"Elise?"

"Yeah?"

"I had a nightmare."

Elise grunted, pushing herself up into a sitting position. She ran a hand through her coarse, fuchsia, doll-like hair - damaged from god knows how many dye jobs and straighteners and beauty treatments which she no longer cared about as much. Her blue eyes were no longer kind, hardened into two icy steel stones as she glared at her own little sister with something akin to disappointment. Sarah, of course, just smiled back at her wearily.

"What was the nightmare about?" asked Elise idly, as she checked through her supplies for the sixth time.

"Mum and dad," replied Sarah. She clutched her teddy-bear, Brian, in one hand as she nibbles through a survival biscuit.

Elise froze for a good two minutes, staring solidly at her gas mask. She hated talking about mum and dad to Sarah, but they seemed to become a much less important topic as the days crawled by. Then, as if someone breathed life into her limbs again, Elise continued double checking that everything she had before was still there. "Mum and dad are dead, Sarah." she sighed.

"Yeah, I know, doesn't mean I don't have nightmares about them." retorted Sarah irritably. By now, she was also checking through her smaller travel backpack, ensuring that everything was there. For a moment, the silence between the two was so tense and heavy that someone could have cut through it with a blade.

"I'm missing a filter for my gas mask." idly commented Sarah, double-checking the haversack which she kept the filters in. Elise looked up, and her expression turned colder. It was no secret that she constantly suspected the rest of the group to either be infected entirely, or wanting to get in on her secret 'supply spots' which, to be fair, only Elise actually knew about. She stood up, her worn-down combat boots crunching the undergrowth, and there was a click as she pushed out the knife from her Swiss army knife.

"Don't worry, I'll go and...ask, the others if they saw it." snarled Elise, eyeing the rest of the group in the distance with distrust. Sarah gulped - she didn't like the fact that Elise was so prone to wanting to stab someone. Again, she reminded herself that Elise was, most certainly, no longer that little girl in New York anymore, the one who looked less and less real every day. Then her fingers curled around a black filter in the grass beside her haversack.

"No, no, I found it!" cried Sarah hastily, and Elise stopped in her tracks. There was another click as she put the knife away, and stuffed the Swiss army knife into her pocket. The pair of them zipped their bags up in silence, and made their way to the others.

Like some sort of rabid monkey, Elise noticed something flying between the branches of a nearby tree. Her hand went to her bloodied white sheath, where she kept her stolen katana, and didn't flinch from its position when she realized it was just Rena. "Just Rena" was an understatement, too. Elise stood protectively in front of Sarah, and muttered "Stalker material if I ever saw one" snidely to her little sister, clearly gossiping about the strange woman at [i]just[/i] the right volume to have Rena hear it.

Sarah frowned, flicking the juvenile on the arm for trying to stir up trouble in the group. At once, Elise let her arms fall to their sides, and slid her shoulders down in a sulking, irritated sort of way. It would be quite amusing to watch a little girl stop someone as intimidating as Elise from doing anything 'bad'. But then again, the relationship between Elise and Sarah was quite amusing overall.

"Let's just get going," snapped Elise irritably. She stomped past Rena, and to the front of the group. Neither of them looked that fussed over the deaths that happened yesterday, albeit it was rumored that Sarah spent half the night crying over it, and Elise eventually rolled over and had to talk to her and comfort her about the deaths. Especially Milo's.