ataraxionlogs | EVENT: MELPOMENE ▒ HOME

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EVENT: MELPOMENE ▒ HOME

CHARACTERS: Ensemble production!
LOCATION: Corridors in the belly of the Tranquility
WARNINGS: Creepiness, disturbing imagery, violence, etc.
SUMMARY: Characters discover slices of sanctuary deep in the maze.
NOTES: Open to all! Covers Stage Four of the plot & Escape.

You've been running and fighting for what feels like weeks now. Exhausted and desperate, you find another door, stumbling through into—

You're home, finally, far away and safe from monsters or spaceships. You're not alone, someone here who's been waiting for you, and they're so happy to see you. Relief overcomes you; you just want to rest, and there's no reason to believe anything here isn't what it seems, is there?

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[It's one room: a tower room of stone and tapestries, wide windows with thin stone tracery bisecting the panes of glass. The sky beyond is dim, coloured with the soft glowing light of some mid-autumn evening. Here is the faded red carpet, worn and comfortably threadbare after hundreds of years, hundreds and hundreds of feet--and the red-and-gold wall hangings--and the red curtains that hang around each four-poster bed, old but well-cared four.

There are four four-posters. Four bedside tables, four trunks, decorated in scratched-in letters, nameplates, stickers. The room smells comfortable--a little musty, a little like woodsmoke from the fire, a little like boys--the posters on the walls, the photographs that wave and smile on their own, the Quidditch pennants--books and magazines and comics and rolls of parchment, loose bits of clothing, robes and wool socks and jeans--four boys live here, comfortably, have lived here for years, and nothing about the room will ever change.

On one of the four-poster beds, Sirius sits hunched over an unfurled roll of parchment, dotted with tiny ink footsteps that are labeled with names, moving through corridors and rooms of Hogwarts castle. And with Sirius, as always, is James. Younger than Sirius, Hogwarts-aged--he fits in this room just the way that he is. Lamplight makes his glasses flash each time that he looks up at Sirius, his fingers tracing along the Marauder's Map. There is some mischief to be had here--even if you can't hear what he's saying, his grin is promise enough of that. It isn't yet after hours, but it will be very soon. And Sirius stares down at the map, glassy-eyed, but grinning, vaguely, in return.]

[ Remus stops as soon as he's inside the door, caught off guard and brought up short by the scent before the sights can sink in. This place could have been pulled out of his memory as easily as Sirius's, every detail, down to the two boys plotting on the bed, and for a moment he feels dizzyingly, blessedly sixteen. But only a moment. Stepping closer hurts, first of all—Remus is aching more than Madam Pomfrey ever would have made him stay conscious to experience—and then brings him around to see Sirius better, in the wrong clothes, with the too-old and not-quite-right face that marks him as the Tranquility's.

The stab of disappointment may not be a betrayal, quite, but it probably is cruel.

James is right, though. James is someone he knows, exactly the way he remembers. Impossible, but so should all of this be.

Remus sits on the edge of an adjacent bed—his bed, his discarded clothing bundled on top of his trunk, his parents smiling at him from the nightstand, his books toppled stack of books piled haphazardly on the floor beside it—and watches, uncertain but hopeful, silent. Even if he knew what to say, he wouldn't be able to say it just yet. ]

[James doesn't look up, and neither does Sirius--even though Sirius hears the little glink that the mattress makes as it sinks down on its springs. It's an ancient sound, one that mattress has been making for years. The four-posters and their trappings are probably as old as the carpets and half the tapestries. Wizards make things that last, and rarely update, giving everything that anachronistic clash of centuries: turntables and candlelight, quills and transistor radios, robes and trainers.

But that particular sound belongs to Remus, as familiar as the sound of him turning over at night, as familiar as the tread of his footsteps--even if he's older now, if the weight of the war and its aftermath have changed him, stooped his shoulders and greyed his hair and left lines on his face that Sirius can't account for, because he wasn't there for them. Not yet. He knows, without looking up, that it's Remus, and not the Remus that belongs in this scene. That makes it more difficult to pretend that he belongs, that the whole of the Tranquility wasn't just some mad dream after too many chocolate frogs and crisps and six rounds of butterbeer.

Without looking up, finally, he speaks to Remus.]

Wotcher, Lupin.

[Affected slang. Sirius was taught to speak in crisp accents; he's always done his best to sluff it off. Beside him, on the bed, James shifts to look up at Remus, with a grin that's probably too familiar, and, tiredly, Sirius looks up at him as well, his smile an echo of the one that James wears.]

