Push & Gravity

2

Javier thought— as any sane person would, he reasoned— that dealing with a crazy classmate's revenge plot, a breakup, drug dealers, his dad turning out to be a degenerate piece of shit, and the accidental death of his school's principal was enough, more than enough, for a single person to deal with in a lifetime, for the universe to throw his way in only one year, but as with many other things, he just sadly, and frustratingly, turned out to be wrong.

Not a week after they'd finally returned to school and to a semblance of normalcy, strange things had started to happen again, which quickly turned into bad, psychopathic things that affected many, but especially those that were there that night at school when principal Susana died.

It was Raúl all over again, it was Álex all over again, except this time was worse— And god, how did it always manage to get worse?

Javier was tired. Just so deeply tired and fed up, he didn't want to deal with any of this, and he could tell Sofía was tired too. She was the brain behind all their cases after all, the one who connected the dots and followed clues until she reached the answer that ended everything. Except, last time, instead of getting an ending to the horror, they'd ended up in one much worse. And now there was a case again, and Javier could tell that Sofía felt the responsibility of fixing everything on her shoulders.

Javier did too. Whoever was behind this, whatever reason they had, it was connected to that night. And so, even though he was tired, even though his life was shit right now, even though he wished he could just buy a plane ticket to the other side of the world to not deal with anything, he stood by Sofía's side and offered her his help.

He knew though, that even without the sense of responsibility, he would've helped her anyway. He just could never leave her alone with something like this.

(And leaving her alone with Raúl's idiocy was just out of the question.)

There was some humor to be found in how they'd ended up right back to where they were months prior. Sick humor, of course—There was nothing funny about this. Whoever was behind this, or the people who were behind it, were serious, not afraid to severely hurt people. This wasn't Raúl with his psychological games, nor Álex who, at the end of the day, was too good to really go through with her acts of revenge, leaving clues in subconscious hope of someone stopping her.

These people did not want to be stopped.

So here there were again, Sofía as the leader, Javier and Raúl tolerating each other in order to help her. At least this time Javier could feel that Sofía was just as reluctant to work with Raúl as he was, but they needed all the help they could get, and having a psychopath on the team could prove to be useful in getting into the mindset of whoever they were trying to find. At least that was how Javier saw it— Raúl had some choice of words for him when he said it out loud.

They were currently, unfortunately, reunited in Raúl's house since they quickly gathered that talking theories and plans at school wasn't a good idea. Anyone could hear them, for one, and nothing assured them that whoever was behind this didn't have ears at school, or was even from the school. People had already heard them, actually, and they either had gone off at them for getting into dangerous shit again and demanded to be left out of it (Pablo), or had offered to help (Claudia), and that would just be putting someone else in danger.

Thus, meeting somewhere else had become a necessity. Sofía had been quick to suggest going to his house since he still had the evidence board on his bedroom wall, but Javier had firmly turned that down saying, quote: "That jerk is not entering my house."

So, Raúl's house it was, and it was him too who got up from the couch now when the doorbell rang.

"Must be the pizza."