#pietistics

he felt it happen because the light aroound the room had changed, reorienting itself; his eyes, fixed one minute on the laptop screen, glanced up at eli's moving shadow creeping close towards him. even as they spoke by the tool shop in the garage, mid-discussion on the pedantic details and arguments around the next hit, there had been with a well maintained distance. an uncertain one as much as a necessary one, though he hadn't thought anything of it at the start, and most certainly hadn't predicted that eli would move to change the mechanics of this game they had been playing on egg shells. that it happened at all meant his words trailed off uselessly.

         ❛❛ it's better if you go around the bastard,   ❜❜ he was saying, arms folded and eyes shot to sharpness beneath his glare. his hands had moved around confidential documents acquired from places that combined eli's developed talent for stalking and kenneth's content in dingier places than prison. ❛❛ if he controls sound-waves, his back will be vul—   ❜❜

there it went, eli's shadow. one minute as far away from him as he could be, and the next he was beside him. a hand settled down above the makeshift table, close to his own, and his head canted down like he wanted to whisper a secret. a flaxen tuft of his own hair brushed the eo's brow, close enough that his breath stilled moments before their lips would touch. a quick, startling cry got there first; he moved back instinctively, his body taut and his eyes swerving to the blaring phone in eli's pocket. he opened his mouth to speak before clipping it shut, irritated. ❛❛ i'll be inside.   ❜❜

" don't. " she spats, " don't do that. " he just struck a nerve. she’s heard similar phrases before from the one responsible for the curse she lives with now. the last thing she needs is another version of him echoing those same exact words to her. elliot cardale was both hospitable and charming, likable in many ways. but the girl wasn’t blind to the fact that he could also be calculating and holier-than-thou at times. she never knew which side of him she was going to get. which only made it difficult for her to fully trust him.

" i met someone. someone like us. " delilah admits. " he doesn't feed. every time i've invited him to come here with me, he has refused. and you know what? somehow it's been working for him. " maybe it can work for me, too. she says internally, but the hope in her eyes manage to do all of the speaking for her. " i think we should just stop all of this. " tracking down evil doers, draining them of their blood, and ridding them of their souls. it was nice at first, but lately she’s been feeling off. different. she wonders if consuming all of these people with negative energy is doing more harm to her than good.

trespassing my asshole. natalie peeks at the intruder between the heavy toes of her boots, squinting as her eyes hone in on the man who starts to take shape. brown hair. glasses. just like basically every other brown - haired man she's seen. she scoffs, hands resting on the armrests of the chair she's commandeered as she lets her head fall back. “ sure. whatever you say, bud. ” she says, eyes closing — though, just as quickly as she closed her eyes and lay her head back, she pops back up, looking at him with squinted eyes.

the elevator pinged to a stop at the ground floor, and he walked inside the small compartment that felt smaller and smaller as the seconds ticked by. seconds that he spent, dull-eyed and blank faced, next to stranger wearing a familiar baseball cap. navy blue, a little worm from rough loving, and despite kenneth's insistence that it was suspicious, wholeheartedly eli. as the stupid box climbed up higher, chiming down hotel floors, he glanced down with a stiff inhale and noticed the tremor in his hands. with a soft clench of his fist, he tucked his fingers behind his back, but eli had noticed the small movement and turned ever so slightly towards him.

he held his breath and trained his eyes forward as the other eo closed the distance, stepped up to his side and pressed the words right behind his ear. the brush of touch made him exhale.

then the door pinged open again and he walked through. this time, there was a nausea to his walk, his wrist pressed to the line of his mouth as he walked out into the hall way.

he had found him, and presently, it didn't feel like a very good thing to have happened. against the backlit street, dark as tar down the night walk road, he blinked frigidly in the cold as the shadow-figure gradually unveiled from the war. it was eli, with his right-out-of-hallmark smile and easy-going composure, but there was little reason to dance around what he had become obvious between them. maybe the knowing was why eli seemed off, fractures in his act, his smile a little forced and his eyes a little too keen to get the word out first. of course he found him, because he'd texted him to see him here, and while the suggestion might have seemed innocuous on text, they both know it was a confrontation in disguise.

             ‘‘   found you,   ’’ he said, and dropped his cigarette, crushed it beneath his boot. then he looked up at the sky as if he believed in god and made an assessment, a prediction, of his chances that this would work. ‘‘   found you out, really.   ’’

he wasn't the reckless sort. he wasn't suicidal. he didn't think for a second, that eli could handle a knife better than he could if they put it to the test. while stepping out into the open now seemed foolish, he had not come without anticipation. a part of him reckoned with the reality of this, the part that came human, that eli couldn't hope to betray him again so soon — but kenneth knew better. ‘‘   you were always so cold to the touch. i should have seen it before.   ’’

the television had been speaking in soft murmurs, its illumination flickering and casting puppet shadows over the walls. a show had been playing, one they had set out to watch together, but half way through the episode his eyes had drifted, and long before he knew it, he had fallen asleep to the reduced noise of it. the clock churned close to twelve, only the kitchen lights left on in the odd little house. it belonged to eli's relatives, passed away now, the ones he had cruelly laughed over the deaths of. but times were warmer now, the night breeze cool from the window.

a sharp, whistling howl of the winter wind outside however, had snuck away into his dreams. he stirred first, head cushioned above a comfortable arm. sprawled out over the settee, they had both managed to fit together in their lethargy.

the crossover between the science departments meant that engagement between students was reportedly more productive. he left his first seminar for the day out and nearly got caught up in the stampede of chemistry students that had been expelled from the main theatre; on the opposite end, lockland's very finest in nuero-science rounded the corner. outside in the green park, dotted with students catching the shuttle bus or chattering away outside of class, he stood with eli cardale. (whatever thoughts came after that, he had a tendency to halt; to maintain such a visceral grudge against his childhood friend seemed ill-advised on college grounds.)

with a backpack around his shoulders, and one of two-dozen hand-books for the physics development course under his arm, kenneth tried — and struggled, to his irritation — to light his cigarette.

❛ because it's too quiet? ❜ he glanced up, and noticed the acute absence of a scattered flock; no birds in sight, the trees unnaturally still. with a wrinkle of his nose, he pulled the car's window back up and scanned the yard of a lonesome warehouse, and the street unfolding along it. it wasn't a startling theory anymore to suggest that eo's, even in their loose organisation, had become more prepared for trouble. his personal vendetta's with a certain lot of them meant his ambitions seemed to align with the eo hunter, if tweaked enough for time. he expected trouble, but one was left to wonder if somehow, perhaps, this group had been tipped off.