Tomorrow was as sweet and tranquil as hoped for. And the next day... and the next... and the next...
Following Luca's departure, the days began to blend. Soon, it was the twenty-first - four days before Christmas. Yes, it was still December. Sometimes Esper James wondered about that, honestly... so much had happened, and seemed to be yet to happen, and so little time had truly passed. For the first time in decades of unlife, time felt as though it was progressing at a slow, steady, forgiving gait; it was no longer the infinite march of Chronos' machination, but a natural thing to be enjoyed and taken one day at a time.
The testing wound down, and then stopped nearly entirely. Now, Esper James simply reported to the laboratory for two reasons: the first was to monitor her vitals. The stated purpose was to check the viability, and stability, of a second-living who was being weaned off of FixAte. The mother abbess had mandated that, while Esper James and Purity were still free to stay in the convent, they needed to be cleared regularly to ensure any hints of feral nature could be nipped in the bud.
This, Esper James figured, was entirely reasonable. The stories they told aboveground, out in Vitus proper, in the schools and the media and the UNAC-limited internet... they were brutal, and nightmarish. Countless movies, games, cartoons, comics, stage plays... A seemingly endless number of iterations of them, all depicting a second-living who sans-suppressant as a beast unleashed.
Esper James did not think herself a horrible monster who would savage the flesh of her fellow human to sate the evil inside, that darkest of hungers which gnawed at the soul as it gnawed at the stomach. Hell, she didn't even drool at the memory of eating that corpsec officer... Well, not as much as she did when it was still fresh in her mind. The occasional infusion of blood from Purity and Est had eased the flesh cravings to a near-nonexistence, and Esper James had begun to really, truly live free of that fear.
The blood feeding became easier, even. Zofia helped as best she could, providing the trio with a variety of sharps so that they could draw red from their veins without the small scars that could potentially come from biting or slicing... though sometimes, Purity still liked to get bitten. It was good for her, so she said, and Esper James was ever so inclined to believe the pinkette on that front. EJ also told herself that it wasn't selfish, even though it felt so indulgent to sink her fangs into Puri's thigh and drink.
The second reason Esper James had for going to Zofia's lab was perhaps simpler, but also more complex. It was more straightforward, was an easy way to say it - but the process of it was less guaranteed. Esper James wanted to speak to Zofi, simple and clean. She wanted to pick the field researcher's brain; she wanted to learn more about the girl with the steel ghoul-fangs, as best she could.
Now, yes - Zofia was weird. She wasn't just weird, in fact, she could be downright creepy. It made Esper James think quite soundly of 'chasers', as they were often called in days of yore... that is, people who had an unhealthy, romanticized fascination with anyone outside the norm, traditionally in reference to transgender people. Zofia seemed every bit a coffin-jockey hearse-chaser as any other corpse club regular whose blood still pumped red and hot, and yet... that went against everything the Knights were supposed to uphold, right?
Like, hell, Esper James often thought... Zofia had replaced her natural teeth with replicas of the same sort of needle fangs that the ghoulette's own gums clung fast to. What would make a woman who allied herself with a group dedicated to the eradication of another, then try and emulate that second group's physiology for cosmetic benefit? What was the end goal?
As they spoke more and more with each passing day, the crab shell of Zofia's introversion was pried away to let Esper James eat at the sweet, supple meat held therein.
-
Zofia sat on a wooden stool, leaned back against the counter of the lab's main room. In her left hand, she held a cup of coffee - heavily creamed and sugared, a fair bit closer to a milkshake than the juice of the fragrant brown bean. It reminded Esper James, in a frankly comical way, of the sort of collegiate-age girls who made their morning coffee part of their entire personality: posting pictures all over their tAsT accounts, formulating ridiculously complex custom orders, railing themselves full of caffeine every morning from seven additional espresso shots to accompany their liquid fashion statement...
In Zofia's right hand, she held a cheese puff snack. One of many, in truth, but currently only that particular puff was held betwixt fore and middle finger. The nuns couldn't smoke, at least not inside the convent, but Esper James could not help imagining the orange, oval-shaped corn fluff thing as the world's most dairy-based cigarette. How foul. How disgusting. What would it be like to light and smoke a cheese puff?
Gross, without a doubt, and then it would smell like burnt corn and cheese powder in the air, on your breath, and in your nostrils. Fucking awful. The blonde decided to stop thinking about all that, because it was frankly nasty, and she didn't want to consider it with any more depth than she had already given the repulsive thought.
Esper James used to smoke, a long time ago... to get those stimulant thrills, you know? The way it felt to get hit by that nicotine, especially after a long day of getting ordered around by Judas... it took the edge off. It was a thing she often missed, especially in recent days, but it had made her whole body smell horrible, so she had stopped. The vitality of a second-living ensured that she wouldn't really be hurt by smoking, of course... but it was the principle of it, and the cloying scent of smoke on all her clothes and in her hair and breath, that had made her stop.
Zofi didn't seem like a smoker, anyways. Not cigarettes, anyways - Esper James could see, in another life, Zofia hunched over a bong in a darkened apartment, playing video games and eating pizza straight from the box. It made the ghoulette grin to imagine, and did a great job of wiping away the remaining vestiges of her exploration into the possibility of smoking a cheese puff.
EJ, by contrast to Zofia, was sat on the floor. There weren't any other chairs in the room, nor stools, and everything here was kept meticulously clean... so it felt okay, she told herself, to sit on the floor. Her back was leaned up against the hard surface of the counter which lined the inner wall of the room; her head was gingerly rested against the actual lip of the countertop, but that was a bit too rigid to really feel comfort from fully putting her weight against it.
The two had been engaged in some casual shit-shooting; that is to say, they had just been talking mostly to talk. Discussing everything and anything, from who had been the top performer in a recent convent-wide shooting competition to what the dinner schedule was for Christmas evening. It was fried chicken, as an aside. After a year-long diet of simpler meals, less indulgent and fatty and more focused on protein and nutrients... the mother abbess thought that, for special nights like Christmas Eve, the nuns could all use something a bit more fun.
Esper James wanted to pry ever deeper into the concept that was Zofia, however; she wanted to learn more about her, because she alone stood as an enigma amongst the sea of black habits and silent stares. EJ's aims were not idle, nor were they unfeasible - and so lips set motion into sound, and sound formed words, which culminated into thought expressed.
"Zofia? I've been, uh, wondering..." EJ started out slowly, deciding it best to play a bit coy with her soon-to-be interrogation of the brown-haired woman before her. Zofia seemed to snap from a haze, blinking a few times and giving her head a little shake to clear away lingering mental fog. That lone cheese puff was cast into the spiked abyss of Zofia's maw, a virgin sacrificed for bountiful harvest to a great and terrible oral god; those cheese puffs didn't know that they were the bountiful harvest, but their little processed corn brains would be none the wiser.
Zofi's chocolaty rings focused down onto Esper James, widened a bit from her recent alerting. "Huh? Yeah? Wassup, EJ? You want me to tell Est to grab you a drink or something? We've got bottled water in the fridge in the practical room, I'm sure you can drink normal water..." Zofia gestured to the practical observation room's empty frame with her now-freed hand, the coffee clutching one bringing a ceramic rim to her lips for a sip.
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Est was in the practical observation room, playing chess with Purity. They had yet to relent, even a little bit, on their demand to follow Esper James around and ensure her safety - and to ensure an absence of deceit. It hadn't really been as restrictive as Esper James may have feared, in all honesty... the trio liked to be near one another anyhow, and so the three of them all staying in the same places, and following the same schedule, was fairly convenient.
EJ shook her head, tamping down an amused smile into little more than a casual, gentle grin. She continued again, then, once Zofia had returned to her relaxed stance on the stool - Esper James didn't want to startle her, even if the chances of doing so were minute. "Zofi, I've been wondering for a while, yeah? Why, uh... Well, haha, a few things actually..." Another moment of silence, then. EJ wanted to keep things feeling as casual as possible, even though these questions had been hanging over her for a while. Now, she felt the need to put forth a surgical effort and excise their answers.
"When I was all fucked up on blood and meat that first night... why'd you wanna be nice to me? Why say anything at all? Why not just let me fuckin' suffer and get it over with?" Esper James continued to smile at that pleasant base level, never getting too enthusiastic nor dissatisfied with it. Anything more or less may have seemed as though she had some sort of ulterior motive.
She did, of course, but she didn't want Zofia to know that!
Green met blue as the two locked eyes, both daring the other to back down or blink, neither taking the offer. Just as the silence was about to draw on into an awkward absence, Zofia cleared her throat and spoke up; Esper James could smell, though the pores of synthetic skin, blood rush to Zofi's cheeks. Silicone couldn't blush, but it sure could try.
"Aha, ha, ha! Oh, EJ, don't...! Don't worry about that, haha...! Look, it's, it's simple, right? You and I... Eugh. Look, don't tell anyone that I told you this; it's how a lot of us think, but not all of us, so it's kinda mixed who you share this with, yeah?" Zofi leaned forward then, taking a long, long drink on her coffee before setting the now-empty mug onto the counter beside her. She drew in a deep breath to steel herself, shutting her eyes tight, and then opening them anew as her breath released.
"You and I? The second living and the first living? We're... We're not really that different, in a way. Like, in a physical sense, we are. We're so fucking different - shit, sorry, profanit- ahh, damn it, I-...!" She stumbled over herself so quickly and consistently that Esper James couldn't help but giggle a bit, Zofia's accidental cursing coming across as a dated comic bit played out in real life. It was amusing for the novelty of it, if nothing else. Zofia drew in another breath and huffed it free before beginning again.
"...but! When it comes to the stuff outside the meat? The thoughts, the feelings, the soul? We aren't so dissimilar!" She found a moment of play then, putting on a more dramatic tone to her voice, as if a villain providing the hero with a final monologue. "We aren't so different, you and I, Esper James..." A giggle for the both of them! It cleared the air and the tension, and set both women at ease. Zofi's shoulders relaxed visibly.
"N-No, hahaha! No, no, really, we... we aren't that different. Like... I'm mostly made of minerals from the earth. Silicone, steel, copper, latex, silver, carbon fiber... I don't actually know how many of those come out of the ground, but you get what I mean!" Zofi gave EJ a moment, then, to consider what she had said and respond. With a gentle 'mhm, mhm' and a few curt, quick nods, Zofi received her acknowledgement.
"And you! You're made of meat, yeah, but not normal meat! Not the same sort of meat you were born with! We're both little transhumanist freak nightmares, made with weird tech in countries that love how much they hate each other and hate how much they love each other! And, like... it's..." The energy drained from Zofia's voice and tone, trickling away like meltwater. It ran in rivulets down her soul and dripped onto the floor, wet and weary, leaving her in a somber state from then on.
"It's not like you chose to be what you are. Someone else assigned it to you. I've been there, too, you know? This whole 'crusade' thing, it's... It's a way for people back home to show off clout. My parents signed me up just to earn the Church's favor, so we'd get favorable tariffs. Ha-ha, secular society in theory... not in reality." Zofia's eyes dropped down, gaze running from Esper James's face to her hips to her feet, though the ghoulette's body was hardly Zofi's actual focus.
Esper James had so many things she wanted to say, but in this moment, she knew damn well she was better off shutting the fuck up and listening the fuck up. More nodding, more 'mhm'ing, more rapt attention - not only did Esper James want to hear more, she also wanted Zofia to feel comfortable in telling her more. She wanted to give this creepy girl with brown hair and fangs exactly the outlet she needed.
Zofia continued unabated, encouraged by Esper James's outward willingness to act as the vent by which Zofia's emotional steam could find release. "I used to be a college student, you know? A nice college, but still! My parents... My dad, he's a regional governor in Poland. I won't say where, you won't fucking know the name anyways... but he's in the political game, yeah? A-And this, this crusade comes up..." She filled her lungs, long and slow; when they were emptied, a great wind of bottled emotion followed behind.
"So no more college, Zofi! Get out and kill people, Zofi! Replace huge chunks of your body with military tech, Zo-fi-i-i~!" Her right hand balled into a fist, winding up to slam the counter - she stopped herself before the potentially devastating motion was made, but she obviously wanted damn well to see it through. Her pupils raised back up to Esper James, then, and a sad smile came over her lips.
"I was a straight A student. Was gonna be a biochemical engineer. Lived in a swanky group-house with eight of my best friends - it was pretty fast and loose and fun, never really official about what any of us were to one another other than that we liked being around one another. Pretty... pretty bohemian lifestyle, haha. And then, one day, I'm getting shipped off to the UNAC with a bunch of other girls." A synthetic tear was bidden to form, and it rolled down her face to drop from her chin. The sound it made as it hit the tile floor was minute, but it could have been the crash of a cymbal for all the weight it held.
"Ha ha ha... so now, here I am. Doing whatever I can to... I dunno. Not get punished. Not get noticed. Whatever I can to stay out of the mother abbess's way, and seem like my heart is into all this, but in reality... We're soldiers in someone else's shadow war, you know? I don't hate you, Esper James. I don't hate the second living at all. You're a person, just like me. W-We should get along."
Now it all made sense. So much of it, honestly... From Zofia's first reassurance, to the way the other nuns treated EJ when she had been crying in the halls, to when she had woken anew in the infirmary. Esper James could have - should have - guessed at this explanation, given that night with Est in the factory, but... but propaganda had put its roots so deeply into her mind that it was hard to divorce the idea of these nuns from the cruel killers she had been told they were. At the end of the day, though?
They were all just people in a war that was bigger than them, like Zofi said. Few of them had any real conviction behind their actions. Few of them ever wanted to see the others die.
Zofia broke down, then, sobbing softly and gently but with a restrained, strangled sort of emotion. EJ could practically feel how badly the other woman wanted to absolutely sink into the depths of her own despair - to howl aloud, to claw at her skin, to rip away everything that the infamous 'they' had done to her. Everything they had made her do. God, EJ knew exactly what it was like, to realize you were working for the bad guy.
Esper James put both palms to the floor, using them to scooch closer to Zofia. Once in range, the little flesh-tearing post-cannibal struck: her arms went up and out, wrapping around Zofi's waist as EJ's cheek laid itself against the nun's leg. It wasn't the best hug in the world, but it was better than nothing. By God, it was so fucking much better than nothing. Zofia could barely bring herself to respond, her own right arm going about EJ's head to hold her in return; the nun's left hand was too cheese powder covered to be apt for an embrace.
They stayed like that for some time. The sound of a third mouth, and soon after that a fourth mouth, breathing joined the fray in the back of Esper James's perception... but that was fine. It was fine for Purity and Est to see Zofi cry, EJ thought. At least this time it wasn't the blonde whose tears were being shed. The other two women must've only been peeking in to check what was going on; and, since it was hardly a moment either of them wanted to interrupt, neither did. They returned to their chess game silently and tactfully, letting Zofia and Esper James have as long as the pair of them needed for this release.
Zofi put away her pain in due time; it wasn't gone nearly as quickly as it had come, but still, it found the door when it was good and ready. The steel-toothed researcher leaned down to give Esper James a firm, almost sloppy kiss on the forehead, still sobbing in those last few moments after the kiss was given. She spoke again as her body pulled away and back up into a straightened posture, right arm offering one final squeeze to Esper James.
"H-Hey, ah... Thanks, EJ. I... I know it's probably fucking scary for you to be here, right? Thinking that you're only tolerated because of what you can do for us? I... I'd like you to know that, well... we don't hate you. None of us do. You being here, being so sweet, being so cute with your girlfriends... y-you're doing so much to change the minds of those who are told to hate you. Please, for our sakes and yours..."
She sniffled, sorrowful expression breaking once again into a fractured sort of smile, like broken glass forming an approximation of her own reflection.
"Please, keep it up. Stay strong. You're... You're doing so very fucking good, Esper James. Thank you for being here f-for us..."