Roxie tugged at the skin on her cheekbones, exposing the rubicund flesh that was pinned permanently beneath both eyes, like two angry-red half-moons beneath pale blue orbs that had once glittered like distant stars. Those starry eyes were now clouded by city haze, and had almost lost their contrast against the constellation of freckles that dotted her face, made dark and prominent by the insistent pressing of her fingertips.
The bed sheets were like ice. She realized, with some deep welling feeling of shame and self-hatred, that it was because she’d pissed in them.
It was a long time before she could bring herself to get out of them. She just lie there, and tried not to think about how the soiled linen with it’s stale ammonia smell reminded her of oxidizer, and the sharp metallic scent of a freshly milled bomb casing.
The nightmares were constant now, and she couldn’t close her eyes again without knowing that she would be rocked from whatever rest she did find, by the sound of an explosion, or by the intensely real feeling of tiny, tiny pieces of another human meeting thousands of bloody collisions with the skin of her face and arms.
She would wake up, sometimes, fearfully wiping hands over herself, to get clean again. Waking was both a relief and heartbreaking realization. The blood and the fragments of bone and teeth weren’t real. But, in earnest, she would never, ever be clean of them.
She got up with tears in her eyes, and a hard knot in her throat that she couldn’t swallow. She gathered up all her bedclothes and heaped them in a damp ball with her underwear. Tugging her nightshirt down, the thirteen year old opened her bedroom door, and tamped as quietly as she could down the hall, hoping she could get the wash going without waking Pop.
She didn’t know what he would think, and she didn’t have it in her to put a false face on. Not anymore. Not as she had that day.
How calm she had been! How callous and cold, as she had walked smartly from the scene, Billy’s ignorant hand clapped firmly into her own, guiding her as much as dragging her from a j where she didn’t belong.
The League had hired her to make a scene of it, and she had. A staged fumble into traffic, a rough knock to the thigh with the front bumper of Bronius’ car. A quick reach and tuck, and the bomb itself had been secured beneath the fuel line in the panic. Smooth. Easy. Simple.
Her job should have then been to limp quickly away, in mock fear of those who emerged, to prey upon the sympathies of those ignorant grunts and their master, who didn’t know they’d just hit a League Agent, and hear back from her league handlers later on how well the operation had gone.
That should have been all. Just a job. Just a package delivered to where it was supposed to go, just like any of the other tasks she’d taken on in her role against the Team. Instead, she’d ran smack into Billy at the curb, and had been forced to delay just a little too long.
She’d had to leave from gig practice at Grimsley’s insistence, and her sudden departure had brought Billy’s curiosity to a head, right alongside her scorn. With Billy screaming, and gnashing, she’d had no choice but to turn aside, to press and shove, and give herself away. She’d escaped the scene, true enough, but even that momentarily shock had made the exfiltration take far too long.
On a six second fuse, eight people died; Bronius, five grunts, and two bystanders. Many surrounding the event had been injured, a reality she might’ve remained blissfully ignorant of, had she simply walked around the corner and gone jogging briskly back to the Gym as she’d been supposed to. Lastly, and to Roxie, the most miserably, Billy had lost almost all desire to be around her, whatever the reason.
They had quietly shared a very nervous cigarette, and then saying nothing, Billy had gone home, and refused to show up to practice for what was now a week running.
As to what Roxie had lost, besides a friend, she couldn’t really put into words. That feeling of spattering blood on her neck and shoulders, of small metal fragments, and bone and human teeth pelting her jacket as she turned to run, of that deafening boom that had rattled her brains about like marbles in a tin can, was a memory that had a deep cost, and an overwhelming presence in her mind, rendering happiness and fondness alike hollow and barren to make room for itself.
She felt like she could no longer recall anything of that time before, as though the blast had simply blown all of that out, that it had spared her the shrapnel, only to lodge debris of another kind deep in her mind.
She plugged the mass of cotton and linen into the washing machine and mindlessly poured thick blue detergent over the top of it, wishing she could lift off the top of her skull and put her thoughts down into the midst of that churning, bubbly mass.
For a while she simply stood there, vacuously, mechanically, like her body was a thing unneeded, and watched the open tumbler fill and turn, and rinse and turn again. Willingly, she thought of nothing, save that single task, and seeing it draw to completion, perception and presence the only sentinels against the horrible memory that would otherwise creep in at all sides, and torment her.
She didn’t know when she’d gone from watching that machine do it’s task, to hunching over the basin and crying for all that she was worth. She didn’t know when she’d abandoned the pretense of silence, and suddenly not cared anymore if her father was awoken by her wailing, but she tightened herself the moment she did, and stuffed her mouth with her knuckles until all that came out was a heavy, wet coughing sound. It didn’t stifle the tears, but it muted them, and that was as good as she could hope for.
She abandoned the idea of waiting for them to dry, and made back for her room as quickly as she could. She was exhausted, and flipping the mattress over seemed a herculean effort, in light of that, but she found that once she’d managed it, sniffling and dribbling from her eyes and nose, that even devoid of sheets and blankets, she could no longer resist the urge to lie down.
Her face felt sticky against the pillow, and her fingers and toes gathered no warmth as much as she rubbed them against the scratchy mattress, but it wasn’t long before drowsiness won against self-persecution and her eyelids swooned downward.
It wasn’t an easy transition, by any means, and she sobbed quietly all the way to unconsciousness, wondering why the fires and conflicts of a region, and of establishments that were neither her own, nor even of her generation had fallen upon her, and why, so unfairly, she had been the one to bear the guilt, and the blame for a thing that she had been driven to, not by her own desires, but by her willingness to do what her heart already demanded of her, when asked.
Why did she have to suffer, to right a wrong that had never been done directly to her? Why did this fall to her at all? Was she just as evil as the Plasmas? Was her desire, to see Team Plasma gone for good and all, just the same as what had ignited this war in the first place: a conviction that demanded the silence of any other?
A single calm, and a sole, solitary certainty was what finally gave her enough peace to close her eyes.
Hilda had died because of them. If she was the only person who could make sure that they got like for like over what they’d done, then it didn’t matter how bad it hurt.
She just wanted it to be over soon before it killed her, too.
Roxie grit her teeth in her sleep. Not because of some nightmare, or stress which had compiled itself therefrom, but rather, out of physical duress. She had been ignoring the urge to urinate until it was a more than an alarming desire, but now a motivating need, and still she’d resisted it’s compulsion to drag her out of bed, by scrunching herself into a kneeling position. Her knees tucked tightly to her chest, she kept her face kowtowed to the pillow, and had willfully denied the pull of consciousness for a full hour longer.
But now, came a much greater contest of wills.
