The air between Emma and Aexilica was frosty as they walked, and she couldn't think of how to thaw it.

"I…don't really care that much about the vampire, you know," Emma tried. She actually felt a bit guilty just saying it, Isolde had died after all, but it was…basically true. Aexilica seemed to be caught up on that basically part though, she looked at Emma with enough scepticism to let Roman Polanski back into the U.S.

"You don't need to lie to try and make me feel better, I'd prefer you just be upfront."

"I'm not lying," Emma snapped, "Isolde was…I…" Fuck, why were words so hard. "Money basically."

Aexilica looked at her with about as much comprehension as that response could be expected to brew.

"You…Do you remember when I started uh…When I got angry after that idiot died. Astrid, the dragon girl."

"When you started crying and pissed yourself?" Aexilica asked. Emma didn't meet her eye, and felt her face burning.

"...Yes."

"Yeah, I remember that." Aexilica sounded less angry, though it may just have been that Emma had piqued her interest.

"I wanted money. I guess I have it now, right? Money and comfort and…" Strangulation, suffocation, smothering, trapping, crushing stagnancy beneath a great avalanche of luxury and placidity, but Aexilica didn't need to hear that, "and anything else I might need. I always wanted to be rich, to have my epic adventure and pilfer some great reward, and…I wanted to get taken to some big castle and fucked into a coma by a hot vampire lady. I don't know. It sounds stupid but Isolde was…I guess she was my last chance for this all to be some big, stupid wish fulfilment."

Realistically, Emma was several last chances gone by now. But then she'd always been a slow learner. Aexilica, like always, seemed forgiving of her to an entirely undue amount.

"I…Guess I didn't consider that you'd genuinely wanted that for so long…" Her lip curled somewhat, clearly being railed by a hot goth woman was a part of the human experience she didn't share.

"Like I said, it's stupid." Emma waited for Aexilica to disagree, to reassure her that it wasn't. The woman kept walking instead, remaining silent for several long steps as Emma's tiny legs scurried along to try and keep up. She was, Emma thought, doing it on purpose.

But then Emma probably deserved that.

"What exactly is our…" Aexilica's face scrunched up as she spoke, suddenly hesitant.

"Relat—"

—"Friendship", she finished, just as Emma began to speak. They both fell silent, looked at each other. Emma started sprinting down the corridor without saying another word, and didn't stop until she found someone else to take her to the party.

The party in question was, as Emma might have expected, rather a large affair. It seemed to be some sort of aristocratic thing, which she found kind of suffocating. On the other hand, it meant the food was good, everything was expensive and, as the hero of it all, she got to eat for free. Emma spent much of her first hour there hastily scoffing offered delicacies.

Unfortunately, being the big, epic hero meant everybody kept trying to talk to her. Sometimes this was entirely acceptable, as lots of hot women batted their eyelashes and asked her about her exploits, but plenty of them were insistent on speaking in strictly intellectual ways which frankly bored the shit out of her.

It didn't help that the stories of how they'd killed the Nocturnae didn't paint Emma in such a great light. Oh she could recount fighting all three of them by herself a lot, until she was blue in the face and beyond, but as soon as the questions got to how she ended up being held prisoner, or what Isolde's last moments were like…Well, Emma had a feeling everybody would've been somewhat less impressed by her if they knew the truth of everything, and decided to employ a tactical silence as the topic came up.

So she stuck to another tactic which had served her well over the years—being ignored. It wasn't hard to make people overlook you, if you knew how to go about it. Stay out of the way for one thing and avoid eye contact, keep to far walls, always remain on the move and looking purposeful so people would hesitate to start a conversation for fear of interrupting something. Above all, make sure there's other, more interesting types around to draw all the eyes.

Emma checked basically every box there, and enjoyed a great deal of success. It was particularly funny watching Larry get tossed around like a football by one of the rowdier stretches of the room, and the sounds of his swearing and promising to wreak bloody vengeance on the gigging drunkards was music to her ears. Emma didn't enjoy it for long, however, until someone ruined everything by walking over to her.

Aexilica of course, looking somewhat hesitant.

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"I thought about what you said before—"

—"I don't want to talk about that, forget I said it, it didn't happen, and if you say otherwise I'll deny it, and everyone will believe me and not you because I'm the one who fought the Noct—"

Aexilica raised a hand, stemming Emma's tide of blubbering with that gesture alone. Pausing, waiting for Emma to stop, she continued.

"I thought about what you said before, about how your fixation on Isolde was stupid and insignificant. And I still wonder what you think about me. Is that also…"

Emma saw a hint of fragility in Aexilica as she trailed off there, and found herself suddenly speaking before she could get word down to her mouth for silence.

She could, technically, just run away again, but Emma suspected that wouldn't be taken well by Aexilica. Truth be told she already regretted doing it the first time, and hadn't really been thinking when she had. She'd just…Panicked. But then she did a lot of that, didn't she?

