as soon as zar read about what vi had done, he had to know if it was true. obviously, she ignored all of his calls and texts (she probably had his number blocked; he couldn’t blame her). it was just… vi could be awful, and vindictive and manipulative. would she have sobbed in a courtroom and pinned the entire gambling ring on wren? absolutely, she would definitely do that. but putting a hit out on someone was absolutely worse. it was the difference between taking someone’s freedom and taking someone’s life. the next morning, though, he realized it wasn’t that he didn’t believe it, it’s that he didn’t want to believe it.
no matter how much vi had hurt him, he still remembered the woman he’d met. vi was charming, enigmatic, with a melodic laugh and beautiful eyes, used to melt under his affection. sometimes he couldn’t believe he had her, though, to be fair, he never really did. the number of times they’d go out and zar would find vi wrapped around someone else was too many to count. and he’d tried to be understanding, because she’d just broken up with daisey, she’d just got cheated on. but no matter how much he assured vi that zar wouldn’t leave her, she didn’t have to try and win back his affection like this or- or look for other options just in case, whatever she was doing, she never stopped. she was the one stray he could never catch, and she made sure he knew it.
zar, as always, had managed to convince that he was the sole problem at first, that he was the one who’d tried to cage her in, that this was what love did to him, turned him into a paranoid fucking monster. as time passed, as he healed, and gained the benefit of hindsight, zar started to realize how fucked she’d been, too. and sure, if vi was to be believed, wren was a fucked up dude. he took her virginity when she was still in high school; he was the skeaziest of the skeaze. maybe she was traumatized from that time, maybe the very thought of wren getting out of prison had her frozen with fear, needing to do anything, anything, to make sure he stayed away-.
he shook his head; no, zar was just making excuses for her again. he couldn’t do that now. he pushed open the front door of the psych building; he didn’t know vi’s schedule anymore, but he remembered most of her classes had been here, so this was the best place to find her on a monday like today. and he did, within seconds, at the little cafe in the building. he stocked up to her, without an awareness of the scowl on his face, the angry look in his eyes. as soon as he got close enough, he asked, forcing his voice level, “is it true? what the blog said about you, is it true?”
though the killer was tormenting them all, life went on. vi had to get back to normalcy at some point, and so she was attempting to do some work ( read: staring at a page in her textbook ) between two of her psych classes. she didn’t notice him until he was almost in front of her, angry expression fixed firmly on his face as he approached. fast. she flinched back instinctively at the aggressive way he stalked up to her, clutching the textbook she’d been reading to her chest as if the thing would protect her from his wrath. though zar had never, ever laid a hand on her, that didn’t mean she wasn’t scared of him, and it showed.
since they’d broken up, something had become abundantly clear to her: she wasn’t meant to love. though she had, certainly, manipulated wren, he’d done it to her first; her first relationship, if it could be called that, involved a grown man lusting after her when she was only a teenager. and underage, at that. obviously, that had ended in disaster. and death. one that she didn’t particularly regret orchestrating after the way he’d treated her, but death nonetheless. her next venture into a relationship had been daisey, who’d cheated on her without a thought — and, clearly, discovered her girlfriend’s biggest secret and kept it on file for blackmail material.
then, she’d had zar. oh, he’d wanted nothing more than to love her, and she’d let him; the problem therein lied not in his actions, but hers. she’d denied him constantly, turning away his attempts at affection if she wasn’t in the mood, draping herself over other men right in front of him. it was cruel, and she knew that, but she’d done it anyway. they’d spiraled further from there, digging themselves deeper and deeper into the toxicity that grew like a poisonous thing between them.
sometimes, though, she still missed him. she missed the good parts, the way he’d take care of her, the affection he’d show at the drop of a hat if she looked at him a certain way. he’d always been good, and she knew she wasn’t. because this was zar, and she was vi, she did what she usually did: she lashed out. “ as true as yours was, ” she snapped, her own way of saying we both have blood on our hands. don’t act so high and mighty. “ if you’ve come to lecture me, don’t bother. i’ve got a psych lecture in forty minutes, so i’ll just stick with that. and your boyfriend would probably be better suited to talk to me, wouldn’t he ? lil decs, or whatever his fucking name is. you’d do well to consult him, too. figure out a more lenient sentence for yourself. ” killer. the unspoken word. one more thing they had in common.
