( "Helly," and Valerie pities him, she does, high out of his mind and half-asleep on a bedroll in the middle of the desert, "grab me a beer from the fridge, would you?"
There's no fridge, no liquor to be found. All seven optics are colors unequal, none matching the same hex code, dim to bright to dead. He must be beyond trashed, that inhaler having started full and ended almost empty. Valerie pities him. She does.
"Yeah," she whispers tenderly into the dark, not moving an inch as his lights go out like smothered embers, "sure thing." )
What an evil skin to wear, how odd to be wearing a pair of heels she doesn't fit into. It feels like more than that, too - it feels like living in someone else's memory, like being dressed up in a bad costume and playing a part in a bad play; one written by an idiot, signifying nothing. Helene. The name is rolled around in her brain well after their arrival to her apartment, burned into her mind the same as that hand on her lower back. Kenshin is gentleman and monster in equal measure. It makes her a sick sort of warm on the inside, heatstroke turning fatal, stomach turning over with dying, tattered butterflies.
Kenshin only ducks out for a second, but the silence he leaves in his wake is murder. Her body screams at her for her ignorance, screams at her for finding herself as a myth. Even David had God's help before he slew Goliath, and V is sure that God quit listening to her many, many years ago. Family, he'd asked in the car. No, they've either got bad cases of shot in the fuckin' head or Snake Nation IDs that signify having moved on to greener pastures. While some family does remain in the desert, they still eagerly away Valerie's return. V doesn't have the heart to tell them that that girl's been shoved in a trunk, eaten away by packrats and hacked up by scavengers.
Kenshin returns. His voice is both balm and agitator, infection and antibiotic. What a familiar feeling. What an awful one.
"No, I'm just feeling a real sistership with Mother Theresa tonight," V replies, doing as she's instructed and sitting beside him, presenting her injured side, "you just happen to benefit."
Nostalgia is a bitch. V almost says as much, watching the way Kenshin touches that duffel bag - he gives it more respect than she ever could, treating it like an old friend instead of longstanding burden. He opens it like he loves it, and maybe he does. He opens it like he loved the man who owned it, and maybe he did. Where V finds its straps to be heavy, its contents expensive but vital to maintain, every pocket is a memory to the other man. How short on those he must be these days! V pities him.
A pretty sitter, V is quiet about the way Kenshin starts to comb through her things. "Use whatever," she mumbles, tracing Kenshin bottom to top, "you're a prick and got me good. I hurt."
It would be uncomfortable for others to watch, the ease with which she strips both jacket and shirt to get to that initial stab wound. It's deep, it's starting to ache across the clavicle, but that won't be for much longer. His hands are lukewarm, tepid like a fresh corpse.
"You really can stay," and her optics shift to catch his, "I don't mind. Might even like it if you did."
There's something underneath that V isn't sure how to verbalize. Other girls do it better - dolls are more professional. Usually, there's some kind of lap-sitting, hand-holding warmup, but V can't find the ability to move or speak like that in this instance. Maybe any instance, really, fumbling through intimacy she's hardly had any practice with. Fumbling for something to hang onto, for the body next to her, a dog crawling back to the beating hand. It's the only hand it knows.
She stops one of his hands. Sick to her stomach, unsure what she is asking for, she blinks up at him with wide eyes. A zoom-in does nothing to help her read Kenshin any better; illiterate as she was years ago, then.
"It could be fun after all that, yeah?" Bluff. A dare. A fucking wild guess and shot in the dark, a self-convincing lie. "Why not, right?"
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