Work Text:
I got a fear, oh, in my blood/
she was carried up into the clouds, high above/
if you've bled, I bleed the same/
if you're scared, I'm on my way
if you ran away/
if you ran away/
come back home
Your Direct Message with topDominoFan#2845
-NEW MESSAGES-
VagaBoondia - today at 2:35pm
forgot to grab toilet paper! can you pick it up on the way home love
topDominoFan - today at 2:38pm
On the list. <3
VagaBoondia - today at 2:39pm
you save my life
every day
topDominoFan - today at 2:43pm
Your knight protector :shield:
VagaBoondia - today at 2:43pm
:hearteyes: :heart: :swoon:
...
VagaBoondia - today at 5:04pm
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she was asleep on polly I had to take pictures
topDominoFan react: :heart:
topDominoFan - today at 6:35pm
I am glad they get along.
Remember how Solitaire was with Anne when she was just a baby?
VagaBoondia - today at 6:40pm
:laugh: fierce guard kitty!
he got me once because I wanted to pick her up and they were both napping
topDominoFan react: :laugh:
they look just like that
topDominoFan - today at 6:55pm
We should have adopted that new kitten...
VagaBoondia - today at 6:57pm
we would have been overwhelmed!
it would have been us, a cat, a new kitten, and then the plantars and Anne when they came home!
can you imagine? they all get into enough trouble :lol:
topDominoFan - today at 7:00pm
Like three new kittens.
VagaBoondia react: :laugh:
Closed up shop, On my way!
VagaBoondia - today at 7:06pm
safe drive! dinner ready when u get home
topDominoFan react: :heart:
...
VagaBoondia is playing: Vagabondia Online [for 2:45:27 - In Party ]
topDominoFan - today at 10:45pm
How is the raid?
VagaBoondia - today at 10:57pm
lost the second boss!
we are trying again
topDominoFan - today at 10:59pm
:wow: Hard one!
VagaBoondia - today at 10:59pm
we have some new members
coaching them! it is okay
want to make sure they are included
topDominoFan - today at 11:00pm
Is Fir there? I saw the sculpture she posted! Tell her it is pretty, she is very talented.
VagaBoondia react: :thumbsup:
VagaBoondia - today at 11:02pm
she says thank you for the tips and advice!
my love is such an artist...
topDominoFan react: :laugh:
it is true! you could quit the restaurant & join a art commune
make big statues of poems in the desert & retire rich
topDominoFan - today at 11:05pm
I don't want to burn a man. :angry:
VagaBoondia react: :laugh:
Did you tell your friends Anne came home?
VagaBoondia - today at 11:15pm
after I was gone for a week! they thought I had disappeared too!
they were all excited when I told them I had been afk with her again
topDominoFan - today at 11:21pm
AFK?
VagaBoondia - today at 11:25pm
home with her! away from my keyboard
topDominoFan - today at 11:27pm
[cat_wise_nod.gif]
topDominoFan - today at 11:30pm
It's quiet.
Did she leave the house?
VagaBoondia - today at 11:35pm
at eleven
she went with sprig, & she shared her phone GPS with me
said she wanted to be outside for a while
topDominoFan - today at 11:36pm
At midnight? It isn't safe.
VagaBoondia - today at 11:36pm
they will be okay!
her and sprig have seen lots of things, he has told me about some of them
topDominoFan - today at 11:36pm
Yes, they told me about fighting monsters. But Sprig is young and doesn't understand the city.
What if someone offers them a ride? What if they go missing again?
I should go find them.
VagaBoondia - today at 11:37pm
they're down the street at the corner park, I can see their location
I have my phone here, she has my number for emergency
they know not to talk to strangers
topDominoFan - today at 11:38pm
I worry.
VagaBoondia - today at 11:38pm
I know :heart:
but we have to give her space
she is getting used to being home again
Mrs. Lewellen said trauma takes time
topDominoFan - today at 11:39pm
I know.
I just worry.
Do you think she is hiding something?
VagaBoondia - today at 11:39pm
Maybe she is?
but we need to let her tell us on her own time, right?
like the therapist said
topDominoFan - today at 11:40pm
Yes
It is just...
She doesn't talk about Sasha or Marcy anymore.
