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[kittyjones.livejournal.com]

When; October 30th, evening.

Rating; PG-13

Characters; Kitty Jones (kittyjones), Faye Valentine (glock30)

Summary; Kitty heads over to Faye's place, to give a little medical attention and a whole lot of sarcasm.

Log; It was getting late. The sun was beginning to fade away into the last quiet night the City would have in the month of October. Tomorrow was Halloween, and Kitty had no doubt the streets would be filled with... well, she wasn't entirely sure what they'd be filled with. One could never tell in the City. But her mind wasn't really on candy and costumes.

It really wasn't on candy and costumes.

It wasn't far to walk, Building 8 was right next-door to her own block, but Kitty was in no mood to dawdle. She worried her bottom lip furiously with her teeth, and clenched her hands into fists. She hurried along the streets, not running, but walking at a brisk, fast past that seemed to warn everyone to get the hell out of her way. Her satchel was hastily slung over one shoulder, one buckle not secured in haste, and if a person had walked past her they could hear various thing rustling and clinking within it.

Whilst she was terrible at keeping up with the food shopping, for some reason Kitty was always able to keep a full medicine cabinet. She'd been almost paranoid, preparing for every pain-related eventuality, ever since she... she'd been...

Kitty shook her head. No point thinking about that now. That wouldn't help.

"She better not be drunk," the girl muttered under her breath in an attempt to distract herself. She was, of course, Faye. Faye who had been acting her normal annoying, sarcastic, far too big for her boots self until she let slip that something was... wrong. Faye has said something about a need for First Aid, and for some things to be dressed. Which implied wounds. Which implied something had caused the wounds. Which implied something, whatever the hell it was, had attacked Faye. What if she was -

Again, Kitty shook her head. Wouldn't help. In the slightest.

She was at the apartment now, coming up to the door, and pausing for a moment to compose herself. If she walked in looking like she did now, all flustered and windswept, she'd never live it down from Faye. Drawing in a deep, steadying breath, she straightened the sleeves of her coat and smoothed back her hair with one hand, before knocking on the door. She hoped the knock was brisk, yet casually. If knocks could really be measured in such ways. Probably it was just your average knock.

"Knock, knock, Valentine," she called in a voice somewhat filled with false cheer.

Comments

[glock30.livejournal.com]

"Don't think you're being cute," Faye replied, looking back at Kitty. "I know you like it when I put on a show for you, but, really, I'm not in the mood today, considering present circumstances."

Faye scowled at her, eyebrows knitting harshly together. "It's not like I'm an alcoholic, you know," she said, eyes roaming over the whiskey and then the bandages and then the antiseptic. Yup, way too familiar a scene for Faye to be comfortable with. "Certain situations just call for... reinforcements, I guess you could say. And believe me, when you've had as many of those situations as I have, you learn pretty quickly what works and what doesn't. Just because you're inexperienced doesn't mean that we all have to be."

The room was full of the sharp tang of Jack Daniels--at least it smelled like Jack--but Faye could still detect the heavy medicinal smell of antiseptic meeting rags. She steeled her spine, set her eyes, jaw, took a swig of the drink again and felt it run through her like hot coffee.

"Believe me, there's plenty on my mind right no-AAAH!" she screamed it. Holy fucking Hell but it burned! Her entire body felt like it was spasming out of control. She had to grab the back of the sofa and lean forward so that she didn't fall flat on her face as her back arched again and her eyes squeezed shut. No crying, she told herself. Don't you dare fucking cry. She kept that bargain with herself as well as she could and took another drink to numb the pain.

At this rate, the whiskey would be gone in ten minutes.

[kittyjones.livejournal.com]

The scowl Faye shot Kitty was the sort of filthy look that could make dogs whine and run yowling far into the distance. Luckily, Kitty was nicknamed for a far more sensible creature of a feline nature, and so she simply gave a little snort of Faye's denial of an alcohol problem. Not that she really had a problem. She just... liked alcohol. And so drank it. "I'm sure you're very well acquainted with the reinforcement process. And I have plenty of experience, just not in this particular area of... back up."

