Captain Uni
Supermaxx
Eddie Brock
Natty
Ezekiel
Nemaisare
mickilennial
Scrawl Banditta
Eve feat Joanie, @Natty
Death and All Her Friends v0.2 ʎɐp ʇɔǝɟɹǝd
"–Perfect day." Eve observed a single La Medusa leather slingback heel rest on its side in a puddle as the rain heaved down and she was pulled away. The golden face of the Gorgon emblem flecked with reflections of teal fur strands left floating about the surface too. The sensation of stormwater was clinging to her and every part of her felt cold and yet when she closed her eyes she was taken elsewhere. There was a beautiful room that overlooked the bay and an orange, hazing light filtering in, casting a glow out in long flakes that lit up the open space of the apartment with the colour of sunset in its slow passing.
Floor to ceiling windows, industrial aesthetic, and monsteras reaching high, high up to the ceiling. The leaves were big as blankets and made a canopy, outstretched and green and alive. A vinyl record crackled on a turntable and a deep, rich voice sang out. "I thought I was someone else."
The pull again and she returned to an alleyway. The deep quiet dark of the night and the dead girl just looked like she was sleeping. Propped up against a large and overflowing dumpster that didn’t deserve her and yet still managed to frame her in a certain kind of beauty anyway. She looked like a doll. A porcelain doll. Oh, but her hair had been shaved off and it reminded Eve of how she used to treat her own dolls sometimes – twisting their limbs unfortunately and cutting their hair down to the scalp just to see what was there.
Eve squatted down slowly, the death thread around this woman was positively humming. She stumbled backward just so, finding the heel of her shoe broken and snapped and there was something tight above her lip and when she brought her fingers to it and to her nose she found blood there. She had nothing beside her or with her other than herself and fragmentary layers stacking in her mind as images and moments. She'd had a bag earlier that night. Her bag, a phone, and the key to her apartment. Gone now, not dropped in the alleyway, gone. Only her coat clung wet to her ribs. She breathed in deep and her nose stung. ”Someone good.” She started to move again.
“Eve? Fuck, what the fuck happened?” A voice behind her - recogniseable. His name was just on the tip of her tongue as she turned around to look from the body and toward him but found herself elsewhere all over again with the rush of vertigo that swept her from her feet as the voice, her voice and someone else's sang again in unharmony. "Later when it gets dark we go home.”
Eve moved and dragged away from the alleyway somehow; bleeding through and back through her fragments and then to a bathroom, floating on her own smile that held itself up and an itch just beneath her nostril; familiar as anything. The reason she came to Harborlight in the first place. She knew the supply was clean. She knew the suppliers were Calder City Famiglia here. Nightclub. Real; late at night and midnight had not yet turned.
In her mind's eye she could picture tall trees; a wild and dense living jungle did the trick of quietening down her usual noise and the voices that walked with her. Now it was all clear skies without those clouds; an interplay of light that spackled through the holes of giant leaves that she looked up at on her high as she moved through the swaths of a sweaty crowd. People littered through this club and they had come for the same thing she had; an escape. Brief and fleeting connections that existed only here and only now. Eve knew the regulars of Harborlight; they were all each seeking to escape from something here and even if the faces changed, the desires did not and Eve liked to watch.
She was all aware and unaware of them; her skin prickling and glistening with a sheen and then her crisp fresh bill crossed hands at the bar and became transformed into a lurid coloured drink in a martini glass that looked like horror movie acid but tasted like sweet miracles. She was situating herself carefully so as not to let the hem of her barely-there dress lift too high, to make sure the pointed heel of her shoe linked against the leg of the stool when the floor vibrated beneath her and disturbed what mental clarity she’d found.
Beneath her the world trembled and something threatened to open but this had not been her. It had just been a girl. A girl at the bar. A very real girl. She wore a denim jacket and something sheer and chic.
A girl with red hair, long and beautiful and it obscured her face as she danced, danced, twirled and moved in slow motion to the sound of that droning song and the voice and the lyrics that were becoming an earworm that had started to make Eve feel nauseous. The woman wore a blue dress. And it twirled in the rays of the sun and then Eve could make out the shape of her long legs as a silhouette behind the fabric as she danced; fluid and free and as the woman’s hair fell again in that slow motion, television advertisement perfect bounce Eve could see her eyes and her cheekbones and she'd seen them before.
