the vixen

It’s a dangerous game he’s playing. Patty can’t decide if it’s deliberate or if Kane is just that strong of a draw, how by first giving her nothing he can fill her with anticipation for the tiniest gestures. Like his neck, craning down until his face is in her space, still not quite resting on her. Hovering just outside contact, breathing in. Patty’s excited, eyes fluttering gently shut at the sensation of individual hairs lifting towards his breath, at the small sound his throat makes when he inhales. Or when his fingers animate beneath hers to grip her on his own terms, testing the smoothness and softness of her breast and barbells. Meticulous, slow. Torture. 

He’s still so far. Even with his fingers on her, the barest pressure on her thigh as he drags his hand up and her dress with it, the hem tickling her calves and knees on the way up. It’s nothing to get excited about. And yet, gentle waves of warmth roll up Patty’s spine. Her shoulders tighten and draw inward, hands bracing against Kane’s chest, eyes closing and head tipping back on a soft sigh as his fingers, bunching up her dress, come to a stop above her hip. He leans to look and Patty opens her eyes blearily to follow, grinning lazily and laying her hand over his, fingers stroking at his own, no hesitation to be found as she pushes her digits over that ring, again and again.

“‘You wanna see?” She asks almost innocently, as if they were talking about something else. Patty’s eyes stare deep into Kane’s face, searching for more of those little changes, anything at all that could tell her what he’s thinking about her right now. Her fingers press down harder on his and, again, she leads his hand a bit higher, forcing him to relinquish his hold on her dress and letting most of it plunge back into place as she forces his fingertips to play with the thin cotton strap on her hip instead, pushing his middle finger beneath it, playing with the idea of having it off and pressing him into the warm skin on her hip. 

Feeling smug, Patty leans even closer into Kane’s chest, grinning up at him, acutely aware of the fact that they’re still out in the open, nothing but trees to hide them from chapel buildings. “How long have you wanted to see? How many times did you steal looks at me in that mirror and try to put together the full picture--what I might look like, where?” 

“Oh, I trust myself very much.” A quick, firm response. It’s easy to do when she sees so much. “I trust the universe.” The difference between the two may be slim. She lets her head fall back, tilting her face to the sky, arms stretching out once again. Curiously, she lets one hand reach up, fingers stretched, then curling through the open space. “You should, too, you know. It all just…” There’s nothing for her hand to grasp, and so she drops it back to her side, tearing her gaze away from the sky to peer at Patty again. “…goes on.”

For now. She glances up toward the sky again, a quizzical sort of suspicion in her eyes, trying to gauge if it’s any closer to the ground than it was yesterday. She likes the sky. She likes when it stays put, really, but there’s a restless anticipation stirring in her chest at the sight, and the sense that there’s something she’s meant to do with it. Maybe not yet, though. She’d like it all to stay where it is just a little while longer.

“I see your side of things. I do.” She nods eagerly, earnestly, to ensure that Patty knows she’s being honest, mirroring the smile aimed her way. “I think that I might try, next time I find a maze drawn on the ground, to solve it your way.“ Just to see if she can, she thinks. It could be nice, pretending not to know about the shortcuts, pretending that she needs to wander so aimlessly. She tilts her head, fixing her discerning gaze on Patty. “I think that you might be very smart, to think the way that you do.”

The woman has thoughts like water, she thinks, so far. Flowing over stones and rocks and pebbles in the stream. She wonders what would happen if she was ever met with a really big boulder. Or a dam, even.

“I’m not any kind of sister. Maybe one day, in a more honorary way, I might be a kind of older sister, but not like them. You can call me Tali,” she says, stopping to hold her hand out to Patty for a proper, business-like handshake. “Because that’s my name.”

There’s no hesitation when Tali talks. Like everything she says is straight fact. Patty keeps her brows high to receive it and ponder over it, a little too slowly, smiling anxiously at the other woman’s take on the universe. She sends a glance up at the sky, thinks about how so much of it is just too big and far away to see. 

“’Sure does,” she can agree on that, at least. “With or without us.” Her tone makes it clear that she can’t exactly be...happy about that. Maybe it’s silly and primitive, but Patty can’t really enjoy a universe she can’t be part of. And she couldn’t imagine being happy for the continued survival of the universe if she died and couldn’t be part of it. Still, smiling distantly, Patty tucks some hair over her ear and stops as she exits the maze through its only opening, blinking at Tali with the same open willfulness. 

“Don’t tease me,” she laughs warmly, when Tali calls her smart. Patty rubs at her arm at the compliment. “You’re the smart one, obviously. Doesn’t take a whole lot of brains to take the road most traveled, or whatever.” Even talking like this feels out of her league, like the words her brain picks out aren’t even actually hers. Just the last vestiges of her high school English classes. Recycled words from poems she read just to get the credit, then never again. She rocks forwards cheekily on her feet, hands behind her back. “But...maybe it’s good to do things differently sometimes. To do the easy thing. Not have to think about it.” 

