Welcome back everyone! It's a shorter chapter this time, and it doesn't exactly follow a linear format because I wanted to be experimental or something, but I hope you like it anyway. Please enjoy, and take some minor consolation in knowing I'm sending my poor OCs to therapy next chapter.
NO BETA WE DIE LIKE THE STALKER IN ERIC’S CAR
TW/CW: immediate aftermath of murder, death of a minor character, blood and injury, emotional angst, traumatized whumpee, references to past character death, nightmares, and if there is more I could tag, please let me know
Eric’s well-practiced smile slid off his face as quickly as he dropped the bowl of Halloween candy when he opened the door to 716 Sunvine Ave. “What happened?” he asked. Vik and Khaled wordlessly shuffled into the foyer, both of their costumes frayed, disheveled, and soiled in dark red and brown stains. Khaled’s face was busted up, like he’d been in a fight, and Vik had a haunted look in his eyes, akin to the first time he witnessed a Code Blue on a patient they couldn’t save. Neither of them spoke as they took off their shoes at the entrance.
“Are you two okay?” Eric asked next. Vik wordlessly handed him the Subaru keys, unable to meet his eyes. Eric’s gaze kept bouncing from one to the other, hoping to figure something out but still piecing together nothing. He reached up and slid the Pikachu hood off his head. “Come on, somebody talk to me, what did you do?”
Cade poked his head into the foyer, leaving the loud horror movie playing in the living room. His eyes widened and mouth hung open for a second before he could gasp, “Whoa, what happened?” Still no answer as their friends listlessly climbed the stairs like ghosts.
“H-hey, is there something wrong?” Cade tried again. “Why’s Khaled’s face all beat up? What did you do?!”
Khaled blinked once, twice, then one more time. “Julio?” he repeated dumbly.
“Who else do we know that can help us hide a body and cover up a murder?” Vik asked rhetorically.
A murder. That’s what happened, Khaled realized, I murdered someone.
Vik straightened up from where he crouched over the body. “Break-ups and past bad blood aside, we need Julio’s help now,” Vik said decisively, like he was the tie-breaker in the roommate group deciding once and for all what they should have for dinner. “Call him. Please.” Khaled noticed his friend’s shaking hands, the only clue that Vikash Gill was barely holding it together.
Your choices, your decisions, a damning voice in his head reminded him. Time to face the consequences of your actions.
“Y-yeah…okay…” Khaled shakily rose from where Vik had deposited him on the concrete and fumbled his cellphone out of his tight pants pocket, nearly dropping the thing on the sidewalk before opening the call app and punching in the familiar number. His stomach lurched as his fingers smeared blood around his phone screen.
Did it feel good? an intrusive voice inside his head asked smugly. Was it everything you imagined it being?
Khaled’s knees wobbled. He crouched down on the asphalt, no longer trusting his legs to keep him standing. What did I just do?
It hadn’t been Murat that was threatening him and his friend. At some point, in between the ‘getting out of the stranglehold’ and ‘beating their stalker and would-be kidnapper to death’, Khaled’s former lay became more than just some vaguely charismatic guy who didn’t respect boundaries in bed. At some point, his mousey brown hair lightened, and his taupe gray eyes hardened into something bluer and colder, something dead and supposedly gone. Once he’d started seeing Thomas in this man who’d held him and Vik at gunpoint, it became less about self-defense and more about…more about what, exactly?
Not like it mattered now; the man was dead, because Khaled killed him.
Khaled’s eyes fell on Murat’s dead, still opened ones, before he quickly turned his head away. The phone rang one, two, then three times, before a familiar voice finally picked up. “Hello?”
Khaled could dissect how awful that impersonal greeting felt later. “Julioit'smeIkilledsomeonehelp,” he said all at once, as if getting the words out as quickly as possible would make their impact hurt any less.
“I…” Khaled gulped. “I killed someone. I-uh, I…killed…” He looked at the body again as his sentence trailed off into nothing. If Julio was asking him if he was okay, or if he was safe, or if he needed any help, Khaled did not hear it as he stared down at the bloody work of his hands.
Vik plucked the phone from his limp grasp. “What he’s trying to say is that we need help covering this up, and you were the only one we could trust to help,” he explained, ever the grounded presence in the midst of a crisis. Khaled stared in disbelief as Vik calmly told his ex what had happened, what they needed, and where approximately they were, even when he seemed just as shaken as he was a few minutes ago. Was it like this when teenaged Vik got in that accident with his cousin? Did he always have to step up and be strong for somebody else? What kind of friend was Khaled, to put him in this situation again? A shitty friend, no doubt.
Vik hung up the phone and passed it back to him. “He’ll be here in fifteen minutes,” Vik said, crouching down next to Murat’s body. “In the meantime, put the passenger seat back up and help me get him in the car.”
They never asked what Julio was going to do with Murat’s body, and Julio never told them. It’s better this way, Khaled convinced himself. He’d rather not know.
Afterward, he and Vik spent nearly half an hour outside the self-service car wash, wiping down the interior of Eric’s Subaru with bleach wipes. Vik finally broke the grim silence first. “Cade and Eric do not have to know about this,” he said, and just as suddenly, he went back to scrubbing the blood out of the leather backseat like it was nothing.
Khaled began to protest—how could he expect him to keep a secret this big from the two other people who care about him? How could he just lie to their faces as if nothing happened?
Then again, he killed someone. No, ‘killed’ sounded too neutral—Khaled murdered someone, in a fight-or-flight response and from a deep well of rage that had not been tapped into in years. Maybe Eric and Cade would understand if it was in self-defense, but Murat’s murder stopped being self-defense as soon as Khaled found that broken beer bottle in the gutter.
When he closed his eyes to try to sleep that night, he saw Thomas’ body at the morgue, cold and torn, skin forever marred with bruises and incisions barely sealed with dark, coagulated blood. The forensic pathologist wheeled over another body on a metal gurney, its visage covered by a plain sheet until they drew it back for Khaled to identify the corpse. Khaled wasn’t surprised at all to see it was Murat. What surprised him enough to wake him up in a cold sweat was when he compared the bodies side by side. Their injuries were identical.
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