'Cause We Are Young and We Are Sick

[The Honeless Beard]

'I've never been more sure," Kasumi whispered, her voice fading, groggy, weak.

Her eyes slid closed as she floated backwards, dark hair spreading out in a sinister halo around pale skin.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Kitty watches helplessly as Kasumi falls over.

All is silent in her mind. Two voices, holding their breath, gazing through one set of eyes at Kasumi's battered and bruised body in the ground. She gazes off into the distance, and sees another girl making her way around the pit. Then, she looks back down at Kasumi.

Still breathing, but-

-she looks so-

-limp.

"Uh," she says, feeling her heartbeat rising, "Seb?"

She grabs his sleeve and tugs on it, pointing at Kasumi with urgency.

"Kasumi's not fucking okay right now, Seb."

[KamiKaze]

It’s kind of funny, describing pain. Like, it hurts, obviously, but how badly? Well, Miranda could walk, obviously, but it hurt to do so. The leg was going to slow her down, obviously, but pain can be an odd thing to talk about to make it clear how bad it really was. So, it was better to describe how it felt, rather than the intensity, maybe.

“I can walk, but the pain is enough to slow me down pretty badly,” she said. “It feels more like a throb than agony?”

“Throb” was better. She wasn’t sure if there are any more details she could give. It didn’t feel like anything was broken, but the pain gently radiated from each step. It made it difficult to walk, but it was possible for her to do so. Running, however…

That was going to be tricky.

She hoped they wouldn’t try something after all.

However, her eyes flicked once she saw Kasumi move. And immediately, her heart started pounding.

Miranda knew what people could do. It’d be surprising if they couldn’t do anything. She saw Mr. Dolph, she saw Will and Richard, she heard about Jasmine, and fought with Brigid and Chris. She’d expected to see more violence, to be honest. Something more… instantaneous. What she wasn’t expecting was to see someone clearly pass out from an injury they clearly got earlier. Was it weird to not expect something like that?

For a moment, Miranda felt something she didn’t expect to feel, either. She tensed up, but for a different reason. It was useless, and surprising, but it made things a little more complicated.

“Hey... “ she started. “I don’t think she’s alright, either.”

She slowly stepped forward, her leg throbbing with each movement. It was clear Kasumi wasn’t okay.

She tilted her head to one side.

Miranda was lost.

[backslash]

Sebastien's attention was pretty occupied by Miranda's description of her injury, by wondering if it would be weird to get closer for a look, by wondering if a bruised knee even needed a closer look in the first place. He had started nodding out of habit, an effort to be polite that he had taken up years ago so that people would get the idea that he was really absorbing their words even if he was privately dismissing them, when Kitty's voice and her hand yanking at his sleeve cut through.

"Hm? What?" He turned back as Miranda echoed the sentiment that something was suddenly very wrong with Kasumi, and the sight that greeted him was about as solid of a confirmation as he could get of that.

"Oh shit."

Sebastien hurried over to Kasumi's side. It looked like she had fainted, but she was still breathing. Dehydration? Her supplies were right nearby, though. The only real injury on her he could see was her bandaged leg. How long had she been hurt? Were those bandages sterile?

Fuck.

He crouched down and reached out, grabbing her shoulder and shaking her. "Kasumi? Hey, Kasumi?"

[The Honeless Beard]

((Skipping to get a death done))

Leg burning, hands groping, tangling in black strands that snared and snagged, forcing her head upwards. She saw lights, tinged green, a fistful of forest green paint that dripped across a neon sky. The sight moved her, made her sway, made her, oddly, even now, think of him.

God was waiting for her, her and her burning, stumpy leg, across the ruined landscape of a city that seemed desperate to reach the forest green on neon, but whose desperation was impeded by the chunky, desolate mess of its tallest buildings. She knew, instinctively, that God was through the mess of arms stretched tall, and that she’d need to wade through the desperate and damned city to reach Him.

