Lost At Sea ⋆ JJ Maybank

𝖛𝖎𝖎. Death Compass

Kathryn can feel it. Her anxiety; it's crawling under her skin. She hates it. She hates this feeling that something bad is going to happen, that she's going to have a panic attack, but it's there, settling in her bones. The only thing she can do is overshoot and pretend as though everything is more than fine.

Which should be easy, if JJ would just stop screaming.

"And we were right outside like this." He leans on the brick wall of the Château's porch. "And all we hear is just, 'Bam! Bam! Bam!' Knocking paint off the wall, G! From the inside. Alright? And I'm just looking at them, like – Wait, first off, look at this shit." He comes over to Pope and Kie, sitting respectively on a couch and on a chair, and ruffles his hair. "Look at it." Dry paint falls from it.

They seem unimpressed, if not slightly irritated. "That's dandruff, disgusting," Kie groans.

"It's not," Kathryn says, a bit offended. She gestures to her hair. "Look. Do I look like someone who'd have dandruff in her hair?"

JJ huffs. "Oh, because I do?"

She smirks up to him. "Kinda."

He approaches her, and she flinches a bit. Whatever he was going to do, it discouraged him. He steps back, eyes narrowed at her. He wants to ask, but his own anxiety coursing through his body keeps him hyper and alert, a bit too much to even register that something is wrong with her.

"Anyway," he continues. "At that point, I was just, like... I'm waiting for death."

Pope puts his head in his hands. He probably thinks they're overreacting. "Oh, okay, so you saw the guys that shot at us, right?"

"Yeah."

"Did you get a good description of them? What did they look like? Anything we can bring to a police report?"

JJ walks away, eyes drifting in the distance, trying to remember anything. "...Burly."

Pope looks at him in disbelief. "Burly?"

"Yeah. You know, like–"

Kie shakes her head. "That's not very helpful." She turns to Kathryn, sitting next to her. "Anything else, Kat?"