multiversallogs | i lost all of the fear

When she speaks to the manager the first time, it's something of a gamble; she doesn't expect much to come of it, and she'll wait this out if she has to, but it seems worth trying. Sleeping pills are more likely to kill her than help her, nothing else seems to be working, and she's tired. The third call, when he asks her to come by, she's on her way out the door mid-conversation, already doing mental estimates of how much money she can afford to put to this right now and whether or not she'll be able to pay in instalments if it goes over her budget.

She arrives relatively promptly, the sound of her heels on the floor announcing her; she looks human enough at first glance, but even a mundane human might notice the oversaturated quality of too real about her appearance, even if they can't see through the illusion to what she is beneath it.

It is not that Severus is adept at spotting fae from thin air - glamors, however, are another story entirely, particularly ones that've colored outside the lines a bit.

He sits up when Ilde enters, and the scrutiny in his gaze is plain. He says nothing for a time, and then he shakes his head slightly and moves to put his book away. As he does, he remarks, "Iron allergy is creative phrasing," tone incredibly dry.

Ilde is patient for as long as it takes Severus to decide to speak, and her smile is thin and reflexive when he does. The examination doesn't stir a reaction, or an expression for that matter- she doesn't care to be looked at, most of the time, but that and not a desire to pass is the reason for the glamour. She's controlling what they see. It's fine.

"Accurate, too," she says, neat and bland. "It made me ill in small concentrations." Ill and weak.

"Stop eating hamburgers," he says, and it's almost sniping, mostly flippant. But he gestures for her to sit down, so it must be fine. To Severus, there are dark creatures, and then there is the fae; the true fae, not the inbred watered-down pets that flit about the edges of the wizarding world, but the horrors that keep to themselves away from the rest of these mere mortals. A genuine elf or fairy could cut him up into tiny charmed pieces with the slightest glance - the fact that this whatever-she-might-be is soliciting his help suggests she could not, in fact, do such a thing, but Severus is not a willful idiot.

(He's also curious.)

"You have nightmares."

One eyebrow goes up, very briefly, but she sits, sets her handbag down by her feet, and doesn't exhale all the way. There's much more she's capable of than she knows how to wield, but for now she lacks the confidence and familiarity to reach for it - thus, here she is. Her lifespan is such that, in an ideal world, she would have more than enough time to learn - centuries, at least - but the likelihood of her living that long gets slimmer every day.

It will be a shame.

"There are serpents in the fog when you go overland," she says, matter of fact. "One of them bit me while it was attempting to choke me to death. The nightmares are related."

What a fantastic-sounding venom, he thinks, but does not say. Instead: "I'll need to see the incision site, and know in as much as detail as you can recall exactly how you were treated."

The moment before the illusion fades, there is no warning; one moment she's an artist's impression of a beautiful woman in cloche hat and velvet jacket, and in the space of a heartbeat...she's still wearing the hat and the jacket, but she's neatly removing both, sweeping her long hair over her opalescent shoulder, gleaming in the low light, her eyes uniformly blue and so dark as to seem black here, oversized with sweeping lashes.

She half-turns where she sits, brisk and straightforward, twisting so she can keep watching him (to see him speak); she was prepared for this, evidently, wearing a camisole low enough in the back that he can see where the bite is healing on her shoulder-blade. The bruises on her throat are still ugly, but faded, and no longer bothering her speech.

"It seemed minor at the time; I cleaned it up." Her teeth, when she speaks, are fleetingly visible - needle-sharp and predatory. "The choking concerned me more, at first." It had taken her a few nights for it to properly sink in that the nightmares were out of the ordinary, which spoke less to their severity and more to Ilde's own state of mind. "I don't know enough about my own physiology - nixie - to safely do much, and it didn't seem severe." She says the name of her species a little like a talisman; she's not one of those watered down pets, but she is, unfortunately, lost.

Edited 2011-08-22 10:56 (UTC)

Well that was... abrupt. It's not that he didn't expect it, but he didn't expect such a drastic change of shade. He doesn't startle, but he does go tense for a moment. (Within the ranks of the Dark Lord's army, he sat beside many an inhuman, but his nerves are still not quite steel. Someday, he won't see a werewolf out of the corner of his eye when he thinks about the difference in species. Today, he still does.)