It’s easier to tell himself there’s no sense of relief at her answer, no sensation at all except clearing the air. She’s not mad, he’s not sorry, and none of it quite feels familiar when he doesn’t have something stronger to drown out any possibility that he cares either way. For once he’s quiet, lips pressed together as he watches her settle in front of him, before her fingers are searching inside the top of her dress. It has him raising an eyebrow, but nothing escapes him until the cigarette appears, and he’s letting out a short huff of air that’s almost a laugh.

Rocks scuff beneath his heels as he presses forward, fingers reaching for the cigarette. It feels like a peace offering, crumpled or not he doesn’t feel like wasting either of those things. Quietly grateful for just the thought of smoke in his lungs that he offers it up around a mouth already muffled by the filter between his lips. “Thanks, bonita.” 

It only takes him a second to get the lighter from his back pocket, another to get it lit, and by the third he’s inhaling deeply. There’s no real satisfaction in anything else she says, not when he turned it on her like a weapon. Still, he’d rather curl up in his self-pity where no one else can play witness to it than admit he felt any real regret for it. The closest he can manage is a confession mouth half beneath his breath. “Got a couple trying to prove it to myself too.” 

It’s drowned out in the next inhalation before he’s stepping closer to offer the cigarette back to her, a quick nod of his head following. “Thought you were gonna show me some gnarly mark on your chest. Where’d you get hit?”

His relief is probably more obvious than he means for it to be. Patty spares them both by not saying anything about it, wearing only a thin smile as evidence at all that she feels victorious over this whole thing. He wraps his lips around her peace offering, tips his head with a loosely-familiar nickname.

“Just don’t suck it up too fast. The sisters’ rules are gonna make it hard to replace ‘em.” Patty hums receptively, flattening one hand over the other behind her back as she looks back to the maze beneath her feet. 

She picks up her only when he says he’d gotten some scars of his own, and just like that she remembers, lips falling open in silent, belated awe before she grins, puffs out a laugh and shakes her head. “I remember. Watching you run off after that thing, and your friend with you. ‘Thought you were dead for sure.” Patty looked him over, as if enough time hadn’t yet passed, as though he still could be. “Must’a been a hell of a fight.”

When he asks after her, Patty doesn’t hesitate to sniff and start pulling the hem of her long dress up on the left side. She bends that knee, turns her foot and flashes Eli her bare hip, fingers rubbing down the pitted tissue over the thickest part of her thigh. It wasn’t so much ugly as a kind of alien, irregular dimple, made worse by pulled-out stitches, the memory of which makes her smile.

He doesn’t know what he expects when he gets to the center. He’d just been focused on getting his hand into hers as quickly as possible. Enjoying that she’d had it outstretched to begin with. There weren’t many people that he could say he was comfortable with. Weren’t many people he’d consider his friend or on his side in this group and mostly that was his fault. He knew how abrasive and off-putting he could be. But she’d seen through it even that first day they’d met. She’d been seeing through it ever since and there was a special place for her in his heart that he didn’t know how to tell her about. And it had nothing to do with the language barrier. 

Only when his hand finds hers, she doesn’t stop there. She pulls him closer and her hands place themselves onto his shoulders while her lips reach up to meet his. Familiar words echo between them and Ladislav feels his body instantly reacting to them, remembering the last time she’d told him to stop asking and he can’t help the smile that forms on his lips as he has them pressed against hers. 

As a hand curls around his neck, he curls one of his own around her waist, pressing against the small of her back. He pulls her closer, so she’s pressed up against him and lifts a hand to cup the side of her face, enjoying once more the taste of her lips, the feel of her skin, the warmth of her body. “No asking,” he confirms with her in the span of a breath it takes him to pull away. 

It was an issue--she knew for sure when she kissed him again that this was a problem. There was a time Patty could read every move before it came. But Ladislav‘s hand splayed across her back she inhaled deeply around him and hardly felt the urge to breathe out again. He reached to hold her face and she followed suit, less of a cup and more thin fingertips lightly feeling their way across his stubbled jaw, testing the strong edge of it. The wine on his tongue overpowered his taste but it only enhanced the subtle sweetness of his lips and--

Patty huffed, eyes closed, brows knit together in frustrated bliss when he pulled back to breathe words across her face, ridiculously intoxicating for how short they were. She didn’t let him go far, couldn’t. For every moment his mouth hovered over hers instead of on it, Patty felt herself nudge forward, the tip of her nose greedily ghosting his face, inhaling the scent of his skin until it felt thick in the back of her throat. Instead of waiting for him, Patty kissed him again and kept at it until she felt absolutely drunk off the affection, slipping off his lips and dropping her head to the meat of his shoulder. She hung there, content, her arms around his back, relishing in his body heat.

