did you say your prayers?

[attitude]

You can live through anything, now. You'll survive if the world is turned inside out. And it will be. Sooner than you think.

There are days when sleep seems to be a shroud that slips over Faye in waves, occasionally clinging to her shoulders, eyelids heavy as lashes touch her cheeks. It's easy to sleep here. It grow still more so by the day, only the occasional interruption keeping her up at night, but her life has been a transient one ever since she woke up in that chamber, and so she's learned to cope with that long ago. People might disappear. People will, if patterns persist. But she'll survive through anything.

She always has.

A touch, cold like ice, brushes against her arm. Another, against her calf. A hand brushes away the sensation with an irritated flick, only to feel something hard knocking against her knuckles. Brow furrowing, Faye's hand turns, pressing harder still against a smooth, rounded surface, until glass jars against glass and her eyes fly open. Revealing butterflies in the sky.

The most beautiful butterflies in the world.

Her breath starts to shake as she glances down, gold darting between pearls of cerulean blue, marble after marble closing around her from all sides, scattered across the sandy beach, a sharp pain under her hand as she shoves herself to her knees.

"No. I need a knife, I need—"

Hands desperately grabbing through air, she tries to push them away, every one of the butterflies, until a face suddenly appears only yards away.

"Get back."


[ There are a thousand blue marbles scattered across the beach, most of them pooled by Faye's side, her 2012 NDPD. The butterflies mentioned in the narrative are not real; they're the result of nanomachines in her bloodstream. Faye thinks that the marbles are biological weapons as she once encountered in her world, but they're actually harmless, although she's very obviously panicked as a result. ]

Comments

[weary_head]

"Faye."

From a distance, it'd been as if she'd been sleeping in a puddle of deep, blue water, and the sight of her surrounded by marbles makes even less sense, now that Dean's close enough to see it.

He'd been hurrying, faster still to see the way she surged up and away upon waking, a call for a knife on her lips that makes his blood run cold. He doesn't understand, but he knows enough. She's afraid, frightened like he's never seen, and like hell is he staying away.

"Calm down," he says, both hands up and fingers spread wide in front of him. "It's okay, were you dreaming?"

[attitude]

No. No. Were it not for the way that her breath caught in her throat, panic cutting off all air and thoughts a jumbled mess, Faye might have screamed to push him in the other direction. Screamed, to scare him off. (But even in the haze of confusion, another voice sounds wryly from the corners of her mind, the one that always has doubts about a reality too content, and it tells her that screaming is the last thing that she wants to do now, because if anyone knows how to push past it, it'd be Dean.) Instead, her hands reach out even through the brilliant spill of gold across her vision, finding his shirt, trying to tug him in the other direction, even as she still feels the cool press of glass near her heel.

"They're here," she manages to rasp, glancing over her shoulder again, and it's blue, all blue, brighter than the ocean that stretches by their side. "It's Vincent's virus, you need to run, you need to get out of here."

She tries to bite down quick and sudden against her lip, intent on drawing blood. It'd worked for Vincent. He'd stopped the pounding in her throat, the spill of blood in her lungs. Kept her alive with that same blood. But there's too much at stake, and it weakens her— somehow, because he's the one she can't afford to lose, strength saps away, and futility sets upon her again.

[weary_head]

She shoves at him, and in his confusion Dean goes, but with his fingers wrapped around her wrist to tug her with him. "I'm not going anywhere without you," he says, and he doesn't know what the fuck is going on, but the fear in her eyes is enough to tell him it's serious.

"Faye, slow down." Even as he tries to pull them away from the marbles - it must be them, they don't belong here, what the hell do they mean - he thumbs at her lip, trying to smooth the imprint of her teeth away. "What's happening?"

[attitude]

"Virus. There's a virus, it's the one that Vincent released and it— it killed everyone and I need to make the vaccine—"

She tugs herself away from his hand, shaking her head, shoulders quivering and she hates this, she hates it, and she was never half as afraid when it was only her in that room. She's lived long enough, and against all manner of odds, and the world losing one girl won't make a difference.

"—and I don't know how—"

But there are families on this island, some of them she sees every single day when stumbling to the kitchen, head possibly pounding from oversleep or an extra glass of wine that does her no good, in retrospect.

"—I have it in my blood, I have the cure, we need to get a knife because I can't—"

Can't lose him, she thinks, shaking her head while her hands tighten around his collar. Were she thinking clearly, it wouldn't be an issue. Too many seconds have passed. He should be bleeding out. But he isn't, and the only thing that keeps her from realizing that is the way every second seems to stretch into eternity.

[weary_head]

"Then we'll get a knife," says Dean, face pressed hard against her throat. Her lips brush her skin, her pulse racing hard against even the barest touch, and it's everything he can do not to lash out, not to punch the nearest hard surface until it breaks.

"We'll get whatever you want, just talk to me." Grasping her wrists to hold them close against his chest, Dean pulls back. "How do you know there's a virus? What does it do?"

[attitude]

Her fingers press against the front of his chest, panic rising up around her throat, until all she can do is cling; the world that spins around her slow as she takes deep, labored breaths. And that's when she notices. She tries the slightest of tugs, a hand slipping out to press against the back of his neck, fingertips brushing against the hair at the nape of his neck. The strength is what catches her off-guard.

"You bleed out," she says, blinking her eyes open again, stars and butterflies speckled at the edges of her vision. "It goes to your brain, and when it attacks, all you see are butterflies. The most... beautiful butterflies."

