sirilla black is horny with her heart (canisirillacus) wrote in flippedrpg, @ 2012-04-26 23:38:00 |
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Entry tags: | ch: swap: hannah potter, ch: swap: sirilla black, p: abby, p: annalisa |
Who: Sirillaswap & Hannahswap
What: coming back from the dead.
When: Friday
Where: compound hospital
Warnings: SAD. Mentions of death, etc.
Status: Logged, but incomplete (continued in comments)
Sirilla was dreaming, or at least thought she was. Dreaming of a village, a strange little village that had felt even more strangely like home. In the dream she actually lived there; her name was Temperance Church. She was a pure and pious woman of God, but she had seen the face of the devil, and the devil had come after her. The devil’s servant had torn open her throat with a knife, spilled her blood, stolen the life from her body. And the face of evil, the face of her murderer, had been all too familiar.
She woke with a start, sitting bolt upright in bed. Her hands went immediately to her throat, and was surprised to find it intact; she touched her arms and hands then, the other places where the knife had cut into her body. And yet, she felt certain that it had happened. How was she not dead? Was this the afterlife-- no, it seemed to be a hospital. One that was far too advanced for the village where she had been killed. Too advanced even for back home; so far as she knew, St. Mungo’s couldn’t bring back the dead. Surely someone would have told her that, someone would have done it for Jane and Luke, if...
It all came flooding back to her, suddenly. The compound, the scientists, Hannah and Renee, the Marauders from other worlds. The village in her dreams had been outside the compound, she’d gone down there with everyone else, pretending to be Temperance Church, an orphan with a brother. And then it had, somehow, become real.
Had the death been real too? She couldn’t be certain. But it didn’t matter, she was-- apparently-- alive. Second question, was she still in the compound? Given the fact that if she had managed to leave, she would have expected to wake up in Azkaban, she probably was still there. That was a relief. She liked it here better, here she had people she loved, Hannah and Renee...
Renee. Oh god, Renee. She had called her an animal, she had sent the whole bloody village to hunt her friend down, for being a werewolf. Oh, god, it was like she had sent Snape down to the Shrieking Shack again, only a thousand-- a million-- times worse. She hadn’t just let the secret slip, she had acted as though she genuinely thought it was a bad thing. Fuck.
She had to find Renee, and beg her forgiveness, if it wasn’t too late. If the villagers hadn’t killed her. As long as she was still alive, they could hide together, Sirilla would keep her best friend safe, even if Renee didn’t forgive her. Her friend’s safety was what really mattered.
But when she got up, it wasn’t Renee she saw first. She stopped, frozen at the sight of Jane’s dead body, horror rising inside her; a moment later she realized it wasn’t Jane, but Hannah. A moment after that, she had gotten close enough to see that Hannah wasn’t dead, either. “Hannah,” she breathed, reaching out to touch her goddaughter’s hand; what had happened while she’d been out? Why was her goddaughter in the hospital?
She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. It was like a million points of pressure all centralized in one place, and then she felt something hit her and it was more painful than anything she’d ever felt in her life. Worse than falling from her broom, worse than the curses that had been thrown at her thus far, worse than regrowing all of her bones.
She felt something and Hannah sat up stock straight, her hands weren’t bound anymore. They went for her throat, trying to claw at the rope. Her mind didn’t care about the showing she’d made on the scaffold, about a brave manner, she was suffocating, she couldn’t breathe. She needed to get it off. NOW! Hannah’s mind hadn’t gotten a layover between the drop and waking up. To it she was still hanging, somehow conscious – against the odds – but she couldn’t get it off. It was like a waking dream, the mind having suffered a trauma needing time to catch up.
She let out a horrible noise, finally finding herself able to breathe, but not yet noticing her surroundings were different. She just kept clawing at the ‘rope’.
"Hannah!" Sirilla exclaimed again, horrified. She couldn't tell if Hannah was waking up from a nightmare or having some kind of fit, or both. Instinctively, she reached out and grabbed hold of her goddaughter's wrists to stop her clawing at her throat; she was turning the skin red, she was going to draw blood if she wasn't careful. The idea of watching Hannah bleed from her throat, the way Sirilla had just died, was too awful to bear. "What are you doing?"
