Femme Fatale

Chapter 3

Date: January 5, 2019
Location: Rogue Shadows Gaming House
Time: 8:02 PM

Ana was lounging at the gaming house after the first day of the NASC. Her team had gone out to celebrate their win today but she had elected to stay home. She had put in a frozen pizza in the oven and now was searching through Netflix on the living room tv trying to find something to watch. She had decided that she was going to have an easy night and turn in early so she could wake up and play some Midnight Solstice in the morning before they had to head to the NASC arena in the early afternoon.

The door bell suddenly rang and Ana set down the remote, getting up to get the door. Who could that be at this hour? She supposed it could have been a package running late. With as many people in the house that they had they got a package nearly every other day.

Ana opened the front door and immediately slammed the door in the girl with the pastel hair's face.

"Ana, please, let me in," Charlie pleaded from the other side. The Rogue Shadows player felt her pulse quicken but other than that she seemed fine. It wasn't like earlier. 

She opened the door again and stepped aside to let the girl in. "No one else is home," Ana said closing the door behind Charlie.

"I know," the girl said. "I saw Paul post on Twitter about a celebratory dinner, but you weren't in the picture. I wanted to make sure you were okay."

"Why do you care?" Ana didn't mean for her tone to come out so snappy. She felt nothing but guilt inside. After what she had done to Charlie all those years ago...it would be completely justified if she never spoke to her again.

"I don't know, Anastasia, maybe because the second you saw me earlier you bolted and had a panic attack? You're not going to have another one now are you?" The Assassin player asked.

Ana shook her head. "You weren't the reason I had a panic attack, not solely anyhow. I was already feeling overwhelmed by everything else earlier today and if it hadn't been you that set me off it would have been something else."

"If I'm not going to set you off again then why won't you even look at me?" It was true, Ana was staring at the wall behind Charlie's head. Ana flicked her eyes to the other girl, reluctantly.

"Why do you care?" She repeated this time with less force. "Why do you care about me at all anymore? I left you-"

"That's right, you left me, Ana," Charlie cut her off. "Do you know how it felt going to your hotel room after Internationals and find that you had cleared out? I tried texting you, calling you, everything. I had to call your mom to make sure you weren't dead in a ditch somewhere."

Ana was silent. For years she had tried to imagine how she would defend her past actions to Charlie, how she would beg for forgiveness. But she had always came back to the fact that she had made the mistake running away. It was her fault. She didn't deserve forgiveness. She didn't deserve Charlie.

"And even through all that somehow I still care about you, Ana." Charlie's words forced her to look straight at the girl with lilac hair. But after a moment she flicked her eyes away.

"I don't deserve that. What I deserve is for you to ignore me, to curse my name, to hate me." Ana hadn't expected Charlie's words. For so long she had imagined her reunion with her to be full of hate and spite; and that would have been justified. But not this, never this.

"Maybe you do deserve that," Charlie said to her. "But that's not who I am. You should know that. I wasn't mad that you left, Ana, I was hurt. I was sad. But I was never mad. I knew you well enough to know why you left. And I knew you needed time that's why I left you alone."

"I'm sorry, Charlie," Ana said, her voice low. "I-I just couldn't be around you. You reminded me of the defeat." It was the blue hair, the blue jersey of the team who had crushed her confidence. "All my life everything had come so easy to me and the first time I was faced with a challenge I found out I was a coward. I ran away."

Charlie opened her mouth to say something but then closed it as she crinkled her nose. "Is something burning?" Burning? What could be burning-

As if on cue the fire alarm went off and Ana suddenly remembered. Her pizza! She ran to the kitchen to find smoke fuming from the oven. She coughed as she covered her nose with her hand. She opened the oven door and a cloud of smoke stung her eyes as she failed to close them fast enough. Somehow, she managed to turn off the oven and thrown the black-as-charcoal thing that was once a pizza on top of the oven without burning herself.

Ana found that the ceiling fan was now running and the slide glass door was open: Charlie's doing. She was also fanning the cloud of smoke in the kitchen in an attempt to get it to dissipate.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, the fire alarm quit and all that was left was a thin layer of smoke in the kitchen and the smell of burnt pizza.

"You still-" Charlie had to stop her sentence to cough. "-can't cook." Ana looked at her and somehow a smirk appeared on her face causing both girls to break out in a fit of laughter. Coincidentally, they also started coughing afterwards.

A moment later Ana collapsed on the couch - which now smelled like smoke from the kitchen on the other side of the great room. Charlie sat down next to her, tapping furiously on her phone.

"I'm ordering a pizza," she said. "Actually, make that two pizzas because I am not eating your disgusting pineapple and ham monstrosity."

Ana rolled over so her face wasn't being pressed into the couch so she could speak. "If you want to talk about pizza monstrosities then let's talk about your no cheese olive pizza."

"I'm lactose intolerant! And olives are a perfectly respectable pizza topping," Charlie deafened herself.

"Uh-huh, if you wanna make the pizza inedible for sure," Ana snarked back.

"You know what? Let's just take this question to Twitter; let the people decide who's right." Charlie had already opened her Twitter app and was setting up a poll as she spoke.

"Loser has to buy the winner their superior pizza for a month," Ana raised the stakes.

"You're on." Charlie grinned as she tweeted the poll. Ana found herself smiling as well and for a minute it felt like the good days years ago when they were together and everything was right in the world.