multiversallogs | paranoia paranoia everybody's coming to get me

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paranoia paranoia everybody's coming to get me

Who: Penelope Lane and Snape, Severus Snape (the younger)
What: An exchange of information and not-as-controlled-as-it-maybe-should-be substances, possibly some rude conversation involving assault and battery
Where: Penelope and Ruby's Haunted-Ass Apartment, Chimer
When: after this
Notes: Closed to just Penelope and babbysnape, plz :3
Warnings: Probably talking about assault/bodily violence, so be aware!

The neighborhood in Chimer where Penelope and Ruby's apartment sits is fairly unremarkable, for Baedal. Tall, somewhat narrow rowhouses sit, in their brightly painted, pleasant, unobjectionable way, in long blocks situated around curving streets which really ought to be picturesque, if they weren't so ordinary looking.

That said, for anyone who can notice those sorts of things, about two blocks from the apartment, the sheer volume and intensity of warding on the unassuming little building begin to make themselves apparent. One would think that having a slightly mean thought while walking down the street by the house would result in being blown clear out of the neighborhood, if it weren't for Penelope herself, who would surely have been rocketed across town by now if that were the case. By the time you're at its front steps, two things may make themselves known to people who are slightly more attuned; One, that its upper floor is haunted as all fuck, and two, that whoever is inside it is most likely piss-scared of something, given the accumulation of all the given information.

People that don't notice this kind of thing will just think it looks like a rather nice neighborhood.

When the doorbell rings, it takes a second for Penelope to open the door, given she's navigating with a crutch and a casted foot, and all. But when she does, and it turns out it's Severus, she turns and just starts hobbling back into her apartment towards the living room, with a vague wave to indicate an invitation inside. Make yourself at home, apparently.

"Hope you didn't have any trouble getting out here. The trains have been full of fucking weirdos lately." Penelope collapses onto the couch in the living room with a surprising amount of sinking-into-pillows for someone so petite, and puts her plaster-casted foot up on the coffee table. She declines to say why these weirdos are any different from the weirdos that normally inhabit Baedal's train system.

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Penelope shrugs, slouching back down on the couch with the air of a woman who really could not give a shit one way or the other. It is extraordinarily practiced, but nonetheless accurate.

"Oh damn," she deadpans in her quick, disaffected way, "I was hoping to have it framed."

This means 'Do what you do best', in not so many words, and she trusts him to infer that. She's more or less the total opposite of him, that way-- she frequently says only the opposite of what she actually means, and he seems to only say exactly what he wants others to know. In a weird way, Penelope respects that, if only because it signifies the same kind of brain-clouding circular logic she understands.

"So like, what do we do about this? I mean obviously I'm gonna kill some bitches," although that is exactly what she means, "but then what? They're some dumb motherfuckers if they didn't think we were just going to trace the fucking letter, but they were smart enough to stage it as an accident in the first place, so."

She waves her hand in the air, as if the motion of it is just going to finish her sentence for her. It does its job.

Severus wasn't asking permission, anyway. (He's a nice boy, honest.) But he sets it aside for now, because if he's going to do the spell, he'll be doing it inside his own wards - the ones here seem fine for what they're set up to do, but he isn't an idiot.

"Considering that the city itself breathes magic and cannot function without it, I suspect the people who did this are not high on the terrorist food chain," he posits, dry. "Even the ones who've been assaulting the city at large for the past several months have the good sense not to go after that which makes life possible."

He pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his inside jacket pocket - Hellsing's brand, the kind whose smoke burns vampires - and offers one to Penelope, first.

"Are you being facetious about that? Killing them."

(He isn't.)

"Dumbass terrorists who don't understand how the world works can be some of the most dangerous, though. I mean, look at all those ignorant fuckers blowing up women's health clinics."

Penelope takes the cigarette from him and lights it with her own little silver lighter, then offers to light his. Check her out, being a gracious-ass host.

"Cards on the table-- I've never killed anybody before. But I mean, I've never very nearly been beaten to death before, so I guess there's a first time for everything." Whether or not she was actually that close to death is irrelevant. Hyperbole is her comfort zone. "Like I know my Mom and my father and my uncle would be so fucking ashamed of me for even considering it but I have never felt like that before. Like some asshole decided I would be worth more as a dead body with a telegram stapled to it than as a living human being. Like I have never in my life felt worthless before, but."

Penelope takes a long drag, letting that hang in the air. It'd be strange, the airing of her grievances, if she didn't seem more angry than emotionally vulnerable. (As if that were something she could be.)

"I had people back home. A family, a handful of friends. People who would have noticed. I was in the hospital for five days and nobody even knew."

