more self-“reblogs” since they were in asks…this was for peaches, on my shiblr

keyboardsamurai:

So to properly mirror her new friend, Shilo sunk down a few inches so that the tips of her toes, at least, could touch the coffee table that ran parallel to their couch.   

“Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, if you did like him,” she officially declared, with all the reassurance of a girl who still didn’t quite understand why there could be something wrong with letting someone’s job get in the way of, well…anything.  ”But,” she added, with a little wave of her cookie dough-encrusted spoon, “you have to be careful.  Even just being friends.

She watched Becky’s almost-always cheerful face contort, confused, when she asked, “Why would you say that?”

But Shilo had already stuffed the spoon in her mouth.  ”GraveRobber says,” she tried to say around it, “all priests are pedophiles.  They have sex with babies.”

If it had been strange to see the other girl’s smile disappear, it was even more alien to see her frown.  ”That’s not true.  Not of him, anyway,” she insisted, then got a little too quiet.  

For a moment, Shilo panicked.  What if she had said something so wrong that Becky would send her home, without completing the promised sleepover?  Would they still talk?  Did they have to stop being friends?  She opened her mouth to apologize, even though she was more sorry that Becky didn’t believe her - or, in turn, GraveRobber, who was always right - but at least she knew enough to know that you weren’t always supposed to elabourate on apologies.

Before she could, the cheer flooded back into her friend’s face.  ”He’s an absolute angel,” she assured Shilo.  ”So much so that he’s totally my real life PB for Castiel.”

Although Shilo was still trying to learn this level of fluency in fandom-speak from Becky, the expert, she nodded and smiled and handed the other girl back the communal bowl of cookie dough.  And wiped the imaginary sweat from her forehead.

“OH!” Becky exclaimed suddenly.  ”That reminds me!”  Pushing the bowl aside, she threw her blankets off, now trapping Shilo under a small mountain of blue fleece, and jumped up.  She disappeared for what only seemed like a split second and returned to the living room with a manuscript.  ”Did you read my fan fiction yet?  What do you think?”

They didn’t speak for the rest of the night.

“reblogging” these from myself because i liked the answers

keyboardsamurai:

2. What is their scent?
Shilo might be a perfect example of that “clean” smell that candles sometimes claim to be.  Not quite sterile, hospital clean - although I’m sure it was a little bit more that before she started sneaking out, just having come from a sterile room, essentially put together by a doctor.  Now, mostly, she smells like…I guess like she’s just bathed.  Like a fresh, clean soap smell.  Formerly to cover up anything that might smell like cemetery or any place/thing that wasn’t her room, just in case Daddy ever got suspish.

If she had a scent, as in perfume, she would probably be just as obsessed with BPAL as I theoretically am.  And every scent would be her scent.  (There are butterfly/moth scents right now.  She would pee with excitement.)

7. Describe their voice.
Quiet, for starters, and unsure.  Pure, too, in the way that…like…it has a sort of crystal-clear quality to the sound of it.  Never really whiny and certainly never hoarse.  Not particularly high-pitched, but not low/deep, either.  Surprisingly steady, too, for how often she stops and starts herself, while talking, and for how nervous she usually is, when communicating with others. 

10. What is their comfort food?
Shilo has absolutely zero fond memories of her dad’s cooking, so nothing he ever made.  She’s still getting used to new tastes and she has a lot of favourite foods, but I think the only thing that qualifies as “comfort” food is peanut butter and sugar sandwiches, not even particularly because of the taste (although she is extremely partial, so far, to sweets), but because it’s the first food she ever figured out how to prepare for herself and the sugar part was always a little, secret treat she would add, knowing that her father would probably lose his mind if he could figure out that she was sneaking sugars for herself.

So, it’s less about the food itself and more about the process and the fact that it represents one of the only ways she knows how to take care of herself, without anyone else’s help.

15. What is their top sense?
“Top”, being her best or her favourite?  Either way, I can elabourate on both and, oh, I think I will!  

When I first looked at the question, I was going to say “taste”, until I realized “top” probably meant “best”.  Taste is not Shilo’s best, most honed sense.  At all.  It’s her most sensitive, though, and favourite because she’s spent her whole life growing up eating nothing but Nathan’s terrible cooking.  And not just his terrible cooking, but his terrible cooking of only bland, boring foods that he thought wouldn’t be “bad” for her.  Over-salted meatloaf and “cookies” made of cardboard and so on.  So, being used to absolutely nothing tasting good, when she does eat something with flavour, she gets really excited, even if it’s a flavour she doesn’t like.  But, since she’s not used to the experience of eating, you know, good food, her tastes a) aren’t very discerning and b) are sort of…all over the place, when it comes to identifying what she’s eating.

