Caine was rather irritated, looking at Diana's passed out form on the couch. She was twitching and muttering worriedly in her sleep, tossing back and forth, and murmuring disturbing things about blood and killing and guilt guilt guilt.
"I should have just let you go over the cliff." He grumbled to himself. "It'd be easier than having to deal with your wacko self anyway."
But he couldn't do that. Not now, not ever. Caine had trouble justifying his irrational attraction to Diana, even now. The best explanation he could come up with was that perhaps even people as powerful as he was had to have at least one fatal weakness. And she was deadly. Diana was cold and unloving, manipulative, and by most definitions, a bitch, but Caine had never regretted loving her, because when she showed affection, as rare as it was, it would make him blissfully happy.
Caine knew it was an awfully sentimental sort of concept, but for him, even before the FAYZ wall came up, happiness had been hard to come by. Caine's life was made up of nothing but plotting and the occasional nap, in which, he was pretty sure, he would plot in his sleep. His family, -fake family, he reminded himself- was too busy propelling hm up the academic ladder to offer him many charming family moments, and Coates Acadamy wasn't exactly the most nurturing environment, so Caine was rarely happy. Content, perhaps, but scaring the hell out of the weak couldn't give him the same rush Diana gave him when she allowed him one of her small smiles or let him kiss her, even if he never knew why she did it.
Early on, Caine had been perplexed by the idea of attraction beyond the physical "oh-look-that-girl-is-really-hot" hormonal response, but eventually he figured out that he did, in fact, love Diana, the cold, unloving, manipulative bitch. He loved that she never backed down to hm even when everyone else was on their knees, and he thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, even after she had shaved her hair off. And she knew it, too. Cane couldn't pretend he didn't know she could control him like a lovesick puppy when she wanted too, but thankfully, they usually wanted the same things, so he could go along with her wishes and his at the same time.
Hesitantly, he reached out and smoothed a piece of hair away from her face. She shuddered under his hand, but stayed in her fevered hair sort of crackled as it moved, brittle and dry, worrying Caine a little. To lose her after all they had been through to scurvy, of all things, the pirate disease, might just drive him as nuts as she was.
"Why'd you have to get guilty, Diana?" He asked her closed eyes. "You couldn't have just stayed in denial like a good little girl? Times are tough, I know. Being stranded on an island seems like the least of our problems most of the time, but you didn't have to actually go insane. At least I had an excuse. The Darkness was in my head when I lost it. But you, Diana, you don't have to do this. What's a wee bit of cannibalism when you're starving? It was my idea. It was my idea!
"Damn it, Diana!" Caine hurled a painting across the room using only his outsretched palm. " I love you, and you love me, you admitted it, you did! Damn it all if this isn't just the goddamn worst timing ever. Damn! Why won't you just get better, you bitch!"
Her eyes flickered open, glazed and bloodshot like she had gotten off of a bender worse than the kids in Perdido Beach were always doing. "Caine? What is it? Are the coyotes back?" She shook. "I let them kill so many people. I ripped so many people to shreds. Just kids. They were only kids!" Diana screamed at him, "They were only kids!"
Caine was on her in a second, before she went lunging at something sharp again. He trapped her arms against her sides. She kept doing this, waking up, screaming about one mostrosity or another, switching from one topic to another, acting like, well, a mental patient. "Easy Diana, easy. You're just having another...episode. I'm going to get you some more water. The tables sure have turned now, haven't they?"
Caine turned away, tossing a weak chuckle in her direction. He wasn't used to actually doing grunt work, but there weren't any more followers to order around, and for Diana, he suppossed, he could bear the indignity of rooting around in the wreck of semi-clean dishes for a glass that was relatively intact.
"The tables have turned." Diana whispered. " Oh yes, I remember when you were sick. I had to clean up so much shit! I brought you a lot of water too, didn't -oh! You threw... someone through a wall! Right through a wall! That's fifteen then."
"Fifteen what?"
"People I killed. But I'm not done counting yet."
Caine grimaced. Something didn't seem quite right about what she said. "But I killed that kid. You had nothing to do with any of that. Diana, you had nothing to do with that. Just drink."
He sat down next to her, wrapping one arm around her shoulders in case she started struggling again, and offered the cup of water in the his other hand. Diana sipped obediently. "I should have stopped you."
"And I shouldn't have made you eat Panda."
"How will I ever tell my parents what I've done?"
"We've done. And I don't think you'll have to worry about them for a while."
Diana gulped down the last of her water, and looked at him from what seemed to be the bottom of a deep hole. "I'm so tired of it all, Caine. So sick of the fighting and the controlling and the mutants, and the freaks, the hunger, the madness. It's going to drive me quite insane."
"God forbid. Hell, Diana, you want to just stay here for a while? No evil plans, I promise. It's just that Perdido Beach certainly wasn't doing you any good, and I think-"
"Like a vacation."
"Yeah."
"I'd like that." They sat quietly for a few minutes, looking at the scattered pieces of canvas strewn across the room.
"Diana, you know I love you, right?"
"Yeah. Kind of a stupid thing to do."
"I know."
"Good."
