The Luckiest Girl In The World

Kathy rolled her shoulder; it groaned at the motion but was otherwise fine. Good, she hadn't dislocated it when she'd hit the ground. Hitting the ground had been better than getting hit by her opponent, but concrete was pretty unforgiving.

( Fight Club! Ish. )

[NFI, NFB, establishy]

( Nightmare )



Kathy flung herself upright in bed, gasping for breath, shaking her head in hopes of dislodging the last images of the dream. No, memory. It was too real, to vividly detailed to be a dream. She was starting to learn the distinctions between the two. Like how memories were always worse.

Glancing at her clock, she saw that it was almost one, but the adrenaline threading through her veins wouldn't let her get back to sleep anytime soon. She thought about doing a couple of laps around the island to try to tire herself out and get a few more hours of rest but honestly? It rarely ever seemed to work. Neither did vegging out in front of the TV until dawn, or soaking in a hot bath with a book. The problem was, none of those activities were good at giving her what she was looking for: a chance to get out of her own head, to forget those things her brain was forcing her to remember. Maybe she should call Anders? He'd said to call if she needed to talk--but no. It was late, he'd possibly be in bed, and she didn't want to talk, she wanted to do.

The lights over the water from Baltimore caught her eye through the window and she shoved her blankets out of the way. Maybe that was what she needed, a trip into the city. Boston hadn't done much for her state of mind, but she'd managed to sleep every night. The bars would be closing soon, but she knew of a couple of after-hour clubs she could get into. With the pounding beat, music loud enough to deafen, and a crowd of bodies to get lost in, Kathy might finally find a way to drown out her thoughts even if she couldn't shut them up.

[Warning for zombie-typical violence to a teen under the cut.]

Kathy...Kathy wasn't doing so well. She had a whole slew of reasons why she wasn't doing well, from her realization she remembered everything about being dead, to finding out Raven had killed her family, to her run-in with Ezra at the Coterie-run bar when she'd just wanted to drown her sorrows the old-fashioned way, it had been one thing after another after a-fucking-nother.

Which was why the phone call at ten pm found her putting the last touches on her makeup and hair for an evening out on the town. Her outfit left very little to the imagination and even less as protection to the elements, but she didn't care. Hell, that was the whole point. This was the third night she was in Boston and the third night of making questionable choices in the pursuit of getting her brain to shut down so she wouldn't have to think about any of the things she didn't want to think about. Sure, it was a weeknight in the dead of winter, but Boston was a college town. There were always people willing to party.

Though that didn't explain how Eliot knew what was going on. She listened to his message with a frown and immediately called him back. The only person who knew she was here was Ezra, so who'd gone to Eliot, carrying tales?

[Eliot's thread is chronologically first, but open to phone calls or that guy in Boston if he'd like! NFB for off-island shenanigans. Content warning for alcohol as a coping mechanism in the comments.]

( Clack clack clack )

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]