VagaBoondia - today at 11:41pm
I know
I worry too
I know their families weren't very supportive of us
but I wonder if something happened?
if they got hurt, and Anne doesn't want to talk about it...
topDominoFan - today at 11:50pm
yes
I do too.
Sasha was trouble. Always underfoot. Remember the garage show they did here? With their band? The sharp, or something.
VagaBoondia - today at 11:52pm
the sharps! that was so fun. like our old concert days!! :metal:
Marcy used to heal for the group. She loved this raid. I keep expecting to hear her voice on call when the boss attacks, telling me to look out!
but no, it’s another friend
I miss those kids. I hope they're okay.
VagaBoondia - today at 11:56pm
I'm going to come to bed
do you want tea?
topDominoFan - today at 11:57pm
What about your raid?
VagaBoondia - today at 11:57pm
it can wait
we will try again tomorrow!
my knight protector needs me <3
topDominoFan - today at 11:58pm
okay.
bring me some tea?
VagaBoondia - today at 11:59pm
of course my love :)
topDominoFan - today at 12:00am
<3
VagaBoondia react: :heart:
The park is supposed to be cold, this late at night. Fall is turning towards chiller days, and winter looms, for as much as it ever turns to winter in Los Angeles. It really just feels like most days in Wartwood, that kind of constant, boggy summer heat where people complain it's freezing when it turns down by just a few degrees. It is, admittedly, much less humid than anywhere Anne went in Amphibia, besides maybe the desert. Her lips have been cracking in little ways more than she noticed for the last good half of the year. The relative coolness doesn't help.
Anne Boonchuy has her hands in her pockets and a jacket her father insisted she wear tied around her waist in a loose knot. Her eyes are on the scattered mulch and loose dirt ground under her feet, not really listening as her companion talks.
"It's like a sad, tiny version of the woods! Like the Mantis grounds outside of Wartwood, where we met, you know? Except way less thick, and with, uh, more trash..."
Sprig experimentally kicks a plastic McClownalds' cup away, and it skips in a sad little rotation, a murky brown liquid sloshing around in it. He makes a disgusted face and looks back up at Anne.
"People just really let all this stuff lay around on the ground?"
Anne blinks, looking down at him, snapping out of whatever thought she was having. "What? Stuff?"
"Uh..." Sprig looks back at the various pieces of litter dotting the sides of the path. "Yknow, the stuff? The garbage?"
"Oh. Yeah... you get kinda used to it." Anne shrugs, sparing a glance for the trash. "My class would come out here on weekends sometimes to help clean it up, but we're in the middle of the suburbs, so it kinda piles up pretty fast. Wind blows it here, I guess."
"It's... somehow worse that somebody's trying to do something and it isn't helping," Sprig says, his eyes widening for a moment.
Anne chuckles, no humor in her voice. "Dude, if you really want to get messed up, I'll tell you about the Pacific Ocean garbage patch sometime."
"The wha?"
"Don't worry about it," she says, waving a hand as she rolls her shoulders back. Sprig gives her a capital-l Look as her attention drifts off again, mulch crunching under their shoes.
"Anne? What are we looking for?"
She blinks, seemingly not hearing him. Her eyes are turned up towards the bright full moon, and that white light reflects in her irises, tinted blue in the hazy night sky of the city.
Sprig frowns, hidden behind his mask. He pushes his hands into his pockets in a reflection of his big sister as he sidles a little closer to her side, wary eyes on the unfamiliar, dirty thicket the path cuts through.
The greenery opens up around them as they come to a moonlit clearing, giving way to a small field with grass, a few solitary trees, a fenced-in tennis court. There's trash underfoot still, and the tall, bright spires of downtown LA drowning out the stars in the sky, but the full moon still glimmers overhead, and it's quiet for a moment. Beautiful.
Anne and Sprig pause, transfixed by the moonlight glimmering in leaves, caught on the fence nearby, the impossibly tall glowing structures beyond them. It looks alien, sometimes, Anne thinks to herself, to see her childhood home with visitor’s eyes, knowing she's planning to leave, not knowing when she’ll make it back again. Sprig is watching the lights of an airliner slip overhead in the night, bound for LAX, silent other than a distant noise of engines, blinking, hypnotic-
A car bleats out a loud horn on a street somewhere nearby and both children jump, instinctively stepping back-to-back to scan their surroundings before they remember where they are. It takes a moment before they relax out of their battle-ready stances, letting their hackles down.
