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]

The light squeeze of a hand on her shoulder as Faye stumbling to a stop, none too graceful for the way that the comfort strikes her off-guard. Slowly, logic begins to weave its way in, making itself sharply known. She's watched people die from that virus. She's watched as they bled, as their throats constricted, as they found themselves gasping for air and finding none of it. Even with wings still stretching across her vision, sparking before dissolving away at intervals, Faye can see that Lily's still standing tall.

And unless she already has the vaccine running in her veins, that simply wouldn't be the case.

"You feel... okay?" Faye asks, voice barely above a whisper. "Nothing hurts? Nothing feels weird? I thought that it was—" Brow furrowing as her expression crumples, Faye glances over at the marbles. Maybe it's a trick. Maybe it's all just some type of sick, twisted trick.

[notfaking_it]

"I feel fine," Lily answers after doing a quick mental inventory of her body. Her muscles are sore, but it's an ache she's familiar with, nothing more than a reminder that she'd been in the studio the day before, that she'd pushed herself a little too hard, resulting in the pain in her foot. Beyond that, there's nothing out of the ordinary.

And she's never seen Faye like this. For the time being, that's more pressing than anything she might be feeling. If there's any reason to be genuinely afraid, it's probably too late, so she'll worry about it later.

"What about you?" she asks. "Nothing hurts?"

[attitude]

The statement is met with a quick sigh, one that feels stretched thin and on edge as Faye drops down to the sand, the skin of her knees grating against the rough surface of the dune. Lily must be right. Faye isn't sure how that can be the case, how on earth Lily might have stumbled across the proper vaccine or some type of overall immunity, but with that problem solved, it's all a matter of trying to figure out how much of an effort it'd take to develop more of it.

"It wouldn't," she tells Lily. "Not even if there were a hundred times this many. I was... made immune to the effects of the virus a long time ago."

[notfaking_it]

When Faye sinks to the sand, Lily follows, kneeling in the midst of the marbles and she brushes one away absently as she studies her friend carefully. The marbles, whatever they are, aren't making her sick and she thinks that's enough to suggest -- at least to Lily -- that they're not what Faye thinks they are.

"What kind of virus?" she asks, wondering why it would be here, why it would show up on the island. The only explanation, if it's not the virus, is that they're here simply to mess with Faye. It hasn't happened often, but at that thought, Lily feels a dull flicker of anger toward the island, as if it were something sentient, something that can think.

There are other questions, too. Why is it here? Why does it look like this? Why was it made? But for now, she just settles on asking the one.

[attitude]

"I'm not... the best when it comes to explaining these things, but." Faye swallows thickly, rubbing her hand against her forehead, trying to force away the tension there. "The virus was man-made. It goes into your bloodstream and kind of mimics the shape of your lymphocytes, I think, or something that you'd normally find there. Goes up to your brain and starts attacking, and then you just... you just bleed out."

She remembers the hoarse cries of a young man, pounding against the walls, trying to escape his fate. Arms flailing through visions that no one could make sense of, and that no one could touch. Slipping always between their fingers.

"Ironically, the antidote is practically the same thing. Nanomachines that target the virus. And whenever... whenever the virus reaches your brain, or when the antivirus tries to stop it, you see a flash. Right in front of you. Slow-moving, like a butterfly."

[notfaking_it]

"I'm not bleeding out," Lily says firmly. At the very least, she can stop Faye from worrying that something's going to happen to her. If nothing else, there's that. She may not be very good at comfort or trying to work out a way to help Faye understand what's going on, but she can give her that much. Whatever these are, they aren't hurting her.

"I think... I think they're only marbles now, Faye," she says, her voice softening a little. "Whatever else they might have been before, they aren't the same now." Sometimes she still can't believe the things she's saying about the island, as if it really is alive, but somehow, slowly, it's beginning to convince her. Things like this, the gifts that arrive, the things that happen to people, they're all a little too much. A little too perfect. Something controls these events, she's sure of that much now.

