75 Godiva Street, Way Too Early Friday Morning

[spin_kick_snap]

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]

Comments

[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?"

[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."

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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."

[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.

[whoisalicewhite.livejournal.com]

Parker was up early a while later, already showered and dressed. Sometimes she got up super-early, sometimes super-late. Routine was the enemy.

"Did you want some fortune cookies for breakfast?" she offered.

[spin_kick_snap]

How had Kathy thought she was going to get away with sneaking around all night? It was a miracle she'd managed it the three nights previous.

"Uhh, no thanks?" Kathy said, both surprised and not that Parker would eat cookies for breakfast. "I'm not really hungry."

She'd been 'not really hungry' for several days now, eating only occasionally. But even normally, she'd probably pass fortune cookies for breakfast.

[whoisalicewhite.livejournal.com]

"They're good cookies," Parker told her, then frowned, hopping up onto her usual space on the counter. "You need to eat more. I think. I'm not really good at knowing that stuff." Witness the cookies. And a licorice binge she went on last week. But she was pretty sure most people ate more than Kathy was eating lately. "Are you feeling okay? ... physically, I mean."

[spin_kick_snap]

"I'm pretty sure Nanika healed everything that was wrong with me when she brought me back," Kathy said, answering and not answering at the same time. "I don't even have a scar where I got bit."

She should know. She'd spent several hours, staring at the spot on her shoulder, almost willing a scar to appear. It felt like there should be something to mark her departure from the living.

[whoisalicewhite.livejournal.com]

"Weird," Parker said, crunching down on a fortune cookie. "Maybe she had to do that to make it work, though." She studied Kathy carefully, looking for jitters or pain, or any kind of illness, and nodded to herself, satisfied that Kathy was just shaky. Not physically wounded. "We might. Maybe. Go somewhere in a couple weeks. You think you and Raven would be okay about not having us around for a few days, then?"

A good way to check on how Kathy was doing, especially if she lied.

[spin_kick_snap]

Not an if. A when.

"Of course!" Kathy said, trying to sound perky and totally just fine. "You guys deserve a break after all these months of stress and worry. Where you gonna go? Somewhere warm and sunny, I hope."

[whoisalicewhite.livejournal.com]

Parker gave her a completely unimpressed look. Really, Kathy?

"You don't have to lie." She grimaced. "Okay, maybe you feel like you do." Who was she to judge? "We won't go 'til you're cool with it. Florida Keys, maybe. We had fun on a boat down there last year."

[spin_kick_snap]

"What? I just think you three deserve some alone time without having to worry about us!" Kathy protested. Totally convincingly.

...She clearly needed to spend more time with Sophie.

[tigerundercover]

Raven would totally be joining the "Cheer up Kathy" brigade downstairs, were it not for the fact that she hadn't actually been in the room when Kathy got out of bed. She hadn't been for a couple of hours.

She'd developed a new routine for her nights. She attempted to sleep in the bed for awhile, then got up (or, since Kathy got back, shifted into something inconspicuous, then got up) and went to find somewhere less . . . bed-like . . . to keep sleeping. Sometimes that meant the basement. Sometimes it was the roof. On particularly rough nights, she didn't find anywhere appealing at all and just kind of roamed around Fandom in different animal shapes until her body was too tired to complain about what she was sleeping on and she could go back to bed.

This had been one of those latter nights, and Raven felt lucky that she'd managed to tire herself out enough to get back to the house before dawn. She landed on the roof's edge in bird form, shook herself out and groomed a few flecks of dust from her feathers, then shifted back to her natural shape and wondered if anyone would notice if she just hung out up here and watched the sun rise.

[whoisalicewhite.livejournal.com]

Parker probably would, given that she was up there already, waiting for the sun rise herself.

"Welcome back." She held out the bag of fortune cookies. "Cookie?"

[tigerundercover]

For just a moment, Raven pondered how hard it would be to push Parker over the side of the building. Which would be bad, and the place wasn't tall enough to kill her, probably -- and also Raven liked Parker and wouldn't ever actually do it.

But still. The thought was there.

"Thanks," she said instead, and took a cookie. She broke it open and methodically snapped off pieces with her teeth, first one side, then the other, never glancing at the paper until the whole cookie was finished. "'Today it's up to you to create the peacefulness you long for.'"

[whoisalicewhite.livejournal.com]

"You could create a park. Although that always takes a lot of bulldozing, first." Parker tilted her head, nibbling on another cookie. "I dunno. Peacefulness. Do you want peacefulness?"

If Raven had tried, she would have found that Parker was stronger than she looked, and just as bendy as Raven was in her human form.

But Parker wouldn't have held the thought against her. She was the one who'd actually dangled Tara off a building once. These things happened, sometimes.

[tigerundercover]

They happened kind of a lot for Raven, lately. Apparently ruthless killer wasn't an easy mindset to get out of.

"I don't know," she admitted. "I'm not sure I've ever actually been peaceful before. It might be kind of boring."

[whoisalicewhite.livejournal.com]

Eliot would know about that. Parker had been ruthless forever, though, too.

"It's good for healing up from stuff. At least the first part." Parker shuddered. "But I had to be peaceful for six weeks when I had a tiny problem with my knee--" It was a blown ACL. Not a tiny thing at all. "And I nearly went nuts. And I watched all of Hardison's movies. And then I helped stop a kidnapping, so that was okay." She cocked her head. "The flying looks like it's fun, though. I wish I could do that."

[tigerundercover]

"It's still pretty tiring," Raven said. "I kind of had to learn it really fast, and I never did get very good at long distances."

[whoisalicewhite.livejournal.com]

"Had to learn it?" Parker folded her legs under herself, and cocked her head. "Did someone throw you off a building? Or something like that?"