unburden | it's everything you want to be

Entry tags:

andrea

it's everything you want to be

Working retail through the holidays is stressful. There's a lot more work and panic and crowds involved than Rukia ever expected for there to be in her job, working in that little toy store hidden away in the corner of the town mall. Truth be told, she loves every minute of it, seeing the bright smiles on children's faces and the frazzled looks that the parents wear — she loves it, because she knows that everyone shopping there is hoping to earn a smile at the end of the day, to make someone happy this holiday season.

She can certainly grin to that.

There's a benefit to being small, as well. She can slip between people with great ease, for one, and somehow parents are also more inclined to take their advice when talking about young kids. She has an eye for the cute toys, for the ones on the cusp of being fads, and so the commission money has hiked a bit recently for her in the boutique, leaving her with more cash to use when buying her own holiday presents.

That's where she is today, stepping around the mall and peeking into windows, wondering how much her friends care, and wondering as well whether or not she even has time to deliver them all. She's just not used to celebrating Christmas.

But she figures, no one will mind if she hands things out for New Year. Right?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Andrea has no idea what to get for Spike.

Somehow, shopping for a vampire in the mall seems completely absurd, but she's managed to get things for everyone else on her short list and he's the last left. The last name and she has absolutely no idea where to even begin. He's much older than she is and he's been around long enough to have been given everything he could possibly need and she's pretty sure any of the typical gifts a person gives when they're at a loss wouldn't be appreciated. Besides, she doesn't want to give him something typical, she wants to give him something amazing. It's possible she's already looking for a distraction, but when she sees Rukia in the crowd, she shifts between two people who are in her way, making her way over.

"Hey," she says, offering a smile that probably only looks slightly frazzled. "Christmas shopping?"

Smiling broadly as Andrea approaches, Rukia takes a moment to process the harried look of her, as well as the many bags that she holds on her person. If Rukia's absolutely new at the holiday thing, then Andrea looks like a veteran at it all. The only problem is, Rukia isn't sure how best to walk around all that stress and tension. Hopefully, she's innocuous enough that it won't be a big deal.

"Kind of," she says, pursing her lips. "Actually, I've never... celebrated Christmas before, so I'm not sure whether or not I'll get any real shopping done, but I thought that I'd look. And try to appreciate the commercial aspect of it. I'm a pretty bad shopper, though. Can I help you with some of your bags?"

She gestures kindly towards the heavy load that Andrea's carrying. Rukia might as well do something with her arms.

Andrea is fairly certain the polite thing to do is insist she's fine and continue struggling, but she's lost track of most social rules over the past few years and she offers Rukia a grateful smile at the same time as she offers her one of the bags. "Thank you," she says with a laugh. "My arms feel like they're about to fall off."

Glancing down at herself, she says, "I'm clearly a pretty good shopper when it comes to most people. Do you want some help?" A few years ago, encountering someone who's never celebrated Christmas might have been strange, but most of what she's seen over time has made it much easier for Andrea to understand the differences across worlds, across time.

More than happy to help, Rukia takes the offered bag and holds it snugly in her arms, careful not to squeeze the contents too tight. "I feel like malls could really benefit from having shopping carts or rolling baskets," Rukia muses with a grin. "I know it makes security confusing, but people can end up buying just as much here as in a grocery store, so it'd be nice if they didn't make us lug all of this around."

Considering Andrea's offer, Rukia wrinkles her nose, shoulders raising in a slight bit of a laugh. "Well, you were one of the people I wanted to buy for... Clementine too. Maybe I'd get some ideas if I knew what you were getting for some of your friends?" Rukia asks. "But then that seems like idea poaching."

"Mine aren't exactly... normal gifts," Andrea admits, although the gift sets she's gotten for Spock, Katniss and Rukia herself are relatively normal. The only problem is that they're the only ones. "I got Mike a crossbow and Clementine is easy, given how much she loves art. I'm stuck on what to get Spike... maybe I'm not as good at this as I thought."

It's been a long time since she's had to buy anyone gifts. It's nice, but at the same time, it's sort of stressful.

"Spike?" Rukia asks, curiosity piqued at the singling out of a single person for a gift. Chances are that there might be romance involved, which always seems to complicate everything else touched by it — gifts, interactions, even so much as the tone of voice that people use with one another. Rukia's still not sure that she'll ever be able to figure out where exactly she stands with Ichigo, even. (But that might have been complicated long before their kiss.)

