Fancy Footwork

[Carrion Queen]

((Kendra Jones continued from Trauma))

Kendra ran to the small building in the distance. She stopped briefly to look around at the large open area between her and the building. Everything looked clear. She took a deep breath and ran the rest of the way into the building, leaping gracefully over some trash blocking the entrance.

Kendra tucked into a somersault, more for flare than out of necessity and ended up scrambling under a receptionist's desk.

She covered her ears and huddled under the desk. Somewhere in the distance she heard gun shots. She curled into herself and shivered.

For the third time she'd escaped a killer without so much as a scratch. Two of them even liked her. She was pretty lucky all things considered, but she didn't feel very lucky.

"Worst day of my fucking life," she cried.

[peregrineink*]

(Madeline Harris continued from The Opening Face Off)

Maddie hummed tonelessly as she wandered over to the small building that seemed to boast itself as a hospital. This was good, she had injuries and maybe she could finally see to them. She had done so many things up until the point of tending to them that she hoped that they hadn't gone and gotten infected, but who knows what time had passed since she had gotten hurt? Such was the thing with her brain these days, time had gone all weird and fuzzy on her and day seemed strange and night even stranger.

Part of her thought that it was merely minutes and flurries since she woke up near Matthew Payne who was now dead but not at her hand. She remembered shooting at him which was strange now. She had been horrified when she did that. Shooting at a person was not so hard now. It wasn't so hard. She knew.

Maddie wandered, looking for things that could at least clean up the bleeding from when the boy hurt her for killing his friend. She supposed that she couldn't blame him. The reasoning behind killing that Abby girl was so fuzzy now. Why had it happened? Maddie frowned. She could recall the girl's face, those exotic looking upturned eyes so clearly, but not a word she had said. Had she said anything at all. Only in dreams maybe. Maddie sighed. She wandered, looking...and then...and then...

Duncan.

oh God...

"N-no," she didn't really no if she said the word, or formed it with her lips, but she grunted a sound out just the same. He lay on his back, his eyes to the sky. She had known he was dead, Durriken Lovel had been spoken over the loudspeaker and she was not a stupid child. However part of her had hoped that it meant that he had ascended body and soul into heaven, that it meant that some magical clean up crew came and took everyone away so she would never ever have to see him. She forgot that it was a small compound and not everyone was as diligent as her at making their work beautiful.

If she was a girl, if she was a teenager like the other people in the Program, Maddie would have passed Duncan in the hallways at school and blushed and ducked away because she liked the color of his eyes. He would have passed the ultramarine paint to her and their fingers would brush and her heart would beat loudly against her chest and she would feel as though she were floating several feet above the ground. And maybe, if she weren't Maddie Harris, if she weren't so wrapped up in her self awareness, she would know that she already acted that way, that she already felt those things.

He was several hours dead.

She kissed him anyway.

It was a fluttery butterfly kiss against dead lips, and her heart skipped a beat inside her chest.

She buried her head against a damp blood drenched shirt, pressed her cheek into stiff flesh and whispered how sorry she was.

[Carrion Queen]

Kendra hiccuped and sobbed to herself in the dark, hidden under the receptionist's desk. Then she heard something that wasn't her own sobs.

There was the sound of footsteps. Someone had entered the hospital. She covered her mouth and stared wide-eyed at the floor for a moment. The footsteps stopped.

It seemed to her impossible that this other person couldn't her her cacophonous breathing or thumping heart. She swallowed and moved her hand away from her mouth.

Slowly she peaked around the edge of the desk to see who was there. Kendra couldn't get a good look at first. Her hair was stuck to her face. She licked her lips and brushed it out of the way.

It was the blonde girl from before. The crazy one. She was....bent over a body.

What's that psycho doing to that dead guy?

For a second she thought the girl was going to eat him for some reason. She couldn't see what Maddie was doing, but it didn't look like cannibalism.

Kendra reached into her pocket and felt the grenade.

That bitch has another thing coming if she thinks she's going to hurt me.

Though last time she had the opportunity and she did not strike. Kendra was spared because she liked her dancing. That didn't matter now though. She had a tight grip on her grenade.

[peregrineink*]

Maddie liked to pretend that Duncan could hold her back, but there was also something nice about the stuff unyielding flesh of him. She shuddered against him, the sobs coming easier now, everything hurt and she just didn't want to go anywhere. She just wanted to stay with him for now, could she stop running? She felt like she had seen every inch of this stupid compound.

Dead Duncan couldn't tell her to go away. Dead Duncan could not reject her company, and there was something so amazing about that that she couldn't help but ball her fists tighter in his bloody white shirt. She didn't realize that she had been speaking to him this entire time.

"There were peonies and everything had gone everywhere and he hit me I didn't want to do it and I don't understand what's happening and I don't want to die but I want to kill myself and I want to live and I keep thinking about my mom and my parents and the music box and you and why didn't I ever tell you..."

She

was

so

tired

of running.

Maddie didn't think she ever wanted to run anymore. Whatever happened, no matter what, she wanted to stay in this room, with Duncan. Forever. Maybe he was still alive, she thought, as she pressed her ear to his obviously dead chest. It was clearly wishful thinking, but it didn't really stop her from hoping that there was some sort of flutter of life that would keep him with her.

He was with her. Could she bring him into her gallery?

Her mouth tugged into a little frown. She hadn't created his art, in fact, with the three blossoms on his chest his art was rather...trite, had already been done. She touched his face. She couldn't stop touching him although he lacked the bright thrumming of human life. Maybe it was because it had been so long since she had regular normal consensual human contact with another human being? When had that been? When had she legitimately been allowed to touch someone else? Not since the game began, and before that it had probably been her parents hugging her good-bye. And really, the only touching she had gotten during this game was when that boy had hit her merely for doing her patriotic duty as an American.