(So far, she’s fondest of tacos and chocolate.)

Her best sense is hearing.  She couldn’t leave her room until Nathan left for work, so she had to listen.  Since she has to be sneaky, she has to know what sounds mean what, otherwise she might have risked getting caught doing something she knew she “shouldn’t” be doing, but needed to, for her own sanity.

(She’s also got a pretty good ear for bug sounds.)

…It’s also worth mentioning that there are certain things she likes touching, to confirm that they’re real.  (GraveRobber is one of these things.)

17. Any OCD tendencies?
The first thing that comes to mind is her compulsion to tuck her hair out of her face/behind her ear.  It’s something she does so often with her wigs that she’ll even do it when she isn’t wearing one and has literally no hair to brush out of the way.

All things considered, too, I don’t think it counts as OCD, but she also has difficulty remembering to not take her pills.  Like, she doesn’t, but it’s still instinct for her to reach for a pill bottle when she thinks she feels a withdrawal attack coming on.  Since she’s found and dumped almost her entire stash of “medicine”, too, it’s sort of just become a routine of grabbing/opening empty bottles, then putting them down. 

The fact was this: nothing kept Shilo from leaving. The only door in the Wallace house that remained locked - or, at least, off-limits - was that which led to the basement. She had discovered (or re-discovered, perhaps, since how could a false fireplace escape her notice for her whole life? …The same way everything else had?) it a week after the Opera, when she finally found it in herself to move, even explore. What she found at the bottom of the staircase turned her stomach and undid at least fifty percent of the progress she thought she had made. And so, she left it alone. But that was it. Even all the windows had stayed open for a few days, before she realized the reason they needed to be kept shut had less to do with her ability to escape through them and more to do with the disgusting quality of the air hanging just outside them. Still, now, at least, she left them unlatched.

In a perfect, fantasy world, maybe, she could simply crawl into her closet and be, without effort, whisked away to someone safe, magical, and far away from Sanitarium Island. There, she might have real tea with real rabbits, never wear a wig again, and - most importantly - be healthy. Or happy. Really, she would take either.

Her world was not perfect, nor fantastic. The best she could hope for would be one, miraculous day when her heart stopped pounding itself into a panic when her fingers brushed the handle of the front door. The last two days, she kept her wrist communicator - previously disguarded, under her bed - strapped on so that the familiar chime of blood pressure warning! might snap her out of her all-too dangerous house-leaving mission before…well, before it killed her.

But today would be different, she had already decided, to her own dismay, moments after she realized what she was doing. Today, she made the effort and discarded her nightgown for something that looked less like a child’s slip and more like a dress. She even wore a wig she hadn’t touched in ages - a dark one, with blunt bangs (something she insisted upon having after seeing the Tao of Mag concert) - to hide her face. It made her feel sneaky and invisible, something she loved. Years of practice made her an expert sneak and if she could escape a prison with her father-warden standing right outside her door, then moving, unnoticed, in a crowd full of people - who could probably care less for her or her anxieties or triumphs - would be nothing. Time to experiment with the living.

She made it through the door and onto the front steps. In her boots, she teetered on the edge of the first. Impulsively glanced behind, just to be sure no men - or ghosts - would be chasing after her, screaming bloody murder and dragging her back inside, where it was “safe”. Deep, even breaths, Shilo. If she had an attack, there would be no “medicine” to relieve her, now. Deep. Even. Breath. Down the first step, then the next, and soon, the gate closed behind her.

once, i asked peaches to write me a zombie repo! fic…and this is how i imagined it starting

The grave-robber flies didn’t start this.  Sometimes people forget the word “didn’t” and sometimes they forget it on purpose because they either don’t know or don’t care.  It makes me sick, either way.  It’s worse, though, when they forget the word “fly”, too.  It’s such a small word, I know, but to me, to us, now, sometimes it makes all the difference.  Sometimes people know the truth and don’t care anyway.  It makes me sick.  

An entire city built on top of the dead.

Surrounded by it.  The ocean is full of bodies, just waiting for the new plague to counteract what the first one did.  No man is an island.  But I live on one.  And we have nowhere to go.  There’s nowhere to go.  We’re all going to die.

There’s no such thing as life after death.  Once it’s dead, it’s dead and it’s rotten and there’s no coming back.  No one told the scientists.  No one told the surGENs.  It worked in small doses and, when the first reanimated heart took, they thought they had something.  They thought they could be clever, but Rotti Largo’s children never had half the brains, combined, that their father did.  What’s better than one dead organ, brought back to working order and ready for sale?  An entire body full of them, of course.  Cheaper, too.  Cheaper to pump the body full of a reagent that glowed so brightly, a junkie might mistake it for Z.  Cheaper to let it sit on ice and slice it open, as needed.

