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Anya hums a terse melody as she flips through her recipe notebook with one hand, the other holding a pot by the handle.
Delta says, "You seem to enjoy cooking at this hour."
She freezes for a moment, and then turns back to the book. "It's...calming. And it's not that late. Clock says 9."
There's a weary air about her. Bright green reflects from her gaze onto the steel counter.
"Considering you haven't started yet, I'd disagree on the time being late." He stands on the other side of the counter, averting his gaze from her white-knuckled grip on the pot and how she turns away from her reflection.
"...Does it truly bother you? To know what you are?" The question slips out before he can think better of it.
"Bother me?" She raises her head to look at him. "No. That would only hold true if we saw each other as monsters, and I don't. It's not that, it's...knowing more about what exactly...changed me….and why. There's just more questions I have than answers, still. I-"
She abandons the rest of those words with a shake of her head, pressing her hand flat against the page.
"...Make no mistake." Anya murmurs. "I won't stop trying for peace. That promise of being a thorn in people's sides, including yours, still applies, not least because I..."
She pauses.
"...I wouldn't expect anything less from you, Anya." Delta says.
When she meets his eyes, her gaze is painfully bright, like light reflecting off of snow. "....I didn't even think of myself as quite human anymore, did you know that? Not since Ivan saw me come back to life after I was killed the second time. I needed time to process it, though, so when I first came here, I wanted you to believe just that. That I was a regular human with one...quirk."
"..."
Anya gathers up the ingredients that had been placed on the counter. He recognizes some of them – orange, sage, cinnamon.
She shakes her head, voice slightly hoarse. "...I'm sorry. I don't know why I brought this out. I can't bring myself to cook right now."
"It's a nice recipe." Delta murmurs.
There's a flash of surprise in her eyes. "You...How was it?"
"I have never had a cold, so I can't speak to its benefit there, but for winter, it was warming. The flavor was good."
"One day, I'll make the other recipe." Anya's voice is barely more than a whisper. "But not tonight."
Her eyes close for a long moment.
"...What do you wish to do, then?"
The question seems to snap her out of whatever thoughts she'd been having. She unties her hair. "If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you what you'd do. Just...not talking. Not now."
It takes time for him to find what to say – by the time he does, Anya has finished loosely braiding her hair. "Music. I found listening to it...peaceful."
There's a crack in the weariness around her – like the first hint of sunlight behind the grey clouds. "You have music here?"
"...Follow me." Delta turns back to look at Anya.
The room itself is smaller than most in this building, but well-kept. A worn yellow CD player is tucked in the corner, standing atop a wooden cabinet full of CDs.
Anya looks at the CD player as if it were to fade before her very eyes.
Delta hands some of the plastic cases to her. "I find these comforting. Try to see if you find any that you recognize."
"I will."
She puts the disc in gingerly, letting the music play.
"...It's nice." Anya whispers, eyes wistful. She taps her fingers to the rhythm of the song.
"Nicer than I remembered." Delta responds, sitting down.
Eventually, his eyes slip shut – not sleeping, not really – just resting.
It has been far too long.
He opens them to see Anya offering him her hand, the other on his shoulder.
"Delta." She mutters, a thread of concern in her voice. "I know you don't require as much sleep as humans do, but that's no reason to disregard its importance. Not for my sake."
He blinks. Multiple possible responses echo in his mind, but he finds, above all, just like her, he doesn't quite want this moment to end – and so, he does not move. "I wasn't asleep."
"...That's not a comfortable spot." Anya sits down nearby, not seeming to believe him.
"I suppose not."
She rests her arms on her knees.
"...I can't promise I'd be any good at it, anymore." Delta mutters.
"Any good at...sleeping?" Anya says, brows drawing together in confusion.
"Not sleeping." He studies her. "Something else I liked to do, before."
"And what would that be?" Anya turns to study him, curious.
"...Dancing." He finally says.
Surprise flashes across Anya's expression.
"Dancing?" She repeats.
"Beta put me up to it. I did not...like sparring the way he and Omega did. I believed it would make the humans fear us."
A bittersweet smile finds its way onto his face. "He and I...disagreed on humans, you know. Yet he still wanted something for me to do that was even loosely adjacent to sparring – hence, dancing. Mother approved, much to my chagrin. But it was not...unpleasant."
Anya stares at him.
"What?" Delta asks.
"Nothing. I just...It's surprising." She answers. "I thought, if anything, it would've been an instrument."
"And why is that?"
"You're always so composed." She reaches towards him, then pulls away, hesitating. A moment later, she slicks back her own hair, mimicking his usual style – though it doesn't stay, falling into her face again.
"Ah."
He averts his eyes as he runs his own fingers through his hair, messing it up.
The room seems to grow the slightest bit colder as the last song fades.
He offers her his hand.
Anya seems to hesitate. "I...can't promise I'd be good at it, either. I've never really danced."
"We can learn."
"...I suppose we can." Anya answers, taking Delta's hand.
He tries his best to remember the starting position of one of the first dances he’d learned. As he places her hand atop his shoulder, faint splotches of pink begin to color Anya's cheeks – more so as he places his other hand just under one of her shoulder blades. They stand a short distance apart. "Just follow my lead. As I go forward, you go back, and vice-versa." He says.
