ᴀɴʏᴀ ᴄᴏʀᴀᴢᴏɴ; sᴘɪᴅᴇʀ-ɢɪʀʟ (spidergirl) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2014-09-22 22:18:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, anya corazon / spider-girl (616), jon kasiya / amun (616) |
Who: Jon Kasiya / Amun, Anya Corazon / Spider-Girl
When: September 13, 2014
Where: Potts Tower, fire escape
What: Jon & Anya have a talk on the fire escape. Implications of murder.
Rating: PG13. It's all implications and not actual violence.
There was something about the open air and muted city noise a thousand feet off the ground that just made more sense than the canned and cold air pumped through the Tower's ventilation system. Maybe it reminded him more of home, Luxor during August, stiffling under the desert heat and crowd. It certainly felt as though he was back there these days. Jon Kasiya sat on the fire escape outside the 11th floor, under the light pouring of the 13th floor patio with a leg on either side of the safety rail. He rested his head on the cross bar imagining the iron to be cooler than it was as he rewrapped the injured wrist. It had taken a year to get out of the life and mindset of an assassin and a bad decision on an afternoon to fall back into it. He felt more like a cornered animal than anything, and tonight he had lashed out. He wasn't sure how to feel, but it would be over soon. One way or another. Anya just wanted to go out for a swing. The eighth floor wasn't quite high enough to perform the task without scaring pedestrians below, so she often climbed out of her window and crawled up the side of the building until she hit whatever jumping point she was in the mood for. Most times, she didn't know until she got there. It had been a long week, a long few weeks actually. Ever since those assassins started showing up on the scene, the Young Allies hadn't been able to maintain a clean night of patrolling. The only way to guarantee it was to not go out with Jon. That didn't sit too well with Anya, but here she was, stealing out into the night on her own. Feelings were… complicated when it came to the former (?) assassin. There'd been a time when she thought maybe they'd had something, but that time had passed. She wasn't even sure that Jon thought of her as a friend anymore, let alone the way she thought he might have. They hardly spent any time alone anymore, and definitely didn't patrol together. Seeing him on the fire escape by himself gave her pause on the way up. Should she stop and say hello? Check and see what he was doing? Did he wanna go for a ride? Anya sighed and made a beeline toward the fire escape. She took a whole thirty seconds to figure out what to say before just blurting out, "So what's up?" Jon's hand fell to the dagger by his side with a startled reflex faster than his ears could recognize the voice. He managed to control the instinct to toss it across the space or jump up to face her, but it was barely. Jon had drawn out two assassins trailing him in an alleyway in the Lower East Side perhaps an hour before. One had been sent back with a message to parlay and his adrenaline was so high. "Huh?" Jon forced the thoughts and bile down, as he sat back, looking up at the interloper. They had met like this a lot, at Potts Tower usually under more amicable circumstances. He knew how Anya felt about his former (?) work--more than he knew how he felt about it. Bringing it up again wouldn't do them good now. He shrugged and finally spoke. "Oh--nothing much." He drew up a leg and pushed back from the ledge towards the building itself to make room for another person and sheathed the dagger, bandaged arm flashing across his chest as he did. "Do you always sneak up on people on ledges?" "Huh?" Anya frowned, looking around to see if maybe he was talking to someone else who climbed up the building. Seeing there was no one else there -- or no one visible -- she pointed at herself. Was I in invisible mode when I climbed up the building? Sometimes it was hard to tell. She probably was; she usually did when she climbed out the window so no one could see where Spider-Girl came from. Jon had made a space for her. Though she was more than comfortable on the glass, she didn't want to be rude. She climbed over the railing and plopped down beside him, propping her fists under her chin and resting her elbows on her knees. "Nope. Didn't realize that's what I'd done…." A pause. "Sorry." She had been invisible or he had been distracted, it was hard to tell recently with Jon Kasiya. He may have set himself up for this fall, but that made it no less stressful. It cut into his sleep and evenings and the Maggia was no help there. But he liked to think it gave him a lean edge. Sometimes it did. Jon leaned back against the wall resting head against the brick and turned to look at her. "It is no harm done--" He almost smiled. "I am fairly certain that if I fall to my death on my own, they