fridgetothefire | Entries tagged with bag of cats

[Spam for Ben]

[They were together in the arena, and they end up together on the barge too, in between their cabins, sprawled a few steps apart on staircase by the fourth floor. As the depthless darkness recedes from her vision and her counterpart's sharp, bright, selfish mind gingerly extracts itself from her own, she glimpses him, and thinks for a dazed moment, with relief and quiet love, and when you wake up, I will still be here. Except - except - he is looking at her, and his expression is all wrong.]

[Public Video (actual immediate response reserved for Peter)]

[She switches to video, with an awkward view of her chin and collarbone as she holds it close to her mouth and speaks as clearly as she can, teeth gritted.]

Help. Stairs, fourth deck, high powered. Fast, please. Ben's mirrored.

[Then she just holds it, turns the view to face Ben and Riddick's fight.]

( Narration TLDR )

[Private to Ben]

Ben. If you can hear this, tell me where you are.

[Private to Morgana]

[There's a lull of silence, just Anya's face, frowning faintly at the screen. She doesn't know what to say. She's harder and colder than the Anya Morgana knows - not bright and sharp like she was on the mirror barge, but hunched and honed.]

Do you have information about me, too?

[Open spam]

[She paces out the bounds of her new prison. Larger, nicer, stranger. She wants to rip someone else's hair out. Malachai walks behind her, with a buffer of air between them, one foot of No Man's Land. He's a sandy-brindled creature in the shape of a sleek, low-slung dog, some kind of mutt, certainly part greyhound - unless someone really looks at him, realizes how big he is despite the way he slinks, over six feet from nose to tail tip, or the curving, not-quite-right way his hips are slung. He is nothing like a dog.

She's been told there are no other daemons here, that it doesn't make them mindless, or monsters. but every time she passes anyone, she has to struggle not stare, and Malachai draws mincingly closer to her, though she pushes him away.]

[Spam for Riddick but also Open in the CES]

[Zane is hungry. And he's some kind of sea creature and not - (her brother) - not the one she knows, not the one she promised to try to come back to. But he's still hers, somehow, and he's in a box, and he's hungry.

Anya is the sort of person who leaves herself notes, nowadays, in case of floods just like this: a little folded placard in her own handwriting sitting on top of her warden's item, This opens doors, like a much more helpful version of Alice's Drink me. So she looks for a door with food behind it, and finds a forest instead. She hears rustling and bird calls and she doesn't understand, but it doesn't matter: Malachai is an ambush predator. She climbs a tree, and he stalks out a place some twenty-five feet upwind. It's a small stretch, for them. And they wait.]

[Filtered to graduates/wardens who were once inmates]

What did you sacrifice, to graduate?

Someone asked me recently, and I didn't have an answer. I'm wondering if that's strange.

[Filtered to wardens who were never inmates.]

Do any of you feel trapped here? Or have you, in the past, because you needed your deal so badly? It just - it seems like a much more important distinction, in some ways, between wardens and inmates, than being able to get a drink without asking someone to buzz you in first, that we can walk away and they can't.

But I'm not sure it's that straightforward.

[Filtered to inmates]

How many of you want to change? Not to graduate, that's a very different question, and not necessarily into - whoever the admiral wants you to be. Just change, in general.

Do you want to be different than you are, in any way, or not?

[Private to the Admiral]

[Wryly, amiably.]

I don't suppose you'll tell me what you're getting out of all this.

[Spam for Harvey]

[For a long time, she practiced in private. In Bruce's room, in Cass's. She'd work with Natasha or Sokolov or Bea in the gym, because that's where they were, but when she was on her own, without the clear label of 'student' hanging over her, she'd do it with a yoga mat and a locking door. Old paranoid habits, needing to be underestimated. She's realized, lately, how much more convenient the gym is, has been gradually trying to acclimate herself to working through drills under anyone else's eyes. She's there now, moving through forms and combinations Bruce taught her, counting out her breaths. Her lungs are - compensating, slowly, better than they were, even if she'll never quite hit the same caliber of athleticism that she might have otherwise. It feels good, not just to push herself, but to know she's going somewhere.]

[Private to Abigail; wibbly timed to after their conversations with Ben.]

I told you once that I was being as straightforward with you as I knew how to be. In the interest of resurrecting that - this scares me. Not what Ben's doing, me and you.

But I will do everything in my power to take care of both of you, as much as you need.

[When the view clicks on, Anya is obviously changed. She has the glowing blue eyes, and her skin looks almost grey. She isn't quite light-skinned enough for classic pallor, but the color is leached from her face. She sits still and straight, with a degree of composure that is, in fact, precisely normal for her. She missed breakfast today, and now it's quite clear why.]

I've allowed Arthas to make me into a zombie for a few days. It is entirely temporary, and I am in control of myself and my faculties. There is no need for anyone to be alarmed.

[Public Spam]

[She works with her hands a lot, now that she's in the maintenance crew. But there's a difference between fixing things and making things, and her occasional forays into invention in Aeris Navem left her itching to create again. Rather than indulging her inner engineer - who has a tendency to slide a little too easily from 'productive' to 'pragmatic' to 'paranoid' - Anya has her knitting bag out again, clacking plastic needles and all. She sets up in a common room, listening to conversation and people watching comfortably.

She's into her second skein when she abruptly realizes the design she's been replicating on some subconscious impulse: a dark blue and charcoal grey sweater with a herringbone pattern, subtle night camouflage for Cassel the cat burglar on nights when frigid high-altitude winds sliced through the floating city like razorwire. She groans heavily and flings her ball of yarn across the room in moment of pique. Which is a terrible idea, because now she has to collect and rewind the damn thing.]

( confidential to Erik, Lua, and Alex )

[It's been a few days since the end of the undersea port, and Anya is...not really dealing well with certain ramifications of it. She hasn't been dealing terribly poorly, even off the Lehnsherr curve, but not well, either. She's not freaking out or breaking down, but she feels persistently discomfited, alien in her own skin, more isolated than she's felt since she arrived here.]

[She's doesn't look frazzled at all, except perhaps a little shadowed under her eyes from lack of sleep. She reclines in her windowseat, the stars sparkling softly behind her. She's solemn, pensive.]

So, who else here has dealt with...something that was your identity, what defined you, being taken away? Or just changing, suddenly. I can't imagine it's a terribly uncommon experience, given the peculiarities of our population.