Guess who finished all of her assignments for the semester and is officially free from all obligation? Me!
So that means it's updating time.
Enjoy!
The loud knocking on his door violently took him away from his deep slumber; they were frantic, insistent. When Add had finally gotten away from all the commotion and drama that had been taking place the last few weeks, with no more discussions and yelling on the hallway, no more strange messages, no more chaos coming from the apartment next door, he had to start his day like that again. The digital clock on his nightstand indicated that it was near four in the morning with its glowing numbers; he didn't suppress the irritated groan that escaped his throat. But no matter how urgent the persistent knocking made the matter seem, he took his sweet time to answer. Nothing was going to rush his way through the morning routine, even if the sun hadn't come up just yet. He knew very well that he wouldn't be able to go back to sleep afterwards.
Still half asleep he made his way through the immaculate living room, occasionally stomping into the furniture because his eyes refused to stay open. The curtains on the large window were open, so the faint glow of a barely standing night filtered through the glass, bathing the room with a hypnotizing atmosphere of stillness, like the entire world was asleep. The air had that coldness of the early morning that crawled inside your skin and got into your bones. But the closer he got to the door, the more that magic sleepiness of the dying night was violated. It wasn't just knocking anymore; it was whimpering and shouting that came from the other side. He unlocked the door to open it just enough to see his neighbor, Ara's face completely red and covered with trails of tears, distorted by a violent despair.
She was shouting words he couldn't really understand, her words running onto and suppressing each other as they got mixed out with the sobbing and the choking. His first reaction was to grab onto her shoulders with more strength than he should have and shake her out of that craziness. The incomprehensible yelling was driving him insane and it was way too early to be dealing with that kind of thing, so he yelled at her to shut up and calm down. She stopped shouting, but the weird mumbling and sobbing went on as she pulled at his shirt and tried to drag him out of his apartment. He resisted at first, but the persistence with which she kept pulling convinced him that there was going to be no end to this madness unless he complied with whatever it was she was asking him to do, that he still couldn't quite decipher.
So he followed Ara to her apartment, with her slender fingers still grasping onto his clothing, like he was going to get lost on the three steps trip. He just went with it without saying anything, still thinking about going back to sleep, or at least trying to. But what he saw as soon as they crossed the doorway left him frozen in place. She stood next to him, covering her face with both hands; not trying to talk anymore, she just let herself cry. The room was covered in a dense darkness with only the edges of broken glass shining slightly under the moonlight that filtered through the spaces left by the sloppily closed curtains. But he could still see it, that silhouette vaguely drawn on the floor, by the couch. Looking tentatively for a switch on the wall next to him he managed to turn on the light, and it was even worse than he had first imagined.
He recognized the man lying breathless, eyes wide open on the ground; he recognized that the reddish stain all over his chest was probably blood. It just took him a second to realize, but somehow he refused to believe it completely. He saw the piece of broken glass sticking out of the wound on his chest; he saw Ara's body covered in small sprinkles of blood. He pulled the pieces together again. His eyes fixated on her face, waiting for the moment in which she would return his consternated and distraught gaze, hoping that scanning her eyes would help him get a better grasp of the situation at hand, assuming that the fact that she went looking for him to his apartment meant he was compelled to do something.
Their eyes met, and he saw that those reddened and swollen eyes, those deer-like, sparkling eyes weren't those of a murderer. If anything, he could only see a victim, a pained girl, a broken creature driven to its limit. He saw the multiple bruises and scratches painting her pale skin with ugly colors and it seemed to him that the reddish stains on the man's body weren't as disturbing as those cruel reminders of sustained abuse. A thousand thoughts crossed his mind in a second, calculating and thinking as fast as he could.
She wasn't going to approach the cops, he knew that much, and he wasn't going to tell on her either if she had never wanted him to call them when the situation hadn't escalated that much. He thought about what it would do to her mental state to be interrogated and questioned about everything, forced to reminiscence everything she had went through and her story put through suspicion. He thought about the fact that the apartment they were standing in was owned by the dead man on the floor, he thought about what would happen to her now that he was dead. He could stay away, away from all of this chaos and misery; he had tried to stay away multiple times and yet, multiple were the times in which she had went to him and only him for help. He had been the only one she had turned to so it wasn't hard to guess she didn't have anyone else to rely on if it had been okay to go to a complete stranger from the beginning. Even now, that she had killed the man and committed a crime, now that there was a bloody scene in the middle of her living room, she went towards him.
Every time he tried to get out of the swirl of her misery, he had been pulled back in by her own hand. And now it was time to make a choice, one that he had been putting off for weeks, even knowing that it was going to come to this at some point.
He took her hand and pulled her out of the apartment as firmly as he could, closing the door shut as soon as it had been left behind them. She waited for him on his living room while he disappeared inside his bedroom, the noise of drawers being pulled open, things being thrown out and zippers closing. Accommodating the strap of his bag on his shoulder as he walked he handed one of his jackets to her and held her hand again, without giving her time to even put it on before dragging her out of his apartment and closing that door as well.
Leading Ara down the hallway, they disappeared on the way downstairs.
Uh oh.