Eventually, she dragged one hand around to lay in front of her against his chest, watching her own fingers trace unplanned patterns into his t-shirt, pressing deeper in places to test the plushness of his muscles. Then she gave a heavy sigh and mumbled without moving. ‘You really do somethin’ to me.”

Ezra ducks his chin down against his chest, smiling to himself. He’s well aware he doesn’t look like it and despite years going out drinking to unwind and pick up people, he’s always been hit hard by liquor. Being a cheap date was always a badge of honor, though, seeing as he always seemed to be the one paying. 

“Yes ma’am, I’m the lightest lightweight you ever met. I never have shots unless forced. Which Danny did once for his birthday and, well …” he shakes his head, smiling at the memory. Patty can fill in the blanks.

Patty speaks into her glass, a faint hollow sound to it and she encourages him to talk. In all honesty, he rarely spent his time drunk talking. That he actually does feel a little embarrassed by, that life seems so far away and carefree in comparison. “Uh, sure I have,” he tries to think back. The very nature of a drunk debate is probably it goes forgotten.

Patty leans forward, eager for something fun but he’s not great at that, even drunk and now sipping at his wine at a more reasonable pace for an Extra-Lite Lightweight, although it doesn’t stop him going into it, “But I’m an expert at ruining things by over-thinking and analyzing it and saying the wrong thing at the wrong time without thinking. I’ll start talking about how the wine tastes and get to exorcisms and demons before you know it and say too much and leave us both miserable…” Ez trails off and takes another swig of his wine before he shakes his head with laughter.

Ezra looks back up to Patty and smiles, “Sure you want me to start talkin’?”

They’ve always been on good terms, but it’s incredibly interesting to see this new side of Ezra, all the roughness buffed away by a little bit of booze. He’s a sweetie underneath it, no huge surprise there. Patty’s having fun just seeing it, sipping away until she’s deep in the buzz herself and listening to him call her honorifics as he dips his head chivalrously. It also helps that she’s a gossip. 

“You knew each other before?” She liked the idea of them before, she likes it even more now. The closest she’ll get to another HBO-piloted romance drama that wasn’t her own. Patty snorts, cheeks full with wine, and swallows down on a grin at the image of Daniel trying to contend with this. It was probably the worst thing in the world, back when none of them had anything to really worry about. “Well...who hasn’t ‘decorated’ the passenger door of a date’s car or two.”

She ought to slow down but this is fun. The wine hits her fast as well, a symptom of going too long without a real binge and a consequence of her rowdier years. Fortunately for Ezra, the rest of her is too tired to dance, too present to really drift. She just sits there and hums, content to talk to him in the candlelight, pushing one of her feet out from under her legs to let it dangle over the edge of the surface she’s sitting on as she leans all the way forward for another cup.

It takes her a second to put the words together in her head. Ezra’s giddy and says them without weight, but it’d be hard to forget her conversation with Daniel, his claims of demonic possession and...Ezra’s struggles with that. She blinks and drinks to cover up her thinking, but thinks, despite the alcohol, she’s got a pretty good poker face in her arsenal. If Ezra has a mind to talk about what happened to him and take a load off his mind, now was the perfect time.

“Really, you need me to say it a third time?” she slurs happily, raising her wine arm high in an out-of-place toast to the evening. "I’m never miserable! 'N anyway, when you’re drunk is the best time to let loose your demons. This is a judgment-free zone. Tell me all about your...you know. Tell me something that got on your nerves today.”

Eli scoffs in annoyance, he wants to say fuck her, fuck those questions, fuck whatever assumptions she’s making about him right now. Whatever it is looking back at him, whether it’s genuine, whether it’s pity, fuck all of it. His lip curls, he feels like an animal with teeth bared, and the only reason he doesn’t spit all of that at her is because it’s exactly what she’s expecting. She even says as much, calls him out on words he hasn’t said yet, and instead his teeth end up grinding together, gaze shifting away from her, staring at the outline of the maze instead.

What he wants is to forget every single awful thing that was ever done to him, every single awful thing he’s ever done. He wants to be high again, he wants that to be an option without worrying if it’s one more thing that’ll destroy him from the inside out. He wants to claw the poison from his veins, every form of it, even his own tainted blood. He wants to forget that anyone ever saw him try and do exactly that.

The list just gets longer, and none of it has anything to do with her. Maybe she could help him forget, maybe he blew any chance of that a long time ago. Maybe it’s better that way, and after too long staring anywhere but at her, his gaze flicks back up and he shrugs his shoulders.

“Yeah. Maybe.” It’s an exhausted admittance, and part of him thinks it would be easier if she’d just fight him back. He’d know what to do with it at least. Anger was easy.

“Are you still mad at me or not?”

