Agent Washington (completelysane) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2016-06-19 08:55:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, agent washington, anna of arendelle |
Who: Anna and Wash
When: Monday, June 14th
Where: Casa de Stefan, Lexi & Anna
What: Hot tubbing
Rating/Warnings: Low - Dream angst on both sides,
Status: Complete!
Wash was getting used to this whole hot tubbing thing. Up until he’d met Stefan Salvatore, Wash had been in a hot tub all of three times in his entire life, two of those times had been a challenge to see just how many members of his squad to fit into a single hot tub. It had been times like this, when they were off duty and between missions when it became absolutely necessary to blow off as much steam as possible in a short amount of time as possible, especially considering none of them ever knew when or where they would be shipped off to next. It had all been fun and games until someone’s elbow had slipped and clocked South right in the jaw. Then it was nothing but bitching the rest of the night.
Tonight Wash only had to share a hot tub with Anna. He had room to stretch out his legs and actually enjoy the way the warm bubbly water eased the ever present ache in his back and shoulders. An empty bowl, once containing a couple of scoops of ice cream sat on the deck nearby and Wash’s second beer of the evening was in his hand. All things considered this very well could be the perfect evening.
To be honest, when Anna read Wash’s post about being an antagonist, she was a little freaked. There was the whole Hans thing from her Dreams--the idea that she’d been attracted to someone who was… well, was pretty much a villain. In Anna’s mind, everything Hans said and did was fabricated to make her fall for him (though, she probably would have even if he didn’t have ulterior motives) and he’d hurt her deeply when she was at her weakest and most vulnerable. It made her question and second-guess the actions and motives of everyone around her. Was any of it real?
She tried laughing it off, though, and had plowed through a Smirnoff Ice by the time Wash showed up at the door. After getting some ice cream and more drinks, the pair slipped into the hot tub to relax. As much as Anna thought she was hiding it, it was probably obvious that her smile was the tiniest bit forced, her mind the tiniest bit preoccupied. She hated the paranoia that settled on her, but she had no idea how to rid herself of it.
“Is it hot enough for you?” She asked after a couple minutes of soaking. “I mean, I like it in the like, late nineties, but I know sometimes people like it hotter. I can handle it hotter, but this feels pretty good to me. The controls are pretty easy, though I had to have Stefan explain them to me. Actually, he read the manual, I think, and learned how to use the thing that way.” ...now she was babbling. She pulled the bottle to her lips to sip, trying to stem the flow of words.
Wash understood paranoia better than most. It was his constant companion, always looking over his shoulder, keeping his back to wall, wondering what will go wrong next. In many ways, his experiences with his Dreams weren’t too dissimilar than Anna’s, although he was unaware of what exactly Anna had dreamed of. That being as it were, Wash recognized that Anna was slightly uneasy. He didn’t blame her. He had been a little too accepting of his new role in his Dreams. The antagonist, the bad guy. However, after everything he’d been through with his Dreams - not the least being how they had squished his memories into a blender with the memories of at least two other people and hit puree until he was a screaming lunatic - having things his way for a while was a nice change of pace.
He was beginning to notice how Anna babbled when she was nervous and as much as Wash was enjoying not having any fucks to give in his Dreams, he didn’t particularly like the idea that Anna was nervous around him. It was what he had wanted to avoid with Kyu and if he could just do it right this time…
“The water’s fine,” he said with a faint smile. “Are you sure you’re alright with having me here?”
Anna nodded. At least the water was good. And the drinks were good. And the ice cream was good. She hadn’t screwed up there. She caught the little smile on Wash’s face, and it made her heart speed up a little, her shoulders relax just a little. Funny how they’d been through so much together, seen parts of each other that were incredibly intimate, and yet still that little smile made her stomach flutter.
She swallowed. “Yes. I mean, of course, yes. You’re always welcome here. I want you here pretty much all the time.” She frowned just a little at her own words. They were true, though, she couldn’t deny it. Ever since Memorial Day, she’d been totally distracted by him, and thought about him more than she probably should have. “Are you all right here? I mean, are you happy? Did I help--did this,” she corrected herself, “help?”