[attitude]

The butterflies continue to beat their wings right in front of her eyes, obscuring her vision, forcing her to look out over the ocean, to where they rest in that space between water and sky. As she blinks, more of them seem to disappear, or simply fly out of view when she isn't doing her best to watch, when her eyes aren't focused at their prime. And she hears Lily's words. Perhaps that's the most important detail of them all. She hears what Lily's saying, and it makes as much sense as anything does on the island, and so her breathing slows, enough to tug her heart to rest.

"Sometimes," she says quietly, still not looking at Lily yet for the way she'd rather do so when her vision isn't obscured, "I hate this island."

She slides a palm against her forehead, fingers weaving through her hair.

[notfaking_it]

"I don't blame you," Lily answers quietly, though she doesn't share the feeling, exactly. What she hates, more than anything else, is the lack of explanation. How a place like this can hurt the people she cares about and no one knows why. No one can tell her how to stop it.

And it's only because she's sure it's some trick, some joke this place is playing at Faye's expense, that she reaches out into the sand and collects one of the marbles. It's really quite pretty, catching the sunlight, reflecting bright blue. But it's only glass in her hand and she lets it drop again. "And now these are all yours? That seems... cruel."

[attitude]

All hers. Bright green meets electric blue as Faye's gaze spans over the length of the shore, taking in the color as it pierces through the muted tan of sand. And maybe it's understandable, she thinks to herself, that she so desperately wants to scream now, tear each marble out from the shore and cast it into the ocean. But there are so many. And her heart has still yet to settle, a steady thud, thud, thud against her chest that leaves her feeling winded still.

"Yeah, well, guess we'll have to try to take it up with upper management," Faye manages to reply, throat feeling slightly dry. "This place has done worse though, hasn't it? Maybe I should consider this getting off lucky, if it's as bad as this place can dream up for me."

Worse, she thinks to herself, would be if Vicious arrived.

[notfaking_it]

Faye isn't wrong about that, but Lily still frowns faintly, looking at all the marbles spread across the beach. Whether or not the island can do worse isn't really the point now, because even if it can do worse, it's done this now. And she can see, even though they're both alright, even though no one's bleeding, Faye is still unsettled. Not that Lily can really blame her.

"Are you going to keep them?" she asks. If this happens to her at some point, if something arrives here that upsets her, she knows she isn't going to keep it. Whatever it is, she'll burn it or throw it out into the ocean or leave it in the jungle somewhere. No one needs a constant reminder of something like this.

[attitude]

Rubbing at the crease of her brow, Faye shakes her head, strands of hair falling to obscure her vision. "I don't know. I can't just let them stay here on the sand, but I might..." She lets a breath through her teeth, nothing above a hiss as she looks out to the lapping water of the ocean. "I might take them out to the ocean, drop them deep into the water. Take them down to Rapture? Somewhere I don't have to think about them, or see them, or worry about being wrong right now."

With a grunt and a sigh, she falls back against the sand, arms folded over her chest. "I should probably tell Dean, too," she murmurs to herself, before turning her gaze Lily's way. "Seems so stupid of me to react, in retrospect. What would be the point of bringing bioterrorism to the island? We're only a couple hundred strong."

[notfaking_it]

"Oh, come on," Lily says, sitting down in the sand, legs folded under her. There isn't anything in her own life to compare it to, but she can understand the reaction anyway. "You had no way of knowing," she points out, looking around at the marbles again. There's so many of them and she tries, for a moment, to imagine her own reaction to them if she'd had even an idea that they might be something dangerous. That they might be a virus. She can't imagine anything other than fear, a gut reaction to a threat.

"Besides, I don't necessarily see the point of most of what happens on the island," she points out. "Logic isn't exactly the most defining presence behind the things that go on here, it seems." The things that were out of their control, anyway, and even if she didn't want to think about something like that happening, she didn't see why it couldn't. After nearly a year here, she'd heard more than a few stories about the dangers that had come and gone in the past.

[attitude]

"I'm just... not that optimistic," Faye sighs through her teeth, weaving her fingers through her hair, tugging lightly until her scalp seems to ache from the pull. When she knows how easily it is to worm one's way into the human mind, to persuade one of things that they might never even dream of doing on a normal day, it's so easy to believe that there's something more malicious going on with the island. Insidious, crawling under her skin. It's the only thread that keeps her from just enjoying this place for what it is, for the friends who've stuck around, for the type of relationship that she never pictured herself having in a million years.