Thanks for being honest, she wants to say. But even now, Patty can’t be sure that he is. He resists her everywhere he can, it feels like, face screwed up in conflict. He reminds her of those boys she wanted to fix in high school and the thought alone drags a dry, endeared smirk back to her lips. There it was. The root of the issue, why Patty still felt fond of his stubborn ass even after his jeers and sneers. He was who he fucking was, she guessed; as determined to be angry and alone as she was to be happy and not. 

She thinks he gives in at the end, maybe. In a way that still gives him deniability. She thinks that’s the most she’s gonna get from him, and in some roundabout way, that counts as effort. Patty stops several feet in front of him and sighs, her smile dehydrated but still alive, despite itself. 

“Nah. I shouldn’t have let you rile me up that bad in the first place. ‘Got a pretty little scar trying to prove you wrong ‘n everything. Stupid.” Reaching up with both hands, Patty held the collar of her dress out just far enough to push her other hand into it, digging around her top a bit before pulling it out, a lone, rumpled cigarette now dangling from the ends of her fingers. She held it close to her face as if checking it for structural soundness before extending her arm and wiggling it towards him in offer, her free arm wrapped around her own ribs. 

“So I guess what you said was kinda true. It’s gonna take something like drowning a sack full of puppies before I ever get really mad at you.”

Kane watches her intently. Eyes dropping so she’s more comfortable looking ahead instead of up at his face, her lip pulled in between her teeth. He’s right. Then, Patty takes steps forward that look genuinely casual, nothing like Kane’s failed attempt earlier. Every movement he took was purposeful, perhaps to his detriment, because now he can’t deny any of this. Not that he wants to.

Kane looks down, chin tucked down as he watches one of her fingers slip between his shirt buttons. Her quiet hum is so much louder thanks to his hearing – a bonus of being marked was always times like this. Listening to his partners more intensely, letting his sense become overwhelmed with these better things. 

Her question sounds like she doesn’t trust him. He smiles to himself, then returns his attention from the finger slipping between the gap in his shirt to her face. “Sort of,” he grins like he knows something she doesn’t, which is true technically. She’s taking control, moving at her own pace. It’s perfect. “It’s about where our wants overlap.”

And she continues: popping more buttons, exposing the middle sliver of his belly until she can slip her hand in. Kane’s eyes flutter shut, a peaceful exhale as she runs her hands up over his abdomen then curling up over his ribs. Her fingers manage to avoid her scar, only smooth fingers over smooth skin. 

It’s been so long since he felt a gentle touch. Only the sharp tug at his shirt has him opening his eyes and looking back down into her eyes. Shirt now free from his trousers she makes quick work of the rest of his buttons so it hangs open. Kane slides his hands up the side of his thighs before settling into his jean pockets. It’s become a habit thanks to Sersh: Don’t touch until he’s told too.

Nails gently scratch him ins slow, indulgent movements on Patty’s part. He’s aware of the wedding ring still on his left hand, more aware of the thought that Sersh would’ve enjoyed this. God, he could imagine her doing this exactly. She would only speak in more certain terms.

“Nope. I’m all yours.”

His instinctual reaction is to tell her to drop it, say ‘leave me alone’. To beg her to let him be, curl up in his self-hatred and the bone-deep hatred of everything this building stands for and suffer through it. Like sweating out a fever; the only way through it is to wait it out.

But… he doesn’t know if it’d help. Even a second alone with his own thoughts in this building and he can practically feel that black rot’s spread, marring him from the inside out. He’s already ruined but now it’s there for everyone to see. 

Wes. Patty calls out and he slows down, nearly considers stopping when he hears her take a few quick steps to catch up. Instead, he keeps a slow pace. Fast enough he can pretend he doesn’t want her to follow him, that he’s actually trying to leave her presence and find a spot to mope in.

He looks back at Patty and… he doesn’t know what to say. Tens of those reasons were whipped and burned into his flesh. Hundreds more swam through his mind – every time Ruth hurt him, every time he hurt himself and every time he’d been locked and chained up like a fucking animal. “I don’t belong in places like this.”

It will have to be enough for her, for now. Wes looks around, up high at the ceilings and the sparse decorations around are all holy figures. Hands held palm up to the sky, tears of rapture, halos adorning hypocrites. Wes slows down once more to fall into step with Patty. He doesn’t look her in the eye, doesn’t know how to ask for distraction without explaining why he needs it.

“You know any spot in this goddamn place that doesn’t have a dying man watching over you? Or old men with beards pullin’ o-faces at the sky?” Wes tips his head towards one particularly rapturous Saint looking done in by a dove’s appearance. 

I don’t belong in places like this.

It was an ominous statement and a serious one, uncharacteristic of the polite goofball she’d come to know. Patty knew Wes had certain...insecurities that didn’t quite match the man he looked to be, but she was beginning to think that general anxiety was just the tip of the iceberg with him. Patty skipped to catch up, feeling slightly shafted by how he seemed to want to keep her behind him. 

