Kitty
Kitty's eye twitch became harder to ignore, now he was using pet names? Why pet names? Is he trying to ruin her stature, the strong girl, who wasn't to ever be underestimated in Everlost with putrid little nicknames? Like Kitty-cat? It was like he was trying to make her look soft, like a little child's toy with rounded edges that couldn't possibly hurt someone. Unless of course you beat someone over the head with it, but that wasn't the case, the fact of the matter was, he was toying with her, using this 'closeness' to weaken her influence. Or maybe she was just thinking too deep into this whole thing.
Obviously she was too deep in thought, trying to find different angles at which Beloved could bring her down with mere nicknames, because when she forced her brain to focus back to what was going on around her, Beloved's arms were back around her waist, his finger pinching her cheek, and the feeling that she missed something gnawing at her.
"I feel like you have heard more than me Kitty."
"Heard what?" She asked, her mind still trying to recollect the pieces of the conversation that she had missed. It hadn't been meant to sound funny, but she found that it did, and Beloved might take it the wrong way. As a little joke, something that would show that she was comfortable enough around him to crack jokes at a serious time. Let him think all he wants! Kitty thought, once again ducking away from his grasp, and sitting on the bed, crossing her legs, all business. Despite what he may think of it, it was only a small slip up of my mind when I got out of my daze. She snapped herself out of it, again, thinking too deep, Akemi, too deep!
"If she is taking my people then we will have some problems. I will not hesitate to kill her." Kitty rolled her eyes. She pretended she didn't notice the glint of evil that appeared in Beloved, he wasn't the boy she remembered, Everlost had changed him. It didn't change his outward appearance like it did One Eye and herself, but his inside, his heart. It didn't scare her as much as it worried her.
"Why is it that your first impulse is to jump in and kill whatever gets in your way, Beloved?" She muttered, rubbing her temples, "you need to think more strategically. Mary has more influence in her little finger than any of us have, children flock to her like moths to a flame. Swooping in and murdering someone like that is suicide. She's bound to have at least one fighter in her Afterlight Cumulus, and you know that." Kitty shook her head, half indicating that Beloved's boneheaded threat was just that, and that she was still trying to fight the haziness in her head. "No, that wouldn't work, this situation wouldn't resolve with her death, that would only make it swell into something worse, something we can't afford. A war." She put up her finger, signifying that she wasn't done, yet, "Before you say it, no, we can't fight a war. Mary has thousands of Afterlights on her side, and growing, and we don't know how many of those are fighters. Them against our one fighter, you, is certain death." She ran her index finger along her neck, rolled her eyes back into her head, and fell back onto the bed, moaning.
"No no no no no, we have to think of a real plan. Mary is a threat, they say she's recently sank and then came back up. That takes motivation. She's planning something, you guys may not care much for the living world but..." Kitty reached up and cupped her hand around the light that will forever come from the lightbulb above the bed. It's all that tethers me to my old life. To what could have been.