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Somewhere in between saccharine shudders of invigorating victory; and the illuminated, odious, noxious loss - the day passes in gangrenous, grueling, malevolent slowness through muddy remembrance forced upon.
Moonlight soaked and mauled them - sunlight bombarded them. Neither knew any delicate touch to caress them with.
Cosma's body laid - still; a series of ravening, vile, foul, seeds in a bed she is practically growing from. Each moment and hour that - with the arrogance of mortality - saunters by, adds fuel to the concern - the truth, that Cosma isn't coming back. That for whatever reason the Turning had failed. Somehow rejected her. Which is ridiculous. What foolish thing with an egregious, withered little god complex that had yet to encounter true savage power could ever reject her? Was the titles of divine nature not known by cleverness? Or had its puttering pride wounded it to truth? Had it always such selfish shade?
Aqua eyes are shut firmly; her chest was sheltered in cruelness. Hedonistic - lounging idly, unmoved with wicked, heinous, dried, crime and atrocity. Long ago Kamilah had given up expecting any headway to be made in this area. Nor had she waited for selflessness. But she has not left her side in a dozen copper tasting hours.
None of them have really. Lily certainly hadn't. But out of the other three she is the only one to have stuck to one fixed area within Cosma and Lily's shared, miniscule apartment. She's only set aside room to sleep to cease Adrian's requests - even then she chose to be slumped near her. Hand rested lazily in absurd protection upon her dried, crimson chest.
She can still smell it. It lingers in her bristled bones. On her tongue an untasted phantom. Appalled and disquiet.
For all intents in purposes, Cosma looked dead. And she... until this worked, she very much was.
If it worked.
"You'd despise this. You're so fond of this place. All these unknowns. All the souls you have not seen." Her lone voice cut through the illness of silence. Her fingers interlock with Cosma's - a dizzying heat - waves of penetrating longing and crippling otherness. She squeezes, captured in a gaze directed to the window; persistent in the belief that one will be returned as she speaks without dominating volume.
The room is occupied by more than themselves; Adrian sits in a pristine fur kissed chair, head comforted by his own lap. Jax had not tried to indulge in such rest; having been pacing just outside the room - Lily sat by a window; hands dug into her pants, and rocking steadily on her heels with puffy, reddened eyelids. It is a tone of softened, agonized privacy. Outside is but the hazards of catastrophic fledglings of calamity. She is struck by secondhand horror that she is left to experience firsthand.
Without reason - Nor cause - Kamilah thought of home. It's ravishing, ravaged darkened seas.
"I didn't quite understand it. I still don't truthfully. You're so cunning, but you always try to help." Kamilah's lips edged upward. "Maybe I will, one day. Or perhaps i've lived too long."
She stares at her emptied features as if the suffocating sunlights of her signature empathy towards her uncharacteristic vulnerability will greet her as she finishes. That in the gnawing bared teeth of human time would have departed her eventually. But the threads of the typical are merciless and realistic. And do not give out and in to normality.
In troubled truthfulness each of them deserved to celebrate; a man so wicked and cruel had achingly finally been destroyed - but there was nothing just in celebrating without the cause - not that she would - or allow any of them to dare try to under her eye regardless.
This was no victory. None that she ever wanted to stroke her ego with. O' Tender was all but this. Death least of of the softest.
A feather light touch descended like holy angel upon her right shoulder. She tore from one to share her gaze with another. Adrian had found himself at her side - cataclysmic exhaustion under his unreadable eyes. He did not move either them nor his hand.
"Kamilah..." He began. Voice shrunk - delicate and tender. Like youth. "it's been nearly thirteen hours. I know it's not what you want to hear, but I think you should begin to consider the possibility that this... the turning, has failed."
She wants to hate him for that. To question his loyalty to someone he so clearly loved; whether breathlessly or less. For daring to suggest defeat. Or white flags. That wasn't what they did. Or who they were. She tries to. There's wisps of contempt that bubble up and burst into contempt; and flicker into graying ash - birth and o' bloodied death so painfully quickly.
But he's right. He usually is. Unfortunately. Turning usually works within hours or less. It stops the human decaying process. And she's -
Cosma smells abhorrent. She doesn't want to witness the... full process.
Kamilah's face flowed between him and the bed, rising from her kneeled position into a full standing position - nearly regal. "I don't... understand Adrian it - usually works, why didn't it?" She's turned only a handful of people in her hundreds of years - but all of them, they've always worked.
He sighed. From deep inward, in the belly. "I don't know either, maybe it was too late, maybe she was already... gone when you tried."
"Her heart hadn't stopped completely yet. When I turned her it was faint but it was still beating." She argued.
"What it's because it was impossible?"
Below their eye level, rusty and hollowed - trees personified, Lily spoke - just loud enough to be heard. The two of them paused; darting their heads over and down to her. "Why would it be impossible?" Adrian asked, the fires throughout New York illuminating his skin from outside the window.
"Cosma's a... w- was, a Bloodkeeper, right?" Lily didn't move, but stared up at them; a plethora of dejected despair. "If she turned then she'd be both. A hybrid. Maybe that's... impossible? Maybe The Vampire Diaries got that one wrong."