“I forget there’s nothing waiting to jump out of a bush and eat us here,” Sprig says, glancing around the otherwise empty clearing.
Anne nods, sticking her hands back in her pockets. “It’s weird now knowing we’re not like, gonna get attacked by every random animal. I got kinda used to not being the apex predator anymore.”
“...like, the best hunter?”
“Yeah dude. Why’d you think I took to hunting so fast?” She cups a hand over a narrow bicep, grinning in the light of her old goofiness. “We’re built for it! Humans were per- persistent? Persistent predators. We’d hunt stuff down for days until we took it down, back in uhhhh yknow! Ancient history!”
Sprig laughs, tucking his slingshot away again. “Wouldn’t have been able to tell from when you got to Amphibia. You were worn out in like a day on the farm!”
“Yeah, well, we got so good we didn’t need to do it anymore, nyeh,” Anne says, sticking her tongue out at Sprig.
He grins back, turning to hop onto a nearby chainlink fence, his voice raised as she walks into the center of the clearing behind him. “Oh hey!” Sprig hangs upside down and backwards from the fence, craning his head back to look at Anne. “A tennis court! Is this why you wanted to come out here? So you could finally show me your sport? I get it, dark so I can jump around and nobody sees it, that totally makes…”
Anne is standing in front of a short flat bench, set off to the side of the mulch trail in the middle of the clearing. She’s staring at it, her hands deep in her pockets. Her expression is inscrutable. She’s definitely not listening anymore. Sprig pulls himself up to perch on the top of the fence, watching her with a frown. Something is definitely up.
She’s silent.
Anne kicks a rock under the bench with the toe of her shoe. It skips and is lost in the grass, swallowed up by green. She kneels down to look at the grass underfoot, running her fingers through it.
Shouldn’t there be something? Some trace, some char, some evidence? The bench itself is unblemished, other than the wear of rain and sun and pedestrians, nothing of what happened here marking it other than her memory.
Anne can feel her heart beating in her throat like she’s hiding from something that wants to kill her, adrenaline pumping her full of the energy to run or fight.
She reaches out for the seat of the bench with a hand, willing a blue spark to leap from the nails in the wood to her fingers with a brilliant shock, for a vision to overtake her, for some final, magical secret left behind in the object to reveal itself, to show her the way back. She’s ready for it, she puts her hand down, she presses it against the bench and there’s…
Nothing.
Her hand rests against cool wood and there’s nothing. Just the sound of crickets in the grass around them, and the buzz of distant passing cars.
Anne squeezes her eyes shut, her head coming forward until the bridge of her nose presses against the seat, kneeling in front of the low bench. Nothing.
She’s tired.
“Anne?”
She blinks, rolling her head to the side to look up at Sprig. He stands over her with concern written all over his face. “Yeah, Sprig?”
“Are you okay?”
She shrugs. His expression shifts to a squinty-eyed frustrated frown as she blows him off again. “Shyeah, dude, I’m great. Just tired.”
Sprig looks around, and then back down at her.
“Is this where it… happened?” His voice is quiet.
Anne freezes. Her eyes go tense, trapped. Looking for a way out. But she sighs, forcing herself to let the tension go, and twists around to sit with her shoulders against the bench, dropping her hands into her lap. Sprig sits on the bench next to her head, his legs dangling over the edge. She glances over at him.
“How’d you figure that out?”
“Well,” Sprig says, hesitating. He doesn’t want to give her a reason to shut down again. “You… kinda look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Mrh,” she says noncommittally, grunting instead of saying any discernible words. Sprig watches her, quiet in turn. Anne finally sighs, pressing the palms of her hands into her eyes until she can see stars dance in the darkness.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, this is where it happened. This is where I opened the box.”
She pulls her hands away from her face, looking down at them. They’re scarred in spots, whorled with the imprint of tools from working the Plantar farm, the raised skin in blister marks from holding a sword too tightly in a fight that went too long.
“I was sitting right where you’re sitting. Marcy was off to my right, she looked at it before I opened it. Sasha was on my left, she took a picture of it, I think? And then I had it in my hands, and it felt like, lighter than it did when I picked it up in the shop, and somebody said to open it. I dunno who. I think I like, turned the handle first, that little wind-up doohicky.”
Her hands play out the motions, unconsciously, as she speaks. Sprig watches her fingers, his gaze flicking between the motions and her face.