Green eyes flicker up towards his voice, but landing his gaze takes a little more time. "You don't see them, do you? You should've seen them by now. They all died in seconds."

[weary_head]

"I don't see butterflies," says Dean, cupping her face between his hands, holding her steady against the panic he can see in her wide eyes. If there is a virus, if it's as deadly as she says, he's already fucked, and if one or both of them is dying, Dean's not going to be anywhere but right here with her.

"I don't see anything but you, and I feel okay. How are you? You feeling okay?"

[attitude]

She shakes her head lightly, but with Dean's hands on either side of her face, Faye finds herself calming just enough, hands reaching up to rest over his fingers and holding them there. If there was a virus, he'd be exposed already. If there was a virus, she'd never forgive herself. But the seconds pass and waves crash out in the ocean, and he's fine, still standing, his voice calm.

"I'm immune to it either way," she replies, taking a slow breath, shuddering less than her last. "Sometimes I see them— just on any old day."

[weary_head]

"Okay, let's just. Sit a sec," Dean says, drawing her down into the sand with him, suspicious enough by now of all those marbles to keep her back to them. "Is that why you're scared?" he asks, tucking a lock of violet hair behind her ear. "You see them right now? How do you know you're immune?"

[attitude]

Deep breaths in and out. Faye forces herself to take those same measured breaths, hands on her lap, refusing to buckle underneath the weight of it all, not when she has more now than she ever managed to find back then. She remembers running through that entire mission, knowing that Jet and Spike wouldn't come to her aid, not unless she managed to call them for it. That was a running theme in the whole team dynamic— Faye could take care of herself, let her deal with her trouble.

"They're everywhere," Faye replies quietly, gesturing left and right with her hands, as though waving invisible specs away. "But I know I'm immune because... Vincent, he was the one guy who survived the first outbreak. Forced some of his blood on me. Thought we could watch as the rest of the world fell to pieces."

Her brow furrows. "I still don't know why he picked me."

[weary_head]

"Did you know him?" Dean asks, and he can guess, maybe, as much as he can guess why any crazy person does anything, why he'd pick Faye. Even at his lowest - when John died, when Sam died, when the both of them disappeared - for all that Dean had wanted to pull the world down piece by piece, he can't imagine seeing someone like Faye and wishing that she be spared.

"Or were you just in the right place at the wrong time?"

[attitude]

"They placed a bounty on his head. That's all. Biggest bounty that anyone had ever seen, which should've clued us all in, but we were... running on our last dime, as always. Wanted a challenge, as always. All the other bounties would've only held us up for a week, but Vincent, three hundred million woolongs," Faye exhales, closing her eyes, still seeing the glow cast itself in front of her. "Even someone who gambles as much as me would have some trouble casting that off. It wasn't the right place at the wrong time, it was having no way of conceiving of how big this was."

A sliver of green peeks through when she opens her eyes, holding her hands out in front of her, and the butterflies start fading away, crumbling into so much dust.

"Bioterrorism. You can't call it anything less than that."

[weary_head]

"He sounds like a peach," says Dean, feeling better for the way her eyes focus on him, hopes that if her gaze holds long enough, there won't be any room for butterflies. He rolls his shoulders, back straight. Big enough to fill her vision. Takes her hands and holds them so she can feel him.

"But you got away. You stopped him somehow."

[attitude]

While not quite ready to walk away, Faye finds herself capable of clinging to the smaller details, her fingers pressing into his palm or eyes darting across the faint color of freckles by the bridge his nose, where the sun's shone any number of times. Keeping herself busy's the only way to escape the most consuming of emotions, she's found, be it fear or mere restlessness, rustling quickly through memories she's not sure she ever spent the time to reflect upon. What was the point, after all? Thinking about a madman no one could save.

"Spike did," she corrects, biting down on her lower lip. "We all stopped the virus, but I didn't get away from Vincent. Vincent left. Guess I was only so interesting after a point."

Closing her eyes, Faye shakes her head. "Can we get rid of them? There's no point in keeping those things around."

[weary_head]

"Bottom of the ocean sound good?" Dean asks, catching her cheek in his palm, thumb stroking at the hollows there until her eyes open.

"We could steal a boat, make a day of it."

[attitude]

Sometimes, it feels like the island's trying to tear everything down brick by brick. Faye knows that she's not the only person who's been through a difficult time, and a scare, in the end, is nothing. It's just a scare. Nothing happens, nothing lasts, and it's only up to her to continue life as it has been. Pulling her lower lip in momentarily, Faye glances up to meet Dean's gaze and tries to smile.

"Bottom of the ocean," she agrees, trying to stamp down frayed nerves. "You've got someone else watching over Cori?"

[weary_head]

"She's with her Aunt Thrace," says Dean, mouth twisting only a little for the words. He stands up and offers her both hands, eager now to get rid of those little blue bastards.

"Bottom of the ocean. We got this, Faye."

[attitude]

She takes it easy in finding her footing, lips curving instinctively at the name Dean uses for Kara— if Dean's the brother and Kara's the aunt, she wonders what exactly that means for the two of them. But once her balance is sure, Faye doesn't wait too long before slipping her hands out of Dean's, leaning in instead to wrap her arms around his shoulders, trying to hide the slight shake in her fingers as she presses her forehead to the line of his jaw.

"Thanks," she murmurs, voice muffled where her lips are close to his neck, inhaling deeply before her breath escapes her in a flutter.