Athena Sargent ☆ Julia Wicker (hedgewitchbuffy) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2018-08-18 14:02:00 |
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Entry tags: | !backstory, athena sargent, bren gallagher |
Who: Athena Sargent & Bren Gallagher
What: Athena’s looking for someone with powers
Where: Here&Gone, Chicago
When: Backdated to Friday, July 6th 2018; evening
Warnings: References to past and reincarnate sexual assault.
Ever since she’d become a reincarnate, Athena had been looking at everything differently. In some ways it felt like suddenly, all of life’s endless possibilities had opened up to her at once, only she couldn’t reach all of them, she could only see them for what they were. Possibilities. Life was no longer as simple as living, breeding, and dying. There was everything in between to consider, and as a reincarnate, your fate was no longer necessarily tied to such a limited range of opportunities. There were entire new worlds to explore, other extraordinary people like yourself to find in your travels that you might not have looked twice at on the street otherwise. Anything was possible when you were a reincarnate.
Except, of course, when it wasn’t.
For all of Athena’s power, now that she was a magician, it was endlessly frustrating to her when there was still something she couldn’t do. It was partially the perfectionist in her, never satisfied until she was able to master something, but it was also the part of her that bled openly for the people she cared about. When someone she loved was hurting, all she wanted to do was be able to fix it. She couldn’t fix this. Athena had gotten pretty good at magic in the short time she’d been practicing it, but stopping something as mysterious and permanent as death? That wasn’t something she could do, and she hated that.
Julia and her friends had their own brushes with death, and if Athena had thought a trip to the Underworld might have solved Avery’s problem, she would have done it in an instant, no matter how costly it was. But her world wasn’t Avery’s world, anything she could personally do probably wouldn’t fix anything in the end. She needed someone more powerful than her, and she wasn’t sure where to start looking.
She’d heard through the grapevine about this place called Here&Gone, not somewhere she would have been able to go before when she was spending most of her time following the footsteps of reincarnates. The place was reincarnates only, and specifically it was for reincarnates with powers. She figured that was as good a place as any to start looking for someone powerful enough to help her friend. Her best friend, really. Athena had met Avery before she’d become a reincarnate herself, and he was maybe one of the only good things in her life right now. If she could help him, she would. She’d do anything for him.
Walking into the club (god, she still couldn’t get over how handy the MTN was in the absence of a convenient portal), Athena wasn’t sure how she should go about doing this. What, should she just start walking up to people and saying, ‘Hi, my name’s Athena, can you stop someone from dying’? Probably not, so she decided to play it cool for now, order a drink from the bar and sit in the corner for a little while to people watch. Nobody was shy about using their powers in here, but so far, she hadn’t seen anything all that impressive, or things she couldn’t do herself. What she was probably looking for was a god, but for all she knew, gods had their own exclusive hangouts separate from the rest of the plebes.
If there were any special hangouts for gods, no one had told Bren about them. Of course, there were only a couple of people who knew that he was actually a god. One of them was a little busy being miserable about the fact that he'd broken up with his demon and the other... honestly, Bren wasn't sure what was up with Hannah. He was even less sure what was up with them as a couple. Hannah had taken it hard that she hadn't been in on rescuing David and even though Bren hadn't actually had anything to do with it she'd still started blaming every distraction outside of focusing on her brother for him even being taken in the first place.
The beer that Bren was holding couldn't get him drunk but he was kind of thinking about switching to a vodka and Sprite just so that the sugar rush could get him good and wasted enough that he didn't have to think about his personal life right then. It was easy to be the guy that didn't seem to take anything seriously. It was hard to be that guy when you were having to face the fact that your first actual real relationship might be headed straight down the drain and there was nothing that you could do about it. He figured even a god got to feel sorry for himself when his girlfriend was probably one more push away from breaking things off with him. The real shitty part of it was that there was part of him that was almost as upset that he probably wouldn't get to be friends with David anymore after it was all over.
All it'd taken to be accepted at Here&Gone was a couple of cosmetic changes, shifting the color of the streak in his hair and the band advertised on his shirt. Showing off your powers wasn't required in the club but everyone kind of looked at you funny if you didn't do it eventually. Bren figured that was the least he could do and it was more than enough to prove that he belonged in a place where the people with special powers would hang out. No one had to know how much more he could do. He really didn't want anyone else to know that either.
Maybe he hadn't been drinking anything that would actually get him intoxicated but Bren kind of let the rush of the crowd pull him away from focusing anyway. He could see, if he tried, all the threads of fate dragging them along; he could see where they'd be going after they were done in the bar and he could see the next year of their lives and he could see the end of their lives if he focused hard enough. He normally didn't. Normally he was happier not actually knowing what was going to happen everyone around him before he even knew their names. Being the Final Fate wasn't exactly the coolest talent in the world, no matter how badass it sounded when you said it out loud. Who really wanted that though? It kind of made it hard to make friends when you were fully aware of what was going to happen to them and how you might fuck things up just by getting too close.
Then there were the ones he couldn't see.
They didn't happen often. Usually it only happened once he'd gotten close enough to someone that their fate was already mixed up with his, like with David and Hannah. Meeting random strangers whose fates weren't clear to him? That usually meant that they were some kind of big supernatural badass. Bigger than a demon. Bigger than an angel even. It meant that he was running into another god, like with Andrew. Or—and this was the one that made his heart skip a beat when his eyes caught on a girl across the room and he saw nothing but her—it meant that they were fated to be important enough in his life that it would give away too much about his own fate to see any of theirs.
