Rating: PG-13
Fandom:: Discoworld
Pairings: Susan Sto Helit / Jonathan Teatime
Spoilers: Post - Hogfather
Keywords: Angst, Character Sketch
Feedback: How much do I have to beg? *gives puppy-dog eyes*
Summary: For Susan, the ghost of winter is too strong to fade with the passage of time.
Disclaimer: *bows down before the Great God of fantasy Sir Terry Pratchett* I would never aspire to accent to His level of greatness. This is only meant as a tribute to His pure genius.
Author's Note: This was written on 4 December 2008, in a single siting. It was snowing, the night was drawing in, and I had just re-watched Hogfather. This was the result.
Special thanks to peculiar_grace and fanged_geranium for the beta reading and feedback. *big hugs*
I can't feel my senses,
I just feel the cold.
All colours seem to fade away,
I can't reach my soul.
— Within Temptation
Susan hated snow.
Of course, there was nothing unusual in this as many people hate snow, or rather the cold that engendered it. The odd thing about Susan's dislike, however, was that she'd once liked it.
There had been a time when Susan had felt that there was something wonderful about the way softly falling snowflakes covered roads and sidewalks in white, and frosted the windows in delicate icy patterns – even if the patterns were always ferns. She appreciated the way snow cast an illusion of a city washed clean of grime. All too soon, of course, the snow would melt away into nothing but grey-brown sludge as the filth beneath reasserted itself. But she'd never been the sort to deny beauty simply because it was transitory. Everything was sooner or later – a fact she had intimate knowledge of. So, she didn't let it bother her. Instead she appreciated the strange exhilaration that came with taking deep breaths of the bitingly frigid air, savoured the smell of snow, and the rare silence that it brought.
There had been a time when she'd enjoyed the winter months. The brisk invigoration of walking through the chill outside and the peaceful calm of sitting at the window with a warm cup of tea clasped in her hands as she watched the snow drift slowly down...
But that had been before.
It had been three years since she'd come to hate snow, though it never seemed to feel like it. Some days it felt like only yesterday and sometimes it seemed like another lifetime.
As the evening drew in around her, Susan moved purposefully through the streets with her parcels held tightly against her as she tried to ignore the fall of the snow and the brightly coloured Hogswatch decorations, which proclaimed that she had only two more weeks to figure out how she was going to avoid the coming holiday. A holiday she desperately did not want to celebrate. She had managed to grit her teeth and bear it for the last two years, but she simply refused to paste on a smile and put up with it again this year. She was determined to find a way out.
For anyone else it would have been a death sentence to walk through the streets of Anhk-Morpork without paying attention. But, as much as she often wished she was, Susan wasn't entirely human and when she didn't want to be noticed she wasn't. People stepped out of her way without even knowing why they had stepped aside. Though she generally hated her strange heritage there were still times when being Death's granddaughter had its advantages.
It was the silence that finally drew her out of her desperate self-absorption. Silence was the one commodity that was difficult to come by in Anhk-Morpork.
Stopping, Susan found herself half-way across a small park she'd walked through a hundred times before. Now, the heavily falling snow had covered the familiar shapes of plants and benches and the white mantle, luminous in the fading twilight, made it all feel strange and foreign. Around her the endless cacophony of the city was muted. On one hand, it was a relief to be away from the never ending noise and bustle, but on the other there was nothing here to distract her from her own thoughts.
Susan kept herself busy. She wasn't the type to mope or look back. The past was gone and only the future truly mattered. She'd been raised to be practical, educated to think clearly, and was naturally not inclined to frivolous sentimentality.
It was because of these things though that she knew that some battles simply couldn't be won.
Memories were designed to fade. The blurring of their edges with time was, to her, the greatest kindness that could be given to any sentient being. But sometimes it wasn't that easy. Some events didn't just happen and pass you by, they reached inside and changed you. The daily reminder of living within yourself meaning that they could never fade gracefully into the hazy past, where they couldn't hurt anymore. Some ghosts could never fully be laid to rest. The only way to keep them at bay was to give in from time to time; mollifying them with a few moments undivided attention so they'd again fade back into the recesses of the mind for a little while. And the simple fact was that she had been ignoring this particular ghost for far too long already.
Pushing back the hood of her cloak, Susan closed her eyes and turned her face upward to feel the cold of the softly falling fakes. She breathed deeply, focussing on the sharp feel of cold air as she listened to the silence around her – the silence that was peculiar to falling snow.
