Snakes and Lovehearts by elvntari

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Is This What You Call A Stakeout

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• Eönwë

There’s a story in this, I think -- standing out here in a night so dark I feel as if the sky is a pool of black ink, any light from the stars hidden beneath the cloud cover. It’s late -- well past midnight -- and I’m here in an empty street, hiding in the even deeper dark of the shadows cast by trees from the local park hanging over the fence that keeps them from truly capturing the street. Of course, there must be a story.

Where does it start? I guess it starts wherever I want it to; with the first time we met; the first kiss, date, time -- maybe it starts with betrayal. Maybe it starts with the first moment I realised something was off -- something wasn’t right because he doesn’t act like this. Maybe it starts with guilt -- or some, twisted version of it where the only victim is myself and it’s also my own fault -- because I liked it, almost. If I could pinpoint the exact beginning of this, maybe I’d be able to find a way to at least take the edge off it, tackle it at the root. But some things are set in stone. There’s no going back.

It’s so dark, and the rustling of the leaves behind me has me on edge. I’d’ve worn headphones, but I need to have all of my senses to my advantage. Except sight, apparently -- but I can’t flip my torch on, not when it would so easily give everything away.

My parents didn’t want me to do this job: Eönwë , it’s dangerous, unskilled work -- you have so much more potential than that, Eönwë . And then, of course, he didn’t want me to do this job: you’re going to join the pigs? Really? With a raised brow and a look of disgust -- or maybe it was disdain -- painted across his perfect face. I thought it was just one of his things, at the time -- something he’d mature out of, but then he ran off with a criminal, so I suppose that explains it.

The signs were there from the beginning and only now, in glorious hindsight, do I see them; like the tail of the viper caught in the torchlight as it slithers away into the brush, leaving you alone with two clean puncture marks and your regrets.

I wanted to do this to help people. Now I do this because I want to hurt him back.

Or maybe I want to get hurt -- like my father mused one evening when it was just the two of us, and he caught me crying at my desk. He was never good at comforting crying children, but he tried then, told me he could see the warning signs as he stroked my hair.

My warning signs.

My warning signs.

I asked him if I worried him.

Only most of the time, he said.

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say right now I’m populating the area of most of the time , out so late like this. My breath forms gentle clouds of vapour in front of me. My hands shake; I should’ve worn gloves. It’s too late to go back and get any now, though -- no, that window of opportunity has long passed.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d have referred to this case as some sort of organised crime , but the patterns -- well, there aren’t any patterns. The first month one of their guys gets caught in a gang fight, the next there’s a robbery attributed to them, then the third they’re dealing fake drugs in alleyways behind public buildings. They call it venom , and I have a hunch I know the exact snake that it came from -- he always was good at chemistry.

Oh, what a truly divine double agent, with those bright eyes and that sly smile. Tells me not to train to become a detective then, when I do it anyway, uses me to his own cruel end. Maybe there was some psychological trick to keep me complacent -- I’d quote Romeo and Juliet at him and he’d quote Othello back at me. He was priming me, and now I’m bearing Hamlet’s fatal flaw -- whether that’s taking justice into my own hand, or hesitating to enact it is anyone’s guess. But I suppose I’m a fool either way, because I miss the warmth of his lips against mine, the taste to his tongue -- the everything.

But I don’t miss him.

So, I wait, leaning back against the chain link fence, trying not to make eye contact with the dark, empty field that lies next to the abandoned hair salon. I could swear I saw a flash of light between the boarded windows just a minute ago. What do I expect to find? Do I expect some concealed suite of black velvet with gentle curtains of red silk and gauze, candlelit and dim, so that the flecks of blood on that lie on the walls and floor aren’t too obvious?

The flashes of light are bright white, though, so logically it’s simply the skeleton of a building, a blue plastic crate like the one we found round back of the old sandwich shop. It probably stinks of chemicals and that cologne he always wears.

I could get closer, listen for voices, but I’m fairly sure that sound will travel in this street; I heard a woman hissing a curse three storefronts down. Besides, if I get closer they might see me. I don’t want them to see me. I don’t want him to see me. Moreover, I don’t need to bust them now -- all  I need is more information for their file. We’ve tried to nab them three times already -- we need our case to be airtight. Oh, how he would hate knowing that he’s on a file, and what information is already stored within it -- he likes to think of himself as careful. His hubris has led him to believe that he’ll never be caught -- never face any kind of consequences. His hubris is a liar, but what about him isn’t?

