attitude | did you say your prayers?

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did you say your prayers?

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. ]

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"Edward, step back, they're—"

A breath caught in Faye's throat as she watched the girl shuffle over the shore, collecting the marbles until they threatened to slip through her nimble fingers. The only saving grace was the fact that Edward had been exposed to the vaccine before, she was immune. Heart still feeling as though it was thudding in her throat, Faye reached out for the girl's shoulder, trying to pull her straight.

"Don't you recognize these? Ed, they're not toys. They look exactly like Vincent's."

"Ohhhhhh, Edward remembers." And she did, trying to find the Vincent-man, the man with the tattoo. Faye had hijacked the weather station, that had been fun. She also remembered the little blue balls now, filled with the bad things and she frowned.

"What is Faye-Faye doing with these? Where did they come from?"

Sometimes, Faye envied Edward's calm. Other times, she found herself completely baffled, enough that it slowed her response; this time, unfortunately, was the latter. Blinking in the girl's direction, Faye quickly shook her head, trying to rid herself of the intermittent glow that still passed through her vision, although not with half the strength that it had before.

"The island dropped them off, I'm guessing," Faye replies, quickly trying to gather as many as she can. "And who knows how many? All I know is that we need to start making that vaccine if we want to say any of these people."

Edward looked around, trying to examine the marbles. "Did one break, Faye-Faye? Because if they didn't break the bad stuff can't get out." But Edward was starting to get a little worried. How could they make the cure? Spike had to steal it, Jet had to get all the old people to fly it up.

There aren't any planes here.

"You're not seeing butterflies? I—" Faye shook her head, rubbing at her eyes with the back of her hand, still trying to pool all of the marbles into a small hole that she pushed into the sand. "I keep on seeing flashes, and it's the same as when Vincent gave me the cure. And the marbles in that room were all whole, scattered over the ground."

Maybe she shouldn't have shared. Maybe it was better to keep her mouth shut. But more than anything else, Faye wanted to make sure that no one else was hurt.

"Dammit," she bit out. "I don't know who we can ask. Can you do anything with your laptop? Check the composition of these marbles."

"Edward doesn't have the scanner." That wasn't something she could rig up, either. She ran the thoughts over and over through her head, trying to come up with a solution.

"Stark-man? He has a computer, Edward can't hack it, but maybe he has scanners?"

"Do we think he could be convinced to let us borrow a scanner? Or to bring it out here, at least," Faye pondered. She was in Stark's class, after all, and after having produced a bike that was almost finished, and surely able to take her across the island without issue, hopefully he had a somewhat higher opinion of her. Or at least knew that she wasn't the type to lie without a cause.

"But without him taking the reins. God only knows we can't afford for him to be struck by the virus."

"Edward doesn't know. Maybe? He's strange, Faye-Faye." Meanwhile, she kept picking up the marbles, being much more careful this time. Yes, these were bad beans. Bad toys. Deadly toys.

Didn't they usually run from these things?

"Should we get the doctor-people at the clinic? They fixed Ed's arm."

"Fixing an arm and blocking a virus seem like two entirely different things to me, and I'm not even an expert in the area," Faye sighed between her teeth, fingers weaving through her hair as she ran through thought after thought, and only found herself arriving at the same conclusion that she'd started with, that any help they sought would immediately be putting someone at risk. If they were doctors, all the worse— people who were willing to put their time and resources on the line for others without any type of meaningful compensation.

Some people thought that the rewards of leading someone back to health would be enough, but there was a reason why free clinics weren't all that common, Faye reasoned.

"We'll get—"

She pauses, finding a marble next to her side, a splinter run down its center. Letting it roll around in her palm, Faye glanced up at Edward in slight alarm. "You really don't see anything? Lights? Wings? Nothing at all?"

"Ed sees the marbles."

She was a little more confused, what was Faye-Faye talking about? Butterflies. She looked around, even getting up to peer into the trees to see if what Faye was talking about was there. But it wasn't. There weren't any butterflies. Why weren't there, was Ed too broken to see them?

"No butterflies."

