freya has, in short, not been handling all of this very well. she hadn't very many belongings at king's in the first place, but what she did have she'd shoved into a near-bursting duffel bag and promptly threw it all out onto the floor of her hotel room. and it has stayed there since, slowly shifting and migrating around the room due to her passerby scavenging. 

a few days afterward and she had deigned to look at a single apartment listing. it had been clean enough, modern enough, and empty enough to make her go mad. she had promptly excused herself from the showing, gone back to her hotel room, and curled under the sterile-smelling sheets to stare forlornly at her rather lovely blue wall with its deco art. 

marble countertops are littered with empty coffee mugs, brown rings at the center. and beside them, telling a story in two acts, cardboard cups that never made it all the way into the trash. printed news articles, official documents (not high security, but enough where they probably shouldn't be glanced at by anyone beneath her secretary), and her own ripped-out notebook pages with her cramped handwriting are strewn over the couch, the coffee table, the floor.

a couple of wine bottles are wedged next to a burnt-bottomed pan, contents mostly full and most certainly abandoned in favor of the half-empty handle of whiskey right beside them. 

for the first time in sixteen hours, freya is asleep. 

and then, just as she dips into blissful REM, she is thrust back into consciousness. bleary-eyed, she stumbles out of the tub, scrabbling for purchase on the bathroom threshold, out into the bedroom and then the tiny living room, to see another ghost. 

she blinks, looks around at all of her things, contemplates her embarrassment, and then picks her way into the kitchen to put a pot of brown go-go juice on.

"did you break into my hotel room just to insult me?" she says, and then, "coffee?"

ana fell

☉

the last she'd spoken to cygne, the woman had been remorseful. forlorn. left wanting and starving for something just out of reach. freya had known the feeling - does know the feeling - and that moment of respite they shared in the middle of the damned sea is what makes freya think she's not here to do something stupid like try to assassinate her. 

"i don't have cream," she says flatly as she follows the rhythm of shaking out the grounds and measuring water (after dumping out a day(???)-old pot and giving it a very quick rinse). 

what happened?

the machine whirs to life. she offhandedly opens the cupboard under the sink so cygne can see where the trash can is. no sense stopping her robber from cleaning up the place.

"nothing, in the grand scheme of things," she says and rubs a crusty out of her eye. after a pause, while the coffee sputters and drips against glass, she sighs again and adds, "love is painful."

ana fell

☉

oh, doesn't she know it. no matter how tightly she grasps at the things she loves most, they always have a stubborn habit of slipping through her fingers like sand. and she hates sand. 

"i have a hot pot," she says and waves a hand at the single camping burner with the aforementioned scorched pan on top of it. she had learned, while coughing through the smoke, that she could not a. focus long enough to cook and b. the hotel room's fire alarms do not work. 

"i haven't had a mailing address for a while," she admits. even before the hotel. it's not like she could put down her permanent residence as king's bar. turncoat king wayland's bar, owned by turncoat king wayland (though it's undoubtedly under a pseudonym, but that would still just be inviting trouble to show up at his door). 

more trouble than she's already invited. 

"no. yes, but no. it's complicated." isn't it always? "i think i might be a bad person."

the coffee maker beeps and she fishes around for a couple more cardboard cups. she has the decency to pour cygne's first. her own, she cradles in chapped hands; the first sip, in actuality, consists of a couple of scalding gulps. the caffeine buzzes through her veins. 

she yawns. 

"you look different." she refills her cup and then steps neatly over a hand broom and dustpan, abandoned in the midst of cleaning up some broken glass. she trudges through the living room and goes to the sliding glass door that leads to the balcony. it's unlocked. 

"this would have been an easier way in," she says, grunting as she tugs the heavy door open. a wrought iron bistro set waits for bodies and quiet, romantic companionship. freya offers her seat some sweat-stained pants and a mess of tangled silver hair.

"there's a laundromat down the street too. apartments require leases and a lease is a commitment." she takes another sip and tucks her legs up under her.

ana fell

☉

"they seemed fairly understanding, considering the circumstances surrounding my family's estate," she says without sliding her gaze over to cygne. she balances the cup on her drawn knees, dimpling her fingertips against it to keep it balanced. it had been a bit of a white lie, glossing over her residency as she did, but at the very least, it's true now. 

"then subjectively, i think i might be a bad person. does it frustrate you? that it never matters how we might feel about the things we do? even if we have to do them when we don't want to, we're...sorry."

she frowns. nudges the lip of the cup against her lips and just lets it rest there. the coffee smell wafts under her nose. steam dews her upper lip. 

the paper draws her from her listless staring. she sets the cup down on the tiny table in lieu of picking up the letter. thumb tucked under it, she opens and reads it with an expression of disinterest. and then tucks it back in the envelope.

"again with the insults. i'm going through something, okay?" she says moodily, but it lacks any substantial venom.

"a job, huh? i could use a maid. clearly." her nose twitches. "you still involved with rocket?"

ana fell

☉

cygne chases herself around and around, mimicking freya's own internal monologue. at the end of the day, she'd had a choice. she could relive becoming an oathbreaker, knowing she could have done something. she could sacrifice the region for her own self-serving interest or she could swallow her pain, step above what he made of her, and pay back her debts. 

she could unshackle her ghosts and free herself from torment. 

and he made a villain out of her. worse, as she grappled with her own acceptance of self, drowning after losing everything that made her a morningstar, he smeared her namesake with that of the enemy. 

she cannot forgive him for that.

she cannot forgive herself for the truth. 