all lose." It took a moment for Anya's brain to catch up with what he'd just said. When it did, she did a double take, with her mouth open in surprise. Her suit's mask didn't cover it, so it wasn't a look befitting a superhero. Or a teenaged girl who was trying to sort things -- feelings included -- with her ex boyfriend. Okay, so she wasn't sure what they'd been, but it had been important to her, so she thought of him that way. (Anya hated the ex part.) "You're not gonna fall to your death on my watch. I'd swing and catch you. Or I'd do a web net to make sure you didn't hit the pavement. Basically, you wouldn't die." At that, the grin did break, self-dismissing and half-expectant. That was the response there always was to the not impossible fact of death. Perhaps it was a heroic trait, one he was growing to expect but not mind. But it was a sort of self-righteous optimism he could never see himself adopting. "Well there goes that plan." He wondered if that was a response anyone would get which had nothing to do with who he was or what he and Anya had been. Anya was difficult, she still was. She had been a girl who had brought him out of his shell, and the first person ever with whom he had had honest conversations about himself. He had cared for her, though he had little context in how to express that outside of a gigolo's performance. But they were fundamentally different. He could no more change himself than she could. But more, his time away from the Order, under Pepper Potts or with the Young Allies, even speaking with older former assassins who had done the same as he was now, something was changing, unwanted and unwarranted, but undeniable. The blood on his hands, nearly the first in over a year, bothered him. But the inconsistency bothered him more. He and Anya had been talking more easily in recent weeks. But the threat of 'I told you so' and the reality of joining the Maggia and fighting assassins had kept it more superficial. It could easily go that way now. It could easily go either way. "I enjoy the height." He offered. By now, Anya was used to how little Jon talked. It seemed easier to get replies from him, unbidden, on the network. For a fleeting instant, she thought to offer to talk to him over the phone, even if they were sitting beside one another. She'd never been particularly good at talking to boys in school, and found that she was even less so. Almost all of her friends had been female, and the very few boys she spoke with were usually brotherly. Or superheroes who were way older than her. Or Red Hulks that she wanted to kill. "Me too," she answered, though it was likely obvious that the girl who went web swinging and wall-crawling often liked to be up high. Even before she had the spider powers, she was game to go up to the roofs of buildings and jump to the next. She and Rikki had learned that specific gig without the powers. With the powers, it was like flying. Still, Anya cringed at herself. She still didn't know how to talk to a boy. "You ever wanna go web swinging with me?" It wasn't that Jon didn't speak, it was more that his words took time to gain momentum, at which point, someone else had usually jumped in. Case in point. But that was fine. Jon had never really had the compulsion to share. "It is fortunate that in some worlds, Spiders can fly." He had been swinging with Anya before, when their friendship was more open than it was now, but since he had made an effort to keep his feet firmly on the ground. He would have made a poor spider. He wondered if he made a poor little bird as well. Jon shook his head. "Not tonight, I think. I only just got back myself." "Why are you out?" Anya shrugged. It wasn't as if she thought Jon would actually take her up on the offer. She was fairly sure that he was actively avoiding being anywhere with her alone. Especially after the time they sang their frustrations. It was hard to navigate their friendship. How did you have one when it was all based on their attraction for one another? And now that it was gone -- from his side -- Anya knew what she'd end up doing. She always ended up doing it: disappearing from their lives. Every. Single. Time. "I enjoy the height and the wind," she answered, twirling a finger to indicate web-swinging loops. "It makes me feel weightless. Like nothing is tying me down." Jon nodded. Amunet, his namesake and the woman who had replaced his actual mother in Jon Kasiya's inner mythology, was a goddess of wind as she was of whispers. So he could understand the motion of it, and here, up in the city between buildings, could feel the air currents trapped and rushing faster than it would on the ground. "One of the buildings I was raised in was a block of flats. Not at all like these, they were older, unfurnished, and quite crowded." "At one point, we had a dozen in one apartment--more perhaps of a dormitory, but they had