JTRM (Nny x Devi)

Devi sucked listlessly on her Brain-Freezy, eyes trained on nothing in particular, while Johnny continued happily scrawling away from his seat on the floor.
She killed him. She really did.
Well, sort of.
It was an unnerving feeling, the metaphorical blood on her hands. Even with a history of guys around her losing eyeballs and brains, or bursting into flames beside her, none of that gore was ever her fault – aside from the chalk-induced asthma attack that killed poor Spindgey Simons, which was gruesome enough for her. The most violent Devi had ever gotten was beating the man sitting a few feet away from her within an inch of his life, which he had done well to deserve, in every regard. So, it was strange to be so hung up over pushing that one inch further and actually killing him – inadvertently or not.
The point was that Johnny laid the responsibility of his impermanent demise solely on her, and maybe that's why it bothered her so much.
The fact that Johnny was more-or-less elated that she had been the unsuspecting command behind the very real trigger was baffling to her, but of course, he was naturally more comfortable with the concepts of murder and death than she was. At some point, he'd rationalized murder as a means to an end of bitter, ugly things, so to him, the fantasy of her blowing all the horrendous, malicious things clean out of his head with one shot must be so romantic. Devi would have gagged if she wasn't so disoriented.
She needed to talk this out with someone, and there was only one person she'd place that much misguided trust in. Her legs bent as she moved to sit up.
"Hey Nny."
Johnny's head bobbed up immediately, and again her stomach squeezed anxiously from his eager response.
"I forgot that I... promised to check in on my neighbor-friend. The rats have gotten so bad, I worry they'll start eating her feet off while she's asleep."
Devi looked to the side, hoping such a stupid lie could pass as a bizarre truth. Johnny watched her a moment, inquisitive eyes darting around the space of her figure, before tilting his head acceptingly as he turned his attention back to the page.
"Yeah, the rats'll do that. They always start ankles first." Was his reply. Devi held in the nausea that she felt from how knowledgeable he sounded about the subject.
"RIGHT." She balked. "So, I'm going to go run down and check on her, before y'know, the rats get at her. You just uh, stay here, keep working, I'll try and keep it quick."
Johnny seemed less comfortable about the idea of being left alone, but agreed as casually as he could. Devi didn't hesitate to rush out, lest something stupid manifest to stop her from reaching her destination, again. Even if Sickness was neatly contained right now, she hadn't forgotten the lengths the little tumor had gone through to make the halls of the building an impassible maze of shit.
Her strides got faster without her notice the closer that she got to Tenna's apartment, and her heart steadily increased to a panicked pace as the direness of her situation sunk in. Her fist landed hard on the door, whacking against the cheap material franticly. A single concerned squeak was the initial reply, which at least confirmed Tenna was inside, and awake.
"Tenna, it's me, open up!" Devi whispered as loudly as she could. It only took a few seconds for the door to open.
"Oh my God, Devi, he's murdered you hasn't he!?" She gasped, but didn't receive any answer besides being pushed back inside her home. Devi released her grip on her friend's arms to walk in paranoid circles around the living room, muttering curses to herself. Tenna watched her go around with large, kitty eyes.
"Oookay, so obviously he hasn't murdered you." She commented, growing more concerned the longer Devi hissed and spat at no one. "...Did you kill him??"
"No!" Devi looked at her, devastated. "I MEAN—YES!"
Tenna covered her mouth in horror at the admission, and Devi dropped onto the couch with her face in her hands. Tenna quickly scuttled to her friend's side, arm slung around her in a messy hug.
"Oh shit, Devi! That's – very bad!! But I bet he did something to bring that on right? Right?" She asked hurriedly. Devi rested her elbows on her thighs and hung her head down.
"Shit, shit, shit, fuck, FUCK." She shuddered out. "No Tenna, he's not dead. But I killed him. I did! I killed someone."
"...Uh, what?"
Devi shivered, shaking her head again.
"You remember that night you told me to call him? And we heard a bang and a scream and all that?"
"Yyyeah?" Tenna looked away uncomfortably at the memory.
"The bang was a gunshot. He had something rigged up that if he answered the phone it would shoot him, and that... killed him. He died that night." Devi stared at the ground. Saying it aloud was horrible. "But because he had those brain-things – or maybe it was the primordial demon living in his fucking WALLS – he got a redo. Satan sent his ass back here, mostly parasite free. Fan-fucking-tastic."
Tenna could only stare at Devi in concern.
"And he convinced you of all that?"
Devi immediately defended her certainty in the outlandish story.
"Tenna no, he was, like, having a fucking epiphany in my living room! You had to see him – he was absolutely losing it, ranting about how I saved him from his insanity and this and that – oh GOD."
She fell back on the couch, melting into a heap on her side. Tenna patted her arm sadly.
