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WHO: Anya & Batman, and later Lua
WHAT: Anya crashing post-cheer event
WHERE: Bruce's room
WHEN: way backdated to Decemeber 10th.
WARNINGS: Anya's in a bad headspace. Depressive/self-loathing stuff, and quite probably mentions of suicidal ideation later on.

She raps on his door, quick and sharp, in the pattern he showed her. Her hand doesn't shake. She makes sure it doesn't. Her jaw aches from how tightly she's clenching it. She feels empty, scraped-raw and scooped out. She doesn't know what happened or why she felt that way, but it's gone and she can't get it back. She wants it back even more than she desperately wants not to cry.

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He's been moody himself, after that... whatever it was that had happened over the past few days, and he's stayed in the room. While poring over some books, he hears the knocking and recognises the sequence. What could she want at this hour (not that he could tell time very easily on the Barge, but by the state of the network, most people were asleep).

He opened the door and looks at her. 'Is something wrong?'

"It stopped." She sounds terrible, hoarse and distant and shell-shocked. She doesn't look bad, except for the tension in shoulders and knuckles, locked in like it will never let her go. She swallows and wraps her arms around herself, like one of the little monkeys in the wire-mother experiments, like a patient in an asylum.

'Come inside.' Reading her tension, he opens the door further so she can come in. It's the flood, except for some reason she's reacted even worse to it than he did.

She nods and scuttles in, making a beeline for the desk, then crawls under it, minding the cords, and curls up into a ball, arms hugging her shins, face pressed against her kneecaps.

He shuts the door and pushes his chair away from the desk, before he sits down facing her, leaving some distance so she has enough space.

She breathes slowly, deliberately, forcing herself to remember each time you can still breathe, you can still go on. No smoke, no impossibly strong hands. It doesn't seem to matter. She knows, objectively, that a week ago she wanted to be here, but it seems so hideous, so pointless if she has to shamble through it as the wreck of lies and bitterness she really is.

There's no point pushing it, she'll speak if and when she wants to, but he stretches out a hand in case she needs something reassuring to hold on to as she pulls herself together.

She doesn't speak, not for a long while, but after a few minutes she reaches out and squeezes his hand, just once, before coiling back in on herself. He's warm and callused and solid, and he offered without her asking. It's not a lifeline, but it's - a breath of air, a dim star to see by, something.

She still kind of wants to tuck herself away until she's just erased, until she never was, but the horror is a little less consuming, a little duller at the edges, and her breathing steadies out, a little less labored than before. She closes her eyes and drifts.

'You have a wonderful voice,' he says quietly. Talking about something unrelated was a better option, but his default for that was Alfred's cooking, and he didn't have that here. She did need to speak to someone, or she needed some comfort from him, so it was best to start on a related topic.

She blinks her eyes open, a little more and a little more rapidly than strictly necessary.

"It was fun, wasn't it?" She tries not to make the question sound like grieving, and only partially succeeds.

'You could say that.' He doesn't honestly think about fun, but he managed to have a snowball fight with his son, and he'd even fit in some decorations with Barbara. It reminded him too much of old times with his mother, at their Christmases.

Edited (tweaked) 2012-12-19 16:21 (UTC)

"It's still my voice," she muses softly, half to herself. She feels like the girl that went caroling was a stranger, a whole person instead of a stripped-down facsimile of one. But she has a nice voice. That's hers.

'The eggnog was good, too.' He shifts slightly, now seated cross-legged: it's more comfortable that way. When she talks, she'll talk, and he has to be emotionally prepared to deal with it.

Alfred had always handled this far better.

"I didn't end up having any. I was so busy - tell me about it?"

She has no habit of pouring her heart out; she doesn't know if it would make her feel better or not, and it doesn't really occur to her to her to try. But she needed a place to hide, and she came here. She doesn't regret it.

'It.. was eggnog.' It's hard to explain when he's never had to comment on it before.

"What's it taste like?" She doesn't really have her mask on. She still looks wan and haggard. But the banality of questions is familiar, soothing.

Edited 2012-12-20 16:28 (UTC)

'Depends on what you put in it. Sometimes it's creamy, usually it's very sweet. My mother used to add nutmeg.'

"It sounds nice. Mama used to use nutmeg a lot, before she stopped cooking." There's a dullness to her voice, a built-up distance. It's been a long time. The words themselves seem dusty, the memories long unused.

'I prefer it with nutmeg.' He falls quiet too. Indirect tangents were never really his style, he'd always gone for the direct approach. 'Do you want to tell me what happened?'

She shrugs one shoulder.

"She just stopped getting out of bed after a while. I hated her for that, for a long time." She's starting to think she just might get it now, though.

He remained quiet, but offered his hand again. There was nothing to be said to that.

Neither of them ever really understood the other, not even when things were good. Magda was traditional, and Anya wanted to learn everything about the whole wide world.

She notices his hand and her expression flickers, not quite managing a smile. She touches the backs of his knuckles lightly, then withdraws back into herself.

"Can I. Borrow a pillow." She wants to stay, and can't ask for that much. Even the pillow seems like too much, when she could ball up her sweater easily enough, just curl up and not go until he insisted, never raising the issue. But the constancy of his regard feels almost like a physical weight; for all that it's more comfortable that it might be, she doesn't do well under scrutiny.

He gets up and goes over to his bed. The pillow is scarcely comfort enough, so he turns his attention to his small first aid that he keeps in between the bed and the desk, and takes out a red comfort blanket. Unfolding it, he took wrapped it around her and then retreated to his original distance.

'I'm here,' he says quietly.

"Thanks." She curls up, still in the protective lee of the desk, and shuts her eyes. She has no idea if she'll be able to sleep - it seems impossible, the way everything echoes in the cold, empty places she's just been so forcefully reminded of. But she can push everything else away, for awhile. That will have to be enough.

'Something like... that flood is going to happen again.' He didn't want to state it directly not when she needed time but she needed to be prepared and so did he if she was going to come here regularly. For starters, he had to rearrange his quarters so she wouldn't be hiding under a desk, which was the most uncomfortable place in the room.