Bren still had a girlfriend. He really shouldn't have been standing up and making his way across the club to see what the girl at the bar was up to. Hannah would understand though, he told himself. She'd get that Bren had to know why it was that he couldn't see anything about this girl.
"Hey," he said when he was close enough. He knew he didn't look like much. He'd left the streak in his hair green instead of the usual red for the night and his black t-shirt was vintage Distillers; his jeans were tucked into scuffed black combat boots. "I think the usual line is something about what a girl like you's doing in a place like this, right?"
The question he wanted to ask, obviously, was what was she. That was the kind of thing you had to ease into though.
Normally, Athena would immediately brush off a lame pickup line like that, no matter who was delivering it, even if she thought they were hot. Also, if she were anywhere else, she might have taken one look at him and immediately assumed that he was as young as he looked, which was at least as young as she was. She was guessing maybe very early twenties? Considering just how many teenagers were running around the building, neither of them seemed all that out of place here. It would have been alarming if she hadn’t known what she was getting herself into by coming to this place, and a bunch of kids with powers in a club wasn’t the weirdest thing she and Julia had ever come across. In some ways Here&Gone felt a little like a hedge safehouse, and that made them both feel a little more at ease while they were in here.
Being in a place where everyone was celebrating what made them special and seeking it out in others was a feeling that Athena was now all too familiar with, and it made her a little wistful. So far, she hadn’t really met anyone else like her yet. No fellow magicians, no one that Julia had known in her own life. She had Avery, but Avery was basically a god. She hadn’t met anyone yet who could share her kind of magic with her. She didn’t necessarily need that, it would just be nice to have someone else who truly understood what it meant to be her the way someone like Q or Kady would, despite their differences.
She could have told him to buzz off, but she didn’t, for two reasons that only one of them she was absolutely sure of. One, she was here to find someone who could help her friend, and on the off chance this guy happened to be a lot more than he was letting on, she wasn’t going to burn that bridge too quickly by telling him off for the cheesy pick up line. Two, and this was the one she was less sure of as far as good reasons go…. She liked his face. Yeah, he looked young, but in a way that was almost angelic.
“I’m gonna let that lame opener slide because I like your shirt,” she told him, arching an eyebrow. Athena was wearing her favorite Green Day t-shirt under her leather jacket, both of the sleeves cut off so that the arm holes hung halfway down her sides, also black, with the logo in white. You couldn’t see it easily from where she was sitting behind the table until she uncrossed her legs and scooted back more comfortably in the booth, taking a sip of her beer as she regarded him openly. Maybe the line had been terrible, but at least he had good taste in music. She could appreciate a guy into punk. “Got a name to go with it?”
Bren grinned and tilted his head in a silent acknowledgement once she shifted so he could see what she was wearing. Okay, so maybe if he'd seen that first he would have come over to talk to her even if he'd been able to see every single detail about her future. It wasn't that rare to find someone who appreciated the same music he did—he and David usually didn't have any problems agreeing on something to listen to—but it was a good enough reason to make small talk with someone that he had no intention of ever talking to again in a club. At least he had something to fall back on if he couldn't figure out a good way to bring up that whole 'what are you exactly' question that he really needed to ask. "Bren. And would you forgive how lame it was if I told you that I've never actually used one before?"
Chatting up girls in clubs wasn't exactly something that Bren had done much of even before he'd gotten Ash in his head and the crap ton of issues that came along with that. Most of his 'relationships' back then had been the kind of thing you fell into when you needed a place to sleep for a while and the easiest way to get it was to crash at someone else's place after hooking up. It'd never meant anything. After Ash, just thinking about casual sex and using and being used left such a sick feeling in the pit of Bren's stomach that he hadn't even tried... and then there'd been Hannah and the way they'd been practically living together (at least as far as having half her shit at his place went) before they'd even kissed for the first time. Yeah, it was fair to say that dropping lame pick up lines in places like Here&Gone wasn't exactly something that Bren had any experience at all with.
It was either disconcerting or peaceful to be able to look at this stranger and not see flashes of what was coming in her future that he couldn't warn her about. Bren couldn't exactly make up his mind about that one. He wasn't exactly a fan of knowing everything about everyone he encountered before he'd even introduced himself but after as long as he'd had Ash buzzing around in his head he'd kind of gotten used to it. This girl was a blank slate and Bren was very aware that he could mess up literally everything in her life with the wrong word. Or was it that whatever he did was the fate that she was supposed to have since he didn't know better than to change it? That was the problem that he kept running into with having people close enough to him that he couldn't see what was coming but he'd been able to see enough with Hannah and David before he'd gotten tangled up with them to know that it didn't matter what he did, their lives were going to be a twist of fucked up subversions of fate that he literally couldn't make any worse just by existing in their lives. With a stranger, though?
Maybe it was actually thrilling instead.
Bren slid in across from her at the table and leaned back casually, long legs stretched across but carefully not touching hers. That was as much for his own comfort as for hers. Normally he'd have filled the air with chatter but maybe Ash was starting to actually rub off on him: he didn't feel any desire to break the silence or give her half a dozen things to pick from to reply to before she had a chance to think about them.
“Hmm.” Athena squinted at him and pretended to consider that, and even though she thought it was kind of bullshit, she wasn’t unkind about it. “Isn’t that what guys usually say though? Or they give that whole speech, ‘I’ve said those things before but never actually meant them………… until now’.” She said that last part a little dramatically, like she was mocking someone else, but it wasn’t directed at Bren. As far as she could tell, he seemed harmless. Not that she was always the best judge of character, but she thought she was getting better at it. She knew slimeballs, and this guy didn’t seem like one.
Relaxing a little more in her seat, Athena figured that while she was here, she at least might as well make a friend. Even if he couldn’t help her, she already didn’t mind talking to him. “But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt since your taste in music isn’t completely abhorrent.” Anybody that was into the Distillers was definitely okay in her book. Maybe if it turned out he wasn’t who she was looking for, they could just spend the rest of the night drinking and talking about music. Athena couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that with someone. Even with Avery, since that was less about music and more about your experience being changed by the miracles a god chooses to bestow upon the crowd. That was pretty cool too.
“I’m Athena.” Studying him, she waited a beat or two before she actually asked the question that she really wanted to ask him. Unfortunately for Bren, Athena wasn’t nearly patient or polite enough to keep making small talk for awhile first before it was probably deemed socially acceptable to broach the more personal, intrusive topics. “So. Bren. Everyone’s got one in here. What’s your special talent?”
Athena? Nice. Ash hadn't actually known Athena that well but for the girl with no fate to have that name... that kind of felt like fate on its own. Of course, opening up that topic meant that he was going to have to explain his connection to it and he'd done his best to be as evasive as possible. Sure, some of the Greek demigod kids knew he was connected somehow. They probably assumed he was another kind of demigod at the very most. Maybe someone else from their series that they just didn't know for some reason. He'd been pretty vague about it and they were usually in the middle of something that didn't include much time for long deep conversations about all of the baggage that he'd have to unpack to explain Ash.
Most people really didn't come right out and ask about powers, even in a place like Here&Gone. Bren didn't even hesitate because even that was less complicated than trying to explain why it was so cool that her name was Athena. He raised his hand to the streak in his hair and pinched it between his fingers; when he pulled them down from root to tip the color changed from emerald green to deep purple. Another pass of his fingers and it was back to the brilliant red he usually sported. Then, just to show off a little extra, he closed dark brown eyes. When he opened them he stared at her with eyes the pale silver of Ash's. Another blink and they were back to deep brown. "Tah-dah. Saves me a fortune. Works with my clothes too."
Actually, Bren could fabricate his clothes out of thin air. She hadn't unlocked that level of knowledge about Bren's freaky powers yet. Being the guy who could make something out of nothing was a lot more telling than being the guy who could change the color of his hair on a whim.
"So what about you?" If she was so sure that everyone here had some kind of special trick then that must mean that she did too. Normally Bren would live and let live but she had started it. "Show me what you got."
Maybe Athena was technically here for her friend, but she still couldn’t help the rush of excitement and wonder she felt when he demonstrated his powers for her. No matter what it was, magic or some other kind of supernatural phenomenon that allowed someone to do what could be considered the impossible by any normal standards, it fascinated her more than anything else in this world. She couldn’t get enough of magic now that she had it, and before she’d become a reincarnate she’d been completely obsessed with the idea of being able to perform the impossible. She and Julia were a lot alike in that way.
She noted to herself that she liked the red color on him best, it was bright and daring against the darker color of the rest of his hair. It made it impossible for him to not catch her eye with that red. The shock of silver in his eyes was even more interesting, and Athena wondered to herself if that was just another party trick like the red in his hair, or if he was possible revealing the true color of his eyes. It was a fifty-fifty chance of being either one, but regardless, Athena’s curiosity was definitely peaked at this point.
Athena immediately wanted to ask a million more questions, but she bit them all back because fair was fair. She’d asked him to show his, it was only polite that she showed him hers now. Also, she was still really trying to mask how into this game of show and tell she was. Silently, with a small frown of concentration, Athena thought for a minute about what she wanted to show him. Digging around in her bag, she found a quarter and placed it on the table, edge first, and launched it into a fast spinning motion before hovering one hand above it, high enough to see that there was no part of her touching the coin.
The quarter stopped spinning instantly, still perfectly balanced on its edge. It only fell onto the table’s surface once Athena removed her hand from right above it. Then, sitting up a little straighter, she pulled the unlit candle that had been sitting in the center of their table and held it in one hand while making a series of strange hand motions that resulted in a sudden burst of real flame on the candlewick.
"Cool." Bren meant it, too; he leaned in closer to take a better look at the lit candle. It looked like a normal flame; when he held his hand out so that his fingertips almost brushed it, it felt hot like a normal flame. The reflection of the small spark of fire reflected in his eyes when he leaned closer. They were still a little brighter than usual when he leaned back with a broad, bright grin. He still couldn't place exactly what it was about her that made her so special that he couldn't see her future but those powers were another interesting piece in the puzzle. Not to mention that Bren was kind of partial to summoning fire out of thin air. It was useful with daimons... or with Hannah's and David's kind of vampires. Or, honestly, probably most things that he was going to run into that could cause some problems. Fire burned almost no matter who you were.
So... cool name, cool powers, cool taste in music. There was nothing that Bren didn't like about this girl so far. He was sure there would be. Nobody was as perfect as they seemed, and even the things that you'd thought were beautiful about someone when you first got to know them could turn into the things that made you fall out of love with them. Like Ash and Arty. Like the way that sometimes Bren got frustrated when Hannah couldn't just lighten up and take a joke, or when she ordered him around without stopping to take a second to consider that he kind of had obligations to not fuck up the whole world when he did something. Not that he was out of love with Hannah or anything. It was just kind of a rough patch right then. Things would settle down when they finally had David's deal sorted out and she had a chance to sit back and be the girl that he'd first started getting to know again.
His relationship problems were not what he wanted to think about that night. "So what kind of label do you use here? My friends usually just call it 'Bren's freaky powers' but I know that's not for everyone."
Seriously though, it was amazing how many names people came up with for people who used magic, like just one wasn't good enough. He'd heard a lot of them since he'd become a reincarnate, and he was pretty sure there were some creative ones out there that no one had used in front of him yet. And sure, maybe the label didn't matter, but in case they hung out later he kind of wanted to be able to introduce her to his other friends as 'my friend Athena, the...' whatever.
Athena might have had more pressing matters for being here tonight, but she couldn’t deny that it was pretty exciting to actually be able to show somebody else what she could do. Other than Avery, nobody else she knew even knew she was a reincarnate. She couldn’t exactly show anyone else that fire trick without risking giving them an actual heart attack. Bren’s enthusiasm at her small display just made that itch inside of her to keep showing off grow a little larger, but she couldn’t let herself get carried away.
Avery was counting on her.
“Magician.” A short pause as she reconsidered. “Well, technically I guess what you’d call her is a hedge witch. Also… possibly an ex-goddess. Not too sure about the details on that one, they’re a little fuzzy.” Julia’s history was long and complicated, but the simple fact was, she should have been accepted into Brakebills and given official Magician status. The fact that she had to learn how to use magic outside of the box and labeled a hedge witch for it was pretty bullshit, but Athena didn’t mind either label.
“I’m okay with either title, though. All it really boils down to is that I can do magic.” She smiled at him, as if she was just now starting to reconsider him. Unfortunately for them both, her interest in Bren had peaked. “What about you? Do you subscribe to the label your friends gave you or do you prefer a different one?”
"I don't know, freaky powers kind of has a ring to it." Bren shrugged, carefully nonchalant about the whole thing. After all, freaky powers was as good an explanation as any but the real one and that was one that he couldn't go throwing around wherever and whenever he wanted. "I mean, compared to the rest of the crew they hang out with I don't understand how I'm that much freakier, but...
"Demons and angels," he told her, a last minute clarification on what could be freakier than what he'd showed her so far. And yeah, he was definitely weirder than that, but they hadn't known that when they christened what he could do. "Well. One demon, one angel. It's complicated. They hunt things, I help."
When he could. When it wouldn't fuck things up for Bren to stick his godly nose in and when he wasn't so close to what was going on that he couldn't tell for sure if it was going to change fate in a really, really bad way. Bren's life was a series of complications and qualifications for what he could do and when and why. It had taken some getting used to and he knew that if he got too comfortable with it now he could still slip up and do something really, really horrible. Ash had and he'd been living with it for millenia at that point. There wasn't going to be a Nick in Bren's life.
"Going back to the ex-goddess thing though..." Because that was definitely the part that was most relevant to Bren's interests. "Not that hedge witch and magician aren't cool enough for me, but anything involving gods and goddesses has a story behind it."
Athena hesitated, if only because it was a strange combination of not really being her story to tell, and also hitting a little too close to home for her in some ways. She was still feeling pretty relaxed though, the alcohol and Bren’s easy company maybe having a little something to do with that. She felt less pressured to divulge more than she’d originally planned on when first coming here and more compelled to, though.
“It’s sort of complicated, and I’m not too sure of the ending. She either won’t or can’t tell me, I don’t know. We don’t always have the best communication skills,” Athena smiled wryly, going in for another sip before continuing. “Long story short, Julia and a group of people tried to summon a goddess. Didn’t really work out. An asshole trickster god showed up instead and killed most of them. He attacked Julia, and afterwards…” Athena trailed off for a few seconds, trying to figure out the best way to word this.
“She kind of lost it for awhile. Went on this total crusade to find and kill him for what he did. She almost succeeded, but the goddess that they had been trying to summon intervened. As a parting gift, she gave Julia the seed of his power, and over time it sort of… grew, I guess, the more she did with her magic. She ended up becoming a full fledged goddess after she restored a sentient forest.” Athena paused, laughing softly. “Not much of a short story, sorry. Anyway, her friends were in trouble. Julia used a lot of her power to help them, and afterwards it’s… less clear whether or not she ever got that power back.”
Shrugging, Athena set down her drink and crossed her arms over her chest. Aside from Avery, she’d never even gotten close to telling the full truth about Julia’s past to anyone, much less her own. It didn’t feel as terrible as she had previously thought it would, which was interesting. “So basically I have no idea if that seed is somehow still in me or not, I guess only time will tell. And that’s her whole sob story. What about you? Demons, angels and freaky powers sounds like a pretty good story too.”
Bren could connect the dots on that story and it wasn't a pretty one... not that Ash's was any prettier. Sounded like Julia and Ash had plenty that they could talk about if they ever found themselves hanging out without Athena and Bren.
"Also complicated," he told her. Bren didn't have the words to describe how complicated Ash's story was. That was at least partly because it honestly seemed like the writer had kind of lost what she was going for somewhere in there and felt like she had to up herself with ever new book when it came to how tortured her hero was... and Ash's wasn't even the latest and greatest (greatest being a relative term) book in the series. "Don't laugh, okay? So my guy's from this ridiculously long series of romance novels."
He paused for dramatic effect, then added, "Take that back, you can laugh all you want. I know I did when I figured out that this is my life now.
"Telling you the whole thing would take literally all night so, highlights. Born in ancient Greece, parents assumed he was cursed and sent him off to live with his uncle—the bad touch kind of uncle who happened to own a brothel." Bren had a feeling she could see where that story went just as clearly as he'd seen the unspoken piece of hers. "His uh. His sister came and saved him. Eventually. Once she was old enough. Ash—that's him, Acheron—caught the attention of a goddess who kind of treated him like a glorified lapdog that she didn't want anyone to know about because it was bad for her rep."
Skipping a lot of details... but who had time to sit through that many years' worth of stories? "So, you know, big surprise, it came back to bite him in the ass and he ended up in charge of a group of hunters sworn to the great bitch goddess. Fuckin' Artie."
Funny how even though the betrayal hadn't happened to Bren, the pain of it was still sharp. "Different kind of demons than my friends hunt and there aren't any angels involved in Ash's story, but the same basic idea. Hunting things that hurt people. Freaky powers are a sweet perk."
Bren really wished it was that simple. He felt bad about not telling her the rest but... he liked her. And there was a good reason that Ash had kept it a secret from even his closest friends for so long. No… Ash had kept it a secret especially from his closest friends because that was the best way for him to keep them safe.
Athena might have laughed, if he hadn’t continued on with the rest of it. You’d have to be pretty heartless to laugh at someone who’s in the middle of telling you about their trauma. Even if it hadn’t actually happened to him personally, she could tell from the tone in his voice that it was maybe still not something he enjoyed talking about. Athena could understand that. Her own experience with sexual assault aside, talking about what happened to Julia… it brought stuff up that had nothing to do with her, and she still had trouble with it. Was it possible to have PTSD from your own reincarnate? Athena often wondered.
Her mouth did briefly quirk up into a small smile before he kept going, and then her face turned pensive, feeling a fleeting sense of kinship with this person who she’d only just met, but seemed to have more in common with than she’d initially bargained for. He’d left less guess work involved than she had, but even so, she would have been able to fill in the blanks of where he didn’t elaborate immediately. That’s just how it worked when you were two people with shared trauma. It didn’t take much to pick up on the hidden clues. Athena was sure that was why Eliot had found a reason to connect with Julia in the first place.
Still, it was almost a little eery how much she already felt connected to this guy. It was stupid, and maybe it all boiled down to just her being lonely. She didn’t really have that many friends anymore, she was estranged from what little family she had left… she was also accustomed to being a lone wolf, which never really helped in the making friends department. Meeting somebody with her taste in music, shared past trauma and also had cool, freaky powers like her? Call her a skeptic, but it felt too good to be true.
“They usually are,” Athena smiled, inclining her head slightly in acknowledgement of said freaky powers. She might not believe in things like fate, but happy coincidence? Maybe. Even if he couldn’t help her, she wasn’t sorry she’d met him. Her features briefly darkened into a more troubled frown, her thoughts once again turning to her friend. “Until you realize what you can do still isn’t enough, anyway.”
“Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.” Ash had told Bren that enough times when he first started speaking up that it was second nature now, the one thing in Bren's life that was almost a religious thought. Sometimes it didn't matter how much power you had. Sometimes what mattered was that there were some things that shouldn't be fucked with or you'd make everything worse. He wondered if she'd remember that… or maybe she'd already learned it the hard way.
Not that he'd know if that lesson was still coming for her. Her fate was just as blank now as it had been when he'd been across the room. He wondered if it was because she'd been involved with gods already, if maybe there was something about that exposure that had left her fate hazy, under certain protections. He hoped that it was because she was going to be way too close to him instead, but hey… why couldn't it be both?
“So,” Bren asked, “what is it that your awesome powers can't do?”
There had to have been something specific and that dark look on her face probably meant that it was personal. That, or Bren was finally going crazy after all and he was seeing things that would never be there.
Bren couldn’t know how much he was preaching to the choir right then, but Athena wasn’t going to help him out by really going into detail about all of the ways in which Julia constantly sought to defy that very idea. Her thirst for knowledge and the practical way she went about obtaining it regularly butted heads with any other thoughts she might have about whether or not she should do it. She was the most stubborn, determined person in the world when it came to succeeding at something, especially when it came to magic. Unfortunately for the both of them, probably, Athena wasn’t all that different.
All magic comes with a price, and maybe no one was a bigger example of that than Julia, but that hadn’t and wasn’t going to stop either of them. Athena knew what she was doing… sort of. She might not understand the real mechanics behind Avery’s reincarnation but she trusted Avery, she wasn’t worried about this somehow backfiring on her, and she hadn’t made the decision to help recklessly. She’d thought about it a lot, she’d weighed the pro’s and con’s of pursuing this quest. She wasn’t train wreck Julia who was so desperate that she’d do anything to get what she wanted, no matter who got hurt and even if it meant sacrificing someone else in the process. This wasn’t about her. She just wanted to help her friend.
“Someone I know got a really raw deal in this whole reincarnation business. Like. Because of the political climate these days people joke about becoming a reincarnate as a death sentence, but he really got one.” Athena sipped at her beer thoughtfully, wondering how much she should unload, and deciding to keep it more vague for the moment. “If I had all those handy goddess powers I could probably do it myself, but… I can’t. I just want to help my friend. I want to give him more time. Him, and the person he loves.”
"But what if giving him more time meant that someone else had to die?" Bren leaned forward, any lingering levity forgotten. There was something dark in his own eyes now, a knowledge that didn't come from him. "What if it means that more than one someone else has to die? What if that's the way that everything's supposed to be and if you fuck with even one part of it..."
He mimed an explosion with his hands. It should have been a joke. It really wasn't. No one knew better than Ash how little it could take to destroy the world and how easy it could be to do it by accident, just because you said one wrong word. It wasn't the kind of mistake that he wanted to make a second time. Not even if the mistake was saving the wrong person instead of killing the wrong person. Not that she knew he could yet. Not that Bren was in a hurry to share more about it until he'd heard what her answer to his question was.
It would suck if she was willing to let the whole world burn to save one person. As much as Bren could understand the feeling it was never something that he'd actually do. And if she would...
Ash's mom would probably have liked her, if she would. She'd been willing to destroy the whole world just because someone had killed Ash, after all. Bren already liked Athena. He really didn't want to be in a position where he had to choose between liking someone and potentially saving the world. It wasn't like he could see whether or not she'd ever be in a position to end it, after all.
It was a pretty strange question to ask anyone, but given the progression of their conversation, it wasn’t that strange. It was just like that moral question of whether or not you would let one person die in order to save millions more, which wasn’t always a simple answer since that one person was usually someone dear to you. Avery was very dear to her, and there wasn’t a lot that Athena wouldn’t do for someone she loved, but she also wasn’t about to sacrifice millions of innocent lives just so she could save one.
She wouldn’t even sacrifice one life to save another, Athena didn’t need to have ever been in that kind of situation to know that about herself. Neither would Julia, and Julia hadn’t always been the most selfless person in the world. They both had their hang ups, just like everyone else, but when it came to human life… nothing was more precious. That’s why Athena was so determined to save Avery’s, no matter what. If it was a question of letting someone else die to save her friend, she couldn’t go through with it, but that didn’t mean she was going to just give up either. Athena would always find some other way.
“I don’t accept that.” Athena might not believe in sacrificing one person for another, but she also didn’t believe in things like destiny. Maybe she should, considering Julia’s track record, but both of them had trouble believing that things were only meant to be a certain way. If you couldn’t succeed at something, you just had to approach it differently the next time. Her tenacity did sometimes get the better of her. Despite the absurdity of their current conversation, she met Bren’s gaze and didn’t waver. “Sacrificing someone else can’t be the only outcome, I would find another way. I’m just stubborn like that I guess.”
Find another way… Bren wished he could be so confident that there'd always be another way. Another loophole that miraculously didn't screw anyone else over. Maybe he hadn't had to make that kind of call yet. Maybe he'd get lucky and he'd never have to. But if he couldn't see…
That was the real bitch about being a Fate. You got so used to having the future laid out in front of you that you forgot how to function without that roadmap.
“What makes you so sure it can work that way?” Bren sounded mostly just curious. The weariness he felt down to his bones didn't come through in his voice. He was good at faking that too, because everyone was used to good natured Bren with the smart mouth, bad sense of humor, and no sense of self-preservation. Even the people who knew who was in his head didn't know about living with someone like Ash and that was the way he'd rather have it.
Athena, though, Bren was strangely less concerned about letting the mask slip in front of her already. “Plenty of people have tried to say fuck you to the way the world works and they usually get crushed by it.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t like the idea of not being in control of my own fate.” It was kind of a cliche answer to give him, but it was a little better than just admitting that she was too stubborn to let something go, even if that was just as true. Maybe she just didn’t know when to give up, and maybe that didn’t always end well for her or Julia, but that didn’t mean they ever stopped trying. She had to keep trying.
If she got crushed by it, well, better her than somebody else. She’d just have to look at it as a learning experience, assuming she was still in one piece to learn from it. Athena really didn’t know what to expect from this whole thing, but considering that she was dealing with gods, she figured she’d have to take a leaf out of Julia’s book and prepare to expect anything. She was already in uncharted territory here.
“If I get burned for it I guess I get burned. At least I tried.” The small smile Athena wore was more self-deprecating than humorous. He could have just been curious and posing his questions for the sake of conversation, but it was the way he asked her that peaked her curiosity more than anything else, so after draining the rest of her beer, Athena tilted her head at him thoughtfully. “Why do you ask?”
Bren knew that she wouldn't know any better if he didn't tell her anything at all. There was no way for Athena to know that she'd talked to someone who could do exactly what she wanted them to do if Bren said that he'd just been asking. Maybe she'd suspect. Maybe she wouldn't. It wasn't something that he could force out of her though and it'd probably be better—safer—for both of them if Athena didn't know anything about what Bren really was.
Corny as what she'd said about being in control was, it hit Bren square in the middle of her chest. Yeah. Being in control of your own fate? That was great. It wasn't something that Bren was used to the idea of. There were always rules to follow, after all, a line that he couldn't ever cross and hadn't ever really been tempted to. Could he really take that away from Athena when she said it was something she didn't want? And would not telling her be the same as taking away some kind of control or was Bren really overthinking this?
Both. It was probably both but Bren still couldn't quite keep his mouth shut longer than a brief hesitation.
"Because I can do a hell of a lot more than change the color of my hair, but I don't like to pull out those party tricks when there's a chance that I might fuck up the rest of the world with them." It could have been a joke. It could have been Bren just leading her on or trying to impress her. He wasn't denying that there were some guys who would think that was an awesome pickup line but that wasn't him. The mask fell at last and Bren looked (and felt) every inch as ancient and world-weary as Ash actually was.
Athena honestly hadn’t expected that to be his answer, her eyes briefly widening as her thoughts immediately started running a mile a minute, almost too fast for even her to keep up with. Her entire body language changed in that moment, her posture going from casual and loose to rigid and alert as she first tried silently to decipher what exactly he could mean by that statement before asking him out loud.
Might fuck up the rest of the world? What did that even mean? Suddenly her whole perception of Bren changed and realigned with what she thought she knew about him, versus what she clearly didn’t. He put up a good act, and her instincts immediately started screaming at her not to trust him. He’d intentionally misled her, but how, and for what purpose? Her predisposition not to trust anyone was kicking in hard.