these balconies. I would escape to when I needed to hear myself think and not everyone around me." He wasn't sure why he was talking about this, in part because it was different, but from many sides of the story, because it was quite the same as what Anya was seeking. Perhaps he finally wanted to be heard. "It is funny, I find, how far we can go only to turn back where we once were. Do you?" Anya wasn't a scholar, and when she needed to hear herself think, it was usually in her own voice that was full of slang and sighs and other random gestures from the way she usually spoke. Abbreviations, internet slang, Spanish, it all mingled together to something that made Anya Corazon. Sometimes when Jon spoke, she thought he was so much older than her. Maybe he was, really. Their life experiences were so different, and age didn't really mean anything. She tilted her head on her hands until she was looking at him and her cheek was on her palm. She thought for a moment, drawing in a deep, sharp breath. "I think about my papa a lot when I'm up there." Anya point out and away from the building. "Spider-Man helped me through it all, even Red Hulk, but sometimes when I'm thinking too much, I start to remember that Rikki, my father, and my mother. They're all dead. And none of them really got any closure. So yeah, it's funny in a way. Every time you think you're moving on, there's always something you have to turn around for." Anya had lost a lot in her life. Jon got that. It had been part of what made it possible for a Mexican-American emigre and an Egyptian assassin to connect--that and interagency political machinations mixed with teenage hormones. But Jon's father had fallen for his mark too. Who knew how many before him. It was a risk of the job, one of the more pleasant ones. But Death he understood. "Death rarely is closure. Only for those who are truly despicable is it an end." The words came easily to Amun, who had been indoctrinated in the mysteries of Set from a very young age, but the belief was harder won. If he truly believed all he said, he would not have fought to avenge his father, and he would have not gone to such lengths to pervent his currently mandated demise. "That does not make it less daunting, though." It was hard to say whether or not she believed in something after this. She knew that superheroes -- in their world -- often times came back, so she assumed there had to be something. Ordinary people, on the other hand, they never came back. Not unless they were burdened with some villainous purposes. There were a few times her mother had come to her, but Anya never knew if it was really her or if it was something in her subconscious that was filling in information. All this talk of death just served to remind her that there were assassins on his tail. How often they trailed him or if they would get the upperhand on him, she couldn't say. If a dumb girl from the City could, then who knew what these guys could do. "Does it worry you? The assassins?" "Of course it worries me. I know where they are coming from." Jon sat forward, pressing his hands against his legs. It was no small thing being hunted by the Order of Set, and a year ago, Jon could easily have been one of the hunters rather than the hunted. He had been. "And how deeply their drive runs." "But I am Amun." He offered. "I have that over them. And talents their assassins do not." It was to his benefit most in this world seemed to have no power. They lacked his speed, and they lacked his Rewi. He lacked their determination which had let in every blow they managed to land over the past two months. But he had made friends here, something he Order of Set also lacked. And they could be strong while Amun himself was floundering. "I think things are finally working towards resolution." She nodded in return. One way or another, it would be over soon. Someone would get the advantage, and that's all it would take. One lucky move. Anya herself had been on the downside of a few of Amun's lucky moves. Their first meeting had her getting stabbed with one of his damn ankhs. It was strange, though, because if she hadn't admonished him, she was sure that Amun could easily have wiped them all out with a snap of his fingers. He was changing, whether he wanted to admit it or not, and Anya felt a little sad at the way things had ended between them. Harsh words and harsher thoughts. The last time Anya had seen Amun in their world, he had quit the Wasps and was on their to-kill list. Jon was no stranger to people wanting him dead, of course. That was the life of an assassin -- kill or be killed -- but over time, she had grown fond of him. Even without the flirtation, the attraction. "You are Amun. You almost killed me like a hundred times. I just happened to have a carapace to protect myself. If only you'd stabbed me in the middle of class that first day." "And risk