BREATHE ✓ ⇢ [EDITING]

Sunset

Becca Hayek knew that the devils' arrival in London only meant trouble.

As she exited the police station with handcuffed Maj and Hans, she couldn't help but wonder what she had done to lead them to London. She'd been very careful, only staying at her uncle's house in Ankara for only three days before her father called, moving from Ankara to Vienna and finally London.

Maj continued to be talkative as the cops released him, but Hans remained quiet. In fact, he was so quiet, Becca worried that she had bailed out the wrong person from jail. She still hadn't understood why she had bailed him out despite everything he had done to only cause her pain.

Becca remained silent on the ride home on the Metro, Hans and Maj speaking in low voices on the train until they got off together. A flustered Becca opened the door to her apartment nearly a half hour later, and she fell onto her bed before the men could even walk in through the door.

Before she was fully asleep, she felt a hand on her forehead and the soft texture of lips brushing against her skin before she was unconscious.

~

Becca woke to find the two men desperately trying to work out how the stove worked. She watched in utter amusement as Hans pressed nearly a dozen different buttons at once as if the stove required a certain overly complex code to turn on.

Hans noticed her first, and immediately stopped his experimenting, shoving Maj as a gesture for him to stand up. Maj, on the other hand, was disarrayed enough and rather hopeless. "What's wrong with you? Why did you-" Maj stopped speaking when he realized that an amused Becca was watching him, and the two immediately blushed so deep a red, Becca questioned whether they were truly humans.

Becca sighed as she turned the knob to turn on the stove and she could have sworn that Hans' face became a deeper shade of red. "You just turn the knob." She told them, especially Hans, who seemed like the more rational of the two.

Hans nodded, dropping the dough onto the flat pan with the fastest of motions and grabbing Maj by the ear on his way to the table. "I have to get to work, but you can stare at the sky or something until then." Becca announced before she left to her bedroom to get dressed.

As she was leaving the house, she noticed the men's eyes on her. "Where're you going wearing that?" Maj decided that he was brave enough to ask the question on behalf of both the men, and his hard gaze never left his cousin's face.

"Work. Try it someday." She offered, tying her hair as she closed the door and ran to the bus, which had just stopped in front of her apartment complex.

As she entered the house nearly nine hours later, she found the men experimenting with the stove once again, though there was a smell of something burning...

Becca didn't wait to find out. She grabbed the emergency fire extinguisher in the closet by the door and sprayed the entire kitchen with it until she couldn't see anything.

As she coughed, she realized that she wasn't the only one in the kitchen. Both Hans and Maj were soaked in the substance from the fire extinguisher, and Hans held a half burnt naan in his hand, his blinking the only evidence that he was still alive.

Becca blushed before she scurried to her room, where Hans, then sporting a new grey tunic, sat next to her. "Maj is very angry at you. I sent him to the washroom to shower before his head exploded." Hans explained, and she couldn't help but smile, and she and Hans sat next to each other in a peaceful silence until Maj walked in whining about the lack of food in the apartment, and so Becca ordered Thai food to make up for her actions that afternoon.

As she nibbled on her Bangkok noodles, she could've sworn that she felt Hans' eyes on her, and Becca couldn't help but blush the slightest bit. She excused herself from the table as fast as she could, laying awake for hours before sleep finally came like a spreading wildfire.

That night, Becca dreamed of Turkey.