Wash had never stopped to think whether or not he was happy. He had been so used to not being happy for so much of his life that it just felt normal to him. Being happy made him nervous, made him wonder what would happen next to take that feeling away from him and, worse yet, did he even deserve to be happy in the first place.
He chuckled a little bit. “A hot tub and a few drinks always helps,” he said. “And honestly, I’m doing alright. Better now than I think I have in a while.” He killed off what remained of his beer and reached for another. He was here to talk about his Dreams, what had lead him to go down the road he had in them. He hadn’t talked much about them recently with too many people. The fact that they were continuing had infuriated him and drove him to seek some kind of alcohol induced solace.
He looked at the bottle he held for a moment trying to put his thoughts into some kind of order. It had been months since his mind had cracked and even though he was doing better now than he had back then, he still struggled with getting a timeline straight. He still sometimes confused himself with the Director or with the Alpha or what event happened in what reality. It was getting better, but he sometimes still caught himself saying “I” when he meant “he”.
“I’m a marine in my Dreams too,” that seemed like the safest way to start. He cracked something of a smile that was a bit more bitter than he wanted it to be. “I’m a space marine, actually. When my Dreams started we were in some kind of war with some kind of alien race bent on destroying humanity. You know how it goes, aliens always want to destroy us.”
When Wash said space marine, Anna’s mind instantly went to Mal. But space cowboy was quite a bit different from space marine, wasn’t it? Silly girl. She listened intently, peeling the label off her bottle and carefully setting the bits of paper and glue aside--so they wouldn’t get caught in the Hot Tub’s filter.
“Because evil aliens are interesting, and good ones are boring?” Anna supplied hopefully. Really, she wanted him to keep going. She wanted to hear about his Dreams.
Wash laughed. “Yeah, that does make for a more interesting story,” he admitted before taking a long pull from his beer. “Sometime after I joined up, I got drafted into this independent program funded by the UNSCDF...that’s, uh, the United Nations Space Command Defense Force. There were a lot of programs like ours in the last days of the war. We were losing and everyone was trying to come up with some kind of magic bullet to win the war with. Our program, Project Freelancer, specialized in artificial intelligence. At least, that was what it was supposed to be doing. The Director...well, he had other ideas. Other plans.”
This was where things started to get complicated for Wash, where his memory started to go wonky. “When I started Dreaming, I Dreamed first about joining up with the UNSCDF, then...the next Dream I had I was a completely different person. I had a wife and a daughter. She...Alison...she was a marine too and she was going off to fight. She left, but she didn’t come back…”
Alison. She was the crux of everything that had happened both in and to Project Freelancer. Wash had never met her, but he knew her. He could see her face clearly, smiling, laughing. She had been full of love and of life. She had been strong and brave. The Director’s memories of her were so strong, so vivid Wash sometimes felt as though he had been in love with her himself. The pain of losing her caused a lump to form in his throat. Wash attempted to drown it with a few large gulps of beer.
“The next Dream I had, I was the marine in the project again. They gave me my code name - Washington - and that was the name I went by from then on out. It’s funny, but sometimes the Dreams really do mirror life.
Wash went on. “The project was granted only one A.I.: The Alpha, but The Director wanted more. He wanted…” Wash squinted his eyes as he tried to fish for those elusive memories shuffled far back in his mind. “He wanted to experiment with what a soldier was capable of in combat with the assistance of an A.I. I think...at first that’s what he wanted. He wanted to win the war, just like everyone else. But somewhere...he lost himself. See, the Alpha was based on his his personality. Alison had been his wife and her loss devastated him, drove him to start the project. When the A.I. was created, Alison came back. His memory of her was so strong it formed a completely separate A.I. personality. And once The Director saw that, he realized what he could do. He could get more A.I. only instead of a whole one, he’d have to settle for fragments. And that’s what he did. He tortured The Alpha by submitting it to trauma after trauma until it started to split itself a part to survive. He harvested those fragments, gave them code names, and implanted them into the soldiers of the Project. York got Delta, the logic. North got Theta, the trust. Wyoming got Gamma, the deception and so on and so on. I ended up with the memory. Epsilon.”
