Yelena continued whispering "why?" and hitting the floor, until Louie was next to her. He placed his little paw on one of her injured hands, but he didn't heal her. Her form reverted to the one we knew and she looked at him, fury raging in her eyes. But she didn't raise that hand again. She did throw one last punch with her other hand but she put significantly less force into it, and she didn't pull it back when Louie started licking her wounds.
"Why?" she whispered and sat on her feet.
Without any hesitation, Louie jumped into her lap and just like that, she put her trembling, injured hands on the back of his neck and started petting him. Louie laid his head on her knee and looked at me as if to say something. No matter how much I waited and focused, I didn't hear his voice in my head. But I didn't need to hear him speak to understand what he was saying.
Over the next few hours, we all slowly came to our senses, the looming sense of sadness gradually becoming easier to handle as we started talking. And all this while, Yelena was just listening to us, petting Louie, but not participating in the discussion.
We talked about completely irrelevant topics--about the weather in New York and how it was becoming colder with each passing day, and how beautiful it would be when the park was covered in snow. We spoke about the market and what our next steps should be, and we carefully mentioned the fact that we had killed Abrathion. This at least earned us a little nod out of Yelena.
We talked about dinner, long before we were even hungry, listing all of the good Italian pizza places in the vicinity. In fact, Leo was so meticulous in his descriptions that even Yelena was distracted.
"I would like to try the one with mozzarella and prosciutto," she said.
"Which one though?" Leo asked. "The one from the Sicilian place? The one from the American-Italian place? I'd suggest the one from Firenze."
"Of course you would," I remarked.
"Anything is fine," Yelena said, and having finally broken her silence, she seemed to find it easier now to speak. She looked at Louie. "Thank you for taking care of my wounds."
"I can heal them too if you want," Louie replied as he stirred in her lap.
"No, you can't," she said, but smiled at him.
"Rory, the usual?" Leo asked.
"Yes, but get three this time," the dwarf said and retrieved five glasses from his inventory. Next, he brought out a dark-brown bottle wrapped in thick hempen rope, and poured from it into the glasses until they were all filled to the top.
"Gather round, everyone," the dwarf said and we all, including Yelena, grouped around the glasses.
"Louie shouldn't--" I said, before I realized what was happening.
"It's not for Louie," the dwarf said and raised his glass. "Do ye want to say a few words, lass?"
We each picked up a glass of the orange, semi-translucent liquid and held it up, waiting for Yelena to reply.
"Viki was always the sensitive one," she started saying, her voice now steady and strong. "She didn't like hurting others. Not even giants. She once told me that she preferred blinding them to killing them. She was brave, and foolish, and headstrong. She made me whole."
The woman stopped for a couple of seconds and swallowed hard before continuing.
"She was my love and my best friend and I will live in her memory," she said and her voice picked up again. "I will live, and fight, and fuck, and kill. So when I meet her again, I can look her in the eyes and tell her of all the things I did in her memory. Just how I would have wanted her to, if it was me."
The woman raised the glass to her lips and downed it in two large gulps. We followed suit and drank the sweet whiskey, an aftertaste of vanilla lingering on the edge of my tongue. I found it odd that the doppelgänger had said she would do all these things in Viki's memory but that was probably just another way in which her culture was different to mine, or rather that of the Cosmos.
Before we put our glasses down, Yelena took the fifth glass in her hands and glanced at Rory.
"My people don't just pour for the dead, dwarf," she said. "We drink for them."
"Go ahead then," he replied.
"As if I was waiting for your approval," she said and downed the second glass before grinning and patting Rory's shoulder. "That's some good shit, dwarf."
Rory smiled at her and sat down to light his pipe. Louie was back on the couch now and watched us as we lazily walked to our spots.
"We're in deep shit, right?" I asked. "Astaroth and Mammon?"
"Were they responsible for the attack?" Yelena asked.
I'd forgotten that she didn't know about the other details of the attack. She'd probably just been locked in there, wondering why some zombies had attacked her.
"Yes. We saw the two of them," Leo replied. "How did you get bitten though? My room was locked."
"I could hear fighting outside my holding cell and then some of Abrathion's lackeys came in," she said. "They were injured, close to dying. They said they'd been swarmed by monsters. We barricaded ourselves in the room but they had no potion with them and were losing a lot of blood."
"They died in there with you," Louie deduced.
"Fuck yeah, they did," she replied. "The thing is, them bastards didn't stay dead for long and I didn't realize they had a taste for human flesh. Not until they made it very clear. But you said Astaroth and Mammon were responsible