“And then I pushed it open, and I thought there’d be like, a catch, or the hinges would be rusted over, or it’d be locked without a key, or like, something. But. No. It just opened, and then there was light. Lots and lots of light. And- lightning? I heard them both gasp, and it grew really bright really really fast and then I couldn’t see or feel or smell anything and then I felt it disappear in my hands and then I was face down in a puddle of mud on the edge of a cliff...”
Her hands drop back down into her lap as she stops.
“Outside of Wartwood,” Sprig finishes. “A few days before I met you.”
Another version of Anne from some other time might have replied with “Uhh, I met YOU, bro,” and a sassy smirk, but this Anne just nods, pulling her knees in closer to her chest. Sprig’s quiet. He wishes he knew what to say. Anne draws in a sharp breath, exhaling in a long huff as she finishes her thought.
“Yeah. And Marcy and Sasha... they were gone.”
She leans her head back, looking up at the moon overhead.
“I went over that memory so many times in my head that I thought I’d never remember anything else so clearly ever again.” She laughs, humorless. “Then the fight with the king happened. And it turned out I was wrong.”
Sprig shudders. “Yeah. Like, I thought I had traumatic memories, but that kinda outweighed the rest of them!” He laughs. Anne laughs too. There’s hurt in that sound, in both of their voices.
He looks around the little clearing, his fingers brushing the wood he’s sitting on.
“I guess… just knowing you, I never really thought about it. I mean, like, when you first started talking about Sasha and Marcy I kinda just imagined they looked exactly like you? Just with different clothing? Even though you showed me their picture.”
Anne considers this for a moment, tilting her head. “Oh, that’d be messed up.” She snorts. Sprig smiles a little bit, shaking his head.
“When I met Sasha… some things you used to say started to make a lot of sense. And then everything happened, with her.” He watches Anne’s fingers tighten to a bone-knuckle grip around her knees and lowers his voice. “I’m glad you listened to me. On the tower.”
“I wasn’t about to let you get hurt,” she says quietly, looking at the ground. “Any of you. You all kept me safe.”
“I think,” Sprig says evenly, “there aren’t a lot of people who would have done the same thing.”
Anne blinks, looking up at Sprig. He glances down at the ground in turn, away from her gaze.
“What do you mean?”
He shrugs. “I think most people would have chosen their old friend over a new group of people. I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Yeah, well...” Anne says, pausing. “I wasn’t going to let you get hurt. And you were right. Sasha… she… wasn’t good to me.”
Sprig nods in agreement, still not looking up. Anne sighs, working her thoughts out into words.
“I guess Marcy wasn’t either.”
She looks off back at the path they took to get into the park, her hands cupped around her knees.
“Neither of them really cared about what I wanted, when we were in school. They were both always kinda off in their own worlds. I was just a - a participant, I guess? There because they needed me to be, not there because I really wanted to be...” She shakes her head. “No, that’s not right. I wanted to be there with them. I just wasn’t- they didn’t listen to me, not really.”
“That sounds awful,” Sprig says quietly.
“Well, you remember what I was like when I started living with you guys. I was kind of a bully to you for a while,” Anne says, rubbing at the back of her neck with a hand as she glances back at Sprig. “And I’m sorry about that. But I think you helped me figure out who I was again?”
He blinks back up at her, surprised. “Really? I was just happy to have somebody who understood me around.”
“Yeah, dude, like… I hadn’t had somebody who really wanted to be around me for who I was in a long time. Maybe ever? I don’t know if you noticed, but my friends from here are kinda messed up.”
Sprig looks at her, as her words hang in the air like he’s supposed to laugh at a joke, and his face is flat. The silence falls and Anne shrinks a little bit, confronted by what she’s said. He blinks at her.
“I guess.”
Anne buries her face in her knees, groaning. “No, urgh, that’s not… that’s not what I meant. I just- I still don’t know what to think of Marcy saying she did this on purpose, and then the fight happened so quick, and I thought I lost you, and then I went all ‘super-anne’ and almost passed out, and then the portal was open and then- then-”
Sprig’s pulling her into a side-shouldered hug as she chokes on her words, bright yellow fire flaring in her minds’ eye. Anne is crying without realizing it as the sword point flashes up again and again, suddenly, quickly, scything a path through a slight little girl mid-sentence like she was so much tissue paper.
