Drifting Down Into Twilight

[Dr Adjective]

So what had she learned?

Unlike Dani, Anthony had put up a fight. Unlike Chloé, he’d been hard to overcome. Sure, Evie had won in the end, but the blood she wore now and the bruises she’d be wearing soon stood as testament to how close-run of a thing it’d been, how much it’d cost her. How stupid of a risk it’d been to let him get close.

So what had she learned? That there was no more point to trying to explain herself, that nobody was interested in hearing her justification, and that the smartest thing she could do going forwards was to start and finish all such interactions with immediate, lethal force.

So naturally, that lesson was quickly undercut when the trapdoor opened again. Battered and winded, Evie couldn’t muster the haste to move for cover. She simply raised her gun and waited for a target to present itself.

The gun soon came back down.

The silhouette Evie saw at the top of the stairs was instantly recognisable even before her eyes could bring the figure into focus. An angel positioned high above her, wreathed in a halo of harsh electric light. A vision of beauty despite the days of wear and tear. The one person left on the island that Evie could still be genuinely glad to see.

Kelsey seemed to recognise her just as quickly, and the Angel set off at a run down the stairs to join Evie in the private little hell the killer had made for them both. All Evie needed do was spread her arms, to welcome her girlfriend into her embrace.

There in the dark, Evie closed her arms around Kelsey, held her tight, rested her head gingerly on the other girl’s shoulder. She had to be careful not to hurt her broken nose. There was still a gun clutched just as tightly in her hand. Still a body going cold on the floor behind her.

Evie pulled her in closer. It was all alright.

It was no heated living room, no comfy sofa. But as respites from an uncaring winter outside went, Evie judged it to be pretty damn perfect.

“Hey, Green Marth. How… how’re you holding up?”

[Rattlesnake]

It felt so right.

Evie's body against hers, slender and soft and warm. Resting on her shoulder, taking strength that Kelsey gave. She would have preferred the other way around, of course, dreamed of taking her turn to lie in repose just so, but that could be arranged later, and in this moment it was Evie who seemed to truly need it.

In that moment, Kelsey was truly happy. Not just in a relative sense, not the relief of a pain suddenly gone. This was the essence of life, sharing, depending, reveling in support and kinship, drawing the mortal shells of each other together that the ineffable ghosts within those shells might come close as possible to true connection. She wanted to squeeze Evie, take everything she was offered and more, devote all her strength to that gesture of unity. Which Evie may not quite be in the condition for, though Kelsey was hardly in shape to cause much issue either.

Either way, Evie spoke, recalling them back to that day not so long ago when they'd become something more that friends. Most shocking of all, perhaps, was that they still seemed, by her girlfriend's estimation, to be an item. Not that she thought Evie capricious or unsentimental or of character incompatible with their relationship, just of all the ones to go the distance, the one where her girlfriend killed several hopefully guilty people wouldn't be the one she'd lay odds on.

"I'm— she started, and cut herself off with a sort of sudden jolt that was part laugh, part sob, part incredulous exclamation, and all emotion.

"So we're still..." she tried and felt her words tapper off again. Of course they were. Here and now, it was impossible to doubt. She hooked away one side of her mask, continued that motion to slide her fingers through Evie's hair, gave her a quick little peck on the cheek. There was a warmth and a wetness there and she pulled back slightly with great reluctance to examine her in the shifting electric illumination.

"We should go get you cleaned up."

[Dr Adjective]

Back on that early-winter afternoon, it'd been Evie who'd been struggling to articulate herself. Stumbling over her words, struggling to break through the mental block of expressing her own feelings and desires rather than simply mirroring the people around her. Kelsey's receptiveness had been doing a lot of heavy lifting those weeks ago. Morbid as it was to consider, the previous ten days had imbued Evie with the sort of confidence she'd always had for competitive pursuits, but now in her ability to express her authentic self as well, and it was Kelsey who seemed to be caught short. Better not to think about whether that meant that her authentic self was, as she'd put it to Anthony, this kind of animal.

