Sun Giant

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Shut up."

The gun was pointed at Matthew, now. Someone else hurryscurried over. Violet didn't waste time looking at her. A line was crossed. She needed to kill them. It was how the circumstances were set. She didn't need to pretend she enjoyed it. The smile was wrong. It was all wrong. Necessity. The sound of her own voice, repeating it in her mind's ear, over and over, necessity, necessity, necessity, a chant, a mantra unto the rice paddies. There were no more bullets in the gun. Violet knew this. The others did not. They did not need to.

"I didn't want to kill him. He was in pain. He was suffering."

She was almost shouting now.

"And she was going to kill me if I didn't shoot her."

Anywhere but here was where Violet needed to be. She took a few slow steps backwards away from Matthew and the other one, the figure on the edge of her vision dark like the shadow of death, growing ever closer, following her further down the spiral. She pointed her gun its way, took several more steps backwards, flicking from one to the other, one to the other, never a moment without the biteless bark trained on someone's face. She'd hit them there, too, if she had something to do it with. It was necessary that she was good. A necessity. A necessity. Because she needed to. She didn't want to. Violet didn't want to hurt anyone. She just needed to.

"I needed to kill them!" she spat.

She needed to run away.

When Violet got close enough to the tree line on the edge of the rice paddies, she turned and ran, darting into the brush, sending herself deeper into the rain.

[Violet Schmidt continued in Hoo-hooo's there?]

[Frozen Smoke]

Faith realised just what a mistake she'd made as the gun swung up, the robed and bloodied girl pointing it at Matthew, the centre of its barrel seeming to soak up all of her vision like a black hole. She'd started Matthew off again and he began to spew words righteously, as her stomach dropped in a way that was becoming far too terribly familiar. Faith let the bag fall out of her hands as she began to crouch down a little, preparing to sprint as the girl walked backwards, swinging the gun and her attention between the two of them. If she fired, Faith was going to run at her, and try and wrestle the thing out of her hands before she got another shot off. It was the only way either of them were going to get through this, as she shouted back at them over the rain, defended herself from the carelessly flung accusations.

She could feel it now. The tension. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Every breath was shallow. Her stare was pointed, precise, away from the gun - Right at her. The black robes were damp now, drooping over her head, but she could see the flecks of blood that painted her face like macabre makeup.

Faith still didn't know who she was.

"I needed to kill them!"

The figure she'd been focusing on turned, and ran, the word them burning in her brain as she struggled to figure out what had just happened. Not that she cared too much. Faith's head flicked around to look at Matthew, making sure he hadn't crumpled to the floor from a shot she hadn't heard, finding relief in seeing him still upright as her gaze picked him out through the wet hair that hung down over her face.

"You ok, bud?" she asked, before turning her head in the direction that the girl had gone, before disappearing into the trees.

"Who the fuck was that?"

[Super Weegee]

After what he accused her of, Matthew should have been expecting Violet to react the way she did. She did kill two people, after all. His mind instead expected a situation like Shauna, where she'll try to play innocent and deny any wrongdoing. It worked for her at the time, but there wasn't any evidence this time that supported Violet's side. All he had was her word for what happened and barely anything else.

Her pointing the gun at him just confirmed his suspicions, fear of getting shot to death aside.

Flinching once again, he slowly began to raise his hands.

Ok...Don't panic, Matt...All it will take is one bad move and it'll be it for you...

She began to talk again about how she had to put Kyle out of his misery. Ok, so far so good, she isn't trying to kill him. It was clear that he pissed her off given how she's shouting at him, but still. As long as she keeps talking, that's giving him time to think. Time that he needs to find a way out of this. He slowly breathed in and out as he tried to come up with potential solutions...

...

...

...But nothing good is coming to his mind.

Violet began walking backwards while keeping the gun aimed at them, no doubt to make sure they didn't try anything. Matthew didn't dare move a muscle. She seems to be walking away and he didn't need to give her a reason to kill him. As she got farther away, so did the tension. Granted, she's holding a rifle, but she would've shot him by now if she wanted to. Why make it easier to miss him?

"I needed to kill them!"

No sooner had she yelled that out, than she spun around and ran into the trees. Even after that, however, Matthew felt compelled to respond to her.

"No, you fucking didn't!" he shouted.

Whether or not she heard him or not, he couldn't tell. Regardless, it seemed to be over. Letting out a sigh of relief after a few seconds, he rubbed his temples. God, that was fucking scary. All it took was one sentence to get her pissed enough to threaten him at gunpoint. One accusation.

An innocent person wouldn't do that, that's for damn sure. Of course she was lying to him about what happened.

He heard Faith ask him two questions, whether or not he was okay and who Violet was.

"Yeah..." Matthew said, rubbing his temples a little harder, "...yeah I'm fine."

Turning to look at Faith, he continued.

"That was Violet Schmidt. She killed that girl right there, as well as another guy yesterday." He then pointed towards the body in question and continued, "She said that...whatsherface was trying to rob her and that she was defending herself. I see a few problems with that. Apparently, that dead girl snuck up on her with a knife. In the middle of an open field. While Violet was holding a rifle."

Matthew let that sit for a few seconds.

"No points for guessing whether or not she's lying."

[Frozen Smoke]

Faith laughed at that. The sound slipped out of her carelessly, as she moved a hand to brush her hair back out of her face, the blunt remark from Matthew catching her off-guard. It wasn't even like it was all that funny, but it was enough, even as she tried to stifle it.

