Young Writers Society

Edward wanted to argue that the only prying eyes and ears was dead on the ground, but he bit his tongue. Engel wasn't going to give him any sort of answer until he wanted to; that much was clear. He cast one last glance at Taipan's immobile body, a hand absentmindedly going up to touch the shoulder that had been shot.

He fell into step beside his brother. Another comment died on his lips, one where he would have questioned if he should take the pin out while walking down the street - he stopped only when he realized that Kratzer's outfit was perhaps the more abnormal of the two of theirs, and he seemed to have no intention of changing it.

It didn't take them long to return to Kratzer's temporary base of operations: an abandoned hotel that must've closed down decades ago if the termites and the rats were anything to judge by. He dropped his gun down on the old bed next to his sleeping bag and then pulled off his mask and hood, finally turning to Edward.

"Vell, it's good to see you again, brozer, zough I must admit you surprised ze scheisse out of me," he said with a small smile. "I apologize for my curtness - zere's...too many ears out here to say much. Too many people want me dead, or...vorse."

"I understand," Edward said, though it was clear he wasn't paying much attention to what Engel was saying. He was too busy scanning the room around them, studying just how old and decrepit it was. He instinctively tensed up. There was nothing to indicate that it was haunted by a partial, but there was always the chance that a creepy, old abandoned place had a deceased visitor that wasn't him.

He awkwardly sat down on the edge of the bed, still very wary of the room - and the building - they were in.

"I don't know how I got here," he added. His gaze lingered on the door, now that he had looked through the rest of the room. "I was just watching YouTube on my tablet."

There was a noise out in the hallway.

He tensed considerably more, straightening and staring firmly at the door as the shuffling noises continued. The door, which hadn't been fully closed, opened ever so slightly...

...and a rat stuck its head into the room.

Edward let out a sigh of relief and sank a little into the bed.

Kratzer eyed him as he shrugged off his coat and put it in a nearby bucket of water to keep the bloodstains from setting. "You seem a mite tvitchy there. You alright?"

Now he finally looked over at his brother again, watching with just a bit of confusion as he saw him deposit the coat into the bucket of water. Edward took a deep breath. He could lie and pretend that he was, but it was obvious to both of them that he wasn't.

He shook his head. "This hotel seems like a place we'd go for a job," Edward said. He rested his hands in his lap. "I'm the most common type of ghost, but there's a type called a partial. They're like what you see in Hollywood. They like old, abandoned places because it's usually where they died years ago - they fixate on things like that. Partials are...frightening, even to regular ghosts."

He kept out the part about how ghosts like him feared someday becoming partials. There was never anything to confirm that as a possibility, but it did seem all the more likely once you knew the difference. He had voiced his concerns to Claire, once - she had felt the same way. But neither had ever dared to bring it up to Schadel. If they didn't know for certain, they could try tricking themselves into believing that they had no chance of becoming partials. But, if she did confirm their suspicions, they would be forced to face a truth neither wanted to fully embrace.

"Vell, if it makes you feel any better, ghosts here don't vork like ghosts vhere you're from. If zere vas one zat could interact viz zis plane, trust me, ve'd know and I vouldn't be camped out here," he assured him. "I've run into vone or tvo in my time, and taken care not to repeat ze mistake. Zey're a bit like ze partials you speak of."

He sat down on the edge of the bed and started to unlaced his boots, shoving a sketchbook out from under the bed to make room for his boots.

Most of his tension seemed to leave him, though some clearly remained as he slid off of the bed. "That's good, then," Edward said. He didn't think Engel fully understood what partials were like, but it was good to hear that his version of ghosts had limited abilities.

His gaze traveled over to the sketchbook. "I didn't know you drew," he commented. He wanted to lean down and flip through it, but Claire had taught him that some artists could get quite aggravated if someone looked at their private works without their explicit permission.

"Ja, have ever since I vas a kid," he said, leaning down and picking it up. "Easier to bring a sketchbook and pencil places zan an accordion, after all." He tossed it down on the bed and took his seat again next to Edward.

