ataraxionlogs | when all of your wishes are granted

Severus pulls the face she can't, a mostly involuntary shudder. Honestly that sounds absolutely, undeniably terrible. Obviously it wasn't as bad as it could have been, if she was able to hold out until she was found, but barely. Merlin.

"It's a complete horrorshow. There are murals of passengers, and when other people manipulate them, it's causing reality to bend to compensate. Somebody took a knife to mine."

Which is why he's been out for a damn day.

Determined not to bleed to death from the face if at all possible, Ilde had eventually clawed her way to her feet and through sheer grim perseverance had made it a fair way under her own power before being discovered by Sally and Ivan; it's not an experience she's in any hurry to relive. Or dwell on at any great length.

"Jesus," not mildly. "And I thought I'd never miss the days my son just drew a cock on every newspaper."

It's probably not worth thinking about what would've happened if someone had drawn disembodied penises on any of the men of the Tranquility, frankly, and after a moment Ilde almost grimaces again as she reconsiders the potential harmlessness of hilarious dick drawings.

For a moment, no expression, and then Severus's eyebrows knit together in something that says both 'Ilde that's disgusting' and 'wow that's actually a really awful thought let's put that aside entirely', and maybe he's blank-faced and stereotypically male enough to get away with not looking like he feels any personal resonance with it. (He doesn't know how to articulate otherwise anyway.)

Instead: "I had a student who had a similar compulsion, but I told him if he kept it up I'd charm his pen to transfer everything to his face."

Severus is a great teacher.

They can just sidle away from that conversational pothole, Ilde is absolutely fine with that.

"I think Guy got tired of it after his sister pinned him down and developed an artistic side all over his face," she said, with a flicker of something that resembles a smile; the longer she's here, the more she sort of wants to talk about them, as if to remind herself that they go on existing, that they aren't still the small, silly things that she treasures photographs of in her room. Keep them fixed in her mind like a north star she can navigate by, because they have been something to live for since they were born.

(One day, she'll tell someone Gulistan's name, and that she loved her, and it'll be more than she's said of her youngest daughter in years.)

"So you know it works, as deterrents go."

Kids are weird. Severus doesn't think he was ever a normal one, and he doesn't think Lily was either, but in a very different way. His students have always been very important to him - but as children, or little things to protect and educate, problems to solve, symbols to build back up? He's not sure. Certainly there's nothing paternal about him.

"It's a private school for magical students, we have a number of options for deterrents. A hard line at torture and transfiguration, though."

Hogwarts. Jazzhands.

"I ended up homeschooling with some of our neighbours. Not exactly the original plan, but it does mean I get to decide what all the hard lines are."

Eton and Cheltenham, and then Oxford for preference or Guildhall if they insisted. Rowing for Guy, swimming for Yvonne. A musical instrument. Yvonne would've had a debut, probably in the nearish future, followed by a successful career in either show business or politics (if you asked her mother); Guy, in all likelihood, would've remained a financial drain on his tolerantly affectionate parents for an indeterminate amount of time.

Instead, when she says neighbours, she means people a solid hour's drive - at least - from the chateau, forcibly carving out something like normalcy behind the barbed, electrified wire fences of whoever is hosting this week. It's a bandaid on an artery, but what are you going to do? What's anyone going to do?

It's not that it feels more stupid from a distance. It feels stupid up close and personal, it's just maybe everything does and if drinking red wine with other women who understand that while they pour over their childrens' history essays makes them feel better about the inevitable decay of everything that ever made sense, fine. It's not as if they're not being practical; Jasper keeps a shooting range on their property and some of the older ones do respectably well.

She thinks about correcting herself - mainly my husband, really because it's true - but doesn't. She turns her rings around her finger, and says, "Did anyone die?" because she wants to know, abruptly.

"Seems I came the closest." He rolls with it. Ilde is still Ilde, he thinks, even if the distance now is the size of an ocean instead of the bathtub she's in; she's the aristocrat parent of one of his spoilt students and not someone who could be shuffled in with Narcissa's friends. It makes him miss being angry at her, which is stupid. But he's quite good at being angry. "You might be in second place. Unless you mean at my school."

Which is a different depressing tale altogether.

"I remember what you've told me before about your school," she says, resting her arms on the side of the tub to prop herself up into more of a sitting position, for the sake of continued conversation; it feels a bit odd to be so reclined, when she doesn't really want to feel more like an invalid than she has to. Being essentially confined to the equivalent of bedrest is annoying enough (she's never been a good patient). "I'm guessing that's not a story that always ended with a rousing tale of administrative mishandling."

Not that she imagines dead students were handled substantially better, just that maybe it's discussed in a different tone, the emphasis hitting different notes.

"I thought I might die when the second person I ran into on the way here was a vampire, but miracles never fucking cease, do they?"

Severus just makes a 'mm' noise. Student death is always a tragedy, no matter what. Usually it's handled fine, but-- war. The slim student population weighs on him, as it does all Hogwarts teachers.

His eyebrows go up at the mention of a vampire. "Nice to know there's at least one around with impulse control better than a rabid dog."

Given the threat her own children live under - given Gulistan - Ilde is as happy not to dwell on the thought of dead students, handled well or poorly. (Is there a good way to do that? There should be a better method of dealing with students threatening each other and near-misses such as what he went through, but the thought of needing to develop a streamlined response to the death of a child is an appalling one, however likely in a world like Severus'.)

"He ended up carrying me. Given that I was spouting blood from the face..." A shrug. She'd had time to be impressed by that.