He murmurs something that passes for a polite gesture in thanks for the light, but beyond that, has no comment - certainly no sympathy. Severus likes Penelope, for as much as he can like anyone without tipping the scales into madness (so it's like an easy tolerance mixed with curiosity, opposed to his usual aggressive apathy). But there's naught to argue with; it's true, he didn't notice, and he's sure he wouldn't have even if he hadn't been in seclusion at the time.

But all that is irrelevant.

"If there is anything, any shred, even the barest hint about you that may hesitate, or feel tormented, then put it out of your mind." His voice is firm, knowing. Unnerving. "In fact that is the best advice I can give you."

You have a soul, Penelope. She speaks of family and her heart and for all the rage and venom, she isn't dark; that much Severus can see plainly. She doesn't need to become a monster because someone else hurt her.

(But Severus already is a monster.)

Penelope wasn't exactly expecting advice from Severus, even especially good advice, so it's the rare sort of thing that rather than getting an immediate smartass reply, it's greeted with a heavy, ponderous silence while she thinks it over.

She knows she's capable of it; most people are, whether they accept that fact or not. Her father wasn't, and it was probably the death of him. Whether she was capable of accepting the emotional aftermath of killing another human being wasn't something she, in her revenge-tinted bloodlust, had really stopped and contemplated. For a split second, she's annoyed that he's made her do so, because now she's having to confront the fact that she's possibly more emotionally fragile now than she's been since she graduated from high school, and that's not a conclusion she's happy to have reached.

"Okay, but I can still kick seven kinds of shit out of them, though, right." Har dee har har. What passes for deflecting humor in Penelope's brain. (Angus chooses this moment to hop up on the couch next to her. Her hand moves over to scratch his back, as if she's not even aware she's doing it.)

Severus wonders if he should feel uncomfortable, observing this. Instead it's just distantly interesting.

"I'm sure that you could." There's a but coming, perhaps. He takes a drag instead.

"Do you want to? Do you really want to. Find them, confront them, hear the things they'll say, land a few punches, fear revenge. You'll have to see them, hear them, know every face and voice, and it'll stick in your memory, even after your bruises fade."

He isn't saying it to be cruel.

Instinctually, she is aware of that. It doesn't stop her from scowling anyway. Thankfully the enormous orange cat crawling possessively into her lap distracts her enough to put her usual expression of jaded boredom back on.

"I really hope you're not about to try and convince me that making them suffer is useless or pointless or whatever because that'd be really fucking annoying," she deadpans. Angus stares at Severus, watching. "Am I not fucking entitled to the sweat of their brow, and also their blood, after I'm through with them? Because I think I fucking am."

"I would never suggest such a thing." And as blithe as he sounds about it, it's the truth; making people suffer always has a point, and suffering is a many-layered art, to be appreciated.

"I'm merely suggesting you not do it yourself."

You have your whole life to live, you've never murdered a unicorn, there are people who miss you back home and you appear to have an at least partially functioning moral compass, etc and so forth.

How very dare you, Penelope would never hurt Wolfgang, he is a precious flower and he has fantastic cheekbones.

"Is that you volunteering for the job, because. I mean I got a laundry list of people pissed off about it. Have you seen Ilde's teeth, they're like a horrorshow."

That would be a non-sequitor if she wasn't entirely aware that Severus was fully capable of putting two-and-two together. That's more or less a question of 'What do I do about all these bitches that I said could come with'.

"Ilde is actually who appraised me of your situation." Because he was ill, Penelope will recall, and so he was not in any condition to have been reading the network when she initially addressed it with such (appropriate) vitriol.

The implication is not deliberately 'Ilde enabled me to kill someone for you', but that's the reality of it. She and Severus speak the same language, and it isn't always a pleasant one.

"I've got a fair amount of experience in situations like these." ... In murdering people, Severus?

"Yeah, I figured that," she mumbles around her cigarette. Mostly because Ilde was the only person she really trusted to show, initially. She's still trying to decide if that was a good idea, given that Ilde went on to show it to Severus without asking, but since she likely would have done the same thing eventually anyway, she's decided not to hold it against her.

She is definitely going to think twice before sharing anything like that again, though. Her paranoia upon arriving in Baedal has been wildly unrestrained.

"Admit it, you just don't want me to fuck this up somehow." Penelope hugs Angus closer to her. If it were possible to shed possessively, Angus would be doing so right now. "That bushy-haired English witch chick, the one that doesn't swear, she was bitching about 'this is exactly what they want you'll be making a martyr out of them' blah blah. She freaked out a little bit like she'd been through shit like this before. I'm gonna go ahead and infer that this is not the first time magic people started killing the shit out of people for funsies, world domination and/or ethnic cleansing. Correct me if I'm wrong."

