No backstory for this one, really. These characters may or may not be from my WIP novel Always for Eternity. My muse couldn't make up its mind. But they're fun to play with anyway.
The prompt for this story is: You stumble across an article online detailing a brutal murder. There are pictures of the victim. It's you.
Front Page News -- an original story by Julie Lynn Thorpe (C) 2016
I stumbled from the bedroom with a groan. I stretched as I made my way through the hall to the living room where my housemate sat, staring at her computer with a frown on her face. I tilted my head as I folded myself into a chair.
“Something the matter, Mika?”
Her head shot up and she glared at me. “You haven’t seen the headlines this morning yet, have you?”
I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes. “Of course not. I just got up, why? Has some horrible thing befallen us all?”
“Just your brutal murder,” she quipped, spinning the laptop to face me. “You’re front page news in fact.”
I shared her frown. I gathered the electronic device and set in my lap, scrolling down the page as the cover story did, in fact, detail the gruesome murder of a man fitting my exact description. The photograph they’d taken was a little harder to study – most of it had been blurred in a pitiful attempt to pretend the death wasn’t as violent as they said.
“That’s you, Vik,” Mika said. “The photo isn’t great, but that’s you. You died last night and yet here you are, in our living room as if nothing’s even happened.”
“Immortal,” I murmured, studying the details again. She knew that it was something we shared. But it did pose a bit of a problem in the digital age where everything hit the media faster than a person could blink.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
I looked up and frowned harder. She was giving me that lovely you’re an idiot if you think you can keep this hidden look. I rolled my eyes and returned to the laptop, looking for other news articles that had covered the same story.
“Are you going to try the old ‘I have a twin brother’ thing again?” Mika asked. I could feel her gaze on me. “Because that’s not going to work if there’s not a body at the morgue and you know it.”
I let the insult slip past as I stood and returned the device to her. I wandered back to my room, wondering if I’d returned late last night and crawled into bed or the shower first. There were bloodstains on the floor near the window leading to a pile of ruined clothing on the floor. A quick glance at the bedsheets told me that I had, luckily, remembered to shower before sliding into clean clothing and into bed.
“So what do you suggest I tell the kind officers who will no doubt find my appearance rather startling?” Turning, I found the young woman standing in my doorway. “After all, I can only do so much with dirty linens. The blood trail leading to my window? The blood in my room? I might as well be considered the murderer as well, Mika. What would you have me tell them?”
She blinked as she took in the room, heading to the window to make sure there was a blood trail leading to my room. Of course, there would be, I had managed to make quite a mess of my floorboards, why wouldn’t there be a trail to my room?
“The truth?”
“You don’t sound very certain of that fact, my dear.”
“That’s because it’ll make things so much harder on the lot of us, you idiot!” Her tone was snappish, but I couldn’t blame her. “What the hell even happened to you last night?”
I shrugged, unable to remember much beyond visiting a bar and chatting up a seemingly nice young man. He did seem like a bit of a strange fellow, but I allowed him to buy me a drink anyway.
“You were drugged at a bar and he killed you.” Mika shook her head in disbelief. “Christ, Vik. One of these days that might actually kill you.”
“Hardly,” I said, rolling my eyes. “It’s far more likely that I’ll find my death in the hands of another immortal rather than some strange mortal offering me a bit to drink and dragging me off to my ‘death’. Someone like you, my darling.”
Mika raised an eyebrow and a ghost of a smile graced her lips briefly. “Well, I’d be the first and most obvious choice after all. Who better than your own housemate, the very one you’ve been living with for centuries?”
“Precisely.”
“Well, Vik, you’d better think of something to tell those cops. They’ll be looking for you shortly, I assume. After all, you’re missing from the morgue and you've got a blood trail to your room. Surely they’ve got some questions they’d like answers to. And you better have them.”
I nodded and made my way back to the living room. “Of course, Mika. Have no worries. And, of course, it’ll be better than the truth.”
I curled up in my seat again and sipped on my morning coffee. I would come up with a grand story in the end, should they come to my door. But until then, I would just enjoy my morning as I usually did and wait for the next century turn.
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