A ray of sunlight had managed to slice its way through the blinds into the darkened recess of the highrise apartment bedroom, and cut across her scrunched brow.
“Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou--” Roxie hissed under the breath, too irritated by the invasive pink light pouring through her eyelids, to continue the facade of sleep, and too afraid her bladder might burst to get up and adjust the drapes. She continued hissing this until the two pressures became simply too much to bear, and she burst awake at the crack of noon with a primal scream in the direction of the adjoining bath.
The shrieking mess of humanity reemerged into the bedroom, no less a wreck, and honestly, far more dismayed. She flopped lengthwise across the huge bed, widthwise, in an effort to get at her gear as lethargically as possible, but was annoyed to find that even stretched from feet to fingertips as she was, the distance across the colossal king-size was the greater. She lifted her hind end into the air, and pushed her face across the satin covers, inching along like a blinded Weedle, splayed hand groping for the edge of the bedside table.
Of course, when she found it, it was only to upset the gear from its charger, and knock it onto the floor. Crestfallen, she smeared her face into the comforter with a plaintive sob. Eventually gathering her gumption, she leaned forward, and patted around on the hardwood. She felt nothing, and so reached a bit further, and likewise turned up nothing. So she leaned a bit more, and a bit more, until there was nothing but a hooked ankle keeping her on the bed, and finally she felt the very edge of her tumbled poke gear.
“Hnnnn!” She whined as she batted at it, hoping to rake it into her grasp, but on the final and most desperate attempt, she tumbled forward and landed flat on her back. “Oof!”
Her head now looking back up at the bottom of the mattress from beneath, Roxie groggily held her gear up in front of her left eye, too tired to open her right. The time she read there did not amuse her in the slightest.
The phone came skittering out from underneath the bed at the end of an angry sling, to clank against the bureau. Roxie, for her own part just pulled down the bedspread from atop the sheets, until it spilled over her legs, and hid from the sun for another several hours, snoring loudly in half-hearted imitation of the monster under the bed.
When Roxie finally slithered from the bedroom, (to the tune of her gear alarm going off at the ambitious hour of 5 PM) it was with a lurking, treacherous hunger. Not for food, though that was certainly beginning to become a concern, but for something much more desperately desired, and no less essential to her.
She went first to her jacket, which she remembered laying abandoned in the hallway, on coming in the previous night. Sabrina had righted the garment and hung it from the peg near the entryway. She fished about in her pocket for a gram she had scored, only to find it missing. She grumbled, but she guessed she couldn’t expect any different. That was the trouble with being a live-in girlfriend, really.
Sabrina did not abide her substantial addiction, or her feeding of it, within the confines of these four walls. And she guessed she could understand that. It was her house, after all. And to be fair, even if she had found that baggie she’d been looking for, she’d surely have snuck out onto the veranda in order to put it’s contents to use. Polite was polite, after all.
She didn’t mind so much. There was always plenty more to score out there, and she wasn’t hurting for quid or nothin’. But it was damned aggravating this early in the morning. Well, this early into her morning, at least.
She checked the other pocket, just to be certain, and though she was disappointed she had been right in her assumption that Sabrina had, in fact, confiscated it, rather than the baggie she’d been searching for, she found instead, a folded slip.
She took it out and examined it. At seeing her lover’s name penned upon it under her grasping fingers, her heart might’ve soared, were it not pinned down under thundering headache and sour stomach. She unfolded the note and examined it.
“Roxie,
“I have to go to the gym. Since you looked so--” here, Roxie found there was an unusually large spacing between the words, as though Sabrina had needed to pause here, and resume writing after searching for the correct word, “--peaceful, I thought it best not to wake you. Make yourself at home as I will not return until late this afternoon.”
Roxie looked it up and down a few times. Nothing about the cocaine she’d no doubt found upon placing this note here. Not that such was unusual. Sabrina made a pointed effort to avoid the subject, after all. When she found Roxie doing wrong, she simply made it plain she did not approve, and then waited for Roxie herself to dismiss the evidence via the nearest garbage receptacle, or open drain. Once she’d even out and out forced Roxie to do it. But it still wasn’t a thing they spoke about. The one time they had, the issue had ended in tears, most of which were her own. Sabrina simply had avoided all discussion of it since.
What seemed the more pursued, and in the end, more effective course, was simply to make Roxie feel ashamed of herself.
Which she did, certainly. There was certainly no part of her that felt good about being caught with a pill-bottle to her mouth or her pinky-nail to her nose, under the condemning glare of her girlfriend, but...
Well, she’d been doing this her whole life, and sometimes the rush she felt from doing it just overwhelmed the shame, and all she could think about was doing it. Or the need to do it.
She did find a little post-script on the flipped side of the note.
“I would have sent for your things, if you wanted to stay a while, but I felt it best not to--” and here again was that same disruption of continuous script that implied much more than was said, “--invade your privacy.”
Which really was just about as good as a total admission that she in fact already had visited the ratty hotel room that Roxie was calling home for the time being, and found it’s contents to be more than she could handle, insofar as any meaningful attempt at transference
In Sabrina’s home, all things were neat and orderly. Possessions were stowed and organized, surfaces were clean and clear, and furniture was neatly arranged.
In Roxie’s temporary abode, the floor was carpeted in a thick, plush layer of jackets, underwear, and shoes, and no surface went uncluttered by the casually discarded contents of pockets or of half-used prescriptions or petrol-station snack-wrappers that still glistened with sugar and the last flaky remnants of whatever had once been inside them. No surface was ever clear, until she swept her arm across it and deposited all to the floor, to begin the process anew. Not even housekeeping had made more than a few halfhearted attempts to come in and try to sort things out.
Roxie knew better than to think Sabrina simply hadn’t wanted to intrude. The rocker didn’t begrudge her girlfriend’s tendency to put her nose in things. It wasn’t her fault for being born with better ability than anyone to snoop about in the business of others, and Roxie certainly didn’t feel like she had anything to hide.
But, simply said, the amount of shame and self-disgust Sabrina could make her feel, without ever straying into the subject itself, kind of dug at her.
...At least enough that she gave up the idea of trying to score a hit, and settled for just filling her belly for the time being. She trudged back to the bedroom and slithered back into her discarded dress. Her boots flopped about irritatingly as she tried to get them buckled on, so much so that she was still hopping around on one foot by the time she made it back to the door
The decision to emerge from the apartment was shortlived. A solid blanket of sunlight punished the concrete on the loft outside, and she took only a step and a half out under its radiant fury before she changed her mind. Hissing, she withdrew back into the safety of the doorway, and it’s shadowy protection.
She couldn’t find her sunglasses, and annoyingly, her skin-tight jacket would not spare enough leather collar to shrug up over her head. She shut the door, defeated for now. Maybe she would just wait until the sun sank, before she was away.
