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Eli stood in front of the cabin for what felt like an eternity. She was never one prone to needless anxiety, but she'd connected Klaus to the leaked footage, which meant others were likely not far behind. It seemed that he'd forgotten that the two of them shared the same contacts and she had formed all those connections first. A little bit of poking around was all it took for someone to mention that somebody that looked miraculously similar to him had passed along the footage to the man who had aired it.
It was dark by the time Klaus showed himself. His clothes were filthy and there was soot on his fingertips.
"You leaked the footage," Eli accused in lieu of a greeting. By that point, she was on her third can of cheap beer.
"You're wrong," Klaus said, lying blatantly to her face. His exhaustion was clear in the way he stood slouched and the roughness of his voice, but Eli was too upset with him to care.
"Really?" Eli snapped, crushing the empty can and tossing it aside like she had the rest. "So you didn't suddenly start showing up at headquarters without being called? Without me or Alex? You happened to go there and just never ran into us in any of those? You went on your own and came back at times we wouldn't notice and it's a coincidence?"
Eli knew her voice was rising with each word. She knew that this was going to escalate if she didn't get her temper under control, but she didn't want to. At least she wasn't strangling him like she initially planned.
Klaus opened his mouth to argue, face twisted the way it always was when the two of them were arguing.
"It was my idea," Aria broke in, stepping in front of Klaus before he could start. "I dragged him into it."
If Eli was thinking straight, she might have noticed that Aria was holding herself like a shield, like she thought Eli was going to hurt Klaus. She might have wondered where she had been or when she'd shown up at all. Later, Eli would pinpoint this as the moment where she completely forgot about her initial target.
"You reckless little fool," Eli snarled from where she sat on the porch. "Do you have any idea what you've done?"
"Something," Aria said. "Which is more I can say for the Elites."
"I told you we would fix things! The only thing you had to do was stay here and stay silent! What the fuck were you thinking?"
"You talk a big game," Aria said, "and then you sit idly on the sidelines because you were told to. Like it isn't within your power to do more."
Eli laughed shrilly. "I don't know how someone could go through everything you did and still be so... naive."
"Naive?" Somehow, Aria didn't sound offended, just curious. "For not indulging in whatever political games your boss is so entrenched in? For not wanting to sit around and wait for somebody else to do something? Or is it something else?"