"I know a Spock, but not a Spike," she says cautiously. "Why are you stuck on his present? Is he... someone special to you?"

Even without having the slightest idea how to define their relationship, there's no denying that Spike is someone special to her, which her smile says plainly enough. "Yes," she says. "But it's complicated. I guess it always is."

Sometimes she wonders if it doesn't have to be. If maybe she just found some courage and talked to him about it, the complications would just disappear, but she isn't sure how to do that anymore. Not since Dale.

"They're always the hardest to buy for," she says, nose wrinkling. "The someone special."

"I suppose," Rukia nods, gaze growing distant at the thought. Even though she suspects that she's lived about ten times as long as Andrea — for some definition of living, at least — Rukia can't help but think that this is an area that she knows so little about. She never had a proper romance before Ichigo, and what they share is shaky enough at best. Kaien was married, only ever a distant sort of love for Rukia. Renji was the wrong place at the wrong time.

Ichigo is... well.

Untouchable, in some ways.

"I think I have one of those now. Someone special." She wrinkles her nose, a little for show. "I haven't decided how I feel about it."

"Yeah, I understand that," Andrea says, because as much as she loves being in love, as much as she craves that sense of closeness, it doesn't always work out in a way that makes sense, which can be frustrating more than anything. She remembers trying to convince Dale that she wanted only him, that she wasn't interested in sleeping with Tyreese, that they'd only been friends. Even during a time like that, jealousy had found its way in.

"Are you not used to it or is it the person?" she asks, letting Rukia know that if she wants to talk, Andrea will be more than happy to listen.

"Both," Rukia replies with a slight shrug. "I... didn't have the time for much of this when I was working my job. It was never my first priority, and I had a lot to learn in order to catch up with my colleagues, so I put it in the back of my mind, with the exception of a couple brief periods. But this is the first time that I've found myself with a boyfriend, I guess."

Wrapping her arms more tightly around the bag, while still mindful of its contents, Rukia glances over at Andrea. "And he's pretty unique. I can't get away with things just by being cute. What about you?"

That gets a laugh out of Andrea, because when it came to Dale, she got away with plenty just by being cute. By the end it had been different, less about having to get away with anything at all and more about just keeping each other alive. With Spike, she isn't sure at all.

"I've never tried it with Spike," she admits, her mouth hitched up into a crooked smile. "But then again, I don't think he's my boyfriend."

"Oh!" Rukia exclaims, eyes wide and blinking as her face floods over with red, warmth spreading across her skin. "Oh, I... I'm sorry, I assumed. Maybe it's a language thing, or — no, I shouldn't have assumed, I'm sorry. Oh, I feel bad." Her nose wrinkles in embarrassment.

"So when you say someone special... you don't mean a romantic someone."

Andrea laughs again and shakes her head, reaching out to touch Rukia's arm briefly. "Don't feel bad," she says. "I do mean romantic, I just mean... it's complicated. Which is probably my own fault for thinking it's complicated. It likely doesn't have to be."

But it still is. He's a vampire. He's feeding off her best friend. These are things that are a little strange for her.

"I don't know," Rukia muses, glad to fall into a relaxed smile again when Andrea nudges against her arm. Poor as she may be at truly understanding how girl talk naturally works, months of living in Karakura have given her a fair ability to fake it. Beyond which, Andrea doesn't seem like the type to judge Rukia for a slip-up now and again.

She's just proven that, actually.

"If you think something's complicated... then it is. Even if you find out that the solution isn't as hard as you thought it'd be, it's still complicated," she says. "Dare I ask how?"

Andrea isn't entirely sure how many people know Spike's a vampire or if it's the sort of thing she's supposed to tell people. Mike knows, of course, and she thinks Clementine is aware of it, too. There may not be many people she trusts easily, but she counts Rukia as one of the few and thinks she would understand. At the very least, she doesn't expect her to go around telling people.

"He's sort of... a vampire," she admits, keeping her voice low. "The kind with a soul, so there's no killing of innocent people." At least not anymore.