Some four days prior, Lara Bullock had expressed a similar concern for Evie's wellbeing. She'd only tallied a single victim back then, and the very thought of talking about it had turned her stomach. She'd held back the instinct to parry the concern with a joke, realising that it'd be altogether too dark to jest about. But that was four days ago. Four victims ago, Lara among them. This time, Evie chose not to joke that Kelsey should see the other guy because... well, he was right there to be seen. So she responded plainly.

"That's probably a good idea."

She would've preferred not to let go, to just stay there in her girlfriend's embrace forever, but of course that was ludicrous. As for the rest...

"But, yeah. We're still."

Pause. Evie's face turned thoughtful for a moment, visibly so. Lara. No matter how she tried to rationalise the way the other girl had invited it, had drawn in close, had ensorcelled her with that animal magnetism... it was Evie that had kissed her first. But she'd also put a stop to it just as swiftly. Was it worth mentioning? Was it worth letting it fester instead?

"I uh... I feel like it'd be wrong not to say, so, uh, there was a... moment."

Evie paused again, this time to brush more errant blood from her lip.

"I stopped it, but, I figure you deserved to know?"

[Rattlesnake]

Why was Evie telling her that now? As in, telling her at all? Kelsey could have gone her entire life without that little seed of doubt Evie had chosen to plant. Maybe it was because Evie was strong where she was weak, in more ways than one. Not that Kelsey wouldn't tell her partner if she'd cheated on them, at some point once the temporary insanity that had caused her to do that in the first place had passed. But if it was just a moment, that didn't exactly sound like much. A hug, a kiss? Girls were so cute, and guys too for that matter, that if you had been denied the affection of your main squeeze so violently...

She pulled Evie tight again in response to her concern. For herself. For Evie. A reassurance. A jolt of strength. A thousand meanings and expressions in a language where all was a homonym. She didn't tell Evie that she'd slept with another girl, technically, just... not like that. The memory of Kitty's warm, slender back against what curve of her body that narrow bench allowed... a strong memory, a source of warmth, but not that kind of warmth. And then, after that, a promise broken. Kitty's unmoderated self, so briefly tamed by her own stroking fingers and whispered words, unleashed again. How many would still live if she'd done her duty and found her again? As if such a thing were even possible, she countered, and almost believed it.

Another squeeze, tighter.

"You can pay it off with some extra cuddle time once we get somewhere safe and sane," she said, voice low. "After you're all fixed up."

She didn't want to break the embrace. It was something she longed for for so long. Something she needed. Cut her down in that moment and, honest to every god she could name, she'd die happy. Regrets aplenty, dreams unfulfilled, but in that moment, absolutely fulfilled. What goals were there in live save those subordinate to chins on shoulders, fingers sliding through her, cheeks ablaze in contact? But she suspected Evie was in something of a worse way than she let on, and besides, the mood of it all was... complicated somewhat in proximity both spatial and temporal to Evie's latest bit of, please gods let it be so, self-defense.

Atlas had nothing on her strength in that moment as she pulled back to let a chasm of half a step gape wide between them. "Please, let's... get out of here."

[Dr Adjective]

Like slapping a sticking plaster on a gaping wound, unsurprisingly the small admission did little to assuage the greater guilt Evie felt over… everything else she’d done.

Still, the renewed embrace felt good. Again, she didn’t wish to let go. But blood was still running out of her nose, and a body was still slowly going bad behind them. Kelsey’s desire to fix up the former seemed somewhat secondary to that to be away from the latter. Fair, really. Unlike Evie, she didn’t have four other fresh corpses fresh in her memory.

“Yeah, let’s.”

Leaning in, Evie placed a gentle kiss on her girlfriend’s forehead. Then at long last, the two parted. Evie motioned towards the stairway, hoping to take Kelsey’s mind off of what remained of the latest notch on her own tally.

“Juanita was with me, did you see her upstairs?”

[Evie McKown and Kelsey Brewer drift on up and In from the Cold].