𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗯𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆:
Two meddling teenagers and one very, very small town.
Slowly add a growing body count.
Mix well until mystery thickens.
One serial killer? Optional.
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A Month After,
Thursday
Life is always odd after a murder.
Not a lot of people expect you to recover from it, tacking you with pitying glances and comforting voices that are passive or pity, or both, in color. That is one kind. The other is the curiosity, sinking deep to find out, from your perspective, a tragic tale that only a very rare few can experience. No one wakes up one day and finds themselves in this ordeal. You are no longer just you, but a memory, a shared story, and an echo of a horrible feeling simultaneously.
What more a survivor of a serial killing case? A witness? A victim?
Life is odd.
Life for Sunny has always been odd, but it definitely got odder this time.
Time passed by like a mid-thought afternoon walk in the park when you were at a hospital. Four corners, the same machinery beeping and filtering to keep her alive- attached to her in some way or the other - with faces: family, the doctor, the nurses, and a few friends when she was a little bit better and less in danger to see them. And routine.
Sunny had started out wheezing, barely able to finish words without it being laborious enough that when people around her noticed, will quickly rectify, pat her pillow down, and tell her to rest. The world was quite sad, unable to move, and only permitted to see a few people at once.
But recovery is a slow process. Healing is even slower.
But even time can't take that away from you. The few blessings time can give is healing.
"Don't try too hard, Lorcan," Sunny warned, frightful for the stitchings still healing on his stomach.
But Lorcan Delos Reyes had been in bedrest almost the same time as Sunny. He woke up earlier than her, but his injuries took a lot more time.
With an anxious mother, had been kept from moving much even with the doctor's approval. Slowly, he was allowed unsupervised proceedings (before that, total supervision from any of the Delos Reyes that visited him daily, and there was an adjudicated person per day; Sunny particularly liked Tuesdays because it meant Mr. Delos Reyes was visiting, and he always had an extra lunchbox for Sunny, and a story for her from his childhood; he was a splendid storyteller. Kit had to meet him, was her first thought), first his room, then his floor, then the floor with Sunny in it, and now, into the outskirts of the hospital.
Now he's stretched, or attempting to, from his wheelchair to press buttons on the vending machine in the hospital's little plant area. Snow stretched in corners and across landscapes, but it was a relatively Sunny day, enough for a light jacket. Sunny had told him she could do it- she wasn't in a wheelchair - but Lorcan was insistent, almost desperate. So Sunny is looking at him now with a gentle worry from her perch on one of benches, legs tucked underneath her, her IV bag on the side, and her hands pressed lightly on Kit's manuscript.