And him.

Hobbling, utilizing His words etched onto a piece of wood, she started through the arms of the city, feeling desolation with every step. She moved briskly, head held high, as the whispers began swirling around them, saying things like impure and hated and disgusted, rattling around in a brain that had been full of nothing but musical notes from thin grass reeds and her own pain and him. A brain that had been empty enough to feel like she was hallucinating when her classmates showed up, but also to feel like her talks with God were real.

“I’ve been waiting,” came His voice, through the green, echoing throughout the arms surrounding them both. She swore they wailed, stretched a little higher at His presence.

“I tried,” she said, her voice small, brittle, “the first day, I really did.”

“You’ve sat for so long,” He said, and she swore she heard amusement echoing throughout the appendages, bouncing around her full, empty little brain.

“It didn’t work. She shot me in the leg. It didn’t work.”

“Avoiding sin is not the same as being pure, child,” He snarled, as thunder boomed in the forest green, lighting the neon even further. She shrank backwards on her makeshift crutch, the bat clattering to the ground.

“Is - Lance, is-”

“Insolence,” God said again, and laughed, the amusement back in His tone, “to ask Me anything. To expect an answer.”

“I…” she started, swallowed around the burning in her leg, “If he isn’t, if he’s not… It’s all for nothing, if he’s.”

“Wait,” she moaned.

“No, no, wait,”

“Please!” she screamed, “stop, please! I take it back, I take-”

“NO,” she shrieked, falling to her knees, broken glass on the streets appearing and slicing through the skin on her knees.

“You thought to cheat,” He roared, “to end it early? You think that it’s okay, that you’re worthy, because you found a way around sin? You’re weak. You are not worthy. You will stay here-”

“Forever,” Kasumi whimpered into the face of Sebastien, through vibrating shoulder.

[MethodicalSlacker]

What struck Kitty the most, as she watched Kasumi in Sebastien's arms, was how fragile she looked. Like a wilted flower, an upstart sprout on the edge of the tar-pits, finally giving in to her surroundings. The world was pushing into her with everything it had, and she was fighting back, even if she was close to cracking up.

Kitty could swear that she saw something tense up in her. A final rallying cry of the body, raising pitchforks and torches to find off a shadow greater than itself.

At the same time, she didn't understand what was causing a feeling in her own body - that of calm. Her voice had left her, and her mind's ear was silent. Did it really only take one good look at a real human body to get desensitized to the whole idea? She couldn't let herself think that way, even if it was true: Kasumi wasn't dead, and Kitty needed to stop thinking that way. Glancing around, she saw the expanse of beige and black once more with a hollow view, peering out at nothing but dead air.

There was likely a way to help, but Kitty felt no pull to reach out or push to act.

"Do you..." she started.

But Seb had it under control. There was no need to interfere.

Kitty could just watch.

[KamiKaze]

Miranda’s eyes followed Sebastien as he crouched down to get a closer look. However, Kasumi writhed and flailed like a fish inside his arms. Miranda felt her stomach turn at the sight of it. Yeah, it was definitely clear. Kasumi was sick, and possibly losing it.

She kept the grip on the iron tight as ever, but it was more out of habit. It felt like it was a part of her, something to keep close. She knew Kasumi was injured, possibly crazed, possibly almost… gone.

That feeling was technically useless. It didn’t help with survival in any way. It may have made things a bit harder. But, it was there, it was real, it was raw, it was something that made her conflicted.

Logically, it was better to let nature run its course. It’d be one less person she’d have to deal with. On the other… logic be damned, watching Kasumi whimper into Sebastien’s shoulder wasn’t pleasant.

Slowly, she continued to limp forward.

This won’t help you.

It may make things worse for you.

If you stick around, they could turn against you.

Miranda looked down.

“Seb… what could you do?”

She felt even dirtier.

[backslash]

What could you do?

...What could he do?

