Anya Lehnsherr | Earth 97400 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fridgetothefire) wrote2015-03-24 12:00 am
fridgetothefire) wrote2015-03-24 12:00 am
068 ☣ cindery, nonexistent, radiant
[Video]
[She's posting from the floor of the maintenance office, where she is on a tarp in the middle of a mess, boxes and sponges and bits of felt and ash and mutilated pens scattered all around her. She has smears of blue and black ink on her face and hands and bathrobe she's wearing - which, when she turns, is open in a deep V-wedge to keep her mostly decent without touching the red, fist-sized external heart now clutching steadily in the center of her chest. She tries to brush her hair out of her face, and adds to the ink smudges.]
If you're fighting the parasites, or demons, or whatever they are, come by the office. I made stamps with the anti-possession sigil on them. They're a little haphazard, but they'll work. Once you clear someone, stamp them. I don't want anyone getting reinfected.
[Open Spam, wibbly time through through the general throwdown arc]
[Anya is also running around exorcising people herself, knocking on doors, poking anyone she finds to see if they'll snarl or flinch. She's weary and bloody and bruised, after the first one or two, and she could probably use some backup to help fight the monsters once she forces them to manifest with the rituals Dean taught her.]
[Spam for Ben, backdated a wee bit to before the sha throwdown kicked into high gear]
[With Dean shuffled off to the kitchens, Andrew gone, and Stephen and Tig in comas, no is left in maintenance to notice Anya not turning up to work but Peter, and he won't hassle her about it. So when she wakes up to find a fresh heart tucked between and a little below her breasts, arteries and veins sliding back under the skin, the raw muscle wet and twitch, rabbit-fast with her shock, she decides that today is a good day to hide in her room and eat jerky and crackers and do nothing and see no one.
Until, of course, he comes to check on her, and her door opens for him, just like it always does.]
[She's posting from the floor of the maintenance office, where she is on a tarp in the middle of a mess, boxes and sponges and bits of felt and ash and mutilated pens scattered all around her. She has smears of blue and black ink on her face and hands and bathrobe she's wearing - which, when she turns, is open in a deep V-wedge to keep her mostly decent without touching the red, fist-sized external heart now clutching steadily in the center of her chest. She tries to brush her hair out of her face, and adds to the ink smudges.]
If you're fighting the parasites, or demons, or whatever they are, come by the office. I made stamps with the anti-possession sigil on them. They're a little haphazard, but they'll work. Once you clear someone, stamp them. I don't want anyone getting reinfected.
[Open Spam, wibbly time through through the general throwdown arc]
[Anya is also running around exorcising people herself, knocking on doors, poking anyone she finds to see if they'll snarl or flinch. She's weary and bloody and bruised, after the first one or two, and she could probably use some backup to help fight the monsters once she forces them to manifest with the rituals Dean taught her.]
[Spam for Ben, backdated a wee bit to before the sha throwdown kicked into high gear]
[With Dean shuffled off to the kitchens, Andrew gone, and Stephen and Tig in comas, no is left in maintenance to notice Anya not turning up to work but Peter, and he won't hassle her about it. So when she wakes up to find a fresh heart tucked between and a little below her breasts, arteries and veins sliding back under the skin, the raw muscle wet and twitch, rabbit-fast with her shock, she decides that today is a good day to hide in her room and eat jerky and crackers and do nothing and see no one.
Until, of course, he comes to check on her, and her door opens for him, just like it always does.]
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[It's in synch with her normal heart, a low echo, a little faster than her usual resting rate, a prickle of nebulous fear. She doesn't know exactly what's happening or how to navigate it, only that it means a staggering amount.]
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He does, for a few long moments, because it's soothing. Even when he tells himself he needs to step back now, that it's just the flood, it doesn't mean anything other than what it does, that Anya is affected and they need to make a contingency plan for how to navigate it, how to meet her responsibilities, how to avoid someone else taking advantage of it. He wonders if it's struck, if she'll die or if her own heart will be sufficient.
But falling the other way pulls more strongly; wanting to take it as a sign, wanting to love her again for being something that they both have to know she isn't. He has plenty of reasons to love her. She doesn't have to be a goddess. But when he draws in a breath to ask another question, to ask what she needs him to do, the weight of everything else presses into the space just a little bit more and his breath hitches.
Everything in his chest, his throat, his head feels like it's constricting, and he waits for it to loosen again, draws another short, hoarse breath when it doesn't; when he finally pushes breath back out, his vision is blurring. He wants so badly to ask her to just tell him what to do, to fold quietly and gratefully into that kind of willing and unthinking obedience, and knows how unfair it is to ask it of her.
But he's fighting back against too much else right now and his next inhale is as choked as the previous, thicker.]
We should... we should... [He shakes his head. He doesn't know what they should.]
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[She doesn't know exactly what she's assuring him of, only that she wants to reassure, and that she doesn't want to do whatever she should, doesn't want to go clean blood off another stairwell landing or build anything or fight anyone, not now, not yet, not when she still feels sensitive and scared and light-headed all at once, not when Ben is here, looking like that, when all she wants is to stay with him.]
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He doesn't so much decide to move, his eyes flicking side to side, to her face - not quite her eyes but her mouth, her cheeks, the space where her neck and jaw meet - back to the extra heart where he always lingers just a moment; but he certainly can't decide to leave. A part of him wants to, wants to shrink back into the wilderness away from everything he doesn't understand, wants to hide in the dark corners of moldering buildings overrun by vines and vermin that are not afraid of him, but he doesn't really want to. He wants to stay close. He wants to be told what to do.