"Rhine-maiden," he reflects, almost to himself. Slowly at first, he leans forward to inspect the wound. "I strongly suspect you should be able to coax your system to purge itself of the toxin, particularly considering the source. You are unable?"

Under any other circumstances, she probably would've enjoyed that reference. She'll remember it later, at some point, and smile at nothing evident to observers.

However. The next admission is one she doesn't enjoy, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with who she's admitting it to. Her gaze drifts away from him, though she'll glance back if she notices him speak again- "I don't know how. I...came into my birthrights in- captivity." She's choosing her words very, very carefully and the tension is evident in her clenched knuckles on the back of the chair. This is not an easy topic, and Severus is not exactly a man who sets people at their ease. (Ever.)

So it's a safe bet she wasn't talking about hamburgers, earlier.

He makes a noise like a snort, and it's just to one side of rudely dismissive. Either her painful revelation fails to tug at his heartstrings because he is an impossibly cold man, or because terrible suffering is commonplace in his eye, and thus unshocking. (It's both.)

"I've been called very cruel," he tells her, and rises to go search for a book. "Yet I've never kept a single person as a test subject." What priorities people have. "It is beyond me why any of your kind would ever associate with humans."

His reaction (and/or lack of reaction) doesn't stir one in her, curiously blank as she is besides the clenched hands; his manner thus far makes it unsurprising, and she'd have probably doubted anything more sympathetic. It's why she keeps back much of what she's given more freely elsewhere, because it's one thing to defy Prometheus's shame and it's another to risk making herself some cold, likely bigoted human's amusement.

"You aren't all useless." She is perhaps not humanity's biggest fan on the whole, no, and her ignorance about her own nature is a sore point. (She has a number of those, but he's unlikely to find the more commonly prodded wound.) "But all of those people are dead." She remembers the taste of human blood and the satisfaction of taking away his ability to even scream and it soothes the tension out of her hands, enough to get her through the rest of this conversation. That will do.

"We have an army, at home, to make things even." At no point in all of this does her tone ever change; it's a defense mechanism, her stillness, the serenity she draws around herself so falsely. It serves. Here she veers left again in topic, which isn't unusual for either her or any other fae, "In the fog, things don't behave the way they're supposed to or expected to."

It's irritating, and one of the reasons she's a music teacher and not doing fog-runs.

Severus' bigotry is something so deeply ingrained that it's a wonder he even recognizes it for what it is at all. Since his birth, the notion of putting people into teams based on their differences and then pitting those teams against each other has been drilled into his head. Muggles versus witches and wizards. Boys versus girls. Rich versus poor. Black versus white. GIs versus VCs. Slytherin versus Gryffindor. Mudbloods, purebloods, muggle-borns, squibs... The Order, Death Eaters. Werewolves. The sheer amount of lines in the sand - wars aside - are overwhelming when looked at critically, but grossly invisible when lived within.

Intellectually, he knows that there are people who are not like this, but in all his years he has only ever known that concept as something abstract, like other people know fairy tales. There has been nowhere for him to look, nowhere for him to come up for air, that has been without violent, endless hatred. He does not hate Ilde for what she is, nor does he find her disgusting. But she is on someone else's team. Like everyone, and everything, else.

"Fair enough," he says of her army, and sounds like he actually means it. He pulls a book down at last, and goes to sit with it, opening it on his desk. "There are a few things it sounds close to, I'm going to have to determine which seems the closest..." It's an awful lot of reading - symptoms, behavior patterns, feelings...

Edited 2011-08-23 09:41 (UTC)

The necessary back and forth on those symptoms, behaviour patterns and feelings is easier than the earlier conversation; Ilde is brisk and cooperative, clearly disengaged but sufficiently forthcoming and that is presumably what matters for the purposes of this conversation. It's not as though he's in a position to throw stones from his glass house of mental health, and it's hard to say how much of her stillness and more disjointed, brief answers here are necessary because of subject matter and how much of it is simply the fact that she doesn't think it means a damn thing to him either way if she pretends to be better than she is or if she doesn't.

There are good days and bad days, but she isn't better. This entire experience is, in some ways, a sharp and marked reminder of that.

There are no stones to be thrown; if Severus notes anything, it is simply that Ilde seems mild and average in her demeanor. It speaks more to his home world than it does to him personally that he sees people without obvious signs of psychological trauma as the odd ones.

