I'm learning to breathe on my own...

Fred's hand formed a small, but effectively made fist and pounded it against her pillow. Newton's 2nd Law flitted between various corners of her head as she found a small amount of release in the thwap thwap of down and fluff. It was all together too warm, and warmer still from her frustrations, so she flipped the pillow over. Fred stared thoughtfully at the expanse of white pillowcase that positively loomed, and it obliged by staring right back.

"What are you looking at," she muttered, aware of just how awake her voice sounded. A voice that was nourished into being on sweet tea, watermelon and bbq still edged with the crisp tones of the awfully aware. And awake. She couldn't forget the awake part. Fred's fist connected with the pillow again.

The apartment was strange enough to begin with. Oh sure, it was filled with all the comforts of home and even familiar reminders of her childhood. There was the dresser her daddy had painted over white when she was twelve. The quilt that her grandmother made, And even her old had, which was really mama's hat once removed from when she gardened. But she'd taken a liking to it somewhere between the ages of five and six. And it was Fred's ever since.

But it was still an apartment. Which of course meant that it wasn't the hotel. So the perfectly nice became the overly quiet and no matter how many things Fred shoved into all the spaces? She never could seem to fill up enough to that her voice and her footsteps and ever the space her body took up didn't echo too loudly back. They were all a phone call away. But they used to just be separated by a shout.

It was bad enough trying to fall asleep with things so far apart. But now she was full of the feeling of not close enough. Which is something else entirely. Her skin itched with it. It fired up and down the back of her legs and then up and over her stomach and shoulders in no real order. It wasn't irritating or even frustrating. It was awareness, plain and raw.

And when it was done with her skin it just slid over and took its place in the bed next to her. It was in her pillow and under her quilt and radiating heat and why was she sweating? That couldn't be called anything but annoying. Any other night and Fred could've happily curled up in the middle of her bed to sleep, spread across it in a possessive mattress-claiming angle that left no argument of just who it belonged to. But now there was this negative space. Sitting there, staring like the pillow. Fighting to make it's own claim. The what-was-not was making her itch again.

The want was.

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Setting exercise - Write a scene of your muse eating a meal. Focus on the setting, and illustrate the surroundings that he or she is dining in. It can be in their home, outside, in a restaurant, whatever, but it must be someplace that the muse would IC'ly eat.


It's heaven.

Fred's very, very sure it's heaven right there in paper colored pleasure, all dyed in the sorts of oranges and reds that aren't really the kind to be found in nature. No, these are manufactured hues for manufactured paper for manufactured foods, which is to say it's been a good five years since she's had anything like it. They're not bright, but the burn her eyes anyway. Her little bits of heaven.

You just stop seeing certain things anymore, and sometimes they cease to be. And you try and remember them. There's taste, and texture, the way a voice sounds when it's not shouting at you, they way honest to goodness electrical lighting lights up a person's whole being, and they can't hiding anything. From you or yourself. Every facet, every flaw just lit up like a Christmas tree. All you've got to do is look to see. And if in the end you choose to blink and squint your eyes so those lights and lines blur a bit? Well that's on you.

Just like the taco is...on you. Fred can't even be sure who shoved it in her hands. The girl with a tree for a name had taken Angel away to talk about the girl they both knew. Which of course left Fred with a bunch of people she didn't. Know, in any well or real way. But they'd listened to the bit about tacos it seemed, and now the small sack filled her hands. They were distracting her and she was distracting them. Back and forth and back and forth because if it's one thing Fred knows? It's listening. And they're trying to listen to the talking going on outside, even if they don't want to admit it. The not admitting it is where the food comes in.


She takes two steps back, then three, then two more. Eating's not something she's accustomed to doing in public anymore, especially with all those eyes on her. Normally there's the part when she has to steal her mean first too, with the running that comes after. So the bag is hugged that much closer even as the back on her knees hit something soft. Fred lands on the small circular sofa with an unexpected woosh of air, mouth drawn up in a nervous bow. She pulls herself even deeper into the upholstery, and that's when Fred revises her religion a bit.