"A vampire," Rukia repeats, eyes wide with surprise, blinking as she carefully extracts a hand from under the weight of the bag and brushes her hair out of her eyes. Vampires of all sorts seem to live in the city, different than anything Rukia's known from home. Hollows may behave in ways that align with a lot of the stories, but none of the lore seems to exactly align.

"Does he need blood to survive? Or is it some sort of life force?" she asks, lips pressed together in thought.

"No, blood," Andrea answers, cautious now, because she doesn't want to put Spike in a situation he might not want to be in. "Not human, for the most part and when it is human, it's... willing."

She pauses, realizing how that sounds, then adds, "Not from me. Which is where it gets weird, I guess, because I'm pretty close with the person he is getting it from."

And how does she date someone who's occasionally sucking on the neck of the person she's closest to in this city without it not being a little weird.

Rukia raises a hand briefly to her lip, rubbing it over the curve, slightly slick with balm. It's interesting to think about — there's no moral reason to stop a person from feeding off of another, provided it's consensual, provided it's informed. But it seems dangerous.

Maybe it's just in the association to lore, Rukia thinks. The idea of bloodlust.

"I see," Rukia blinks, tilting her head as she continues processing the information. "How long has this arrangement been going on for? You're sure it's safe?"

"Awhile now," she says, considering Rukia's second question for a moment before she answers. "And no. I'm not sure." She loves Mike and trusts him with her life, but sometimes she's not entirely sure he has his own best interests at heart.

"I don't mean that I think Spike would go too far and hurt him," she says, looking into the window of a shop, wondering how she got to this topic of conversation and wondering, at the same time, why it's taken her so long to express these worries to someone. There is no one, that's the thing. She can't very well tell Clementine and close friends, people she trusts, they're a fairly limited circle. "I'm not sure what I mean, really. All I know is that it makes me uneasy sometimes. When I think about it too long."

"Sometimes, it isn't always..." Rukia pauses, trying to find a way to phrase herself accurately. It's not an easy task, trying to weave around different people with different motivations; it becomes even more complex when one looks across different species, different societies. "Sometimes, it isn't always the predator that's dangerous or means harm. It can be submitting that does the most damage."

She exhales softly, shaking her head. "I'm not trying to judge, but old habits die hard. These are the kinds of situations I was — maybe am still — supposed to look after," Rukia explains.

"Look after how?" Andrea asks, intrigued by that response. At the end of the day, she prefers to deal with her problems on her own, but the idea of Rukia needing to look after something like this is interesting to her and she's curious to see what she might do or how it would be something she'd deal with. And why.

And she agrees with what Rukia's said initially, about submission sometimes being the issue, but she doesn't know how to change that or what else to say about it. One day, she'll have to visit why it makes her uncomfortable, but she's not ready for that yet.

"Removing people forcefully, if I have to," Rukia says, feeling something twist in her chest at the words. She doesn't mean to be harsh, she doesn't mean to be threatening, but back home, sometimes it was necessary to put an end to even the most well-meaning situations. She thinks of the Quincy massacre, and some part of her understands, however much she wonders whether or not it really was the best choice.

"In my world, it was my job to protect living people more than anything else. The undead, or people like me, we're... valuable only in that we do our job and help maintain balance," she adds with a pause.

"People like you?" Andrea echoes. More than anything else Rukia has said, that sticks out and she glances over at her curiously. What happened to her world before has changed what she thinks of a lot of things, it's changed the way she sees a good chunk of the world and it makes it a lot easier for her to accept the things she's been told since arriving in Darrow.

Still, that isn't the sort of thing she expected to hear from Rukia.

It's more than that, though. It's the idea of someone being only as valuable as what they can do for the rest of the world.

While the nature of her existence isn't one that Rukia wants to share with everyone, there are a couple of important things to bear in mind this time — first, that Andrea has always been trustworthy. Second, that Rukia's pretty sure Andrea will believe her, if she's already consorting with vampires and the culture that surrounds them.

Again, she shifts the bag in her arms, taking a careful, hidden breath.

"I'm a reaper," she says, tilting her head. "When I say that I've been around a lot of death, it's because... well, that's my job. I guide the souls of the deceased and help them find the afterlife. I, myself, died many years ago."

Until this moment she hasn't been aware of it, but Andrea realizes she's surrounded herself with people who have already died. Briefly, she wonders if it's something she's done on purpose, subconsciously seeking them out, feeling safer with people who've gone through it once already.