Kasumi whimpered out one word that meant nothing and stayed limp and feverish in Sebastien's arms. The most frustrating thing - the infuriating thing, actually, was that he could think of what needed to be done, but he himself didn't have the skill or the equipment to do it. They were stuck here in the middle of a wasteland that smelled like a melting parking lot when they needed an emergency room.

"She's still breathing," Sebastien said hoarsely. "She needs- fluids. To stay hydrated. And antibiotics. I think we have some in the first-aid kits, but she can't take anything until she wakes up."

It occurred to him that he hadn't actually seen Aaron dying. He swallowed around a sudden lump in his throat.

Care for the dead, but take care of the living.

Kasumi wasn't dead yet. He had to keep working on the assumption that she would wake up.

As gently as he could, Sebastien eased Kasumi back onto the ground and scanned the immediate area, locating her bag among the small mounds of dirt she had been accumulating. He pulled it over to him, opening it up to rummage around the first-aid kit. The bandages had already been rifled through, as expected, but there were plenty left and he, Kitty, and Miranda all still had their supplies.

"Her bandages need to be changed and the injury should be cleaned. After that we just have to keep an eye on her."

Sebastien looked back at Miranda and Kitty, and then back down to Kasumi.

"I can... I can handle it."

He took the blanket from Kasumi's first-aid kit and folded it underneath her leg so that the injury wouldn't be directly on the ground, and then he began unwrapping the bandages from around Kasumi's knee.

As soon as he got the first clear glimpse of Kasumi's knee, Sebastien grimaced, sucking in a sharp breath through his teeth.

"...This is going to take some time."

Kasumi was more fucked up physically than he had judged at a glance, but he could take care of it. He hoped.

Her knee was torn open and shattered, a raw and angrily glistening red that indicated infection might be setting in. She hadn't done a great job of cleaning it before bandaging it up, if she had cleaned it at all. Her kneecap was in pieces, and Sebastien could see fragments of bone and metal. The bullet.

It was the kind of injury that would take years of proper care and therapy to fully recover from. Kasumi had Sebastien and a first-aid kit.

He took a deep breath, forcing himself not to look away from Kasumi's ruined leg. Okay. Gloves. Saline. Fresh bandages. Tweezers.

He could handle it.

It felt kind of rude to completely tune out Kitty and Miranda while he worked, but he needed to focus. He couldn't get all of the fragments of the bullet out safely as it was, and he didn't want to drop any back into the area. There was a larger piece stuck in her femur, the main body of the bullet itself, that he wasn't going to risk trying to remove. The best he could do there was to clean the area and re-bandage it tightly enough that it would hopefully keep any more contaminants out.

This close, Sebastien could catch the coppery tang of Kasumi's blood as it mingled with the smelly air. It wasn't enough to make him nauseous, and he generally had a strong stomach anyway, but it was still unpleasant, the kind of thing you'd keep smelling and tasting long after it was gone.

He dropped the metal fragments onto the blanket as he went and swept the unceremoniously into the dirt once he was through so that Kasumi wouldn't accidentally roll onto them if she shifted. She had been unresponsive since he first approached and didn't look to be coming out of it any time soon.

They just had to keep hoping she would wake up.

Sebastien re-bandaged Kasumi's knee with the sterile bandages that were left, wrapping it tightly, and sat back on his heels. He peeled the bloodied gloves off and bundled them up in the soiled bandages, and tossed the whole bundle aside after a moment's thought. No bio-waste bins out here.

Kasumi wasn't looking much better, but at least she had fresh bandages and three people able and willing to keep a watchful eye on her.

Sebastien sighed. "That's the best I can do for now." He finally looked back over at Miranda and Kitty again and noted that the sun was setting. He had vaguely noticed the light starting to fade as he tended to Kasumi, but hasn't really registered the passage of time until now. His neck and knees ached from kneeling bent over for so long, and he sighed again as he massaged the back of his neck to work out some of the stiffness. Looked like another night sleeping out in the open.

