when she got the text, her heart sank. ana will not be stopped; freya doesn't know if she would even try to stop her. it brings her joy. to destroy herself. to destroy all that makes her human. 

all that makes her hurt. 

her new assistant had objected to freya's sudden departure from ever grande - but you have a strategy meeting! and then you have to be in dewford by two to help rebuild! - but she claimed a family emergency and left, promising to be back on the radar in the next few hours. 

she's here now, with a softly glowing bundle in her arms, even though ana should be the one holding a damn emotional support pokemon. she kind of has one in kanaya, but the gardevoir is also going to be mucking around in her brain. 

the duskull lingers, an ill omen. 

"i don't think submarines swim," she mumbles to herself, afraid if she doesn't grasp onto the conversation, grasp onto her friend, she's going to lose her. moxie coos, tilting her head up at freya and then curling deeper into her lap.

ana fell

☉

into the deep dark they go. all that makes ana who she is comes to life on that screen and in an instant, she is stripped of the staunch belief that there is more to a person than meat and bones and firing synapses - that there is soul somewhere in the middle, kindling from muted coals to wildfire. 

this is her, this is ana, in her entirety, bits smeared and erased. ana, pockmarked with scars in the shape of song lyrics, lain flat and barren and exposed. 

it is intimate, watching ana through her own eyes while she drifts, only half-lucid (a quarter lucid, an eighth lucid), and a heat warms the back of her neck. moxie nips at her hand and freya realizes she'd been squeezing the dragon a bit too tight. 

"sorry," she whispers, pinching the delicate feathers beside her head in another apology.

and then she hears herself, the crash of water against salt-bleached rocks, her dragons in the distance playing in the surf. just a bare moment, a blip in all that emptiness, and while they travel through the void, freya thinks of ana's dripping words, transcribed through a rotom. 

i kinda love you. not in, like, a 'mawwiage' way, - a soft, sad smile - 'but like, being willing to die for someone is a kind of love, right?'

this is not dying. she had not killed this part of her, the part of her that remembers. the part of her that drove her to find freya in the first place. the part of freya that made her open up her heart in return.

she flinches when lights begin to die. 

ana fell

☉

it does not make freya feel better. endure enough pain and you will become calloused. you will push yourself too far and your body will falter. stutter. stop. you're only human. 

is ana human anymore?

the lines have all blurred. she doesn't know anymore. her own corpus is filled to the brim, near bursting at the seams, with memories of selves she shouldn't have lived. ana's is emptying, draining, disappearing. neither of them asked for this - to become less of and more than themselves. 

moxie is set on the seat. she moves like a ghost to ana's side, tentative. if kanaya motions for her to leave, she will, but she wants to be closer. she wants to be there, hand on metal hand, knowing she can feel her. 

'the thing,' she says, after a long time, 'about being remade, is it hurts. no matter who does it.'*

ana fell

☉

you can't pin down a singular moment and take it away forever, just as you can't take away a whole person without causing ripples in all the other lives they affect. freya watches wordlessly as they dig ever-deeper, past self-actualization, past the foundation of ana z. fell, and into the past. 

into the before. 

"i remember," she says. it wasn't so long ago. lyune is healed and the wing he'll never use is still in ana's garage, sleek and beautiful and useless. 

here is a thread that could undo it all. it is a careless action, tugging on it after freya's seen this house of cards. her fingers curl; she bites her lip and holds her breath. cygne lives there, slumbering, all the pain that's ever happened to her hiding in moments like these. 

what happens if they unearth one connected to more? ana is here because she was cygne and freya is angry, so angry that love is such a double-edged sword. 

she can't fault her for forgetting. 

ana relaxes and it takes another heartbeat or two before freya follows suit. at least one thing is made certain. ana will never have to do this alone again. 

ana fell

☉

and just like that, they're gone, pulled back to the present via a series of happier memories, though it does little to make freya feel better about the whole orchestration. she shifts every so often so she can maneuver out of kanaya's way, but the gardevoir doesn't even seem to notice her. 

it's all so familiar to the two of them. fluid, in a way that screams this has been done a thousand and one times already. it's different, knowing and seeing. 

moxie's tongue forks out at the new space, but delighted at the idea of a warm place, with a makeshift roof over her head, she slithers away from freya and into ana's lap proper. 

plenty to worry about, she goes to say, but a trickle of thought brushes against her subconscious. her lips purse; a flash of hopeless agitation is smothered and then she smiles down at her friend. 

"lemon squeezy. now, i have to know - have any luck with the sygna suit?"

ana fell

☉