PERVERSE - Apply Fic

18

Eva tried her best to bathe in their bathroom sink to get the dirt out of her hair. Barry kept complaining about the smell. She has been rinsing herself in the sink for a better part of an hour when Fallon leaves. She is the first, unable to sleep. Eva doesn't worry if it's her. She knows Barry is an idiot. It is not her that smells, but the body they have shoved into the storage room, through the blankets they forced into the cracks in the door.

She returns to the main room after forty-five minutes of dipping her hair in the cold water. It could have become warmer, but Eva did not care to burn herself. She does not mind the cold the way the others do. Perhaps because she didn't die in the warmth of the day, in the arms of someone who cared about her.

Opioid deaths are so common around here that Eva is surprised there isn't someone there like her.

She whips her wet hair around her head. The sun is not yet rising. If she were to go outside, like so many of the others, her hair would freeze in chunks on her head. Only Ambrose is still there.

She pulls a cigarette out of her pocket and lights it. He looks at her. She drags in slowly and exhales, the air blowing into the room.

"Better smell than death, isn't it?" she cackles.

Ambrose shrugs. It smells like death in it's own right. Like the old age home of an aunt he barely remembers seeing, the stench in the walls just like of the old and the smell of dirt. Maybe that's the body. It's hard to think with so many spells.

"I thought we might be Gods," Ambrose admits. "Didn't you?"

Eva huffs, gesturing wildly with her cigarette, "I mean, did you think you were the kind of person who would become a god? I know who I am, Ro. Do you?"

Ambrose shrugs, "no idea."

She looks him up and down. He's handsome, probably. Not her type. He would be more handsome if he knew it, she thinks, and maybe that makes him more her type. She grabs her jacket, still dirty, and starts to shrug in on.

"Come on," she says. "We should go get that new lockbox."

~~~

It is irresponsible to let out all your heat at once in a cold like this one. It didn't return in the hours since she got back. Just knowing about the bodies in the church, literal and figurative, she became as cold as if she too were inside a coffin.

She wonders if she has an unmarked grave. She wonders if she was cremated, if they could even find her body, how many unmarked graves there are in town.

Kaia couldn't keep in the heat, and it's long gone now. The anger she felt, the need to let it out. Kaia has always been good at making herself smile. Even in the cold. Even as she stares up above her, bathing in the soft gold glow of the streetlight above her head, feeling the first snow of the year fall on her face. She stops moving just to feel it rain, the light and the snow, down on her face.

She never even liked the cold, unless it was an ocean wave on a hot day. She shouldn't have let all her heat out at once. Now, Kaia doesn't even care, and she isn't trying to make herself not care.

It reminds her of the day she first came into Canada, when she knew nobody and nobody knew her. She always hated being unaccepted. One of the benefits of going somewhere new is that there is no one beside you denying you.

Clare is behind Kaia by quite a distance. They left together, told the others they were going to search for Leo, but they didn't walk together. Kaia was just a bit quicker. She moves steps ahead, and Clare doesn't try to catch her. Actually, they are surprised Kaia invited herself along with Clare.