Heartthrob

Purity was awakened to the sound of her phone going off, not a call, but a flurry of notifications over tAsT. Eugh. It had been a few days, that much was true... And surely, her girlies had to be hungry, but... She looked down to EJ beside her, and Esthrielle on the other side, making a gay ghoulette sandwich within a now-decided-to-be-shared sleeping bag. She had been busy, too busy for a few cute gal pals who liked their meat hot and fresh in more ways than one. No, no, it was right of them to want to keep in contact with her... And it would've been bad of her to just ignore the notifications, right?

She pondered it over for a minute or two as pings rolled in, her phone doing that annoying thing where it vibrates again to remind you of a notification it thinks you've missed. Thank you, phone, she hadn't missed those DMs. She had been... Trying not to think about them. Wondering if she could get away with ignoring them for now, nestling back down amidst the shared warmth, throwing an arm around EJ and pulling her close and kissing her cute little forehead. But no, no... It had been her fault that these girls were addicted in the first place. It had been her intent to get them that way, if only to dull her own pain by heightening theirs. Ugh.

She took her phone in one hand and began to read. Message after message, about five or six in total, all inquiring about some sort of double date? Group activity? Something like that. It was the middle of the morning, and she had been trying desperately to sleep it away so she could be up and offer some comfort to her new housemates. She had been cut out for that sort of work, it seemed: offering comfort to others, especially, preferably women. She wasn't afraid nor ashamed to say her time in Vitus had turned her into something of a misandrist, anyways... But still, that was a thought for another time. Right now, some girl she owed a debt of care to was messaging her frantically to ask for details.

A group activity? What, like a threesome? An orgy, even? That seemed... Excessive. Too many bodies. Too much drinking. Too many drugs, oftentimes. That was a scene she was trying to get away from... A version of herself she had tried so hard to escape. To go back now, when she had the closest approximation of a good thing going that she had ever held in her hands, would be a failure on her part. It would be a betrayal of EJ's trust, if not Est and Kell's. Speaking of Kell...

Purity looked up and away from the phone to where Kell usually lounged, sleeping sitting up. Not tonight. Tonight, a pair of eyes looked out at her from the darkness, the glint of them giving them away, wide open and devoid of sleep. Purity nearly screamed, but practice holding back such exclamations came in useful once again. Kell went to stand and approach once spotted, her eyes returning to their normal half-lidded nature, her crocodilian smile appearing once more. Once she got near to Purity, she leaned over so that she could whisper, so as not to wake the pair yet slumbering.

"Hey, Puri...! Sorry about... Scaring you, I think. I... I have trouble sleeping most nights. Days, I guess? I dunno, I've only been undead a few years, still used to using mortal terms for things... Sorry, is that racist? Like, calling you mor-" She was only stopped by a gesture from Purity, a single finger raised and pressed to an otherwise open mouth in a moment of gentle emphasis. Puri began to whisper then, her brows furrowing in annoyance, but her chest rising to then fall in a sigh of relief.

"Kell. No, it's not racist, we are mortal, you are... Indefinite? I guess? Who cares. Whatever. I don't mind if you have difficulty sleeping, but hey, like, what the fuck. Don't just stare at people while they sleep, okay? It's fucked up." Purity took a few more cycles of breathing in and exhaling to calm her nerves, having felt a single bead of sweat appear at her forehead before rolling down her face; its descent was cut short as she wiped it away with her free hand. Kell nodded in response to her words, then taking the silence by force with another fusillade of sound.

"Whuh? Oh, shit, I wasn't staring at you... I was eyeing over Est. She's... Interesting. Weird. Never met a Wayward before. The New Way was always supposed to be this big, scary machine, a furnace that ate up good little boys 'n ghouls and spat out black oil and crematory ashes. But she's... Softer than you'd expect, y'know?" Kell smirked down at the sleeping cyborg, taking a hand and running it through her own mop of hair before gazing back up to Purity. "She's not the monster we were made to hate. I hope she knows we aren't like that, either."

Purity was a bit taken aback by this, for myriad reasons, but before she could interject, Kell continued. "You know... We aren't all meat-hungry cannibals, killing eachother for our next meal. We're still people. Somewhere deep inside, we're still human. We have thoughts and feelings and kindness and cruelty. We can be more than just... Cogs in the machine, I'd like to think." Puri's frown softened to a look of confusion as Kell began to wax philosophical, but still, it took some seconds of silence before she dared offer reproach.

