Was listening to "The Good Stuff" and "I Lost It" by Kenny Chesney and I thought somehow of Johnny and Kitty...so...it had to be done. It begged me. NOT a songfic, just what ran through my twisted sick mind during both songs. Rated T for rather descriptive creepiness.
Without further ado, I present this One Shot. Maybe a sequel but only writing this one once.
Johnny sighed, running his hand through his green hair once again for what Kitty could only notice was, like, the hundredth time that minute. "Gods, Johnny, what's pickin' at ya's? Only thing'd make ME this nervous is if'n Ol' Phantom boy were ta show around...and I gave Ember fifty bucks to handle the ol' windbag so's you an I could have some fun tonight...but I guess we aren't a-gonna. I just...this keeps happening, Johnny. I love ya, but I can't take this. Not in this poor excuse of death we were given. But, hey, if that's how ya wants it, okay then. I'm going home."
Home
The word hit Johnny like a freight train and he felt like throwing up. Lurching from his chair, he gasped out her name. "Ki...kitty...wait, please."
But she only scowled at him and shook her head. "Dammit, Johnny, I'm not going to stay in this half-life forever. I'm going home."
As she vanished from the restaurant, he screamed out a low, mourning moan. Lowering his head he allowed one tear to slide down then he realized how utterly stupid he was. NO! Hellfire, he would not lose her again, powers that be could be damned for all he cared. No, no, NO.
Focusing on her, on the woman he so desperately loved, he transported to her and found her not in the home which they shared in their haunt but in the past on earth, twenty-three years prior. He watched from behind her silently, smiling as he watched them, alive, once more. As they laughed in the summer sun on that magical second date where she'd earned that nickname.
Kitty...how she had led him into a pet store upon browsing their small town, how she had held each little kitten and they swarmed around her eagerly. How, afterwards, he had led her into his daddy's ford and rode her out into the country, watching the stars as the moon cooled the earth. And he smiled as he heard her laugh as she too, watched that night they had truly fallen in love. How her father had grasped her from Johnny's arms and slammed that door in his face so fast Johnny didn't even know up from down, much less what to do.
The sweet memory of his begging his mother for the money for a ring for his girl and her angrily handing over the money on the condition he obeyed her every whim until she deemed it a debt repaid. He bought the one she had been fantasizing about, the emerald oval stone with real, golden trim and their intended engagement date scrawled inside, with their initials there. How she had exclaimed in pure delight and kissed him for the present.
The days whirled around him suddenly, as Kitty summoned whatever specific memory she wanted to see, and then it was there, something he was unawares of. Her father had grabbed her and pinned her to the wall, anger electrifying the air. The sounds from that past time found Johnny's ears and he stiffened in shock.
"PREGNANT? ANGELINA JOSEFFA MARIOTT, YOU'D BEST EXPLAIN THIS, RIGHT NOW YOUNG LADY!"
She screeched and shoved him away, that human auburn hair flowing into her eyes and she raised her chin in defiance. "Don't you tell me what ta do! I'm eighteen today, and I'm all but engaged to Jonathan anyways. I've got his class ring, see? All green and Gold... and when I tell him of this baby, his baby...he's gonna marry me I'm sure of it."
"PRACTICALLY ENGAGED IS NOT A CLASS RING, STUPID GIRL. And you best get the hell outta my house, you are no longer welcome here. NEVER AGAIN!"
And Johnny watched in horror as Angelina rushed out the door, and falling over him as he stood ready to walk up the steps to ask her for an evening out. He didn't ask, Johnny remembered, averting his eyes at knowing what would come as the earth-Johnny showed her his brand-spanking new motorcycle. Why in God's name had he not asked why his girl, his Kitten, was sobbing her eyes out and shaking nonstop. He had his arm around her, but he knew now that she should have been held, and kissed, and cherished until she would have told him. why And Johnny's soul only got heavier as he heard that engine start and rev up. It spun off with the two of them in it, only to come to a metal-twisting, crunching, blood-spilling halt not even two blocks away as a truck topped the hills at an unsafe speed and careened into the young couple. As he was thrown from the motorcycle and wrapped around a streetlight, his spinal cord instantly snapping in two and killing him within minutes as paralysis took over and his brain stopped accepting commands, as his heart had nowhere truly capable of actually pumping blood to and burst, life fading from his eyes.