Wash was staring at the bottle in his hands. It was mostly empty now. “Up until this point I had been Dreaming as both Agent Washington and the Alpha A.I. I didn’t really understand what was going on or why I was Dreaming I was two different people. It...really kind of messed with me. When I got Epsilon...I kind of...cracked. In the Dreams Epsilon showed me everything that had happened to the Alpha, all of its memories. I understood then why I had been Dreaming the way I had been, but...it really didn’t do me much good. I started having difficulty telling reality from the Dreams. I started calling people by the wrong names, mistaking them for others. All the while, in the Dreams Epsilon was becoming unhinged, unraveling, while still connected to my mind. It was making us both literally crazy. When it ...I don’t know how to describe it other than saying it killed itself...when it did that, I had a kind of mental break of my own both in the Dreams and here.”
Wash was quiet for a moment, glaring at the now empty bottle in his hand. “They removed Epsilon and stopped implanting other Freelancers with A.I. But by then I knew everything. I knew what The Director had done and was doing, both to the Alpha and to us. He was experimenting on us and we had no idea. He was using us to commit acts of corporate terrorism on rival projects. We stole tech and information. We were told that we were combating an insurgent cell, but it was all a fucking lie, and not one of us knew better…”
That wasn’t true. Connie knew. Connie knew and she had tried to tell him, to warn him, and he had rebuffed her. Stupid idiot. Wash licked his dry lips and reached for another beer. “The Project started falling apart. My squad - my friends - they abandoned the program, abandoned me.” That bitterness was back in Wash’s voice. He hated the feel of it in his mouth, but he couldn’t help it. And then, one by one, I watched them die. It was my job to collect them afterwards. The very reason why I had been declared unfit for duty was the reason they thought they could trust me to go out and retrieve sensitive and valuable project property. Retrieve or destroy, depending on the level. Carolina was first….” Wash trailed off. That lump was back in his throat. He couldn’t talk about what happened to Carolina. It scared him knowing that she was going to die in the dreams soon. He had just gotten her back in his life. He had just found out she was his sister. They were a fucking family, something neither one of them had ever had until now. He had no idea what the fuck he was going to do if that carried over, even a little bit, into reality.
Wash cleared his throat. “Then York. Sigma took over Maine’s mind and he started hunting us down. He killed North and took his A.I. South shot me in the back and used me as bait to lure Maine away so she could escape. After that it became my job to track Maine down. My own squad mate. Someone I had trusted with my life up until that point.”
When Wash mentioned the girl--the wife? Why did the guys she dated in this world have wives in their Dreams?--and her heart twisted. She moved a little closer to him and reached a hand out to wrap around the crook of his elbow. Seeing him verklempt like that made her want to comfort him. And Anna was a very physical person when it came to these kinds of things. She didn't say anything, though, she just listened. Her eyes moved down to his dog tags when he mentioned his code name, too--remembering that bit of conversation they'd had on Memorial Day. And how much fun she had tugging him around by those tags.
She only released his arm when he reached for another beer, but she stayed close. Her thigh was pressed against his in the tub, her shoulder brushing against his as they moved together. The jets kicked on, and hot water came in gusts out of them. It was set to a certain temperature, so it had to come on every once in a while to maintain the heat. Anna jumped a little, though, at the sound and the sudden movement of the water. Her heart was thundering. Listening to Wash talk about his Dreams was intense. At the mention of him watching his friends die, Anna gasped. She lifted a hand to cover her lips, the wetness seeping in a little. Her drink was long forgotten, even though they'd brought out plenty to share. Anna could make her way through one or two--three, if she wanted to get drunk--but Wash drank two or three times as much as she did. Funny how tolerances worked like that.
"I'm so sorry." Anna whispered behind her hand. She couldn't imagine. This was different from her Dreams. Sure, Hans was a dick, but he wasn't... he wasn't someone that Anna had spent years with, learned to trust with her life. God, the things Wash had been through in the Dreams. It was literally more than one lifetime's worth. "What happened?"