It's nearly after hours.

[ Remus smiles back at James, helpless to do anything else. The smile doesn't shrink when his attention moves to Sirius, but it does change. Raised eyebrows, a crooked slant, a longer and more searching stare. They could pack a lot of information into a look, the four of them. Between Sirius's time and Remus's the language evolved, so the brief widening of eyes that meant you're going to get us caught became you're going to get us killed, the half-smiles that meant see you in September became pour one out for me if I don't make it back. But the basic ideas are the same.

This one means do you have a plan. Because Remus is running on fumes but also on hope, always, and he knows they aren't at Hogwarts but he doesn't yet know that James isn't here, with them, wherever they are. He hasn't sorted out that he isn't the one who needs rescue, instead of Sirius.

... So this is going to go badly. ]

Yeah, it would be. [ If they were really at Hogwarts. His tone is agreeably noncommital. He picks up a model from his nightstand—Dai Llewellyn, national hero, frozen with a Quaffle in his arms—and it comes to life in his hands and zips off across the room. ] Big plans?

Always.

[Always, James echoes, like nothing is amiss, and there's a little bit of his usual bravado in his tone. That's a hair-rumpling tone, that stupid finger-comb that he always does. He doesn't do it now, but that's because there's work to be done--or at least, that's the reason Sirius gives to himself when James looks away from Remus, like he can't focus on him. He looks away and so Sirius does as well, following James's gaze, like a mirror double of him. Without looking at Remus, he answers for James--]

Stash of dungbombs that we've got to fetch.

[We, in this room, means four people, exactly. Messieurs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs. The fact that Peter isn't here should be more jarring than it is. Sirius finds that he hasn't really thought of Peter, that he doesn't care. Thinking his name is a little jarring.

If he thinks about it, for longer than a minute, Sirius knows this can't be real. But he also knows that he doesn't care. Not yet, not now. He's content to stay here.

And then, James says, as he unfolds another bit of the map, well, I'm open to suggestions for their placement.]

Think we can help with that. [Sirius taps one section of the map, with a superior air.] Starting here. Slytherin common room. Always a good place.

[He stares down at the Map, watching the footprints move themselves around corridors he knows better than the back of his own hand.]

If we go out that door, it'll be there.

[That's to Remus, even if he's still not looking at him. If he doesn't look at Remus directly, he doesn't have to make sense of how he doesn't fit in the room--too old, different clothes--and he doesn't have to think about how he doesn't fit, either.]

[ While James and Sirius plot, Remus is listening, so sick with nostalgia that he's almost pulled into the game. It's hard not to fall in line like a good lieutenant, even four years out. For a moment he thinks what day is it, so he can sort out the trajectory of the patrolling prefects, but that's quickly followed by what month is it and what year is it and it all crumbles like herbs left out too long. He has to look away from the map, the illegible names of people who can't really be there.

So he's listening, but he's also taking the photograph of his parents off his nightstand, removing it from the frame, and quietly folding it into a pocket of the coat he borrowed from the zombie-infested Macy's. He doesn't take his eyes off James long—looking past his stupid hair and his mischievous grin for the smaller things that were already falling out of his memory, because he'd never thought he needed to commit them to it—but his wonder fades the longer Sirius goes on talking, until he's frowning at them both. ]

It won't be.

[ No dungbombs, no common room, no Slytherins. ]

You have to come back with us. [ —to James, but his attention shifts quickly. ] Sirius?

[It will be there, because it has to be. Because the castle is unpredictable, but there's no one who has had their fingers on the collective pulse of Hogwarts castle the way that the Marauders have. Dumbledore comes closest, but even his way is different. A keeper who engages and oversees and defends and learns isn't the same as four students who don't know when to go to bed, who crawl through the walls and get under stairs and tell jokes to the paintings. It's a gritty intimate understanding that they've earned, both through cleverness and scrapes and a willingness to say all right to whatever's asked, anything from jump to oi tweak the tit of that statute and see what happens.

Remus's denial gets James to look up, first, with a frown that's closer to a scowl--but still familiar, as if some minor fallacy were just pointed out to him. Back, he repeats, incredulously, what, downstairs? Because yeah, obviously, we'll have to, to leave, and meanwhile, Sirius stares fixedly at dot labeled PERDITA VANCE, wandering down the charms corridor.]

Don't.

