#mostlysobersoldier

“Amelia!” Lucius bangs on the door. “Open up!”

Things Lucius can do: sneak out of the hotel room before Marcus gets up to provide a little warning.

Things Lucius can’t do: hold Marcus off forever. They’ve already made it to Texas. Anything can happen in Texas.

LJ is bizarrely chameleon like. He’s always been good at adapting to his surroundings, which makes him capable of both playing videogames for 32 hours straight with Mar and somehow hanging with the cool kids. Like he is now, stoned at the top of some hill deep in the woods, because this damn town is nothing but trees. But maybe he only notices it more now that he’s seen the outside world, even if it was only for a couple weeks. Still, in that couple weeks, he got a taste of freedom, he found a world outside of Smalltown, Nowhere, and he got to go all the way. With a girl. Hella. His dad would be proud, if he weren’t avoiding him at every chance he got.

Since all their targets (targets, a military word, easier to think of them like that because that’s what they’d been trained to think) were wealthy or--at least--well-to-do, it’d been easy to pass off most of the murders as sloppy theft, burglary gone wrong. No one would ever guess they weren’t in it for the money, no. They were in it for the thrill.

Send “Evil I” for a twin verse where our muses are serial killers together

They could have full conversations with a single glance.

It’d always been that way. Since the war, when they’d so often end up just a couple feet apart and yet deaf–completely deaf–shots ric-ric-ricketting around them, bombs breaking loud cracks in concrete. The war, where they learned how to communicate through their eyes, and when they learned what they were capable of, how far they could go. One look and they could say get behind me or move forward or get down.

One look. Amelia’s eyes had changed over time. Since they’d gotten back on American soil, her eyes had hollowed out, the sockets dark and sleepless. There was an emptiness there. A void that’d been sucked clean out.

He knew it. He felt it, too.

And, sitting across from each other at an all-night diner in a town that was up past its bed time (lost track of towns when they seemed to swap one out for another every few months, just to stay on the move), Amelia gave him The Look.

That one. I want that one.

Lucius could’ve pinned her for Amelia’s type the second she walked in (chime tinkering in her wake). Old money, old fashioned. Slim cut dress with a sliver down the back, hair done up nice and professional like. Pearl earrings. The woman walked with her chin parallel to the floor, because she could. Because she’d never known a life where she had to look where she was going, she’d simply expected the red carpet rolled out underneath her, thank you very much.

Women like that, they lit up Amelia’s eyes. Empty eyes. Hungry eyes. Eyes that said: I want that. I want to be that. Just for a couple hours. Because with Amelia, it seemed that that empty thing inside her only got filled when the deed was done and she could just exist in someone else’s house. Ransack the clothes, the jewelry. Dress up like a little girl in a doll house. It was sweet, you know. In a way.

That one, her eyes pleaded, looking straight at Lucius. I want that one.

And Lucius–

Well. He couldn’t say no. Not to Amelia.

Besides. If he were being honest with himself, he only felt truly like himself with warm blood on his hands.

“A little hard not to take seriously when there are actual bullets,” She chuckles. She’s either not going to wake up tomorrow or she will but with a huge bruise where his hands are pressed. “Yeah? I’m sure there’s someone who lost a leg. I’m okay.”

…..I meant something more like…reading or painting. But you like baking, really?

Most o' the time I'm too tired t' read anythin' outside o' reports. I'm seein' numbers behind my eyelids 99% o' the time now. Though I did get t' peek at a book earlier t'day. That was a treat.