Chapter Text
Vi’s apartment definitely wasn’t big enough for this many people. She didn’t know a single one of them, drunk college kids spilling beer on her floor and vomiting into her toilet. It was getting out of hand.
No.
It was already so far past out of hand that Vi couldn’t even see the hand it had once been in anymore. Powder’s hand. Vi was going to fucking kill her.
She squeezed through a huddle of sweaty kids at one end of her now sticky table, and snatched a bottle of vodka from someone’s hand at the other. A ping-pong ball dinked off the back of her head.
When Vi whipped around with a snarl, the table was apparently suddenly a lot more interesting than it had been ten seconds ago.
“Powder!” she snapped, the music drowning her anger out.
Between one song ending and the next starting, there was a firm knock on the door. Vi shoved her way through the gaggle of bodies, fuck off ready to roll from the tip of her tongue. When she whipped the door open, the harsh words escaped her.
“Where the hell is your girlfriend?” she demanded.
Ekko winced, the bass of the next song thudding out into the hallway as if it were a physical thing. He answered with a shrug before carefully maneuvering around her to get inside.
Utilising every tool her therapist had bestowed upon her, Vi closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and counted to ten.
This was fine. She was fine. She was calm.
In fact, she was so calm that she was even going to be nice about it. She was going to see every one of these little shits safely out the door in an orderly fashion. Except that little fucker who’d vomited in the sink. Vi didn’t care how drunk he was. She’d prop him up with a bottle of bleach in his hand if she had to. He wasn’t leaving until the sink was shining.
A stack of cardboard boxes next to the door caught Vi’s eye before she could shut it. She frowned at them, stepping into the hall to get a better look. There were more boxes piled on the other side of the door too. Boxes that hadn’t been there a couple of hours ago.
Vi pulled out her phone and checked the time. Almost one. She lived at the end of the hall so only had to deal with one neighbour on the right side. She’d been…fine: a middle-aged woman Vi had to endure arguing with her long-distance boyfriend on the phone almost every day. She was pretty sure she’d left to move in with him. Could’ve been worse. Had been worse. But the apartment had sat empty for the last three months. Who the fuck was moving in in the middle of the night on a Saturday?
Something smashed behind her and the hairs on the back of Vi’s neck prickled.
“Hey!” she shouted, kicking the door shut and storming back inside. It didn’t take long to find the culprit—a girl who could barely keep her eyes open trying to reconstruct the candle that was now in at least a dozen pieces on the window ledge.
“You’re done,” Vi said, grabbing her wrist because if she grabbed her hand there would have been blood shed. Vi definitely would not have been able to count to ten then. See? She was growing. She knew her limits.
“I’m so sorry,” the girl beside can’t-keep-her-eyes-open said.
“You’re done,” Vi repeated. Attempting to carefully pry the pieces of glass from her hand didn’t work. Vi had to resort to shaking her wrist like she was trying to make a toddler drop something out of their death grip. “Get out of here, get her home.” Vi turned them both toward the door, the more sober of the two nodding and apologising again.
After discarding the glass in the trash, Vi set her jaw to scream Powder’s name again but before she could there was another knock on the door. Louder this time. More incessant. A cop knock.
Vi groaned.
“Don’t be the fucking cops,” she murmured, shoving her way through the crowd. Another round of hammering on the door stole Vi’s chance to steady herself with a deep breath. She yanked it open, ready to plead her case.
“Oh shit.”
She hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
In the hallway stood a very unimpressed looking woman. A woman she’d never seen before. It was surprising that the look on her face was the first thing Vi noticed because the woman was—
“What are you doing?” she demanded, voice sharp. Her arms snapped up to cross over her chest, forehead creasing, frown deepening. It made her look even more unimpressed than her original state of not being impressed—which had been just about as impressed as Vi when she’d seen vomit splattered up her sink.
“Shit,” Vi said again. She realised what an ass she must have looked: staring wide-eyed, mouth open, the word shit falling out of it over and over again.
What was she doing?
“It’s one in the morning!” The woman snapped and Vi finally returned to her body, managing to lift her jaw.
Fuck.
She was beautiful.
The fact that Vi had to look up at her had her all weak in the knees. Blue hair, blue eyes. And her arms crossed over her chest like that were pushing up her—
“Hello!”
“Hi,” Vi said, jerking her eyes back up to the woman’s face. She was scowling now, huffing. And Vi did something very stupid. Couldn’t help it. There was something about a hot girl yelling at her that made her grin.
The woman scoffed and cocked her hip.
“Sorry, who are you?” Vi asked. Sure, she could have said something different. Sure, she could have said it with a slightly nicer tone. But, Vi liked the way the woman’s eyebrows pinched. Liked the way her nostrils flared.
“The person unfortunate enough to have just moved next door to this nonsense.” The woman was assessing her, eyeing her up and down and waiting. Vi straightened her back and copied her stance, crossing her arms over her own chest.
The music was so loud that Vi could feel the beat in her chest. But it had faded into the background. Something more interesting had caught her attention.
“I would like to speak to the occupier.”
The occ—Where the hell was this woman from? She had an accent. British? Australian? Definitely stuck up. Coming around knocking like that. Demanding to speak to the—
“I’m the occupier,” Vi said.
