Venus and Edie, round 1.

[shewent]

Being dead wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Hell wasn't as bad as they said.

Heaven wasn't as good.

And who the hell predicted that you could just go from one to the other like walking down to the trashy 7-11 on the corner.

Though the 7-11 has way better beer.

Edie flopped back on the worn couch, looking through her lowered lashes as those meandering around her parts. A hodge podge of mediocrity if she'd ever seen one.

Maybe this really was just hell. Maybe hell wasn't something that seemed awful at first, but just the eternity of boring weighing you down day after day for all eternity. Like some fucked up Twilight Zone episode you could never really get out of.

Shit, this was getting to heavy. Pushing herself up, she dusted off her butt, before calling out to whomever was near that she was going for a walk. She doubted they cared much, but it just felt weird not to let someone know.

Comments

[celebrityskinned]

"Why're you letting me know? I'm not your mom."

The new girl isn't bored yet, but she's over the stage where every dead person needs to be looked over to see if they're someone she knows. She was excited when she met Kurt Cobain and Biggie, Marilyn Monroe and Joan of Arc. Now, brushing elbows with history has lost its sheen.

Now Venus is settling into the difficult part of finding something to do with her unlife, something she never actually planned for. She figured death would be the end of her guilt, end of her uncertainty, end of all the parts of herself she hated. It turned out that it was just the end of a promised ending.

She stretches out on the couch with a magazine that she can't seem to read. Eyes don't seem capable of making sense of language in the land of the dead. Everything's written in English but none of it actually looks like words, more like a typewriter vomited up strings of letters. At least magazines have pictures.

She doesn't even look up when the girl passes until she sees the blue skin, and that's when she looks up with surprise and something all the more inscrutable on her face.

"Edie Sawyer?"

[shewent]

"Old habits die hard." She pauses, smirking down at the girl. "At least harder than we did, right?"

She was about to walk by, when the woman's face clicked in her brain, somehow. It took another few turns of the gears to realize it, and then everything all came together.

"You're Venus Dee Milo, aren't you? Hey, did you ever make it on the team?" She let out a cold little knowing chuckle. "That why you're up here now?"

Down here? Over here?

[celebrityskinned]

Venus isn't sure what to do. She's been competing with Edie for years, if not consciously than in the back of her mind. On the pedestal of Woman, Edie's face is what's carved into the marble, not because she's admirable but because she's the one Venus has had to emulate.

She sits forward on the couch.

"Sure is. Not that there's much of a team anymore. Even if Tike and Guy made it out alive, we were going to disband the group and cash in all our stock." So much good that does her in the afterlife.

[shewent]

Well, that made her feel weird. Some mix of jealous, angry, and strangely enough, relieved.

It was what it was and now it was gone. It had been a huge part of her, but now her life was also gone, so did it matter?

This was probably going to be something she was gonna dwell on, but hell, she had time here. They had nothing but time.

"Damn, that's a shame to miss out on." She finally settled on, smiling tightly.

[celebrityskinned]

"Not really." Venus shakes her head, and her smile is far less tight, far more genuine than Edie's even as it was self-deprecating. That's one of the reasons she could never be a carbon copy of U-Go Girl; Edie has a shrewdness to her lovability, a sense of mystery and self-possession, whereas Venus' charisma comes from her earnestness and desire to be liked. Edie always knew where she was in the world; Venus always felt the need to prove she'd earned the patch of earth she stood on.

She wasted so much of her life proving it.

"You seen any of our cohorts here?"

[shewent]

"Not yet. Well..."Her eyes drifted over to where some burn out super hero sat sprawled out, staring out into space. "I guess that depends on who you consider our cohorts."

"But nobody from the team." She was quick to add, shifting her body to face Venus. Where ever she had been going seemed a waste now, she was much more interested in the woman in front of her. In the connections she had to Edie's old life. What was infront of her was a Pandora's box, and Edie was never going to be good at ignoring that.

"How long has it been since I ate it?"

[celebrityskinned]

"I usually go by whether or not their logo would get ours in trouble for copyright infringement." She shrugs, looking over at that other superhero with a pitying expression.