Heaven is brightly wrapped tacos and this particular bit of fabric.

It's old Old, and used, and loved. One half of it sits higher than the other just below her, and the smell of it mixes itself up with the beef and tomato in her hands. There's soap, where someone's obviously tried to get a cleaning it. Real, actual soap. Fabric softener too, maybe bits of it left behind by the last person that sat there. So it helps her see a crampt wooden room with dappled afternoon light, filled to the brim with white bits of electrics way part their prime, and a soft, brown woman with more than enough good years left to call her own.

There's sweat, and dandruff, a small burn hole just to the left, and a flash of white where the covering is clear worn away on the right. It's people, and love, and age, and the not-cave, and about all the normal Fred's about to be able to handle in that moment.

It's holder her, and she's holding it right back.

So she opens up her first taco, and steps right through those heavenly gates. Which are somehow made of golden arches topped with a sombrero. It's the not normal in her back again, but she's plenty used to that my now. Fred thinks, sometimes, it might get a little lonely without it.

The taco itself tastes like a test. Will it be a good as she remembers? As wonderful as all those flavors she clung to for so very long, desperate to recreate? It's a taco and a memory and herself. She's going to sink with it, she expects to. Because it can't possibly be what wants it to be. Bits of the wrapper are inside Fred now, because she's eating it that fast. It's a five-year famine coming to an end.

Fred smiles, and it's everything but angelic.

But it tastes right.

Just exactly right.

Fred sits on the edge of her borrowed bed, feet dangling and swaying ever so slightly. The bed it just tall anough that she can't quite reach the floor, though if she is industrious and stretches with a good bit of focus, the ground will greet her. The lights are off in most of the house, and it's quiet except for the occasional creak and whisper from the way a space will talk to you. And normally Fred would be familiar with it all by now, having taken time to say hello and see what there is to be discussed. But the days have run together a bit on her, time lost in the way traveling can sometimes take it away, and keeping the usual conversation from being had.


And what's there has been spent in the lab downstairs, or trips back and forth to the house that was Buffy's, but now's so empty it hurts in a way Fred didn't plan, or working on her computer. Fred's time has ben so taken and twisted she doesn't really know what hour it is anymore...only that it is late. And jet lag isn't her friend. She tries laying down, but Fred's legs still feels like they are swaying, even when they aren't moving at all. So she sits up and lets them do what they want anyways.

And still thinks about Buffy's house, empty and alone. All of those things, waiting for her to come back. All of those friends, waiting for her to come home. It's like the space that Fred couldn't see in her own life has opened up right in front of her, in someone elses. And they're here, everything that truely matters is still here. All Fred's really left or lost are silly, silent things, and suddenly the seld awareness appears. She's been spinning a bit, maybe more than anyone really saw, but spinning none the less. Waiting to be pulled back or rescused, for someone or anyone to come and save her. To take her home.


Only this is home.


Just like that's Buffy's home. With her rooms and her things and her friends. Her baby... Fred's home had gone and packed up and moved right underneath her feet, maybe even more she even saw it was gone. But Buffy's hadn't, and she was going to make sure it was still there when she came back. And...and that she came back.

Somewhere in all that thinking Fred makes her way downstairs, silently slipping the whole way. And of all things she finds the beer, lined up in the neat little rows. Well, not so little rows. At first it's just one of the bottles, it's dark amber colored glass just like the one her Dad would sip from on the porch on some nameless Saturday afternoon. So she opens and drinks the whole of it, and sits right there with him the all of the while. In her head she tells him countless, unordered and meaningless things. And then the kitchen is her lab, a liberated place to taste and see and be a part of welcoming Fred back to herself. It's all very organised at first, some bottles followed through. Some tasted and discarded.

Some good, some not.

Some right for her, others not at all.


But the whole of it...welcomed.


With progressingly less steady feet and arms.