[Because downstairs is a real place, one that they can walk to. And it will be the castle outside that door, the narrow stairway up from the common room--and then out the portrait hole, blow kisses to the Fat Lady and go, because nothing has been ruined yet, because everything is good, even with the threat of war and destruction on the horizon. This is a world you can live in.]

We can stay here. [It's probably cowardly. He says it anyways, as he reaches to unfold another bit of the Map.

Boring, James counters, instantly, and he narrows his eyes at Remus as if daring him to challenge it, or propose something else. There's a little too much aggression in it. What's wrong with you two?]

[ Remus shifts back on the bed, seeking some distance from that look but not willing to turn away, not from either of them, eyes darting between James and Sirius' unhelpfully averted gaze while rakes a hand through his hair, pulling it back from his temple, where his scattered grey hairs have begun forming something that could be fairly called a streak—so that's one thing that's wrong with them. They're both too old. That James can't see it is... something. Nothing good. ]

It's all right. [ Placating, for James' sake, like he's talking to a child. He is talking to a child. ] We're not staying here. [ That's for Sirius—not harsh, exactly, but with an undertone of what the fuck is wrong with you.

Dai Llewellyn swings back around the room, over the top of the bed curtains and down between James and Sirius, hanging from his broom by his ankles, and Remus catches him out of the air and holds him still. (He could pocket the model, too, with the photograph and the folded front page of the Prophet, but if he starts collecting trinkets from this room he won't be able to stop. None of it will survive the maze collapse, anyway.) ]

We can't miss the jump. We can't leave Lily.

[ James wouldn't want them to. ]

Sirius, look at me.

[ ned is caught staring at one of the moving posters, swallowing loudly. he will not get acid reflux, but this isn't any holographic effect. but the rest of the scene is familiar. even if he only had one roommate: boarding school.

he sees the two and feels like he's intruding. he recognizes it as sirius' memory before he even sees him, too. but sirius is as he is now, and he's been shoved in a few of these scenes already to notice what's real and what isn't. ]

Sirius? [ he calls softly, edging towards the bed. ]

[If someone else from Hogwarts were standing there instead--Remus, Lily, even Harry or Hermione--hell, even Snape--it would be jarring. Snape would be the most jarring, obviously, and the others are the wrong age, or from the wrong time, and it would pull Sirius out of the scene a little more, make it more difficult to pretend that everything is as it should be, that he doesn't somehow belong here just as it is.

So is it more jarring, or less, to look up and see a face that doesn't belong here at all? Someone from the Tranquility, and his name filters back to Sirius quite quickly--Ned, who does pies, who can do any sort of pie that you like. It's like looking at a crowd in a shop and seeing one of your professors patiently waiting to buy a Fanged Frisbee--they don't belong, yeah, but you also can't make sense of seeing them here.

James doesn't look up. He's too focused on the Map. But Sirius blinks, slowly, at Ned.]

Yeah? [And then, a little uncertainly--] What are you doing here?

I've been getting that question a lot. [ he admits, shaking his head. there's probably a more tactful way of saying it, but he doesn't stop to think about it. ] This isn't real.

[ it's spills out of his mouth all at once and he needs to amend his statement. ] I mean. This. This exact-- This is real, I remember it. From your memory, but now. We're not.

I think we're still on the ship.

[But the reality of the dormitory is impossible to argue with, for Sirius. When he looks over to where Ned is, he can see the dent in the wall from the bludger they'd captured after quidditch practice in fifth year, brought it back to the dormitory and let loose. He can see the notch in Peter's bedpost, where James had run into it, broken his glasses, chipped it--

Peter, there's something about Peter to remember. Something about thinking that name makes Ned's face twist, in Sirius' eyes, change, and he looks away, looks out the window--

The ship. But when he looks out the window, he can see the orange-red of the autumn evening sky, clear of clouds. Out there, the trees are bare of their leaves, and the air will be crisp and smell of rotting leaves and woodsmoke and cold.]

It's Hogwarts.

[--Or at least, that's what he begins to say, but James looks up with a slight frown. Sorry-- who are you?]

[ ned frowns at james when he's addressed, unsure about how he feels conversing with figments. he'd tried to avoid it as much as he could in the past. instead, he turns back to sirius, still working his way closer to his bed. ]

It is, but it isn't. You're older now, just-- you didn't know me then. [ his voice is gentle, trying to ease sirius out of this delusion, knowing somehow that he can't leave until then and that might mean sirius gets trapped too. ]

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EVENT: MELPOMENE ▒ HOME

sirius black || mostly open!

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