"Year and a half. For what it's worth, the stock never recovered after you died." Something Venus will carry with her long beyond the grave, knowing she was never enough to pump the X-Statix' flagging numbers back up.

[shewent]

Edie was transparent in the little stoke of glee that gave her battered ego, missing Venus' tension. In heaven, your ego always seemed to be a little bit battered, but hearing that made her feel good. She left an impact. A positive one, if he absences mattered that much.

"That seems so short, now." She said softly, before grinning up at Venus. "Back then a year and a half seemed like eternity."

Unless Venus had an approach to being a superhero that Edie couldn't even grasp, she'd know what the blue woman meant. When you woke up every day knowing you might not be going to be in one piece that night, a year and a half was far too long to thing about.

[celebrityskinned]

"Right? Our contracts only lasted three months at a time, and half of us didn't live long enough to see our first renewal." Venus laughs, and it's a wry sound. Maybe they're lucky, the X-Statix. They embraced mortality, instead of spending their lives fearing an afterlife that was more dull than anything else.

"I like to think I lasted a while. That's why we were going to quit. Got the death-seeking bug out of our system."

[shewent]

"I know you were always just on the tip of our tongue for next."

She could spread a little ego boosting around. It always felt good to know you were wanted, and so far it didn't seem like Venus had a terrible experince on the team. There wasn't the deep bitterness she had seen in some others. Not that she didn't understand them, but she was glad Venus didn't seem the kind.

[celebrityskinned]

"Thanks. Is it rude to say that you weren't even cold in the ground before Spike Freeman called me up?"

She won't mention Guy. There's just something a little bit crass about telling a dead woman you fucked the bereaved.

[shewent]

"Nah. I never had too many delusions about just exactly how important I was to good old Spike Freeman." He nose wrinkled up, before she burst out into laughter.

It was hard to hold grudges about that sorta shit when you had the whole context of eternity to deal with.

"Any good gossip? Hell is boring by the way. Or heaven. Sorry."

[celebrityskinned]

"Good. For what it's worth, he took out a hit on all of us and your boyfriend snapped his neck. Then we had Dead Girl go use him in purgatory like some kind of macabre sock puppet." Venus makes a gesture with her hand like a little snake.

"How's that for gossip, girl?"

[shewent]

"I can't imagine it happening to a nicer person." Edie snickered as she tried her best to visualize it all. Good. That ass deserved no better.

At the mention of 'her boyfriend' there was a moment of stillness on her face, briefly, before she tucked it away. That was an emotional minefield she wanted to get into with someone who really was a stranger. Still, would he show up here?

Did she want him to?

Henrietta = Princess Di's expy

[celebrityskinned]

Venus snickers too, because it's true. No one ever had any love for Spike Freeman, and no one was under any illusion that he loved anything but his bank account. He probably slept with his checkbook under his pillow.

"We had Princess Henrietta join us for a while too. She was a ghost. Then she haunted some pop songs and killed people all like The Ring."

Re: Henrietta = Princess Di's expy

[shewent]

"How many dead people have been one this team at once?" She snickered. "It's like foreshadowing."

Looking off into the distance, not that that was a very exciting prospect around these parts, she let out a soft sigh, shaking her head. It was still a struggle to deal with the reality of death. It was like infinity. You thought you understood it...until you really tried to understand it.

"Live fast and die young sounds so glamorous until you get to the die young part."

[celebrityskinned]

"Seriously. It almost makes me long for some eternal damnation, you know?" Venus raises an eyebrow, then says quickly "not that I'm serious", as if placating some invisible force eavesdropping on them.

"You want to go sing lullabies to the unbaptized babies or something?"

[shewent]

Edie snickers, because she knows that feeling. Oh, does she know it. And sometimes, some one seemed to be listening. Someone suddenly dropped from sight with a scream, and nobody knew why.

And then sometimes they showed back up.

Yeah, she hadn't really figured out any rules here.

"The unbaptized babies are assholes."

[celebrityskinned]

It's so unexpected that it makes Venus laugh. "Wow, what did the unbaptized babies ever do to you? Are you not a mothering type or something?"

