darkart: ( commission, dnt ) (was worse than having)
sᴇᴠᴇʀᴜs. ([personal profile] darkart) wrote in [community profile] ataraxionlogs2014-08-12 08:01 pm

sooner or later we're gonna die ( open )

CHARACTERS: rainbow brite and the color kids
LOCATION: various
WARNINGS: sometimes people are jerks (tba)
SUMMARY: catch-all for stuff this month! shoot me a pm if you'd like to do something. or slam into this post with whatever.
NOTES: parts of this header might be a lie


There are times when Severus feels similar to when he did before the war hit full speed; in the years that lingered as twilight before the worst night fell on all of them. His talents were nurtured and he was rewarded not for unraveling the dreary methods to achieving good marks, but for challenging himself and rising above peers thought to be 'brilliant'. Scholastic drudgery became tasteless. He remembers Professor Slughorn pulling him aside one day in seventh year, wringing his clammy, clean hands, telling him that he was going to give him zero credit on an essay for doing parts on potions he shouldn't even know about the existence of.

(I can't have anyone think I'm exposing you to that sort of thing.)

It's not unlike those days. Here, in space. With no head of house to stare at him nervously, but also no dark wizard to touch his shoulders and whisper validation (pulling him in like gravity). It's just Severus, working on puzzling out how to get what he wants from a new set of circumstances and series of limitations. The Tranquility is the trade-off to escape politics, and what a bloody abysmal deal on both sides that is.

He swears a lot in private. At the ship, at the way magic slips from his fingers when it shouldn't. He spends his free hours in the dark of his quarters, deep inside the walls of Occlumency, finding small respite in the silence of his own mind. But mostly he works: Xenogen of course, still occasionally drifting through Medical - though they need fewer extra people now, thankfully, it means he's less likely to run into Lily - and tending to the portion of the gardens now set aside for proper herbology.

He moves to level 010. He sort of hates it. What else is new.