“Nice trick,” Eve said to the girl in denim now and she wore her expression soft as traces of wonder swam in her eyes beyond the mydriasis that had turned her pupils to boba pearls with size enough blot out the stormgrey of them. The approaching woman was younger than Eve, but only in age; something about her spirit was older. This one was a creature of tectonic emotions and something had bristled them and had made Eve’s hands grip the edge of the bar and almost lose a spill of the chartreuse martini but was enough to hold her in the moment and seal it shut.
The girl in denim initially just blinked towards her in response to the comment, as if snapped out of a thought.
“What trick?” She speaks before catching herself, as if the memory of what had just returning to her. “Oh shit, sorry. Been a long night.”
She took the spot at the bar next to her, flashing Eve a quick smile, her eyes taking her in fully for a moment. Pulling a couple of bills from the back of her phone case, she offered them towards the nearest bar tender.
“Rum and coke, please.”
It was quickly taken. As she waited, she let out a quick sigh as her eyes moved back towards the room, glancing nervously between wherever she had come from and windowed room above.
“That wibble wobble,” Eve said with a giggle, demonstrating physically by swaying on the stool. “They water down the rum here,” she added, swinging one leg over the other, bouncing the heel of her other foot against the floor. “And if you look too much up there it will look back at you.” That was spoken quieter.
She exhaled a bit, as if caught in the act.
“You know him?” She asked, turning back to her and gesturing with a tilt of her head. She grimaced a bit as her drink was passed to her and discovered the truth of her warning after a sip.
Eve’s gaze hovered off into the middle distance beyond the girl and at nothing. “Does it make a difference either way?”. She quickly snapped away from whatever temporary daze clouded her answer and expression and laughed loudly. “Be careful little aftershock.”
She nodded as if considering her words. She tried to distract herself, taking another sip through the straw before rubbing her temple in annoyance.
“Be honest with me.” She began, taking in all of Eve once again. “If a guy you used to fuck ghosted you and then tried to rock back up like nothing happened, how pissed would you be on a scale from 1 to earthquaking his balls?”
Eve smirked at that. “Oh guys I fuck don’t do that. They wouldn’t dare.” she laughed, knocking back the last of her drink. “As for what I’d do though…. You ever see how they make ground beef?”
The girl let out a short laugh.
“I’ll keep that in mind, then.” A hint of flirtation. “Sounds like a solid plan. I’ll have to invest in a mincer.”
“A must have for any girls apartment,” Eve said with a smirk before she quietened again, quirking a brow. ”I think I’m supposed to be somewhere else,” she said nonchalantly, watching off into nothing again.”Ciao, bella terremoto. Enjoy your night.”
And then Eve left.
”You make me forget myself.” It was gone midnight now and the streets were darkened and stark in this part of the city. She took an easy breath and was pirouetting along the curbline as that song hummed low and she followed it's sound where it was building. Thick, teal faux fur sleeves kept her warm; a coat that she hadn’t fastened and the chain metal of her tiny dress sparkled under flickering streetlights as she danced across the concrete alone. A beaded clutch dangled at her wrist.
"You just keep me hangin on" The song pulled her away from the voice that sought to reach her and dragged her into a room of concrete she did not recognise, this room did not belong to her. This had not happened, not to her. But night had set in and the red-haired girl was stood and her records were playing again. Something else this time but it crackled all the same and as it turned so too did the room as if the room itself sat upon the record as it moved through the story of the song. A gathering storm, he sang. Someone sang. Eve didn’t know. The girl was opening a birdcage but it remained empty until she climbed inside. “Are you supposed to go in there?” Eve asked, unsure why she did.
“Does it make a difference either way?” the girl answered and once she was inside of the cage, her hair had gone, and her long fingers wound the bars of the cage as it expanded in size to fit her and she sobbed against it and just stared out tearfully through Eve. “Where is he?” she cried out desperately through choked sobs, asking someone in the room who, to Eve, was only a presence. A crushing and oppressive weight that was inescapable.
The girl in denim flashed in front of Eve again, like a blink she couldn’t blink away. “You know him?” and then she was gone. Eve was sat in a chair; no longer watching the girl, but participating in her place as a looming figure approached that she didn’t recognise by sight, but only by the horrifying dread that started atop her head and bled all the way down like a cold, sharp chill before a hot brand touched her wrist and burned through her skin and Eve screamed–
”Oh such a perfect day..." A man held her wrist, and Eve screamed at him as suddenly her lengths of strange time as captive had passed and she staggered against the concrete curb of Calder City before falling against it with a smash. The streetlights blinking down at her, illuminating her back to lucidity. She was here.