When he's sorted which map to use, he sits back, resting his knuckles against his mouth for a moment in an unconsciously thoughtful pose before he speaks. "Obviously there is no textbook cure. I'll be using a pattern and altering it, then tailoring it to fit you personally, so to speak. Like all anti-toxins, I'll need the original venom, which means I'll need your blood. As it's already running rampant in your system, the finished product will be rough; it will be the cellular equivalent of taking sandpaper to your retinas. I can make it, it will work, but administration will be unpleasant."

'Unpleasant', it bears noting, is an understatement.

"Or," and he shifts his weight to lean on one elbow, "I can sell you a supply of a potion that will prevent you from dreaming. It is habit-forming, and should be used sparingly, as suppressing REM will ultimately damage your brain if carried on with for too long. You can supplement and attempt bloodletting and wait it out. It will be slow going, but ultimately less painful, and less expensive."

Edited 2011-08-23 10:43 (UTC)

Watching him as he explains, Ilde remains silent when he's done, taking time to mull over her options. The potion is tempting, and for that reason she immediately rules it out; disturbed sleep isn't a new thing, just new in this particular form, and she views the addiction as unfortunately likely. She's managed, 'til now, and she will continue to manage. Making it worse isn't what she's here for, and she's realistic about the likelihood. She has too much else going on in her mind at night to convince herself that she'd be able to set it aside for only this problem.

Which means either the expensive, painful option, or simply waiting the toxin out.

Quietly, in that same neat, distant tone, "Will it end on its own, if I wait it out without either of these options?"

"I have no idea," he admits, and shrugs one shoulder, the movement somehow elegant. "I suppose I could take notes, take samples, compare it in a week, then another week, and give you a guess. I've not found any documentation on the things in the fog besides wild speculation and ominous warnings; it is an woefully neglected field of research. It depends on your patience - perhaps it will end."

Ilde exhales, and there's not much else to say but: "The anti-toxin. Give me a quote."

Without further commentary, he names his price - it's on the steep side, considering the economy, but not so much to be unreasonable. She'll get what she pays for.

"And I can pay this in instalments?" This is important; she thinks she can scrape the lump sum together soon if she has to, but it'd be far from ideal, and she'd rather get this over and done with sooner rather than later. Pain that will end is better than an addiction that might not.

"That's fine." Of all things, he is not unkind about finances; it's the sort of helpless frustration that sticks with a person. He pulls out a sheet of paper, and begins penning a sensible contract.

Conversely, it's a new concern for Ilde - she'd worried about money when she was still living in Italy, but it was an abstract concern that came out of being prone to worrying on principle and with the awareness that her father's reliability was hit or miss. She grew up in the lap of luxury, and while she'd carefully educated herself, she'd never been in the position of having to ask how much something cost. It trips her up here and there, now, but in the grand scheme of things she's still doing well enough that she'll save her tantrums (...knifings) for everything else.

There's a lot of everything else. When there's one less thing to worry about, thank fuck for that.

"Thank you." She's courteous, not embarrassingly grateful, and more or less satisfied with this meeting; it's a lot more than she expected to come of it when she contacted the shop in the first place. "Do you need anything other than my blood, from me?"

"Your signature." This is hardly legally binding, but Severus likes to keep records; he finds it helps things move smoothly and, with any transaction for a service, it's best to have something besides a verbal agreement. Even a simple one. He sketches out the details, the timeline (only a few days) and then passes it to Ilde to read and mark.

She does take the time to read it first, less because she suspects him of anything and more because it's simply good sense to do so; even if it isn't legally binding, it's a good idea to know what you're signing your name to at any given time. Records and lists make her oddly comfortable, like nailing down something that otherwise feels vague and ephemeral. (Reality. It's not supposed to, she thinks.)

She signs.

While she's reading, Severus pulls out another sheet of paper and writes out a few lines - book titles, and their authors. When she's done, he trades her. "I cannot vouch for the accuracy of those pertaining to any reality, much less your specific one, but it should be a start." As he speaks, he duplicates the record, so that she can keep a copy, and an envelope floats over to him from the other side of his desk. "I imagine they'll be offensive, as most published studies are conducted by humans. However it would be unwise to not exploit the resources available to you; multiversal libraries are a vein of knowledge most people will never be exposed to."

With that sorted, he stands. "I'll need to draw your blood, and then that will be all for today."