A sharp ringing cuts through the silence, and I swear I hear some noise I wasn’t even aware of cease to listen. Shit. Shit, shit, shit; I forgot to silence my phone. I turn on my heel so that no one could see my face if they were to peek out, and slip it out of my jacket pocket.

“Hello?”

“ Eönwë , dear, it’s two am. Where are you?” Mother’s voice is quiet and rough, but I can still hear the edge of fear in it. She’s probably been waiting up to hear from me.

“Out, sorry.”

“ Out? Out where? It’s two am. ”

“For a walk?” I wince.

She sighs. “We both know that’s not true, darling.”

“Look,” I lower my voice, “I found some place promising -- it looks abandoned, but I can tell there’s some shady business --”

“Just come home.”

“Right -- yep, doing that.” I hang up. There’s no use in arguing with her.

It takes me a good minute of scrambling with my frozen fingertips and my phone to find out which buses I need to hop on to get home, and another minute to realise that the reason there’s a twenty-minute wait time for all of the buses is because it’s two am. It’s alright, though, it’s only  forty-minute brisk walk home in the dark. What could go wrong?

I silently curse the acute class-divide that plagues this city, leaving me lost on the wrong side of the centre to try and make my own way through the maze of skyscrapers until I reach the rich townhouses embedded between, like carved pearls in a necklace of dark steel. It’s not a walk that I’m afraid of -- after all, I used to walk it with him, and he’d tease me every time I flinched at sudden movement, or froze when I caught the reflection of light in the corner of my eye -- us poor folk don’t bite. Usually, at least. Even back then did he know what he had planned? Where he would end up? Where I would? Every memory becomes evidence to be dissected and run through with a fine-tooth comb, looking for clues.

Yet I’d still trade everything to walk here with his hand in mine again.

---

I try to slip in quietly -- I made sure to bring my keys with me for that exact reason, but it turns out that a pair of gloves would indeed have been the better choice: both of my dear parents have stayed up to wait for me. I can see my mother, with her feet up on the sofa, leafing through an old copy of Vogue -- if I had to place a bet, it’s the one she was interviewed for back when she was young and a model with an astronomy degree, full of potential. They asked her why she was swapping such a glamorous lifestyle to have a baby. She wilfully misinterpreted the question: well, as a scientist, my hours are flexible.

She’d always planned to have it all, but now the only telescope in our house is several decades old and covered in dust. She used to say that she blinked and suddenly she was forty-seven, then she’d add that she wouldn’t change it for the world. But she would, I know she would -- she’d trade this life over, and over again to have all that promise back.

Maybe I feel guilty, because she had to make do with sitting me out in the back garden and trying to teach me the constellations through the light-pollution.

“Nice of you to finally show up.” My father is tired.

“Sorry.”

“Where were you?” He watches me with narrowed eyes as I heave my coat off.

“Just -- just down by the -- yeah.”

He shakes his head. He knows what I mean. “You’ve got to stop going back there -- don’t give me that look -- it’s a habit , and it’s one you really ought to break.”

“I don’t go there much,” I mumble.

“You find some way to link every case back there --”

“This one is actually linked, look -- I have the file and --”

“The file that you made,” mother interjects from the living room, without looking up.

“That doesn’t mean anything -- it’s my job!”

“If you say so.” She gets up. “Anyway, now that you’re home safe, I’m going to bed.”

“Are you not more concerned with the fact that he has the file on hand if he needs it?” My father was always such a nitpicker.

“Goodnight!” Mother calls from the bottom of the stairs.

He shakes his head at me, which is fine, I guess, I never expected him to get it. They both think it’s because I’m still upset over the breakup, but the truth is it’s because I know him, and I know that he’s involved, and how he thinks, and why he would see fit to take his business back to the same place that we met. This has his name written all over it. Quite literally, too, because as soon as I’m in the privacy of my room, I slip the battered manila folder out of it’s draw. In the upper right hand corner, in neat black print that reads simply: Mairon Kuznetsov. Then, below it, in my own messy scrawl, the names that listening to the chatter on the streets gave us.

Gorthaur.

Sauron.