Isabel was having trouble sleeping. No matter how long she lay in bed she simply couldn't seem to fall asleep and in the off chance that she did start to doze off she wound up tossing and turning herself back to wakefulness. Knowing the cause of her insomnia might have helped, but for the time being she had no solutions for her problem.

Eventually after a few hours of succeeding in nothing more than knocking most of the blankets and pillows off her bed and onto the floor, she finally conceded defeat and got up. There was no use lying in bed and continuing to be frustrated so she might as well wander around the Sanctuary a bit and see if she couldn't manage to get some sleep later on.

Mumbling and grumbling and generally in a foul mood she unlatched several of the locks on her door and wandered out into the hallway with the aim of heading upstairs to the kitchens. Maybe if she put something in her stomach it might help. Either a snack or a bottle of something alcoholic. As it was so late at night there wasn't likely to be too many people up and about to bother her so it would be relatively easy to be in and out of the kitchen and back to her room quickly.

It was night. They were outside.

They were surrounded by glowing flowers. Big flowers, easily the size of her head, glowing white and pale purple. A thought in the back of her mind: is it normal for flowers to glow like this?

Sure. Probably. Why not? It wasn’t important, anyway. What was important was the girl right in front of her, with the glowing red eyes and the soft, golden hair. She came closer, closer, until those red eyes, that golden hair, and a soft smile were all that Kaitlyn could see, and still it wasn’t close enough.

They embraced. They kissed. Eyes closed, she felt the girl’s cheeks in her hands, fingertips brushing against her hair.

A sickening crack. The other girl collapsed, falling backwards. Kaitlyn opened her eyes, but everything was dark.

“Are you okay?” Kaitlyn’s voice shook. “Victoria?” She already knew that it wasn’t okay. Reaching absently behind herself, her hand brushed against a wall, then a light switch.

They were in a small room. She flipped the switch, and fluorescent lights flickered to life, buzzing abnormally loud, like a thousand robot bees hovering right next to her ear. She looked down. Laying on the floor was the girl she loved, but her head was flattened against the ground like a leaky water balloon. Her eyes were still moving.

Kaitlyn screamed.

It was night. She was in a small room.

This time, it was Kaitlyn’s room, and she was in her bed. All too slowly, she realized that she hadn’t actually hurt Victoria. That was just a dream. A very disturbing dream. The second one she had that night, in fact.

Kaitlyn wished she could give up on sleeping entirely. She didn’t feel like trying again tonight, at least. In fact, she didn’t even want to think about sleeping, or about anything else.

When Isabel walked into the kitchen, she found Kaitlyn sitting on a barstool, pouring vodka from a half-empty bottle into a small, clean glass.

The lights in the kitchen were just about always on no matter what time of day or night it was. As such Isabel didn't find it the least bit odd that the room was brightly lit once she reached it, though after walking through a mostly dark building it was a little rough on the eyes. The downside to the lights being lit most of the time was that it was nearly impossible to tell if the room was occupied unless the occupant was chatting or making a racket rummaging through the cabinets.

She almost didn't notice the smaller girl perched on a barstool at first but the glint of the overhead lights bouncing off of the bottle in her hand caught and drew her eye right to the mini mutie. One eyebrow raised as she paused on the doorway and took in the sight of a little girl pouring herself a drink. It was almost comical really. She couldn't quite remember the girl's exact age, but it didn't matter all that much either way. She had to be at least half the legal drinking age.

"Aren't you a little young to be drinking that stuff?" she asked as she made her way further into the room and took the bottle out of Kaitlyn's hand, though only after the pint-sized terror had finished pouring herself the drink. She sauntered her way around the counter and over to one of the cabinets to fetch a glass for herself, one larger than what the younger girl had selected. She leaned her weight against the counter's edge and poured a drink for herself before settling the bottle down beside her and out of Kaitlyn's reach.

It wasn't her job to tell the kid she shouldn't be drinking. She wasn't her mother or her caretaker, so it wasn't her problem. Chances were the kid would take one sip of the stuff and spit it right back out. Vodka wasn't exactly a pleasant drink and she doubted the younger mutant was experienced enough with it to have it go down smoothly. She did have to wonder if the bottle had been half empty when the girl had found it, though. If what was missing made a reappearance Isabel wouldn't be sticking around.