"I don't think it would be a good idea to try moving her now. It's getting dark and I don't know if there's any shelter around here anyway." And at least one person had met their end in a tar pit already. Sebastien wasn't looking to do a repeat performance of that thanks to stumbling around in the dark.

He sat back and closed his eyes. This had been a productive day, right? Nobody new dead on his watch. Kasumi might make it. He had done the best he could, and it might even be enough.

It did little to fill the gaping hole in his heart, but it was more than nothing.

[The Honeless Beard]

HIM
______________________________________________________

Gunfire echoing throughout the wood house,
The smell of sawdust and smoke billowing,
His forearms resting upon a wooden saw horse,
His scent wafting towards her, filling eager nostrils,
Wooden targets hung, metal fenceposts marked distances,
Eight hundred, five hundred, two.
The ropy muscles of his back tensed beneath the grey shirt,
An article of clothing, displaying him so triumphantly as he squeezed,
The bullet, spiralling out of the maw of the weapon he held, with pride, purpose,
The slight pull of her teeth, tugging on lower lip.

---

“Watch this,” he said, holding the reed between his fingers, a knife slitting a small line in the end of it, “you take this, and…”

He blew, a sound rang out, clear and clean as a bell. A knife, the right plant, and she had music.

He smiled, handed the reed to her, plucked off one of his own, and suddenly it was shifting, the mounds of dirt around her piled with reeds that had gone dead and yellow, crispy and curled. They buried the meagre grass blades she’d surrounded herself with, surrounded them with the real thing - dead and gone as it was. Whimpering, she reached for one of them, to unbury the truth to re-discover her lies, the blades of grass that she vainly put to her lips and blew and imagined the real sound, the clear sound, that burst forth.

But the more she dug, the more reeds there were, and with every fistful of dead plant there was more failure surrounding her knuckles. But the blades of grass on their sad little hills meant that she lived in a world where Lance Adams was alive, where Lance Adams’ death wasn’t blared across an island and penetrating her dreams, where she and Lance Adams were going to be married and start a family and love each other forever, with gun range visits on Saturdays and bible study and volunteering at animal shelters and it would be good.

The blades of grass whistled to her, their harmony whispering forth like the church choir as she fought to uncover them, the sounds of the devil is preaching the sounds of the redeemed to her ears, and that I am cursed and gone astray, I cannot gain gain salvation. The whistling became a hum, the hum became enunciation, and she covered her ears with bloody palms as the enunciation, the vocals, became howling.

Lance said something, a voice floating across the wind, but it was drowned out, buried by

and she covered her ears.

---

“Do you…”

“...believe in ghosts? Oh, no. No, none. The Holy Ghost is the father, and all of that. But not ghosts, oh no.”

“Do you…”

“...believe that she could steal? Oh, yes. Yes, she believes it, anyhow. She believes that the power lies in her, yes, a kind of wile that would allow her to just… take what she wants from who she wants it. But she won’t, oh no, just couldn’t bear to allow herself - oh, dear, no - to be in that position.”

“Do you…”

“... think she can dodge it forever? Oh, yes. Heavens, dearie, yes. She stays to well-lit stores and shops and closed circuit securities, to remove the want to steal. Yes, she thinks that the only time she’s to take something is when it’s given, and she needs to wait. Oh yes, she needs to. Simply must.”

“Do you…”

“Oh, dearie, no more questions. See how tired she is? Can we pick this back up in the morning? Yes, oh, yes, I believe we can.”

