to put a sizable difference between herself and everyone else, even if she has a handle on not acting like a total axe murderer, or something, and still has the capacity for being friendly.

She lets her comm device fall shallow into the crack between the arm of the chair and the cushion. It's not exactly plush but it's comfortable enough, and Claire sits up in it, dropping the soles of her boots to the floor with a thunk. Resolutely not wincing, she thinks to hold out her hand to offer it up for a shake and realizes halfway there that Lily is actually holding something and maneuvering might be awkward. There's nothing to do for the intended motion, but Claire does brush the front of her jumpsuit off as if she's known all along there was invisible lint there.

"Sorry," she says, though she doesn't know who she's apologizing to or what she's actually apologizing for. "I don't think I've seen you around very much. Are you new?"

Or maybe it's just because not everyone comes creeping into other floors' kitchens like a crazy person, Claire, but sometimes it pays to be somewhere you aren't expected to be.

w/e it's all good gimme yr cr

[lightmagic]

"It's nice to meet you, Claire." It's clear that she means it, genuinely - her smile maintains and she relaxes her stance, hip resting against the edge of the nearest table. She seems almost at home, though not enough that she really seems settled - that's just par for the course though, anyway. She's also nice enough that the fake invisible lint doesn't throw her at all.

"I am," Lily admits finally, nodding. "I just arrived during the last jump, so I've been..." she does free one hand now, waving it a little in a vague gesture before returning it to the mug. "Trying to get used to things." That's an understatement if it's anything, and her smile turns a little self-depreciating. "It's taking some doing, and I have to admit I've been spending most of my time in my room."

Claire being on a floor not her own doesn't register as strange to her at all, not least because she's been caught out on floors not her own more than once while exploring. "How long have you been here?"

[pushfall]

Claire smiles, because what else can she do? This story isn't so dissimilar to hers, the way that she reacted when she found herself here, too. On some level she had closed off, shut down, tried to process it and found herself coming up blank. She hates to admit it, but at least Lily is trying, in her own way.

"You have that new look," she says, but she's teasing and she hopes that it shows. "It takes a while to get used to things. I know it took me a while, and I come from a place with actual alien and space movies. I still haven't decided if that's prepared me more or less for this. It makes everything make more sense but it also makes it feel less real. I've been here for."

She comes to a complete stop, trying to think. Eventually she hitches the sleeve of her jumpsuit up and 28 glares up at the both of them. "Well, since th twenty-eight jump, I guess," she says, leaving the sleeve rolled up. "How are you adjusting?"

[lightmagic]

Lily laughs, genuinely, when Claire says she has that new look because even if they weren't on the new kids' floor, she does, generally speaking, teasing or no. "I'm a witch," she admits slowly - it's still strange to know she can do that, say it to almost anyone at all, with no repercussions. "So I'm used to magic more than I am science, and it's a little..." She pauses, trying to find the right word. "Jarring."

Four jumps, then - it's long enough to get settled, clearly, and Lily purses her lips as she tries to think of the best way to describe how she feels about the whole thing. "Now that I'm a little more used to the idea of my son being almost the same age as me here, I think I'm all right."

Yeah, that one was a whammy.

[pushfall]

Claire envies her that openness, but doesn't let it show. She wouldn't have to, if she would just look up the records necessary and maybe start trusting more than one person at a time.

In the meantime, Claire laughs in return, saying, "If you were ever as bad at science as I was, then science and magic aren't really that different from each other. And I've met a couple... magic people, since I got here." It's true that she's taken more of a shine to it in recent years than she had in the past when all the matter was that the pleats on her skirt were straight and her hair was properly curled. Sometimes it still manages to impress her, or surprise her, given Lily's following statement.

Her eyebrows retreat almost to her hair, trying to imagine the sort of blow something like that might deliver. "How do you get used to something like?" Claire asks, laced with some disbelief. Not that she couldn't fathom getting used to it, but she still hasn't come to terms completely with the idea that Nathan is walking around and talking and being bossy the way he's always been, when she'd just buried him not long ago, back home. Sometimes she'll look at him, and it will feel like she's staring at him sideways, looking through a lens that's been superimposed over the image of him that she has and it catches her momentarily off-guard and vulnerable, and it hurts, knowing what's waiting.

[lightmagic]

"Well, I am at least used to things like televisions and phones, which is more than I can say for some of my contemporaries..." There's that tone of poking fun at herself again beneath her words - beyond that, she's curious. "Have you? Maybe I know them." She isn't so self-centered as to think that her own world is the only one that could possibly have magical people, but there does seem to be a grouping of them that know one another, comparatively.

"It's..." Lily frowns at that, finally instead sinking into the chair nearest to where Claire is settled. "I don't think I'll ever be actually used to it. I think it's more the idea of..." It takes some thinking, finding the right wording. "There was a war on at home when I left it. I think I'm just glad to know he's grown up at all." Saying it aloud makes her sound more tired than she looks, and she takes a drink from her cooling tea.

[pushfall]

"At least you have a leg up," Claire agrees, regarding the television and phones comment; although, privately, she thinks that she would take magic over any of that any day, never mind that she's had one foot in that pool, so to speak, and wished for years and years that she could go back to just believing in phones and television. The grass is always greener, as they say.

In the meantime, she ignores Lily's question, some throwaway comment lingering in the back of her mind and joining with the idea that she's been rude in not inviting Lily to sit down. The chairs are drawn up wagon style around a small table, and whether that is how they were arranged to begin with or because someone rearranged them is anyone's guess, but Claire straightens up and watches Lily sip her tea, saying, "Do you want to sit down?"

[lightmagic]

Lily likes phones and televisions, as it were - they're rather practical, all things considered, and while she deeply loves magic she's also proud of what she is and where she came from. Still, they seem far-off to her now, even here in a ship where she uses a handheld communicator like she's known it her whole life. Maybe that makes her a quick learner; maybe it just makes her desperate for grounding. "It was strange to me growing up that so many of my classmates didn't understand electricity."

Either way - she laughs a little at that, finally truly settling in like they're having a real conversation instead of oh, I spotted you looking from afar. She sets her cup down too finally, hands free to settle in her lap. "Thank you for talking with me," she says at length, "There are people I know from home, but it still feels a little isolated here and things are a bit awkward with them." That's partially self-imposed and partially because she's supposed to be dead, but who's counting details?

i'm sorry i got so lost

[pushfall]

Claire has the fleeting thought to ask sarcastically if she also grew up in colonial times but stifles it with a smile. It isn't like she doesn't know people with that same conditional existence, growing up, even if it will never altogether stop being strange. She doesn't say anything about the notion of her brother growing up without his PSP or whatever gaming was awesome that year. Thinking about Lyle at all leaves her with a little bit of a dull ache in her chest that she hasn't quite figured out how to fill yet.

"I know the feeling," she eventually admits, winding herself back up into the chair a little bit not closing herself off. "My father's here, on the ship, and it's pretty awkward for about a hundred reasons." Him being dead is only the tip of the iceberg, really. "Who do you know? I've been here a little while, maybe I know them."

good morning c:

[lightmagic]

"It's just so strange," she says, "because they're from such different times... It seems like it's a cruel joke." Remus is closest to her but it still feels stilted. She tries to ignore it.

The thought that Claire might know the same people intrigues her a little - she smiles, looking down at her cup. "Severus Snape, Harry Potter, Remus Lupin, and Sirius Black." She pauses, thoughtful - "there's another young lady from the same place as me, she told me her name is Hermione Granger." A succinct list of wizards and a witch like her (a vast array of personalities, too. surely she knows at least one of them).