"Gotta say I've never seen a kid look so sour when they get their hands on booze. Aren't ten year olds supposed to be all giddy and foolish when they're doing something illegal?"

Kaitlyn stared at Isabel, face wracked with all the guilt of a kid caught doing something she shouldn’t. She set the bottle down, preparing herself for a lecture about how stupid she was acting.

To her surprise, Isabel didn’t seem to care that much. She even sat down next to Kaitlyn and poured a drink of her own. And got her age wrong.

“I’m not ten. I think I turn thirteen in like a week or two.” She knew that her birthday was in late August, but since it hadn’t been celebrated in almost a decade, she didn’t remember the exact date. “But, uh…” Kaitlyn looked miserable. She sounded miserable. “I guess this is what people do to deal with their problems, right? They drink a lot?” With so many things making her miserable, it seemed like taking up drinking would be a logical course of action.

She took a sip from her glass, and grimaced. “This tastes terrible.” Way more terrible than she had expected.

If Kaitlyn hadn't sounded so very serious the situation might have been rather comical. It wasn't often that a child was driven to drinking by whatever issue they had. And a twelve year old talking like a world weary adult that had to crawl into the bottle to stay sane was almost too much. What even was there for twelve year olds to be upset about? Nightlight bulb burnt out? Broken crayons? Forgot to get a cootie shot before playing with boys?

Isabel may or may not have had a very good idea of what constituted as problems for a twelve year old. Her childhood hadn't exactly been normal and monsters under the bed had been the least of her worries. She didn't have a whole lot to compare and contrast.

"Most booze tastes bad. That's why people mix drinks," she commented with a small grin at the younger girl's grimace. She managed to get her own sip down without so much trouble, but then she'd had a lot more practice than Kaitlyn. At least now she could make a fairly confident guess that the bottle had already been about half empty when the girl had found it.

"People with problems drink, but not to fix the problems," she continued as she eyed the fridge and wondered what kind of juice might be in it. She was starting to get a hankering for something sweet or maybe tart and juice would satisfy that craving and make the vodka go down easier at the same time. "People with problems drink in order to escape their issues for a couple of hours. But they're still there once they sober up. They aren't dealing with anything. They're avoiding having to deal with it." She could know. She'd been doing it for years and thus far it had worked out pretty spectacularly. At least, until a certain blow hard had come along and made her talk about her feelings. Ugh.

"What kind of problems could a kid your age have that're bad enough to start drinking anyway?" she asked while deciding she would get up to raid the fridge after all. She hoped there was orange juice.

Isabel was in the Order, right? So it should be okay to tell her about this. How could she put it nicely?

“There’s some… stuff, I can’t get out of my head.” Was there a way to put it nicely? “Stuff I’ve seen when I’ve killed people.” Deep breath. It was hard to talk about these things, especially since she tried so hard to hide it. “Even if I manage to go all day without thinking about it, I get nightmares. It's so bad I don't even want to sleep anymore.”

And that was just the tip of the iceberg. The redhead stared intently at the glass in her hand. “There’s not a lot of ways I can deal with that, except avoiding it.” She was working up the resolve to kick all of it back and wait for the alcohol to start working. Then something occurred to her. She turned to Isabel. “How do you deal with it? I mean, you’ve… uh…”

Kaitlyn had heard the stories about Isabel. She wasn’t entirely sure if it was okay to bring them up.

Killing people probably wasn't a normal twelve year old problem. Isabel wasn't so sure when exactly she'd really begun killing people, but it probably hadn't been quite that early. She was pretty sure at Kaitlyn's age that she'd started to become invested in the mutant cause, but she hadn't had the opportunity to join up with a group of mutant supremacists until a few years later. The younger girl had gotten an earlier start, but the bone manipulator was still almost certainly further along murder-wise. Especially if the girl was still at the point where killing bothered her.

Isabel decided that her sudden desire for juice could wait a few more minutes. She knew what it was like to suffer from nightmares and sleepless nights. She'd hardly slept for weeks after she'd gotten out of the Camps. Eventually she'd trained herself to avoid thinking about it all together and the nightmares came less frequently. Mercury's presence seemed to have helped on top of it, though since the Big Reds had gone missing once again she couldn't exactly recommend that Kaitlyn procure herself a monkey-tailed security blanket.

