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this is a gift, it comes with a price

Who: Anna Demirovna/Huntress and Mina Barrett/Queen
What: Anna decides that she and Mina need to talk about their respective fae...situations
Where: deep in the trees outside of town
When: night of Day 4, an hour after sunset
Notes: It's not impossible to stumble on this scene, but it would have consequences, so check with us first. Also, Anna doesn't fully distinguish between herself and the Huntress, so pronouns will get weird here.
Warnings: The Huntress in particular is generally pretty violent and unsettling, and she's likely to show.

She can feel herself crackling under her skin — mist and lightning, a kind of nervous tension — and she hates it. Hates the uncertainty of where they are and what they're doing here. (She had been so sure that the one who'd given her to herself was going to take her back again, just before Cape Kore took her away from Chicago, and the idea of that is simultaneously two different kinds of upsetting: because of the violation inherent in taking away something that was now her, a part of her identity; and because of the fleeting notion that she'd lost her opportunity to be free of this.) When she sprints, inhumanly fast, into the trees, it is her abilities as the Huntress that she taps: she can't afford to spend the blood it would take to use the vampire version of the ability.

As the underbrush becomes denser and then impassable, she lets herself come to a stop and leans against the thick trunk of a tree. With a feeling of relief, she drops the glamour masking her appearance: lightning crackles through her hair, and the air smells of rain and the ozone before a storm.

She needs to talk to Mina, to the Queen. They're in this together now, in more ways than one...even if Mina has never seemed to be as strongly affected by her Title as she has been. Still: this is one expenditure of blood that's worthwhile. Anna concentrates — and Summons.

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Mina knew what Summoning was. She'd felt it a handful of times, always accompanied by an unobfuscated resentment. She was a vampire. And a pirate. But she lived by honor. Honor that was somehow always lost on the others. Especially the neonates.

And there was no question that this particular neonate was the one doing the summoning.

"Damn, damn, damn, damn," Mina hissed under her breath, picking her way through the underbrush. She was a fearful combination of furious and giddy, partly still punch-drunk from her first feeding in days. She still didn't know what that all meant, but she supposed she was a soldier, not a philosopher. Not everything had to mean something, did it?

She saw the crackling energy and smelled the change in the air. It was bad enough having to deal with the little Lance twit (even if she begrudgingly liked the little idiot), but that wasn't who she was dealing with, was it?

Damn.

She was waiting for her, of course. Not fully the Huntress; just... no longer attempting to hide the reality of her appearance. With her cheek pressed against the bark of the tree, her expression was more exhausted than imperious. Exhausted, and vaguely guilty. Normally she'd have been all too eager to bring Mina to heel with a choice application of that supernatural power of personality that the Daeva called their own, but right now she wasn't in the mood for diversions.

Hence the summon: she wasn't interested in wasting time.

Despite her posture, the twisting and untwisting of her fingers together betrayed her nerves. Well, that, and the unconscious intensifying of the lightning in her hair.

Nevertheless, she straightened as Mina approached; there was that part of her that demanded a show of pride.

"Primogen Barrett."

Edited 2012-10-26 02:37 (UTC)

"What the hell was that about?" Mina hissed, feeling the effects of the Summoning begin to fade and her temper start to rise. A flash of glittery light shimmered over the surface of her skin. Thank God, the devil, or whoever was listening that no butterflies popped off of her.

She couldn't abide it.

For a moment, Anna actually looked cowed — but a brief moment only. Then her expression shifted to something crueler, haughtier, as if she might laugh in Mina's face, and— back again to a more typical frustration.

"I need to talk to you. And I didn't think you would be interested in having this conversation willingly. And I don't want to waste any more time." The attempt at keeping the defensiveness from her voice ended up coming off rather stiff.

Edited 2012-10-26 02:52 (UTC)

"And so you thought it would be conducive to conversation to force me here against my will?" Mina asked, unafraid of her little Fae snit. After all, what more could the Fae possibly do to her?

She hated to imagine it.

Leaning forward, she jabbed a bejeweled finger right at Anna's collarbone. "If you do that again," she said softly, "I'm going to pop your head off like a dandelion. Are we clear?"

But she didn't wait for an answer. Sighing softly, she leaned against a tree, crossing one leg in front of the other. "What do you want?"

Well, that certainly did it: Anna's eyes widened and then narrowed; her lips twisted, and she laughed, sharp and cold.

"Do not threaten me, Queen. Or do you even know who you are, in there?" She did not speak so softly as Mina had; mist crept through the underbrush and her eyes were storms.

The Huntress took a step forward, and smiled. Strange enough, it seemed genuine — or whatever passed for "genuine" among the fae.

"Don't you remember?" Her tone was cajoling. "Don't you remember when we were the same?"

Mina rolled her eyes. "Oh, do stop being tiresome," she said.

But she wasn't sure what bothered her more; Anna being insufferable or the fact that something inside of her...something ephemeral and fleeting...hummed. It was something she couldn't describe. Something inside of her that she didn't want to touch. As a surgeon, she wanted to cut it out.

Of course, she couldn't. It was as much a part of her as her eyes or her legs or her heart.

She leveled her eyes on Anna. "My name is Mina Barrett," she said. "I will not respond to any other."

"Not your name. Your Title."

Still she was smiling, and the glamour around her heightened the spark in her eyes, the gloss of her hair, the color and the bow-like curve of her lips. It was so very easy to be confident like this; in fact, "confidence" was almost a meaningless concept to one with so little capacity for self-doubt. Indeed, she wondered how she ever could have forgotten how little she had to be afraid of.

"We can hardly expect to fully triumph if you cannot acknowledge who you are."

Another step forward. "It is such a simple matter."

Edited 2012-10-26 03:44 (UTC)

Mina greeted this with a cold glare. "I don't have time for this," she said.

Indeed, the only title she wanted to acknowledge was 'hierophant.' But that seemed like a far away world right now. Another time. That was what gnawed at her the most. She could handle being displaced in space. But in time? Mina had always been so careful to keep abreast of the spinning of the world. If she didn't, she knew she would go mad. Like so many Kindred before her.

And she refused to let this Fae infection destabilize her resolve.

"Goodnight, Anya," she said.

She started a little at the name, and her expression fell. So did the intensified sense of glamour in the air around her. Only Leander called her "Anya" any more, and he was gone — no longer hers in either sense of the word — and she hated him a little for hurting her, for leaving when she had tried so very hard...

"Don't—" Her voice wavered on the word, and she repeated it, more softly this time. "Don't go, Mina, please. I just want to figure this out, and you're the only one who has any real hope of understanding."

When Anna used her name, Mina's jaw loosened a little. She hated it that the girl required such...training. But she needed to remember that she was just that: A girl. And unlike Mina, she'd been hit by this Fae storm at the wrong point in her life, at a point in her life when she was only just discovering who she was. If she'd even reached a point at which she could ask such a question.

"How can I help you figure anything out?" she asked gently.

Still the lightning in her hair and the smell of rain around her, but of course that wasn't something she could really help anymore. Her arms were crossed lightly across her body, now, holding herself.

"There weren't many of us who got Titles," she said, still quietly, as if she couldn't quite bring herself to let the words be heard. "Wallis, and then you and Brie and Rosa too. And perhaps it was different, for you, with the Title split between the three of you. But..." She paused. Her fingernails were digging into the palms of her hands: a focusing kind of pain. "I remember...things. Things that happened to me, before I was...me. So many different hunts..."

Her chin jerked up, and she met Mina's eyes. "I need to know if it's like that for you, too."

Misery did love company. Mina set her jaw, raising her chin just slightly. She couldn't look at Anna the same way she looked at Jacqueline. Not for real. But she could pretend, for just a moment, that she was somehow the same.

Pretending could temper her patience.

"No," she admitted softly. "It isn't like that for me. The life I remember is my own. Which is no less impressive, of course. I'm an utter sensation. But..." She struggled for a moment, trying to put it all into words. "When I dream," she started haltingly, "it's different now. I still. They're my memories. I dream about my own life. But in those dreams...I'm not the person I was then. I'm...whatever I am now."

It wasn't what she wanted to hear; it was still better than not hearing it at all, than being completely alone in this.

"So it both is and isn't the same. Even for you, the Title, it... it plays with your memories. Leander, he—" Her voice caught; she hadn't really meant to speak of him, but he was so tied up in all of this for her that it was just short of impossible not to. Haltingly, she continued. "He... said that he was worried about me, that becoming... myself would cause me to lose who I was before. I thought I would be fine, and that at least I could trust my own intentions: to use the Title to help the city. But it's not that simple, and besides, it didn't even help, did it?" There were pricks of blood at the corners of her eyes.

A pause, and she reiterated: "It's not that simple after all."

"Answer me this," Mina said, drawing in a deep breath. "And answer me as Anna, not the Huntress."

She paused a moment, trying to find the right way to phrase it. Perhaps simple was best.

"Who are you?"

Anna hesitated. It was such a simple question, on the surface, but the answer was all tied up with her own instinctive, incomplete response, and with what she wanted to be able to hear herself say.

Leander had once asked her something similar.

"I am...myself. Is there another way to put it? I don't know." She breathed in, breathed out: unnecessary but soothing. "I'm still Anna, still me. At least... mostly I am. But sometimes... sometimes something catches my interest as the Huntress, or being Anna is too hard and frightening... and then that is who I am, instead."

Edited 2012-10-28 18:11 (UTC)

Mina shook her head. "No, no," she said. "You misunderstand. What I'm asking you is...who is Anna? Who is Anna Demirovna? What defines her. Forget about the Huntress nonsense for a moment. Focus on that single question. Use adjectives if you need."

She would happily volunteer several. But that wouldn't be productive.

"Oh."

She frowned a little: a less complicated question, but not precisely easier. After all, she'd never been much prone to introspection. (If she had been, she would have to think about the things she had done, that made her a monster — really a monster; not just a monster of God, like the Lance taught. She edged away from that line of thought as instinctively as she would the flame of a candle.) Any other time she might have answered easily that she was the beautiful and beloved young Harpy of Chicago, but right now that answer felt hopelessly shallow and false.

"I've...not thought that much about it, I suppose." She hesitated again. "A young woman — for a very long time, in fact, if nothing goes wrong. That's something that I never truly thought about before, until recently. The daughter of a ballerina and a bureaucrat," she paused to grimace slightly, "before we all emigrated and became just another poor family in New York. A dancer. Kindred." She shrugged. "I'm not very good at this sort of thing."

Mina nodded slightly, pursing her lips. "Anna," she said in a surprisingly gentle tone (Mina was hardly maternal, but she had helped Anne and Jack to raise a child, after all), "that, I think, is the key to keeping the Huntress from taking over. You need to learn the answer to that question. Beyond descriptions and titles and proper nouns. You need to have a deep understanding of who you are. That's the only way that you can stay yourself."

It was why, she supposed, the Queen hadn't manage to take much control of her own mind. Mina was so sure of herself. She knew who and what she was. And she liked who and what she was.

Anna was too young. Far too young.

"I don't really see how I'm supposed to do that." There was a note of frustrated despair in her voice; the lightning sparked. A childish reaction, perhaps, but then: she was indeed very young.

"How do I find out 'who I am,' as you say, when all this—" she gestured to the lightning in her hair, a thread of which leaped to her lifted fingertips, "—has already happened?"

She looked into the tangled undergrowth, just to have the option of averting her eyes. "I know you're trying to help, and I'm grateful. I just..." She trailed off.

"I won't coddle you, Anna," Mina said. She wouldn't have coddled Jacqueline either. "You have to make a choice. You either choose to be your own person, or you accept what's happened to you and let yourself become that. It's the easier choice, certainly. But I'm not sure it's what will make you a happier person, in the long run."

Indeed, Mina doubted Anna would be much of a 'person' at all, if she gave in.

But that was her decision.

Under normal circumstances, concealing her emotions might not have been a perfectly easy task, but it at least would have been manageable. Right now, though, Anna's own unruly glamour threw the lightning about her hair into disarray and cast an intimidating starkness over her features, despite her best efforts to keep her expression calm, mature, collected.

The truth was that she was frightened — angry, even, at the notion of being asked to change. She had been weak, before, and now she didn't have to be afraid. Or, well, afraid of being weak. She just had to be afraid of losing herself to...herself, instead.

Maybe it was that she truly didn't know what she wanted.

"What makes you so certain that you know what will make me happy?" Confrontation had always been easier than admitting uncertainty.

Mina's poker face was strong enough to conceal a flash of panic. Sometimes, it was easy to forget how dangerous the Fae were. She'd never really taken them seriously. There were so many other dangers in the world, that for the most part, she'd dismissed the Fae as unimportant. And each time she had, that decision had cost her.

Still, she refused to be bullied by a child. And that was her pride every bit as much as it was the Queen's pride.

"You listen to me very carefully," she said in a low, dangerous voice. "You are not the first Kindred, nor will you be the last, to discover a crisis of identity. We all go through it. Your situation is unique, yes, because of the damn Fae infection. But it's hardly unique enough for you to have any kind of monopoly on this situation."

The lightning sparked and she tossed her hair; she wouldn't scream and stamp her feet on the ground like a child of five — though she might certainly want to. She was fairly certain that Mina was bluffing: what could she possibly do to her? Really, what could any of them do to her, ever again, if she didn't want them to? It was almost enough to make her laugh (high, joyful, pealing like bells around the necks of hounds).

But then, Mina might not be bluffing. She was the Queen too, after all. And, though she didn't know anywhere near the full details of her history, she was fairly certain that the Ventrue had over one hundred years on her.

(Self-preservation would do, where judgment failed.)

"...I am listening." Mina was trying to help; the trick was to not, after going to all this trouble, resent her for it. She lowered her chin, averted her gaze. "I know that I don't have a monopoly on this situation — after all, it's why I called you here in the first place. I just... you act like this is an easy choice to make."

"The most important choices are never easy," Mina said softly. "But I think that knowing a choice is going to be difficult is half of the battle. Take that for what you will."

Anna's expression was thoughtful. "I just... I don't know if it's so black and white. Even if I choose to stay myself — even if we choose to stay ourselves, I guess I should say — it won't make all of this go away." A bitter twist of her lips. "I suppose I have the power to give the Title away again... I think. It's not as though I've tried. But that would just land someone else where I am now, wouldn't it?"

There was also the fact that, well, it was her. Giving away the Huntress wouldn't feel terribly different from giving away Anna, and while she knew in an abstract way that the feeling was probably imposed by the... "fae infection," as Mina so clinically put it, it didn't make it feel any less immediate, any less real.

"You're not that selfish, Anna," Mina said. She didn't really believe it for sure. She liked to think that Anna had more substance than what was on the surface, but there were never any guarantees, of course. It almost felt like a bit of a challenge:

Prove me wrong, little twit. Prove to me that there's more to you than there is to you.

But she silenced those thoughts for now.

Folding her arms, she considered her options a moment. For better or for worse, she was going to have to mentor this girl, wasn't she? Well, she knew all the tricks. The same ones Anne had used with her, the same ones she'd seen the other Valkyries use with their young progeny. "Go an entire night without allowing any of the Huntress' powers to manifest. See if you can."

Her lips thinned at the challenge. Who was some Crone heretic to tell her what she could and couldn't do, when she didn't even have a full Title, or memories, or a willingness to wield what was hers by right —but that was slipping into the Huntress's thought patterns, already half-failing at the task.

Damn it. She hadn't yet lost a bet to Mina, and she could tell already that it would bother her to start now — even with a bet with such a transparently blatant purpose as this one.

"No, I am not that selfish." Or at least, that was what she was meant to say. She could strive to live up to the words later; for now, there remained reason enough to try to keep and control the Title, to not lose herself.

"But...you do realize... this, right now—" she made a vague, cross-body gesture that encompassed the lightning threading through her hair and the shimmer to her skin, "—is just...what seems to happen when I don't use the power to conceal it. I can't go around looking like... some kind of freak." And yet, the gears in her mind were already turning, considering. Was there some way to damp it down, to let the use of illusion become a kind of passive mask, not an active tapping in to her abilities...

"Darling, I do hate to say this, but you are a freak. We all are, at the moment." Perhaps a tad bit unnecessary to say right now, but Mina never could resist a good barb.

Sometimes, she could stand to use a few new lessons in self control.

But it wasn't about her right now.

"Consider this," she said thoughtfully, "a return to when you were first Embraced. A young Kindred needs to learn how to control her powers. This is the same thing. Only a different sort of power."

She gave a brief, annoyed snort of air. "Thank you, Mina, confirming that I'm a freak is extremely supportive and encouraging." Sarcasm was perhaps not the most helpful response she could have chosen. But it made her feel better.

And it perhaps helped to pass off the subtle wince she made at the reference to control. There were flashes in her memory — the blurred and furious haze of Rötschreck; her parents' blood on the floor.

It was a terrible thing indeed when a young Kindred does not learn to control her powers.

Mina had a point: not only about control, but about what she was, what they both were — freaks. However much she wanted to believe the Lancea Sanctum's priests about Kindred being the wolves of God, she doubted they'd much approve of her now.

"I told you, Anna," Mina said. "I'm not going to coddle you. That isn't my fashion. But, if you want my help, I will give it to you. And that is your first task. Try going a night without manifesting the Huntress. And once you can do that. Try going two."

"I don't wish to be coddled." That might not be entirely true, a part of her mind admitted, half-defeated and half-jeering at her own patheticness; she shoved it down. Fine: a new challenge. See if she wouldn't face it.

"And fine — I'll do it." She paused and briefly chewed her lip thoughtfully.
"Or, I'm going to try. You act like it's such a simple matter," she couldn't help adding, "but I'll learn how."

Admittedly, it was easier to goad herself forward if she framed it — however perversely inaccurately — as a matter of "beating" Mina, of proving her wrong.

"If you treat a matter as though it's simple," Mina said, sounding more self assured than she felt, "then it is a simple matter. That's the mindset you require right now. Worry about the rest later."

Another huff.

"Fine." It was hard enough just listening to Mina; did she have to rub it in by acting so damned certain about everything?

(...Probably. In fairness, she'd have done the same.)

"Going to give me another string of pearls if I succeed?"

"If it's a reward you need to motivate yourself, I'm sure I'll think of something," Mina said with a sigh.

It seemed a bit far-fetched right now. All they had was what they could scrape and scavenge.

She glanced down, at the little bulge in her shirt, hiding the ring around her neck.

"I'll get you jewelry of some kind."

Anna rolled her eyes, for a moment extremely blatantly the teenager she'd been embraced as.

"I don't actually require jewelry, Mina. Though you're welcome to attempt to scrounge some up for me, for old time's sake." Eyebrows still raised, she added, "I just hope you're properly appreciative of the challenge I'm setting myself, is all."

She paused, then met Mina's eyes pointedly. "—Because I don't wholly believe you when you say you don't struggle with this too, with strange feelings and urges whispering in the back of your mind."

Mina set her hat at a jaunty angle on her head, offering Anna a slight quirk of her eyebrows. "My darling Anna, if I did, do you really think I'd tell you?"

With that, she turned around, slowly sauntering off.

She watched her leave, trying not to hiss with frustration.

When Mina was well out of range, she added quietly, "Actually, I'd rather hoped you would."

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this is a gift, it comes with a price

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transferring comments over here via copy-pasta so we can keep going on DW :v

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oblique references to both her virtue and vice in this comment, I am pleased with myself

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whee backtags

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