She sighed, looking up, maybe she should bring him somewhere more comfortable. Did that even make sense? Her eye caught a glimpse of something near the desk...was it a face?

"H-h-hello?" This was probably bad, but Maddie did not have the energy to move at this point. She squinted her eyes at the figure....it looked so familiar....her heart brightened a little bit. "Kendra!?"

[Carrion Queen]

Kendra looked like she'd been shocked when Maddie said her name. The girl saw her. She stood up from behind the desk and held her grenade by her side.

"What are you doing....?" she asked cautiously.


She took a step backwards.

"Don't come close. I know what you did. I SAW you."

She swallowed and her hands balled up. This girl was crazy, but even the crazy people had been nice to her. No, it wasn't possible. She couldn't stay with her.

"If you even think about trying to- HURK"

Kendra took another step back while keeping her eyes trained on Maddie. This proved to be a poor choice after all when she dripped on an overturned chair. Her grenade went skittering away.

[peregrineink*]

I saw what you did, I SAW you.

The accusing words echoed in Maddie's head. They sounded hateful. Something hell out of Kendra's hand but that didn't matter. Who cared? Kendra hated her now. What happened? Kendra was her music box. Kendra was such a pretty dancer. Maddie would make Kendra like her again. She stood up, regretfully leaving Duncan. She had to make Kendra understand that she didn't want to hurt anyone anymore.

She walked to Kendra. Her arms held out, beseeching. Kendra had tripped and she had fallen and Maddie was shaken and she stumbled over herself and suddenly she was on the ground too. Kendra didn't seem to want her near her, but Kendra did not seem to understand that Maddie was still a good person.

Maddie also didn't seem to understand that she was carrying the knife she had used to make Jennifer Steinmen beautiful in an open denim strap in her overalls that she usually used to carry her larger brushes. Struggling with another person while that knife seemed to be free range was not the best of ideas.

Squish.

Maddie froze. She waited for the pain to come, she had felt the sinking of metal into barely yielding flesh....the pain wasn't coming though.

"Kendra?"

[Carrion Queen]

Kendra gasped.

She looked at Maddie through the veil of her hair which hid half her face. Kendra had sat up after she tripped, while she tried to push Maddie away. Now she fell back. She swallowed. It tasted like salt.

"Mmm"

She shut her lips tight together and a few tears fell down the sides of her face.

A sharp slowly spreading pain that was twisting her insides and took her breath away. Her right hand clenched into a fist while the fingers of her left hand grasped desperately at her chest, nails digging in at the flesh near her heart and pulling at her shirt.

Air came out in halted, choppy expulsions. The pain made it laborious to inhale and she breathed in gasps. The oxygen dragged against her throat.

Her hand moved down. Her fingers curled and slipped against each other now that they were slicked in sticky red.

"This isn't.....how...."

It wasn't how she'd imagined it. She thought she'd make someone angry and go out with a barrage of swears and swinging limbs. This was a lame way to die, in her opinion. Kendra though about how people said you gained some sort of peace at death. Those people were full of shit as far as she was concerned. It was getting numb now. It might have been shock.

She sobbed. She was afraid. She didn't want to go alone. She hated being alone.

Kendra struggled as hard as she could to stay in the place where even if there was a killer, there was at least someone. But in the end she lost. The pain faded and she was dragged backwards into the deep black nothing, her last words were unintelligible whimpers.

Kendra Jones: Deceased

[peregrineink*]

"Kendra?"

Silence.

"Kendra? Wake up."

A light shaking of the shoulder.

"Kendra?"

Maddie was just kidding herself. Her eyes weren't even closed.

She was too young to understand the value of things, and there she sat, surrounded by gears and springs and wires, smiling up at her mother, holding the little ceramic ballerina between two fingers.

Maddie crawled away from the body that used to be the dancer. Maddie was disgusting. Her fingers found the grenade where it fell and closed around it. Oh. Oh my. Her fingers laced through the loop like she was trying on a wedding ring.

Maybe she could finally find the strength to stop all this? It would be easier with a bang. She could make herself into a Jackson Pollack.

She held the grenade in her lap and began to tug, she glanced up.

Duncan.

She looked back down again.

No.

Someone had killed Duncan.

She could probably kill whoever had killed Duncan.

She slipped the grenade into her pocket.

It was easy to patch herself up then, now that she had a purpose. The swelling on her eye was still pretty bad, but it was easy enough to clean up the various cuts on her face. She looked like hell, but then again Maddie had never really looked much like anything anyway. She gathered her waist length blood stained hair to one side, frowning at how tangled it had gotten. What did she expect? It usually got snagged on every little thing.... she braided it as best she could, hissing whenever she pulled at a tangle. She managed to get it into one semi-coherent braid, and as she worked on it, she tried to remember the name of the person who killed him...

It had been after a day, his name had been mentioned in the same breath as Priscilla Sawyer...it had been while the announcer was discussing plugging? Durrikin Lovel...

Brett Torres.

Maddie frowned. She wasn't sure if she had met him in game and didn't now if she would be able to pick him out of a crowd, but if she tried hard enough she bet she could blow him to hell if she tried.

Her lips curled into what she could imagine to be a smile.

She had purpose now. Maddie located her pack, she picked the knife out of Kendra's body and made sure her other weapons were secure. Yeah. Maybe it was time to avenge a few deaths...


(Madeline Harris continued in The Burial Of The Dead.)