"Jeez. You fucking bitch, I'm just trying to help you," spoke a man. A strange man, just a man that rubbed at his eyes and face. "You were just spinning in circles, weirdo. Fucking weirdo." Nobody of importance but her bag slipped and fell from her wrist and she bolted off. "Crazy cunt," the man said with disdain for her, but a shrug like the whole thing was just another night in Calder City.
The porcelain dead girl looked back in a flash and the earth moved under Eve yet again.
“You know him.”
"I'm glad I spent it with you."
"Goddamnit, Eve wake up!"
Recollection finally kicked in as she moved faster than her consciousness did through the slipstream and against the tugging of the death threads. Her eyes shifted from their pitch white to find their colour again and the ground had shape that she could feel beneath her outstretched hands. "Luca?"
"Yeah, it's me," he said in that way he did. With a sigh behind it, and his own brain working into action as he surveyed the scene himself. There was no window into his thoughts and he was a closed book, but there was concern in a microexpression; the way his eyes narrowed just a little and he flexed his hand instinctively as if he was on the attack.
Eve blinked. Once, twice, and again. "How did you find me? Why are you here?"
"You called your dad at some point," he thought to continue but watched as she frowned at that; like the notion of it meant nothing. He continued. "I was at Harborlight..." he said, glancing this way and that; for witnesses.
"I didn't call anyone, I lost my phone."
"Saw you leaving." Luca said, reaching into his own pocket to reveal that small beaded clutch and he held it out in front of her. "Followed your fucking trail of chaos– You practically scratched some guys eyes out back there!" He was already extending his free hand to help her. He looked at the body then and he didn't see beauty in it like Eve did, he saw the danger of the situation. "Eve did you do this?" he asked, and not for the first time since he'd found her, it just seemed to land for the first time now. Now that she'd come back from whatever had taken her over.
"I do not kill." Eve answered fast, the question had sobered her to an insulted anger that darkened her eyes and tensed her jaw.
Luca stopped and glanced between the two corpse and Eve. "Right," he said quietly, gaze scanning the alleyway again too, the danger loomed still. "What did you take? What happened? How did you get here?" He knew all of the answers, of course. He knew she was one of them; a grey. Silvio had spoken about her episodes and he'd even witnessed her peculiarities himself but never like this. He'd never seen her face twisted with such torment.
"I don't remember," Eve said. Still returning to herself. "There was a song, this song. It kept moving me. I don't remember."
Luca sighed again and took a sidelong glance down the darkness to the left of them that was their way out. “Come on, we’re getting out of here.” Luca lifted her up with little effort and she barely resisted, thrown over his shoulder as he set off out of the alleyway just at the moment the heavens seemed to open at last. That frail moment shattered. "Such a–"
Floor to ceiling windows, industrial aesthetic, and monsteras reaching high, high up to the ceiling. The leaves were big as blankets and made a canopy, outstretched and green and alive. A vinyl record crackled on a turntable and a deep, rich voice sang out. "I thought I was someone else."
The pull again and she returned to an alleyway. The deep quiet dark of the night and the dead girl just looked like she was sleeping. Propped up against a large and overflowing dumpster that didn’t deserve her and yet still managed to frame her in a certain kind of beauty anyway. She looked like a doll. A porcelain doll. Oh, but her hair had been shaved off and it reminded Eve of how she used to treat her own dolls sometimes – twisting their limbs unfortunately and cutting their hair down to the scalp just to see what was there.
Eve squatted down slowly, the death thread around this woman was positively humming. She stumbled backward just so, finding the heel of her shoe broken and snapped and there was something tight above her lip and when she brought her fingers to it and to her nose she found blood there. She had nothing beside her or with her other than herself and fragmentary layers stacking in her mind as images and moments. She'd had a bag earlier that night. Her bag, a phone, and the key to her apartment. Gone now, not dropped in the alleyway, gone. Only her coat clung wet to her ribs. She breathed in deep and her nose stung. ”Someone good.” She started to move again.
“Eve? Fuck, what the fuck happened?” A voice behind her - recogniseable. His name was just on the tip of her tongue as she turned around to look from the body and toward him but found herself elsewhere all over again with the rush of vertigo that swept her from her feet as the voice, her voice and someone else's sang again in unharmony. "Later when it gets dark we go home.”
Eve moved and dragged away from the alleyway somehow; bleeding through and back through her fragments and then to a bathroom, floating on her own smile that held itself up and an itch just beneath her nostril; familiar as anything. The reason she came to Harborlight in the first place. She knew the supply was clean. She knew the suppliers were Calder City Famiglia here. Nightclub. Real; late at night and midnight had not yet turned.