"the choices i make, inevitably, always, hurt people," she says. 

a snicker. "maybe i'll give it a listen. i don't get maid service, by the way. too embarrassed to let them in. or maybe they told me they wouldn't come around anymore. honestly, i don't really remember the conversation."

she rubs at her face, perpetual sleepiness stuck on like a stringent mask. "you got a civilian name? something not connected? or we could put you through the amnesty system. get you out there the right way. atone for your...delivery sins. you think?"

the rest of her coffee is somehow gone. she doesn't remember finishing it. alas, she leaves the empty cup on the table and leans back, tucking a frayed braid behind her ear.

in the past, she's been careful about how she asks this, but arceus, she's so tired."do you remember galar?"

ana fell

☉

this is the human condition, she tells her. with love comes pain and suffering. with happiness comes an equal weight of grief. the cost of closeness and intimacy is the weight of loss and she has quickly come to loathe it. 

"i don't think knowing you're doing something shitty makes it better when you do the shitty thing," she says. she's so wrapped up in all of it, looked at it from every which way, she can't make sense of what's shit and what's not. 

if she let elisa have fernando, it would cripple the region. 

and you would be free, finally free. and he wouldn't find king or delta and you could make everything right. you could go back.

"valid point. i can at least say since, er, moving in, that i haven't contributed to the pollock of semen stains that are probably all over the bedroom."

her reaction to galar is different than the rest. almost, and this may sound callous, as though she were glitching. recognition flashes in the woman's eyes, the slightest tightening, loosening, tightening, and freya ends up turning the other cheek, tilting to look up at the sky. 

at least she has a nice view from here. 

"first things to go? it tried to get away from me, at first, but i kept writing it all down. i read it when i start to forget." passages of pain and heartache and grief and brief glimpses of a love fought for over the course of two decades. 

she prays it is not a memento to a love lost. 

"ana then. okay. nice to meet you. can you still fight like you did? and is your arm okay?"

ana fell

☉

"and all the good caring's done for me," she says, which isn't really fair of her to say, not when she knows and doesn't know that cyg - ana's been through hell and back too and here she is, drinking her shitty coffee and telling her that maybe it's really all that bad, but maybe she's not all that bad. 

pink bleeds quickly into red over the thin clouds hanging above them. the stars are nigh nonexistent, but that does not stop her from searching the tinged lilac, a fruitless endeavor that leaves her stupidly irate. or maybe that's because ana's bringing that tantalizing nightmare out of its box and across the table. each exhaustive, waking moment is another where her willpower slips, where her army of over a hundred strong promises her, in hisses and snarls, that they will be enough to end it all. 

and then, the forgetting. the forgetting of the remembering and freya understands, really understands. to the point where, while she is still searching for those stupid, invisible stars, as far away as they've ever been, she does not notice the wetness crawling down her cheeks.

"you remade yourself," she says in a reverent whisper, tearing her gaze from the sky to look at the glinting craftsmanship before her. 

"i let someone else make me before. hurt me before." she uncurls from herself and reaches a hesitant hand out, asking with her eyes if she can touch. and then it's fingertips on warm metal, beautifully complicated joints connecting lovingly forged knucklebones. 

"because i wanted to stop caring. i wanted to forget that i ever wanted to care." she stares intently at the swirling pattern she makes on ana's palm, the small of her wrist. "and i told him if he gave me what i wanted, i would die for him. he had to let me die. and he said yes, and he spun madness inside of me, and i got what i wanted for a very long time.

"and i took from him, and took, and took, and he fed me, and i did not know what else to do, but i could have done anything else. i thought i was a monster; so a monster he made me.

"but i wasn't...a monster. i was just hurt. grieving. ALEXANDER STONE had just died. my parents had just died. i had no one, ana, except for him." it's ten feet away from her, the meat at the table, the chemical makeup that makes freya who she is, the laws of reality and physics that keep her atoms from colliding with the table. with the impossible arm of a stranger/enemy/ally in front of her. 

"and then i met a stupid man who punched me so hard in the face, it literally knocked the insanity out of me." here, where she wavers, five feet away now, the director standing behind an actor reading a script in a flat voice. it shakes. she shakes. the metal is not warm and it is not cold under her hand.

"i stopped taking and i started coming back to myself and i started feeling and it was so awful, but it was also okay because king was there. but there was a moment, in the kitchen of an apartment just like the one i fucking viewed last week, that fernando looked at me and he told me he would not let me die. that he was never going to give me what i wanted and it didn't matter that i didn't want to die anymore. he lied and i sought out a fucking god and he...

"lost his."

hot breath on her lips, eyes rimmed, the weight of this world she's created sitting on thinning shoulders, "but i have to fulfill my promise. the one i didn't keep the first time. and i have to stop the other woman he's hurt from hurting him. and king doesn't - didn't - understand and it's killing me."

she catches herself now, hand lingering in ana's own, blinks glassy gold, and says, "it's beautiful, too, you know. this. that you made it - that you made you you."

ana fell

☉