fridgetothefire | 027 ☣ some messages

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027 ☣ some messages

[Private to Zane, Abigail, and Cassel, vaguetimed after the breach, Wednesday-ish?]

...how are you guys?

[Private to Ben, Wednesdayish]

Thank you.

[Private to Sylvanas, thursday]

[Her voice is small, nervous and tentative, though there isn't really fear in it, just uncertainty that she ought to be asking at all.]

I know we haven't spoken, much. I'm really sorry if this is - rude or painful, or anything, and you don't have to answer. I just.

You hate Arthas, right?

[Private to Mal, Friday, text, sent right before she dies]

I've decided to let Arthas make me a zombie for a few days. If all goes as planned, I will be able to resist any and all brain-eating urges. If it's messed up or he lied to me about what's going to happen, being killed will reset me to my normal self. I don't want any of the people who love me to have to do it. Could you check by Cabin 1x17 in the next few minutes and make sure I don't emerge on the warpath? If you don't want to, I'd trust Beatrix to do it too.

Thanks.

[Private to Arthas, Friday]

I'm ready. Is now good for you?

[OOC: I may add other starters to this post as older things play out/I think of them. If anyone has something they want to have brought up with Anya BEFORE she becomes a zombie, let me know and I will add it. There will probably be a separate public zombie post later.]

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[She wishes, suddenly and fiercely, that she'd gotten a chance to see his soul. She's glad in the same moment that she didn't, that such a shredded, vicious version of herself never touched him. She tucks both desires under her sternum like seashell's into a child's box of treasures, side by side. It's done with now; it's okay for her to want it and not want it at once.

Her smile is - not easy, but full and inexorable in answer, a little bit chagrined. She'd offered the excursion to comfort him, but she's not so blind to miss it happening the other way. You don't always have to be she bari, he said. And she does, she is, but - she can have this anyway, sparkling glass fragments and private smiles and a nebulous, permeating kindness like the warm light of an impressionist painting.]

I love you, Cassel Sharpe.

[Her voice still sounds quiet to their adjusting ears, though she speaks them normally. It doesn't matter. The words are clear.]

I love you, Anya Lehnsherr.

[He would make her anything she wanted, including joy, if it were in his repertoire. Instead he's got a grin and the touch of her hand and the knowledge that she knows she's family. She's vital. She makes him feel as though maybe his soul is a little bit worthy of joy itself.]

Can I hug you?

[She didn't mean to ask - but then she wanted to ask, and for a moment, filled up with the smell of the forest and the afterimages of sparks still in her vision and the ache of her cheeks where she's smiling back at him, suffused with how warm and good and easy this was, to just be this way with each other until things were better - and it seemed so stupid not to say it. She'll just squeeze his hand a little tighter if he says no, and maybe set off another rocket, awkward and laughing as they try to arrange it with one hand each. But she wants to, if he doesn't mind.]

[He doesn't say yes. But he doesn't say no, either. Touch is still a matter of deep and painful and terrifying trust, but he trusts her. He does.]

[So instead of saying yes or no or anything at all, he just stands and pulls her close and holds her: like an anchor, like something he can anchor. His hands press to her shoulderblades and he can feel the strength of her backbone holding them just so far apart, her steel-and-soft sister-form. Her strength. She is stronger than him, and he loves her for it, but then again, he'd love her anyway.]

[She holds him tight and careful, like Pietro after he tripped and spilled his shins and elbows over the floor, like Wanda when she was small and scared. She breathes deep, lets steadiness settle over her shoulders like a cloak. She didn't do this in Oxford, not with Zane or Ben or anyone, didn't even hold her own daemon.]

I was so cruel to him.

[A sigh, a whisper. It's easier to say when it's impossible to meet his eyes.]

[He knows the power of eye contact, the intricacies of tells, and he knows some of Anya's despite her skill. So he doesn't pull away; he holds her close and rests his chin on top of her head so his voice can flow through the bones in her head. It's a soothing technique he's stumbled across by accident, with Zane, the vibration of words in bone rough and sweet like a cat's tongue.]

What was his name?

[Angel, his name was angel.]

Malachai.

I don't even know what he was. I never did.

[This is soft, sad-shamed, a little lost. She'd looked, sometimes, stolen into libraries and glanced through the canine sections of Lamarck's Exposition of Zoological Philosophy, But none of the entries had ever been quite like him.]

[He sighs, gusty, pained. It's so important to know, to understand yourself.]

