spin_kick_snap | 75 Godiva Street, Way Too Early Friday Morning

Kathy could hear the noise all around her. Worse, her jaw ached from all the clacking she was doing herself. She wanted to stop, to push her way through the endless mob of dead people, to get somewhere she could be alone and not HURT anyone, but her body wouldn't do what she wanted. It just dragged itself forward, gliding through the other exes with a grace that seemed wrong for a corpse to have. She was faster than the rest, able to sprint while they only staggered, and somehow that speed translated into an ability to slide through crowds like mist.

Because of that, the dead girl that had once been Katherine Hana Li made it to the center of the mob, where all the exes in this location had turned their unblinking attention. Only one thing could cause this kind of focus in the dead: fresh meat. Where the living Kathy now realized that she was looking at the remains of a stocky man in a green bandanna and pair of sweats, the dead Kathy only saw food. She knelt on the hard pavement and did as her undead brethren were doing; she reached out and grabbed her own portion of that fresh meat and hot blood, bringing a handful of something wet and slippery to her mouth--

Kathy managed to wrench herself out of the dream, stifling the gasp that would surely wake Raven if her thrashing hadn't already done so. She lay still for a moment, frantically swallowing--not bile, which would have been nice, but saliva. If she really wanted to, she could remember the taste and the smell of that dead Seventeen. Most of her recognized it had smelled awful, that nothing smelled good with its insides on the outsides.

A small part of her, the part that came to the forefront whenever she ~~remembered~~ dreamed about the past eight months, thought it smelled delicious. She was afraid it always would.

Silently, she slipped out of the guest bed and made her way to the bathroom where she could rinse her mouth out and brush her teeth again. It was the only way to get the imagined taste of salt and pennies out of her mouth. And then to the living room, where she snagged the laptop Hardison had given her and called up a queue of cute animal videos. She'd stay up till dawn before sneaking back into the guest room to catch another hour or so of sleep. Or, at least, to pretend to so nobody asked questions about why she was up so early.

[Open for housemates!, text under the cut NFB, warning for zombie-typical violence]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

vdistinctive

She'd done a good job of being silent; Val noticed her on the move before Eliot did. She nudged him awake with her nose, and Eliot rolled out of bed and followed after her, thinking she just needed to be let out the back for an early morning pee.

"Kathy?" Eliot ran a hand over his face blearily and was glad he'd taken to sleeping in sweat pants, with the girls staying over. "Couldn't sleep?"

From:

spin_kick_snap

Kathy startled, literally bouncing on the couch before she turned towards Eliot. "Oh, I..." Her mind blanked on a good excuse. "...I..."

So, yes. Exactly that.

"I'm fine."

From:

vdistinctive

"Sure," Eliot said. clearly not believing it for a minute. "'Course you are." He went over to the back door to let Val out -- which she'd take, even if that wasn't why she'd woken him up -- then came over to sit next to her.

Hope you didn't mind your mentor's shirtlessness, Kathy. At least he had on pants.

"You ain't been up all night, have you?"

If she had and he hadn't noticed, he was going to be so pissed at himself.

From:

spin_kick_snap

A year or so ago, Eliot's shirtlessness would have flustered her greatly, her infant crush playing the opening chords of Hot For Teacher. But Eliot had become her mentor and more and her feelings towards him had turned to love of a much more filial variety.

Even if the part of her that was still eight--no, nineteen now--took a second to appreciate the view.

"Oh no, of course not." Which would have been her answer, regardless. "I'm just poking around on my laptop for a little while before I go to bed again. Still settling in, you know?"

...Ignore those dark circles under her eyes, Eliot. They were a trick of the light.

From:

vdistinctive

"Yeah, I getcha." Both what you were saying and the things you were saying them to cover for, Kathy. Eliot hadn't actually come back from the dead, but he'd come as close as someone from a non-magical world was going to get.

He'd even gotten to whip out that cliche Twain quote a time or two.

"Mind if I sit up with you a bit?"

He wasn't going to press her for details she didn't want to share, but he wasn't about to leave her alone looking wrecked, either.

From:

spin_kick_snap

"Oh, you don't have to do that!" Kathy said quickly. "I'm sure you're tired and I'm not going to be very interesting anyway. And I probably won't be up for very much longer."

Just till dawn, really!

From:

vdistinctive

"Nah, I'm good. This ain't actually much earlier than I usually get up."

He was sleeping better than he had back in December, but still wasn't completely back to his normal schedule, himself. Especially not with visions of dead Kathy's head flopping around to go with all the ones of mindless-evil Hardison and Parker that kept popping up in his dreams.

"And I never said you gotta be interestin'. Could catch up on my own reading and let you keep doin' your thing, if you like."

He had a book about the history of the electric chair. You know, a little light reading.

From:

spin_kick_snap

Ein Kleine Horrorshow?

"I...okay," Kathy said, realizing that protesting more was just going to make it obvious that she had something to hide. "I mean, if you're sure...? That I'm not bothering you, I mean."

From:

vdistinctive

"One of these days, I'm gonna manage to convince ya that there ain't any kind of time with you that I'd call 'bothering'." Eliot gave her a small smile. "But in the meantime, neither is you checkin' to make sure it ain't, so. Nah. You and me, we're good." He picked up his book from under a small stack of magazines on the coffee table. That's right, Eliot was so old school he still got paper magazines. He flipped it open one handed, the other arm stretched out across the couch, close to, but not touching, Kathy's shoulders. "'Course, if there's anythin' you want to talk about, that'd be okay, too."

Smooth, dude. Real smooth.

Confessions of an Ex-Hero

75 Godiva Street, Way Too Early Friday Morning