Well. She isn't expecting that, and there's a split second of genuine surprise (then it's gone, because she doesn't care to be examined) as she accepts the list he offers and scans the titles briefly before tucking it, neatly, into her bag. It puts an interesting spin on the rest of their interaction, though she doesn't immediately decide what that is.

"Thank you," she repeats, simply; she'll look into these. Something has to be useful, and it is somewhere to start, which is more than she had half an hour ago. Prior to Prometheus, any number of fruitless visits to the doctor have prepared her for blood tests and the like and she turns her arm up like it's almost habit, thinking in passing that at some point soon she's going to stop doing things that require her to bleed so frequently.

Nothing irritates him more than ignorance. While there is no universe in which he is a nice teacher, it remains a compulsion, brittle as it may be.

So he takes the samples he needs, and they both get on with their day.

It makes sense to her that she should be taking this under supervision; it's not going to be a pleasant experience, and the cure has the potential to be dangerous in and of itself. A few days beforehand she begins rescheduling her music lessons to clear a couple of days after, considering the not unlikely possibility that she's really not going to be feeling like dealing with anyone. (She takes the opportunity to vaguely imply scheduling priorities and demands on her time, essentially because she can charge more if she's sought after, and she's good enough to get away with it.)

After killing a bit of time on the network, she presents herself at the apothecary, promptly on time.

Brusque but professional - coddling would be disingenuous in a hundred ways, and he's not good at it anyway - Severus ushers Ilde into the basement, which is despite its look, clean. There's a cot set up, and he runs through a reader's digest version of his brewing process in a low voice. He has ever confidence hat it will work, but the discomfort she'll feel ... well. It could be just discomfort, but then again, it might not. He hands her the glass, and instructs her to drink it all, quickly.

In just his pressed white undershirt and vest, shirtsleeves rolled up (his left arm, wrist to elbow, is bandaged securely), Severus sits and waits.

With the glass empty, Ilde sits at the edge of the cot and they don't wait long; her hands curl around the wood as it begins to take effect, white-knuckled, and her habitual glamour dissolves as she loses focus on it, pressing her eyes shut and sinking her sharp teeth into her own lip. Blood wells, in her determination not to shriek against the sensation of something burning out of her, centered at the bitemark on her back and spreading through her like a sandstorm. She's made a refuge out of silence and stillness and sometimes it's harder than others to maintain, though the fact of her ability to do so at all right now speaks for itself.

It hurts, in essence.

He watches her seize, and does nothing; another man might hold her or offer her a hand to cling to, but it would be pitying and he doesn't pity her. Severus instead waits for a moment and then, when he's sure it's not anything beyond what he expected, goes about preparing a cold compress and something for her to take after, to ease the shock.

The cot itself gives her something to grip and that's enough for now, that will about do- she doesn't know how long it takes, scraped clean from the inside and left gasping, not quite choking. Her hands ache from clenching and she feels weak, unsteady, worn out by this cure and by the abruptness of feeling as though all her recent sleeplessness has caught up to her, leaving her blurry at the edges.

It's wretched, in the immediate aftermath, but it is at least the clean tiredness of healing and she knows the alternatives so intimately well that the sense of relief almost makes her sick as she slowly and carefully loosens her grip.

He's near her, then, close enough to touch but he doesn't - he knows better. "Lay down," he says, quietly. "Just sit for a while, no one's in any hurry."

Not touching is a very good idea when she swivels in his direction, teeth not quite actually bared. A moment later she remembers where she is, and why, and lying down seems like the very best idea anyone's had in a long time and she does, pulling her feet out of her shoes and curling up to let herself breathe for a moment. Just breathe, nothing more remarkable than that.

"May I have water?" Her own voice, a few minutes later, feels both far away and far too loud at once, while probably being neither.

Edited 2011-09-02 16:53 (UTC)

This time he doesn't even really tense up, though there's a distinct awareness about him all the same. He stays beside her for a moment to make sure she's not going to throw up or faint, and then moves to pick up a glass of water waiting nearby. (There's a pitcher, too, because she's a damned water-being and he's not stupid, along with the recovery potion.)

"It's downhill from here."

Downhill makes her think of afternoons spent rolling down grassy hills because they were there, which is a far more pleasant association than almost anything she's thought about today so far. It occupies her mind as she drinks the first glass, slow and careful, and it is at least a bit less disturbing than some of the ways she usually finds herself a bit of peace lately.

