notes: an alternate version of the long-awaited date, now with a liberal helping of mentorship feelings! thank you to cupid-of-ruination, zumisumi, starlatine and transversely for providing invaluable feedback.
title taken from 'in the dark we crush' by julia cohen.
all concrit greatly appreciated!
Baam's eyes are still strikingly bright. Sun-golden, sky-clear. Jyu Viole Grace's brutality pulled taut around him like a shroud (though he never could quite learn to affect cruelty, Androssi thinks). And yet, behind that awful FUG-mandated fringe, the same earnest eyes that had peered out from a boy's face years ago when he'd thrown himself between her and those whimpering fisherman candidates with a righteously suicidal zeal. Incongruous and almost, but not quite, reassuring.
"You kept me waiting a long time," Androssi says, leaning back against the leatherette chaise. This has the unfortunate side effect of positioning her face directly in the path of the sunlight spilling in through the window, but after all she has a certain image to cultivate; she isn't going to do something as plebeian as, say, shielding her eyes. She tilts her head to the side instead, shifting away from the stinging light. These are all angles she knows how to play. She considers this, her body's warm-eyed limpid-smiling response calibrated by decades of flashbulb exposure, and discards the reaction.
Baam blinks and presses that disconcertingly sincere gaze to her own. Its weight almost physical. As always his sheer lack of calculation startles her into speechlessness, the panelled walls too close around her, the achingly familiar sensation of being pinned down like a butterfly on a board, flayed apart before the gathering. She'd seen a collection of them at a gallery once, back when she was still learning the extent of her new name. Translucent wings spread out by a dispassionate hand, the visceral horror and vicious glee she'd felt at the sight of them. The scale of her own capabilities suddenly intoxicating. "Sorry?" he tries.
"I guess it wasn't completely your fault." Androssi waves a hand magnanimously. "Nobody asks to be kidnapped by a cult of fanatics in ugly cloaks."
He frowns, in all likelihood about to contest this last statement, because of course he wants to defend the maniacs who threatened to massacre his friends if he didn't take the lead role in their dramatic Messiah quest. She would not be surprised if he'd managed to befriend them too, along the way. Earned their undying loyalty. The kind of ridiculous, impossible coalescences that he seemed to make a habit out of.
Androssi is overcome by a surge of weariness. Well-worn enough to wind her, not from the shock of the lethargy itself but an unfurling horror at the realisation that she had expected it. That she had accustomed herself enough to this boy to expect anything. She compensates by switching on her most inane media-darling smile. "Say, we probably shouldn't be associating, what with FUG's whole down-with-Zahard thing! Should I be worried about any upcoming assassination attempts? I'd hate to discredit your minions by downing their newest rising star in ten seconds."
Before, a remark like that would have elicited some degree of overwhelmed bewilderment. Instead, Baam only looks - thoughtful. Pensive. He's been drifting since he came back to them, the quiet elation he'd worn when he'd seen his old teammates again since dissipated. "They weren't all bad people, Miss Androssi," he says.
"You came back, though. I can't say for certain whether Wolhaiksong's hospitality has any more… finesse than your last hosts," Androssi casts a dubious eye over the perplexing miscellany of architectural elements masquerading as a luxury resort room, arranged as if the designer had had a reasonable idea of what constituted good taste and then sprinted gleefully in the opposite direction (what kind of deranged individual coordinated chintz with steel eel print?), "but you - you came back."
"I - yes. I did."
His fingers lie motionless on his lap; something else FUG has taught him. How to carry himself with purpose despite the lack of it.
"So, anyway, how was it? The whole Slayer bootcamp experience? What did you do? You're - stronger than you were, before."
"Ah... I trained a lot, mostly. Learned how to control shinsoo better, and a little bit of hand-to-hand… I just wanted to be good enough to be able to return here on my own, so I could see everyone again. By the end I had a lot of help, though. I, um, I had some good instructors."