---

Maybe Henry was right to keep Claire the same, in the end. After all, Henry knew about time travel and closed loops - perhaps, by keeping Claire’s coffee as a teenager identical to the one that Claire had in the present, Henry was merely protecting the time-space continuum. If he had changed the order, say - if Claire had grown up with a taste for black coffee as opposed to lots of cream and sugar - wouldn’t that mean Henry could be erased, too? In a way, Niffenegger utilizes this motif to establish a recurring theme throughout the novel - one of a lack of control. There has been a few attempts to relate this passage to the taking of consent, the thesis being that Henry is stripping away Claire’s ability to choose in her own life, and is molding her into a pre-set version of herself because he’s afraid to face alternate venues. I disagree with this strongly - for me, it’s a case of Henry seeing how in love Claire and he are in the present day, and so establishing a building-block foundation whereupon he can reinforce those feelings from a young age and continue their bliss for as long as time permits him. After all, Henry knows his own future - dead at 46, footless and broken - and so must make up for as much time as he has.

---

What could you do, the woman said, voice soft and full of concern,
As the faces gathered round her, pinched and piqued as they learned,
That the knee, swaddled up, oozing and boiling hot,
Belonged to a girl who’d wind up dead, who’s number came up in the lot.

---

“What’s this called?” Kasumi asked, sitting cross-legged on her living room carpet. Around her were various open magazines, pages well-worn, pictures of brides and cakes and corsets in glittery whites and pastels across the glossy pages.

“It’s called a train, dear,” her mother said, patient as always, a warm smile etched across her face.

“Train,” Kasumi said, fingers petting the glossy page, “it goes behind me when I walk?”

“Yes, like a silk river, flowing behind you, following you into marriage.”

---

Work.

Work on the body that isn’t yours to save. Work to keep it stable. Work for shelter, work for stability, work your life away.

Fight against the inevitable. Steal the right to stave off death. Rob someone of their dignity, without asking, without discussing their feelings on the matter.

Nothing else matters save your pride, your skill. Surrounded by those who you want to impress by impressing your will on the helpless, the weak. She won’t say no, so you can just save her, can’t you? No thought to the how’s and why’s.

She was shot, and you didn’t care how. She lay down, and you didn’t find out why.

You’re seeing it in black and white. Use your hands, stain them red, and they become snowy, downy, milk poured into glass. Keep them to yourself, and that’s black satin, wrapping itself around your eyes, choking you of breath. Choose red to be white, choose nothing to be black, binary choices, neutral causes.

Work, boy. Work until the weight in your chest is transferred to hers.

It’s all you’re fucking good for.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Was it wrong to say that Seb was going to town on Kasumi? That did sound a little overly sexual, and yet, she couldn't find another way to describe what looked to her like miracle work. The other not-dying girl looked like she was managing to hang on fine, so all there was to do was to see if Kasumi would make it. The twitching was good, right? That showed activity, or something, in her neurons, at least?

Kitty sighed.

It didn't look like Kasumi would make it.

"There's the woods, near here," Kitty said, thinking to the map, "We could...trees..."

She was distracted.

Kasumi was doing everything she could to hold on.

She continued to be her witness, for whatever it was worth, even if she was starting to feel a little uncomfortable with how comfortably she felt watching the quiet spectacle.

[KamiKaze]

Watching Sebastien get to work was… an experience.

It was weird to think of it like that. Miranda, like the rest of them, had watched Mr. Dolph’s brains splatter onto the glass windows like splashed paint. The memory of Will and Richard slowly sinking into the dark water would probably etched inside her brain forever. She fought Brigid and Chris. And yet, seeing, even from where she was standing, bone and metal and blood mixing together in some half-formed slurry, it was something else entirely. The metallic smell hung in the air, only somewhat covered up by the stench of tar. Miranda’s stomach continued doing turns.

Call it a different experience, she guessed. Of course watching someone die from a shot to the head and people dying from falling off a cliff was awful. But to watch someone get a bullet pulled out of their leg as they were unconscious? It made her skin crawl, but in a different way. It didn’t help that Kasumi looked almost gone already. She was breathing, her eyelids were fluttering, her hands were clenched. If it weren’t for that, someone could mistake her for having died.