“He tried to kill me,” Wash answered simply. “Several times. Through the course of my mission I met these sim troopers, the Reds and Blues. They were used by the project just like I was. Only instead of sending them out on various missions of terrorism, they were used to test equipment and Freelancer agents. I don’t think they ever actually knew that. As far as they were concerned they were involved in a civil war with each other. The Red Army versus the Blue Army, or something like that, I don’t know. They’d had some experience with one of the A.I. at their base and Command thought I could use that experience somehow in my current mission. So I more or less gathered them up. “
Wash set aside his third empty beer and reached for another. This was going to require at least one more bottle to tell. “Apparently while the project was tearing itself apart the Director had decided to hide The Alpha and wouldn’t you know it, he hid it among those goddamn Blue soldiers. He was right under my nose and I didn’t realize it until I actually saw him…kind of implant himself into one of the others. He had no idea who he was, the Reds and Blues had no idea who he was. To them he was just Church.” Wash laughed at the name. Leave it to the Director’s own ego to have the Alpha take on his own name.
“I realized then that I had an opportunity to bring down the Project myself. Some of the other agents had attempted to do that in past. Tex – Alison…Beta,” Wash winced slightly. Just saying the name prompted the ghost in the back of his head to stir. “She had attempted to orchestrate a break-in shortly after my…episode… with Epsilon, but it didn’t succeed. Not completely. But I realized I could. I bargained with the Reds and Blues, talked them into helping me. We snuck into Command and retrieved my crazy-ass A.I. They still fucking had it! After they removed it from me they hadn’t destroyed it like they said, they had it stored at this facility. So…I stole it. It had all the memories, all the evidence of everything the Project had done. Every single illegal thing. I was going to use it to bring the damn project to justice, but first I wanted to destroy it.”
Wash adjusted his position in the tub. He’d been sitting too long, and was starting to become restless. He fidgeted a bit, but continued. “I gave Epsilon to the Red and Blues. Told them to get it to the authorities and Church and I…we were going to get rid of Maine and destroy the facility at once. I trusted them. I don’t know why…but I did. I guess I just didn’t care. I knew I was going to die, I didn’t plan for actually leaving the command base after confronting the Director. I actually wanted to die. I literally had nothing left to live for. Everyone I knew was either missing or dead.” Wash paused for a beat. “Maine shot me,” his hand pressed over the scar in his chest, “but I managed to set off the fail safe EMP any way and it…did what it was supposed to do. It destroyed everything at the base. When I woke up after that Dream, I thought it was over and I was happy. Hell, I was ecstatic to be finished with it.”
He sighed, “but I wasn’t. I didn’t die like I’d wanted to. Like I was supposed to. Somehow, and I have no idea how, I survived. And the reward I got for all my efforts? Prison. I should have known better to trust the sim soldiers. They didn’t take Epsilon to the authorities. They fucking screwed me over.”
Anna's hand slowly lowered from her mouth so she could trail her fingertips over his chest, moving to the scar there after his hand drifted away. She'd touched it before. All of his scars were familiar to her by now; she'd spent a lot of time looking at them, running her hands over them, but never obsessing about them. She didn't find them to be repulsive in the slightest. They were a part of him, a part of his history, things that made him who he was. Anna liked him as he was, she wouldn't want any part of him to change, but she wished that he didn't hurt so much.
"I'm sorry," Anna said aloud again. She felt like a broken record, apologizing over and over for his Dreams. It wasn't like it was her fault, but she was filled with sadness and sorrow for him. Anna was an empathetic creature by nature, and couldn't help but feel some tiny portion of the emotions she perceived in him. Betrayal was something she understood very well. And paranoia. And anger. "So, you've started a new chapter in your Dreams. After everything you've been through."
Wash’s hand moved to Anna’s at his chest and wrapped around it. He pulled her hand away from the scar, not so much because he didn’t want her touching it, but more for the connection hand holding provided him. Wash had never been a Hug-It-Out kind of person. He was used to standing off on his own, burying things deep within himself. But occasionally, even he needed some kind of human contact.
“A new chapter,” he repeated with a slight nod of his head. With his free hand he picked up his beer and finished it. He was starting to feel a pretty good buzz, amplified by the heat of the water around him. “A new chapter of revenge.”