In the short run.

The landfills turned into body farms almost quicker than serum turned to virus.  Of course the flies swarmed the area and carried it.  But, by then, it was already in the hospitals, on the streets, tinted blue - a cheap alternative that you’d never know wasn’t your standard painkiller…until it killed you.  And brought you back.

Here is the truth: GeneCo started this.  They start everything and, this time, I think they’re going to finish everything, too.

We’re all going to die.

excerpts from ye (really, really) old gr/shilo log

Her fingers traced the shell of her ear awkwardly, trying to tuck a ghost strand of hair behind it.  Even if he didn’t, she sure did.  ”Great,” she groaned, slouching her shoulders.  ”That’s just what I need, now.”  But, really, she didn’t have much to complain about.  Another kiss.  Granted, a small one and in the same way, probably the same place, her father had kissed her, many a time.  Didn’t stop it from feeling different, though.  Wouldn’t prevent her from getting that same-as-the-first-kiss jolt of electricity dancing down her sides. 

“Hey, hey…” he said, still smirking, “I believe I said that I didn‛t mind.” He reached out and ran his hands over the side of her head, inwardly marveling at how smooth it was which then, of course, kicked his brain into the thought process of curtains and carpet, or the lack of both, matching… which, in turn, sent his brain on a whole different line of thought that he figured was really better just to halt immediately unless he made it twelve million potential children lost on his pants, instead of just the six that had been there previously. “I said you were beautiful, didn‛t I? I know you heard me… I meant it.”

Well, as it turned out, the carpet did match the drapes, but if he’d said anything and used that particularly terminology, Shilo would have pointed out that her room had hardwood flooring and been thoroughly confused.  And slightly horrified when properly explained to.  Luckily, with the two of them trying so hard not to think of those sorts of things, they wouldn’t have to worry.  ”I heard you,” she confirmed, squirming, but not out of discomfort.  ”I just didn’t think you…I don’t know.  I thought you were just being nice.  Or silly.  Or…something.”  

“Grave-robbers are not nice or silly,” he said in a very mock-serious tone. “We‛re brooding and mysterious and very, very  dangerous. Remember that.” He gave her a pointed look and then started wandering around her room again, hands in his pockets. He wasn‛t really moving with a purpose, just moving to… well, move; to have something to do with his feet. It was the product of never having a stable place to rest for long, for always dodging or hiding or running from something… Graverobber wasn‛t sure if he knew how to be still. Finally he turned on his heel and looked back at her. “You should probably sleep, kid. Tomorrow you can try to start fresh… we‛ll get this medical crap moved out of here and downstairs and explore the house a bit, yeah?”

Whereas she could pinpoint the last time she ate (lunch, yesterday), Shilo couldn’t remember the last time she wasn’t feigning sleep to fake her dad out, get him to leave her alone.  Or being forced to sleep by her…pills and, even then, there was nothing relaxing or restful about her episodes.  Although she didn’t want to, wanted to latch onto Graverobber’s long, thin scarf and trail after him the whole night through, she knew she wasn’t exactly in a position to do anything else.  ”Okay.”  She beamed, focusing on the two words: tomorrow and we.  They were enough to lift her off the piano bench and carry her to her bedside.  Where she paused to scowl at the plastic curtains and gave the heart moniter’s rolling cart a soft, but swift kick out of the way.  What did that do, anyway, she wonderd.  Not much, she’d bet.  A machine that goes ping!, she remembered, Monty Python.  From when her dad let her watch movies in his room.  …That was when she realized she was hesitating.  ”Are you staying?”

He shook his head, “I have to run out for a couple of hours, take care of some business, sell the last of my stock before it goes bad, grab some things fr—” he almost said ‛from my alley‛ and then stopped himself, “and then I‛ll be back,” he said, offering her a smile. “Two, maybe three hours tops. And I‛ll uhm… crash downstairs,” he added almost hesitantly and then, “unless you‛d rather I…” he lifted his brows suggestively.

“Okay,” she said again, kicking off her slippers and pushing the curtains open so she could take a seat on the edge of the mattress.  At first, the smile she settled him with looked rather matter-of-fact.  ”Crash upstairs,” she instructed, turning her head only for a second to peel back her covers.  ”That’s where the beds are.”  Then, as if to illustrate her next point, she slipped under her blankets, but stayed propped up on both elbows behind her.  The little grin may have lost some of its innocence.  (He was a bad influence, after all.)  ”I take up less than half of it, you know.”