It was only out of her still strong desire to help her friend and the strange look in Bren’s eyes that kept her still. Against her better judgement, after a stunned pause she leaned forward in her seat, her own eyes gleaming with guarded interest. “Those must be some party tricks, if they can have that kind of effect.”
"They aren't the kind that you can show off twice," Bren told her. Okay, sure, so there were things that he could do without it fucking everything up, but the whole Fate powers thing? That kind of infringed on other people's free will and that was a major no in Ash's book, and in Bren's too. Nothing like being born fated to end the world to make a guy really appreciate the power of being able to make your own choices about the little things in life.
And that was why. It was why the hair and the music and the being the kind of smartass that no one would ever suspect of being anything more than a giant pain in the ass. It was why he was as far from some big, serious god as he could manage and he lived in a world where no one knew who Acheron Parthenopaeus was (or at least most people didn't, and the ones that did wouldn't know he was hitching a ride with Bren unless he told them). No one was afraid of Bren and that was... god. That was all that Ash had ever really wanted, wasn't it? To just be some guy?
Bren liked being just some guy. Even after he'd told Hannah and David that he was a god he was pretty sure that they didn't actually think about him that way. Sure, they'd seen him set some vampires on fire and make a leather jacket out of thin air. That was different than keeping some guy alive by just telling him not to die.
If he was smart he'd tell Athena that he couldn't do what she wanted. He'd tell her that there was too much of a risk and that anyone else she asked, anyone who was willing to do it, they weren't going to do it for free. Just look at David and Finley and that stupid deal that Bren could break with a snap of his fingers if he wanted to but he couldn't. Not unless he wanted a hundred other things to go spiraling out of control. "One wrong word," Bren told her. "One wrong word was all it took to kill Ash's best friend. Someone he loved. One word that he said because he was mad but he didn't really mean. But that didn't matter.
"Once you fuck something up there's no taking it back, Athena. There's no easy way of fixing it. You can't just go back to your last save point and try again because that isn't how it works."
“So you’re a gamer too? Nice.” It should have sounded like a joke. In any other situation it would have been posed as more of a joke to break the ice, but nothing in Athena’s tone was casual or light now. She said it off the cuff, like she couldn’t hold back the impulse, but she looked at Bren more seriously as she said it. Maybe they could talk about video games later, when Avery’s life wasn’t hanging in the balance.
“I hear what you’re saying, I do. Great power, lots of responsibility, believe me I know the drill.” Maybe Athena wasn’t a goddess and maybe Julia hadn’t always been, but they weren’t unfamiliar with stakes. A lot of the time, even if you didn’t like it, you’d have to side with the many over the few. Even if that few happened to be your best friend. There was a time when Julia would have done anything for Quentin, and maybe their friendship had gotten a little messed up, but that core of who she was as a friend to him had always been there, even when she was at her darkest. Maybe she hadn’t known Avery that long, but he felt like a best friend. She couldn’t just sit this one out, and Bren had her full attention now.
“Isn’t that kind of just life, though? Powers or no powers, we fuck things up all the time. I know it’s not the same, but there’s never any easy way of fixing something, no way to turn back time. You just have to keep trying.” Her eyes glittered with a determined light, making it clear in her last words that, if he turned her down, she was just going to keep looking until someone else would help her. Maybe it was a gamble, but Athena had a sneaking suspicion that Bren might just be the kind of guy who would rather take control of the situation than risk letting someone else do it. At least, that’s what she was hoping. “Would it help if I told you he’s a really good person and I think he’d do the world a lot more good by staying in it longer?”
"Can you look into the future and tell me that you're right?" Bren could... maybe. If whatever was keeping him from seeing Athena's fate didn't keep him from seeing her friend's fate too. "Can you tell me that he's going to stay a good person and that me stretching his life out instead of letting it end when it's supposed to isn't going to mean turning him into someone you don't even recognize anymore?"
Because that was always a risk. People changed and sometimes they didn't change for the better, especially once other people started fucking around with their lives.
And did it really matter anyway? Bren knew just looking at her that she wasn't going to give up on this. Now that she knew that there was one person hanging around who could do it, who could keep her friend from dying, she was probably going to figure that there were others. And if she figured out there were others...
Bren didn't even know who all those others were, he just knew that if he existed because some romance writer decided she needed a super hot, super powerful, completely fictional god for her books, then there had to be someone else who fit the bill. Someone even more powerful than him maybe. "Look. I'm sure he's great. But you're asking me to break my biggest rule."
“I know it’s a lot to ask… but that’s only because it’s also a lot to lose if I don’t.” She’d been holding it together pretty well since Avery first told her what would probably happen to him, making herself focus on finding a solution to this problem and not letting herself dwell on what would happen if she didn’t succeed. That just wasn’t an option for her, she would find a way to fix this. It’s the only way she knew how, to identify the problem and solve it. It was how she coped with most thing. Just the thought that she may not actually be able to fix this very suddenly unsettled her in a disturbingly vulnerable way.
Athena couldn’t promise him that Avery wouldn’t change, and they both knew it. Even if she was very sure that he wouldn’t, because to her Avery represented all that was still good in the world. Being able to see into the future wasn’t one of her gifts, not this future anyway. Julia and her friends had managed to work some serious mojo to talk to versions of themselves from different timelines, but she wasn’t Jane Chatwin, she couldn’t just change another timeline to hopefully fix this one. She had to find another way. Because any timeline that took someone like Avery out of it so soon was bullshit anyway.