The Camps were one thing, though. Killing was quite another. She couldn't help but smirk just the littlest bit as the younger girl struggled to come out and call her a murderer. It wouldn't have bothered her if that word had slipped. She'd be the first to admit that she was a killer. Unfortunately the younger girl still seemed to be rather shy about the whole thing.

"Killing just doesn't bother me," she replied with a shrug. She was being extremely unhelpful and she knew it, but she wasn't so sure how to explain herself. "You're just getting your feet wet with this whole murder thing, so it's gonna take some time to get used to it if you wanna keep doing it."

"Dead is dead. Once someone becomes a corpse then that's it, they can't hurt you. Once I kill someone, I forget about them. They aren't important anymore and I can always find a reason for why I did it. It doesn't bother me because my killing is justified. It doesn't bother me because the people I kill don't matter. It's either me or them at this point and it's not gonna be me."

There really wasn't anything for her to deal with. She had become entirely desensitized to killing and she genuinely believed that she was in the right in all of her actions and therefore she had a clear conscience. Any issues she did have tended to get buried and stubbornly ignored, which wouldn't really be any help to Kaitlyn. In fact, if the younger girl would to do as Isabel did it would probably lead to the Sanctuary housing an alcoholic preteen. The rest of the Order might not like that so very much if the problem were traced back to her. Not that they could do much about it.

"You trying to drink away your problem is just gonna make you sick on top of everything else. You're a little small to be trying to down shots of vodka. You might be better off doing something legal, like finding someone to talk out the issues with maybe. Figure out why this stuff bothers you so much and focus on that."

Kaitlyn alternated between feeble attempts at eye contact with Isabel, staring off into space, and quick glances at the hard alcohol in her hand.

Justifying the bad feelings away hadn’t exactly worked yet for Kaitlyn. She’d lain in bed for hours before, muttering things like ‘it was just an accident’ or ‘it was him or me’ hundreds of times, over and over, as though clinging to hope that the words would stop feeling hollow and make her chest stop heaving and her tears stop flowing if she just managed to repeat them enough.

How about… talking about the stuff she was dealing with?

With other people?

Like, out loud?

(Was that even a real suggestion?)

As far as Kaitlyn could tell, that would be at least ten times as unpleasant as anything alcohol could ever do to her. Fortunately, though, Kaitlyn could think of some serious practical problems with that plan.

“Who could I even talk to, though? I mean, Lenna’s busy pretty much all the time.” Managing a drug empire does that to a person. “Mars and the other reds fell off the map again,” as sometimes becomes expedient when one and one’s clones work in organized crime, father figure or no, “and my girlfriend just…” would probably be completely horrified and never talk to her again? “…No. Just, no.”

Kaitlyn spent a moment in silence, considering how horribly some of her past, should it be revealed, could ruin her relationship with Victoria. She fought the urge to down her glass there and then.

“…I can’t really think of anyone. Unless you’d want to do that.” Isabel probably had much more important things to do with her time, though. Also, Isabel kind of intimidated Kaitlyn.

Isabel simply shrugged as Kaitlyn seemed to balk at the very thought of talking out her issues. It was merely a suggestion and seeing as she didn't really have a whole lot of experience helping people with their problems, she'd gone for the most widely used therapy suggestion. Isabel didn't talk out her issues, either. They were crammed down in the back of her mind somewhere that she didn't have to think about them, some of them deeply enough that she didn't even have to worry about rogue dreams. But like her non-issues with murder, it had taken some practice to achieve.

As for the girlfriend comment, she chose to pretend she hadn't heard it. That was definitely not something she wanted to get involved in.

"I dunno, I'm not so great at the advice thing. I mean I guess if you have to talk at someone I can stand around and let you, but I'm not gonna be any good at telling you what to do about your problems." Emotional turmoil wasn't really her thing unless she was the one throwing a tantrum about something. But guilty consciences weren't something she could easily relate to. She killed or drank if she was upset about something, but those two options didn't seem to be working very well for the younger girl so she was at something of a loss.

Speaking of which, a thought donned on her as she eyed the shorter girl's glass. "Someone with your explosive personality probably shouldn't be drinking anyway. Real flammable."