Rick's theory about being cursed was ridiculous, but she has to acknowledge how many of her loved ones are gone now. She has to accept that maybe she's done this on purpose.

"A reaper," she says. "You know, in the world I come from, that's the sort of image that usually terrifies people, but I never thought of it like that. I always thought... well, it sounds comforting. Having someone there to guide you."

"Many people where I'm from assume the same," she says, looking forward with a slight, sheepish smile. "There are people who expect us to be monsters, spirits... almost no one expects for us to look more or less human. No one expects for us to have been human at one point." Rukia glances over with a slightly amused shrug.

"But keeping death a mystery is probably better than not."

Turning to face forward again, Rukia bites down briefly on her lower lip. "Anyway, normally, people shouldn't be able to see me. But I have a... synthetic body, I guess you could say? It's pretty realistic, but this isn't the body I was born in or anything," she says, one hand releasing her bag for Rukia to poke briefly at her cheek, showing off the human-like give. "When I'm not wearing this, only those who have died or the very spiritually attuned who can see me."

"So not me then," Andrea says with a bit of a smile, because if she knows anything about herself, it's that she's still alive and she's never been very spiritually attuned. Gabriel, she thinks, might have been able to see Rukia.

Or Dale, if he'd been here.

She pauses, not knowing if her next question is the sort of thing that's okay to ask, but if it isn't, she expects Rukia will tell her. "How did you die?" she asks. "If that's... if I'm allowed to ask that."

"Probably not," Rukia admits with a tilt of her head, glancing over Andrea and trying to see if she can sense any amount of spiritual power emanating from her soul, but as far as Rukia can tell, Andrea's entirely human. Most people are, otherwise the system simply wouldn't work at all.

She shrugs at the question, offering a small, reassuring smile. "Don't be afraid to ask about death; when you work around it for so long, when you know that it's all really a cycle, it's not a topic that we're afraid to discuss." It's when souls are destroyed that becomes another matter, Rukia thinks, but she'd rather not discuss that. "I don't remember how I died, though. I was only a baby when I did, and... the only thing I vaguely remember is feeling cold, aside from some warmth around me."

"Jesus," Andrea murmurs, even though Rukia's told her not to be afraid to ask about it. The idea of someone dying as a baby -- someone she knows -- it just hits close to home and makes her think of Ben and Billy. Of Judith, dying with Lori on the ground in that prison yard.

Maybe it's naive of her, but she finds herself wildly hoping that someone like Rukia was there for them. To guide them wherever they needed to go. To make them feel less afraid, less sad about having to leave.

"Sorry," she says. "I'm sorry, it's just a friend's baby died not long before I came here."

"No, don't apologize," Rukia says, shaking her head, although her gaze briefly slices to the side. She's not sure whether or not she should put a voice to all of it — the fact that life was perilously dangerous for her after death, that she was dropped in one of the poorest districts of Rukongai with no way out. The fact that she survived as much through luck as anything else, and that there was no heaven in any of it.

Life after death was... well, just as hard as it would have ever been if she stayed alive, Rukia thinks.

"Death can be hard," she says, nodding. "Especially when you know that it was undeserved. Unreasonably soon. But there is something that comes after, I can promise that."

That gets a soft smile out of Andrea finally and she shakes her head, although her smile is grateful. "I'm okay with not knowing," she admits, though it is nice to hear that there's something, that Judith and Lori might have found Amy and Dale. That there's something there for them, even if they're no longer here. It makes it a little easier to deal with the fact that they're gone.

A moment later, she laughs and says, "This isn't the conversation I expected to have today." That doesn't mean it's unwelcome and there's a part of her that's deeply grateful for it. Her friendship with Rukia is significantly different from those she has with most other people in this city and she appreciates the honesty.

"I don't think most people expect to have a conversation about death," Rukia laughs in return, shaking her head. "And I'm not exactly wearing it all over me. But... I'm glad that we could have this conversation. And I'm really glad that you're okay with what I am — I don't get to share that with a lot of people here, so it's nice. It's nice to have friends who know."

Smiling, she ducks her head bashfully as they continue walking forward.

It's odd, finding things here that remind her a little bit more of home.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

it's everything you want to be

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject