Black.

All around.

Everything, really. Herself, too. She was just a midnight void, a phased existence, a concept composed of a million-million ideas that never really amounted to more than herself. Constant, unending absence... and yet, still, a soul - a consciousness - remained.

Why?

She pondered it to herself. She'd never really died before. Never in, uh... in a way that didn't start with pain and then immediately blink to an awakening within the caustic amniotic fluids of a morgue's cold-womb. Never in a way that didn't still give her nightmares, thirty plus years later, making her wake up in a cold sweat as the reaper came for her in the form of rigid steel and burning rubber. Never in a way that didn't make her cry when she remembered it in the evenings... though she had never told her therapist about that.

Some things were too personal to be shared outside of the mind of the self, she figured. Like, yes, the corporate counselor at Tsang HQ had told her that therapy was important... that she really should be medicating, because most people got past their death in the first decade... but fuck that guy. She had always figured he was just trying to slip her some benzos and get her nice and pliant. He seemed the type.

But enough about him. The consciousness of a girl had been given momentary peace, a brief respite, and she didn't want to fucking spend it thinking about the sleazy dude who Tsang had assigned to make sure she wasn't too suicidal. No... instead, she thought of things that brought comfort. Things she wanted to return to... things she couldn't wait to get back to, honestly.

First up? Purity. Sure... she had a rocky relationship with the pinkette. It ate away at the non-Purity entity that Puri had, to be blunt, tried to coerce her into sex- no. Rape. It was rape, girlie. Sex without consent is rape, she reminded herself, even if she would normally have wanted that rapist under normal circumstances. Hell, she had already given herself - willingly and enthusiastically - to said would-be-rapist only days prior. She had tasted the apple of Eden, and drank deep of sin's dark delights... and found those pleasures of the flesh all too delicious.

And yet... Yeah. No, yeah. Purity had tried to rape her, and yet... Purity had also begged her, crying, to be taken back. She had realized what she had done was nigh upon unforgivable; she had been bitten, kicked, and treated in a way deserved of a rapist, and yet her love was still strong. She had stayed, despite it all - even after the ghoulette had fucking killed a dude, and set them both to be fugitives, she had stayed.

So... The idea of a blonde felt her heart-no-heart chill and pale, growing heavy at the edges but hollow within - a leaden effigy, full of room for more than what was present, but outwardly far too weighty for much more than grief. So the ex-secretary had taken her back, taken her in... stayed with her, and even made it that much more official. They were... together now. No more situationship. No more tentative dance about what they were - they were lovers, officially, and without question.

Was it worth it?

Amorphous blackness closed its eyes though it had none, mentally pinching the bridge of an amorphous, endless-yet-nonexistent nose. Fuck. Fu-u-uck. That was enough about Purity... she could wake up mad, frankly, and then give Purity a renewed piece of her mind. Or maybe not, really. Maybe she'd just... Take the path of least resistance, which lay intertwined with the path of greatest comfort. Having the pinkette around had really... it had really done something good, in the end, for the girl with the emerald eyes.

But that was, as she reminded herself actively and with more than a pinch of self loathing, e-fucking-nough about Purity. No... The next mote of comfort she clung to was chestnut of flesh, pale of lock, and ruby-eyed in a way that would make even a vampire jealous. Her name was Esthrielle. Esthrielle Esippardi, apparently, though the comfort-starved wraith had yet to really understand her relationship with the man who was apparently a dohge. Doje? Doughj? Was that really how you pronounced it?

Fucking Italian. All floral vowels and soft consonants. Eastern languages had been a topic she had taken in college, back when she was alive enough for college... they had kicked her out after she had been manslaughtered vehicularly, of course. Some institutions only played with the second-living - some, those who were stubborn and paranoid and perhaps just a bit racist (speciesist? existentialist?) denied all but the true-living, the first-living.

Anywho.

Esthrielle had been... Well? She also had a strange relationship with the docile little lamb who was dead-but-dreaming even now. Their first meeting had been a whirlwind of thought, emotion, and sensation for the girl with the needle-sharp teeth. Even now she could imagine the crackle of electricity as it flowed through Est's blade; even now, she could still see the gleam of its light upon Est's reinforced carapace, black and polished as a beetle's own. The smell of charring flesh, inanimate yet animate, accompanied the memory.

Est had killed that man, the potential abuser, and saved the would-be victim from a new and permanent trauma, a black brand upon her soul which would never really go away. And then, of course, Est had ordered her to take the pair of them somewhere safe - back to the golden haired girl's apartment. She had been so very gruff, then... so very, very gruff. Brusque. Demanding. Concise.

In hindsight, it was everything Est had needed to be. The then-Tsang employee would have bubbled and gushed and sobbed and floundered without a strong, firm hand to guide her after such an abhorrent, abominable experience. And, of course, it was just how Est was, in a lot of ways - even now, after having shared everything two people truly could (some exceptions may apply), Est was just a short-tempered and short-spoken sort of woman. It was how it was, as the youth of the UNAC would say.

So... Est, an in-the-flesh icon to represent every little fault of the East against the West, had become something of an antagonist for a bit. She was, to be blunt, a terrorist. A religious extremist. A murderer. The argument could be made that she was a genocidal maniac, a xenophobic bigot who would see all like the girl she had saved laying dead in the streets. And yet... she had saved the gal with the black-dyed tips.

Est had saved her. She didn't have to save her. She could have just grabbed anyone off the street, or even just let that awful man do his dark deed and then swooped in while his victim was alone, cold and vulnerable, dripping with someone else's lust and her own blood. She would have been far too weak and fragile to even think of denying the Wayward, much less giving her all the muted fury she had been bestowed in the apartment. Est would never have known the teeth of a ghoul, because the ghoul wouldn't have been strong enough of spirit to deliver such alabaster daggers.

And more than that? Est had... had missed her, on purpose, in Judas's manse. She had aimed the gun, and there was no possible way she would have missed unless she had intended to miss. Her bullet had gone wide, sparing the sleepy secretary, and buried itself into the wall behind blonde hair. And in the factory? In the winter's chill, bleeding and dying, her whole body failing her? Est had never disparaged the other woman. She had attempted to make amends, if anything.

Est had sought her out. Est was here with her now - here with both of them, her and Purity. She had chosen to let herself take comfort in the hearts and arms of others, despite it all. Differences were put aside, for the good of all involved. It made the ghost in the black feel a bit sad... a bit remorseful, really. She wished she had been nicer to Est when they had first met. She had never been what Esper had thought she had been.

Esper?

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Who the hell was Esper?

Esper... Was that her name? Esper was a cute name, a name that was chosen, not bequeathed. But still... it didn't feel right. It felt wrong, in all honesty - wrong, in a way that set the thought-that-was-named Esper ill at ease. There was something else... some remnant, buried deep within her brain-no-brain, like a potsherd at a prolific dig site. She remembered there were a ton of dig sites in the East, lots of them in... Italy.

Why the fuck did it keep coming back to Italy?

Well, if the remnant was an Italian potsherd, perhaps her identity was the rubble left by the Roman empire. Perhaps she was, in a great many ways, just a ruin waiting for excavation. She set her mind, then, to dig: clearing away what clinging memories still clouded her formless conscience, the dirt and debris of a thousand thousand moments lost like tears in rain. There was a memory slowly floating to the surface of her detached sea of waking dreams, a sticky sort of recollection that would have been a footnote if not for the import of its words.

It was her name - her full name. Her full first name, anyways. Everyone needed a first name. Last names were... subjective. Vestiges of a time when it mattered who you were born to as much as who you were. Well, Esper supposed, nepotism still existed... but not in the same way! Not the same way at all.

She focused on the memory fragment with everything she could muster, feeling her arms and legs and neck and chest and loins and lower jaw even though those things didn't really exist. They began to tingle, slowly but surely, and she realized that she was rebuilding herself through her own slow assertion of what actually constituted her. Wow, very philosophical - she never realized she was such a thinker, but then, there was always time to become something new. That was a thing she had forgotten, she figured, but the idea of becoming something new... it had been buried away, much like this potsherd. It felt good to clear away the dust.

And then, suddenly, a surfacing. A face came then, one that mingled delight and dread, excitement and exasperation. Black hair appeared in the black void, an absent face in the abyss alongside. Esper was rewarded with the knowledge of lips moving within that infinite black, body restoring itself even as her awareness became numb, dragged out of inky midnight waters like waterlogged salvage.

"Esper James, I'm not a woman who lets such trivial problems interrupt my life. Do I make myself clear?"

-

A gasp. A scream. A striking, shocking pain, one that was etched into a nonexistent bore hole straight from her forehead through to the back of her skull. Esper James's mouth went wide and panted, struggling with the pain of reawakening - the lack of wetness upon her, and the sudden reminder that she did in fact have a body to deal with, only added to her frantic bewilderment.

It was bright around her. There were people. There were a lot of people, frankly; a lot of people for such a small room, at least. Dozens and dozens of sets of black robes and black veils, habits and headdresses, their owners all watching her like hawks. Someone was taking notes. Someone was inches from her face. Someone still was giving her an injection, one that made her body feel as heavy as an anchor as it flowed into dead veins. Everyone who wasn't observing her was simply watching, faces stoic, but pupils glued to her.

A blink. A scream, the memory of a bullet piercing her frontal lobes and ravaging her skull beginning to fade like post-surgical pain. It was horrible, but despite her body's response to such torture, her heart felt light. She was Esper James! That was her name! She was Esper James, the ghoul, the girl who had... who had done a lot, frankly. A lot in these last few weeks, at least. A life of monotony flooded into her mental pathways like a landslide, and she became herself again, knowing what and who she was without the shadow of a doubt.

She looked around tentatively, trying - and failing - to suppress the smile that awkwardly formed itself upon her still-healing lips and jaw. Many of the onlookers, the nuns which surrounded her like a murder of crows, smiled in return; theirs were tight-lipped almost one and all, though the softening of their expressions seemed practiced in their relief. A singular cheer arose, then. The other women, those who hadn't cheered, each began to fall about themselves in elation and satisfaction, cheering and clapping and widening those smiles of theirs.

It was refreshing, to be reminded and know in full that they were, in fact, human. These machines had hearts, and their veins pumped something close enough to blood to replace the red with blue and get away with it. The woman leaning over her she recognized as she looked into those soft brown eyes, noting the steely fangs and the soft, sorrow-laced quality of her own smile. Zofia leaned down and kissed EJ's forehead, right where the bullet had made its entrance. It made EJ's flesh come alight, but she pushed that thought aside for now.

The nuns began to flash their eyes then, a great many LEDs indicating an even greater mass of messages being sent faster than thought. Angelien, the woman who had been injecting her with a leaden tincture, set the syringe aside and took one of EJ's hands in her own. She gave the fellow blonde a nod, her own smile closed of lip and drenched in restrained emotion.

No words were spoken aloud, but the room - an infirmary, Esper James figured - was filled with sound and motion for moments far exceeding a brief celebration. It took a great deal of minutes for the cacophony of it all to cease, though as it did, Esper James's smile remained yet; if anything, it had been bolstered by the warmth of the atmosphere and air which surrounded her. The sea of habits parted after an interlude, and the mother abbess stepped forth from its absence.

She drifted to EJ's left side, the one opposite Angelien and Zofia, and took EJ's other hand. The abbess leaned down, then, whispering a few words into EJ's ear. The ghoulette couldn't process their exact nature, the definition of those vocalizations which were bestowed, but she knew their intent: the mother abbess was happy to see Esper James awake and alive again. They had been scared for her; scared that she would sleep and never again know life.

Of course! These Waywards knew nothing about the reanimation process, did they?! They knew that the second-living would, in theory, come back to life if slain without hateful ways. But their equipment, likely provided by the church itself, were designed purely for true-death. Fire bombs, acid capsules, silver powder and blades and bullets, electric projectors which would cauterize and de-animate flesh... They had never seen a corpse rise of its own volition. They had never known how it worked, and while the second-living didn't really know the specifics either, the Easterners were only aware of it in its most vague of senses. It was more akin to a rumour than true fact.

EJ smiled back up at the abbess; she felt her own lips move, saying something about her relief to be back, something to still any hearts which may yet be frantic. Zofia exclaimed eagerly, putting her ear to EJ's chest in an approximation of a hug; Angelien squeezed EJ's right hand, nodding again and shutting her eyes. The mother abbess smiled down at the blonde girl in the infirmary bed (oh! EJ noticed she was in a bed; better than the slab from earlier!) and nodded, too.

Whereas EJ could think only of Purity and Esthrielle within her deathly dream-sleep, she could not even recall their existence at the present moment. She could only focus on the world immediately about her: the soft sheets and warm comforter which swaddled her, the plush pillow upon which her head was laid, and the soft blue of the wallpaper above white-tiled trim that coloured the infirmary walls. Fluorescent fixtures kept everything quite medically white, but that was fine; it was comforting, to know she had been looked after while more dead than she had been for a long, long while.

More words. None of these landed; not a single one, no meaning imparted, drifting in one ear and straight out the other. She couldn't even really tell who was speaking... it wasn't Zofia, it wasn't the mother abbess, it wasn't Angelien. No nuns that she could see were moving their lips except to smile and laugh and rejoice, though even these things had begun to fade, and the crowd had begun a slow trickling out of the infirmary to give EJ some space.

Either that, or they had something better to do. Frankly? It could have been either. There were certainly other things to be done, she was sure... the convent was shockingly large for such a place, really. A hidden stronghold for the very people who would see Vitus burn; and yet, it was so professionally built, so very well-maintained, so expansive...

Those conjectures were for a future moment; for now, old moments would do. She couldn't move her arms when she tried to return Zofia's nearly-a-hug, but even the attempt filled Esper James with the warmth and comfort of returning the gesture. It satisfied her in the same way. More words from the mother abbess, these now directed to Zofia and Angelien; the women with brown and blonde hair, respectively, straightened their stances and made to leave. Zofia gave EJ a wave and a smile before stepping out the door.

The abbess nodded once more to EJ, and made to leave as well. EJ vocalized something to her, some happy sound, as she left - it was returned by a wave from the matriarch, who slipped out the door without giving a chance to respond. And then... EJ was alone. Alone to recover... alone to linger in her joy, the joy of life. It felt good to be alive, to no longer be drifting in that ebon crypt where her soul had fled. Now that she was awake and alone, though, only one thing was on her mind; it came slowly, as thoughts do when in recovery, though it was of no less import for its tardiness.

Where were her girlfriends? She wanted to kiss her girlfriends. Wow, it was so cool she had girlfriends.