Reaper's Touch

Hex: Cleaning

"It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you."
-Bill Ayers

Hex could not stop cleaning. At first it had been rational, practical, even a necessity. The apartment was dingy and neglected, with random rashes of mold spreading out from the window frames and air conditioning unit, Roach Motels full of their dead residents in the corners of every room and cabinet, and a bread crumb trail of their dead bodies leading back to the bathroom sink, all flipped over on their backs, jointed legs folded up like staples. There were scuff marks all over the walls and floor. No harm in doing a deep-clean of the place after they moved in. It would only take a few hours.

Only those few hours kept getting extended. Hex wasn't happy with the job she'd done on the mold rashes, for example, and now she was scrubbing at the one around the living room window again with a water/bleach combo and an old toothbrush. She had been at it for hours and hours, in this exact same spot, but Gus had been gone all afternoon and there was no one else around to snap her out of it or talk sense into her, so she kept going like a toy that some careless child had forgotten to turn off.

Hex had scrubbed the wall so violently the toothbrush had gone through two layers of old paint, and the surface mold was long gone, but she still felt like she could see the little dark spots. And as long as she could see spots, she couldn't so much as take a five minute water break.

The sound of the front door opening was far away in Hex's ears, and she was so ultra focused on her task she didn't bother even looking over her shoulder to see who was there.

Gus's voice called out to her. "You're still cleaning that?"

She grunted in annoyance. "Almost done."

"You said that five hours ago!"

"It has not been five hours!"

Gus walked over to the window. Hex saw his reflection appear next to hers in the glass. He looked cold, sick and exhausted.

"Um... yeah, it has. I left three hours ago, and you had already been at it for two before that! You're tweakin' bad, baby. You can't see that?" he said with concern, putting a hand on her lower back.

Something about the physical contact made Hex feel a surge of irrational rage. She jerked away from Gus.

"Leave me alone and let me finish this goddamn job!" she snapped at him, her eyes blazing.

Gus looked stung that she had yelled at him, but she couldn't help it. Everything was annoying the hell out of her today. She could feel herself being mean to Gus, acting crazy even, but she couldn't get a handle on it. This was what always happened when the meth stopped being fun. It always ended here, with her pissed off and obsessing about something stupid. And that just made her angrier.

"Where were you anyway?" she asked.

Gus shrugged. He was coming down and had been mopey all day. Hours earlier he'd said he needed to take a walk and "clear his head."

"I went to see Lucas," he mumbled.

"That asshole?"

Gus had eventually told her what'd really happened on his birthday and the conversation he'd had with Lucas. Hex hadn't been surprised. Lucas had always seemed volatile to her. A long history of surviving dangerous men had fine-tuned her instincts to be so sensitive that she could feel anger in someone, especially a man, long before they ever showed it. And Lucas was the angriest man she had ever encountered. Whether he was violent or not, she had no idea, but he was full of rage.

"He apologized," Gus mumbled.

"It won't be the last time," she said.

"He's my best friend."