Half vampire half something else, was not... common. But not unheard of. If anyone was the one to break the glass ceiling it'd be Cosma.
But it would of happened already. Wouldn't it?
"So what do we do, then?" She crumbles the silence that follows the suggestion. "We..." An inhale. "We can't continue waiting."
There's a beat; o' pregnant pause - and then -
"She deserves a burial." Lily spoke. "A proper one."
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Kamilah's been to an uncountable number of funerals in her lifetimes. Blurred and plenty. Arguably and yet indefinitely; it is the most hellish part, of the conditions of barbaric existence.
Bountiful. Sometimes bloody. Always sorrowful. Once any family she had left were crudely outlived; the company she took up had mainly been vampiric. And there wasn't sound reason in returning ash. to the hungered earth. But the boundless sky. She never bothered burying the results of what little human friendship she had managed to keep. Her kind rarely partook in such a human tradition.
Irrevocably; Cosma was, and is, the difference - the gap; bridged and bridging brutality and beyond.
In spite of the state of New York; rancorous; irate, rich, charmed, gruesome, macabre and godly with grievance - by some grace and mercy of a God she has surpassed in power, they find no trouble amongst themselves as they flounder through the city.
Their shoes moan and cry like phantoms against the aged silver of cobblestone; heavy with nothingness and weight of impending finality in the night. Cosma laid leisurely; limp, cradled in the arms of Adrian, pale even without the blundering battles of thy moon. His steps jostling her; head secured against his body, one arm behind his neck and another forgotten on her upper body; ignoring the shrapnel of bullets Jax; unwilling in the apparent inherit brutish abandonment of the plan; had shot each of their ways as the two of them left. Each a sudden heretic at the concept of burial. Neither him nor Lily had come. Not that she could fault them.
The graveyard is a feral playground; but tonight, none have made themselves known to the group walking inside of it. But preparedness is thick; lavish in her lungs; and the stake wrapped her fingers daunting and bemoaned by greed.
There is something martyr like in this; that makes Kamilah seep with agonized, stuffed displeasure. Made worse by the acute quiet that has overtaken them. As if any conversation will alert the earth; and in its raging fire shall bring the sun upon them; and ash will combust each of them but one.
It felt wrong. She must have family; she talks so highly of the odd little people that that raised her. To do this without them; felt insulting to the corpse in Adrian's grasp. Kamilah does not know the sensations of parenthood; but there must be something inflamed; horrid and personal; privately singular - in the burial of the creation you have wrought. Friends; beside the ones here.
Oh - lord, they'd - someone, would have to tell them, when - and if, any of this returned to normal. Something close to normal.
She doesn't even know if Cosma had siblings.
She furtively spares an eye towards Adrian; features, darkened by the night, and pent up with pensive distance. He's doing it for their sake; she's not dim. After her display of devoted panic, her auburn burned affections for the human became the business of all of them. Someone had to hold it together - and she was hardly at her best. The two of them could not be blown into the daggers of grief while the calm person was the corpse between them.
They were headed to bury the first person she's loved - fully; irreversibly; desperately; in one hundred and twenty years - sue her, if a mask, haphazardly shattered.
Hours pass; showing themselves to be trickster facades; as they reach an already half dug grave. Disturbed and shovel abandoned on the ground by unknown causes. Both stare down at the sight; before a brief, unspoken, glance in each's direction makes the choice for them. She nods; flocking to the other side of the hole to allow the man space.
Adrian bends downwards; crouched as he unburdened himself with the cargo in his arms. He hesitates, in an awkward position, leaving her between his knees and chest. For only a moment; as crickets sound off blindly around them. Before he muttered something she couldn't hear - lowering her down farther into the open coffin: white silk and padded. Something invasive deep in her wants to slam him down onto the concrete and tear out his eye sockets for it. Against logic. But lets him continue undisturbed.
Within minutes he rises from his crouched stance, using his hand to wipe away the dirt that accumulates on his pants from the action. For a long month - or less, possibly, she eyes Cosma from above; intense and richly obsessive in her unreadable concentrated look; arms folded together. But it isn't until Adrian's called her name for the fifth time does she surface back up to reality.
Cosma is beautiful. Death is not enough of a god to change that. And with this; the two spread dirt over the coffin in tense peace.
Somehow it ends. She doesn't know how much time has stomped through. But she knows now that there are only the two of them.
It's freezing outside.
"Cosma was the greatest thing to happen to me in centuries. She was fearless. Unafraid of our world. Even when I offered for her to lose its knowledge. Clever. I've never known anyone else like her. She's... a hero."
"I loved her." As she admits it she ponders how perhaps that's the problem. The universe striking down with crashes of untamed primal vengeful vengeance - heroes weren't meant to be loved - with intimacy; solely adoration was all the things to be permitted. To do something more severe was to stand idle as the stars spit in your eye with dark toothy grin or slam your fingers through the crevices of opened and shut doors. "I love her." To love a hero is to be lonely as well as smothered.
"I know. I... i'm here, for you, if.." He trails off, when she holds up a hand to stop him. eyes clenching shut antsy towards the ground. But she nods in unspoken understanding. She doesn't need his comfort. Not... right now.
Not here. There was... there was still so much to do, she... they... with Gaius now gone...
They'd rebuild New York without her.