Three years. In two weeks time it would be three years exactly. That first year she'd been fine, able to sit at the Hogswatch feast that night convinced that she was alright and that she'd be able to put what had happened behind her. She still wasn't sure if she'd been in some kind of shock or merely deluding herself exceptionally well. Or perhaps she had just been so overloaded with all that had happened the night before she had, as yet, been unable to absorb it all. Whatever the case, the next Hogswatch had not been so kind. Memories plagued her at every turn, making her feel raw and edgy. She'd held herself together and doubted that anyone around her had been aware that anything was wrong at all. The strength of will that that had cost her though made it an experience she certainly did not want to go through again this year.
It was silly for the events of a single night to alter one's life. Silly, for a person you knew for only a few hours to have such a profound impact on you. Susan sometimes thought that it wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't come from such an unexpected quarter. After all, men and sex and all that nonsense had never really been part of her personal horizons. Well, alright there had been a few young men over the years but never in any way that was serious or lasting. She was a lady after all. Therefore men meant marriage and even if it had only been herself she wouldn't have considered handing her life over to some man, but it wasn't just herself. There was Sto Helit as well. When he died her father had left it in the hands of capable advisors and councillors and Susan was confident in leaving it in their hands for the time being. She wasn't particularly interested in ruling but that didn't mean she was going to hand over rulership of it to any of the simpering, useless, power hungry fops who had proposed to her over the years.
There certainly had never been any possibility of her marrying either of the two men she'd ever really felt anything for. Lobsang had far too many responsibilities already to take up the mantel of the Duke of Sto Helit on top of everything else. When he'd chosen to take his mother's place and become the Anthropomorphic Personification of Time any chance of anything real between them had ended. Not that she blamed him for the choice, she'd taken up her grandfather's scythe when the need had arisen. They were both subject to demands of their not-entirely-human natures. And as for Imp, sweet lovely hopeless Imp... That had been no more than a summer romance when they were both sixteen and captivated by the newness of what they felt. Even if it could have lasted she could never have chained a kind, if slightly foolish, musician to the politics of ruling a city state
The rising wind blew chillingly across her face as though to bring her back from those unprofitable musings. Susan opened her eyes to look at the rapidly darkening park around her. The snow still illuminated it beyond what would have seemed possible in the gloom, as though to remind her that it was still there. As the sky darkened so did her thoughts, eventually turning where she had least wanted them to go, where they'd had no choice but to go since the snow had begun to fall. To the only other man there'd ever been.
At first, she had deliberately tried to remember his name wrong, to think of him as Tea-Time, feeling in some indefinable way that a silly name might make his lingering memory less threatening. It hadn't worked. All it did was bring his soft voice even more sharply to her mind.
I did say Te-ah-tim-eh.
She'd just stood there, unable to break eye contact with him, her heart pounding in her chest, her mouth dry, her palms sweating – all of the ridiculous things she'd heard about from others but had never dreamed she'd feel herself... had never wanted to feel.
From the moment she'd turned, startled when someone she hadn't even realized was there had pulled her grandfather's sword from the sheath at her hip she'd been lost; unable to look away.
She'd never really been sure what had frightened her more – her reaction to Jonathan, the fact that he saw and recognised that reaction for what it was, or the fact that he'd clearly felt the same. He had seemed as caught off guard by what sparked between them as she had been, as unable to look away from her as she had been from him. The only difference was that he hadn't been horrified. She'd seen the fascination in his eyes, the wonder, the curiosity... Or in his eye, rather. That cherubic face surrounded by those golden curls would have been almost too pretty if it hadn't been for the glass eye, unnaturally dark against his pale skin. As disconcerting as that had been, however, it was nothing to the pinprick pupil that had gazed at her out of what should have been his normal eye. The grey of the iris had almost engulfed that small dot of darkness and looking into it had been to descend into a kind of oddly charming hell.
Jonathan had been utterly mad by any conventional definition of the term; but somewhere beyond the normal realms of human thought he'd found a kind of sanity all his own. He didn't see the world as she did, as anyone approaching sane did, but he understood what he did see and was in his own way as practical and logical as she herself.
And he had seen her.
That was the hardest aspect for her to cope with, then as now. Somehow from that distant realm of sanity beyond insanity, Jonathan Teatime had looked straight into Susan and seen something inside her that no one else in her life ever had. In those eternal moments when they'd unable to look away from each other there had been understanding.