In her mind's eye she could picture tall trees; a wild and dense living jungle did the trick of quietening down her usual noise and the voices that walked with her. Now it was all clear skies without those clouds; an interplay of light that spackled through the holes of giant leaves that she looked up at on her high as she moved through the swaths of a sweaty crowd. People littered through this club and they had come for the same thing she had; an escape. Brief and fleeting connections that existed only here and only now. Eve knew the regulars of Harborlight; they were all each seeking to escape from something here and even if the faces changed, the desires did not and Eve liked to watch.
She was all aware and unaware of them; her skin prickling and glistening with a sheen and then her crisp fresh bill crossed hands at the bar and became transformed into a lurid coloured drink in a martini glass that looked like horror movie acid but tasted like sweet miracles. She was situating herself carefully so as not to let the hem of her barely-there dress lift too high, to make sure the pointed heel of her shoe linked against the leg of the stool when the floor vibrated beneath her and disturbed what mental clarity she’d found.
Beneath her the world trembled and something threatened to open but this had not been her. It had just been a girl. A girl at the bar. A very real girl. She wore a denim jacket and something sheer and chic.
A girl with red hair, long and beautiful and it obscured her face as she danced, danced, twirled and moved in slow motion to the sound of that droning song and the voice and the lyrics that were becoming an earworm that had started to make Eve feel nauseous. The woman wore a blue dress. And it twirled in the rays of the sun and then Eve could make out the shape of her long legs as a silhouette behind the fabric as she danced; fluid and free and as the woman’s hair fell again in that slow motion, television advertisement perfect bounce Eve could see her eyes and her cheekbones and she'd seen them before.
“Nice trick,” Eve said to the girl in denim now and she wore her expression soft as traces of wonder swam in her eyes beyond the mydriasis that had turned her pupils to boba pearls with size enough blot out the stormgrey of them. The approaching woman was younger than Eve, but only in age; something about her spirit was older. This one was a creature of tectonic emotions and something had bristled them and had made Eve’s hands grip the edge of the bar and almost lose a spill of the chartreuse martini but was enough to hold her in the moment and seal it shut.
The girl in denim initially just blinked towards her in response to the comment, as if snapped out of a thought.
“What trick?” She speaks before catching herself, as if the memory of what had just returning to her. “Oh shit, sorry. Been a long night.”
She took the spot at the bar next to her, flashing Eve a quick smile, her eyes taking her in fully for a moment. Pulling a couple of bills from the back of her phone case, she offered them towards the nearest bar tender.
“Rum and coke, please.”
It was quickly taken. As she waited, she let out a quick sigh as her eyes moved back towards the room, glancing nervously between wherever she had come from and windowed room above.
“That wibble wobble,” Eve said with a giggle, demonstrating physically by swaying on the stool. “They water down the rum here,” she added, swinging one leg over the other, bouncing the heel of her other foot against the floor. “And if you look too much up there it will look back at you.” That was spoken quieter.
She exhaled a bit, as if caught in the act.
“You know him?” She asked, turning back to her and gesturing with a tilt of her head. She grimaced a bit as her drink was passed to her and discovered the truth of her warning after a sip.
Eve’s gaze hovered off into the middle distance beyond the girl and at nothing. “Does it make a difference either way?”. She quickly snapped away from whatever temporary daze clouded her answer and expression and laughed loudly. “Be careful little aftershock.”
She nodded as if considering her words. She tried to distract herself, taking another sip through the straw before rubbing her temple in annoyance.
“Be honest with me.” She began, taking in all of Eve once again. “If a guy you used to fuck ghosted you and then tried to rock back up like nothing happened, how pissed would you be on a scale from 1 to earthquaking his balls?”
Eve smirked at that. “Oh guys I fuck don’t do that. They wouldn’t dare.” she laughed, knocking back the last of her drink. “As for what I’d do though…. You ever see how they make ground beef?”
The girl let out a short laugh.
“I’ll keep that in mind, then.” A hint of flirtation. “Sounds like a solid plan. I’ll have to invest in a mincer.”
“A must have for any girls apartment,” Eve said with a smirk before she quietened again, quirking a brow. ”I think I’m supposed to be somewhere else,” she said nonchalantly, watching off into nothing again.”Ciao, bella terremoto. Enjoy your night.”
And then Eve left.
”You make me forget myself.” It was gone midnight now and the streets were darkened and stark in this part of the city. She took an easy breath and was pirouetting along the curbline as that song hummed low and she followed it's sound where it was building. Thick, teal faux fur sleeves kept her warm; a coat that she hadn’t fastened and the chain metal of her tiny dress sparkled under flickering streetlights as she danced across the concrete alone. A beaded clutch dangled at her wrist.
