brutal | grayson hawthorne

lalala

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Electric Touch (ft. Fall Out Boy) by Taylor Swift
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That night, the group decided they needed to get some sleep.

They planned to pretend the news bomb that had dropped was irrelevant, which in a way it was - but Liz really didn't need all those memories brought up again.

Anyway, they all set their alarms for six hours since they dispersed, ready to meet back once the timer on the phone left for Avery ran out, and they were sure they were going to get another phone call.

But, of course, sleep didn't even cross Liz's mind as she went her Hawthorne House bedroom that night - she didn't go home just to be ready in the morning, of course - and the first thing she did was pull out the letter from her waistband and sit on the edge of her bed.

My dearest Elizabeth,
You will always be one of us, and you were the first choice.

And a USB falls into Liz's lap.

She doesn't hesitate to grab her laptop and plug the drive in.

A file pops up, she presses it, only slightly cautiously, because who knows if the old man is trying to give her a virus?

It's a video.

The cover clip is a black screen, but in a way that looks like someone's hand is just covering the camera.

Liz presses play, and immediately turns her volume down as a white noise type of sound fills her room, and the video plays, lagging and too blurry for her to make out anything besides pixels.

She takes a moment before starting the video over, keeping the volume down, and focuses all her attention on the image on the screen.

It's starts out with a person too close to the camera. A girl, probably. And then she backs up, revealing a second girl. Liz could recognize that auburn hair anywhere. It's her and Emily in some kind of room. The walls are brown, so Liz isn't sure if it's somewhere at school or Hawthorne House.

They speak with large mannerisms, throwing their arms around and around each other. They might be drunk.

The camera shakes, and now it's only Emily on the camera. And shakes again suddenly, both girls fighting to be in frame. Liz loses her grip on what's happening as the video pauses and buffers too much for comprehension.

She starts it over from the beginning again, this time turning her volume all the way up and focusing only on the sounds.

She prepares herself, but still winces as a staticky noise fills the air around her, and she realizes despite the voices that can be vaguely heard, nothing can really be deciphered.

"Lizzy?" Grayson knocks at the door, but opens it anyway before Liz can answer him, pausing the video again.

He's wearing a pair black, expensive looking sweatpants. And is shirtless. His hair is wet, either he just came from the pool or a shower, but the smell of chlorine that overwhelms Liz's senses as he takes a seat on the bed beside her answers her question.

"What are you listening to?" He pulls her laptop from her lap and her arms feel too much like spaghetti to protest. Nope. No. She's not falling apart around him right now.

"None of your business," she pulls her laptop back before she catches herself leaning over his shoulder.

"The prodigal son," he then settles for saying. "Is what the answer to the phone call thing is," he explains. "Or maybe just another clue."

"Your grandfather left me a flash drive," Liz gives her own information for whatever reason. "That's what the video was."

"But you'll have to decode it," Grayson knows before Liz has to say it, definitely having scarred eardrums from the noise Liz had been blasting.

"And I don't really have time for that with everything that's going on," she finishes their interaction. "I wouldn't even know where to start."

Grayson swallows. "I can help." Liz doesn't say anything for a moment. "If you want me to."

"Okay," she breathes. "I guess we have six hours."

And she doesn't really know why she agrees. Maybe every minute she spends with Grayson is just a minute he's not with Eve, but somehow, Liz isn't even thinking about Eve, only the way Grayson bends his head over the note the old man left Liz, the outside world ceasing to exist.

She doesn't really know why he offered either, since he clearly is still hanging out with Eve despite what Liz has said to him about her. Liz gets a feeling in her stomach in how this whole situation almost maybe begins to remind her of what it was like with her, Grayson, and Emily, but she blocks that out by playing the video on full volume again.

They don't make too much progress, realizing invisible ink is probably a no-go with how small the paper is for there to be any other words, and somehow, they've ended up on the floor playing Fireboy and Watergirl - Liz being Fireboy and Grayson being Watergirl, of course.

"Do you remember," Grayson starts once he reaches the end, waiting for Liz to catch up, "those videos that you and Emily used to make on my cameras? The home videos."

"I try not to," but Liz can't help but smile a bit at the memory as she takes them to the next level.

They would do "tours" of Hawthorne House before ending the videos in a montage of the two of them reacting to Try Not To Laugh Videos. They were silly videos, things the girls did, not thinking anyone would even notice until Grayson got pissed at them for taking up all the space on his memory cards.

"You think that's what the USB is?" She then realizes that while she was trying not to fall into the green liquid, Grayson was actually getting himself lost in her puzzle. Maybe he needed a distraction too. From what though?

"It makes the most sense. But, there must be a hundred of those videos," he then brushes off. "I doubt you can remember anything important from them."

"Especially since we were probably drunk in half of them," Liz is similarly dismissive of whatever he was going to say about them.

He lets out a soft laugh even though she didn't really think her words were funny.

a/n:
mastermind? next chapter is dear john otherwise that'd b good foreshadowing