Kitty could see the tense muscles in Faye's back, the almost desperate way in which she was clutching the bottle, to quick look she gave the medical equipment before steeling herself once more. Kitty didn't like this. Any of this. It shouldn't have happened in the first place. She certainly didn't like putting the antiseptic on Faye's back and...

Faye screamed. Faye screamed. Kitty almost screamed herself in shock, but toned it down a notch to just a surprised grimace. And then Faye was falling, and grabbing the sofa, and her face was screwed up like she... "Oh, I... fuck. Sorry. Sorry I..." Kitty knew she was babbling, but what else could she do? "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to... I have to..."

She didn't know what to say. What words could counteract, could overrule something so basic as a scream of pain? How could she carry on... but she had to carry on, for Faye's own good. All she could do was nod approvingly as the injured woman reached for the bottle. "Yeah. Have another drink."

Kitty pressed on. She couldn't stop. She couldn't think about stopping. She couldn't even think about her not being able to think about stopping. She just had to... do it. She continued to clean the wounds, as gentle as she could possibly be, softly encouraging Faye to carry on drinking as she worked. And then perhaps by way of distraction, she spoke again. "Well, if there's plenty on your mind, then there's plenty for you to talk about. So talk."

[glock30.livejournal.com]

At Kitty's snort, Faye rolled here eyes. "What? Don't believe me? 200 woolongs says I'm not." Faye took a swig of the whiskey anyway, feeling it numb her mouth a little as soon as it left her throat. "So you're saying that you can't hold your alcohol? Well I knew that already." Faye looked at the bottle clutched in her hand and, for some reason, sobered enough to feel like someone had just kicked her in the chest. "Be thankful that you've never had to deal with this kind of... back up." She took another swig. "It's never fun."

The scream had surely torn her vocal chords in half. Her back was burning, skin had to be tearing itself off of her bones and falling to the floor. She could feel it. Her eyes were watering but only as a physical reaction to the pain, not because she wanted to cry. Faye hadn't cried in a long time and she wasn't about to start now. But... fuck it hurt. Even with the alcohol dulling her senses it hurt.

Faye felt her back twitch, the material of her sofa being clenched in her tight fingers. She dropped her forehead against the couch and it felt cool and smooth underneath her skin. Kitty was still cleaning the wounds: long, slow sweeps of antiseptic and cloth alternating on the soft skin covering her spine and the jagged tears of the incisions.

She sighed, taking another small, quick swig. "Believe me," Faye said, "you probably don't want to hear about it. It's all very long and boring and path... pathetic? Yeah, that's the word." Even Faye knew that her speech was slurring, but it didn't matter. As long as her back was more or less numb to sensation, she didn't care. At this point, though, Kitty could probably ask her anything and Faye would tell the true.

Oh, well, Faye thought, smirking.

[kittyjones.livejournal.com]

"All right," Kitty smiled a little, trying to lighten the mood with a joke, "I'll admit, you don't have a problem with alcohol, Valentine. Quite the opposite. Alcohol, judging by your hangovers, has a problem with you."

Keep her talking. That was the trick. Keep her talking, and (even better) keep her drinking, and then she might not... might not scream. At least, not so much. But... it worried her - in fact, to be quite honest, it threw her completely. Not just out of concern for a friend, but worry, worry that the wounds were causing this much pain. Were they worse, deeper than she had initially thought, were they...

No. Of course not. Kitty mentally reassured herself as she continued the gentle strokes of the cloth, moving from her back to the marks on her sides, working from top to bottom. Faye was just screaming because... well, because anybody would scream at a time like this. But the wounds weren't that bad. She could heal her. She could fix this. She could. She could.

And she did. Or at least, with one final sweep, she finished the application of the antiseptic. The process of fixing the woman up was by no means over, but this part, the inherently painful part, was. "That's done. See? Told you it wouldn't be so bad,"

She rid herself of the cloth, and realising her hands now stained thoroughly with the sharp scent of the liquid, wiped them hastily on her trousers, before taking a deep breath. The hard aspect was finished, they could take a breather for a minute, let Faye recover herself before Kitty moved on. "But then, you're always telling me I'm pathetic and boring, and self-absorbed too. And being self-absorbed, it's only natural I'd want to hear about things that are pathetic and boring. Like me. And, apparently, your life."