There was a voice, someone yelling. Her hands were being restrained and Hannah’s head turned, focusing on the voice. Her eyes widened a bit. Siri? That wasn’t possible. She was dead! She couldn’t be here… unless Hannah was dead too? She’d been hanged. But she was lying down, now sitting up…
Hannah’s brain started catching up, she could see something was wrong. She was breathing. There was nothing around her neck. There was no crowd, no dirt roads, no people in period clothing, no gallows or ropes. The teen took a deep breath, it wasn’t constricted, her neck, her back, they… didn’t hurt. And the lights above were bright, almost white. …sterile. “Hospital?” the words came out roughly. Her mind was catching up to where she was. There had been no blackness like when she was asleep, the last thing she’d been falling, the pain had been awful. And now…
It was then that she realized just who it was that was holding her arms. She was there, in front of her. “Siri...?” She hoped against hope that this wasn’t the dream…
"Yeah," Sirilla said, letting out a breath of relief. Her grip on Hannah's wrists loosened as her panic went away, but she didn't let go. If she really was remembering correctly, it had been a while since she'd talked to Hannah properly. She had been bleeding… she had made herself bleed, and Hannah had (understandably) freaked out.
Merlin. What had happened?
She wasn't doing a very good job of processing everything that was in her head, but the way Hannah woke up-- and the way she reacted to her-- told her that she probably should be. "Yes, love, it's me. What happened to you?"
Siri’s hands were still on her wrists. There was physical contact that she could feel. The voice was real, the person in front of her was real. It wasn’t some kind of an illusion. She tried to move her arms, the grip on her loosened, and she was able to. There wasn’t anything holding her up. Everything certainly seemed to be in the right place. Her head didn’t feel like it was about to fall off its moorings. And – what was she wearing? These weren’t hers? But none of that was important.
Instead of answering the question asked of her, Hannah lunged across the table, pulling her arms out of her godmother’s hold, wrapping them around the woman instead. She buried her head in her shoulder and refused to let go. She was here, she was alive. Just like they’d said. They weren’t dead. They must have been back at the compound. It meant that the experiment was over. They’d… they died. The hangings did happen. She knew that. The memories were so vivid. But they were alive! They were here!
Hannah closed her eyes tightly. She wasn’t going to cry and she was NOT letting go. Not again.
Sirilla was taken by surprise when she was hugged, but a moment later she realized why. She had died… had Hannah seen her die, or seen her body afterward? After everything her goddaughter had been through, after losing her parents, that must have been awful. The logistics of how that had happened-- most importantly, how she was managing to not be dead at the moment, if she'd stayed dead long enough for Hannah to notice-- were incredibly confusing, though. Maybe it wasn't her condition that was bothering Hannah; maybe there was something else going on. She could sort that out later. Just now, she had a goddaughter in need of a hug.
Wrapping her arms around Hannah in return, she pressed a kiss to the side of the girl's head. Well, woman, really, but still a girl to her. She was never going to get past the idea of Hannah as a tiny little babe, despite all evidence to the contrary.
"It's alright," she said, lifting a hand to stroke her hair. "All in one piece, both of us."
And that did it. She couldn’t help it, a few tears escaped. She was just so relieved. This wasn’t Temperence Church, the Lady of the Hypnotist Sect, or the one who was devout and Puritan. This was the woman she’d lost, not once now, but twice. And to the same person… or different versions of the same person. It was not something that she was willing to let happen, not something she would EVER happen again. They’d lost too many over their time here. What if next time there wasn’t a way back?!
Hannah bit her lower lip, wiping the tears away. She had died herself, but it wasn’t that that she was concerned about… No that was a lie. It had been the most painful thing she’d ever experienced. But the fact that Padfoot was here… She didn’t even pull back before she started speaking. “It’s not alright,” she said, the words muffled. “You died! And I couldn’t do anything to stop it!” She couldn’t… she just couldn’t.
So it had been her death that had unnerved Hannah. Maybe that explained why she'd been clawing at her throat; had she been dreaming about being stabbed there the way Sirilla had. Her death didn't bother her, though, not really-- at least not philosophically, and she wasn't hurt just now, either. The repercussions of it, though, the fact that people she loved had been forced to deal with it, that wasn't so good.
"I couldn't either," she pointed out. "Bloody Temperance or whatever her name was, she didn't fight back at all. Thought it was God's will, or something."
