PERVERSE - Apply Fic

10

When they regroup, it is past noon. Barry and Lydia make frozen pizza after frozen pizza in what passes as an oven in their basement. It took forty minutes to preheat, and another hour to cook all four pizzas, one after the other. It's three in the afternoon, but it feels like a midnight snack. The sun is already in the west, so lights don't stream in through the closed blinds covering a window so small they couldn't crawl out in the event of a fire.

In quiet, they mostly sit and eat. Their journey back to life has left them with a jet lag, and with tired eyes and blinks that last too long, they eat on their separate cots, mostly at separate from separate pizzas. The cheese burns, sticking to the roof of their mouth. The oven has raised the temperature of the room by at least five degrees Celsius, akin to having a personal space heater. If they closed their eyes and ignored the old smell of the blankets, it might feel like a place they'd rather be. At the very least, the basement of the church is starting to feel less transient. There isn't another place they can go.

Once everyone is done eating, Audrey passes out sheets. With Kaia and Este's help, they compiled information on everyone and they pass them around.

"You don't have to share if you don't want to," Audrey's voice is sharp and clipped. "I mean, I know, so I can do the investigating if you aren't interested."

"I mean, we don't have to read them either," Eva shakes her head. "We don't have to do anything."

Kaia wants to agree, but she can't. She loves horror movies. Kaia can remember going to an older theatre in Vancouver with Rory, curling up next to her and watching classics, trying to commit every thought that occurred to her at the moment to share with Rory later. The buttery taste of popcorn and comfort and excitement was on her tongue. Kaia doesn't know much, but she knows a few film theories. Their deaths aren't MacGuffins. At least, Kaia's death isn't. It's everything.

No, the pages are Chekov's gun. It will go off. Possibly immediately. The people who killed them seemed trigger-happy. Maybe it's Chelster.

Barry doesn't care for his. He essentially tosses it aside. He knows what he did. His world stopped stilling the second she died. He is certain that his love for her didn't bring her back to life. It would have done so sooner than his death. If anything, his love for her rose him from the grave. He had to join her on whatever plane of existence, whatever spot in Heaven or Hell or whatever in between they were then and are now.

Lydia does peek at the information from her death. She had a stroke. A fan site reports her brain was without oxygen for twelve minutes, and her parents unplugged her body, and run on machines but without any activity in its brain, twelve days later as well. She's always appreciated symmetry.

When Clare gets their file, they pour through it immediately. There are articles in the local newspaper and a few stories reported at the national level. A boy whose name she doesn't know, a face they can't picture. They hear the sound of a gun firing. A boy who hated the police, who pled not guilty. The smell of hot tar in the air, warmth through their stomach. Laboured breaths. Squeezing someone's hand. Then, the thought is gone. The file says Clare Canosa is a local town hero. The Canosa family is still in town, and she had a Catholic burial that thousands of people attended. The boy's prison is hundreds of miles further south. That's what happens to cop killers.

A face Clare cannot picture. They wonder what he would say now, two years into his sentence with at least twenty more to go. He's seventeen now. Maybe if they did know each other before, Clare wouldn't recognize the young man the boy is becoming.

True crime podcasts sometimes start with stranger premises.

Leo only skims his paper, since the details are already aligned. He died in a fire in a factory. He didn't take his medication that morning. Surely, he was unconscious before he died. At least he doesn't think he suffered. His body was recovered but the funeral did not have an open casket. He doesn't want to think about his mother standing over his grave, or people saluting him as if death has any value, or as if Leo's life had any either.