Demilan and Maileena returned to the apartment. Throughout the entire walk from Odis's place, Maileena noticed Demilan's random mumbles and lack of concentration. His pupils were widened and his mind seemed to be somewhere else. After 6 months of not using Vex, his body was having a somewhat strange reaction to the purple drug's return.
Demilan dropped his black duffel bag on the floor as soon as the two walked through the door into the apartment and lay on the couch. "Oh, man," the ex-soldier was euphoric.
"Are you alright? How are you feeling?"
"How am I feeling?" he laughed. "Have you ever tried Vex before?"
"No," she sounded slightly agitated.
"Well, it's…" he stopped himself.
"Great? Awesome? Amazing?"
"It's the feeling that made me lose everything," he said in a blank tone. "It's neither of those things."
"Oh… I see."
"That motherfucker… fucking Odis!" a sudden rage overtook him. "That prick knew what he was doing when he stabbed me with that syringe. He knew what the addiction did to me." He buried his face in his hands.
"You should rest."
"Rest? What are you talking about? We have to go after Kleon in the Godly Succubi!" He tried to get up from the couch, yet Maileena held him back, pushing him back down. "You're in no shape to fight anyone right now. Rest. We'll figure out what to do later."
"I need to find Telia."
"And I need to find Vera!" she snapped at him. "But we'll both get killed if we get reckless!" Demilan saw her expression, burning with anger and frustration, and remained on the couch. "I'm going to make us some coffee." She disappeared into the kitchen.
Night fell quickly that day, and soon enough the effect of the Vex wore off of Demilan's face. A part of Maileena was angry at him for making them delay their search for Vera. If it wasn’t for his fucking Vex addiction… Yet a part of her also knew that it wasn’t really his fault. He couldn’t see Odis coming at him with that syringe, and the bottom line was that he was a victim of the drug.
The two sat in the living room with the sounds of crickets echoing from outside and the occasional sound of a car passing by. Other than those, it was silent. Too silent for Maileena. She never liked the silence. She held her revolver in hand, spinning its wheel again and again, while Demilan sat next to her, counting what remaining bullets he had to use with his Skyla rifle. There was eeriness in the air around them, and Maileena didn’t favor it much. Ever since her sister was kidnapped by men from the Godly Succubi, she was constantly going through something, never leaving herself alone to her thoughts, never giving herself a chance to think about what recently happened in her life. From being raped and abused by Kleon's sleazy men, to being rescued by a rough soldier looking for his wife, to extracting information from a drug dealer. She knew that keeping herself out of some occupation would make the notion of her sister in the hands of those wretched men appear in her mind. And she was right.
"Do you ever… think about what led you here?" she broke the silence that wrapped around the two of them.
Demilan seemed taken aback by the question. At first he seemed hesitant to answer. "I wish I could NOT think about it," he said eventually. "Without Telia… I feel broken. Incomplete. It's a constant reminder of what led me here."
"You couldn’t have known that your addiction would get her kidnapped."
"It doesn’t matter. The reality is that without it, she'd still be here. I don't even know what she has gone through during these past 6 months." Suddenly the notion of what Vera might have gone through ever since she was taken occurred to Maileena. Did they rape her? Did they hit her? Those questions made her furious. If they've laid a finger on her, I'll kill them. I'll chop their fucking heads off. "Do YOU see yourself accountable for what happened to your sister?" he asked her.
"I…" she thought about it for a second. "I do," she confessed. "It's like you said. The reality is that if I hadn’t gotten mixed up with those people, Vera would still be here."
"But your case is different. You were trying to help the two of you make a living. You were trying to make money to feed yourselves. I was just a junkie."
"Either way, we can spin this around in any direction we want. We can blame ourselves or we can blame no one and say that we couldn't have known that this would happen. I think that whatever we choose, we should also blame the people who did this to us."
"Seems like everyone in this country is… rotten."
"Does that mean we're rotten, too?"
"I know I am."
"Demilan…" she turned to him, her eyes glistening in the moonlight coming through the window. "I've had the pleasure of dealing with the lowest sorts of people. I've seen rotten. I've seen more of it than I would rather. You're not rotten. The lengths you'd go to save your wife, the way nothing stops you, even if it seems you've lost everything. You're a good man, Demilan McCloud."
"I appreciate it, Maileena, but… I'm really not. You're forgetting that I used to be a soldier in the Alatarian army and in Code Sanguinary. That means I've killed people. Hell, I've even tortured some."
"So what? As long as those people deserved it, it doesn’t matter."
"Is that what you think?"
"Yeah. Look, there's no right and wrong anymore, no heroes and villains, at least not in the way we used to define them in stories and fairy tales. Everyone has bad deeds on their record. It's how we live with ourselves that differentiates us from one another. People like us… people who are in pain and agony over the things they've done… we don't get to fall in line with those other scumbags who go to sleep with a smirk on their faces after raping or killing someone. A good apple on a bad tree isn’t necessarily rotten. It's just an apple with shitty luck."