Seeing Faye smirk, Kitty took this as acquiescence to press on, and blurted out the first question that came to her mind. A broad question but, hey, it did the job. "Tell me about your world then. Who do you know back there?"

[glock30.livejournal.com]

"Damn straight," Faye agreed, taking a swig as if to emphasize her point. "And I just happen to have the ultimate cure for a hangover, too. Just don't tell the idiot who told me about it that I regularly practice what he preaches. Think of what it would do for my reputation!"

Faye could still feel the dull throbbing of disinfectant-cleaned pain. It thrummed across her back like a bass buried deep within her skin: stinging, hot, but it was heat underneath a heavy lead blanket. The smell of whiskey and the heavy antiseptic, she told herself, was what made her eyes sting. It wasn't the thought that she was marred, that she might actually have to blend in dress-wise that bothered her, nor was it the pain. Whatever, she thought. What the fuck ever. The whiskey was starting to taste good.

"If that's your def-in-iti-on of the word 'bad' then I reeeally have no desire to know what tor-tu-ous or agony means to you," she replied, feeling delicious cool air breeze over her back as Kitty moved away and began messing around on the coffee table. Faye's back still throbbed, but her hand throbbed more. It took a minute for her to realize that it was because she was clutching the bottle so hard her hand was shaking.

"Ha ha," she said, punctuating each syllable so that she was sure Kitty wouldn't mistake them for anything else. Kitty's question, though, threw her for a little bit of a loop.

Since being in the City, Faye had made it a point not to think of things that took her back to certain places. Thinking of her ruined home, for example, was something that she didn't revisit, and--although it was mostly unavoidable--thinking of the Bebop and all that came and went with it was territory that she didn't like to trod on. Right now, though, Faye was so far gone that it didn't matter. All the rules she had created for herself were on different continents from where she was.

She giggled--giggled! She knew she'd regret that later--and looked over her shoulder at Kitty. "Who do I know? It's not a question of who I do know so much as who I did know." She went to take a sip, thought better of it, and said, snickering, "Ed always makes for a goood story."

So help her god, she would steer this conversation as far out of Spiegel Sea as possible.

Oh yeah. She was tanked.

[kittyjones.livejournal.com]

It took some effort to stop herself from snorting with laughter. "How blessed you are to have knowledge of such a miraculous device. Don't worry, my lips are sealed. We wouldn't want to besmirch your pure reputation." Then she muttered under her breath, just loud enough so that the other woman could hear her. "Faye Valentine, eternal object of goodness and innocence, that's you."

Kitty thought it had been a long enough rest. Time to move on. She hated to disturb the flesh anymore, wanted to just leave it be, but it wouldn't do to leave the cuts open. So she so produced some clean bandages from her bag, slightly starched and stark in their whiteness. If she could wrap Faye up in this, then you wouldn't be able to see the cuts anymore, not for a little while. Hidden away, and protected. Just a few light strips of material could give the impression of her back being flawless once more. Until the strips were removed, of course. But never mind about that now. Carefully, she began to wrap them around Faye, doing (if she did say so herself) a far better job than the other woman had done initially on her own.

Not that she could really blame her.

"Torturous? Agony? In this present instance, I'd define them as over-exaggeration," she quipped back, providing verbal distraction once more. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Faye's hand clenched hard on the bottle, her knuckles showing through her skin, bone pale as any of the bandages. "Hey," she spoke gently, placing her own hand on top of it to stop it shaking, "be careful. I'm going to fix that hand up in a minute, all right? Just be careful with that bottle. You could break it, and then there'd be no more whiskey, and think how terrible that would be."

She watched Faye cautiously as the woman fell silent after her little mockery of a laugh, Kitty wondering guiltily if she'd said the wrong thing in asking her about her home. She knew it was always awkward when people asked her. She never had a single idea of what to say. And now Faye was... hold on a minute. Was that a... Yes. Yes, it was. Faye giggled. Faye Valentine just giggled. What the flying Jesus is going on here? Good God, the poor woman really was drunk.

Of course, Kitty wouldn't take advantage of her in her weakened state. Of course not. She was the perfect gentleman, in all but gender. "All right then, who did you know? There was your little ginger monkey of a computer genius, and...? Was there anybody... nice?"