A dull pain in her stomach said otherwise, though.
With a contemptuous glare through the peephole, she marched back to Sabrina’s room, and made a beeline for the walk-in closet. It wasn’t much to get excited over. Sabrina was a creature of habit, context and order.
All the racks and shelves mostly stood empty, and only a small category of real-estate was devoted to Sabrina’s daily active-wear. Four identical copies of Sabrina’s trademark dress jacket, with a empty fifth hanger that suggested the fifth such was being worn now, a formal dress that was distantly out of vogue, and one old t-shirt that said Silph Co Team Building Camp, and was dated well before Sabrina had been born. Aside from that, were only just a few plain white blouses, and black slacks, and precious little else. Roxie frowned. It just figured that Sabrina’s ascetic nature made no allowances for the typical vanities of a woman’s wardrobe.
She snorted. If there was something to be found of that nature, it seemed, Sabrina’s began and ended in her bathroom. Roxie had nearly been buried by haircare products the first time she’d gone looking for fresh towels in the washroom closet.
A plastic storage bin caught her eye, as she looked past the glove-rack, and she tugged it sloppily from behind Sabrina’s arranged and polished shoes. Unrepentantly she cracked it open, and rifled about through it’s contents.
There was some interesting stuff in here, really. A stretch-fabric halter, in a decidedly un-Sabrina-like color, which was obviously not from when she was a kid, but had obviously been bought with no realistic concept of how gravity worked or the questions of mass which it might’ve tried in vain to contain, a set of white low-rise denims that she might’ve confused for Holiday’s, and a huge set of bangles that she couldn’t rightly say wouldn’t have looked at home on stage with Koffing and the Toxics. She rolled her tongue around in her mouth, uncertain if she should ask about them later, in spite of mounting curiosity over their origin.
She dug past the low-top trainers what matched the top, until she hit paydirt.
She sprung up and turned to face the mirror, clutching the first such item of her interest. A huge octagonal hat, the likes of which she might’ve expected some sergeant of the police force to wear. “Hello, Jenny.” she catcalled at her reflection, as she put it on, then shook her head. “No,” she said casting it back and going for something else.
She pulled the ushanka over her nest of hair, and smirked. “You know niet about true Sinnohyan winter, Almiansk,” she told herself in the mirror, voice thick with hamfisted Snowpoint accentuation. Just as quickly, she threw it aside. “Nope.”
Deep down in the bin there was a dress that seemed like it had seen better days. Elaborate couture flattened by years of disuse and storage, with violet accents, and thick black satin. She lifted the headdress and placed it on her head, with regality.
She spread her hand toward the mirror as though laying down heavy decree. “Kneel, or die.” she spat, then snorted. “Yeah, right.” she rolled her eyes and tossed that off as well.
Lining the bottom, she found was another garment, which captured her wonder as she pulled it out. “Oh, my...” A thick, velveteen cloak, garnet and unblemished by it’s obviously lengthy term of storage, kept flowing from the box as she tugged it, and her eyes grew wider and wider. “Yes.” she acknowledged, before she’d even gotten it fully removed. “Yesyesyes!”
She whipped and twirled it, and threw it over her shoulders with a stationary bounce.
Being meant for someone much taller than her, it nearly dragged the floor, but she gathered the soft vestments to her bare neck with a huge grin. It had a plush cowl that she could throw over her head like a hood, and a lined collar with heavy corded strings.
She smiled at herself in the mirror. “Champion Lance? Eat your fuckin’ heart out.” She practically kicked open the closet door, and went stridently for the door. Only upon exiting the closet did a particularly interesting thought cross her mind. She had been continually pressing the soft fabric against her bare neck since putting it on, and she couldn’t help but wonder how amazing it might feel to be fully enveloped in this heavenly sensation. She had wiggled her dress and knickers off from beneath it by the time she made it to the front door, laughing insidiously all the while. It really did feel amazing.
The chilly October wind, and late-evening sun was no match for her this time, and she billowed down the steps, in her own mind, like a blood-colored spectre, however much like a cape-wearing imbecile she might’ve looked to everyone else present.
The elevator ride down was an exercise in restraint, as twice her solitude was invaded upon, and she could only grin smugly to herself as she shifted beneath the draping fabric. She bolted when she hit the ground floor, and dashed through the revolving door with explosive energy onto the streets of Saffron. The corner shop she had in mind was a block and a half away, and since there was really no point in being inconspicuous in a bright red shawl, she took it at full clip.
She had a powerful blush going by the time she made it to the shabby glass doors, from the exhilarating touch and ghostly caress of the flowing cloak, and while the risk and reward of being stark naked beneath it was present, she wasn’t the type to let it fluster her. The deep breath she took was more to contain her excitement than it was to firm any nerve.
She took her time in the aisles, giggling mutedly, and making no concerted effort to stand aside as others tried to sidle past her. She turned up at the counter with heaps and heaps of confections and candies. This engine ran on fructose, after all, whenever it wasn’t onloading narcotic flex-fuel.
The clerk looked at her with unrepentant curiosity, and she shrugged. “That’s it, luv.”
He tallied the total, and then read it back to her. “Thirty one, twenty.”
She reached for her clip and then staggered. She closed both eyes. She’d left her clip tucked in her dress. “Fuck me.”
The clerk, misunderstand, blinked. “Excuse me?”
Roxie shook her head with disdain. “Uh. I actually forgot me quid.”
The clerk didn’t budge, as if expecting some alternative to be forthcoming on her end. She shook her head again. “Sorry. I’ll put it back, then, shall I?”
He shrugged, and with a bedraggled sigh, she took up the great heap of it, feeling much less confident, all of a sudden. She turned, and gave a wide berth to those behind her as she marched back toward where she’d amassed the junk food.
But then she was struck with another insidious thought. She trilled with evil chuckling, as reached up and through her collar to flip the cowl so that it hung inside the garment, rather than outside, then, the pulled it together and knotted it in the front. “Forgot my money, but please believe I remembered my five-finger discount card.”
She’d come in with nothing but a billowing cloak, and so far as anyone else knew, she’d leave the same way, with the exception of two huge, lumpy tits. She couldn’t help but snort with laughter, as she inspected her expanding “bust” in the reflection of a nearby drink cooler. “Not sure what’s in those snack-cakes, dahling, but my is it doing wonders for your figure!” She accentuated the disguise with the addition of two puffy crisp-bags, strategically positioned to mask the off-center positioning of creme-rolls and beef jerky.
She nearly made it out without a hitch, too. If it hadn’t been for one particularly cantankerous Rage bar slipping through her “cleavage” and hitting the tile with a slap between her bare legs, it might’ve been a picture-perfect operation.
The clerk hollered, and she bolted with a ludicrous scream at the chase begun, this time without concern for the sunlight outside. “You’ll never take me alive!!”
She wasn’t much of a sprinter, really, being bandy-kneed and short, but she had a sort of natural advantage in being well experienced with trouble, and unassumingly fit in an athletic sense. The clerk gave chase as best as he was able, in apron and dress shoes, as Roxie weaved and dodged through foot-traffic. The only problem was that in flowing red cloak she drew a lot of attention, and in front of her, rubberneckers clotted the sidewalk, forcing her down an alleyway.
For the shop clerk, who was brandishing a tire-iron and screaming wildly, on the other hand, the crowds parted obligingly.
“I’ll pay you later!” Roxie yowled over her shoulder as she ducked around a dumpster, and shot like a laser toward a double-back corner.
“Like hell!” The clerk screamed in denial. “Nobody steals from my shop, you hear me!?”
Roxie’s heart sagged as she made the corner and charged straight into a chain-link fence with a chained gate. “Shit!”
She spun, and tried to scream past him, as he came on, but then had to leap backward as the tire iron cut end over end at her head and clattered against the far wall. Prone on her back, he made it to the implement before she could climb back to her feet, and so all she could do was press herself against the steel fence.
She felt a bead of sweat roll from her brow, clear to her navel, unobstructed. She has out of options. There was only one way to escape. She held up both hands, placatingly. “Look, mate, I’m just goin’ to get my billfold, awrite? There’s no reason to--”
As the tire-iron came up threateningly, she ditched the facade, and reached down with both hands to mount her last ditch defense. She grabbed the trailing end of the cloak, and ripped it straight up to her neck, with both eyes clamped shut.
After a pregnant silence, she opened one, and took a peek over the bunched fabric in front of her face.
She couldn't tell if he was stunned, or just horrified, but either way she would take it.
“Is that a skull and crossbones--oof!”
He didn’t have time to say more, as a heavy bag of spice drops fell from her cowl like divine providence, and she caught it with a quick underhand and slung it as hard as she could below the center of his apron, like a sugary blackjack right to the groin. He doubled over and she sprang, leapfrogging straight over his head in full, indignant exposure, leaving behind a trail of billowing dust and tumbling snackfoods as she thundered back out onto the street.
“NOBODY CAN CATCH THE CRIMSON STREAK!!” she cackled madly into the crush.
Roxie’s trip back to the apartment was slower after that, but brisk for the sake of being unimpeded, and soon she found herself seated in front Sabrina’s door, feeling quite a bit more glum than when she’d left it. Perhaps just a bit BEACUSE I look she’d lost most of her dishonestly gained foodstuffs in the scuffle, but mostly because along with her money-clip, she’d also left behind the key Sabrina had given her, and was locked out.
She thumped her head against the door, and sighed. “Hope Sabrina gets home soon.”
It was bizarrely both surprising, and expected when the door opened behind her, and she fell backward into the entryway to stare up at the person in question. After all, if you spoke of Giratina, it would surely come, so the saying went.
“‘Ello.” Roxie said sheepishly, still holding half a banana creme bread in her hand.
Sabrina tilted her head, and then as if she were leading up to something, turned her focus down the hall, upward from Roxie’s perspective. The rocker tilted her neck toward her own heaped clothing discarded in the hall. “Is the laundry basket a concept I must really explain to you?”
Roxie held up both her hands, as if trying to encapsulate the idea. “So, it’s like a basket...that you put laundry in?”
Sabrina grunted in a way that inferred everything but amusement. “A novel idea, I’m sure.”
Roxie swallowed cake. “I’m definitely intrigued.”
Sabrina, patience showing it’s threadbare state, pointed with the authority invested in her by eminent domain. “Please, I encourage you to test its effectiveness.” She then crossed both arms. “I am your girlfriend, Roxie. Not your maid.”
Roxie didn’t push it any further. It wasn’t wise, and she was more than content to take this tongue lashing as opposed to the one that would no doubt be forthcoming if she was asked to explain why her clothes were on the floor, and not on her.
Not to mention the tiniest admission that they were together, which had been for so long denied by Sabrina, seemed to erase any sour feeling from Roxie’s heart.
---
Sabrina’s living room, if it could so be called, provided none of the amenities to which Roxie was accustomed. Growing up for her had all been carry-overs from Almian ranch-life where living room doubled as dining room, and her and her father sat crammed knees to elbows on the couch, and ate freeze-dried TV dinners on fold-out trays, while they laughed and pointed with open mouths at the Pokemon Variety Hour, and then parted ways for bed.
In Sabrina’s home, the living room was rich, warm, egalitarian space, where two oaken and tweed chairs faced each other over a coffee table. There was no television, hidden or in plain view, and such provisions as there would have had to have been to take a meal here were nowhere to be seen, as Sabrina would have likely fainted at the mere suggestion.
For Sabrina, time spent in the living room, was time spent in contemplative meditation, simple distraction, or quiet discourse.
For Roxie, time spent in the living room, was punishment.
Today, Sabrina had chosen to read a thick paperback novel, over which she spared not a giggle or even a wry smile, so Roxie couldn’t have imagined it being her sort of thing, which need be, of course, either raucously silly, or plain tawdry, to get her to bother investing enough time to sit still. Still, Sabrina gently flicked over a page in the silence so deep Roxie could hear the clock in the other room quietly ticking, and even the quietest breath she could take in and out, seemed loud enough that it might as well have been the huffing of a runner in his last stretch.
Roxie, who most often chose to spend her time here in an effort to finally annoy Sabrina enough that she bid or begged Roxie to leave, did so for two main reasons:
For one, it was fucking boring.
For two, most often, she really itched for something to take around this time of day, and made every effort to see that she was excused to go and scratch that itch.
But today, Roxie decided to take it in good humor, since Sabrina had been really nice to her today. She had kept her fuss over Roxie trashing up the apartment down to a dull roar, she hadn’t even really gotten upset about Roxie digging through and wearing her old things, and even when she’d found out what Roxie had been up to, she’d only gone so far as to make Roxie return to the establishment she’d alighted from, and pay what she owed, though this time she was insistent that Roxie do it with her knickers on.
Sabrina hadn’t even left her to her fate when she’d complained of the possibility of getting her skull caved in upon her return, but instead, gone along with her, though, she had let Roxie do all of the talking. The rocker had actually been sort of surprised it went over so well, really. The guy had just taken her money, and said no more of it. Keen-like, even.
So Roxie sat in her own chair, opposite, with her knees folded beside her. Sitting this way aggravated Sabrina if she did it with her boots on, so Roxie was careful to take them off beforehand, and now sat scratching her ankle while she watched Sabrina read.
She kept this up for a long time, trying to be quiet and still, which were two very difficult things for Roxie, but it as it turned out she did not need to test the limits of her endurance, as just when she was adjusting herself for another long course of it, Sabrina dog-eared a page, set the novel aside, and folded her hands. “What is it?”
Roxie shifted, not expecting to be called on to explain herself, and plucked her sock back up over where she’d been scratching. “Nuffin, luv. Nuffin. I was jes watchin’ ya.”
Sabrina looked back at her with something that Roxie could pretend was contemplation, for lack of any real grasp of what computational engines ran behind those stolid red eyes, and then said something that took her by surprise. Not because it was profound, but because it was, to Roxie, a question she actually had a shot at being able to answer. Truly, it was a rarity among the more abstract queries she'd been posed since meeting Sabrina.
“Why?”
Roxie hugged her knees, indelicately putting her underwear on display, and rocked herself gently. “Because I like to.”
“I'm not doing anything.” Sabrina explained.
To which, the ex-leader only shrugged. “I know.”
Sabrina let out the tiniest huff. A huff so small that it might've passed for a staggered whisper from Roxie herself, but in Roxie's case suggested that there was about to be a lengthy diatribe. Instead, there was capitulation. “I don't understand why you pretend to be captivated. I’m not keeping you here.”
Roxie felt a little trickle of ice water run through her heart, at that. So it was back to this, again. She kept her smile on her face, but flattened her back against the chair, so that Sabrina couldn't see how the words had made her shoulders slump. Roxie didn't dare ask if Sabrina wanted her to go, since she were almost horrified of what Sabrina might say, whether she meant it or not. “I'm not sure wot you mean, dahling.”
Sabrina gave a minor scowl. “I mean, why do you just sit there, if you don't enjoy it? I'm not forcing you.”
Roxie, upon realizing that she was speaking in the specific, rather than general, let go of a breath, and took a moment to compose herself. Being that she didn't stock overmuch worth in composure itself, this did not take long. “Well, because you like it.”
Sabrina paused, and then seemed to review something, eyes subtly scanning from side to side as if looking over a transcript of events that Roxie couldn't see between them. “Why should that matter to you?”
Roxie flattened her mouth. She didn't really enjoy the implication that she was disconcerned with the feelings of others. She was willing to admit that occasionally, she could be quite the asshole, but she didn't go around in full disregard of any and all sentiment. She certainly tried not to go around in disregard of Sabrina's. Not only because it might've been a death wish, even.
“I’d like it if you were happy, is all.”
It was Sabrina’s turn to sit back sharply in her seat. She focused on Roxie, and kept her face impassive and expressionless. Only her eyes moved, like the ticker-tape in a telegraph machine.
It wasn't that the concepts or ideas that Roxie was talking about were foreign to her. She too, had lived a life with others in it once. She had known about all those things, even if her versions of them had been those of a child, undeveloped and over too soon. Rather, it was that she simply couldn't reconcile those concepts with regards to her current situation.
Why should anyone care how she felt? Why should anyone trouble themselves to see that she was pleased? She certainly made no such provisions for Roxie. She took care that Roxie fulfilled her obligations, obeyed her rules and those of the city, and didn't die while in close proximity to her home, lest the implications fall upon her. That was it.
As for how she felt about it, Sabrina didn't feel like it mattered. It was simply an abstraction, which had to be so often maintained, with more abstraction. Roxie had something that Sabrina wanted. In order for Sabrina to indulge in it as much as she liked, she maintained that abstraction by way of several meaningless acts which served to keep Roxie “happy” but did nothing but inject chaos and disorder into her life; being lenient when normally punishment should have been forthcoming, allowing Roxie to invade her privacy and personal space, and giving her otherwise free reign to do and speak as she pleased.
To Roxie, she supposed, these must have seemed reasonable facsimiles for the tenants of a romantic relationship. Being more pragmatic, Sabrina knew that this, like any other contract which two persons could enter into, was simply a matter of give and take, and the perceptions of such did not matter insofar as the fulfilment of its articles.
So it troubled her that Roxie seemed to care more than she did. Not because she felt inadequate, but because she knew it was dangerous. She frowned ever so slightly. She shouldn't have so easily allowed herself to use the affectionate titles Roxie had devised, as she was taking the term girlfriend far too seriously.
But then, hadn't she been meant to? Hadn't that been the idea? Hadn't she also done what she’d done to make Roxie happy?
She frowned deeper, and her eyes moved alarmingly fast. What kind of slippery slope was she on, exactly? Dismayed, she clicked her tongue, and fell back on deflecting rhetoric. “Why? You're the only one who does.”
Roxie made a face like a kicked Lillipup, which was, to Sabrina as disconcerting as nails on a chalkboard. In that look was sympathy, empathy, and a bizarre sort of inverted reflection of herself that made Sabrina wince. She shook her head before Roxie could object out loud. “Don't tell me you didn't see the way they looked at me, today.”
Roxie didn't have to think back too hard to recall the bowed heads of concession, the averted eyes of concern, the wrung hands of anxiety. Sabrina made almost everyone they’d come into contact with wary and meek.
Putting two and two together, it suddenly became more clear as to why she’d taken no guff over lifting that stuff from the corner shop when not but a few hours earlier she’d nearly been assaulted and battered. The very same clerk had simply taken her money, nodded his thanks, smiled in short increments, and sent them on their way. She knew now he’d simply been too afraid to do otherwise.
Even though the question was rhetorical, Roxie answered. “I saw.” She admitted, and scooted to the edge of her seat. Sabrina laid her hands defiantly on the arms of her chair, as Roxie slinked out her hers, and padded slowly around the table.
“Why do you think that is?” The psychic asked, her tone instructive, rather than philosophical. She intended to say exactly why, to explain to Roxie that the matter was of no concern, but the rocker only came straight to her, and sank right down to the floor, where she draped her arms into Sabrina’s lap, and rested her chin on Sabrina’s tightly crossed knee.
She looked at Sabrina with a bizarre sort of wonder in her her eyes that took Sabrina’s feeling of certitude away unnervingly. For her part, however, Roxie just smiled her low smile and shrugged. “I know e’zactly why. It’s because you see them as beneath you.”
Sabrina stiffened angrily at first, thinking it a rebuke of incredible gaw, that Roxie’s prostrating pose was meant to be mocking, but then the woman, who was, Sabrina had to remember, several years her senior, kissed the top of her leg, and threaded her fingertips through the supple fabric of Sabrina’s dress, in a supplicating way, before she went on to make a point that was perhaps more knifing than she realized. “And...you’re not wrong.” She giggled, and then shook her head. “But the way to choose to live your life, because of that, is the reason people look at you the way they do.”
Roxie looked back into her glower, even as Sabrina’s eyes blazed down at her, without a care in the world, as though she were contented, as though she were completely indifferent to that disdain, and that further, she had no desire to even escape it. She looked, in Sabrina’s frame of understanding, as though she were exactly where she wanted to be, on her knees, and defenseless. Sabrina hissed, in an utter vacuum of understanding. “People should be afraid of me.”
Roxie slid her hands slowly across her girlfriend's thighs, so that she could overlap them beneath her own chin. “Maybe they oughta be. But that dun’ mean they gotta be.”
Sabrina chortled darkly. “They would be better served, if they were.”
Roxie, who smiled and stuck her arms under Sabrina’s knees, hugging her legs tightly, denied that. “I’m not.”
Sabrina flattened her brow. So that was it. Roxie didn’t understand that she was the exception, not the rule. But then Roxie blew away that misconception as quickly as the others. “Because I know you can be kind,” she explained with her neck tucked between Sabrina’s kneecaps.
Sabrina laughed aloud, and pushed Roxie away with her shins, as she reset her legs, but the rocker clung stubbornly. “Roxie, if only you knew,” she chastised. “If only you understood. I am not kind. Not even close.”
Roxie’s own frown sprang to life then, and a gap of freckly skin disappeared between two crashing white brows. “I didn’t say you were!” Her look softened, and she returned to her chosen posture, but now it took on a more morose quality. “...I said you can be.” Her head thrashed, suddenly, as she denied Sabrina’s proclamation, even further. “And don’t treat me like I don’t understand what it’s like to feel like your past dictates your future. I know that just as well as anyone. Even you.”
Sabrina snarled. “Who I am today, hinges upon something I cannot change. My fate as a psychic, and the power to which I am vessel, whether I wanted it or not.” She tried again to force Roxie off, but the woman did not yield to the meagre physical force Sabrina was capable of investing, so compromised. The decision to resort to psychic ability was forestalled however, as Roxie spoke in turn.
Roxie smothered her face shamefully in Sabrina’s legs. “And I’m only here because of my drug problem, is that it?” She sighed. “You think I am where I am because I chose this?” She lifted her head. “Do you honestly think that?” She scoffed. “You think I want to wake up every day and find myself looking for sumfing that does me more harm than good, because It lets me forget how awful things are?” Roxie’s eyes watered, and she heaved a breath. “Maybe the smile has gotten so good it can even fool you, luv, but the only thing I have right now, that I have because I wanted it...”
She swallowed and set her head back down on Sabrina’s legs, once she’d finally settled. “...Is you.”
---
There came a time when the logic of discourse broke down, when the mathematics of a given range of possibilities could not be condensed any further, like the computation of a perfect chess game. Sometimes, in life, there was simply too many unexpected variables, too many unforeseen twists of intuition, too many tricks which a given scenario could permute toward under the guidance of human hands.
This, primarily, was the circumstance under which Sabrina found herself going to sleep most nights, her body enveloped in the fresh and still excitingly new sensations of post-orgasm delirium, and comfortably uncomfortable with sweat and saliva and the touch of another clinging to her body, as she contemplated the whys and hows of what had seen her to that state between rumpled bedsheets, and Roxie’s quietly recumbent form.
Continually, she found herself wondering how she was time and again outmaneuvered into a position, where Roxie, who was without a doubt the least clever, least gifted person she’d yet had the misfortune of bumping into, managed to entrap her time and time again, into this same sort of compromising situation.
It was often times enough to make her sorely desire jumping out of bed, and hurling Roxie from the room. And yet, there was always this intense feeling of satisfaction that threaded itself about the periphery of the situation, that she felt would overtake the whole experience if only she allowed it to.
She looked at Roxie, over the fluffy range of pillows, as though she were an object on the distant horizon.
She was rolled away, and herself quite sweaty and used-looking, which only further enhanced Sabrina’s wonder over the thing. Roxie was not a particularly beautiful woman, in the traditional sense. Nor in a modern one, to look at her. She was short, and awkwardly built, and freckly all over, and everything about her was such a livid mess, that Sabrina could almost imagine her slobbering all over the other side of her pillow. Every so often she would stir, and scratch at some part of her skin that was either already pinkened by the scratching, or bore the winding track-marks of more or less contemporary self-abuse. She would have had something of a cherubic face, if it hadn’t been marred by her snouty nose, and thin-lipped perpetual grin of vapidity. In short, Roxie was no beauty.
So this night, like all the others before it, Sabrina had no answer to arrive at. Except, that which had threatened to come up at the behest of their earlier conversation. That it wasn’t a question of outmaneuvering, or outplaying the other, not a question of advantage and disadvantage, but rather, a choice, concious or unconcious. Roxie had chosen to be with her, and she, by way of unspoken consent, had allowed that. Which, by what served as Roxie’s logic, meant that Sabrina had as good as chosen her, in kind.
Sabrina had to pay the matter some heed, now, it seemed, whether she wanted to or not, since all the evidence that existed was, at best, corollary, and there remained only one way to know more.
“Roxie,” she called in the dim light that crept into the room from the windows.
“Yeah?” Roxie answered. Sabrina knew she wasn’t asleep. She had, after all, only been awake for a handfull of hours, being a nocturnal beast. She was simply waiting.
“Did you mean what you said to me?” Sabrina asked.
Roxie shifted. “I did.”
Roxie had said she could be kind. And in spite of all the assurances Sabrina had that she was mistaken, the psychic had thus far been mistaken about a lot of things, regarding the woman who shared her bed, if she bought into this emergent theory. “Do you...” Sabrina felt her voice grow quiet in potent mixtures of confusion, and anger at herself, as rationality tried desperately to keep her from voicing the words she’d now arrived at. “Do you really want something better? Do you want to have something better to wake up to, every day?”
Roxie’s head swept across the pillow as she seemed to be trying not to cry. “I do.”
Sabrin wasn’t certain when hot tears spilled out of her own eyes, and ran in twin courses down the side of her face, pooling annoyingly in her ears, as she struggled with herself. “I want something better, too.”
She brought one hand up from her side to correct this gross oversight in bodily control, but before she could, Roxie hand already rolled and caught that hand in her own, pinning it to the mattress as the other came to the Psychic’s face.
Sabrina’s deeper sense of control whirled in panic, as she was sure Roxie felt those tears there, but next to the deep kiss she was drawn toward, impelled to by that sure-handed grasp, it just couldn’t compare.
Passion cooling back to a level that either of them could speak, Sabrina felt Roxie’s lips just a hair’s breadth from her own, quivering just as surely as her own were, in the culmination of hot expulsion of sobbing lungs. “Just help me along, luv, and I’ll be good to you. I’ll always be good to you.” She threaded her legs insistently over and through Sabrina’s own in a full-body grasp. “I’ve made so many mistakes before, and I’ve fucked up so bad I don’t know how to get right, but I can at least do that, if you just let me! I know I can.”
Sabrina grasped her hand so tight that it hurt, and pressed her forehead to Roxie’s. “Then please, Roxie,” she gasped. “I need you here, tonight. I need you to stay. Don’t go out. Don’t get yourself mixed up in this stuff any longer.” She positively crushed Roxie against herself. “Just lie here with me, and leave the rest of it behind. I can get you through it.”
All the air seemed to come out of Roxie at once, like she were ruptured hot-air balloon, or some racing car that had consumed it’s final petrol fumes just after the finish line and now needed pushed back to the garage. She lost all of her strength at once, and simply fell limp in Sabrina’s arms, and Sabrina knew that was what she’d been looking for.
Someone to finally take that impossible weight off of her back, to finally be willing to help her, not because she was a nuisance, or because they wanted her to go away, but because they actually cared about her. Someone who could give her a light at the end of the tunnel, a solution that wasn’t a solution in the chemical sense. Not some temporary fix, or bump to get her through, but a permanent, stable fixture, instead of another chemical. And the second she knew she had it, that it was forthcoming, the facade of casualness, of happiness totally imploded.
Roxie screamed because of how bad she hurt, for the first time in Sabrina’s company. She cried and wailed and shook, and couldn’t even move for the terrible fear and anguish she’d bottled for so long, that all Sabrina could do was keep her still, and hold her for real concern that she would simply melt into the blankets and vanish, right there in front of her. Even when it didn’t seem like there could be anything left inside the body which she was now beginning to realize was almost hideously frail and weak in her arms, Roxie cried on, coughing and choking, and sinking her teeth into Sabrina’s shoulder in an effort to bring it to a stop, which would surely fail, and did, for almost an hour.
Sabrina felt the expansion and deflation of Roxie’s lungs finally slow beneath the wide-splayed hands she held across her naked back. Though her collar was now slick with moisture, and any effort to do so would have been pointless, she felt Roxie try to wipe some of it away, with her fingertips, as she sniffled the last of her pent emotion into depletion. Her gestures were slow, and meek with exhaustion, and Sabrina found it difficult to begrudge her that, in this new understanding, even if it was not yet fully formed.
Still, she choked out her contribution to this new accord between them, this new treatise, which had the clock been wound back not but a scant two hours prior, Sabrina would have wrung her hands in cool satisfaction of: “I’ll give you anything.” Roxie moaned quietly, with her eyes closed, pressed tightly against Sabrina’s neck. “I’ll give you everything.”
As it was, Sabrina could only wonder how ignorant she’d been, to have not seen just how important, how crucial this little give-and-take between her and Roxie truly was. In her mind, the size of the thing, had clouded her understanding of it. She’d felt like it was such an insignificant, tiny thing, beneath her notice or contempt, and suitable enough to warrant. She gave trifles to Roxie, and in exchange, she could exact whatever she liked
But that just played right into what Roxie had said of her, didn’t it? To her, these deeds were small, and worthless, and so she regarded them as nothing. Just like she regarded everything, and everyone, as matters of insignificance and unimportance in the enormous scheme she alone could see.
But, the reverse, she now realized, ran counter to her assumption. The things she did, and the power she could put behind them, whatever their effect, was small only to her eyes. If, as Roxie had said, she was not incorrect in assuming she was above the station of mere mortals, then what did that make her?
To someone like Roxie, she couldn’t have been anything short of a goddess in terms of real ability and scope. And what could you call the intervening acts of a goddess, but simply what they were?
Miracles.
To her, these things were small, but she now realized in an abject lesson that still laid shuddering itself to sleep in her arms, that to Roxie, these little kindnesses, these insignificant niceties that Sabrina had regarded as simply a means to an end, were so enormous that they simply couldn’t be anything else.
In but as many words, Roxie had just forsworn all to her, in exchange for a simple promise to help, and to share in her burdens, which were, to her, unconquerable. And what had it really cost Sabrina, in the end? Did she lose anything, by making that promise? Maybe the loss of a few nights rest? To her, these matters were nothing. Sorting the human mind was miniscule work.
But she’d gotten Roxie’s entire world in the bargain: Anything and Everything. Roxie had been willing to give that, in exchange for something Sabrina was predisposed to give anyways. She decided right then and right there, that she was done playing part-time deity, and that she would leave the greater matters to someone else, or to noone else. It didn’t matter. Not as much as this did.
The logical part of her knew that it was not as easy as she made it sound, nor as simple. That next to her world, Roxie’s was just as insignificant as any other. But the fact that she’d been willing to give it to someone like Sabrina, meant that it was precious, and so was the agreement which bound Sabrina to it.
She didn’t doubt that she would face obstacles, and more barriers and hardship that she didn’t and couldn’t understand right now, but even if that was the case, there remained the satisfaction which she now felt--that she hadn’t felt in so long that she barely remembered being able to feel at all--which told her that if the importance of it felt tiny in comparison to the world around her, that because of the way Roxie felt about it, and because the fact that no one else in that wide, abundant world had ever seen fit to, it was the world she knew which needed to shrink to fit that feeling, rather than the other way around.
Roxie stayed that night, the whole night through, the first in their time spent together thus far, and refrained from searching the streets for more substances she didn’t need, content to be alone with Sabrina. For her part, Sabrina spent the night bringing her new understanding under the auspices of reality, and condensing it into a form which made room for this new optimism, yet still allowed for a cynical eye, to help make it practicable.
Roxie had stayed, that much was true. Her feelings, her words, they had all been earnest. Sabrina could stand on the solidity of that much. But Sabrina also knew that there would be many nights where Roxie would forsake that comfort, and follow the corruption that her life had brought with it, from a terrible past. That Roxie would, on occasions, lie to her, or defy her, based on a need she couldn’t control. And whereas the logical side of her thought it would be best to snuff out that want, this new immutable portion of her denied that as folly. Roxie had given her so much, without provocation or manipulation, and this part of her would not allow that to be cheapened or sullied by forcing Roxie to act or not act as she pleased. Roxie wanted to be free of this, and she wanted to be with her, and to have made either course a mandate would have destroyed the very thing this new, and slowly shaping worldview was built upon.
She would help, she would guide, and she would push if she had to, to a point. But in the end, Sabrina wanted it to be, just as much as Roxie needed it be, her own victory, when her addiction was finally dead and gone.
She looked over at Roxie, from the twin holes her contemplative stare had been boring into the ceiling, and, her view of things having finally contracted from their gargantuan state, finally saw what a truly huge undertaking this was to be. However, in her slowly thawing heart, one which really only had eyes for Roxie and Roxie alone, knew that in the end, not only would the effort be worth the result...
But she knew as well, if only simply for the fact that for the first time in a long time, she felt anything at all, that Roxie truly deserved it.
---
Reluctance felt the upswell of a great change, and that unsettled her deeply. She, after all, wanted what was best for Roxie. She was the orchestrator of the new design, the new equilibrium of Roxie’s heart. From wreckage, she had built a delicate balance. And the balance relied on one thing: Maintaining the status quo.
Reluctance saw calamity in the coming change, that was certain, but this was not the first upheaval she had faced. Nor the first she had put down. Reluctance gently patted the command console. “Oh Roxie. Damned if you aren't just the sweetest thing. But luv, we’ve been down this road before, haven’t we? It only ever leads us to more heartbreak.”
She sighed. “But it’s no matter, dahling. I know just how to stop this in it’s tracks. I’ll save you from yourself, you naive girl.” A heavy breaker switch to her left, patched ongoing REM sleep into the repressed subconscious.
Thereafter, Roxie, who normally twisted and turned in her sleep, positively writhed in it.
A girl she’d once known, a the first girl she’d ever been with, chased her through a darkened hall, stumbling and clambering, and still gaining on Roxie, even though she’d had half her body blown away. Roxie's legs felt slowed, like she was running through margarine, and no matter what she did, she could not escape. The bleeding, spilling corpse of a girl who been once been a Champion fell over her in wave of putrescence, pinning her to the floor, and began slithering it’s bloody half-hands against the back of her head, and between her legs in sick mockery of the way it had once, in life,shown her what it was like to truly be a woman, and all she could do was whimper with her mouth open, devoid of sound, as it went on and on, defiling her inside and out.
Figures emerged all around in the dark, but not to her aid.
A tall man, with regal headdress, and eyes that bulged from a purple face, wheezed with laughter from a collapsed throat that bore the diagonal scars of a bass-string garrote she had tightened.
A blue-haired youth burbled and spat red spit in her eyes, that drooled from the hole in the side of his mouth and the long, open slit in his esophagus.
A five-year old girl stared on accusingly from the horribly askew angle of her badly broken neck, as ice-cream dripped on the floor from her ghastly pale hand and melted, uneaten.
And all Roxie could do not to be driven insane, was to convince herself that she somehow deserved it. Just like she always did. Just like Reluctance planned it.
For Reluctance watched the scene unfold, and knew that it was a necessary hardship she now forced upon the whole, but that in the end, Roxie would be better off for it. As terrible as it might’ve been, the way they lived now was simply better, more stable than that which Roxie had chosen of her own accord. The drugs were making a mess out of Roxie, that much was true, but the greater truth of the matter, was that they worked. The drugs couldn’t lie to Roxie. The Drugs couldn’t betray Roxie’s love for them. The drugs would always be there. In the end, that was a preferable alternative to investing in a hope that would ultimately fail her, and drive Roxie who knew how much further down the hole. They had tried this once. And it had cost Roxie dearly. She would never allow it again.
Roxie could never be happy in that way again. Not after what had happened. They were simply too far gone. She wouldn’t let some temporary daydream jeopardize Roxie’s fragile stability, when the first time had done so much damage.
But it was hardly necessary to ruminate the matter. Soon, the woman in question would make her appearance, and drive the point home clearly enough even for Roxie herself to understand.
But a hand reached for the switch, just as the girl from Roxie’s past threatened to breach the shadows and emerge onto the stage of Roxie’s nightmare, and cut it off, letting the scene fade to black, without Billy making her dread appearance known. Not Reluctance’s hand, but another.
“That is more than enough.”
“Who are you?”
The tall figure in black did not answer her, but only turned, showing a face that Reluctance recognized instantly as foreign. The face, after all, did not resemble hers. Instead, it asked a question of it’s own. “Who leads, here?”
Reluctance, sitting straight in sudden fear, held her breath for a moment, until anger finally overcame her. She had never seen an outsider! She didn’t even know it was possible! “How--Why?...Who?” She shook her head. “I lead! I do! How did you get in here!? Who the hell are you?!”
The taller figure pulled her face more fully from the shadows, so that she could be seen for what she was. A set of sharp red eyes, leered out over a statuesque face. “I was sent here to establish diplomatic relations.”
Reluctance swallowed. “What are you talking about? Diplomatic relations with who--STOP THAT!” She roared in command, but it was too late.
Wrenching the control sideways, the new figure broke the switch cleanly from the board with a fizzle of static, and cast it to the floor. “I’m afraid that, given the nature of my purpose here, I can not allow this sort of thing to continue.”
“You can’t just--”
The figure tutted, and shook her head. “Sorry, but, I’m afraid Sabrina has decided that she loves Roxie quite deeply, and so I simply cannot abide your interfering with that. I am, after all, the Facet which oversees that matter. You may call me Sensuality, or simply The Diplomat, as you prefer. ”
“I DON’T CARE WHO YOU ARE, I WON'T HAVE TERMS DICTATED TO ME!” Reluctance screamed. “I HAVE THE PRIMACY, HERE!”
“Dictated?” Sensuality chuckled, stepping dangerously close to Reluctance until she’d been pressed back into her seat. “You misunderstand. I am only here to convey the sentiments over which I have the most faculty. I am an emissary, and nothing more. So long as you do not harm Roxie further, you have nothing to fear from me. In fact...”
She traced a alluring finger down the length of Reluctances jaw, kissed her unrepentantly on the mouth until she was molded against the headrest, and whispered hotly in her ear. “I think you will enjoy my methods of negotiation.”
Reluctance shoved her away, hard and cold, and kicked the chair away behind herself. “I won’t stand by, and watch you destroy everything I’ve built to protect Roxie! You think I’m hurting her? That’s NOTHING compared to what you’ll do!”
Sensuality gathered herself just as tall and proud as before, and looked down into Reluctance’s steel-blue eyes with a sultry, yet severe stare, domineering and unplayful. “Careful now. It wouldn’t be wise to make an enemy of me, nor the woman whom I represent. I can be a powerful ally, and a partner the likes of which, even your most lurid fantasy couldn’t compare to. Or I can be the thing which burns out out of this place, and raises a new Primary in your place, just as quickly. The decision is yours to make.”
Leaving Reluctance to stew, Sensuality turned on one wickedly sharp heel, and slinked from the control room. “I’ll be viewing Roxie's memories in the Data Storage Center. You can find me there, once you decide which it will be.”
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