"But you wouldn't have done it if you had the choice. Not for them."
"The person who took you in - you wouldn't have either."
She huffs out a delighted laugh. She doesn't touch the emblem in her hair. "Like I said, I don't expect you to understand. I'm looking for something different than what you're looking for - or who, I should say. I mean, honestly! Still climbing after her? Have you considered that she doesn't actually want you to? She did try to kill you, you know."
At least I never did, she doesn't add. As helpless as a small fluttering thing, and she could have crushed him so easily if she'd chosen to.
"Rachel is -" Baam starts, and stops. Maybe there isn't anything else to say. Rachel is. Rachel exists, and that's reason enough. Beginning and end.
Well, not if Androssi can help it. Rachel might have been his first teacher, but she will be his best.
Androssi does not remember the woman who had led her to a makeshift arena - the ground compacted by a thousand daily violences, feet hammering on dirt and the intermittent muted thud of a body following through - and ordered her to fight. She supposes she should be grateful to her as a first mentor of sorts. A facilitator. The woman's fingers searing uncomfortable warmth into Androssi's shoulder. But as a general principle, Androssi prefers not to linger on any period of time she's been less than what she could be, than what she is now. After she'd earned her name she'd sifted through whatever she knew of the woman that wasn't blurred by terror or exhaustion and carefully excised it from her memory. The privilege of strength on her own terms. Everything she is, she constructed for herself.
Nonetheless, there are things her body recalls, long after the fact of their occurrence.
"You shouldn't make a person into your axis," she says lightly. "It never ends well, from what I've heard."
"I owe her - "
"I think any debts remaining have been repaid, since she, you know, pushed you out of the dome -"
" - and she owes me," he finishes. "At least a, a reason! Anything at all. She stayed with me, she named me, she taught me. I have to know why she - if she hated it so much, she. She didn't have to. She never had to."
Baam's knuckles have bleached white, the tips of his fingers digging into his thighs. Balanced on the edge of his hideous overstuffed armchair, staring forward with an unsettled intensity. She doesn't think he's looking at her anymore. He has never truly been able to sever his gaze from his past, from Rachel, from the light trickling in through the rift in the ceiling that he's long since come into.
Why he's so desperate to cling onto the boy he used to be is something Androssi will never understand. She too had been utterly infatuated with things like intrinsic compassion and selfless generosity until it was alternately beaten and starved out of her, and she'd learned to fill in the hollows they'd left with a ravenous want. Clawing her way to the head of the table fuelled by that hunger. Moral qualms were just dead weight. There was no point trying to preserve what she already had when it was nothing more than worthless. When there was so much more to have.
Fight, the woman had said, her grip like a brand. Androssi has never since stopped.
This is not a kind world, she could tell Baam. You know this already. You haven't even begun to realise how much you're going to suffer. People like me break beautiful things because we can. If you don't hurt others, they're only going to hurt you, again and again, and you're not meant for that kind of life. I've told you that so many times, but you never listened.
Or even, you could still leave if you wanted to. But that isn't quite true, anymore. Perhaps it never had been.
"Well then," she says, rising to her feet. "I need a sparring partner - you wouldn't want me to lose my touch, would you - and don't think you learned anything from those tacky Slayer sycophants, anyone who spends that much time loitering in the shadows or whatever has got to be totally incompetent. Crushingly incompetent," and there it is, the sense memory of a room not dissimilar to this one, the riotous deluge of light through glass filamenting Baam's hair with gold, weightless, incandescent. The world, everything that awaited her at the summit of the Tower pared down to this: her measured heartbeat, her arms raised to shield herself in anticipation of Baam's first movement. She had thrown him to the ground and helped him up, then. It had not been difficult. A physical manifestation of what she was capable of, destruction or restoration dependent on a whim. It's only occurred to her now that Baam, too, carries the weight of that same power. They are still learning, all of them.
She thrusts out her hand. Cursory, impatient. Waiting, like always, for Baam to reach her.