Clorad==> Check on Kirbyy.
>You’ve never been to Kirbyy’s hive before; as much as you like her, you felt it safer to keep some layer of professionalism between you both. You’ve already watched people die, getting close to a yellowblood like her is just stupid. But you’re here now, with a pot of soup and a box of cold medicine, because it’s been, what, a week? It’s been longer than it should be. You should have brought Sydnee to check her out.
Kirbyy’s hive is in the woods, a few miles from Dedede’s compound for easy visiting, and isolated. She’s told you she basically just sleeps there, and does anything interesting with her matesprit. Sleeps, and stores her clothes, half of which she ‘borrowed’ from you with no intention of returning. It’s… Modest. You’re surprised at how simple it is. There isn’t even a TV going inside.
You knock three times at the door and wait. If she’s sleeping, you’ll feel guilty waking her, but you’re worried. If she isn’t with Dedede, there’s no reason for her to be away this long, or at least not without checking in. The house is silent, so you knock again, and call out to her.
The secuwrathy team looks tense behind you, waiting near the scuttlebuggy. This is a dangerous thing, you’ve been told. The door opens silently and you bite your tongue, taking a short inhale instead.
“Hi, Kirbyy.” You say, glaring at Giggle Knives, but manage not to let it seep into your voice. This is your fight. She’s yours. “Are you still feeling sick? I brought soup.”
Giggle smiles wider, her artificially sharpened teeth glinting in the moonslight. “If you scream for them, I’ll kill her. I might do it anyway.” She steps aside, graceful, and you walk in.
“I don’t need help.” You sigh, dropping your care package to the floor and watching Giggle’s smile twitch slightly when you don’t react to the splash of hot liquid. You’ve been alive too long, in too many bad situations, to let yourself show fear now. “I’m going to destroy you, and I’ll have it televised.”
“Oh, you don’t mean that. I can just touch your pan, just like that troll you think about so much used to. Doesn’t he scare you? You had to kill him in his sleep.” She laughs, turning on her heel and leading you out the back door. “All he had to do was speak, but I can just think.”
As soon as her foot touches the grass, you jam the hilt of your scimitar into the back of her skull, and make her fall. She rolls with it and spins to face you, dropping her pistols into her hands and firing close enough to your head that your fin burns, and your ears ring, barely managing to dodge the shot. Over the crack of the shot, you hear a manic laughter, that gets overlayed with another track on the next shot. Why can’t clowns just have regular guns? She cracks the pistol across your face, snarling, and your blood splatters over the painted splatters on the muzzle.
Dodging to the side keeps you from being hit more than just a glance off your shoulder, which sears and aches, but doesn’t make your arm stop working. Your head spins, and you think you black out for just a second, but come to as your face hits the dirt to keep running. The manic laughter layers into an ungodly cacophony, bearing down on your pan as you maneuver trees and half-completed garden beds to get nearer to her. She reloads, laughing herself.
“I’ll win. I’m going to take over this worthless planet, and your kind will rot.” She shoots again and you shudder as the shot glances against your knee. She’s moving closer, now. Thinks she’s winning. “We should be the ruling class, after all. We’re the dominant caste; we’re the ones the gods speak to.”
You run towards her with unsteady footsteps (why did you choose to wear heels?) and hiss when a bullet shatters your left scimitar. She looks scared, backing away, and the weight on your pan gets so much more, enough to barely slow you, and it feels like cracking, you want to lay down.
You want to sleep.
You want her to win.
You remember Dartos, you remember waking up alone, you remember being ripped from your island and all your memories. You remember choosing to fall in love with someone because being alone was more terrifying than the bruises.
Still, you reach her, and turn the hilt in your left hand towards her and swing it at her head. It connects with a thud, with the strange, muted sound of skin breaking over bone. She falls with a shriek as your secuwrathy team swarm around you, but you snarl and they back off, shrinking into the trees.
She lifts one pistol to fire a shot and you kick her hand, feeling sick and satisfied when you hear the bones shatter and the sharp intake of breath she makes, the sound when it’s too much pain to even make you scream. The pistol clatters and she draws her arm to her chest, shaking with silent, harsh sobs.
“Collar.” You snap, and one is handed to you. You stomp on her wrist to make her drop the other gun and collar her, feeling at once the pressure sitting against your pan ease. The memories waiting like a sick taste in your throat fade again, no longer distant and foggy, but no longer current and painful. Blood dribbles away from the needles in her skin, keeping the collar hard to remove and injecting her with a low-grade psychotropic. “I’m going to kill you, and you will never feel your powers again before I do.”
She yanks at the collar, sobbing with screams, blood and unsealed paint dripping down her cheek, her arm, her broken hand clutched tight to her chest. One of your team tentatively wraps your arm with a ripped sleeve, another two moving to pick her up. Giggle screams more when they lift a cloth to her cheek, and you yank their arm back hard enough to throw them to the ground, feeling your skin burn with warning colors.
“Don’t touch her. She keeps her face until her church takes it.” You want to take it yourself, but you can’t. You can’t. Not if you’re going to look Muralist in the eye again. “I’m going to kill you tomorrow. And I will make it hurt. Tell me where she is, or I let them take your face from you.”
Giggle fights against the hold on her arms, and then falls forward when her handcuffs are placed and she’s released. “Don’t. You can’t.” She sits up on her knees, snapping at the hands that lift her to her feet. You motion for a muzzle. “She’s in the trap. She’s alive.”
“Good.” You watch her be muzzled and shove through the two secuwrathy still trying to bandage you to get your friend. “Think about your death. There’s no one waiting for you on the other side.”
Kirbyy is fine, bruised and traumatized but she clings to you unbroken, and lets you take her to your scuttlebuggy to go to the palace. When you get there Sydnee frets over both of you and you insist on her sleeping in the block directly beside yours, where your team will keep her safe. She’s alive. That’s all that matters. She’s alive, and Giggle is captured, and the fuzz in your pan doesn’t ache, though you don’t think you’ll ever get that time back from her.
Your dayterrors will fade, again, like they did before, the last time someone touched your pan, the last time you were forced to remember Dartos and your island and everything before you left the mining colony. At least you don’t love her.