the one where someone dies / grady&zeke&killer

[calla]

He avoids Maverick on his way back to the kitchen, stumbles over Stella's brother instead and tries to ignore him by chugging the closest open drink. He walks into the counter and slams his hand in the fridge, spills vodka on cashmere and then finally spins around to stare at Zeke, about to ask him something stupid, something about his own weird hand that he won't even remember tomorrow so it doesn't matter.

It's not like it's the only elephant in the room. Between Zeke and Mav, Zeke's always been the preferred roommate and isn't that sad.

It's like a game of Plinko - the way the little chain of names falls through his skull. Maverick and Zeke and Zeke and Stella and Stella and Benji and Benji and Parker and

Parker's still got that damning polaroid. Wicked little thing. Insane little psychopathic rat obsessed with ruining Grady's life all because of what? An inferiority complex? A grudge?

Stella'd drag his body behind a hot pink porsche if she ever found out. Not that she'd ever believe Parker over Grady. He's already got a cover story brewing, a teeny little escape clause just incase she decides to do something stupid like lose her mind and bring the photo to Stella. That'd be the day.

He'd laugh if he could get his face to remember how.

Everything's coated in something soothing, blurred, like a camera lens covered in vaseline. Miraculously, the tequila's still cold. Benji had tasted like blueberries and Mav had felt like an old bruise, now there's just a burn and the motion sickness that comes from watching the pattern shift in the marble. There's a point above his left eyebrow that goes numb and he jabs at it, misses and ends up with a finger in his eye.

"My girlfriend's dead." He tells a slotted spoon on the table and he realizes he might've hated Cleo a little bit.

Funny how that happens.

The spoon just sits there, judgemental, like a judgemental little spoon. Like a fork.

He’s meant to marry a beautiful rich girl and have three beautiful children and be miserable for the rest of his beautiful life. Wanting anything more than that is selfish. Wanting another drink is selfish but he does it anyways. It'd be a lot easier to be a spoon.

There'd been a commotion earlier, something happened back at school and people had scattered - or maybe they hadn't, maybe nothing had happened, the room was swimming too much for him to tell for sure. Zeke would probably know. He seems like the kind of person who might know things. Boring things maybe, but still things.

The room does a tilt-a-whirl trick.

"Provence-" He starts,

and then the lights go out.

And he doesn't shriek. He doesn't.

But he does put up a fuss about being left behind in the dark. He digs his heels in and pretends like it's the end of the world. He trips over something in the hall more than once, nearly falls down the stairs and nearly twists his ankle on the landing. He tells Zeke that the house is probably haunted and out to get them and then giggles about it, cuts himself off abruptly and starts up again.

Lightweight, Stella always liked to titter at him. Like she wasn't just as bad.

Grady makes her brother help him across the yard and then pushes him away, arm flying out - "Hey, I'm taken." He spits it out, and then sees the blood red of Cleo's nails.

The glass walls swell like bubbles do right before they pop.

"M'gonna be sick-" right into a petunia pot.

He groans against the terracotta, palms flat against the ground even though his elbow keeps buckling. The petunias wink at him and then wilt down, starting to die in real time.

elegant

[arx]

Panicking wasn't in his nature. But anger—the kind that bubbled up and boiled over, the kind that rotted slowly, slowly, slowly until there was only a blackened heart left behind, the kind that turned your skin red, the kind that burned and burst all at once—that was a familiar feeling. That was something he knew all too well, something he'd always let the lake just sort of- consume from him.

The lake hadn't feasted since he'd been- since-

Well, the metaphor is that the lake is starving because he's been in reconstructive surgery, physical therapy, and too many fucking piece of shit contraptions to do anything but sit on the shore and drown in it all.

"Fuck this bullshit!" He couldn't contain himself, not even to save face in front of his friends, and not even after he'd slammed the bathroom door behind him so that no one could see the tears stinging at the corners of his eyes, burning because fear and rage make for volatile recipe.

He looked at himself in the mirror. He'd actually looked into this one many times before—see, Elaina was good at parties and he wasn't all that great at holding his liquor—so naturally it's where he wanted to be now with a buzzed brain and mutilated principal on his mind- shit, and his hair was fucked.