"Everything that arrives seems to do so for a reason. People get things from their past, whether it makes them happy, or sad. There are days when everyone just has nightmares. All this craziness that goes on the island, and somehow we still try to push through every day, it's—" She fights the impulse to grab her gun and rain holes in a nearby tree trunk. "It's all we can do, but it's hell."

[notfaking_it]

"Maybe," Lily allows, though she still isn't convinced that Faye's reaction is out of the ordinary or strange at all. Whatever controls the things that happen here, if there's anything at all, it's impossible to predict what it may or may not do. And it's impossible to fault someone for reacting to what looks like a danger.

"You want to get rid of them now?" she asks. It might be a lot of work and it might take some time, but she isn't about to leave Faye right now either way. There's so much spare time on the island, she doesn't mind spending hers with someone who might need her. "We can find a boat if you want. I'm sure someone will take us out there." She hasn't been down in Rapture, but if Faye would rather take them there, she'll go.

[attitude]

"Yeah," mutters Faye, groaning before she pushes up and to her feet, knocking the sand off her hands before resting them both on her hips and surveying the stretch of shore in front of her. "It's not like I can leave until I know that all of these have been collected somewhere. Or as many as I can find. Can only hope that there weren't any that appeared deeply buried underground."

The breeze weaves between the two of them, picking up Faye's hair and whipping it around her eyes, nose itching from the graze. Sighing deeply, she glances over to ask, "Any brilliant ideas on how to do this? I don't expect you to stay, by the way— I mean. I appreciate it. But there's no pretending that it isn't dull work."

[notfaking_it]

"The two of us can make anything interesting," Lily answers with a shrug and a smile, rising to her feet as well and looking around at the marbles. There are an awful lot, but she isn't going to leave Faye alone to take care of such a thing, not when it's so obviously made such a mark on her.

"We could use my bag," she says after a moment, gesturing to where she's dropped the gym bag in the sand. Her shoes and dance clothes are in there, but they can be taken out, left on the beach for a time while they collect the marbles. There isn't anything so deeply personal in there that she'll be upset if it's lost or taken by someone who catches sight of it in the sand. "They won't all fit, but at least it's a bit of a start."

More importantly, she hopes Faye will feel better with something to do, a task to accomplish, even if it's only collecting the marbles and putting them in a bag.

[attitude]

It's the remark which brings a slight smile to Faye's lips. The remark itself is probably only special in that it's anything but— just a plain statement made, a confidence easily shared between most friends. But it's so painfully normal that Faye finds herself hurtling back to years long past, when she and her friends would gather around the fountain, marveling over the sound of water as it splashed out over the ocean, staring at the blue horizon and wondering where they'd end up if they swept out as far as they could.

This reminds her of that, even though they're grown enough not to see adventure for its own sake.

"Or the towel," she replies, glancing over at the heap, folded over unintentionally in her panic. "At least the work isn't the kind to require a lot of brainpower."

[notfaking_it]

"We can manage it, anyway, between the two of us," Lily teased gently as she reached for her bag and began to take her things out. There wasn't much; a pair of tights and a tank top, her pointe shoes, a towel, and she folded her clothes into the towel before leaving it to rest on the sand.

"Why would someone create a virus like this?" she asked as she began to collect the marbles strewn in the sand. Every so often she'd pause and look at one, watch the light reflect off it, the way the sunlight bounced off the surface. It couldn't have been natural, not if Faye thought the marbles contained the virus. That was too perfect, too clearly manufactured. And the next question, why did they make her immune? Or how had she gotten that way? Lily knew Faye had lived in an entirely different world from the one she'd grown up in and sometimes it was so clear to her how little adversity she'd had to face in comparison to the people she'd met here.

[attitude]

"There's always a reason to develop a virus," Faye sighs, trying to think of the best way to collect the marbles with the least amount of effort— let nothing be said of her propensity for laziness, even in the most unprecedented of situations. In the end, she scoops her hands through the sand, leaving only enough of a gap between her fingers for sand to fall through. "If you can think of a reason why life would be easier if a certain person or group of people don't exist, then there's a reason to create a virus. And if you're going to create a virus, all the better to have it be nearly undetectable."