“It won’t be forever,” she said, even if part of her was sad about the idea of leaving a place that screamed sanctuary so accurately. Wes slowed enough to walk by her side and she was grateful for it, her fingers coming to curl around the soft inside of his elbow encouragingly. “When everyone’s ready, we’ll keep on. It’s just four walls and a roof until then.”

His request took her by surprise for a second but...then, not. Patty glanced around the hall that surrounded them and the decorations that covered so much of the walls, then back up at him, pausing for a good minute to think. She let go of his arm to head for one of the windows, picking up a candle and dish that had been set out presumably to illuminate the hall. Then, waving, Patty started to examine every door, pulling on the handle to a half-empty maintenance closet...that had a nice metal cross hanging on the inside of the door. 

Patty glanced back at Wes as if looking for disapproval, shrugging her shoulders noncommittally and reaching up to tip the cross off the wood, muttering a quiet apology to it as she walked further inside. She set it on the floor, turning a dry bucket upside down on top of it like a secret, then she stood again, looking carefully around the narrow closet. The surrounding shelves were a bit oppressive, taking up so much of the space. But they started higher up and way in the back, there was one corner empty enough to sit down in without even her taller companion needing to worry about banging his head. She turned back to him for approval once again.

“...feels better, doesn’t it?” Patty tilted her head, already crouching down to push the candle somewhere the flammable materials wouldn’t be threatened. “Kinda like sleeping in the kitchens back at the truck stop.” She set her back against the wall, pulling the end of her dress out to right it and patting the space next to her for him to join. 

Ladislav chews his lip when she tells him he just started. She explains the whole point of it again and he takes a breath, opening his mouth like he’s about to tell her it’s stupid again, but then she holds out a hand and tells him she’s waiting. It squares his jaw and for a moment, he just looks at her standing there, like some prize at the center of it all. It’s almost tempting to just step over the lines and go and meet her without following the path. 

But, for her, he sighs and walks the rest of the path, keeping his head down until he’s close enough. Not quite at the center, but his hands reaches out to find hers anyway. He doesn’t look up at her, just holds her hand there as he makes his way the rest of the way before he reaches the center. 

He looks up at her when he reaches it and gives a slight smirk, because whatever he was supposed to find, she’s a distraction. “Now what?” 

For a second, Patty almost backs down. Ladislav stares at her and it’s been a long time since any man’s been able to fluster her just with that, but she feels the urge to look away and laugh, even if she keeps her arm up and waiting. Thankfully, he starts walking again. She relaxes, a small dip forming in her outstretched arm as she waits with the palm up instead, blinking, mouth parted pleasantly when he gets close and pushes his fingers through hers. It kills the game a bit, the fun, but replaces it with something else, something like the pull she feels when he has to move almost beyond the length of their mutual armspan, gently tugging her weight off one of her feet as she leans to keep his hold. 

Finally, Ladi makes it to the center. Her hand returns to her and he steps in close enough to fill every space in her peripherals, bringing his eyes up only now like he’s a master of Hollywood romance. She’s too old to act like a girl, blushing at her feet. But she feels herself melt a bit when she stops dodging and looks all the way up at that gaze, chin pointed playfully high with a thin, tempted smile.

A more derisive laugh is all that greets that question at first. Eli’s eyes narrowing slightly as if that’ll help him pick up any trace of sarcasm in the question. It sounds like it should be, which only makes it confusing when it sounds more genuine than anything else. His teeth tear at the inside of his mouth, before he answers with a short “great.” 

As if he placed any real expectations on the people around him. They could treat him just as badly and he wouldn’t care. And the only thing that comes too quickly to his mind the second he starts considering what he wants, is heroin. An abrupt craving for it, years of habit making it his first answer, his first and only love. “What exactly is it that you think I want? ‘Cause I’ll tell you now, people and their bullshit expectations don’t have fuckin’ thing to do with it.”

It’s a simple, understood, and unvoiced fact that it doesn’t matter what else anyone thinks of him. Including her, because she could never be capable of as much loathing as he holds for himself some days. “So if you’re waiting for an apology you’re shit out of luck.” 

More sarcasm. More biting edge to his words. It might be fascinating if it wasn’t a little sad, and Patty felt anxious even just feeling like he was determined to fight with her again. She speaks up before he’s totally finished speaking, trampling over his last few meaningless words that he’s only saying to make certain she knows she’s unimportant.

“I’m asking, Eli, not telling--’cause I honestly have no idea,” she fights it, but laughs, slightly at his expense. Whatever makes him feel like this is something that has to be this way, she can’t help but feel sorry for him. What he wants is a complete enigma; whatever it is, she suspects he isn’t really even trying for it. If only she had more self-control. Or sense. Frustrations does bleed in at the end. Why did things have to sour for no good reason? 