She’d simply stared, transfixed. Miranda wanted to look away, but she couldn’t.

Eventually, Sebastien spoke. He’d done everything he could do.

He was right, though. It was getting dark, and moving her would be difficult.

She knew that she could easily leave, let whatever was going with happen with Kasumi happen. Again, one less person to deal with. But…

“I was there last night,” she said, responding to Kitty. “It’s… not comfortable to sleep, but I managed.”

She had to be careful this evening.

[backslash]

"I'm staying here," Sebastien said firmly. He didn't think Kitty would wander off on her own, and he sort of hoped Miranda wouldn't either, though it was hard to say whether he felt that way because he thought she would be good or useful company, or if he just didn't want to hear that she had fallen into a pit in the morning.

In the end, they both stayed and he didn't have to worry about anything besides whether Kasumi would make it through the night.

---

Kasumi was still breathing when the sky began to lighten, but she didn't seem to be getting better. If anything, she was even more pallid and her breathing more shallow. It was possible she had just lost too much blood, or infection had already set in too deep. Blood poisoning was bad news.

Sebastien quietly looked her over while Kitty and Miranda still slept before the announcement sounded again.

When the announcement did play, he only half-listened, still focused on the sweat on Kasumi's brow and the halting pattern of her breaths. He didn't want to admit that there was nothing more that he could do except hope, but there was a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach which told him that was exactly the case.

[decoy73]

She got closer to the group. After all, they had to be better than Snake, or whatever his name was. She walked forward.

And then one of them fell backwards.

Oh hell no.

Sarah went forwards ... and then she took a step back. She wasn't going to deal with this shit.

((Sarah Miller continued in The Lone Gunman))

[The Honeless Beard]

THEM

---

Have you ever wanted to start a family
so badly, that you would forget the risk?
A babe filling your belly, quickening inside you,
a home life filled with eternal bliss?
Have you ever considered what goes into the pot,
to cook a familal meal?
Love devotion loyalty trust,
bravery that has to be real?
Have you ever thought, and stopped, to think,
that happiness may be made up?
That life just consists of problems that persist,
to ensure that your debt’s paid up.

---

She opened the top lid of the toilet of the brightly lit bathroom, her attention still on the bright words and colorful pictures of her phone, bottom lip chewed on by a pair of canines that were slightly yellow in contrast to the stark white and pale, industrial green. The overhead lights were blue and harsh, and she’d caught her reflection walking in - saw the black haired asian girl with poor skin, too-small eyes, and bad posture - and cursed the lights themselves for casting an odd spell.

She finished the text, sent the text, and looked towards the toilet, and saw, in the bowl of deep red water, a fetus floating inside.

The lights shut off all at once as the smell wafted up and hit her, the rusty dark scent of loss and blood and misery and afterbirth that hung wet and stagnant in the air around her. She retched towards the side as she was bathed in a pale red light, almost a pink, emanating from the direction of the bowl, forcing her to squint against it. There was a cracking from outside the bathroom stall, a huge noise, filling her with anxiety and a far-off sense of dread. The noise was joined then with the faint lilting of homemade reed whistles, a heartbeat that filled her ears, and a low mumbling.

“-rself,” she caught, as the fetus’ lips began to move. She pressed herself back against the bathroom stall door, taking the small and wet and animated… thing out of her immediate sightline. The words still kept pouring from it, over and over and over.

“Don’t lie to yourself, don’t lie to yourself,”

The walls outside the stall door began to crack even further, thunder erupting from outside her little den of horror. Her fingers struggled to find the lock.

“Don’t lie to yourself, don’t lie to yourself, don’t lie,”

The lock wouldn’t budge from her position facing away from it, forcing her to half-turn. She didn’t want to give her back to the toilet, not totally, but the small stall hemmed her in, taking the decision away.

“to yourself, don’t lie to yourself, don’t,”

She turned her back, pulled hard on the lock, and suddenly the screaming began.