"No butterflies," Faye repeated, feeling her breath leave her in the softest of sighs, even as her heart continued to thud, hard and quick against her chest. Pressing her hand there, Faye ran the other through her hair, as though gently coaxing could bring back all thought and help surface an answer. "Maybe..."

She could hardly believe the suspicion that was building. It was almost optimistic.

"Maybe these don't have the virus. Maybe I'm freaking out, and they're just marbles," she sighed, picking a handful out of the sand and pressing them close to her palm.

Holding a marble up to her eye, Edward tried to see through it, but she didn't know what she was looking for. Was it supposed to swirl or twinkle or blink? How did someone know if they were the good marbles or the bad ones? If they were good marbles, maybe Edward could just play with them and everything would be okay?

"Edward hopes they're just marble-marbles. Edward doesn't want the bad Vincent things to happen again."

"You're not the only one," Faye said quietly, brow wrinkling before she set her forehead against her knees, weight heavy on the ground, arms weighing down as she looped them around her legs. Worrying was always exhaustive; Faye had relearned that lesson all too well during her time on Bebop. It was always easier to run through life without worrying about the consequences, because alone, the worst that could happen was that she'd disappear at last, completely, wholly, and with her, so would the last of that beautiful world she'd once been a part of. But with the boys? With Edward? And now on the island? God, but it was tiring.

"Do you know if lymphocytes generally survive in the ocean?" Faye asked, staring out into the distance, wondering if chucking the marbles there would be enough. Out of sight, out of mind.

"No." It was the only answer Ed could think to give. She just didn't know. She didn't know if they were real or if they were like the circus toys and real enough. Real enough to hurt.

"Maybe fire?"

"Fire's not going to melt glass. Not unless I ask for the type of fire that only the fortunate few get access to," Faye murmured, dragging fingers through her hair and getting sand between the strands, and she huffed in frustration upon realizing what she'd done. Throwing them into the sea was the easier option by far, but would it work? Would it keep the virus at bay? Faye had no way of answering that question, and for once, she regretted not taking more classes at the island school. Maybe Dean even knew.

"I'm going to toss them into the ocean," she decided. "Bury them under the sand until we find out whether or not someone has the materials to check on the marble."

"What if a dog unburies them?" Edward knew Ein liked to dig holes and there there were plenty of other god around, some really big ones, too. What if they really were dangerous and the dogs got them, would the dogs get sick?

"Maybe we can put them in a box and take them somewhere."

"The box won't keep the virus in, if it's really still in the marbles," Faye considered, pressing her palm to her forehead. Then again, Edward was right. Even if the sand was probably better than leaving them in air, there was always a chance that people went poking around where they shouldn't. "Maybe sand... in a box." She sighed, nodding.

"Okay. We'll find a box. Pack it with sand, drop a couple marbles in, but take Redtail to fly most of them out."

"Like presents. Ed can wrap them like presents and Faye-Faye can hide them until someone makes them not dangerous."

That was a plan. That was a good plan, from Ed's point of view, everyone knew that you didn't open hidden presents. You just didn't.

"Just make sure that they're labeled as dangerous and we'll be set," Faye agreed, the best that she could come up with at the moment. If the virus was airborne, then perhaps they could simply keep it from making too much contact with the air, spreading through it, infecting others. And Redtail still had enough in her to take them out to the water, far enough that it'd drop deep into the depths of the ocean, never reachable by anyone who didn't deliberately make the trip.

"Let's do it."

"Where can Edward get a box?"

She stood, hands still filled with marbles and tried to think hard. There were boxes, there had to be. Things came in boxes and there were always lots of things around.

Frowning, Faye rubbed at her brow in resignation, running through all of her belongings. They had drawers in the hut, but there was no way to easily transport one of those. But then her brows raised with an idea.

"Redtail," she replied, glancing over in the direction of the hut, mere minutes away. There was a reason why Faye tended to stay within a certain distance of her ship, and this only seemed to prove that she'd made that choice correctly. "I have some boxes for my clothes and jewelry in there; we'll use one of those."

"Edward can find them!" She dropped the marbles she'd been holding on the soft sand and ran off. She could do this part, she could help Faye-Faye make everything better and save the island.

If the island needed saving. But if Faye was certain, that was good enough for Edward.

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