She'd tried to tell herself a hundred times since that night that she'd imagined it, that she'd been over tired, that she'd been seeing things that weren't there, that she was letting her imagination get the better of her... anything to make it unreal. But here and now in the uncompromising silence of the snow covered park she knew, as she had then, that she hadn't imagined anything. Jonathan had looked at her and had not seen the Duchess of Sto Helit, or the granddaughter of Death, or even just a young woman in a black dress – he'd seen Susan.
He'd known who she was, of course. The sword had been enough to tell him everything he'd needed to know.
Nobility. I'd bow, but I fear you'd do something dreadful.
Oh, he'd known her alright. He'd known not to underestimate her, known better than to dismiss her heritage as family myth as so many did these days. He'd known to take her as the serious threat to his plans that she was. But he'd also known that all of that was only a small part of the whole.
Even now, the memory of that gaze could make her feel somehow cold and over-warm at the same time. He'd known everything she was but hadn't cared. He'd taken it into account of course. He wasn't stupid enough not to. He'd realized that with her heritage would come abilities but it hadn't altered his own strange ability to see past it to the person she was. She had known as she looked into that one insane eye that if she let him, he could own her in a way she'd never believed anyone could. It had come with the equally certain knowledge that she could own him but that was beside the point. The simple fact that anyone could have part of her, hold her in any real way, terrified her far more than she would have imagined anything could.
Sometimes she wondered if that forcefulness of knowledge was what some people – those who wouldn't mind being owned – would call love at first sight. It couldn't be called liking or wanting; even calling it lust oversimplified it in the extreme.
Then he'd touched her. She would never forget the heat of his hand through the fabric of her sleeve, the grip of his fingers in her hair, the feel of his breath against her ear. She hadn't known she was capable of feeling what she felt then. In all honesty, she hadn't really believed it existed. Oh she'd read about it, read about the heat and mindlessness of passion and how violent the feelings could be. She just hadn't really taken it seriously. She'd put it down to wishful thinking and over-heated imagination. But there was no denying the way her heart nearly pounded out of her chest, the way heat surged through her, and – more shaming than the rest – the stab of lust that had shot to her core, leaving her trembling in its wake.
What might have happened if they had been alone Susan would never know. If Banjo hadn't been there, hadn't literally torn Jonathan away from her... She'd been grateful for it. The shock and the physical distance had given her the chance to breathe again and to pull back together the tattered shreds of her self-control. But it had hurt just the same. Somewhere deep inside the loss of his proximity had torn at her. Something inside of her wanted him near. It was that wanting that had ignited the rage, equally shocking in its force.
The reason she was there, what Jonathan had been trying to do, the faith grandfather had placed in her to stop what was happening, and the all the lives that still might hang in the balance – Susan had forgotten all of it. The fury that had swept through her had nothing to do with anything but the desire to erase from existence the longing she felt and to punish the one who had made her feel it.
It was bad enough that a damned Assassin, of all people, had reached inside of her and let lose things she hadn't know she could feel. Far worse, though, was that he had seen and understood his effect on her; had known it and revelled in it. Jonathan Teatime was a threat to everything she wanted for herself, to the staid and proper life she's carefully crafted. A threat even to the person she'd believed herself to be. So, she'd lashed out at him, determined that he wouldn't have any more of her than he already had and desperate to take back from him what he'd taken.
She'd never actually killed anyone before. Oh she'd been Death but that was merely collecting the soul after the body had died. That wasn't the same as killing. In truth, she hadn't really known if she could kill. She would have liked to go on in that happy state of ignorance but Jonathan had taken that as well.
What had happed at the Tooth Fairy's castle could have been put down to the heat of the moment could even, possibly, be considered an accident of sorts. What had happened later when he'd come back for her had not been.
Susan could tell herself that she'd had no choice. He had after all been a threat to the children, to Grandfather (maybe), and certainly to herself. She could tell herself that he would have gone on to kill others if she hadn't killed him first. But Susan wasn't stupid and most certainly wasn't given to self-delusion. She hadn't thought and wouldn't have cared about any of that on that cold, bright Hogswatch morning. Because when she'd seen him again, standing in the schoolroom with the morning sun making his golden curls glow... she'd known that she wouldn't be able to escape him. It wasn't physical proximity she was worried about, although that was part of it. She's seen in his face that he had no intention of giving her up. He'd felt this thing between them as strongly as she had and what she'd run from, he'd embraced. She'd been absolutely positive that as long as he was alive he would always come back for her.