She can't possibly know about the little girl left in Edie's past; the press never found it, and Guy kept Edie's secrets cloaked under the wounds he bared.

[shewent]

Edie's start is fast, her expression covered qucikly, but the little break is there. A bird wing in the dark, and then she is grinning, and shrugging.

"Those little dicks-" But her sentence trails off as a high pitched, reedy scream can be heard from...far away. Space and time were all fucked up here, and the sound seemed to come from the distance in all direction. A disquieted stir hit those around them.

Screams of horror weren't common this high up the ladder.

[celebrityskinned]

Maybe normal people would run, would follow the herd instinct that comes from seeing people running. Ghosts, shades of people famous and anonymous, rush past them, scrambling for cover. A crowd, half of them unsure what they're running from, swarms past, leaving stragglers behind because this isn't the place for the virtuous, just the passively self-interested. No one tramples each other but no one bothers to help each other up either.

And Venus and Edie just look at each other, eyebrows raised, the same call in their chests - not of duty, but of glory, maybe. Or at least something to make them worth the attention people would pay them.

"You know, we really shouldn't have wished for excitement. We totally jinxed that."

[shewent]

"I would have though I used up all my jinxs."

But she was already grinning, feeling that high of the adrenaline dumping into herblood stream, the battle at hand making her body hum with energy.

She would be lying if she said she hadn't missed this part. Just a little. Especially in the long, gray haze of the afterlife.

"Roll out." And with that she started against the crowd, feeling like she was fighting against the most lack luster herd of salmon as she pushed through the crowds.

[celebrityskinned]

"How do you want to take this one?" Venus ties her long braids in a knot so they'll stay out of her face and pulls off the jacket she's wearing. Idly, she wonders what happens to the twice dead, the crowd of people crushed under the ghost of Godzilla's feet. Part of her flares up with excitement at the unknown. Part of her wants to know, and part of her fears more tedium.

Her own heartbeat starts to pound with that familiar, blessed adrenalin rush - she didn't know a shade could still feel adrenalin. She didn't even realize she still had a heartbeat.

"We got anything to drop on him? A...boat, maybe?"

[shewent]

Edie looks around for whatever she can see which...isn't much.

"How do you feel about busting up the scenery?"

She was pretty sure she could get something out of that, somehow. There really wasn't much to work with. Apparently heaven didn't expect Godzilla to be stomping around up here.

Though someone had to let him in, so if Saint Peter hadn't been aware that maybe this guy shouldn't be let pass, she didn't know about the quality checks going on here.

Or maybe Godzilla really does deserve to be here. And they're about to kick the crap out of him.

[celebrityskinned]

"I feel like God'll forgive us." Some part of her is endlessly entertained by the idea of punching her way through heaven, too. Or purgatory. The afterlife, painfully boring until now, and part of Venus just wants to stretch this fight out forever because it'll be a change of pace.

"Can you still teleport?" she asks Edie, energy and plasma starting to glow around her own hands and shoulders. "Let's send this lizard back to Tokyo."

[shewent]

"Gods gonna owe us one. Let's find out."

Around here, walking was at least something to do, and maybe she'd gotten a little fat and lazy with her powers. Maybe.

She laid her hand on Venus, not entirely sure what to expect. At not entirely sure what she was feeling once she did. It was like the warmth of something far to hot through an ovenmit, but way hotter, and at the same time far more toned down under her own flesh.

She closed her eyes, reached for that pull inside of her, and suddenly they were on the crest of Godzilla's head, and the sway of the beast tromping around made it hard to tell what parts of the world swaying around her was lightheadedness and she had to grab on to one of the hard ridges decorating Godzilla's head to steady herself.

[celebrityskinned]

"Watch your feet!" Venus lands between Godzilla's eyes, sliding a bit on scales that seem far too rough to be as slick as they are. Her foot goes out from under her and just like that, she's on her butt in a less-than-graceful slip. Guess she's a bit rusty, too.

"Can you poke his- can you get his eye? I can't teleport something this big-"

Well, she probably could, but she won't, because she's not looking to die again so soon.