Anna was definitely a Hug-It-Out kind of person. Maybe she was rubbing off on him. (All innuendo aside.) Her fingers laced through his in a supportive and encouraging way, and she gave his hand a squeeze. "I... God, Wash," she said, breaking into an embarrassed smile. "I don't know what to say. I mean, you've struck me dumb. It’s not something that happens with me a lot, as I’m sure you can imagine. I’m speechless, really. Mostly. Kinda." She realized after saying it that she was still talking, and therefore couldn't actually be dumb, but still. She ran her thumb over his knuckle, holding it with both hands in her lap under the hot water.
"I realize it's probably hard to talk about? But I do like hearing about it. I don't want you to ever think you're burdening or bothering me by talking about this kind of stuff." It wasn't pleasant topic, but she felt honored that he was comfortable enough with her to talk about it together. "I mean, we all have weird Dream shit that we're going through, and the only way to feel less... freaked out and alone about the whole thing is to share it with people we trust." Anna realized that she really did trust Wash, and after hearing his story she trusted him even more.
Wash didn’t think it was possible for Anna to get “struck dumb”, it just wasn’t in her nature. She was talkative. Nothing wrong with that, really. He smiled at her wanly, grey eyes fatigued, but not sad. He had accepted that these Dreams were a part of his life now and would continue to be for as long as he stayed in Orange County, which as things stood now, was looking to be indefinitely. It was difficult to detach himself from the things he Dreamed, they were so deeply ingrained in him.
“You trust me?” He asked a little bemused. “After everything I just told you?” He was actually a little surprised to find her still hanging on to his hand now that she knew what he had done in his Dreams, that he’d temporarily lost his mind here. He was also surprised that she didn’t seem to mind that she had slept with someone like that, with someone who didn’t really mind being the Bad Guy.
“I think I trust you more after everything you just told me.” Anna said, though now she was looking down at their combined hands under the water. “At least you're being honest with me, and that's the part I like. I mean, I've been lied to more than I care to think about.” She lifted her green eyes to look over at him, and in her explanation they'd lost a bit of their sparkle. “So long as you never lie to me, we're okay. Even if the truth hurts, it's better than being kept in the dark.”
Wash wasn’t sure if that was a promise he could make. He wouldn’t lie to be mean or to hurt her, but there were certain things he just didn’t like to talk about. That being said he rather have the sparkle back in Anna’s eyes again. “If you ask me about something, I’ll answer you as best I can, alright?”
His eyes fell to her lap and her hands around his. He wondered for a moment what exactly was happening between them. Was she like this with everyone? It kind of made Wash want to laugh picturing Anna holding Stefan’s hand after a bad day, but he also found that he hoped that she didn’t, that this was something special. And that surprised him. A lot.
“Okay.” Anna replied, brightening a little. The smile came back to her lips, the twinkle back to her eyes. She straightened up a little. “And I’ll do the same. You can really ask me anything. I’m not one to lie--I mean, I try sometimes, but I don’t really have much of a poker face.” That part was very true.
Anna released his hand with one of hers, leaving the other’s fingers laced through his, and turned just a little so she could grab her drink from the side of the tub. She could drink a little more and still be coherent. And she felt like she needed something to loosen the knot that was building between her shoulders. “...in my Dreams… I fell in love for the first time with a prince named Hans. And he asked me to marry him. I trusted him completely, and then… when my life was on the line, he told me it was all a lie. He never loved me, he just wanted to marry me to get to my throne.” She gulped deeply from the bottle. Twice.
Why couldn’t any of them have nice dreams? Wash frowned and his brows furrowed together tightly. What kind of asshole told someone whose life was in danger that they had been lying to them, or that they had been attempting to get their throne? To make matters worse, if Dream Anna was anything like this Anna, it took a special breed of dickish evil to tell her something like that. The fuck?!
“I’m sorry, Anna,” he said. “That’s….you know there’s a special place in hell for assholes like that. Are you still Dreaming?” Wash kind of hoped she wasn’t, at least not about that particular dick. And then a thought hit him. “Wait, you said he was after your throne? Are you royalty?”