"You're my friend," Emma blurted out, realised how lame it sounded and then hastened to explain herself, "I mean like, my first one. Not just here I…Didn't really have any before."

She waited to see Aexilica's surprise dissipate, and ended up just waiting to see it appear first. It did not, so Emma kept talking and tried to obfuscate how disgruntled she was by that.

"That's not to say that we're just friends or that I only care about you because I'm desperate, or lonely, or anything, but—"

—"stop talking now," Aexilica smiled as she said it which threw Emma for a loop. She trailed off, stared at the taller woman and found herself getting annoyed as Aexilica's smile slowly turned into a smirk, then into outright laughter.

"What's so funny?" Emma snapped, which seemed to only make Aexilica laugh harder. She finally seemed to regain control over her lungs, only when she'd actually pooled enough blood under her own face for it to be visible beneath the bronze, now rather flushed, skin.

"I shouldn't have over-complicated this so much in my head," Aexilica grinned at last.

Emma stared at her, suddenly wary she was being mocked. "Over-complicated what? I don't…What are you talking about? What?"

"Do you want to dance?" Aexilica asked suddenly, turning out to the rest of the room.

"No, fuck that, I hate this, overcomplicate what?" She was not about to be all mysterious and coy with Emma, she'd had enough of that crap with the women back on earth.

"I'm glad you're my friend too," Aexilica said, "and…I have a hard time putting any of this into words as well."

She looked away for a second, seemed about to say something else. Wait, was she…should Emma?

"Let's dance," Emma said at last, getting the distinct feeling as she did that both of them had somehow missed a trick but vaguely just glad to not have Aexilica pissed at her anymore.

They headed out into the centre of the room, and they danced. Neither of them was any good. Emma had always been somewhat sedentary back on earth, with her closest experience actually dancing being occasionally getting brutalised in a moshpit, which was awesome, and doing it by herself in the shower— which had gotten her killed. Aexilica, somehow, was even worse than her.

When one of them wasn't stepping on the other's feet, they were bashing against one another. Stumbling around like a pair of drunkards fighting, and incessantly giggling to one another all the time. They probably looked stupid—it was hard to imagine everyone was staring because of how impressive they were—but Emma could hardly bring herself to care.

Everything was actually going pretty good, now that she stopped to think about it. And who really needed gothic dominatrixes anyway?

***

Kruger was somewhat relieved to see the deranged pervert still had her clothing on, but he had not missed her skulking about the party hissing at anyone that attempted to speak with her.

It had been a constant cause for concern, and one he'd kept his eye carefully affixed to as the celebrations continued. Emma was not as unstable as he'd first been led to believe—which was to say, she had yet to slaughter several dozens more of his men—but it was still an exercise in futility trying to predict her. He'd been relieved to find the woman holed up in her room for the last few weeks, as it meant she was nobody's problem save her own. And the poor servants who'd kept bringing her food, he supposed. The stories of that smell…

Still, even that reprieve was over now. She had, at least, been bathed before coming out, but the fact that eyes were not watering within ten paces of her did not mean she would be behaving in any way properly. So Kruger kept watching, cautiously, warily, prepared for whatever great disaster the woman might choose to spawn at a moment's notice.

So far, there had been none. But then that was the trick with disaster—it never came when you were expecting it. An anticipated disaster would invariably become no more than a mere obstacle, it was only when it struck blind and unprepared targets that it truly struck home.

Kruger's ruminations did not survive the next minute, because his eye soon caught glimpse of Larry. He turned, and felt a shock of horror run through him at the angel being tossed through the air like a ball by jeering guests.

"No!" Kruger yelped, hurrying over to put an end to it, "no, stop that at once!"

Good lord, this couldn't look good on his cosmic karma records. Allowing an angel to be abused like that was hard to quantify, exactly, but Kruger imagined it would be right near the bottom in terms of winning him positive points. It took a surprising, and somewhat horrifying, amount of time before Kruger finally managed to secure the severed head. Apparently his now-heroic status was not quite sufficient to make his guests readily part with so favored a toy. Larry was scowling in his hands.

"Took you long enough asshole, what did you think I was enjoying that? Did you not hear me yelling about it? Are you even listening now?"

Kruger had to admit he wasn't, because he'd just seen Krummer.

The man was actually out-doing even Emma for disruptive influence, currently wrestling Vari in one corner of the room. Wrestling, and not losing. Kruger kept forgetting, even now, that he had been turned by one of Isolde's kind—though none of them had yet figured out which. The bruiser Eric was seeming a fine bet however, judging by how competitive the match was currently.

Vampiric strength seemed more than a match for Vari's, though a disparity in skill was letting the Sculd hold his own for the time being. What concerned Kruger more was how much the two of them were moving around. It seemed every fractional shift in balance sent them shooting yards to one side, and the odds of them hitting something were upsettingly high. Kruger thought about stepping in but…

No. No, it was enough that Krummer was doing so well, he thought. Besides, there was no shortage of other things to worry about.

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