He pulled at the curls until they sat where he wanted, chuckled at himself in the mirror because it made him feel normal, made all this feel fucking normal.

Except this time it wasn't normal. It was not remembering how he got somewhere, not knowing where he was, not knowing, not understanding. It was pain so sudden shooting through the phalanges he'd been regrowing that he had to cringe and grit his teeth and curl what was left of his fucking fingers into fists—of course, he couldn't really force his left hand to do it so really what's more infuriating and frustrating than being out of control?

The lights cut out as he considers punching the shower curtains or swiping the soap dispenser across the room. Feels far too dramatic now that he's standing alone in a powerless house that he does not belong in. Oh, and there's someone chopping people to pieces, hiding bodies, hanging- no, stringing them up like stockings along their fireplace.

He can only hope that the excited child stringing up people hasn't stitched his name into the fabric. ZEKE. It's like he can feel the bones in his hand realigning. ZEKE. His fingers. ZEKE. His toes. ZEKE. He can see himself, his reflection shining in the eyes of a murderer.

ZEKE!

"Provence-"

He claps a hand against Grady's back—"Sullivan."—eyes readjusting to the moonlight on porcelain. "Lovely weather we're having, isn't it?" Zeke was only forcing himself to talk over the thudding of his heart; he couldn't stand to let any of them hear it. Especially Grady of all people.

He chuckles with Grady as he helps him from faceplanting into any counters or tripping into any ditches as they both laugh and chuckle at nothing in particular on their way to-

Shit, where are they going?

"You know," Zeke glances over his shoulder, scans the dark corners of the yard, watches the moonlight shimmer off of black window panes. Swallows fear, laughs it off. "We should really try to fix-"

"Hey, I'm taken."

"Yeah," he pats Grady on the back as he retches into a potted plant nearby. "Seems like a nice date." Nothing was normal. But for just a moment Zeke forgets to be terrified.

[cluekiller]

I am called empty eyes, but what lies behind this mask is a collage of faces I memorized. Visages of the dead and their final expressions before expiring. What did I see during those final exhales, moments before the glimmer of life drained from their eyes? I saw fear in Cassius, a stubborn anger in Cleo, regret in Parker. I know exactly how they felt because I feel all of it, I always do. It doesn't end. It is an impossible itch, it burns, and I NEED to do this. I can't stop feeling everything and nothing all at once. It doesn't make sense. I don't have time to make it make sense. I have a job to finish. Time ticks away.

I disposed of Parker easily enough. It was messier than I wanted, but I'm outside of my element. There are no chains or binds to anchor them to their personal Hells. Instead, I must use the environment to my advantage. If I can kill Parker, I can kill everyone else. Let them step into my path. I hope they feel brave so I can crush that feeling, and watch the joy fade from their eyes. It's what they deserve, is it not? They can party and pretend to live normal lives, but we all know what happened.

Hypocrites. Pretenders. Frauds.

When they tell my story, they will call me a villain instead of a vigilante. By then, I hope I am too dead to care.

After Parker bleeds out, I take a moment to catch my breath. The silence is heavy. There is a moment I feel a jarring sense of loneliness. I really am doing all of this on my own. Is it impressive or sad? Nobody feels the way I do. They don't know what I know. Even if I told everyone about all of it, I doubt they would do what I have done. They're all wired differently. To be cowards. Cowards who summoned the wrong fucking devil.

I hate them.

The itch returns by the time I hear them. Zeke's voice rings out, and I wonder how far along his bones have healed. If he is weak, then I have the upper hand. I smile gleefully at that. Whoever is with him sounds ill. Fate is on my side today.

When they are close, I remove myself from the shadows and kick Zeke in the small of his back.

"Stay down."

I close the door and lock it behind me, then walk forward. My knife is pointed at Grady, the follower. It is his turn to feel cornered.

I slash at his torso.

[calla]

Grady throws up hors d'oeuvres and a whole bottle of vodka with all the grace of a grazing gazelle.

