Vengez-Moi [slow updates]

Part One: Prologue

They'd locked her in her bedroom. The door was barricaded from the other side, and there was no way out.

"Think, Nepeta, think," she muttered to herself, pacing in panic across the room and back again. "How can I get out? How can I save my purrother Equihiss?"

Once she had reached her bed again, she flopped back on it. There had never been a time in her life where she'd felt so hopeless. With her strawberry blonde hair not stretching out very far on either side of her head, she stared at the ceiling for a moment. It was then that she saw a vent going into her room. Surely, she realized, I could use that to find and purrotect my purrother from the pawful thugs! With some hope finally accompanying her fear, she climbed atop her dresser just like a cat, clawed her way into the vent, and started finding her way through.

Even though it was dark, and even though she shook with anxiety, and even though she had walked straight into a few of the vent walls, she eventually heard something that sounded like her brother. She did not care about the racket she was making as she darted through the vents. She only cared about Equius.

Finding the room he was in would certainly have been a mistake if Nepeta hadn't been armed. She had a set of claws that resembled that of Wolverine's, but she also had her determination and never-ending love for her adoptive brother.

Equius was recovered in a room with a man Nepeta recalled being referred to as el Payaso, due to his makeup resembling that of one. His real name was Gamzee Makara, but even Nepeta thought that clowns were less scary than him. He had a string around Equius's neck, choking him and cutting off the circulation of his jugulars.

Equius's head lolled back, and he could see Nepeta. For whatever reason, he smiled at his little sister, and she gasped. "Equihiss..." she whispered, shaking her head, as if any form of begging could have prevented it.

"I told you, you shoulda motherfuckin' paid me up," Gamzee taunted, his tone melodic but his voice scratchy.

That was the last thing Equius heard before he died, and Nepeta understood that.

Gamzee dropped Equius's corpse to the ground, where it landed with a loud thud. Seeing her brother being treated so disrespectfully angered her. It introduced her to a rage she's never known before. It was pure. It was burning inside of her. It gave her the adrenaline to jump out of the vents and to attack Gamzee.

That was always the part of the dream when she woke up. Quickly, she had sat up with a loud gasp. This was the seventeenth night in a row where she'd had the dream, and the seventeenth night since it had actually occurred. Every moment had been burned into her mind, seared into both her conscious and subconscious so that she would not forget the death of her brother. She reminded herself once again to bring it up with her therapist.

Her father--Equius's father, who had adopted her--refused to go back to the house they had lived in before, which Nepeta didn't blame him for. They both could agree that the whole thing was too traumatizing to return to, so they were staying in a hotel down the street. Because the Zahhak family quite enjoyed their own flashiness, her father had gotten conjoined rooms in a five-star hotel. As a nineteen-year-old, Nepeta was thankful for it.

But because the nightmare plagued her once again that night, she snuck into bed with her father. He was very large, and she was absolutely minuscule, so she was not much of a disturbance. She curled up under the covers with her little cat plushie, holding it as tightly as Equius would have hugged her before letting it go in hopes of not letting it suffocate for too long.

Suffocate.

Equihiss.