i made a mosaic from torn snapshots of youth. [parker/zeke]

[arx!!]

The refreshing swim he'd been hoping for felt distant now as he lay gasping at the lake's edge.  His lungs felt as if they were trapped—ribs turned to ice, squeezing like vice grips until the moment he turned his head for air and- nothing.  His muscles twitched as he forced himself quickly to his feet, choking down coughs and forcing breaths through his nose.  His whole life he'd never been afraid of the water.  Not until today.

He sat at the edge of the court yard at the north end of campus and looked out over the lake as the afternoon heat tried its best to dry out his curls.  Still, he kept his fists clenched and jaw set just to prove to himself that he wasn't still afraid.

His wrist shakes as he checks his watch, its gold hands pointing out just how long he'd been waiting here with his eyes fixed on murky depths and thoughts drifting to classmates that he'd reduced to sticky notes and red string upon his bedroom wall.  If Ally hadn't made it look so nice he would've torn it down this morning.  At least that's what he'd been telling himself as he sat outside the girl's dorms waiting for Parker Gautier.

He'd already turned in his project already and had been sleeping at home for the past week so all he had for the full closure, off-campus lockdown curfew weekend was a backpack with his roll bag full of knives, every hair conditioning product known to man, a pair of notebooks, pens he needed to return to Ally, and still way too many cookies.

And, yes, the combination made a very strange noise as he jogged to catch up with Parker, a smile on his lips and a question and greeting all bundled into one.

"Parker, hey-" he walked backwards so he could look at her without slowing her down.  "Any chance you'd ever lend me a camera?"

[Tom]

Everything was madness. Ever since she's had to move out her dorm back home, she's been nothing, but busy. Between Yearbook, trying to wrap her mind around what's happened, and having to move back home to work at the morgue while going to school, she's on the verge of a mental breakdown. Knowing everything was kind of her thing, but in this moment, she's truly at a loss of what to do. Pictures turning into ghosts of what once was. An annoyance in the way her fingers pull at the string on the wall, ripping dozens of photos to the ground. She'd clean it up later, pack it all away for home in a bit, but right now, she needed to go to Maverick and her smoking spot.

She's spent enough time staring at dead faces. She doesn't want to stare at any more. A silence fills her as she looks to her camera, pulling the strap over her head and around her shoulders. Murder wasn't a normal occurrence ad they've already been through four of them now. People dying left and right, fingers twist around the camera as she silently steps down the steps of the dormitory. As long as she had her camera, she could catch someone trying to kill her. It's a better plan than nothing at all. Cleo had run across the killer twice and died for it. A part of her felt there was a connection to the killer and Cleo. Things weren't adding up, but it wasn't her job to solve it.

Instead, she'd go home to hear her parents asking her if she's okay and babying the hell of out of her. Offering to let her rest, but she'd want to work overtime. Forget about the Salvatore Academy deaths. A silence falls over her as she exits the girls dorms and heading out for her and Mav's spot. The sound of a jumbling of multiple things comes from behind her, pulling the camera forward, she clicks it in a swift moment. Only to realize a second later it's Zeke trying to catch up to her and is now in front of her walking backwards.

"Parker, hey-" A raised eyebrow towards him before she listens to what he has to say. "Any chance you'd ever lend me a camera?" It isn't the first time she's been asked this. In yearbook, she's been asked for a spare camera before. She's got them, but most of the time they're for other types of film or set ups. Silently, she stares to his pack, wondering what is inside it. A killer was on the loose after all, but she stares at him for a moment, remembering how Zeke was nothing like his sibling.

"Maybe. What are you using it for?"

Photography is her passion.

"I could help you depending on what you're trying to capture."

[arx!!]

He stutter steps into stride next to her and stammers out the beginning of an answer—"Oh, for- uhhh"—before hearing the rest of her proposal and thanking every god in the universe he hadn't completed his sentence. Parker may have dark tastes, but starting a conversation with—"Hey, can I borrow a camera to take stalker-y photos of my classmates so that my homemade, murder mystery, bedroom wall looks complete?"—might not have been the best of ideas.

"Yeah, yeah," he smiles at her, tucking his thumbs beneath the straps of his backpack. "Maybe you have what I need already actually, I, uh-" Okay, so maybe it was weird to say no matter what point of the conversation. Ugh, screw it.

"I need pictures of everyone," he hops himself into a backwards stride again. He looked her over carefully, as if the longer he looked into her eyes the easier it might be to uncover some dark, hidden secret.

And for the second time this week he had to remind himself that his classmates weren't the enemies. The guilt of having thought it sours and boils quickly into a fiery hot rage—some fuckin' friend he was, huh?

"I'm trying to sort everything out," he says it matter-of-factly in the hopes of keeping the fear from slipping into his voice. "With the murders."

"I need- evidence." There was a force behind his words as he walked beside her again. "I'm just- trying to find something, y'know?"

Anything.