But it will be okay. It is. So he moves, at first without thinking, but when he notices himself doing so he decides deliberately to sit close, to agree that way, to see if goddesses are warm like humans are; he nudges this last thought a bit further away from the others when he notices it, doesn't dismiss it but tries not to allow it entry either, fails but acknowledges that. He sits down right beside her, close enough to feel the shiver of her breath, that his own pulse muddies the rhythm of her dual hearts.]
Jack asked... [He doesn't remember everything reliably, doesn't remember it always in order, but most of what happened at Manticore is forever imbued into his memory. He remembers the breathing and heartbeats of his unit pressing around him, the weight of their confusion, their eagerness to understand.]
You can see her heart. Zack... said she was beautiful. And Max wanted to know who she was.
She'd watch over us. [He leans, ever so slightly, into the human solidity of Anya, knows they are separate, knows it down to his bones, has to, has to, but they blur together when he closes his eyes against the sting in them and breathes in. His words before had the vague softness of memory; now he aims them more solidly at her instead:] She'll watch over us.
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[It sounds like a child's promise in her mouth, tremulous and a tiny bit petulant, Anya at three years old getting dressed in her winter layers or crawling into the little chicken coop for eggs, telling her indulgent father I can do that all by myself! like so many children before and after her. An aspirational promise, hopeful of being trusted with the opportunity, nervous of the weight.
She can't make everything turn out fine. But she can watch over him. Wants to, for the rest of their lives.
She doesn't know if it's the right thing to say, or if there is a right thing to say, if she should be quashing this. But it's already firmly planted in liminal space by the barge's caprice, the lines between her and Her blurred with every soft thudding beat, and she wants so badly to be enough.
She leans toward him too, wraps an arm gingerly around his shoulders, approving, welcoming. Echoes herself, in the way that is meant to sound like a confident reaffirmation but generally sounds like the speaker needs to convince herself.]
I can do that.
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[It's a verbal rejection, though not harsh - careful, like gently collecting a child's hands away from sharp objects, and he's answering her but he might mean them both. This is dangerous. She wants so badly to be enough; he wants so badly not to need so much. But though his muscles are tense beneath her hands - as he always is, as though he requires more tension just to be upright, just to move forward, than most people - where she touches, the trembling slowly stops. He does not try to pull away. For a moment he does not lean closer, but he does not pull away.
And then he does, a huff of breath out and a deeper inhale back in, and he bends closer to her, follows the sound of too many hearts when the glass cracks. She wraps an arm around him and welcomes him in, and he bends to her, carefully fitting himself in alongside her, knee to knee and hip to hip and side to side until he's curled, his nose pressed in along the side of her neck, breathing in deeply, the visceral smell of the external heart only marginally capable of masking the scent of Anya beneath it.
No, he didn't mean she needed to do that, to be more than she is. He told Alex once that Manticore gave him knives, and he swallowed them when he left so he could keep them with him but out of sight; they have been there ever since, carving at him from the inside, gut and heart and mind, but he'd thought he'd gotten a better handle on them. He thought he'd learned to manage himself better, to keep from hurting himself or from hurting others. Lately, though, it's there again. It always will be, as long as he is alive.
He knows that, and draws in a hiccup of breath, fails to notice the first tears pooling hot between where the skin of his cheek touches the skin of her collarbone.] She'll watch over us both.
She has to. We are hers. [This lost prince, and this Barge princess.]
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She cries too, silent except for the little hitch in puts in her breathing, for how hard it is, for how grown up she is trying to be, for the mother she lost too many ways and the one Ben never had, for the one he made on his own. Anya cries for the Blue Lady, made of curling paper and raw need, always watching her children suffer.
She strokes his back, long slow motions, rhythmic, telegraphed. Like ironing, she thinks with a bubble of absurd humor, warmly smoothing out his shakes section by section like wrinkles in his shirt, too choked up to say anything at all.]
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She misses her mother, and he misses his unit. It's distinct, for once, from missing Manticore: he knew each of them by the way they moved, their smell, the sound of their breathing. He would have been able to pick his brothers and sisters out of a lineup of their twinned clones, he is sure of it. And he will never see them again, by his own choice.
His fingers are twisted into the fabric of her robe by the time the tears finally stop, by the time he's breathing in and out without the suffocating weight of tears, by the time he's relaxing again. He feels tired, still, but in a better way. As if pressure has been relieved, somehow, as if when the thick feeling in his throat recedes he will be able to breathe again.
If it were anyone else he might feel embarrassed, or shamed; but it is Anya. He shifts a little to be able to take her weight a bit more onto him if necessary, to take his weight back a little, but makes no move to get up or to pull away. He does not lift his head from her shoulder.]
I love you. [It's quiet, and simple, and warm; he is a man that tries to take very little for granted. He says it now and remembers a time when he wouldn't have said it at all, and savors that security. Savors that he not only gets to know it for truth, but that he gets to say it, and he gets to be heard. For now, it is enough.]
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Hers are settled into a slow tandem now, the same weary peace.]
I love you.
[There is no variation that would make it more accurate or more poignant. She imagines cupfuls of light being passed back and forth between their palms, and instead of trickling away like water, it wells up, spills over, increases with the giving as love does. Something shared to see by.]