Tucked up on the cot, she tracks him with her eyes, habitual, watching movement and too tired yet to find much meaning in it. Whatever other kinds of bastard he is, his manner is sufficiently distant from what she remembers that her wariness is what's become usual, not something particularly triggered here. He couldn't be called soothing, but he certainly isn't making anything worse.

Making things worse would be counter-productive to ensuring the work he's done is effective. For all the things that he is, Severus is not someone who will self-sabotage his own work. After a few moments, and an instance of refilling her water glass, he asks: "Are you feeling relatively coherent?"

Her feet feel clumsy and superfluous, but she's sufficiently coherent to remind herself that she's not in the water and the urge to curl her tail underneath her is not actually going to help anything right now. Accordingly, after a moment's thought, she says, "Yes. Relatively."

He holds up two fingers, moves his hand, watches her eyes - he's not a doctor, and he's not looking for the typical cognitive signs, but his own little markers; he didn't predict anything like brain or nerve damage from it, but not doing a simple few checks would be ridiculous.

"I'm going to give you something to help you recuperate," he says. "It's a mixture to super-hydrate your particular chemistry, as I suspect you're going to be sitting around for a while out of the water." It's in a steel cup, and seems to be clear - it'll taste very cold, inexplicably.

Ilde follows the movement, though it's harder to tell without clearly visible pupils. (Not impossible, just more difficult, and that's not exactly something with which he's unfamiliar. One assumes.)

The particular coolness of his concoction is soothing, unlike the wizard himself, and she doesn't need to drink it as slowly as she does, it's just a significantly more pleasant experience than the potion had been and preferable to prolong. Chill appeals to her in much the same way a human would gravitate toward warmth; heat doesn't bother her so much as she just doesn't feel the need for it.

"For a while," she agrees, absently, between sips. She's more alert now, just almost drowsy - there's something feline about her languor, like she's going to arch her back and stretch her claws at any moment, and the way she keeps one eye on him at all times doesn't actually detract from the similarity.

Apparently satisfied with her reactions, Severus decides to leave her alone for a while. He's already told her to just sit, and assumes she will, so he moves away and goes about doing some quiet work; he's not going to stare at her unnervingly for an hour, but he's also not going to just kick her out. If he found her presence so abhorrent that he couldn't tolerate her recovering from the initial shock in his office, he'd have met her somewhere that he could leave from.

Her impulse is first of all to go to sleep, and for a while after he leaves her to her own devices she indulges that some and dozes, not deeply. It's restful enough, a stillness to let herself unwind and almost relax, and she drifts there that way for maybe an hour, maybe more. Suffice to say she hasn't exactly been clock-watching since she took that potion.

When she does finally begin to reorganize herself (find her shoes, her handbag, consider the monumental task of standing up), it's mostly because she suspects she will actually fall asleep if she's not careful, and she does at some point need to get home. She should've organized for someone to pick her up, but hindsight is 20/20 and she'll be fine, she decides. If she gets worried, she'll sit down somewhere and text somebody.

"Where do you live?" A quiet inquiry, noticing she's starting to gather her things. He assumes based on lack of volunteered information that no one is coming to get her. Maybe she doesn't have anyone, maybe she doesn't want anyone else nosing into her business - it's not something he's going to pry into.

Ilde looks up, then, and considers for a moment before she says, "Raven's Gate, on the bank." It's a good area, and the house they're moving to isn't all that far away - bigger, nicer, but not taking them out of the district they've settled into. Raven's Gate makes sense on a number of levels, handiness to the river being not the least of them.

"...All right." Of course she lives as far away as fucking possible. But he doesn't sigh or appear particularly longsuffering, and instead just starts putting things away, and picks up his cloak.

It takes her a moment to connect action to intent, and not only because she's tired; he doesn't exactly give the impression of someone who feels the obligation to go above and beyond for more-or-less strangers. The fact remains that it does become clear, and she chooses not to question, slipping her feet back into her shoes as she rises and being briefly grateful for the foresight that was wearing flats for once. Getting vertigo from her heels when less than at her best is not unfamiliar, and never pleasant.

"Thank you," she says, because it's polite.

He gestures, dismissive, pulling his cloak on. (Of course he wears a cloak, how dramatic - but then, considering the magic he has wrapped about himself, it's probably not surprise he's in no hurry to show his face in public.) "If you keel over on your way home it would look alarming bad for business."

i lost all of the fear

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( about a week later. )

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