The lock came free and she burst out of the stall door, her foot reaching to land on tiled floor, and nothing was there to resist her.

She fell.

---

BAD WOODS GIRL
By CROSS BOW P.I.G

[intro]

Uh. Uh. Mikey, get that beat up.
Look, look.

We was barely eighteen just a coupla kids,
Tryna figure out our lives and we’d just barely kissed,
Livin’ at our mama’s house, meetin’ at night,
The world was a chase scene, yea, we were mid-flight,
Though somethin’ strange came over her one day,
Dragged me by the collar and she started to say,
We were standin’ on a path near the woods where we’d play,
Her lips formed the words that made me start to sway,

[HOOK: Chromall Girl]


There’s the woods near here,
I want you to take me here,
We could play with each other near the trees,
There’s the woods near here,
Come on, bring me there,
We could play with each other near the trees.

---

Henry’s friendship with Gomez is another point where the the author is trying to inject sinister implications into the grand-themes of the book. Though Claire and Henry are certainly not the best of people, one thing the book attempts to do and justify in their narrative is how they are not evil. While evil does impact their lives - Gomez’s lust for Claire over his own relationship, Henry’s time travel, and Henry’s father’s alcoholism, which are all treated with their own weight and as outside forces trying to tear Henry and Claire apart - they themselves are not considered by the narrative to be bad people, and just flawed. Gomez, however, is portrayed as an out-and-out morally disreputable human being. We see how he’s essentially waiting for Henry to die so he can take claire - despite having four children with Claire’s best friend. We see the company he keeps - mostly homophobic or racist men, all who have bad run-ins with Henry in varying times and vulnerable positions - and his influence from them. Finally, we see Gomez’s insistence, over and over, that Henry is sick and dangerous due to a condition that Henry cannot control, as evidenced when the older Henry crashes through a window at a board game night, ruining Claire, present Henry, Gomez and Sarah’s game. While the other three put a blanket around the older Henry, Gomez doesn’t want to touch him for fear of contracting the illness.

---

I was there last night, the girl giggled, adjusting her night shirt, it’s… not comfortable to sleep.

This was met with tittering, some half-hearted slapping and shushing. Kasumi wrapped her arms around her flannel-covered knees, cocking a head at the speaking girl.

“Did you find another bed?” she asked.

The girl met her eyes, winked.

I managed.

---

“What if I don’t want to get married?” Kasumi asked, her voice small. Her mother sighed, a defeated sound.

“Everyone has to get married, Kasumi,”

“Why?”

“Because you can’t have babies if you’re not married, sweetie. You can’t start a family. You need to do things in the proper order.”

Kasumi went quiet, thinking about this.

---

“I’m staying here,” the voice said, strong and willfull, just before another man joined him, whispering behind a hand.

“Jasmine King put a bullet in Lance Adams.”

[MethodicalSlacker]

When it looked like Seb had Kasumi stable the previous night, Kitty felt decent enough to lie down and not sleep. The open darkness was not to be trusted.

Now, in the morning, listening to the announcements, she sighed. Senseless death. Rubbing her eyes open, she rolled over and viewed the trembling body of Kasumi, still alive and kicking. Maybe kicking a little more literally than she was supposed to be kicking, but still, a decent sign.

Kitty sits up. She rummages through her bag, and pulls out more bread. She hadn't eaten any dinner the previous night, or anything really during the day before coming to the tar-pits either. She drinks some more water, now. It brings satisfaction to her soreness. Kitty gives Seb another glance. He doesn't look to her like he's had any sleep either. Kitty takes a moment and looks at the lines crisscrossing her hands, and realizes just how filthy they must be.

"You," she manages for Seb, before coughing into those same dirty hands. Righting herself, she tries again to speak.

"You holding up okay?"

Her eyes went back to Kasumi. Kitty took another sip of water.

Inside, the night had been quiet, and it looked like the day would be too.