He has resolved, right here in this moment, to never ever let Stella talk him into this again. Between the drinking and the puking and the people, he's smack dab in the middle of pandemonium; forehead in the dirt, cheek against terracotta.

He feels like he's been drawn and quartered, like someone from those stuffy old books in the study that they're not allowed to have except they do. The giggly elation that had him leaning against Zeke and poking at him fades away. He can feel it seep out of him and into the flowers and all that's left is the sickness and the fatigue and the beginnings of a headache.

He blinks for a little too long and a pair of shoes step into his line of vision. He stares at them for approximately two whole seconds before his brain even attempts to catch up.

"Zeke..?"

He's too surprised by Zeke's sudden skills in teleportation to keep up with their surname-only rule.

But then it only gets worse because the whole fucking greenhouse spins. He can see the sky through the ceiling and it's that - not the knife in his peripheral, not Zeke still all the way across the room, not the shadow somehow over them both - it's the fact that he can see the stars while he's still inside that strikes him as so wrong.

Naomi gave him glow-in-the-dark stars for his birthday once but he never put them up.

The Sullivans' never had a greenhouse. Grady's mother was always too afraid that the dirt would track through the pristine-ness of the house and ruin the rugs.

But he already feels like shit - so what's one more on the pile? He finally stops staring at the stars to watch where the mint green of his cashmere starts to turn red, and then he looks up very slowly at the jackass looming over him.

"This was expensive." He hisses through his teeth.

There's a nagging part of his brain that is unequivocally more upset about having his sweater ruined than being literally stabbed. But he can't even feel his fingers - he wouldn't be able to feel the slash in his side if he tried. It makes him a little bit braver when the room spins again, he holds himself like he's having a wardrobe malfunction instead of a possibly mortal wound.

"You look tacky as fuck." He spits deliriously.

Then, with increasingly terrible coordination, he grabs the petunia pot he just threw up into and chucks it.

elegant

Wd9zUKPeBCknife
+8
knife
+10

18/12

knife·knife

[arx]

Everything is so fast.

Too fast, actually.

"Stay down."

He doesn't recognize the voice. Or rather, he doesn't care to. But in the split second between the threat, being shoved ungracefully into a rack of empty plant trays, and colliding awkwardly with a rain barrel, the only logical conclusion he can come to is that- "Grady." -is all the absolute idiot Stella had always claimed he was.

Rage blazes behind his eyes, in his chest, blushing his cheeks and flaring his nostrils as he breathes in slow. He waits, he tries not to grumble as he moves slowly to get to his feet. He's drunk, he didn't do it on purpose, he's just fucking around, why are you so fucking angry?

It's all so fast. It's all at once. And Zeke is feeling slow.

Click.

"What the fuck is your-?" is all he can get out before his heart seizes up and twists itself into a knot so tight that his throat closes along with it. The stars suddenly seem wrong, as if they were nothing more than pinholes in the lid of a jar. The moon makes the scene look as if it were lined with silver. And there was. A silver lining, that is. Zeke could see it turning Grady's shirt red; at least it's not him.

Again.

"This was expensive."

"Grady..."

"You look tacky as fuck."

"Shit, Grady, come on."

He yanks him by the collar because he needs him to heel before the bigger, scarier dog lunges for the both of them. Adrenaline was already making his heart race, blood pumping in his fingertips and down to the tips of his toes, bursting where bones healed and nighttime air met skin. But he doesn't try to bargain, only tries not to trip.

And still he feels so behind.

Maybe this is another nightmare. Maybe he was screaming in his bed right now, tossing aside the covers in a sweaty, pain-ridden daze, pissing Grady off and that was the only reason he was bleeding dark red across a green landscape. Maybe this was just a party and he'd passed out on Elaina's couch. Maybe they'd been telling ghost stories around and around and around again in a lovely little circle of smoke and comraderies only the depressed or depraved would stick around for.

Or maybe he's suffocating again- drowning -and waking up tied to a fucking chair. It seems he can't tell the difference.

"Come on!"

Zeke needed to find his sister. Now.