The pink-haired club retiree sighed, shaking her head and closing her eyes. "No, no... I mean, you're right, we are all human despite it all. Life puts us through some shit, a lot of awful shit, horrible, terrible shit that breaks us all out of shape and bends us into new, awful shapes. But even if you shape a lump of clay into a sword and use it to stab someone to death in front of their kids, it's still clay, right?" She opened her eyes as she finished, lips curling at the edges in a wry smile. It felt good to smile, even with such gallows humor as that. Take whatever you can get, right?

Kell nodded and offered a similarly grim grin, going to sit down pretzel-legged on the other side of the sleeping bag so she could continue conversing. She was careful not to bother Esthrielle with her big stompy combat boots, but if the Wayward rolled the wrong way, she'd have a face-and-mouth full of bootheel. "Mmhm, mmhm... I think about that a lot, y'know? Why are we so terrible to eachother? Humans, as a species, that is. Why do we kill and rape and enslave and abuse eachother? Cause it makes us feel strong? Stupid. So fucking stupid."

The pair continued their conversation for countless minutes, the time whipping by them, more and more of the same sort of recursive rhetoric being passed back and forth. In a way, it wasn't the content of the conversation itself that mattered, it was the fact that it was happening at all. In Vitus, if not the rest of the husk of mother Earth, cruelty was to be expected. Humanity's evils weren't just inevitable, they were profuse. And if you stopped to ask why, if you took a moment to try and gather yourself and rally against the dark, it would consume you while your defenses were lowered. There was no avoiding it.

Eventually, the pair cut it short. They didn't want to bother the double E's in their in-between, and Purity had some messages to respond to, anyways. Before she went, Kell spoke up one last time, her face cheery but her tone having taken a notable downswing from earlier. "If you could die, Purity, would you want to stay dead? Or would you want to come back, like us? If you had a choice, y'know. Tsang isn't too keen on respecting DNR orders, but like, if they were?" The weight in her tone belied a deeper sort of meaning to the question that Purity couldn't quite parse, the mist about Kell's inner workings was still too thick, but it set the pinkette on edge.

"Uhh... I guess I'd come back. I mean, there's still so much left for me to do, right? A-And, y'know, I'd want to be with... With EJ. With Whatever she's got going on. When I first picked her up and took her home, I didn't realize she'd end up such a hot commodity, I'll be honest... Plenty of diminutive, timid little office-worker girls in Vitus, but... Still. I want to be with her. She's made me feel a way that nothing else has for a long, long time."

Kell nodded, a trademark Kell motion to make, before turning and returning to her chair without a further word. Purity was left without an answer as to the meaning of the question, no glimpse into the deeper meaning of all of that. It didn't help her nerves in the slightest, and the edge she had been set upon wasn't particularly sharp, but it was keen enough to cut if settled upon for too long. She turned down to her phone, hammering out a small, quick response to her ex-playmate to placate her without making any hard commitments. She just wanted to get back to sleep.

[ Yaaaaaaa, me n a nu grl r playin arnd recently n mby we cn meet up for supper <3 ]

And bam, text sent, in the most casual, horrid text-lingo she could muster. Usually she was fucking shitfaced when texting these girls, but now, she was more awake and aware than she had ever been when communicating with any of them - and so, hopefully the mask was genuine. Now that the text had been sent, though, she was free to go back to where she belonged - at her blonde lover's side, or in this case back, holding her about the midsection and squeezing her tenderly in the morning's harsh embrace.

She slipped low beneath the edge of the sleeping bag, hoping the sensation of her own body brushing against her petite partner's wouldn't wake the latter up. It didn't, or so it seemed, and so she set the phone away from herself and ensured it was on mute. Back to sleep... Back to safety. Back to the sanctuary of her own dreams, muddled though they may be, and a bit wary now that she knew that Kell had been watching Est during the night. Fuck, she forgot to address that - she'd have to the next time she got a second to talk to Kell. Seemed weird... Kell had been giving off strange vibes since the first time she had met the brunette.