She starts to walk out of the maze, towards him. “I don’t have any expectations for you. I feel like I just turn around sometimes and there you are, ready to fight. Maybe that’s what you want. Maybe you get off on it. Am I close?”

Only briefly does she wonder if the sisters would be upset, hearing Tali talk about their maze like this. There’s little concern in that curiosity. Rather, she sets it neatly aside, hoping to have it at the ready the next time she crosses paths with one of them.

Her eyes never wander from the other woman’s face for long, even as she resumes her path through the maze, her steps prowling and deliberate and slow. It’s easier to process the words that way, measuring them against Patty’s expression, weighing their intensity, their stability, to determine how strongly the woman truly believes them. People can say all sorts of things.

“I guess I don’t like to miss things.” The eye carved atop her wrist seems to pulse. One of her first, the lines clumsy and white against her skin. “But I think shortcuts are right where you’re supposed to go. If you have somewhere to be, you go to it, and everything always happens just how it’s supposed to happen. And then maybe you could retrace your steps after.”

It’s exciting how openly Patty speaks on the topic, though, offering elaborations on her opinions before Tali even has to ask. It’s exciting to imagine what it would be like if she believed the same things, exciting to compare it to what she already thinks, exciting to put herself in somebody else’s mind for a moment. She walks until she reaches a dead end, and pauses, and turns on her heel to glance briefly along the path she just took.

“Are you going to try to change what I think? People do that, you know, sometimes. I think it’s kind of sweet.”

There’s something really intense about the other woman’s eyes. Some part of her just wants to see it as normal attention, someone who cares about her response as long as it seems like she’s thought it through. But some other part of her feels intimidated intellectually, like she knows her own opinion won’t hold up to scrutiny. But...Patty’s no stranger to this kind of shame. She accepts it, shrugging casually and letting her own eyes fall and travel the lines of the maze, a silent statement that she is all that she can be, offers all that she can offer.

“That’s fair,” she responds, and it’s not a lie. This felt more like a ‘food for thought’ kind of topic, the kind no one was necessarily wrong about. “It feels like you really have to trust yourself to know what’s a shortcut and what’s not, though. I don’t know if I could do it. I’m not a great...’decider’.”

As if to demonstrate her own loyalty to what she said, Patty makes a move to exit the maze without stepping out of bounds once. The two of them circle around the same maze, at times in opposite directions. She looks up, minorly startled, when Tali asks if this is Patty’s attempt to change her thinking.

“No way,” she says on the end of an easy-going laugh. “If you really do get the same results, who cares how you got there? People are gonna do what works for them. Besides...I’m pretty bad at convincing people to see my side of things. ‘Never seems to go well.” She smiled at the other woman, an attempt to keep things amicable. 

“I’m Patty. Are you one of the sisters here?”

“I think that it’s a metaphor.”

Tali had been watching the woman for a very long time, maybe. Just like all the rest of them. Stealing glimpses from windows and around corners, playing that game that she loves to play, the one where she tries to guess what somebody’s next move might be. What secrets they could have for her. And she’s watched her navigate the maze with delight, imagining the first time she navigated her way to the center. Maybe she could do it with her eyes closed now.

“You know? For life. The world. From up there.” She steps forward, gesturing up toward the sky and whatever Heaven and God there might be there. Carefully, arms spread to keep her balance, she walks along the lines of chalk, as if walking on the tops of real walls. Her scars catch the light. “All those paths that you might think you have to take, to go where you need to go. When you can really just-” She frowns, then shrugs, and takes two long, decisive strides across the lines and gaps, ignoring the imaginary chalk boundaries.

“It’s silly, I think. To follow the lines. But I guess I’ve done it so many times already.”

She doesn’t have long with her thoughts before they’re interrupted by someone else’s. Patty looks up with bright eyes at the speaking woman, a stranger. Instincts have her freezing as first but she relaxes gradually as the girl goes on, her words gentle and wise. Those outstretched arms are a beacon for calm that Patty’s eager to take at face value. 

She looks down at the maze in silence as Tali ‘walks’ it and looks back up in time to see her step over out of the intended path. Her eyes flicker over the shiny, excessive scarring but snap back just as quickly, as if she’s afraid to be caught staring as Tali comes close. 

“Silly, huh?” Patty smiles a bit, only slightly unnerved by it all and the strange focus in the woman’s eyes, before crossing her arms over her middle and trying her best to sound smart. “For me...shortcuts can be kinda scary. You never know what you’re missing, you know? I like to go down every one, even if I can see it’s a dead end.”

Again, Patty smiles, taking a closer step towards Tali without really thinking about it. It’s a welcoming gesture. They’re surely seeking the same refuge here, after all. “’Course that means retracing my steps a lot. But it’s easier than thinking I got somewhere before I was ready to.”

Sersh laughed at anyone who saw Kane as some ‘mystery’. He was a simple man to read in her eyes, she knew exactly where his head was at more often than even he did. Sersh laughed at Kane the most for it. He watched everyone and everything intensely and no-one more so than himself. 

It seems Patty has that same knack for reading him as she calls him out.

Making Kane suddenly aware of the way he’s standing, the way he ‘gives in’ in a deliberate way. It’s an attitude that never came naturally to a man raised to be at the ready, vigilance and awareness beaten into him until it was all he was. Kane’s thinking of his dead wife as he watches Patty, he’s thinking of how much Sersh would have liked her. A drunken stupor to mourn her seems to have reminded him of the good bits and how fiercely they overweighed the bad. He didn’t have to die with her – something Sersh would’ve told Kane if she could. He was an ascetic married to a hedonist.

Sersh would’ve really like Patty.

Watching Patty move her dress, showing her ankles like that’s something scandalous. It is, in a way. Kane thinks she was covering up given where they’re staying but her skirts swaying only fill his mind with the image of himself hidden beneath them. It’s far less modest than anything else she could’ve worn.

The smile is barely seen but it’s there in his unflinching gaze. He gives in. Completely.

“I don’t think you want me to leave it.”

Jeez. That thought seems to dominate her mind in the moment--jeez. Was it her fault that he’d come to her this hard or was it already in his mind before he approached her? Patty wasn’t sure which thought intrigued her more. When they first met, she thought he’d be a harder nut to crack. All serious, looking for a reason to be disappointed or annoyed. Maybe that part of him was still real, just momentarily dwarfed as he looked for a reason to ‘do’ something else. Something willing and alive, something that hadn’t exactly been subtle about how attractive she found him, during the drives, during the lessons. 

Eyes half-lidded, Patty drew her bottom lip gently into her mouth as her eyes dropped to his abdomen instead, whatever part of him matched height with her eyes so she was no longer looking upward. She took a few casual steps forward, reaching out to dip a fingernail underneath one of the middle buttons holding his shirt together, humming quietly in thought as she wiggled it out of its hole.

“This is about what I want, then?” She said, more of a disbelieving statement than an actual question. Again, Patty’s singular fingers worked more buttons out of place until she’d created a gap large enough to push her hand through, soft palm flattening against his skin as she pushed it deeper into his shirt, caressing his ribs and starved muscles. She picks her eyes back up, chin craned high to meet his as she continues her intrusion.Eventually, she pinches the fabric in an attempt to lazily pull it free of his belt in bursts, before running her hand back up to separate the remaining buttons at the base of his neck. 

“Got somewhere to be later?” She asked, delighting at the crisp feel of his chest hair under her fingers as she raked them gently down, scratching slow lines down the line of hair at his navel with her thumbnail. “‘Waited too long to rush things now.”

It should be something he argues, or something he should apologize for, but he’ll never do either of those things. It was his honest opinion at the time. He doesn’t know that it’s changed, just that it doesn’t matter today. If he’d found her smoking out here instead of wandering a maze etched on the ground, likely he’d only feel envy. 

Because his brother wasn’t dying today and he wasn’t trying to tell himself he didn’t care.

Eli can’t tell if she’s serious or not, but it has a short laugh escaping him all the same. It didn’t seem like anything she should wish for, and maybe that summons more guilt than anything. How quick he was to lash out at people that actually mattered to him.

“You think I’m not an asshole to my friends too? It’s my only real life skill.” 

Eli laughs back. He’s really a kind of sad enigma of a man. But Patty has to admit, he’s got a strange talent for spouting words that make him seem both proud and ashamed at exactly the same time. Smiling slightly at her feet, Patty starts to walk out of the maze when she picks her head back up, glancing at him pointedly with her brows up high.

“And how’s that working out for you so far? ‘You...getting the most of what you want, that way?” She asks, honestly curious. Different folks, different strokes, sure. But she couldn’t help but feel like no one could ever really be happy with pushing people away on a whim. 

He follows her silent gesture, filling up her glass more generously this time. 

“A blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Jesus? Weird thought.” Ezra chuckles lightly at the mention of Eli, Jesus-like is not the way he’d describe Eli, but he can see it. Probably spends too long thinking on it before he shakes his head, “Definitely ruins it soon as he starts talking.”

It’s nice, though. Ezra realizes then that maybe Eli does have friends in the group. Or it may simply be Patty, an easy presence and easy person to talk to. He’s glad, all of a sudden, someone like her has survived this long. 

The question is taken at face value. If he wasn’t feeling a little warm from the drink, he’s certain he’d be moping still. Ezra looks at the glass in hand, the drops of deep red liquid left behind. He smiles into it, “Right now? I feel pretty good about it.”

“Ask me later once this is –” he waves the waggles the glass side to side “– is out of my system and you’ll get a proper answer.”

Patty appreciates it. This second glass she sips a bit more carefully, swallowing with her brows knit together being the only sign she isn’t a fan of the taste. She purses her lips in a tight, approving smile at the hints Ezra makes to the oddities of an Aryan Jesus, a battle she stopped fighting or even giving a shit about long ago. But it’s always the little details that reveal why she likes someone. Picking her knees up, Patty crosses them to sit, puling the loose hem of her dress over them absently as she gets comfortable, grinning at Ezra’s giddiness as she looks him over.

“What on--don’t tell me you’re a lightweight?” She asks, following it up with a laugh that’s too airy and prolonged to not have been affected by her own drinking. Patty rocks a bit in her seat and balks at him, blinking through light haze at the tattoos on his skin. As though they alone signaled he was supposed to be a certain kind of way.  “That’s...adorable.”

She murmurs, fingers arranged around the rim of her glass, elbow in the air as she holds it near her lips. And takes another big gulp. “...come on, haven’t you ever had a big philosophical battle all lubricated and shit? Live a little, Ezzy.” She leans forward, arm outstretched, and pokes at him with the hand holding her glass before bringing it to her mouth again. “Talk.”

Ladislav gave half a smirk when she tells him that maybe it was supposed to be a subtle thing. That she felt inspired. He can’t say one way or another how he feels about the labyrinth or the idea of walking it and when she asks him to do it too, he lifts ab row at her like she’s just asked him the most incredulous thing she could. 

Only then he’s taking another sip of the wine and stepping towards the labyrinth’s entrance. He digs his toe into the dirt there and gives her a look that says he’s completely doing this against his will, before he takes his first steps along the path. 

He doesn’t make it far, only a semi-circle before he stops and holds his hands down at his side in exasperation. “This does not work,” he whines. 

Patty keeps her mouth shut but smiles tightly at his reluctance, and also the knowledge that he was going to try. ‘Cause she’s asked. In order to keep him trying, she doesn’t say anything about it, just twists in place playfully in silent encouragement for him to reach the center, as she did. Only, he stops. Frustrated, or probably embarrassed. 

“You just started,” she chuckles, as if expecting this. “Technically, you’re supposed to get to the center and then leave the center. You’ve got to at least do that before you judge. Come on.” 

Patty lifts an arm and holds it out in his direction, wiggling her fingers enticingly as she steps around in the center like it’s all a great big interesting game. She kind of just wants him to meet her there. “I’m waiting.” 

Patty’s answer has Kane cracking a smile. Ruining his too serious expression because of where the women’s mind immediately goes. Hands tucked into his jean pockets, he nods as though this were serious, interesting information, “Didn’t know about the cock.” 

He walks forwards, ignoring the labyrinth ‘walls’ as he approaches her, watching them before switching his focus up to Patty. He’s watching that playful grin and…he gives in. Just a little. Kane follows her imaginary adventures about this minotaur with a smile mostly to himself.

Clicking her heels together just like Dorothy he wonders how different the Wizard of Oz would be with Patty as the star. He returns the playful smile. Lets his gaze wander because she’d already dragged them both into the gutter. They’d exchanged ‘looks’ in the minivan, no harm he decides, in carrying that on. Just to entertain himself.

“Nuns with a dungeon…” he pauses, stops a few feet away in the middle of this maze, one foot on the ground one on a ‘wall’, “I hope it’s the fun kind. Can’t imagine they let him out often.”

There was something daring about the way Kane stepped over the maze and not through it, as if it didn’t exist. He did it like it didn’t even matter, a level of pride or nonchalance that shit all over what it represented, his steps slow and heavy as if daring someone to say something about it. Patty’s lips pressed together tightly as though she was trying to fight the smirk that appeared anyway, and kept her feet rooted firmly to the center as he came nearer. 

She liked the look on his face. Kane was easy to telegraph if you knew what to look for, and thankfully she’d had plenty of excuses to search for his tells. The swagger in his movements when his playfulness was genuine. How to tell a real blink from a fake one, that only existed to punctuate an otherwise totally-fixated gaze. Like the one he was giving her now, everything in him carefully structured to appear laidback. Patty watched him back, but her eyes didn’t wander when he did, they stayed waiting for him to look back up into them. She knew what he had already.

Only when Kane stops in front of her does Patty look down, stepping back just a bit with her heels on the edge of the circle’s rim while still remaining in with him. She reaches down to gather small fistfuls of her dress, all white, ankle-long and on the modest side, chosen out of respect for the sisters. Playing along, looking for non-existent stains or oddities, pretending it was that he’d been looking at, and not her. But she looks back up and can’t help herself but to call him out a little bit.

“You looking for trouble, Kane? ‘Better leave it alone. You could get more than you bargained for.”