"Damn it, Tenna, what did I get myself into?" Devi groaned into the cushion. "He's still up at my place, and I have no fucking idea how I'm going to go back up there."
"Poor, poor, foolish Devi." Tenna sighed and continued her patting.
"No kidding. He was so bizarre about it, Ten. He looked at me like his salvation. Like I'm a fucking saint, or something."
"Well, bright side, at least he won't try to murder you again if he thinks you're the Patron Saint of Destroying Head-demons, right?" Tenna thought a moment. "Well, he did try to kill you because you were his only joy in life, or whatever, so..."
Devi screamed her torment into a couch cushion for a few seconds, then sat up again, calmer now.
"No, I don't think he's going to try to kill me." She said plainly. "At least not right now, anyhow. Who knows how he'll be the more these... lessons go on."
"You're still going to mentor him?"
"Well, yeah, I guess!" Devi shot her hands out in exasperation. "If I told him to fuck off now that'd probably just piss him off. I don't even know if he'll leave me alone now that he likes me so much."
Tenna could sense the repulsion wafting off of Devi with that emphasizing on "like".
"Ewww, you don't think he'd... try anything, right? All touchy-touchy?"
"Ugh, no. Thank God." Devi looked up at the ceiling. "That was one of the things I liked about him so much, at the start. He never tried anything like that. Never tried to grab my hands or put his hands on me, or get me to put my hands on him all flirty-like – he didn't even ask me out, I asked him. And that stupid... kiss, I initiated that too."
"YOU wanted to give another human being a KISS?" Tenna's eyes glittered teasingly.
"Mmughhh, don't torment me."
"You really liked him."
"UUUUGH." Devi slumped again. Why was her life so hideously unfair, constantly?
"None of those HORRIBLE choices matter right now. I'm freaking out over kinda-sorta killing this guy, and also that he's totally enamored about it." She exhaled. "I just needed to... let that out, I guess. Because I'm stuck with him now, for some unknown amount of time."
Devi got up and stretched her arms and neck out while she walked. Tenna pouted.
"So you're just gunna go back up there...?" Tenna debated momentarily if she should try and talk Devi into staying longer, or not going back at all, but any deterrent would be unlikely to work, knowing Devi, unless she had a couple of weeks to chip away at her immense stubbornness. She offered her some uplift-y parting words, instead.
"Well, I guess I'm glad you've been with him for like, an hour, and no death has happened yet."
"Thanks, Ten. I'll... call you when he leaves, or something. Wish me luck." She sighed and left to return to her self-made mental turmoil.
–
LATER, UPSTAIRS:
"How's this?" Johnny lifted up his finished comic to be inspected by his newly-appointed tutor. Devi pulled her mouth away from the straw of her now-melted Brain-Freezy and took the tablet from him, reading over his scratchy handwriting as best she could.
It was a fairly simple multi-panel Happy Noodle Boy comic, with protagonist hollering about ugly things on the street and committing acts of erratic violence. One of the comments he made was randomly about having head pain, and Devi wondered a moment if Johnny just used half of what was intended dialogue, and the rest was random thoughts that went through his mind while he wrote – in this case, likely a brain freeze. She decided not to bring up the writing and focused on the effort put into some of the panels.
"Y'know, even if it's just stick figures, you've got a pretty good handle on perspective." Devi commented with a lenient nod. Johnny's eyes glistened a moment from the positive feedback, but made sure to flicker his pupils down and away from Devi's focus when she moved to hand him back his drawing.
"I think your original talent's still in there someplace, Nny. It's like a drippy faucet, you just need to turn the water on – something like that." She took another sip of her drink. Johnny stared at the comic laid across his lap.
"You said it was being "rerouted", before." He replied. Devi perked an eyebrow, but after a moment remembered their previous conversation on the cliff about the same subject.
"Well, if you're not murdering creatively as an artistic outlet now, there's only one place for it to go." She peered down at him, and Johnny lifted his head in modest surprise.
Like usual, Devi was right. Compared to his life before the wall-thing's destruction, he killed far, far less frequently, and definitely much less colorfully than before. He used to pull out intestines with salad tongs at buffet tables; break off limbs and reattach them to another victim with a staple gun; insert things that should never be inside a human being into orifices and then sew them up – now his killings were sparse, and straightforward in nature. A tire iron to the head of a truck stop bastard was a merciful attack, in comparison to what he would have done to him for the same offense a year earlier.
"I guess so." He mumbled noncommittally, despite his growing certainty about it.
"You've just been distracted still, which is obvious with the existence of your Meaty guy. All I'm doing is making you focus your energy onto paper instead of letting it evaporate out of you."
Johnny was silent a moment before speaking again, picking at his drawing absentmindedly.
"And what if that doesn't work?" He asked. Devi stuck her lip out curiously.