Oh, Tsang asset reclamation or whatever the fuck those glorified repo-men thugs were called show up, and all of a sudden EJ happens to know a literal anti-Tsang activist who knows how to help them escape, where they can all hide out together, and how to lay low long enough that Tsang stops looking for them with the same ferocity as at the start of an investigation? It was sketchy to Purity, to say the least... And sketchy shit almost never turned out properly, in her experience. There was always a catch.

That's just how shit happened to be, though, wasn't it? There was always some sort of catch. Some wrench in the system, some razorblade in the Halloween candy. Every bargain in the UCAS felt Faustian in nature. Even the whole undeath thing... It was selling your labor, your very existence, to the highest bidder just so that you could wring a little bit more juice out of life before you moved on. Fuck. Was that what Kell had been talking about? God damn political extremists, getting their worms in your head.

She sighed and shut her eyes. She'd think about it more later, probably, but for now, she put all that shit about deals and selling yourself from her head. Nuzzling up close to EJ, she took a deep breath of her woman's scent - the distant vestiges of perfume and shampoo mingling with fresher notes of body oil, blood, and that light sort of sweat the second-living made - and shut her eyes. Her thoughts went, instead, to Esthrielle.

Again, Kell had been right. Est wasn't the monster the East had always been made out to be. She was normal in a lot of ways, and even friendly and likable in many of those same ways. It was shocking almost - to finally meet a Wayward in person, one that apparently had killed multiple people in the past and sent at least a dozen to their true death if her stories were to be believed, but... She was human. Normal. She breathed normally, she spoke normally, she ate normally, she... Presumably pissed normally and all that. Full bodily function, not like the second-living. She was anything but what the propaganda fliers and ads would have you believe.

They would've told you she ate babies, kicked puppies, and stabbed second-living with silvered knives just for kicks. They would've told you she was a monster - evil in ways too terrible to describe, hell-bent on dismantling the entire UCAS, burning all of Vitus to the ground, and pissing on the graves of everyone who stood in her way. If she could piss, that was. Purity still wasn't sure on that one, and she wasn't about to ask. Still, though, Esthrielle was...

Seeing her like this, bruised and beaten, body sore from what she had been put through even now, vulnerable and willingly so around those she trusted enough to fall asleep near... It was impossible to believe she was harmful. Maybe not harmless - she had been involved in that firebombing last week, after all. She had killed people. She would probably kill more people before her time in Vitus came to an end. But still... Maybe they deserved to die? Maybe Vitus deserved to be burned to the ground. Maybe it would be justice, in a way.

Fuck. No, no, no. Enough of that. God damn Kell getting her claws into Purity's mind. It was bedtime. She was gonna snuggle those two poor girlies beside her sooooo strongly when they woke up, they would forget what it felt like to not be held. They both deserved it, and needed it badly. All three of them did, but Purity had told herself she had to stop being so woe-is-me about her own troubles. And with what had happened when they went into town last... Eugh.

EJ had told her, of course. Est had been there to confirm or deny things, but she hadn't been strong enough - hadn't dealt with it enough in her own mind, found the right ways to cope yet - to take the floor herself at any point. That had been fine, though. Their experience, with Judas? The cat? EJ eating a dude alive on a sidewalk? God above, she didn't find herself jealous in the slightest. They had been through a sort of Hell, too, just like she had been - and all it took was it happening and affecting Purity to make Purity really realize it.

That particular note made her bitter, though she didn't try to fight it. She had been so caught up in her own pain that she had nearly coerced Esper James into some pretty one-sided sex very early in their relationship, for fuck's sake. Purity hadn't even thought of EJ's side of things. And now, with the benefit of hindsight, that sort of thinking - the self-serving nature of it all, eating up and away at those you love - dug into her like a dagger in her ribs. It tasted acrid on her tongue.

Enough! Fuck! She slapped herself on the forehead a time to try and shake this sort of nonsense from her head. She was trying to sleep, surrounded by women who cared about her and wanted her safe, and whom she cared about and wanted safe in turn! Why was she so focused on this sort of awful thinking?! She scrunched her face up and harrumphed, nuzzling in deeper to EJ's neck and actively trying not to think of anything at all. And soon enough, the thoughts drifted away, while Kell resumed her distant watch. Tomorrow would be a new day. Hopefully a good one.

At her seat, Kell drew her pistol and began to play with it again.