Explorean Resort, Cozumel, Mexico, Saturday Night

[spin_kick_snap]

She probably should have expected the nightmares. Raven's text had upended her sense of safety; even thought she wasn't on the island now, knowing that her home was gone and all of her supplies were inaccessible had messed with her pretty hard. Sleep had been long in coming, even as exhausted as she'd been, and when it came, it had brought old friends along with it.

She was back in the basement again. It's where she was kept, when Rodney wasn't using her body, staring at a wall. In the dream, those were the best times, even though she stood silent and unmoving, staring at a crumbling brink, cloudy gray eyes unblinking. Because when she wasn't staring at the wall, it meant Rodney was puppeting her body around, his mind overriding hers, his will dominating her body. She could feel him, like cold oil spreading over her brain and down her nervous system, stealing control away from her. She tried to fight him off, tried to keep him out, but it was no good. Rodney wanted control of her body and he could take it.

"No, no..." she whimpered in the real world, starting to thrash. "Leave me...don't make me...no..."

No matter what she dreamed, Kathy felt like a prisoner in her own mind. When she dreamed of being a free ex, she still had to watch as her body moved of its own volition, attacking anything that moved. Sometimes she killed and ate people. Other times, she remembered the pet store and the mess that had been left when she was done. But those were still better than the Rodney dreams, when she was literally enslaved to his will and he could make her do anything he wanted.

Like now, when he presented her with the bound forms of her friends. Anders. Dante. Eliot. Raven, , stuck in her vulnerable human form. Ringo. Alluka. "You think there's nothing worse than being controlled my me, puta?" Rodney asked, voice coming from her own throat. "Tell you what. Here, I'll let you go. See how you like that."

To her horror, Kathy felt the cold ooze steal back up and out of her body, leaving only the ex behind. And the ex looked at her friends and saw only meat--warm flesh and hot blood. She lunged at the closest of them--Ringo, no, please!--and bit and bit and bit while Rodney's mad laughter rang in her ears and her head.

"It's always in you, girlie. Always. Just waitin' to get out. This is what you are..."

The taste of blood filled her mouth as she struggled up towards consciousness, hitting and kicking and trying to scream but blood, so much blood she was going to choke.

[For the guy with her. Violence and such under the cut.]

Comments

[spin_kick_snap]

Kathy shook her head. "Never," she said. "Never once. I regretted hurting you, I just thought that it was too important to quit. That we'd be able to fix it and you'd forgive me." Her gaze went distant and inward, memories rising up again. "That I could prove to you both I was more than you thought I was. Better. Not a cartoon."

[not_every_mage]

Anders shifted against her, thoughtful in the dark.

"That thing Dante said stuck with you, didn't it?" he asked. "Why is that, do you think? You know he was just angry."

[spin_kick_snap]

"Even being angry doesn't really give you an excuse to deliberately hurt someone you care about," Kathy said quietly. "You can be mad, without trying to tear someone down."

She got up, needing to pace. "The thing is, I don't know if he was just mad. I think he was saying how he truly saw me. You say I know like I should know it, but I really, really don't." They'd never talked about that night, so Kathy had no idea how Dante felt about it. It was one of the few things that still niggled at her when she thought about LA. "Regardless of whether or not he meant it, it reinforced every nasty thing I ever worried about--that I was stupid, that I was just fooling myself, that I was nothing. And maybe it wouldn't have lingered so long if it didn't prove to be true."

[not_every_mage]

"I'm not going to argue with you about it," Anders muttered drawing a pillow over his face in resignation. His voice was muffled for the rest of what he said: "I'm going to lie here and be quietly furious at Dante for having lodged it into your head so firmly."

He didn't know whether Dante had meant it or not -- at the time, it had felt to him more like anger and frustration than like a well-reasoned criticism. But there was no point in trying to convince Kathy of that.

[spin_kick_snap]

At the time, Kathy hadn't really been thinking too clearly about Dante's state of mind. She'd been running off in tears and then dwelling on it, which had only cemented it further in her mind.

"No, don't," she said, coming back to lie down next to Anders. "I don't want to cause trouble between you. And...I mean...he wasn't wrong. He might have said it to be hurtful, but I was a bouncing girl in rainbows who fought with fancy sticks. He was just calling it like it was."

[not_every_mage]

Anders sighed again, lifting the pillow off his face to give Kathy a wan smile. "You were also stupidly brave," he pointed out. "And deadly with those sticks. I never thought you were a cartoon. Foolish, but not a cartoon."

[spin_kick_snap]

Kathy leaned down to kiss him, a small crack in her heart healing over with his words. She didn't want to admit even to herself she'd been worried they'd both thought of her that way, but the relief she felt was too palpable to be ignored.

"I love you," she told him when she pulled away. "And I promise to be a lot less foolish in the future. I'm giving this new 'listening' thing a try. Hear tell it helps in relationships."