“Eve? Who is this? Did you do this?” A voice she heard, the familiar voice but far away and yet clear enough to pierce the veil.
"You just keep me hangin on" The song pulled her away from the voice that sought to reach her and dragged her into a room of concrete she did not recognise, this room did not belong to her. This had not happened, not to her. But night had set in and the red-haired girl was stood and her records were playing again. Something else this time but it crackled all the same and as it turned so too did the room as if the room itself sat upon the record as it moved through the story of the song. A gathering storm, he sang. Someone sang. Eve didn’t know. The girl was opening a birdcage but it remained empty until she climbed inside. “Are you supposed to go in there?” Eve asked, unsure why she did.
“Does it make a difference either way?” the girl answered and once she was inside of the cage, her hair had gone, and her long fingers wound the bars of the cage as it expanded in size to fit her and she sobbed against it and just stared out tearfully through Eve. “Where is he?” she cried out desperately through choked sobs, asking someone in the room who, to Eve, was only a presence. A crushing and oppressive weight that was inescapable.
The girl in denim flashed in front of Eve again, like a blink she couldn’t blink away. “You know him?” and then she was gone. Eve was sat in a chair; no longer watching the girl, but participating in her place as a looming figure approached that she didn’t recognise by sight, but only by the horrifying dread that started atop her head and bled all the way down like a cold, sharp chill before a hot brand touched her wrist and burned through her skin and Eve screamed–
”Oh such a perfect day..." A man held her wrist, and Eve screamed at him as suddenly her lengths of strange time as captive had passed and she staggered against the concrete curb of Calder City before falling against it with a smash. The streetlights blinking down at her, illuminating her back to lucidity. She was here.
"Jeez. You fucking bitch, I'm just trying to help you," spoke a man. A strange man, just a man that rubbed at his eyes and face. "You were just spinning in circles, weirdo. Fucking weirdo." Nobody of importance but her bag slipped and fell from her wrist and she bolted off. "Crazy cunt," the man said with disdain for her, but a shrug like the whole thing was just another night in Calder City.
The porcelain dead girl looked back in a flash and the earth moved under Eve yet again.
“You know him.”
"I'm glad I spent it with you."
"Goddamnit, Eve wake up!"
Recollection finally kicked in as she moved faster than her consciousness did through the slipstream and against the tugging of the death threads. Her eyes shifted from their pitch white to find their colour again and the ground had shape that she could feel beneath her outstretched hands. "Luca?"
"Yeah, it's me," he said in that way he did. With a sigh behind it, and his own brain working into action as he surveyed the scene himself. There was no window into his thoughts and he was a closed book, but there was concern in a microexpression; the way his eyes narrowed just a little and he flexed his hand instinctively as if he was on the attack.
Eve blinked. Once, twice, and again. "How did you find me? Why are you here?"
"You called your dad at some point," he thought to continue but watched as she frowned at that; like the notion of it meant nothing. He continued. "I was at Harborlight..." he said, glancing this way and that; for witnesses.
"I didn't call anyone, I lost my phone."
"Saw you leaving." Luca said, reaching into his own pocket to reveal that small beaded clutch and he held it out in front of her. "Followed your fucking trail of chaos– You practically scratched some guys eyes out back there!" He was already extending his free hand to help her. He looked at the body then and he didn't see beauty in it like Eve did, he saw the danger of the situation. "Eve did you do this?" he asked, and not for the first time since he'd found her, it just seemed to land for the first time now. Now that she'd come back from whatever had taken her over.
"I do not kill." Eve answered fast, the question had sobered her to an insulted anger that darkened her eyes and tensed her jaw.
Luca stopped and glanced between the two corpse and Eve. "Right," he said quietly, gaze scanning the alleyway again too, the danger loomed still. "What did you take? What happened? How did you get here?" He knew all of the answers, of course. He knew she was one of them; a grey. Silvio had spoken about her episodes and he'd even witnessed her peculiarities himself but never like this. He'd never seen her face twisted with such torment.
"I don't remember," Eve said. Still returning to herself. "There was a song, this song. It kept moving me. I don't remember."
Luca sighed again and took a sidelong glance down the darkness to the left of them that was their way out. “Come on, we’re getting out of here.” Luca lifted her up with little effort and she barely resisted, thrown over his shoulder as he set off out of the alleyway just at the moment the heavens seemed to open at last. That frail moment shattered. "Such a–"