"Sorry! - Sorry." she apologised, trying to straighten herself out. Her hands were shaking, she realised, as she tugged on her shirt. There was a nervous energy still running through her, unfulfilled, slowly venting out in every motion. "Not funny." she confirmed, after she was certain she could keep a straight face again. Faith tried to force herself to absorb what Matthew was saying, take in the supposed facts of the situation that he was trying to share, but it all felt like it was pointless trying to learn. It felt like a science lesson in last period. All she could really think about was the fact that holy shit, she'd just stared down the barrel of a gun, and lived to tell the tale.

It all seemed so impossible, and given the corpse that was slowly coating the surrounding greenery with blood and soil, mixed into an unsightly dark brown - It clearly was. And yet both she and Matthew were fucking alive. She pressed her mouth together, trying to stop the laugh of relief, of exhilaration from bobbing up again. She half wanted to punch the sky in celebration.

It took a long, hard sigh for that to go away, rolling her head back on her shoulders and closing her eyes as she tilted it towards the sky. The rain didn't feel like it was cooling her down, it was far too humid for that, but it felt calming anyway.

Her eyes landed on the corpse of the girl once more after she brought her head back to a more normal position. Not as drawn the the horrible wounds or the results seeping out of it. Now she noticed something else, a speck of black that stood out between the green and the brown, half submerged in the swampy field. A bag. Her eyes tracked over to Matthew, trying to gauge if he'd seen it, what he'd think of her if she just went over and took it.

Fuck it.

She walked towards where the body lay, and began to talk again, over her shoulder back at Matthew.

"So, I'm glad this worked out, but like - next time - if you could not run away on your own, that'd be sweet."

Her hands gripped the strap of the bag and tugged. The corpse lurched upwards, and Faith's eyes grew wide for just a moment, before she realised why.

"Sorry." she apologised, almost reflexively, as she slipped the strap to the side, off from the girl's shoulder. There was an urge to do something to make it right. Stealing from a corpse was wrong, she knew it was wrong, but equally she knew she had to do this. She hadn't eaten in 3 days, and this was really the only way she had to eat during the coming ones. Faith wasn't about to ask Matthew for his food. That'd be even worse than stealing from a corpse, stealing from someone who was alive, one of the few people who hadn't lost their fucking minds.

A hand reached out over where Layla's face had once been. A ritual she'd seen in war movie after action movie, back in Chattanooga, where everything made sense.

There were no eyes left to close.

Faith felt sick to her stomach as she stood up. Her voice wobbled as she asked her first question, just a little, as she turned away from the body towards Matthew again. If she didn't look at it, she didn't have to think about it.

"Probably best to get going, right? - Gunshots seem to attract attention. And not good attention."

[Super Weegee]

Matthew didn't really find what he said to be that funny, but it seemed to get a laugh out of Faith anyways. Then again, she was clearly shaken by the whole thing, so it might have something to do with...adrenaline maybe? Having a two-time killer point a gun at them can do that to anyone.

Faith asked him to try to stay with her and not go off on his own. With what happened to Regina and what nearly happened to him, he understood why. Going alone was too much of a risk now, especially since neither of them have weapons.

She seemed to be struggling with something on the ground and he was about to ask what she was doing before she managed to free it on her own. The dead girl's bag. Violet didn't pick it up after she killed her? Granted, she's a bit psycho now, so her rational functions may have been turned off there.

Now that he was looking at the body for longer than a couple of seconds, he could see the girl's head in all of its bloody detail. Starting to feel a bit sick already, he was thankful when Faith got his attention and suggested that they should get moving, since the gunshots attracted the bad kind of attention. That actually got a chuckle out of him.

"What," Matthew said, smiling a bit, "we're not the good kind of attention?"

Turning serious again, he turned around and faced away from the bodies. Since he didn't move an inch because of the possibility of getting shot, it wasn't too hard to retrace his steps.

"You're right, though." he said, "We'll go pick up my stuff and find somewhere else to go."

Looking up towards the sky, he continued.

"Preferably somewhere with a roof over our heads. You ready to go?"

((Matthew Hunt continued in The Past Has Passed Away))

[Frozen Smoke]

Faith tried her best to offer him a smile that mirrored his. They were about as good as attention as it seemed anyone was going to get, given that everyone they met seemed to either be insane or dead. The smile dropped quickly from her face as she looked away, eyes tracking her own footprints in the mud of the field back to where she'd been standing, before Violet had ran away. She'd left Matthew's bags there, and the umbrella, not that the latter was worth a damn now she was thoroughly soaked.

"Sounds like a plan to me." she responded, simply, as she cut another parallel gouge through the mud back towards his stuff. Her hands opened the other bag that she'd swung around to sit in front of her around the back of her neck, it pre-occupying most of her attention as she tried to feel her way inside it, eventually grasping something that felt particularly solid. She pulled it out of the bag, and inspected it for just enough time to read "Food bar", before ripping the packaging open and biting into the chalky substance that poked out of it.

It tasted like plaster and stale cheese, plus it absorbed all the water in her mouth like the worlds driest cookie, and she had never eaten anything better. One hand kept it close to her mouth, as the other gripped the second bag's strap, letting her continue taking greedy bites out of the dead girl's food. Hunger pangs outweighed the pangs of guilt that came with sating it.

She shoved a half chewed mass of bar to the side of her mouth in order to speak, as she looked up to see Matthew beginning to trek away, seemingly already having a destination in mind. She'd ask him about it later.

"Alright, lead the way."

((Faith Clementine Marshal-Mackenzie continued The Past has Passed Away))