Well, that probably wasn't helpful. She paused for a moment, and then asked, "So you did think I was actually dead, then? I mean, obviously I'm not dead now. I'm here, love."
God’s will? The idea of her not fighting back was bad enough. But the fact that that woman who wasn’t Padfoot hadn’t even tried… She had to remind herself that yes that woman HAD been a different person. Completely! Someone whom Hannah had never really know. Someone she didn’t WANT to know! But she’d been what Hannah had for a while. And even when she’d been that way… she’d been able to communicate.
The words Sirilla spoke next caused Hannah’s shoulders to stiffen. Think she was actually dead. It left a bad taste in Hannah’s mouth. She just… she couldn’t. She had to tell her but she… not now. Not here. “You were,” she said sitting up. “You… they buried you while I was in jail. After I was found guilty. I-I couldn’t get to you.”
Surprise flitted across Sirilla's expression. "I was buried?" she asked, shocked. The idea of that, being buried underground… when she hadn't really been dead… or had she? "But I just woke up here, I don't even feel like I've been asleep for very long…"
And then the other part of what Hannah said registered. "What? They found you guilty?" Temperance had not thought to pay attention to those sorts of details. She had missed quite a bit of the world going by, absorbed in her prayers as she was. Or maybe that had been after she was already dead; she might as well have been, for all that she'd paid attention. "What happened? They didn't… you're…"
Hannah was alive and well in front of her, but she had woken up here in the hospital too. Just as Sirilla had, and she was meant to be dead. "Did they hang you? Did they--" she hesitated before adding more quietly, "Did they do anything to Moony?"
So it had been the same for Sirilla as it had been for her? No time lag? Hannah pulled back from the hug and nodded in confirmation. She’d been about to explain that she had felt the same way, no time lapse, immediate movement from one to the next, but she wasn’t fast enough. She watched Padfoot’s face as she asked the next questions.
She swallowed before nodding. “They did… The trials were on two different days. I found out you died just before mine and… I didn’t even care about the outcome. They arrested me for witchcraft, used my scar as evidence, I was doomed from the start.” She looked down, not wanting to see her godmother’s face when she told her the rest. “They did… we both…” she paused. “Us and Nora, and Fleur and…”
Hannah looked around for a moment, she saw a few of them on other tables. They were here. They were all here. But what did that mean? Her attention returned to Sirilla. “You got attacked and Regulus was taking care of you, Miles?” Maybe the name would help. “I went after Moony, we spent the night in the woods, and by the time I left them the next morning she’d already been arrested.” She didn’t talk about her own, not yet. That wasn’t the question on the table. “If we’re here, then she’s here too,” the thing pointed out, she knew Sirilla. She knew her only too well. Guilt was a shared trait. And the women needed to talk. And all Hannah wanted to do was forget…
It wasn't the time lapse that bothered Sirilla. A time lapse didn't mean much, really; it was hard to keep track of time when you were sleeping, anyhow. It was the idea that she had been buried that really got to her. That she had been entombed underground when she hadn't even been properly dead. It made her skin crawl; she had never liked confined spaces. She was Padfoot, she was designed for the freedom to run free. Ironic, really, that the next eight-plus years of her life would be spent in a jail cell-- or would have been, if she hadn't ended up here.
But that was nothing on how she felt at the next bit of news. The small pit of dread she'd experienced at remembering how she'd accused Renee grew and nearly overwhelmed her; she had gotten another of her friends killed. And Hannah had died, too. And Nora, another baby (in her mind, at least) that Sirilla barely knew. If she knew who Fleur was, the memory of the woman was escaping her entirely at this moment.
"I'm sorry," she said, swallowing. "I didn't-- I didn't get attacked. I did it all to myself. I had--" she didn't quite know how to explain this, but she might as well try-- "I had this whole other personality in my head, and I was awake but I couldn't do or even think anything, except I could feel, and when-- when I started going after Renee, I tore up my own face with my hands. I think it was partly me trying to make Temperance stop, and partly her trying to make me go away... she thought I was the devil inside her, or something. It was..." She trailed off, shaking her head. "I never want to be possessed by the spirit of some crazy religious bird ever again, let's put it that way."
That hardly mattered, anyway, compared to what had happened to Hannah and Renee. "And at a time when I should have been around to protect you both, not get you both in even more trouble. Even if none of us are really dead-- I'm still really, really sorry."