057 ☣ But now am found

[fridgetothefire]

[She feels brittle and stretched, like an old rubber band, achy and shocky. The world isn't quite steady. She blinks open tacky eyelids, sees blue sky instead of read cape, then closes them again, takes carefully counted breaths, tries to center herself in her body until the static clears. She sits up, and realizes dimly that the world really isn't steady. She's in a little motorboat on a charming neighborhood canal of some sort, rocking lightly with the shallow waves. The position of the sun suggests it's afternoon. She doesn't have a hangover but she still feels strange, unreal and full of echoes. Her back aches where she was laying on something - her communicator. Her breath whooshes out as memory rushes in, and she swallows several times, picks it up with hands that shake only slightly.]


[Public, video]

[Anya has messy hair and a drawn expression, carefully tamping down on hope and fear alike.]

...hello, this is Anya, can anyone hear this?



[Private to the Admiral, a little later]

Give me an expanded storage room off the maintenance office and I'll be able to stock up better.

Comments

[fridgetothefire]

Odd. A little - unreal. Shuffled, maybe? Not in the sense of having things mixed up in my head, I can remember it all right, or I think I can. But like - god, I don't know. Like rumpled laundry someone threw in the drawer without folding, it fits but it sort of doesn't.

[fireincarnate]

Like you were remade. [Her gaze is sharper, now, as she looks at Anya - really looks.]

...Do you have all your scars? Your tattoos?

[fridgetothefire]

[She shivers, a tiny bit - there's breeze off the water, after the perpetual indoors of the barge - but holds out her hands with a skewed grin, trying for brave.]

I've even got my blisters from working the miter saw yesterday.

Or. However many days it was.

[fireincarnate]

[Jean reaches out - slowly, carefully - to place her hands over Anya's. Her own are always cool, unless she wills it differently, as cool and smooth as the breeze that brushes them.

Anya's feel like they always have, rough and warm and alive.]

If you were remade - they made an effort to get it right. [The Admiral?]

[fridgetothefire]

I don't. I just don't know.

[She grits her teeth, grips Jean's hands but not too tight. There's a gap, or - not a gap any more than a jump cut in film is a gap, smoothly flicking from one frame to another without pause, but that sort of shift, an unrecorded interim perfectly skipped between the maintenance office and the motorboat. But she is, in every perceivable way, precisely herself.]

[fireincarnate]

You will. [She squeezes Anya's hands, light and tender.]

I want you to guide me, all right? Think back, to the moments before you disappeared and right after. We'll focus on that. [If something changed there, in the in-between, she should be able to see it.]

[fridgetothefire]

Okay.

[She just thinks through it, deliberate and precise. It's hazy - just because she was tired on top of tired, twisted and stressed, the reprieve from putting the nanites to work eclipsed by trying to imagine solutions to a crisis she wasn't ultimately around for anyway. She put her head down to rest for a moment. And then she was waking up in a boat on the canal, remembering things gradually the way you do when you wake up from the strangest dreams, although there aren't any dreams themselves. A smooth, neat shift.]

[fireincarnate]

[Jean focuses, very careful to look and not probe - it would be so easy to alter Anya's mind herself, and she refuses to do that. She uses her mind as a precision instrument, a microscope, led by the Phoenix's instincts.

And she's confident, when she speaks.]

There's nothing there.

[fridgetothefire]

[Nothing there. Nothing changed, but also nothing there, in ten days of the unknown. It's scary in its own way, and she shivers a little, leans in closer to Jean. She's still herself, whatever she's come through, and that's what matters.]

Thank you.