Malachai.

What did he look like? I - could help you look.

He looked like a dog.

[Wrong wrong wrong. Servants were dogs - content servants, devoted ones. Sometimes soldiers, the stalwart sort that never wanted to be anything else.]

Like a jackal, maybe, sandy and rangey, but bigger. Longer, anyway. Thin. His back legs were slung a little strangely, and he had stripes on his hindquarters.

[She used to count them, over and over. Fifteen on his back, nineteen on his tail.]

He - he wanted to trust someone. And we were trapped for years and years. I don't know if we could have done a damn thing either way, that young, but I never forgave him.

[She cut him out and rejected him and she didn't even need a blade.]

[He makes it his mission, in that moment, to find out what Malachai was. He has to. He just has a description to go on, but he knows enough about animals that maybe it'll suffice. Maybe. And if there's just this one small thing he can do for her, then he'll do it perfectly. He'll be useful.]

[When he pulls away now, he doesn't look in her eyes or even at her face; instead, he tugs her hand toward his chest and inspects the spaces between her fingers.]

I feel like that's probably a metaphor, or something. I don't know.

Did you love him? Is that why you punished him so hard?

[It was definitely a metaphor, she thinks. And she remembers the moment she really started to change, on the barge - the truth flood. Forcing her to face all her own feelings and choices. If he'd been there, flesh and fur and sad dark eyes, she wouldn't have been able to keep pushing him away. She lets him examine her fingers as she examines her reasons, probing amid the snaggle-toothed outcroppings of ruins in a country she inhabited not too long ago.]

That would be too sweet, I think.

It was more like - if he wasn't part of me, then I had someone else to blame. So I acted like that was true until I believed it.

[He squeezes his eyes shut. His voice is gravel-rough and tired, but mostly because he's remembering. When he opens his eyes, he flips her hand over and inspects the back. Careful.]

If it'd been me, really me, the way I was when I got here, I would have been just as cruel to her as you were to him. I would've made her hurt.

Who we were then isn't any more real than who we are now.

[She's calm when she says it, solid, like sun-warmed stone. There's not a speck of doubt in her, not about that.]

. . . Yes.

[She's right. It's true. Otherwise, why would he still love her the way he does? Why is she still family?]

[Lives that never were stick with you, even once they're, by all appearances, gone.]

They're - facets. And to people like us, especially, who are still becoming - what we will be.

What was she? Yours.

You don't have to say.

[She tries to imagine, and can't. Her instinct is to say a bird, a jay or a jackdaw, clever and flashy and infuriating; but that's too easy, open. It's just what she wants him to be. The truth is that neither of them has ever been able to just fly away.]

[He smiles, a touch self-deprecating.]

A lemming.

[For what that's worth.]

[Anya doesn't quite predate the slanderous documentary, but she's never seen it.]

Oh my gosh. You must have been intolerably cute.

I was n--

[Okay even he can't lie about that.]

She was pretty adorable.

[She thinks: Malachai could have eaten a lemming in one bite. But he was always a bit of a soft touch, at least compared to her.]

Were you a scrapping urchin dandy again?

Gyptian. So - yeah, kinda.

[He wrinkles his nose.]

It was like a family without being the kind of family we had. A little less close-knit. More distant. Slevin and me were pretty close, weirdly. He hates me usually.

Zane and I found each other. But we always do.

Did he - are you okay?

[Not sharply, just - she knows what he did, there. She needs to ask.]

[He's quiet for a moment, distant, remembering. Then:]

She wouldn't let him. His daemon. He was going to, but - she broke the rules.

[All the rules. It felt like fingernails on a chalkboard, lace gloves, emotion work. And then it felt safe.]

He didn't hurt me, in the end.

Good.

She was - something. Special.

[He can elaborate, if he needs to say more about it, or he can inquire about her interactions with them, if would rather divert the conversation. Either-or, gently presented.]

She was. She loved me. Instantly. Even though she wasn't supposed to. Even though he didn't want her to.

[They always find each other. He loops his arm through Anya's and chews his lip, thoughtful.]

You knew him?

I was looking for someone else, and I found him.

He saw me try to give my own daemon a concussion and decided to bring me home.

[It was more complicated than that, a few weeks of dancing around each other, a standoff of mutual fascination and paranoia. But she is still pretty sure that made the difference - that it made Zane feel less horribly freakish and alone, having someone even more oddly estranged from her daemon around.]

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027 ☣ some messages

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