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]

"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.

[spin_kick_snap]

Old-school Sophie would have delivered that line more casually.

"Not sure what there is to talk about," Kathy said, also super-convincingly as she snagged a magazine herself. Because, yes, she was interested in what the Williams-Sonoma catalogue looked like, thanks. "It's been a pretty quiet week for me. I figure I'll start looking for a job soon, I guess?"

[vdistinctive]

Yeah, well, old-school Sophie was a professional at this sort of thing.

"Could do, if you think you're up for it." Eliot kept his thumb in his book, but clearly wasn't actually reading it yet. "The quiet workin' for you? Or is it leavin' you too much time to think?"

[spin_kick_snap]

Yeah, but she'd still been terrible.

"I'm just not used to having so much free time on my hands," Kathy said, not really answering his question. "There was always something else to do: study, hang out with people, patrol..."

Now she was out of school, avoiding most of her friends (those who weren't avoiding her), and the idea of putting her costume on made her nauseous.

[vdistinctive]

"You're feelin' a bit at loose ends," Eliot noted. "I know it ain't nearly the same thing, but I had some trouble with that kind of thing when I first joined the army, too. I'd come home on leave and without the structure of basic or the stress of the work I didn't know what to do with myself."

Then he'd come home and found his high school sweetheart married to another man and had just kind of -- stopped coming home at all.

"You got any ideas of what kinda job you might want to do?"

[spin_kick_snap]

And in the stillness dwelled memories that Kathy was doing her best to avoid. Mostly by putting her fingers in her ears and yelling, 'LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!'

Great strategy. The best. No one had a better strategy.

"I don't really know," she said, staring at a page full of blenders. Why did people need so many blender options? "I was thinking about walking through town and seeing what caught my eye. Maybe the gaming shop in town, or the pet shelter or something."

[vdistinctive]

Because different things blended differently! Eliot totally had at least three, himself.

"I could definitely see you helpin' out at the shelter," Eliot said. "You've always had a caretaker streak in ya, and those critters'd probably love the company."

Val started scratching at the back door to be let back in, as though she was anxious to come prove Eliot's point.

[spin_kick_snap]

And they didn't have questions and the demands they'd make on her were for food or cuddles or cleaning, nothing hard like Be the girl we missed and loved.

"It might be nice to spend some time there," Kathy said thoughtfully. "I wonder if Raven would be okay with us getting a dog once we move. I've never had a pet before."

[vdistinctive]

"Dunno," Eliot said, setting his book back down and going to let Val back in. "She's been doin' alright with this one since gettin' back." Though every now and then Eliot noticed a somewhat strange expression on the girl's face when she interacted with Val. "That could be somethin' for you to research, too, if you like. Havin' a dog of your own isn't quite the same of takin' care of someone else's for the weekend. There's trainin' responsibilities and things you ain't have to do when you're pet sitting."

Or when you're swooping in and renaming your boyfriend's dog and ruining all his hard work training her, Hardison.

[geniuswithasmartphone]

In their bedroom, still completely asleep, Hardison rolled over and grinned in the darkness.

[spin_kick_snap]

"Which is one of the reasons why our mom would never let us have any," Kathy said, holding out her hand for Val. She idly wondered if she smelled different to her now. "Always said it was too much responsibility. Also, I think she just didn't like pets. I volunteered to bring out class hamster home for winter break in fourth grade and she freaked about wood shavings on the carpet."

[vdistinctive]

If Kathy did smell different, Val didn't much seem to mind. She came trotting over, tongue lolling and tail wagging, for all her petting due.

"Some folks just ain't pet people," Eliot said. "They do tend to make things a little . . . chaotic. Even when they're clean and well trained. My sister and I had to work on our parents forever to convince 'em we'd take care of a dog ourselves, instead of just gettin' them stuck with the gross stuff while we spent all our time playin'."

And then their parents had still gotten stuck with a lot of the gross stuff. Eliot had only been about six when they got Rocko.

[spin_kick_snap]

"Yeah, but that argument doesn't fly. They still ended up giving me a little sister." That comment won the first genuine smile from Kathy in days--

--That faded when she realized she had no idea what had happened to Sarah or her parents. She'd have to ask Raven at some point, but she kept forgetting to ask when they were together.