Demilan chuckled in response. "A good apple on a bad tree… my wife used to tell me similar things. Ever since I saw those horrible things in the Tearful Rebellion, I've had those awful nightmares. Every single night. They refused to let me go. People getting bludgeoned to death. Women and children trying to escape the wrath of President Alford, to no avail." He held up his necklace, the one with the dream catcher as its pendant. "Telia gave me this necklace, saying it would make the nightmares go away." He let go of the necklace. "Want to know a funny thing? It worked. The nightmares stopped. For a long time I felt relieved, but now… now they're back. Without Telia…"
"We'll find her, Demilan."
"I remember standing on the rooftop of that hospital after waking up from the coma. The first thought that ran through my mind was that Telia must be dead by now." Maileena's eyes focused heavily on Demilan. She saw the sadness in his eyes now. His voice became heavy and slow. "I was ready to jump. I didn’t want to live like that. I mean, what's the point of trying to live on when I know that I've already lost everything I had?"
"But you didn’t do it."
"No… I didn’t. A part of me started to realize that Telia might not be dead after all. That's when I decided to find her and make amends for my mistakes. I don’t care if I die doing it, as long as I save her. Most people would have jumped. I even saw one do it a while ago."
"You did?"
"Yeah, when I made my way from the hospital to that warehouse in Ashcote, where I found you. This poor woman was standing on the Maroon Bridge, you know, the one that crosses over the Wailing Lake."
"The one that’s known for all the people who jumped to their deaths in it."
"Right. She started telling me about how her husband and child were murdered by the Ferals, but I didn’t care enough to listen. I was too focused on getting to Ashcote and finding Telia that… I was just so careless about her. I just wanted to stop to light up a cigarette, and she… she threw herself," Demilan looked as if he was struggling to say the words. "I just drove away." Maileena gazed down at her revolver, her mouth slightly open. "Do I seem a bit more rotten to you now?" he asked.
"No. It was her choice. That had nothing to do with you."
"Then why do I sense disappointment in your voice?"
Maileena simply spun the wheel of her revolver, remaining silent, not because she didn’t want to answer his question, but because she didn’t know how. She held the gun up, making the metallic barrel shine against the moonlight. It didn’t feel as heavy as it was when she first picked it up. "You know, I still haven’t picked a name for this gun." she said, changing the subject.
"Take your time" he allowed her to avoid the question.
Despite the circumstances of the conversation, Maileena quite enjoyed it. It'd been a long time since she had an honest, mature conversation with someone. Ever since she dropped out of school and lost touch with all of her friends, she had only found herself in the company of thugs and criminals who know nothing about having a mature dialogue with a person, and she could never talk with her young sister about such matters. In shitty times like these, I better cherish every nice, lovely moment I can get.
When the dark, moonlit skies changed to bright ones, lit by the warm sun, Maileena opened her eyes, awakening from her sleep. She didn’t even remember falling asleep, yet she woke up on Demilan's couch. She rubbed her sleepy eyes and tried to adjust her eyesight to the brightly lit apartment scenery. Her revolver lay on the floor, apparently having dropped from her hand when she fell asleep. She looked around, searching for Demilan, yet she couldn’t spot him, until she heard his voice coming from the bedroom, grunting and sighing heavily.
Curious about why he would make such noises, she opened the door to his bedroom, slowly and quietly, making the door squeak loudly as she entered the room. "Demilan?" she called out to him. The former drug addict sat beside his bed, his eyes red and his mouth open, grinning. His hands rested on the floor, and his eyes were staring at the wall, looking as if it was the most interesting thing in the world. "Demilan, are you okay?" she inched closer to him, eventually crouching by the man to take a closer look at him. That was when she saw it, laying on the floor, right next to him. It was a small wooden box, containing about 4 purple pills, an emptied syringe with droplets of purple fluid still in its cylinder, and a small bottle, containing the same purple fluid in it, to refill the syringe's cylinder. Vex in all its forms. Pills and liquids. "Demilan, what did you do?" she asked him, getting no response in return. Demilan was too high on the drug, wasting away in a mental state that probably brought him as much joy and pleasure as it was destroying his body and brain. He must have had it here in the apartment all this time… a leftover from his days of addiction. "Demilan, talk to me!" she urged him to answer her, yet the man still stared at the wall with a silly grin on his face.
At that moment, Maileena knew that she was facing a much bigger problem than she initially thought. Without Demilan, there was no way she could save Vera from the Godly Succubi, and right now Demilan was gone. There was only the shadow of the former soldier, drifting in the purple haze that was once his undoing.
