028 ☣ public post

[fridgetothefire]

[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.

Comments

[godsays]

What did you want?

[fridgetothefire]

To learn.

About another kind of magic, about Arthas, about myself.

[godsays]

What about yourself?

[fridgetothefire]

Sure, ask about the complicated part.

...let me in the CES? If I'm going to talk this out I want it to be in person.

[godsays]

All right.

I'll meet you there.

/spam

[fridgetothefire]

[She waits for him. She's very cold, enough that the air is a little chillier around her. She doesn't breath while she waits, and she has no heartbeat. It's only been a day, and she's gotten good at keeping herself frozen, so there's only a very faint scent of death.]

[godsays]

[He's there in moments, and when he steps up next to her, brushes the little Cassel-made token across the door to open it, he briefly flares tin to catch that scent. To listen, to smell, to see what's different.

It unnerves him, but he makes an effort not to show it.

The door opens to a clear tropical island. A lagoon. It resembles, strongly, a sheltered cove where Zane lived, in another life - as a mercreature. It's reassuring that the environment doesn't turn to a red sun and a sky filtered with ash. He's all right with this.]

[fridgetothefire]

[She frowns for a moment, in concentration, rather than displeasure, putting more force of will behind her encapsulating bubble of chill to compensate for the balmy warmth. Then she follows him through, unlacing her shoes and stuffing her socks in them by the door, rolling up her pantscuffs a little and then wading into the shallows. She stands there, waves foaming slightly around her shins, very still.

She's stalling, because she thinks no one will make her face this more - effectively, than Zane, even the ugly parts. But she's doing this to confront it. She told Arthas to break her neck without any hesitation. Cowardice now does not become her.]

It comes with powers.

[godsays]

Oh.

[That makes him understand part of it, anyway. He'd suspected there was some reason like that.]

To know what you're like with them?

[He studies the water, considering swimming.]

[fridgetothefire]

I've had them, twice. Different kinds. And I was a wreck about it, both times, and no one ever...heard me when I tried to explain why or how, and it just kept turning into knots in my head.

I wanted to know if I'd feel differently if it was - something I made happen myself, instead of something the barge shoved on me and then took away again.

[godsays]

Is it? Different.

[fridgetothefire]

I think so.

I feel less - changed. That's dumb, maybe, because this is definitely the strangest. The most different.

I don't feel - taunted. It's not an alternate me, something that's close enough to glimpse but out of reach. It's something that could happen to me. It has weight, as possibility. It feels like it actually belongs to me.

[She could find a way to keep it, if she wanted.]

[godsays]

[He nods, digesting this.

And then he decides, well, why not. He shucks his shirt, and climbs up on a little rock that extends over the water, next to the beach area. He can see the bottom - clear as glass, this water, fifteen to twenty feet down. So he dives in, and surfaces with a flick of his hair. It's different without a tail, but the basic physics is the same.

(There are relatively fresh scars on his arms, but none on his chest. No mark where the spike was.)]

What do you think? Do you like powers?

[fridgetothefire]

So far they've been more trouble than they're worth.

[This is mostly just her aggravation with everyone's freak-outs, combined with some small need to denigrate the necessity, the importance of being more than she was. Then again - it isn't necessary. She's been carrying on towards her goals perfectly well without them until now. Which is comforting, in its way. She tilts her head a little to watch him, but otherwise keeps still where she's standing.]

Admittedly part of that is - limited applications.

[godsays]

So you think you don't have enough powers?

Or the people who care about you are just too much trouble?

[He doesn't have a particular horse in this race. He asks the questions to be potentially provoking.]

[fridgetothefire]

[She doesn't blink, now. But she holds herself with a sort of measured blankness that suggest she might have blinked, if she were alive.]

Neither, exactly.

It's just the combined limits of circumstance. And exasperation is an acceptable verdict. I am satisfied with my dissatisfaction.

[godsays]

[ Zane laughs. ]

What I said was right.

You make strange choices.

[fridgetothefire]

[There's a slim little weasel shark, maybe two feet long, swimming tentatively closer, taking a wide arc around Zane, drawn to Anya by the taste of carrion on the water. She waits.]

I've said for a while that what matters is how you use the tools you have. Powers can be very - convenient.

[It's a word other than useful, at least, though it is exactly what she means.]

These particular tools are poorly suited to anything I'm trying to accomplish now, except for...practice and play and testing myself. And that makes it easier, I guess, not to get torn up by jealousy, and self-loathing over the hypocrisy of being jealous, and the whole existential mess on top of that.

Right now it just feels like extra things I can do, in exchange for feeling like a puppeteer's hand with a very ill-fitting glove inside my own body.

[This is not a bitter complaint. It's just part of the zombie experience. A lower price than she expected, honestly.]

[godsays]

I don't think it'll ever be really part of who you are.

But that's not a bad thing. You have more than enough identity without something else on top of it.

[ He means she's bold. She's such a presence, especially when you learn her language, know to watch her. ]

Changing your past, though, is the kind of violation you don't want. So that's not an experiment you can do.

[fridgetothefire]

[She does look over at him, at that. It looks strange, with her empty glowing eyes, but she looks caught for a moment, vulnerable, nervy, and something else, soft and tentative in between hope and gratitude.]

No. I don't want it to be part of who I am. I always - it feels so stupid. To define yourself by, partly by negative space. By an absence. But it feels like a present thing to me. Everything about my life was shaped by being only human.

[You have more than enough identity. In spite of everything, it is terribly reassuring to hear.]

I wanted to know if I could. Use this. Or things like this. And still be myself.

[godsays]

Congratulations.

[ Because he knows she can. She's dead, and she hasn't changed at all. ]

[fridgetothefire]

[A very thin, wiry smile.]

Thank you.

[The shark, moseying through the shallows, finally darts in toward her shin, and she strikes, a spear of ice forcing itself into existence between her hand and the water in the flash of an eye. She accounts for the refraction of the water and skewers it cleanly, a cloud of blood blooming around her ankles as the shark thrashes. She hoists it out of the water, and it slides farther down the icicle toward her hand. When it stops twitching, she sighs softly, viscerally satisfied. She extracts the ice and drops it carelessly into the water to melt, then holds the small shark in both hands, peering at the hole punched through muscle and sinew and cartilage, carefully rebuilding the connections.]

I still have to see how I feel when it's gone again. But the prognosis is good, I think.

[godsays]

[ He doesn't flinch, when she spears the shark. But he doesn't really like it, either. Interesting how deep his aversion to violence sometimes runs - just as deep as his need for it. ]

I like people better alive.

[fridgetothefire]

[Arthas called it a failsafe, that she would hunger before she exerted herself too far. She keeps pushing herself, using as much magic as she can. It hasn't driven her mad yet, another successful experiment. Killing replenishes the acrid power sliding through her, and like this, with animals, it doesn't bother her at all. She raised chickens from eggs, watched them hatch and named them, chased their bodies in circles after Papa cut their heads off when they were grown. She wonders what shark tastes like.

She reaches for the dark sizzling energy that animates her body now, cups an oily handful of it in her mind, squeezes it tight, like a piece of coal, like a seed, and plants it amid the shark's patched flesh. Its eyes ignite, glowing white-blue just like hers, twitches in her hands. She lets it slip back into the water, and it swims in tentative circles around her.]

I like being alive better, too. But I'm glad I got to try this.

[godsays]

[ And, at this, he is fascinated; he draws himself out of the water to watch, and settles back when the shark is swimming again. ]

What's it like?