Her words are soft, but hard; she needs no amount of imagination to guess at why someone would create a weapon. But it's also a fact of life that she's long since grown accustomed to. The marbles don't offer any sudden revelation.

"But the general populace never knows. Governments don't want to freak us out. It all gets swept under the rug."

[notfaking_it]

It's not an answer that surprises Lily, really, she's well aware of the awful things people are capable of and she doesn't imagine it changes much world to world or even across time. There will always be those who are capable of evil, even here, she expects.

"How are you immune?" she asks, then. "I mean, I can understand the mechanics of it to a degree, but did someone choose you?" She isn't a scientist, but she knows the basics of why people recover from viruses, how their bodies work. But that, the basic knowledge of twelfth grade biology, is far different from what they're talking about here.

[attitude]

"It... it's complicated," Faye sighs first, rubbing her face with her bare palm, willing the butterflies to subside for good. When life was always on the run and about chasing down the next bounty head, she didn't have to dwell on memories from the past, of seeing Vincent standing on that street, his hair billowing in the wind like some type of stormcloud circling in the sky. Or the feel of the point of his blade as it slid down her chest, and the sudden snap of a string as he cut away the button of her shirt.

"There was this doctor, I don't know much about him," she begins, "and I don't care to find out. But he made this virus, planned on setting it off for some kind of political movement, tested it on people. Only one man survived. Something in his blood... made him immune. And he found his way to Mars, when the rest of the crew and I were hunting. I found him. But that meant being exposed to the virus."

She slipped more marbles onto the towel, a few clicking together, the sound reverberating in Faye's jaw.

"For some reason, he saved me."

[notfaking_it]

"He knew how to make you immune, too," Lily says, though it's more of a question as she slides a few more marbles into the bag. It's getting heavier now, but she simply shifts it up onto her shoulder and the marbles clack against her hip. She still feels fine, though she's aware of it now, conscious of the slow, rhythmic pulse in her throat. Whatever Faye was scared of -- with good reason, Lily thinks, given how it sounds this virus worked -- she's still sure it's not happening to her.

But she can't help but make sure every few minutes.

Crouching in the sand a few feet from Faye, she collects several more marbles, then glances over at her friend. "And then?" she asks softly.

[attitude]

"And then he decided that he wanted to take down the rest of the world," Faye went on, her breath catching in a wry laugh. It's the type of story that feels clichéd. Everyone wants their slice, everyone wants to grab more than life gives them, and if they steal from others in the process, so be it. Because it's either steal, or be stolen from. Life isn't any more of an exception than any material possessions might be. If the days are gray, then at least to steal the happiness from others might provide a solace.

But Vincent went beyond that.

"I'm not angry at him. I might still be scared, but I'm not angry. I just feel sorry for the bastard," she assures Lily, eyes edged as she takes another handful of marbles, deposits them on her towel. "Either way, we couldn't let that run free."

[notfaking_it]

"He was killed?" Lily asks and there isn't any judgment, just a question. It may not even be the right question, it may not be what happened at all, but the way Faye is speaking makes it sound that way and she's curious. Not only is she curious, but she thinks talking might be a way to deal with it, at least a little. Not a perfect solution, maybe not even the right one, but it might help Faye a little bit and that's all she really wants.

She hefts the bag onto her shoulder again and stands. It's about as full as it's going to get now and she nods her head toward the water in a question. Do they take them out there now or does Faye want to collect them all, make sure there are none left in the sand? There's no boat near them, but she can find one or find someone to take them out.

[attitude]

"He was killed," Faye confirms, and that's all there is to it, the words that she can offer on the topic. As far as how she feels, that's more complex. That he had to die was without question, and even if the same threat loomed over them now, Faye would make the same decision as Spike did, and Vincent would be able to meet his peace at last. But how she feels about it, and where the blame lies, it's all too much, too scattered, wrenching her heart to even think about. Some of what he did was unforgivable.

Some was inevitable.

But she looks up in time to catch Lily's movement, and for that she nods. Might as well start now, she thinks, a steady purge just as good, if not better, as struggling to rid the beach of every last one.