"...Who taught you?"
"Beta's...partner, Luís. He knew quite a few."
She winces as she makes a misstep. "I'm sorry."
Delta ignores the apology – too many, tonight. "Try not to be so tense, Anya."
"...I'll try."
He remembers how she was able to keep time while listening to other songs. "Would the music help?"
"It might." She answers, glancing past him at the case of CDs.
The CD player whirs to life, filling the air with soft singing. They start practicing once more.
"You used to like to do this." Anya looks up at him.
"I did. In a sense," Delta muses, "my brother's wish that this also serve as a way for us to understand each other more backfired. Learning this only made me more fond of humanity. More keen to cling to it."
"Then you stopped." Anya leaves the when and why unsaid. They both know the reason.
"Then I stopped."
"Do you mind having started again, even for just one night?"
"Many things have changed, but that is a memory I treasure, even now. So, in that regard, no."
"And in others?"
"...You know just how dearly my sympathy cost me, Anya. I cannot forget that it is war."
"...I admit I don't quite understand all that happened in the past 25 years. But I know the guilt." She answers. "It eats you up until you see no escape but to hide, even if it's from yourself. Why do you think I went to Dreamscape in the first place?"
He goes still.
"That in itself is a form of death. Though in my case," Anya turns to look at the wall, her expression unreadable, "that death ended up being much more literal."
"You can't expect me to-"
She shakes her head. "I don't mean forgiveness, or even forgetting. I can't tell someone to do what I myself can't. Just don't hide from yourself. I'm trying not to, because I...I'd only end up smothering the parts of myself that they cared about. The Anya they knew."
"It's difficult, isn't it?"
That causes her to smile a bit. "It is. But worth it, to me. It's nice, I think. To know that traces of that me still exist."
"...No se puede..." He starts to say, struggling to remember the idiom he'd heard over 25 years ago. "No se puede tapar el sol con un dedo."
"What does that mean?"
"...You reminded me. Luís used to say that. It means that you cannot cover the sun with a finger. The light still shines through, in its own way. Not least because the sun's light is..." He looks at her golden hair, suddenly glad she isn't looking at him, focused as she is on not making a misstep.
"Necessary for life?" Her response is automatic – second nature, as that is one of the first things children learn about the sun – yet somehow he is struck by it, this time.
"...That it is. It's also revealing."
"...It is."
"Decades are quite a long time for things to be buried, though. To decay, as all things do, in time."
She looks at him, gaze intent - the flash in her eyes like the glint of a hook in the gills of a fish. "Most things. Not all."
Four songs start and come to an end before either of them speak again. They settle into a rhythm.
"..Some things are..." Anya murmurs. "They're..like an ebb and flow."
"....I never quite understood that saying."
"Hm?" She has to focus to hear his voice, barely more than a whisper, over the music.
"Ebb and flow." Delta adjusts his grip on Anya's hand, stepping forward as she takes three steps back, trying to match his pace.
"What do you mean?" Her eyes only briefly meet his, trying to ensure that she doesn't take a wrong step again.
As Anya now takes three steps forward, Delta steps back.
"It refers to an increase or decrease, but when it comes to the tides, the water itself does not change in volume significantly. Any apparent difference is more or less an illusion."
"...I never quite thought about it that way." Anya murmurs.
A new song fills the silence.
Her fingers drum on his shoulder, in time with the beat. "You have a point. But I think it may be more about the reach of the water. Unless you follow it," She steps back, "the high tide is the only time you'd likely come into contact with the water."
Delta does follow, now acutely aware of where they touch – one hand on her back, the other holding her free hand. "You may be right."
He watches Anya's hair catch the light, turning gold as the sun's rays, as he twirls her.
"I don't think you needed to worry. You're still a good dancer." She tells him. "That didn't ebb away, not too much."
"...If I were to ask you to dance again, would you mind?"
The smile tugging at her mouth is faint, but it may as well be pure sunlight to him. "...No. I wouldn't. Would you mind just one more dance, tonight?"
"I wouldn't be opposed to it."
One more dance becomes two, which becomes a third - during which, Anya abruptly stops halfway through, teal eyes studying his face.
"Is something wrong?" The words come out even, by some miracle - the air stuttering to a halt in his lungs as he stops, too - the distance between them shrinking even further.
"No." She answers. "I...was thinking. When the tides pull back, even if someone were to go avoid the tide itself, there's still traces it leaves behind. Wet sand, tide pools, shells on the beach."
"...Even those traces vanish, given enough time."
"Like shells becoming sand." She says. "...Would the tides be the same without a coast?"
"...I fear it is well past our time for tonight."
"I see."
Her warmth lingers on his hands.
Delta stops in the doorway. "...What do you see? An ebb or flow?"
"...Change. I see change. But you..." Anya trails off. "...the...tides, I mean. They flow based on their own will, don't they?"
"...Not entirely." He finds he doesn't have the courage to look at her directly.
He clears his throat. "The sun...pulls on the tides, as well."
"So they say." There's something weighted in her voice.
"It's said because it is true." Delta answers, watching the surprise dawn on her.
A few moments pass.
"...It was nice. To learn this dance from you."
"It was...pleasant for me, too." He whispers, turning from her gaze. "Until the morning, Anya."
"Until tomorrow, Delta."