"He talked to me about you when I approached him about Gold Star initially," Luke admitted while stirring the cat-shaped ice cubes with his straw in the glass cup of water. The clinking broke up the silence that followed.
It was almost 8 a.m. and neither of them had slept well, if at all. Penelope had made breakfast as Luke cleaned the dishes in her sink. She wasn't sure why he felt compelled to help around her apartment, but in the years she had noticed he doesn't seem to like to stay idle in his free time.
"Do I want to know?" Penelope sipped her cup of POG juice out of her light up pineapple cup with the tropical umbrella sticking out the top. The freshly made French toast piled in front of the two.
"It was nothing, just nonsense. but it bothered me."
Penelope paused mid-bite on her French toast and studied Luke through her messy day-old mascara lashes. By the time she had finally felt tired enough to sleep last night, or rather this morning, she was too far gone to consider taking her makeup off. Her head dozed onto Luke's shoulder while they provided commentary on reruns of jeopardy and she woke up with a sore neck and mascara flakes all over. He had a troubled expression and a long stare that triggered her worries.
"I was too frustrated to admit he got in my head." Luke bit his lower lip momentarily and balled his fingers to a fist, knee shaking under the table.
Penelope recognized Luke's signs of dissociation and as she liked to describe "quiet panic attacks". His eyes seemed to stare into nothingness, and his breathing had become long and deep as if in sleep. It was no secret they all had some degree of PTSD. Years worth of trauma and suffering added up in their nervous systems like a trail of falling dominos. Though they all suffered in different ways and coped in different ways, the team was a family that relied on each other during their hardest times. So Penelope determined long ago that she would learn as much as she could about everyone's triggers and signs, so she could do her best to help them like they always helped her.
In this case, Luke tended to internalize and apply blame to himself. She would usually let him have a moment before distracting him from the racing thoughts or flashing memories. She would remind him how appreciated he was and offer to buy him a pizza and watch a movie or play Mario Kart.
What she really wanted to do was wrap her arms around him and never let him go. To kiss his lips, his neck, his chest, all just to show him how loved he was. It was dangerous to her heart just how easily she could imagine twisting her fingers into the curls of his hair or dancing her fingertips along his jawline. But instead, she resorted to shoving those feelings and wants in the little vault in the back of her mind and coped with humor.
"Okay okay, enough with the depressing - let's put a pause on the depressing and come back to it later. This is too serious of a conversation to have this early in the morning and before caffeine, and you've been incredibly and uncharacteristically too serious for Luke Alvez to be all in the last 48 hours," Penelope groaned.
Penelope brought a piece of syrup soaked French toast for Luke to bite off her fork, as he did the syrup stuck across his lips and chin.
"Alvez, why are you the messiest eater I've ever met?" Penelope chastised. Luke rolled his eyes with a chuckle.
"Maybe if you had a better aim with a fork I wouldn't wear my food every time you offered me something. Remember the Great Buffalo Chicken Dip incident of 2019?"
"How dare you. That was a completely accidental flop of the chip. It's not my fault you eat a completely outrageous dip to chip ratio. I'm purely innocent," Penelope gasped.
"Purely innocent, huh?"
The silence that followed was deafening. She made the mistake of looking too long into his beautiful brown eyes. The air between them somehow felt more charged than it did overnight, but neither dared move.
"Pen, there's something I want to tell you-"
A ding from Penelope's laptop caught their attention. A chat box was opened on the screen addressed to the one and only: The Black Queen. All the chat box contained was a link.
She felt the tears threatening to spill as she stared at the three little words on the screen. A rock hard lump in her throat sucked all the air from her lungs. And then came the chest pains that tightened and twisted around her heart like vines on a brick house, constricting, entrapping, and sharp like thorns. Penelope was brought back to her reality by the feeling of Luke's hand on her back, reading over her shoulder.
Penelope ensured to activate her protective programs before opening the link. A video popped up of two women blindfolded and tied to chairs side by side in what appeared to be a small dark room.
"What the hell is that," Luke peered over her shoulder.
"I don't…" Penelope began, quickly trying to back back and find the source of the video. "I don't know."
The video cut out to be replaced by a scroll of white text on a black screen: Can you find them?
"I'm calling Emily." Luke quickly dialed his emergency line.
"Is this Gold Star related? Would Gold Star know anything about my past?" Penelope's pulse quickened.
"We're going to find out. Were you able to locate the source of the stream?" Luke paced the living room. "Hi, Emily? We need to get to the office now."