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

"Lorne?"

Fred slipped into Lorne's office on feet used to getting around quietly. Of course, the subtle entry then seemed that much more defeated by the loud echo of the door clicking back into place. Both her hands settled behind her and wrapped around the handle. She was either chastising it for being so noisy, or steadying her own resolve. It was a matter up for interpretation, and most likely the opinions would vary depending on who you worked for.

"Do you really think we don't know what they're doing? Splitting us up again, making sure we all got them when we were in separate rooms?"

They'd waited a week. A week for everyone to get settled. To get used to their cars and their offices, their budgets and their tools. Until the phone was an already more tempting way to talk, as opposed to crossing an entire building. An entire gianormous building.

"Did they think that we wouldn't talk? That we didn't know what we were getting into?"

It seemed as if Lorne was finally catching up with her. He smiled, and Fred stepped closer. It was an old, familiar habit in a new, distracting place. It felt good.

"Well I don't really know Freddles," he offered. "I don't really think I put my nose on that until now."

He was lying.

Fred didn't need to be like Lorne to know it. And actually, she was all right with that. It wasn't as if he was directly trying to manipulate her. Not really. Which already made him better than most of the people in the building. And Fred didn't think he was a part of some already-formed plan to....

But he wanted this. Fred reckoned he might even want this more than any of the rest of him. Looking at her friend she wondered, really wondered, about how much he missed his home.

Not Pylea. They were on the same page about that. But Caritas. So much had happened so fast, and he'd had to move on quicker than anyone should from something that mattered that much. It was so much of who he was. The seeing and the talking and the making things better, in his own way. Sure he was still taking care of them. Fred never doubted that he was looking after her. But a part of Lorne was never happier than when he was working the room.

Wolfram & Hart? Was a really, really big room.

She understood him wanting a little of that back. So she figured he already had too.

"Well I did think," Fred declared with no small amount of conviction. She'd learned from the best after all. "And I do know."

She thought small army of lawyers that'd come to find her in the lab, paperwork in hand. They hadn't seemed to mind when she left after, all the documents still in her possession. As if they knew, no matter what, they could find them.

They could find her.

It was part of the deal after all.

Fred dropped her small cache of papers on Lorne's desk, where it matched up with an almost identical file. A few pieces of stark white, heavily bonded paper scattered free. On each of them was her signature, the black ink seemingly twice as dark as the text she was agreeing to.

They'd find them. She had no doubt about that.

With a small, precise nod Fred left the room.

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.