More than that, though, what terrified her was the bone deep knowledge that even if she never saw him again, she'd never escape him. She could scrub her skin a thousand times and never be able to erase the memory of his touch. She could throw herself into life with utter abandon but never expunge the memory of what the warmth of his breath against her had made her feel.
She knew it because it wasn't him, as such, that was the problem. Jonathan was merely the catalyst. Somehow meeting him had awakened within her levels of passion, lust, and hatred she hadn't even known existed and let it all loose. He'd torn her self-control away and in doing so shattered forever the woman she'd believed herself to be. Worse, he'd seen it all and had wanted that woman, and she'd liked how that felt.
The tears were a surprise, their heat shocking against her cold bitten cheeks. Susan reached up and brushed them away with an equally cold hand. Horrified at their existence, yet grateful to be brought back to the present.
The snow had stopped and the wind was hurrying the clouds away to reveal the icy stars high above, bright as the points of daggers in the moonless sky. Night had truly fallen as she stood motionless in this small pocket of silence.
Susan would have given anything for all the feelings to have died with Jonathan. She would have given anything never to have met him, never known she could feel all the things he'd evoked merely by existing. But wishes were useless things in the end.
Outwardly her life had returned to normal as though nothing had ever happened. Inside though she couldn't stop the strange new longings he'd unleashed from gnawing at her. It wasn't just the desire to be held and touched, although that was certainly part of it. But that desire was easy enough to cope with. She'd got through her teenage years with little more than the briefest of stolen kisses after all. It was the emptiness that was the worst. For that all too short a time someone had known her, had seen past her title, her blood, her bone – had seen into her.
Susan had never known, never even guessed, that she was lonely.
The idea had never even crossed her mind and she would have dismissed it out of hand if it had. She hadn't know she's ever been lonely until Jonathan lay dead at her feet and it had rushed back into her – startling her with the realization that somehow and however briefly he had filled an emptiness inside she hadn't known was there.
Imp had adored her with the unquestioning nature of one's first love and Lobsang had understood what it meant to be who and what she was. The others who had tried to court her over the years had each seen in her something different – each leaving her equally cold. Cracked and mad and dangerous as he had been, Jonathan had filled that emptiness and somehow seen some indefinable part of her no one else ever had. She had no doubt that the oddities of her not-entirely-human nature wouldn't have bothered him. She could almost imagine him laughing over the way her hair aggravatingly restyled itself. He wouldn't have overlooked what she was or ignored it. It just wouldn't have bothered him, she was sure.
There was also the fact that she knew that she had sparked in him the same things he'd sparked in her. Jonathan had mirrored her in his reactions, wanted her not because of anything she was, or even in spite of what she was. Instead, like her, he'd seen someone would could own him and be owned by him. The only difference was that it hadn't frightened him.
There had been no hope that things between them could ever have come to any other ending than it had, of course. One of them had to have died. Susan wasn't foolish enough to harbour any illusions about that. If it hadn't been him it would have been her. However, that knowledge did nothing to heal the emptiness inside that ached whenever she saw lovers holding hands or the glint of a wedding ring on a finger.
It was just her luck that she'd only come to feel just how powerful passion really was through an utterly impossible obsession.
The cold of the night bit at her nose and ears as the temperature dropped rapidly and the air she breathed stabbed in her chest like knives. But it would never be cold enough to numb the ache in her heart or to freeze the heat in her blood whenever she remembered him.
Susan didn't hate Jonathan for what he had been or what he had done. She hated him for what she had felt for him. She wanted to go back to a time before when she didn't know that she was lonely, when she didn't know what lust felt like, when she didn't know how fingers curling in her hair and whispered words in her ear could make her body react.
More than anything she wished, ached, longed never to have had that single taste. A taste that was just enough to show her how much she was missing but not enough to satisfy the craving. Leaving her with a void in her soul that she knew would never and could never be filled.
"Damn you," Susan said softly, breaking the silence at last.
The words brought her no relief, though. She couldn't undo what had been done and she couldn't put Jonathan's part of her nature back into whatever little box it had once lived. She couldn't go back to being who she had been. All she could do was pretend she still was and hope that someday she'd be able to fool even herself.