detention?" It was in no way an actual thought that had crossed through his mind at the time, more one of the eerily more frequent attempts at levity that had emerged as Jon developed something resembling a personality over the past year. "They would have sent a note home for my parents to sign and then where would I have been, yes?" Anya may not have found it quite as amusing as Amun did. He turned to face her and studied the mask covering her face. If he had worn one how much trouble would be saved? Then again, he had not been working when this all began anew. "You know it was nothing personal." "Vincent would have signed it for you." She smiled in return. He was getting better at jokes. Lynn would have absolutely have fawned over him now, especially since he wasn't always wearing that Egyptian gothboy get-up all the time. He didn't always frown either. "Duh, of course I know it wasn't personal." Ever since she'd saved him at the mall, they'd had a weird, uneasy truce. He only attacked her when he was getting paid to, and he left her family and friends alone. That was the first time she'd really realized that he wasn't quite what she'd thought. "You really panicked that first time I saw your face.It's kind of funny in retrospect, you know?" "Who?" It was a serious question that accompanied a momentarily confused look. Jon had had several 'guardians' over the years serving as contact and overseer on jobs which had longer covers or on which his mentor, Kafale, had not also been contracted. It made little sense to commit such temporary men and women to memory, thus while Vincent rang a bell, it did not pull to mind a face. "Oh." It dawned on him when this was someone Anya knew also. "The Wasp. Yes." "But he liked to hear himself talk so very much. I would have never heard the end of it." It was easy to dismiss these encounters now with some distance, but there had been nothing funny in Jon's failure, or perhaps in the Wasps setting him up to fail. As the Hand of Death, he had had no small reputation in the right circles, though he was no super-powered individual, speed aside. Still either the Wasps had not communicated with his Order, or his Order had not communicated with him fully what he was hired against for that operation. He likely would not have listened in either case. "There is nothing funny about it. You were the one that got away." "Yeah, but if I hadn't, we wouldn't be sitting here today," Anya answered with an even bigger grin. Looking back, she was glad he hadn't gotten a chance to kill her dad or her best friend. Well, no, she was glad even then when he called off his personal vendetta against her. It turned out all right in the end. Most of it, anyway. "So it's a good thing I got away." The heat was a little aggravating, so Anya pulled the mask off over her long hair. She shook it out and then swiped a hand over her face to wipe the sweat from it. No one was going to see her from up here, and as far as she knew, there was no Anya Corazon here in New York City (or Brooklyn for that matter) to mess things up for. "Come on, it's a little funny. Who would have thought we'd end up on the same team fighting the good fight and, you know -- kissing -- at any point in our history?" "Well you could have been taken from before." Jon knew as he was saying it that it wasn't he smartest thing to be pointing out. He stopped himself as she continued and finally nodded. "But I am not that upset by it. It was only a job for both of us." He watched her take off a mask and couldn't hide what was perhaps a distant smile. In truth, kissing had been far from Amun's mind for some time--though, never that far. Jon had liked Anya, even when they were enemies, because she spoke to him and regarded him as more than just a means to an end or a weapon. Few people did, if they ever had before. Their relationship had soured when it was clear that she had never seen what he was at all. "Is that what we are doing?" "Well… we're both Young Allies. I hope that what we're doing is good. Saving people. Stopping bad people from hurting other people." There was a very fine line, Anya thought, between stopping someone and hurting them when you were a vigilante. If you pushed it too far, you became the person you were fighting. That was why it was so important for Anya not to kill or maim anyone permanently. She struggled with it more often than she cared to admit. Red Hulk, Jade, the Ravens… they all touched a sore spot inside her. If she let herself go over that cliff, she wasn't sure there was any coming back. Was it hypocritical to go off on Amun for one time? Yes, of course it was, but he was better than that. He thought he was nothing but a weapon, that all he had to offer was his skills, but Anya was convinced that he was wrong. He was a person, a human being who had feelings and emotions. She knew it. "Sometimes I wonder, though." |