Chapter Text
Cleo swears under her breath as she dumps the rest of the cheese into the pan, trying to make the lumps in the sauce disappear with the force of her glare. White sauce was her greatest enemy, but she'd be damned if she'd let the dinner that marked the end of exams be a bloody microwave meal.
Even if Joe was in a publishing deal and she had to cook the stupid pasta herself.
They're thrilled for him, of course, but did the publishers really have to schedule the meeting for dinner time? Maybe they were just trying to avoid their own families; God knows she could use a break every now and then.
Just as she ponders what she'd do with a week off - though, honestly, they'd take a day at this point - the sauce she's supposedly watching bubbles over, hissing where it meets the stove top and coating her newly cleaned hob in muck.
Cleo scrambles to turn the temperature down, stares at the slightly lumpy sauce a few seconds longer, turns the temperature off and resolves to dump the mixture through a sieve to try to deal with the worst of it.
Right now they just want the bloody lasagne finished, and Joe out of their bedroom / study with good news and his generally calming presence.
Eventually, dinner is thrown in the oven, and she sighs in relief as she moves to set the table for five, and nevermind that they don’t expect Gem for at least half an hour.
Though cutlery and such was normally Bdubs’ job, he and Scar had been working hard and revising harder - the pair deserved an evening to re-watch Star Wars and lounge. Whatever results the two of them came out with, Cleo would be proud.
Probably.
Distantly, Etho knows he looks like shit: drenched from the storm, jeans ripped from a two story fall; even his black mask wasn’t dark enough to hide the blood soaking through it.
And, of course, he was pretty sure there were at least three bullets in his left arm.
Luckily for him, there is a grand total of no-one else in the apartment’s lobby, and if he still believed in a God he’d probably be thanking them as he begins to abuse the lift button until finally, finally, the doors creak open.
Unluckily, no less than two floors up the elevator doors creak obligingly back open, revealing a tall man in the kind of red flannel even a lumberjack would be proud of. Staring at Etho with wide eyes, he tiptoes into the lift like he’s entering a pen with a lion, never once looking away from Etho’s bloody arm.
“...You okay?”
“Yep,” Etho half hisses, trying to grit his teeth in an attempt not to swear bloody murder at a seemingly innocent stranger. Probably not entirely innocent, though. No-one’s completely innocent these days. Or those days. Any day, really.
He’s rambling. He wonders how much blood he’s lost. He wonders if this was a bad idea. He wonders- and the lift door opens up again, Mr.Not-Quite-A-Lumberjack politely moving aside so he can stumble into a hallway somehow even more grimy than the downstairs lobby.
Etho pulls the crumpled paper from his pocket as he stumbles onwards, relieved to see there were signs for which apartments were where.
Still, it feels both instant and agonisingly long before Etho stood on a Zombie themed welcome mat, leant against a front door he didn’t recognise, trying to mentally prepare himself for what he was about to do.
Cleo was going to kill him for this.
…If he didn’t bleed out first.
He takes a deep breath, and he knocks.
And an achingly familiar voice yells out,
“SCAR! POST!”
Oh- oh no. He wasn't prepared for anyone but Cleo to open the door - if Oscar or Ben saw him covered in blood - teenagers weren't meant to be exposed to this kind of thing, right?
Before Etho can think hard enough to scramble back from the door, a deeper voice interrupts. "I'll grab it, Scar! Don't miss the fight scene."
The door is tugged open suddenly enough that he almost falls through, by a man with a blue puppet on his hand and a distinctly unsettling smile - one that doesn't even flicker as he takes in the gunshots in Etho's arm.
"Oh, dear. Would you like me to call you an ambulance?"
Shock has left Etho clutching at the door frame to hold himself up, but he still winces at the offer, and tries to make himself form words that resembled the rough idea of please God no hospital.
What he manages instead is "Cleo?"
The man is still, for some reason, fucking smiling at him, but he does turn slightly to the hallway behind him. "Cleo?", he calls through the house, and at the answering shout of "Not now, Joe!" he rolls his eyes with a companionable air that feels distinctly unearned.
"It's rather urgent, Cleo?"
There are faint sounds of a scuffle deeper inside, and another shout.
"BDUBS! Get the pasta out of the oven."
Trying desperately not to focus on what Cleo's going to say, or the blood loss and accompanying dizziness, he stares instead into the house behind the man, recognising the tattered hallway rug despite himself but stubbornly refusing to let his knees buckle underneath him.
Then Cleo turns the corner, frizzy hair loose around their shoulders and pasta on her shirt, and the world stops as she does, stumbling in shock with a few choice swears.
Clumsily, Etho manages to force the remaining thoughts from his tongue as he tries not to collapse on his ex-wife's inherited carpet, and he whispers two words with the last of his energy.
"Blue creeper?"