"It will." She affirmed, even if she wasn't exactly sure of it herself, seeing as the only test of her theory was her own experience. But with those statistics, it worked one-hundred percent of the time, and those were good odds, right?
Johnny didn't look totally convinced, but decided to trust Devi on the matter, for now. She had yet to steer him wrong as it was, and as she had implied before, he was the urchin in need of guidance, not her.
"Right..." He murmured as his eyes shifted away. Devi held in a sigh. She suddenly felt more exhausted with offering up her free emotional energy to play therapist to Johnny, and decided she was done for the night.
"Welp. That's enough arting for one night, I think!" Devi announced with a pair of slaps against her knees. She sat up and walked from her seat to the middle of the room, as if to urge her guest to get up as well. She had successfully survived an entire night with her former attempted-murderer, and with the evening's events still weighing on her, she was unwilling to let it drag on and invite something even weirder to happen. Johnny was surprised by the abrupt 'last call', and watched her move away with hesitant eyes.
He got up, if only to appease her, but the idea of leaving her side now made him a pinch more anxious than he would have liked. It might have just been a delusional sense of security, but it was one that he had grown quite comfortable in for the few hours that he remained at her apartment after his revelation, and the fact that he would need to leave had escaped him until she had said as much. In all likelihood, Johnny thought, Devi probably wanted to sleep, a bodily function that he often forgot other people did nightly. He wouldn't want to deprive her of it, even if the concept of sleeping was completely unalluring to himself.
"Oh, yes." He stalled while he tried to think of some small talk to distract himself. "That was quite a bit of drawing, for me anyway."
"It's a start." Devi gave him a tiny smile, and Johnny felt he chest swell with pride – both in accomplishing the task given to him, and for seemingly pleasing Devi. He messily loaded up his pencil bag, then stepped around the coffee table to linger near her side at the door for a moment.
"So... do I come back tomorrow?" He asked. Devi's eyes widened in surprise, mostly at herself for not even considering a time for this new addition to her schedule.
"Oh, uh," She tried to think. "—maybe not tomorrow."
Devi couldn't tell by Johnny's expression if he was saddened by that, or if his stare was one of expectance, waiting for instruction from her. Truth be told, he could come over tomorrow, but she wanted a some time to digest all of this, and maybe plan things better, if that was even possible.
"I'm going to send you home with er, well, homework!" Her mouth hitched up on one side in an awkward smile. "Just... draw a couple of things while you're away, and bring them back in, uh..."
God, how she wished she didn't have to give herself a countdown for this.
"—in, um, three days! Same time." A wider smile forced over her face, and she tried not to think about how she had less than a meager seventy-two-hour window of no-Johnny time to rethink her life choices. Johnny wasn't happy to have to wait that long to see her again, but accepted her judgement with as little pouting as he could manage.
"Alright, I will see you at 6:00PM, in three days." He repeated aloud, more so to make sure he remembered than anything else. Devi nodded and opened the door for him.
"Great! Okay, see you later, Nny!" Her voice barely held back her deep desire to be alone now. Johnny smiled at her and waved a sporadic goodbye with his hand beside his chin.
"Bye!" He bid happily. Devi only waited for him to turn around before shutting and locking the door as quickly as she could.
Her hand remained tightly clenched around the last lock as she finally, genuinely, allowed herself to absorb everything that had happened tonight. Her forehead hit the doorframe with a forlorn thud, and her shoulders lowered pitifully.
Learning she had been the cause of Spindgey's death as a child was hard enough to swallow, but at least it was medical-related. An asthma attack – it was about as bad as accidentally giving a kid with a peanut allergy a bite of your PB&J during lunch hour.
Knowing her actions had lead to the grisly, violent demise of anyone, let alone someone she used to... care about, was sickening. Truly nauseating. Her imagination was too healthy for her own good at the moment, visualizing Johnny bloody and broken on the floor of his house, a circular piece of his fucking skull missing. She suddenly regretted having seen so many horror films, as any and all concepts of exit wounds and brain matter haunted her in a fleeting flash of imaginary gore. It was only made worse by the new memories of his upbeat, enthused expressions from the rest of the night.
Just for a moment, Devi despised those new memories of his happiness that she had. They reminded her of the 'old' Johnny, and she didn't want to picture him as he was before – how she had perceived him; as a comically-cynical movie nut and art buff. Someone that she enjoyed spending time with, laughing about how stupid people could be, and musing over whether this-or-that had deeper meanings. Mixing the image of his sneery smile that she used to love so much with any idea of how he could have looked in the clutches of death made her want to convulse in hurt and disgust.
She urged herself to her bedroom and sprawled across the face of her bed, before bundling herself up in a misshaped, unhappy ball. If the universe would permit it, she would be grateful to not think about him for the entire three days that she would be without him, but Devi knew without a doubt that the universe sucked ass, and that she would be plagued with constant thoughts of her new 'pupil' whether she liked it or not.