He feels no shade of compunction about speaking with Ilde; Penelope is a being of magic, like they are, and thus it is their business what happens to her in this context - and even more so Severus' business in particular, being a wizard with her a witch. Ilde isn't human, it isn't quite the same, and thus deferred appropriately.

And on the heels of that cruel thought, Severus takes a turn in the opposite direction-

"You aren't wrong," he says, and if he's capable of gentleness (he isn't, not quite, but almost) he's as close as can be. "I have spent much of my life fighting in similar circumstances. I've seen what happens when people who aren't meant to take lives end up killing. I don't think that you need to."

It sounds awkward because it's true. And he's not terribly good at expressing true things.

The revelation that apparently most of the worlds that contain magic end up having hideous magic-assisted wars is not surprising. It is somewhat surprising, though, that her world has more or less avoided those kinds of conflicts. Not that the great number of magic-using people in her world are any smarter or less power-hungry than the rest of humanity, but generally speaking they kept most conflicts to the level of family feuds with the occasional Montague/Capulet-style handful of casualties. Or necromancers. Everybody hates fucking necromancers.

"So, I'm sorry, you're trying to do what here, save my soul? Because I can absolutely assure you if you've got this impression that I'm some kind of innocent virgin who needs protection I am not only so far beyond perplexed as to find it laughable that you've gotten that impression but also kind of annoyed that there's someone out there spreading the vile rumor that I'm anything but the rank bitch I spend a frankly staggering amount of personal energy on maintaining the self-image of. Dishonor. Dishonor on them, dishonor on their cow, dishonor on their whole family."

Penelope smokes like that wasn't the strangest series of phrases ever uttered by mankind.

The cultural reference is, predictably, lost on Severus; eve if he was the Disney-watching type, his contemporary time is a few decades behind for that one.

Instead, his only reaction is to look vaguely bemused. Protection is not something he is offering, merely advice - he wonders if she realizes that now that she's given him that note, he'll be going off to do this with or without her blessing. To anyone who half-glances at her, that attitude is a deliberately cultivated thing. People who kill don't cultivate anything. Penelope is attempting to seem broken; Severus is.

It's strange to see someone want to be that way. Even if she is funny when she gets going.

"The time for your needing protection has, evidently, passed." Well, that wasn't nice, Severus. "Your soul is your own business; your ability to make good on your threats is another matter. I do not believe you are a killer."

Whether or not her attitude is an affectation his more or less irrelevant, in Penelope's view. It's a necessity, one that she's convinced herself through trial and error is the kindest way of metaphorically grabbing people by the face and pushing them over backwards. If they don't like her in the first place, they won't be disappointed when that friendship later ends up getting them hideously killed!

And, you know, she just genuinely doesn't like a majority of people anyway, so. Bonus.

If she were a different person, she might have taken offense at his rude reminder of the assault, but since her casts have been doing a pretty consistent job of doing that anyway, it just produces a shrug and a flicker of a facial expression translating as 'okay, fair enough.'

"Okay but now it sounds like you're daring me to do it. Which, I really gotta say, not the greatest way of trying to get an American to not do something. In general." She's enjoying this.

"I hadn't factored petty stereotypes into things," he admits, unbothered. "And I still don't believe you."

He probably won't ever, either; if she decides to ~prove him wrong~ and murder somebody to make a point to him, well... she's got bigger problems than her current predicament.

"I'll let you know if anything comes of it."

"Well, jesus, don't let me stop you. What the fuck am I supposed to do in the meantime, sit here with my thumb up my ass and play dumb if anyone asks? I mean I'm kind of invested in this now, and you're just gonna take the ball and run with it and leave me sitting here useless? I mean god knows I'm not exactly the most, like, learned individual--"

You have no idea how accurate that is, Penelope.

"--but I have to do something. I need... I don't know. Something."

It's that combination of her desire for vengeance and the absolute necessity to take her control back that makes her shake with rage at night, when nobody else is around to laugh at her for it and think her even weaker than she's recently been made well aware that she is.

"Unless you'd like to be an accessory? Yes."

If he needs to end up sanctioned by a guild retroactively, he supposes he could, but honestly it's easier to just handle things his own way - if he wanted to, Severus could very well argue that Penelope has hired him, via this conversation. He'll just be waiving her fee as a community service, being such a nice guy.

"I'm afraid I can't help you with the rest."

Soul-searching beyond 'don't become a murderer, it isn't pleasant' is beyond him. She obviously can't go hunt these people down and kill them on her own, and it would be recklessly stupid to take her with him. She's got to square it with herself on her own.

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