-- the messenger (mini-plot!)+(reserved)

[Elliot is on the edge.]

The weather tonight is tragic with heavy guilt and chance of redemption.

"This dress does not make my butt look bigger!" Elliot practically squealed as she jumped out of Eiji's car. Her date turned off the car, having parked it skillfully between a familiar Mustang and Draco's Audi. Fumbling with something as he lingered in the driver's seat, Eiji left the lights on, and Elliot hurried to the front of the car, suddenly bathed in white light as she spun around on the spot, head thrown over her shoulder and trying to get a decent view of her backside.

It was a Tuesday, the end of the month and exactly fifteen days since she had last seen him, and truthfully, there was something decidedly magnetic in the way he had been smiling at her all night. Washington was a change unexpected, unannounced and altogether spontaneous because the Academy had it’s own agenda and it wasn’t even half a week before the hooks in his chest began to tear at him and they realized the hard way how terrible they were at being apart.

But he was here now, braving the rain so that he could take her out to dinner and the two of them had spent the entire meal trading subtle glances and meaningful nudges thinly veiled underneath jokes concerning Starbucks coffee houses and Draco's new TV obsession - The Bad Girls Club. Now, as they lingered just outside the hotel, they weren’t completely passed jokes, but they were just using them as a mask now, and no matter what Elliot was saying, she was thinking about his touch, and how he always smirked when he was kissing her, and how much she missed falling asleep next to him.

Still making a vain attempt to get a proper view of her behind, the blonde's pout eventually dissolved, changing into something much brighter, her smile contrasting against the heavy night that surrounded them as she ceased spinning and stood with her back to the car, hands resting on her hips as she let out a dramatic sigh.

"Whatever," the ultimate surrender and teenage standby as she tucked away a wild blonde curl from her baby blues and cast Eiji a wayward glance over her bare shoulder.

"Come on lover boy, I'm cold." Her smile was obvious even in her voice, as she called past the darkness for him. Elliot was never quite able to shake the warmth that Eiji's presence brought to her, the light that he lit in her eyes every time he entered a room and for that more than anything did she need him - the hope that he had breathed into her, these were the things that kept her going no matter how flawed she felt. He encouraged the very best parts of her, always.

[Eiji Almasy.]

He learned not to wear much around her. The length of the separation between them only seemed to heighten the fact that he would only be dressed for half the night anyway. His dress shirt was literally half undone, and his blazer was haphazard, buttoned in what he thought was the middle and his arms pulled up to his elbows. He wanted to feel the night air, he wanted to feel how it permeated of her and them, and he wanted every small reminder of reality and the world around them, in the case that he forgot himself and sunk into the endlessness of her that now never seemed to be out of an arms reach.

The truth of matter was that he had missed her, terribly, ridiculously and in every atrocious and embarrassing form imaginable. He'd done the pacing act, and the restless act; he'd watched Love Actually three times with Draco, and had finally fell apart during The Notebook the next day, insisting and threatening that they just had to find a suitable place in the morbid state, and he didn't care too much if rain made Draco's hair frizz, he'd leave without him if he had to. He wouldn't call it anxiety, what he had felt. It was more of a quiet decaying, the feeling of being spread too thin and too fast; the simple knowledge that there wasn't much left of him without her.

Moving wasn't so much of a problem, seeing as how they didn't have too much to take with them; most of their possessions still vandalized and in the process of being replaced. It had still taken more days than he could stand though, before he could find himself in Washington, one car ride away from seeing her again. A traitorous, blond sneak had alerted her to his presence, and when he rode up inside Alix, looking like some debonair actor from the mid twentieth century, what, with his hair combed for once, she'd been waiting for him by the stairs.

She was wonderful, there really wasn't anything else to it. It was beyond words but he remembered what she'd looked like in that moment; hair all about her, smile vague and somewhat mocking, and she had looked so damn lovely in the waning Seattle sunlight that there was nothing he could say to break the sudden silence. Life with her had turned into snapshots. He remembered, but it was never enough; photographs inside his own mind that when he saw her, his eyes would shine brighter, and the secret he wore at the corner of his mouth would become more slight, but more prominent at the same time.

In the light from his car, she looked just as amazing as she did when he saw her for that millionth first time, earlier in the afternoon, and he found himself at a loss again; the subtle, erratic beating inside of him the only indication that he was still there and not wherever she took him. His usual expression overtook his starstruck one, and a teasing smirk curved his lips; she was too much. Pocketing his phone, he exited the car, closing the door absently but mindful of his painfully precious paint job. Locking the doors behind him, his headlights flashed and then faded, the glow of the hotel's foyer their only light.

"Don't worry, I like it," he told her, a grin in his voice as his arm moved along her waist, tugging her to him, fingers becoming too familiar and keys already disposed to his pockets so he could shift to stand before her, too impatient to wait until they reached his room. His free hand found hers and he raised it to press his mouth against the back of it, looking completely full of it and irresistible.
"The dress, not your butt," he mentioned, just the hint of a quirk behind his laughing eyes, pulling her with him as he began walking backward.

[Elliot is on the edge.]

"You're retarded," and her smile was wayward and charming, because she had been the one spinning around in the headlights like a mental case just a second ago, and still, she knew that he‘d let her tease him. Her hand in his felt sincere and fitted, as if they had been designed as a perfectly matched pair once upon a time, destined to meet some day, and as they walked toward the front doors, she felt alive and real and whole, which were all things that she hadn‘t sincerely felt in almost two weeks. In the moments like these, the instants where she was with Eiji and suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that everything was finally right, on these nights, she wondered how she could have managed before he came along to save her.

Her black pumps shadowed his steps with just a half-second delay as she followed his footfalls carefully, trying to step only exactly where he had, breaking into laughter at every stumble or slip-up. With her attention focused almost solely on her footwork, Elliot found hardly anything else in her surroundings worth noting - save for every flash glance upwards to meet Eiji’s coy, smirking eyes - and so, it wasn’t until they were just a breath away from the front entrance that she finally spotted something foul enough to make her cease everything she had been fascinated with just a second ago, her face suddenly overcome with a distant but clear-cut touch of irritation.

“What are you doing here?” And her voice sounded sharp, unfailingly severe and radically different than it had fifteen steps back.

[mae]

Mae looked up from her boots and the cigarette that was balanced between two of her slender fingers, meeting her sister's steady blue gaze. “I -" her voice faltered and in an unusual show of surrender, her eyes fell back toward the ground, "I need to talk to you.”

Mae, who was a model first and foremost above all things, had a compulsion and a sort of wild anxiety about how she appeared in public. She had never been the kind of girl that would go out in a messy ponytail and sweatpants, could never brave the outside world without her makeup and that last, cursory glance in the mirror before the first step out the door, and so, as the Lycan leaned against the hotel wall, trembling and shaped into something much less wicked than usual without any trace of makeup or arrogance, it would be devastatingly obvious that something had to be unbearably wrong.

Those usually lethal violet eyes flickered over Eiji for only an instant, purely just recognizing his attendance before looking back to her baby sister with something very rare, and excruciatingly raw left discernible in her expression. The cigarette in her fingers was burning dangerously low and despite, she couldn’t seem to pay it any mind.

“Maybe we should go inside?” Her voice was buried in the back of her throat, hesitant and completely out of character for the older girl, another deadly allusion to the nature of the secret she was guarding.

[Eiji Almasy.]

Later on, he would remember those last seconds with her, and he would ache, because he wouldn't be able to see that favorite smile of his on her face for a long time after, or be able to hear her laugh so freely and carelessly. He didn't imagine she knew how endearing she was suddenly, to him. There was something compelling about her, and he wasn't convinced, because he knew more than he suspected, had known since the very first day he'd met her. There was something about Elliot that made it hard for him to let go, of any part of her he was lucky enough to have. Watching her skip after him, his eyes never leaving her face and catching hers whenever she glanced up, his hand steady around hers and the other hovering near her hips, Eiji felt parts of him burn brighter, beat faster. There was a wave of an epiphany, and his world was washed in color, and he could hear as clearly as he could see, feel as wholly and as surely as the girl before him; he could kiss her forever, with how he felt.

The end result was a consequence of the fifteen days between them and the few hours they had spent pretending that at the forefront of their minds wasn't the other, the promise of his suite after, specifically chosen one whole floor above the others, and on the other side of the hotel; while he had to keep his kisses polite in public, masking just how much more it was than simply wanting her, and the exact enormity of how he missed her. He thought, fuck propriety, because they'd both waited long enough.

He stopped his steps, hand tightening around hers and the other curling along her waist when she met him in the middle. He ignored his thoughts, which were entirely criminal, and focused on her, beyond the sparkling eyes, the illicit grin. It wouldn’t be until the next morning that he would hate the logic in his rationalization, how it all just figured that it was cigarette smoke that would be the first cracks in their night.

Her tone halted him and the brilliance of his eyes dimmed a little, but he knew even before he turned to follow her gaze, who it was behind them. Mae Davis had the uncanny ability to steal even the best, most untouched expressions off Elliot’s face, and that was perhaps the whole crux of why he hated his girlfriend’s older sister; more than the trashiness and being utterly disgusting, Mae being able to kill everything good that Elliot possessed, without even trying, annoyed him most.

His look resembled Elliot’s, except his was more refined, though he didn’t bother to hide the slight distaste curving his mouth.
“I’ll meet you,” he muttered to the girl, looking like he didn’t want to, but it was in everyone’s best interest if he left, rather than stay and say something entirely satisfying but regretful to the other Davis girl.

[Elliot is on the edge.]

In the treacherous weeks to follow, Elliot too, would wonder, fleeting and reckless, about the what if's. She would wish that she had caught a his eye once more before, that she had captured a clearer memory of the brilliance that radiated through his smile and the way that the sight of her in those days always caused his eyes to burn, ardent. While everything in the days to follow would feel torturous and feigned, everything about Eiji would always be furiously real and undamaged.

“Don't,” because left alone with her heinous sister, without him, she would surely choke. Elliot was bright and intelligent, charismatic and honest, gracious, but for all the things she was, there was so much more that she had just wasn't, and she had never, ever, been courageous. In the moments without her boyfriend, she found that things were suddenly vague, erratic, and she was prone to second guessing, missing that indisputable sense of certainty and faith that filled her whenever they were together.

“Just quit acting like such a freak, and tell me why you're ruining my date,” because the promise of being alone, and of his name on her lips, was still weighing on their minds. The blonde tapped her foot loudly against the pavement, deathly afraid and doing her best not to show it. Something about Elliot seemed to relapse in the presence of her sister – the subtlety faded and her edges began to fray. She became the quiet little girl again, meager and envious behind her wild teenage sister.

[mae]

The sharpness of Elliot's response made the older girl wince, and the quiet panic in her eyes, was making Mae's stomach turn. She couldn't do this, she couldn't.
It was just then that the iniquity of the whole scene struck her silent for a moment because she had been the first one they'd called with that awful cold plastic voice, and she had been the one to drive to the Hospital in a manic frenzy and she had been forced to identify that terrifying crimson silhouette; which a sight which would doubtlessly, haunt her forever.

And now she was here, because she had to be the one to tell her sister that their father was dead.

“El,” the sweetness of her voice was immediately another cause for concern, a tone wholly unfamiliar from behind Mae's usually wicked smirk. “El,” and as she was saying it, she still wasn't believing it, her belief shatter and suspended with the ghastly last image of their father still swimming on the surface of her mind.

“Dad died.”

[Elliot is on the edge.]

As the flickering overhead street lamp bathed Elliot in static luminescence, there was a deadly hollowness about her that had appeared suddenly and sweepingly, stealing away the light from her eyes as something in the pit of her stomach twisted violent and fleetingly, she thought she was going to heave.

Her heart was swelling, but for the first time, there was decidedly nothing gratifying about it. For one of those deadly rare instances, she was completely aware of the organ tucked carefully away behind her ribcage, and as the world around her muted, she swore that she could feel every tiny breath of her heart and every angle in the way that it was breaking.

It was the loudest noise she had ever heard, the combination of her heart breaking just then, and the way the world around her had crashed to a stop. There was a stillness surrounding them all of them all of a sudden. The trees had quit swaying and the highway behind them was all at once, empty, and the only noise she could hear for a long, agonizing moment was the orchestra of blood pounding in her ears as she tried desperately to get her bearings, to discern up from down and find a little light so that she could attempt to get her head above water.

run.

Every part of her cried, begged, just run- do not lose it in front of these people; get the fuck out. And Elliot felt her muscles seizing up, her bones threatening to collapse beneath her with every seconds she let slip away. She wanted to melt into the ground and disappear. Her head was screaming and she was already stepping out of her pumps, bare feet pressed against the pavement, already moving backwards and all she managed before a manic disappearing act was a jagged 'I have to be alone – I, I have to go' and a broken goodbye before she turned tail and disappeared into the thin night air, running as fast as her legs move.

And the very last thing to cross her mind before she took off, the thing she couldn't help but think was that the only person Elliot had always run to in times like this, had suddenly become the one idea she was desperately running from.