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. ]

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[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.