For some reason.

"Did you end up with a dog in the end?"

[vdistinctive]

"We did." Eliot smiled at the memory. "Not a puppy or nothin'. We went to the pound and adopted a grown up dog who was gettin' close to bein' put down. That was important to my mom -- if we were gettin' a dog, we were saving one." Then the dog had outlived his mom. Stuck around just long enough to comfort Eliot and Trudy while they were grieving. Eliot's smile faded at the edges.

That'd been a rough couple of years.

[spin_kick_snap]

"I don't think Furnado does anything like that," Kathy said. "Maybe--if I do decide to get one--I'll venture into Baltimore. I think an older, steady dog would be better than an excitable puppy."

Though the idea of going into Baltimore scared her, funnily enough. Too many people.

[vdistinctive]

"They're no-kill," Eliot confirmed. "Or they were, when I adopted this girl." He stretched out his leg to rub Val's lower back with his foot. She playfully nipped at the cuff of his sweatpants. "I ever tell ya about that?"

It was a nice story. One likely to take Kathy's mind off things for a bit, since she didn't seem much interested in talking about what was actually bothering her.

[spin_kick_snap]

Nooooo. Kathy was definitely not interested in talking about that. She was still clinging to the belief she was successfully pulling off her facade as being her happy, cheerful, old self.

"No, you didn't," she said, turning to him. She was just happy to have something to focus on that wasn't inside her own head. "What made you decide to adopt her?"

Kathy's hand found the velvet of Val's ear and scritched.

[vdistinctive]

Val was in heaveeeeeeeeeeeeen! She scrambled up onto the couch and flopped herself down happily at Kathy's side, belly totally available for rubs any time. Her paws wiggled in the air. Aaaaaaaaaaany tiiiiiiiiiiime. . . .

Eliot snorted at his goofy-ass dog. Really, it was like she wanted people to think she was touch starved.

"Actually, it kinda went the other way around. She showed up at the diner one day about -- hell almost two years ago exactly. Once I made sure she wasn't a student, I took her over to the shelter so she could get herself adopted up proper." He smiled at the memory of inspecting the place top to bottom to make sure they were secure and well-kept before letting them take the puppy from him. "Trouble was, she kept escapin' and poppin' up on my door step."

[spin_kick_snap]

"Awww, has someone never been petted in her entire life?" Kathy cooed, the lines of tension around her mouth and eyes loosening ever so slightly. Her hands fell to Val's belly and she scratched gently. "I guess not. I guess not!"

And then she was offering a tentative grin Eliot's way. "Of course she did. She'd found her person." She did a bit of quick mental calendar checking. "Val short for Valentine?"

[vdistinctive]

"'Sright," Eliot agreed. With the name, not with the idea that Val had never ever been petted before ever. No matter what dramatics the dog was getting into on the couch. "The last time she popped up, it was right at the start of that snow storm we got. She had this old card in her mouth, all 'be my valentine'." He shrugged. "I wasn't gonna let her freeze. Day of, she took down a gremlin right there in the kitchen, and well. I kinda ran outta arguments against her."

Specifically the one where he thought he'd up and die on her and leave her pining away all alone with no one to feed and protect her.

[spin_kick_snap]

Hey, Kathy knew for a fact that Val had been petted and loved before. She'd done some of that petting and loving herself.

"So, basically, your whole life is having people decide that you belong together and you finally coming around to the idea?" Kathy teased.

[vdistinctive]

"Not my whole life," Eliot said. "Just . . . you know. The last several years of it."

Once upon a time he'd been able to make decisions for himself. He was sure of that.

Admittedly, a good chunk of his life had been spent finding one person after the other to order him around, though.

[spin_kick_snap]

"Well, your whole life as it is now," Kathy said, leaning down to press her face against Val's soft tummy. Sometimes you just needed a dog belly to rub your face against, right where the skin was thin and easy to bite though...

Her stomach growled and with a horrified cry, Kathy flung herself away, right off the couch, bouncing her way into the corner where she covered her face with her arms and trembled.

SHE WAS TOTALLY OKAY!