“And I can’t look into the future and tell you that, but I can tell you that because I believe it? Because I know deep down he’s one of the good ones that’ll stay one of the good ones. Come to one of his shows with me, you can see for yourself…” Athena was grasping for anything now that might convince Bren to help her, not caring how desperate she might sound in the moment as she looked at him imploringly. She was desperate. “Come on, don’t you ever just meet someone and…. know?”
It was stupid for that to send a tingle up Bren's spine, one that settled at the base of his skull and stayed there. Just meeting someone and knowing was supposed to be how his life worked all the time... except with her it wasn't. It was a different kind of knowing, being able to see someone's future and knowing what it held and seeing someone and knowing that they were something big even if you didn't know what or how it would happen.
Bren reminded himself that he had a girlfriend. He loved his girlfriend. Letting himself get swept up in the mystery of meeting someone whose fate he couldn't see at a club didn't make him love her any less. After all, he couldn't see Hannah's future either. There were no spoilers for what was going to happen with him and her. It wasn't her fault that things had settled into something...
"Look..." Bren was about to turn her down for good, but he figured out pretty fast that he couldn't. It was kind of a dick move when she was so desperate and this last thing she'd asked, at least, was so small. "Okay. Sure. I can come to one of his shows and see for myself. Maybe I'll be able to tell when I look at him if... if it'd be okay. But if not...
"I'm not promising anything." It was important for her to know that. Bren couldn't make any promises about what his decision would be no matter how desperate she looked.
“Really?” The stress lines in Athena’s face immediately disappeared as relief washed over her features. Even if it wasn’t a one hundred percent ‘yes’, it was still a lot closer to a yes than a no. At least in her book. If Bren hadn’t already figured it out, Athena was pretty firm in her tenacity. If he somehow hadn’t already figured that out… well, he was about to. Now that he’d given her an inch, there was no way she was going to give up now. Not when she suddenly felt so much closer to fixing this than she had in weeks.
She might have tried to put some last minute pressure on him, if she hadn’t suddenly felt so off her game. She wasn’t sure why, there was just… something about the way he’d looked to her just now, maybe, or the way their eyes met when she’d asked him if he ever just knew. It was probably nothing, just her being stupid, but for a second she couldn’t shake the small thrill that had shot up her spine in the lingering space between exchanged words before he’d answered. She couldn’t explain it, it’d just… affected her.
Athena sternly told herself to snap out of it.
Whatever the case, she was grateful that he was even willing to give Avery a shot enough to come see one of his shows, so eventually Athena was able to successfully shake off whatever it was that had happened to her a second ago. It was nothing. Just a fluke. “No promises,” she agreed solemnly, but her eyes shone with gratitude. “But trust me… once you see him perform, you’ll know. It’s life changing.”
For a second, Bren remembered darkness underground, fire and birds and ghosts, an unpleasant vampire and a momentary rush of feeling human and helpless against the inevitability of death. Life changing? Maybe. Not completely. It'd only lasted until Bren had stepped aboveground again and remembered that no matter what kind of message the mortals were getting out of this, he wasn't one of them anymore and he really wasn't going to die with the rest of them. Not even if he wanted to.
"Now that," he told her instead, "is something I'm gonna have to see to believe."
He loved and hated being the reason that she didn't look so hopeless anymore... loved it because he'd always just wanted to help. Hated it because even though she said she understood that he couldn't promise, her face said something different. Fuck. Bren was screwed.He hated being a disappointment.
Quick enough that there might have been some lingering doubt about whether he'd actually reached for it at all, Bren produced his cell phone. "I guess we should exchange numbers. So you can let me know when this show that I have to see is."
Hunting with Hannah and David didn't exactly leave him time to keep up with the concert circuits all over the world, after all.
“Oh, right-” Athena shook her head at herself, because duh. Obviously they’d need to exchange numbers, and she was quick to twist in her seat and pull her phone out of her back pocket. “Here.” With a quick swipe of her thumb across her phone’s screen and punching in a few numbers to get past the security code, she opened up her phone’s contacts to a blank one and passed her phone to him so he could enter in his info, sort of not verbally asking before then plucking his from him so she could do the same.
She kept feeling like there should be some kind of catch to all of this, getting him to agree to help her, and maybe there would be. Julia was trying to warn her in the back of her mind to still be cautious, but maybe that was just because of the sheer lack of hoops they’d had to jump through to get here. Julia was used to hoops, and Athena… was still so new to all of this that she wasn’t sure about anything anymore, except for maybe two things. Saving her friend, and Bren. She had a very, very good feeling about Bren.
After staring at his phone screen for a few seconds, Athena suddenly smiled to herself and after punching in her phone number, in the space where she was supposed to put her name she wrote ‘Freaky Powered Girl’, with her first name in parentheses. Then she passed his phone back to him so he could see, and do the same on hers, if he hadn’t already. It was dumb, but she was suddenly feeling in a much better mood.
Bren had already entered himself into her phone as 'Distillers Dude'; when he saw what she'd put for herself he grinned and backspaced it. It only took a couple more seconds for 'Freaky Powered Guy (Bren)' to be added to her contacts. Even if nothing else good came out of this, at least Bren had made a new friend.
If she wasn't so pissed off after he told her he couldn't help her friend that she never wanted to see him again.
The way he slid her phone back across the table was a little too easy to be completely natural. "So. The night's still young. And now I've got a really important question for you..."
This might be the only time they hung out before Bren disappointed her just like he'd probably disappoint everyone else who came to him looking for the kind of god who could give them a miracle. He was going to milk it for all it was worth.
"Favorite Green Day song. And... go."