The Boss breathed deeply, her knuckles still sore from Matthew's suprisingly hard face. She had Johnny back, her best friend. But everything was different now, no? She had spent over five years empty and hard, and he had spent them in a mindfuck of a torture porn. How did they come back from that? She had gotten used to being on her own, but now felt guilty whenever he wasn't around. And she loved him, though she wasn't enough of a pussy to ever tell him how much. He was more than family, since as she'd told Asha, no one cared who she was before the Saints. They were her life, Johnny was, but she still felt unwhole, or rather like things did not fit right inside of her. Life had been simpler when she was Russian and allowed to be cold inside, and vengeance more satisfying and destructive when she was Hispanic. She'd felt a flare of that old anger when she thought Phillipe had killed Johnny, the kind that had put Jessica in a trunk for Maero to destroy instead of just shooting her in the head, but then the enormity of the loss had blown the fire out, and she had been left only with a screaming hole. Shaundi had become her past self, flames of the itch to destroy worlds always licking at her palms, and five years had soothed her girl, and released her somewhat, as time did to the worst of wounds. But it seemed to do nothing for holes, only letting them grow larger, as the Boss grew more adept at hiding their existence. Now it felt like they were too much a part of her to ever cease existing, and she sensed a similar change in Johnny. If it had been her Zinyak had taken, and she had spent years failing Carlos, over and over again, it seemed impossible that she would not have gone crazy.
"Merde." She resumed focusing on her breathing, carefully putting her emotions back into a semblance of order, and stood only when she was certain there was no trace of inner turmoil. The mirror on the wall of her and the other girls' cabin seemed out of place, and felt so strangely humanizing. It was frighteningly easy to forget who she was, and become something outside of herself- humanity's last hope, the president, the boss, the saint, the leader of the last free humans- but none of those symbols fixed their hair in front of a mirror; she did, and no one else.
She wove the strands of hair expertly between themselves, the french braids that were always wrapped around her head forming thoughtlessly. There was a new distance in her relationship with Johnny. They had shared everything except her coma and his incarceration since her life began and she met him, but now there was a seemingly insurmountable gap, a period of time filled with horrifying experiences and hardships for both of them that neither of the other could truly understand. And now that he was back he felt like a cool older brother, briefly hanging around with his little sister and her high school friends before he went back to college and his real life. Not that her family was rife with cool older brothers. She didn't know how to fix things, and stared at herself with dead eyes that nonetheless held a hint of supressed tragedy, ruthlessly crushing the seed of thought that maybe things couldn't ever be fixed before it could fully germinate and bear fruit. She would break under the weight of that thought if she let it in, or worse, she would harden further and then nothing could reach her. She felt like a silly prince in a story she'd once read, half of her stone and the other human. The stone half rejoiced at the thought of being untouchable, while the human part knew someone like her needed ties, or else she would become something like a rabid animal that needed to be put down, too coldly intent on blood to be suffered in a largely civilized world. She would turn into the type of person who left Shaundi and went after Killbane, and more of those people were not necessary.
She walked towards Pierce distractedly, her stomach still churning so heavily with anxiety she couldn't help but picture it as being filled with green glass waves capped with white, an old wooden ship with white sails being thrown into the air by the swells.
"Hey Pierce," she began, the presence of her lieutenant snapping her out of her head and seamlessly into her public persona. "We've had some good times haven't we?"
Okay, maybe it wasn't seamless, the Boss admitted to herself, her legs wrapped around Pierce's waist, pulling him deeper. She didn't believe in using friends, but the sick feeling inside her needed to be resolved somehow, and this seemed the least damaging. She'd been clear it was just casual, and drinking usually ended in a blackout where she did something stupider than killing someone or sleeping with them. Unfortunately, since she tried to avoid repeat engagements, Pierce would probably think she was a shit lay now. She couldn't get her head out of her ass, and kept thinking of Johnny, while awkwardly trying to avoid picturing him as she had sex with someone else. Kinzie said she had impulse control problems, and the Boss hadn't been listening, but maybe there'd been a solution in there somewhere. Obviously one was necessary.
She grabbed the metal bars of the bunk, the coolness helping to anchor her and allowing her to refocus on Pierce. The threat to her reputation helped her to put away her thoughts and at least make it more exciting for Pierce. Secretly her mind was still outside the room, poking around behind sunglasses for confirmation that they could make everything okay, but it would stay a secret, because she was not a fucking idiot child.
It was because they were soulmates, she decided, having sucessfully rocked Pierce's world and immediately returned to worrying. He was the love of her life, in as many senses of the idiom as you wanted; you didn't just recover from that shit. But it was because he was the love of her life that things would work out, eventually. And whatever had changed, he would always come for her, and she would always come for him. That was what you did for the people you loved.