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

[notfaking_it]

"Hey, if it works for you, I'm certainly not going to try and bring you down," Lily answers as she slips into the ship with a moment of almost unreality. She's still aware of what she's saying to Faye, still present in the conversation, but for a moment she's also very aware of the fact that she's stepping into a ship, inside something she never would have hoped to see in her own time and place.

"I mean that," she adds softly, her free hand falling to rest on the pilot's seat. The bag at her hip makes a soft clinking noise, the sound of the marbles shifting together as she finds the right place to stand. "Just because I can't necessarily picture something for myself right now doesn't mean it's not the right way for someone else. I like when the people I like are happy."

And it really is as simple as that. All the things she's done to Nina -- for Nina -- have been about making her happy. She only wants the same for Faye.

[attitude]

When she's like this, inside the ship, she can almost forget that she's trapped on an island. She can insert the ignition key and almost feel like she's just about to pass through into orbit, getting to see the Earth from afar, all of the colors and swirls and clouds like the shifting tendrils of mist that they are. They won't get that far, not even close, but Faye feels an ache of loss in her chest just by being here at all, starting up the ship until they hover several dozen yards above the ground, landing wheels retracting.

"I'm not arguing that it can't be for anyone," Faye replies with a casual arch of her brow as she takes the ship out over the ocean, her stomach turning in muted excitement. "But it's not my thing. It was my parents', but I guess I ended up falling pretty far from the tree."

[notfaking_it]

For a moment, Lily can't respond as they rise, her gaze drawn to the sand disappearing below them. She's never been one of those people who love to fly, but she certainly doesn't hate it either and this is something she knows people from her time has never been able to do. It's the sort of thing she never would have even known to imagine and that's what makes it more exciting.

"It looks different from above," she says, then laughs, knowing how ridiculous that sounds. It's true, though, and she stares down at the ocean for a moment. "Sorry, I'm just... you don't think of things like this when I'm from. Or some people do, but it isn't something that I thought of or even knew to think about."

[attitude]

"It's fine," replies Faye, voice quick yet hushed. She understands when people want to marvel at the world below from such a height, as there's something undeniably majestic about it all. The waters are calmer from above, and the world seemingly small, yet here— uniquely, here— endless still. It's the very type of wonder that brought her to signing up for all those space missions, the first commercial flights, and the very thing which inadvertently sent her down this long, winding, impossible path. "Believe me, no matter what my dreams were as a girl, it's not exactly like I predicted having something like this to myself, either. Even after you don't go up for months, you... start to forget what it's like."

Lips thin, Faye releases some of the pressure on the craft before opening a small window to the side and letting her towel fall open while her craft continues ahead on autopilot. "Hand me the bag?" she asks, eyes watching close as the marbles fall into the ocean, white foam rising to the surface after.

[notfaking_it]

Carefully, Lily unzips the bag, then hands it over to Faye. She can see where the marbles hit the ocean far below, though once they're under the water, that's the last she sees of them. They're too close in colour, they drop too quickly, and once the foam settles where they've hit, there's no sign of them at all. It's best this way, she thinks, to rid of them in a manner that's quite permanent. There are tides, of course, currents, but the chances of the ocean bringing all these marbles back to the beach are slim.

"So they're gone," she says, although not all of them have gone into the water yet and she pauses, watching Faye with the bag. They'll be gone soon, too, disappearing into the ocean. "You can throw the whole bag in there if you want. I can find another one." Gym bags aren't hard to come by out of that box and she doesn't mind if it's brightly coloured, so long as it fits the things she needs to be carrying.

[attitude]

The wind catches sharply in the gym bag, but all it takes is a sharp flick of Faye's wrist before it's back inside the craft, and she presses a few buttons to close the open space in the cockpit, the pressure sharp against her ears before everything falls quieter for the calm. Running her fingers through her hair where it's whipped around her eyes, she shakes her head in Lily's direction.

"It's fine," she says, pressing her lips tightly together and willing the words to make themselves true. "Wouldn't want to make you sit in front of the clothes box for several hours to replace something you used to help me. Bag doesn't hold the virus, anyhow."

With a soft groan, Faye leans back in her seat, pressing a couple of buttons to retrace the path of their flight, leaving the craft on a slow autopilot.

"God," she says. "This place is run by an asshole."

[notfaking_it]

"It is," Lily agrees simply, tucking her hair behind her ear to get it off her face. Although she still isn't sure what she believes about the island, who's in charge or why things happen, she does know that she doesn't like the way it plays with people. It seems like a game, more than anything, and although Lily is on board with all sorts of fun, she prefers it to be the consensual kind. There's nothing consensual in what the island does to the people who live there.

A game, a power struggle, she doesn't know, but she doesn't like it either.

"Do you feel any better, though? With them gone?" she asks, leaning her arms against the seat gently, her chin resting against them.

[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.