“Hey.” Sprig pushes his face into his big sister’s hair, and she clutches his arm, sniffing loudly. “Hey. It’s okay. I remember. You don’t have to say it.”
“I- I- Sprig if she, if she survived, I know she’d have found the box, I know she’d be back by now, she’d be looking- looking for us- I-” Anne heaves a breath, her words shaky as they pour out of her.
Sprig shakes his head. “You don’t know that. She might be too scared. The king might have too much of a guard on it. Anything could be happening.”
Anne squeezes her eyes shut. “I- I just- I can’t believe I left them there, I can’t believe I let Sasha try to cover us, she really said that and I- I didn’t think about what it meant, I didn’t realize she meant to leave her behind, that she wanted to throw her life away for me again I just-” She sobs, and drags a sleeve across her nose, wiping away a mess. “I know maybe it’s stupid because of everything they did to us and to me but I miss them, Sprig, I miss them so much, I - I keep waking up dreaming that Andrias has captured them and is doing terrible things to them and they’re just screaming in my head, Marcy and Sasha, and I can’t sleep so I stay up looking for ways to get back to them and I’m so tired,”
Sprig holds her as she rambles and cries. He shuts his eyes too, just listening. Eventually she runs out of steam and just sits and hiccups, quietly, in the darkness, her hand still hanging onto his around her shoulders.
“I miss them too,” he says. Anne draws in a breath, listening in return as he talks. “Sasha a little less, I guess. But Marcy saved my life, like, twice. I know how much you care about them, even if they hurt you. And... I remember the way you’ve always talked about them, and I guess I hope that. Well. Maybe this is stupid too. But maybe they can be the people you thought they were once?”
“Does that even make sense?” Anne says, sniffling. “Do people even change like that?”
“You did,” Sprig says lightly, squeezing her shoulder. She stiffens, silent. “You used to be mean to me because you thought that’s what friends did, and then you changed.”
Anne’s quiet. Sprig pauses.
“If Marcy… and Sasha, want to change, they will. They can.”
Anne sniffs again. “That’s not gonna matter much unless we can get back home.”
Sprig pulls away and looks at her with a questioning expression. She flaps a hand, sitting up as she rubs her eyes with a sleeve.
“I mean, like, home for you all. And it’s still home for me too? I never thought I’d miss it but I do. I miss the basement, and all the open space, and being able to do whatever, whenever. Here everything is stacked on top of each other like sardines and you can’t go anywhere without somebody being there. I didn’t realize how crazy that is until I lived with you guys. I miss Wartwood! I can’t- I can’t imagine not being able to go back, I can’t…” She sighs, looking at the ground, sounding defeated in a broken-hearted way. “I can’t imagine having to choose. They’re both home, here and with you all. But right now I don’t know if we’ll even get to choose. I- I don’t know if we can-”
“Shh,” Sprig says, putting a finger to her lips. She blinks in surprise. He blinks back. “You’ll jinx it.”
She laughs half to herself. “I guess. I just… we’re out of options, Sprig, and I don’t know what else to do.”
“We’ll figure it out, Anne. We always do.”
“Yeah… I’m just… I just wish they were here, you know? I just want to - to try again.”
“You’re gonna see them again, Anne.”
She nods. “I hope so.”
“Yeah!” Sprig crows, bouncing on his feet. “And then we’re gonna let that no good lousy monarch have it! For the revolution!” He punches the air repeatedly in a fit of excitement. Anne watches him with a little smile. He smiles back.
“We will, Anne. They’ll come home.”
“I just hope they still know what home looks like,” she says, sighing as she looks away.
The corner of Sprig’s mouth quirks up in a bigger smile as he looks at Anne, her face turned back up to watch the moon. He remembers how Marcy looks at her, the glances Sasha steals when she thinks nobody else is watching.
I guess big sisters don’t understand everything.
“ I know they do.”
Anne sighs, lowers her arms, and her fingers brush against the wooden leg of the bench. She freezes. Her hand reaches back and feels the outline of a carving in the sturdy wood, driven in by an old red pen-knife.
SW + AB + MW.
Marcy had taken the knife from Sasha and carved the infinity symbol in a swirl around their initials, keeping them together ‘no matter what!’.
A little smile drifts across her face.
“Yeah. Yeah, I think they do.”