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]

"Marginally," Faye replies, glancing over with a solemn look, the kind that she tries so hard not to need around anyone on the island. She'd used it freely with Spike. Most of the time, she managed not to worry too much about stepping back in such a way with Dean. But on the whole, she didn't want people to worry, or to sense her weaknesses, some part of her still terrified that they'd leak out through the cracks in her heart, coming back later to freeze them all.

"But it's still a shock, you know? Just a reminder that there can be worse that that the island brings here. In that way, no, I don't feel any better. This is the devil I know. What happens when it's the devil I don't?"

[notfaking_it]

Lily think that's the sort of question that can be asked about life in general, but there is a different sense of direction here. A purposefulness that isn't always part of life off the island. Things here seem to happen because something is directing them, because it wants a reaction and so she understands what Faye means in a way.

"I don't know," she says honestly, then sighs. "I know you're not really expecting me to have an answer, but I wish I did. I imagine there are a lot of people with that same question."

Lately, she's been thinking on it more and more often. Nina's poster, the marbles on the beach, things meant to make people feel something, even if it's negative. She doesn't know what to make of it.

[attitude]

She allows herself the slightest of smiles then, shaking her head. The burden of explaining any aspect of life and the whys isn't one that Faye would wish on anyone, not even her greatest enemy. Because life is too big, too complex, too everything for a single mind to contain.

"Even if you did have an answer, which some people do," Faye begins, eyes taking on a softer look in her amusement, "knowing me, I wouldn't be able to take your word for it. Sometimes, you have to answer things for yourself."

And then, she thinks of sunset over a glittering span of water, the splash of a fountain in the distance, and the cries of gulls in the air.