Anna flushed. Deeply. It was weird to admit it, though it worked with her personality. She smiled, though now it was embarrassed and apologetic. “I'm a princess. Princess Anna of Arendelle.” Then she bowed and lifted her head, because she couldn't exactly courtsey. “My Dreams pretty much ended. The day was saved, the evil Prince banished, the magical winter melted, yada yada yada.” She gulped again, feeling just a little like she had to catch up with him. Of course, she never really could.
Ít was probably the buzz in his head that was making Wash stare at her. A princess. He tried to catch the laugh as he felt it try to escape and was only successful in kind of holding it in, turning it into a kind of snorting snerking noise. And he knew that was incredibly rude. “Sorry, just. Princess. Damn. I had no idea. Although, now that I think about it...It kind of makes sense. I mean, it suits you.” Ok now he was babbling. Wash pulled his hand out from the water to reach for another beer to keep himself from saying something incredibly stupid.
After taking a gulp he looked at her in what he hoped was a much more serious expression. “Ok, so...magic winter...you’re going to have to explain that one.”
Anna was beet red as Wash snorted at her. She tried to frown, but the embarrassed smile remained. She released his hand so she could splash him and still hold her drink. “Ha ha.” Though, he didn't sound like he hated it. That was a plus?
“Well, my sister was born with ice magic, and she tried to conceal it from our kingdom for most of our lives. I didn't find out about it until her coronation, and when I told her that Hans and I wanted to get married, we got into a fight that ended badly. She ended up freezing the entire kingdom.” Anna hoped she wasn't making Elsa sounds like a villain.
Now Wash laughed, turning slightly so not to get splashed in the face, and holding his beer up and out of the way. Aww, he didn’t mean to embarrass her. After the emotional dump of his dreams, hearing about hers was...kind of nice...dickish princes who wanted to steal thrones notwithstanding. Maybe she dreamed about being in a fairytale. That would actually be neat...so long as it was more along the lines of a Disney fairytale and not a Brothers Grimm fairytale. Yeah, grim was right.
“You two fought and she buried the whole kingdom in ice? Why would she do that?” Wash wondered if maybe Anna’s sister was trying to protect her. Maybe she had known that Hans was an evil son of a bitch, and in her efforts kind of got carried away?
“She never knew how to control her powers. She's the reason I have this white streak in my hair. Isn't it lovely? Another gift from the Dreams.” Anna normally did a pretty good job of being the streak in with the rest of her hair. She moved her hair a little, releasing it from the clip that bound it on the back of her head so he could see--though he'd probably seen it already. He'd probably ran his fingers through it without knowing why it was there.
“Apparently she hit my head with ice magic when we were little. Some magic trolls healed me. And, afraid people would come after her with pitchforks, my parents convinced her to hide her magic. We spent a really lonely childhood separated by secrets, alone together in a mostly empty castle.” Anna frowned a bit. It felt like a long story over-simplified.
Anna’s Dream sounded sad to Wash. He and Carolina had only just recently found out about each other and had been separated for most of their lives. He couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to have grown up knowing about each other, but not being able to see one another. “That must have been hard,” he said, “to not be able to see your sister. I’m really sorry, Anna.”
He looked up at the white streak in her hair. He had noticed it before, but like Anna had with his scars, he hadn’t obsessed over why it was there. It had simply been a part of her, a bit that made Anna, Anna. Now that he knew, though, he understood the significance of it, a kind of reminder of a lonely childhood. His eyes moved back to Anna’s face, his brows furrowed again. “Is she here?” He asked. “Like here in the county? Do you get to see her?”
Anna shrugged softly. Tonight wasn’t supposed to be about Wash comforting her. There were a lot of things she’d suppressed from her childhood in this world, from her childhood in the Dreams. She had anger issues and sadness issues, but mostly she just swallowed it all down and ignored it. Anna wanted to be happy, so happy she was. And caffeinated. It was hard to dwell on painful pasts when one had the equivalent of a gallon of espresso running through her veins.
