The Big Picture || Tony Stark

Four || Violated

04

Violated

It was reaching four in the morning when Eleanor trudged home.

After Cal failed to answer the first time she called, she figured he was most likely sleeping. While she was relieved that he wasn't staying up, wreathing with anxiety, that also meant that she had no choice but return home to her shop for the night. She didn't have a key to his house, and she certainly wasn't about to go pounding on his family's door this early in the morning.

The doorway was bathed in shadows as it always was, and once again, Eleanor thought about the security light that never worked - even back when the shop was new. She wanted to invest in a new one, if only to see her keys after dark, but even in the darkness, she could see the splintered wood where the burglar had forced the lock.

A few days ago, Eleanor went to bed without locking the front door, and wouldn't have given it a second thought. But now, she was aching with nerves at the thought of being in the house without a lock, if only for a few hours until the locksmith replaced the deadbolt.

But Poe was just as she had left him, curled up on a towel besides the door, and that in itself was a relief. That meant no one had opened the door since she left.

As soon as she stepped into the home, she reached in to turn on the light, but even after flicking the switch several times, the kitchen remained still with darkness. The electrical in her building, after thousands of dollars and dozens of professionals, worked only about half the time. While normal, the darkness was still unsettling.

The only light that worked was the battery-operated lamp in the kitchen and Eleanor carried it with her to the stove, where she filled up the kettle and set it to boil, then down the hall into the bedroom. Despite it being hours since she escaped the rain, her clothes were still soaked, and when she finally pulled them off of her bloated, shriveled skin she realized how freezing she was.

She suddenly regretted the decision not to walk to Cal's, where he had running water and even a claw-foot bathtub. All she wanted to do now was sink into a long, hot bath.

Instead, she wrapped herself up in her bathrobe and wandered back down the hall. The kettle was screaming, but she didn't immediately run to switch it off. She stopped just outside of her studio, shivering at the draft that escaped through the broken window.

The light from the streets gave her a perfect view of the massacre which was her studio. Glass still littered the floor, and paintings had fallen off the walls during the struggle, but Eleanor really had no intention of cleaning it up. In reality, she didn't see the mess. All she saw was the shadow of the coat rack in the corner, that kind of looked like the outline of a body.

She shook the image out of her head and slammed the door closed. Out of sight out of mind.

In reality, though, it wasn't just her studio. It was her whole home. She felt violated. Like her entire space had been invaded and there was almost no hope of reclaiming it.

She went into the kitchen and turned off the burner, but instead of finishing up her tea, she took out the bottle of red wine she hid in one of the empty cupboards. She took a swig directly out of the bottle, feeling her nerves slowly loosening as the alcohol twisted in her empty stomach. She sipped it on her way back to the bedroom, where she locked the door behind her and crawled into the middle of the empty bed, where her laptop was still lying there from earlier.

She opened it, fired up Google, and typed: what percent of burglars return.

Out of pages of links, Eleanor scrolled down and clicked on one near the middle. It took a while for her spotty service to load, and she scanned down it, until she paused on a bold paragraph that stated: