kore_logs | 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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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."

this is a gift, it comes with a price

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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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