“...Yeah. If I got drunk I’d prolly just end up blowing stuff up.” Alcohol generally isn’t good for self-control, and Kaitlyn generally needed as much self-control as she could get if she didn’t want to leave craters wherever she went.

She set her glass on the counter.

“But I don’t think just talking about it would help anything.” She shrugged. Talking about it meant thinking about it, and just thinking about it sucked. It would probably only make her feel worse.

Another shrug was given as her offer to sit relatively still while the girl chatted was declined. If the girl didn't want to talk, then Isabel certainly wasn't going to make her. Taking was pretty terrible and she personally hated it when the topic came around to feelings and memories. She would have rather gotten caught in a drunk minor's explosion. Though apparently her word of caution had given the younger girl second thoughts about attempted alcoholism.

"If you don't wanna talk about it, then don't talk about it," Isabel replied, finally straitening up and heading toward the fridge to rummage for juice. As she had suspected, there was a carton of orange juice pushed to the back of one of the shelves which she pulled out before pouring a portion of it into her half glass of vodka. After replacing the carton she stuck a finger in her glass and swirled its contents, rather than finding herself a spoon. It also offered the chance to test the juice to alcohol ratio by sticking her finger into her mouth afterward, though the strength of the drink wouldn't have mattered much anyway.

The fridge door was nudged closed with her hip and she made her way back to the counter where she settled back into her spot by the girl "I don't like chatter much, either. Even if I did there's not too many people that like listening to the details when it comes to murder." Not that it was murder that bothered her. But there was no reason to go spilling secrets to a morose preteen. "Things I don't like or can't justify, I forget about. I refuse to think about them and in time I get good enough at pretending they didn't happen that they don't bother me anymore without my permission. You learn to train your mind and kill your conscience and nothing can stop you."

This sucked. Drinking was out of the question, and talking about her feelings was never a good idea in the first place. She rested her head on the counter, face-down, fighting back the urge to cry like some kind of helpless little kid.

“So,” she replied without looking up, “you’re saying I’ll just get better at dealing with it someday?” As she killed more people? Kaitlyn didn’t feel particularly relieved by that. It should have made her feel better; all she had to do was keep along with helping the Order and all the nightmares would stop. She might even get to the point where seeing those things from her nightmares wouldn’t be a big deal. Which would be useful to someone in an Orderling’s line of work.

But on the other hand, some stupid part of her mind found the concept of remorseless killing even more terrible. This was stupid because she knew she would have to end up killing people eventually anyway; why feel so guilty about it? The logical, reasonable part of her mind said that being able to kill people without guilt would be great. She could think of literally no downsides to having that ability.

"I'm saying that's how it works for me," Isabel replied, eying the younger girl as her forehead hit the counter with a muted thud. Giving advice wasn't exactly her specialty, and dealing with young kids wasn't much better. If the preteen started crying or something because of the frustrating conversation, Isabel would be at a complete loss. She was having enough trouble trying to figure out something that wasn't a terrible idea to suggest, but if the waterworks started she might have to make a getaway or find someone else to pass the kid off on.

"It might eventually work out the same way for you, but it might not. You can keep doing what you're doing and eventually get used to it, or you can stop killing people and find some other way to get the job done and then you just have old guilt to deal with or whatever." Kaitlyn was an Orderling, so more likely than not she'd be required to get her hands dirty again in the future if she wanted to continue being involved with missions. She'd have to find a way to cope. "Only other thing I can think of is talking to the Boss Lady about finding a different job for you. Don't wanna kill anyone? Find a job that lets you blend in or work behind the scenes."

Kaitlyn rolled her head to the side, so she was looking at Isabel sideways. “I’m kinda offended you think I’d wuss out on you like that.” With that said, her fierce eye contact dulled down and broke away as she started to look forwards. “I mean, I’m a walking freakin’ bomb. It’d be dumb to have me just… doing paperwork or some crap.”

She was a big girl. She knew that there were more important things in the world than human life, and that, sometimes, the world would be better off without some of that life. “It’s not like I think there’s actually something wrong about the stuff I do. I’ll still do it. This is just some… stupid… emotional thing, you know? I just gotta get over it.”