serendipity/ hs au

-1

"Deep within everyone's heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences not the monotonous succession of days passing by, but moments of intense, almost desperate happiness."
-Irène Némirovsky

a/n:
hi! this is a fanfic alaya and I (Georgia) are writing, and we'll alternate chapters. we don't really know if this is going to go anywhere but hopefully it will (: (Also the main character in this book, violet, isn't white or skinny. She's a darkskin black girl, and she's curvy.)

Harry Styles; CEO of styles.co, aged 24, body, found dead at the bottom of Plymouth River.
The body was cut up into pieces, the head was decapitated; skin burned off...

I close the article once details got too gritty. I was shaking, the paper in my hand seemed to be rattling, as if the information inside of it was too much for it to contain itself.

Already there were so many flaws written in this newspaper that I could pick out. How could they know the body was his, if it was fucking burned? The questions crawled around my head like spiders.
Harry styles was the CEO at the company I had started working at a few months ago, and he was murdered two weeks ago. The office had been shut down for a week for investigation, the police found almost nothing. Many people who worked here quit in fear "that they would be next", or at least that's what the middle aged women whose name I didn't care enough to know said to me before she packed up all her desk things and left.

Everything around the office has been eerily quiet ever since work started again on Monday, and I felt as if I wasn't the only person who was on edge. What had once been a work place filled with familiar smiles was now a room filled with pale faces and suspecting looks.  I was friendly with most of the people who worked here, but I always knew something was strange. I always felt as if there was some big secret that was always hidden about this company, and I could tell it was soon going to unfold.

I tapped my pink chipped nails against the countertop over and over again, while I watched the clock. I felt something bubbling inside of me as if I waiting, hoping for something to happen. I always felt this way.

"Violet, are you even listening?" I hear my co-workers voice, Zayn next to me.

"Oh yeah, sorry I was just thinking." I give him a warm smile. When I look up at the clock I realize I had been spaced out for the past 20 minutes, thinking about the murder.

"You're always thinking about something. Anyways, we have all this work to do and if you don't help me I'm going chop you up and throw you in the lake." Zayn jokes, handing me a thick file of papers.

"That's not funny." I try to hold back my giggles. Zayn literally didn't care about anything in this office, he hated it here made a point of showing it. When Zayn smiles, his eyes squint.

"Who cares? Harry was an asshole anyways, it's not like anyone here is honestly upset that he died." He says dismissively.

"Zayn! Shhhh!" I put a finger up to my lips. "You can't just say things like that, besides you didn't even know him."

"Like you did." Zayn chuckles, before putting on his glasses and starting to organize his papers.

That's what Zayn and I did here. We were at the bottom of the totem pole. Lowest of the low. We organized files, opened mail, and answered the phone. Basically paid interns, no one cared if we were here or not. It felt like years ago I got invited to do an internship last summer. I had needed to leave my hometown, my mother, my ex boyfriend and all the parts of my life that had been permanently stained. I had left without telling anyone, and was in Chicago applying for this job the next day.