fridgetothefire: (mysteries)
Anya Lehnsherr | Earth 97400 ([personal profile] 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.]
warisart: (Mistake)

[personal profile] warisart 2015-04-13 02:39 am (UTC)(link)
No.

[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.]
warisart: (Lost in Thought)

[personal profile] warisart 2015-04-27 06:22 am (UTC)(link)
[He lets her, the parts of his mind that are ever his own trusting her in ways that his most deeply conditioned reflexes haven't yet learned; trusting her with the untried parts of himself that have been gaining strength here, that he has been discovering along with the rest of himself, is almost easy. Almost because he barely has them to himself.

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.]