"Congratulations to him for meeting the lowest run of functional decency." Severus is a very well-educated dark wizard who knows an awful lot about vampires, but he still finds the Oh No I Am So Hungry drama to be really stupid. He's quite content that Ilde was unharmed by one - particularly considering all the idiotic things she was up to with bloodsuckers while here - but he's not going to suggest this bloke who hauled her up here get a medal for not killing her in the process.

"I'd say well done for the getting you here bit, genuinely." Not the not eating her bit though. That they can all learn how to do or be lit on fire while he watches on impassively.

Ilde is not going to bring up that time she anything ever with a vampire, previously. (She remembers Elena with not uncomplicated feelings; Angelus blurs into every other bad idea she had when she was in her early twenties, which is sort of great, if something that would doubtless offend every fiber of his being.)

"I appreciated it," she says, instead, drolly.

And she had, which certain people in her life might be relieved by, if they knew. Certain people who might not have always been sure that that might be the case, in such a scenario, besides the vampire part. And she misses Jasper, too, but that wouldn't surprise him. He's been wrangling her and the world around her for a decade and a half - of course she misses him when a crisis hits and she has to handle it herself. She thinks he would even say so, possibly without looking up from a newspaper if he could find one, and she misses the comfort of knowing what to expect.

A beat later, "It's an odd how things work here. Coming and going. I sort of want a scar to see if I ever leave again, if I have one on the other end. If I just don't know where it came from."

"No, you don't want a scar." Demonstratively, he points. At her face. Which is still healing. He lowers his hand. "You want your head to work. You want to be able to see through the manipulation of time and reality."

Another day he might sound very serious. Today, Severus sounds a bit like he's discussing the weather.

"But don't we all."

"I'd settle for a scar," but she doesn't really mean it, reflexive, and it sounds too resigned to the fact that he is completely, blithely correct to be at all convincing an argument. There are times she's contrary enough to make the effort to be argumentative; this isn't one of those times. All the effort she has in her for the next little while went into not bleeding to death on the shuttle bay floor - she's going to have to work her way back up to giving enough of a damn about being difficult to pick pointless arguments for the sake of keeping someone trapped in conversation with her.

Besides, he came in here and sat down to talk with her of her own volition. She probably doesn't have to fight with him to extend that interaction. Doing so might actually be entirely counterproductive.

--the twitch of her lips is the grimace she can't quite indulge. "I'd settle for being able to come to a fucking conclusion about anything." They have so much, and it's still just conjecture and condescension. Even Ilde is frustrated by that.

"I have two conclusions." His elbows are rested on his knees again, leaned forward. This almost feels like they're actually friends; it's easier because he knows they aren't. This is a strange in-between time. He can't be friends with anyone he can't fight with, and he recognizes that this woman has grown the fuck up in a way he might never.

"The first is that this ship was made to terraform into different realities. Stealing resources, harvesting life, all things to benefit its origin universe - leaving behind mass destruction but never hurting home, and so never facing any consequences."

People say that motherhood changes you; it didn't change Ilde enough. She's a loving mother, but not a very good one - she grew the fuck up because the world started ending and there's no safety-net for that. More of one, for someone like her, but not so much that she could afford to do anything but drag herself up from her knees and learn how to live in it. So she did. And she has. And it never really feels like enough, but how many more years will it matter for?

God doesn't know. God is dead. Things that would have taken her aback, before, are possibilities to be realistically considered, now, and she does. A part of her remembers recoiling, a little, from the realization of how much Nathan Petrelli had come to accept this as just their lives, now. That girl feels a century ago, a story she told herself so she could comfort herself that she's better than something.

"What are we, in that scenario? Resources?"

That's what they are in any scenario that she can think of.

Edited 2014-11-24 08:28 (UTC)

"Either that or accidents." He shrugs his shoulders, minutely. "The jump drive dragging debris in, instead of moving the ship out. They do like to toss around the word 'mistakes'."

Which is unnerving, but also interesting, because it could mean about a thousand things. Severus once told Nathan Petrelli that he was never going to subscribe to a particular theory, and he's kept to that. In some ways it's a defense mechanism because he's seen how the obsession can eat away at people, but he also wants to keep all his options open, so that he misses less.

"The other conclusion is that, of course, we've been taken here more or less on purpose, perhaps not personally, but as products of other realities to have experiments run on is."

"So then our population is the way it is because if it were too varied, suddenly the results might not be relevant to whatever it is." It's not a bad theory. None of them are bad theories (most of them aren't bad theories), but there are so many of them. Plausible possibilities that you could make a case for based on the evidence at hand. It's the gaps that are the problem, the places where you have to make a leap--

Also, maybe her internal monologue should steer away from visuals involving leaping and falling for a while. Her face still hurts.

"I love the 'whatever it is' part of that sentence, that was my favourite part."

A restless flick of her caudal fin.

"'Whatever it is' remains our battlecry." Wry. And then Severus exhales heavily and pushes himself to his feet, slow with the aches and pains spread throughout everywhere.

"But that's a long debate for when we're not both in the infirmary." Your face, Ilde. His face. Severus probably shouldn't be having her talk so much, or having himself talk so much.

"I'll hold you to that," she says, though it's idle - warm enough, quietly appreciative of the visit, but not presuming too much on the back of it. It's a conversation worth having, and someone worth having it with, that's the truth; they aren't really friends, and that's the truth, too.

They aren't specifically not friends, either, though. She'll take that, somewhere like this, and not feel as if she's too badly settling. Friendship bracelets aren't all they're cracked up to be, but you can't put a price on somebody with more sense than God gave a turnip who might prefer you alive.

"Try taking it easy, so you can speak from a place of experience when you tell everyone later you did and you hated it."

when all of your wishes are granted

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