“It’s really okay.” She said, and moved back closer again. Her shoulder came to rest against his as she leaned back against the hot tub’s wall. “I mean, the Dream world mirrored my real life quite a bit--I was really sick as a kid, and my sister went off to boarding school, so I spent a lot of time alone. We didn’t really get to know each other until she came home from college, and I was going off to college.” She nodded, grinning softly. “Her name’s Elsa, and she’s amazing. She basically runs Arendelle Network.” One of the biggest television networks in the area.
“I’ve got this amazing vegetable garden in the backyard of our childhood home. Elsa lives there with her wife, Kate.”
Anna’s body was warm against his. Normally Wash preferred a certain amount of space between himself and other people. Personal space was an important thing for him ever since he’d been young and his step father insisted upon invading it and every time he did Wash usually ended up with some sort of dark bruise or red angry welt. It was an issue of trust to let someone get this close and the amount of those people Wash could count on one hand. Anna had become one of those people and had done so very quickly. That was what this was about, wasn’t it? Trust and friendship. That was what the two of them had become, what the two of them needed.
“Being a sick kid must have been hard too,” he said. He was curious what it was Anna had been sick with as a child, but figured if she wanted him to know she would have mentioned it. Her childhood illness also explained quite a bit of why Anna was the way she was: so full of life and energy now. To Wash it was as if she was making up for all the time lost as a little girl confined to her house while all the other kids were able to go out and play.
“It’s good that you and Elsa are able to get to know each other now,” he said thoughtfully. “Carolina and I went through most of our lives not even knowing the other existed.” Wash really didn’t understand why Dr. Church had waited until Carolina was a grown-ass woman before casually mentioning to her that she had a brother. Then again, if he was anything like the Director in the Dreams, Wash didn’t really care to know one way or the other. The fact that Carolina didn’t talk about him much gave Wash all the information he needed.
“I know a Kate,” Wash said thoughtfully, though he doubted very much that the Kate he had swapped bodies with was the same Kate Anna’s sister was married to. Kate was a popular name. Besides that Kate seemed very involved with Clint Barton.
Anna shrugged softly. "I never really felt all that sick? But being stuck inside the house was a bummer. Though, I read a LOT and I watched a ton of movies and stuff. It was something to do with my immune system, they thought. Or I had thin blood? Whatever, it went away, and it's over now." She'd been seen by the best doctors across the country, and basically lived in a bubble, but never got an official diagnosis. It seemed like everyone argued over what she had, but no one argued over how to treat it.
"Yeah, we're super close now. I never really realized how much I loved and missed her until I got her back." That wasn't entirely true. Anna always loved and missed Elsa, and it was a part of her day-to-day life for her formidable years. She blamed herself for the rift in their childhoods. But that was too heavy to dwell on for long. She brightened a little, wondering if the Kate Wash knew was the same one that was married to Elsa. "Oh? I guess Kate is a pretty popular name."
Anna took another gulp from her bottle. It was less than half full now, and her head was starting to feel pleasantly heavy. She leaned it against his shoulder for a moment before picking it back up again, grinning. "...if I didn't know any better, Mister Wash, I'd think you were trying to get me drunk."
Wash was definitely buzzing at this point and that restless feeling had essentially passed. He’d lost track of the amount of drinks he’d already had. His body was relaxed against Anna’s. “Ugh,” he made a face, “don’t call me that.” He polished off the remainder of his current drink and set the empty aside. He gave her a teasing smirk. “You’re a big girl,” he chuckled. “I think you are getting yourself drunk. Course…” he looked around them at the hot tub. “Sitting here in the warm water probably is helping considerably.”
“What do you want me to call you?” Anna asked, looking over at Wash with lazy eyes and a flirtatious smile. She gulped one last time from her bottle and set it aside. “I can honestly, completely, and without a sliver of doubt say that there is nowhere else in the world that I would rather be, than here in the warm water, drinking hard apple cider with you.”
“Just Wash is fine,” he answered her with a small laugh. He glanced down at her, snuggled up to his side, her head resting against his shoulder. Honestly there really wasn’t any other place he would have rather been either. Wash had no idea what was happening between them, if they were just friends getting to know each other or if this was the start of something different. The idea of the latter frightened him a little bit, but for Anna’s sake - and perhaps his own - he was willing to stick around and figure it out.