Kitty...his darling Kitty...she screamed out his name in pure panic as her body hurdled over the truck and motorcycle, hitting the asphalt and road rash attacking every inch of free skin as she could not control a single movement...no, that wasn't right, Johnny noticed as he took in her death, something he had only seen that one time all those years ago, and even then trying to figure out why in the Hell he was standing beside a broken him was brain overload and had seemed perhaps a tad more important at the time.
But now Johnny saw it. The hands clutching her stomach, the gasping and trying to curl as her body lost all sense of control and organization on the ground. As she tried in vain to protect the life within her, the life that he now knew came from that night he wanted to impress her by buying her that pure gold and diamond bracelet...which she had thanked him for with such a pure, clean love that only she had to offer. She tried, that day in death, to save their child. The child that he would have raised up with her mamma's looks and charms, and his suave personality and love for all things outdoors. Would have worked nonstop, twenty-four seven three hundred sixty five days a year if it meant giving him the life he deserved, full of the opportunities and familial relationships neither parent knew crack about. And then, he watched as she bleeding and broken self spotted his newly-dead cooling body and her scream full of horror and unknown pain cursed his ears and he flinched and set his jaw as he watched a barely-alive Angelina drag herself several feet over to him and collapsing as death's sour notes closed around them. Her hand slipped to her stomach one last time and he lost it.
The ghost he had followed whirled around as her ears finally heard the 'intruder' behind her and she gasped as she watched him sink to his knees and sob hysterically. She went down with him and he clung to her, nuzzling her hair with a love he hadn't shown her in years. "Gods...Kitty...Angelina...I f...followed you here to say why I was so nutty at that restaurant. I...I was gonna ask you...if you..."
He hesitated and watched below for a split second as Kitty's mother threw herself out that door and screamed in anguish at seeing the mangled bodies as police fought to restrain her. He turned back to focus on the only one he really gave a damn about. "If you would...be my girl. Forever. I have loved you for twenty-three long years, and twenty years ago when our lives went from one world to the next, I thought I could continue being the way I was before, committed enough to stay, but not enough to be eternally serious. But I was wrong. Gods, Kitten, i love you. So...I guess what I'm asking is...will you do me the extreme honor, my beloved girl, to marry me and live with me until we are called up to whatever -if anything- awaits us in the sky?"
She nodded, with tears pouring down her face. He hesitated, thinking for a second and looked at her. "Do you trust me, Kitten?"
"I always have, Johnny."
"Stay here, eyes closed. I have a surprise for you."
Without another word, he burst through the horrid memory which still played down below and floated, intangible and invisible, in front of his his dead lover's human body. Gritting his teeth and praying to whatever entity existed that what he hoped to do worked, he plunged his hands into her abdomen and felt it, the faintest pulsing of a human unborn baby. Grasping the slippery things entangled in the process, he envisioned his child's unfinished human form being in his possession and as it did, as what he wanted to happen happened, he grinned and then burst back into the Afterlife. He plunged both himself and the time-warped child into her stomach and her eyes squelched as if in pain and then he felt the shift, the internal bodies clicking together in suden harmony and he let go, phasing his hands back out. "Kitty? Are you...okay? I should have asked, but it tore me up to think of what you must have felt, and I can't imagine you going through it again, and this little one deserves a chance at life too."
Her eyes swam with more tears and she threw herself at him, wrapping her arms around his neck.
Instinctively, he transported them to their lair, noting that eventually a room would have to be built for Junior. But for now, he felt they would be busy with other things. Thank the gods he hadn't lost her today. Thank the gods he never would again.
