Every single other person in their life had abandoned them, which, you know, sucked. And wasn’t Zarah’s fault, even though she liked to blame herself for it (she liked to blame herself for everything except the stuff that actually was her fault), but it left Kihri as literally the only responsible person in her life. Which, fine, whatever. She’d be the helpful fucking angel on her shoulder, she’d make sure to keep her ticking along because keeping her sister alive meant keeping herself alive, and keeping her okay meant that her one source of conversation and human contact wasn’t a broken wreck of a person. And also because she was her sister and she loved her and all that gay shit or whatever, but anyway.
The problem was that when literally any new opportunity for contact come into their lives, Zarah pushed them away. It was one thing for Kihri to have to fill that role when there was no alternative, but to have others appear and be rejected… She didn’t know if Zarah was doing it intentionally or not (realistically the latter, but spitefully she suspected the former), but it made it real hard for a girl to keep her motivation up.
“Okay,” she said, having taken a second to collect her thoughts and push down the bitter thoughts. “Okay. Good. Now, it’s time to talk strategy. Would you say there was any noticeable difference in the time different types of wounds took to heal? If there is, we can tailor the kinds of stuff we get to that. ”
Zarah blinked at her. “You… are not stopping me?”
“Zarah, I can’t stop you. If you’re actually committed to getting to the other side of this thing in one piece, then I’m all for us arming ourselves!”
“Then why…”
“Because I had to make sure you weren’t – aren’t – just going to use this as an excuse to go out in a blaze of glory or some bullshit like that.”
Zarah opened her mouth to protest, but Kihri fixed her with a stare until she closed it.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. So. Different types of injuries.”
“…not as far as I see, no. Remy did say that Orae was taking unusually long to heal from- to heal, so perhaps gunshots?”
“Hm, alright. Not really helpful for us, but interesting. If it’s a standard rate no matter what, then it might be that bullets do a lot of damage even though it’s quite concentrated. So we just need to figure out a way to do the maximum amount of damage without using a gun, and also hopefully without killing ourselves in the process…”
There. Crisis averted for now. Hopefully it would keep until after they were done dealing with all the crazy bullshit, but, well, hope in one hand and shit in the other.
And she couldn’t even shit.
I
“Excuse me?”
Rinet jumped, spinning around in her chair, barely managing to bite down on a curse. “-god, I’m so sorry, I didn’t hear you come in.” And also you shouldn’t have been able to come in, I distinctly remember locking the door. Her service weapon hung uncomfortably as always below her left armpit, but after the previous night, she took even less comfort in it than she had before.
spectrochroma.wordpress.com 