Sure, she was cute, but that didn’t excuse the lack of manners. Vi might have given her a fairer chance if Powder hadn’t invited a bunch of kids to her apartment without her consent. If she hadn’t already reached the height of what she was able to endure tonight.
“You’re a grown woman!” No shit. “You think playing music this loud at this hour is acceptable?”
Dropping her arms, Vi sucked in a sharp breath and forced a smile that concealed the clench of her teeth.
“I’m going to shut this door,” she said. “And you’re going to knock again, real nice this time, and ask me politely to turn the music down. And I might consider.”
Vi slapped her open palm onto the door and held her smile tight as she pushed it closed.
Almost closed.
The woman stepped forward in the same motion as she jammed her hand up, meeting the door before it met its frame. The impact shot through Vi’s wrist to her elbow, vibrating it. She gasped.
“Turn it down!” The woman demanded before Vi could process what had happened. “I’m in no mood.”
“Yeah?” Fuck being calm. This woman was insane. “That stick’s a real mood killer, alright. Have a good fucking night.”
This time Vi forced the door shut before the woman had a chance to react, slamming it in her face.
No stranger to confrontation, Vi had spent three years in prison. Her apartment was in an even rougher area than the area where she’d grown up. She’d been in countless fights. Past tense.
She’d moved on from that now. Wasn’t going to fuck up like that again. This? This was nothing. But for some reason, Vi’s skin was itching. She was riled up. Her heart was hammering faster than the beat of music pulsing in the air. With her back to the door, she scanned for Powder. Some stuck up asshole from—England? Australia?—wasn’t going to be the thing that had her coming undone. Lost in reeling thought, realising that a few minutes had already passed, Vi shook her head and focused.
Music off. Kids out. Sink clean. Kick Powder’s ass. That was the plan.
She pushed herself away from the door in the same moment as a familiar thumping thundered through it again. Heat flashed from the base of her spine to her neck. Her fist clenched. She wrenched the door open so hard it bounced off the wall behind with a crack.
“What the fuck is—” your problem.
Vi didn’t finish the sentence.
All her anger immediately dissipated at the sight she was met with. The woman was back. This time her arms were dangling loose at her side and her nose and eyes were red. The breath she let out was as watery as it was shaky.
“Please,” she said. “Please can you turn the music down?”
Vi had gone soft. Self-aware enough to know she wasn’t as hard as she’d once been. Or at least pretended to be. Tears worked on her every damn time. The woman said nothing more, her chest deflating. At her side, her hands twitched, thumb rubbing back and forth over her index finger in a way Vi knew was self-soothing.
Now she felt like an asshole. She hadn’t meant to make her cry. This wasn’t even her fault.
“Vi!”
There was the fucking culprit. Powder’s hand was on her shoulder before Vi could turn.
“Listen,” Powder started, defensive.
Vi eyed the woman again, took a long few seconds to trace her gaze from her legs to the floor and back to her face. The woman huffed, this time without heat. And Vi folded like one of those goddamn little origami cranes.
“Get everyone out of here,” she grunted over her shoulder. The woman looked visibly relieved, her shoulders dropping. “Now.”
“On it,” Powder promised and then she was gone. A second later Vi heard her bellow over the music which quickly cut to a chorus of disappointed groans.
The woman nodded curtly. Vi just looked at her. Without the music, the woman seemed to realise where she was, that she’d been crying, that Vi knew she’d been crying. Her back stiffened as quickly as it had relaxed. She nodded once more and then turned away, leaving Vi staring into an empty hall.
It took far too long for everyone to leave. Vi had to drag one guy out by the hood of his sweater, and snatch a bowl of chips back from another.
“Get the fuck out of here!” she shoved him down the hall, rolling her eyes. Fucking kids these days.
When the apartment was finally empty, Vi stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the damage. Ekko already had a bottle of disinfectant in one hand and a rag in the other. He looked deliberately away when Vi met his eye with a narrow stare. Powder slapped his back, urging him toward the bathroom.
“I know you’re mad,” she started when he was gone and Vi laughed through tight pressed lips.
“Mad?” She shifted her jaw and blew out a long breath, fingers tightening over her hips. “I’m so far past mad that I can’t even remember what mad feels like.”
Powder lifted a shoulder, dipped her knees and then gestured vaguely with her hands. “Well, it seems like therapy’s going well, sis.”
Vi nodded.
Getting rid of her body was going to be hard. She’d have to kill Ekko too. He was probably involved anyway. Real inconvenient that she lived on the second floor.
She didn’t.
Let them live. Too tired, in the end. Decided it would have to wait for another day. Between them, they’d returned the apartment back to its original state and then some, saving Vi a job tomorrow. The clean up had been reconciliation enough, and Powder left with promises of it never happening again.
Vi flopped onto her bed with a sigh, teeth brushed, face washed. Mid yawn, a loud thud had Vi’s head tilting back at the wall her headboard rested on. Another thud. Then a shrill scraping, like something heavy being dragged over wood.
Snatching her phone, Vi illuminated the screen to check the time.
02:04.
Something heavy dropped against the wall. The bed shook. Then the scraping resumed.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”