A small smile danced across his lips. "My best friend likes drawing, too," he said. "She likes all forms of art, actually. Her room is filled to the brim with art supplies - Schadel first started doing it to bribe her into letting her stay, but now she just does to make sure she doesn't get bored."

He leaned back and looked up at the ceiling, imagining what Claire would be up to now. She would likely still be working on her latest piece of artwork in her room - something involving paint, if the cups of water were anything to go off of - but she would have to leave it eventually. Would she get worried when she saw that he wasn't on the couch? Would she think that he had left without saying anything, or would she realize that he had been whisked away from the agency?

If she did, would she call Schadel and Liz? Would they even know what to do? Question after question came into his mind, and refused to leave no matter how hard he stopped trying to think about it.

"I've never stayed in one place long enough for anyzing like zat, but I alvays make sure I've got somezing," he chuckled, picking up the sketchbook and flipping idly through it. This one was about halfway filled. Foxes dominated his subjects but humans and more abstract images frequented it as well. All of them were dark, however: the vulpines were half-skeletal and men walked with a shambling gait and a gaze that was feral or dead more often than not. Though he lingered on no single sketch or graphite drawing for long it was easy to see that certain elements from the war still haunted the artwork in the form flags, symbols, or even just in the style of attire. The way Kratzer twisted the organisms he created was hauntingly accurate yet agonizing. Pains that only the likes of himself or Edward could really understand in what had happened almost seventy years past.

As Edward watched his brother flip through the pages, he began to notice a prevalence of dark themes. It made his heart ache. Some of it was clearly references to the war - he could easily see it in the designs of the people and the objects. But other things that weren't necessarily references to the war appeared just as distorted, and Edward couldn't help but look up at Engel as his brother continued to revisit his old artwork.

Claire's art was a bit lighter. She liked painting things and not people: the flowers out in the front of the house, the house itself and little mementos of her friends. Engel used his art to vent; she used hers to escape. But she never really could - ever so often, flames would sneak their way into the work. A family would be disappearing into the distance, a couple's hands linked together. And, sometimes, there would be a sad girl all by herself, though the age was never exactly the same.

He sighed and closed it, putting it down and rising. He didn't really have anything to do but he had a hard time sitting still. The adrenaline was still running through his veins, though it was fading, and killing Taipan had left him with a sense of finality that he somehow struggled with. He'd been after her life for a long time. She'd been the greatest obstacle between himself and the targets he needed to eliminate in the last stages of the war to ensure the Allies' victory, Hitler's death included. She'd been the muscle behind what they'd done to him, and to his family, and it'd become a quest for revenge as much as it had a quest for justice.

He wandered to the window and gazed out of it. The moonlight slanted through the boards across the torn carpet, the only luminescence his current abode offered.

Edward saw his brother rise and did the same, following him over to the window. He wasn't really sure what he was supposed to say. His mind must have still be on the woman he had just killed. It didn't seem like he was sad about her death; it was more like he was relaxed than anything else. Whoever she was, she must have been someone he had wanted to deal with for a very long time.

"So," he quietly said, leaning up against the wall beside the window, "what have you been doing since the bar?" It was small talk, and something told him the answer would probably be on the gruesome side, but it was something to fill the silence.

"Vorking for Boomslang," he answered, a bitter tone of resentment to his voice. "Ze same as alvays - mercenary stuff, mostly. Assassination, kidnapping, ze vorks. Yourself?"

His guess was correct—it was on the gruesome side. He wasn't sure if he was supposed to feel happy about that or not, so he settled with keeping a neutral expression on his face. “I've just been working at the agency, getting a couple of cases done here and there.”

He looked down at his hand and studied its palm.

“We solved our first murder,” he said. “I feel like that's a pretty monumental thing, even though Claire and I weren't able to do much besides talk with the ghosts in the area and brainstorm. Liz and Schadel did the most of the legwork—people tend to get fairly creeped out when they see me coming.”

He glanced over at Kratzer. “I never told you what I wear out on the jobs, did I?”