Vigilante | ✔

Part VII: Frame Break

It was one of Eli's days off and he was spending it studying. Somehow he didn't find that as depressing as he would have months earlier. Then again, he had other things to worry about. Or more like, he had one annoyingly persistent problem plaguing him.

At the moment, he was trying not to think about a certain masked stalker of his. He thought about him enough the rest of the time.

"Hey, have you heard about that masked guy being back?" Eli wondered why he'd thought he could go through a couple of hours without having to hear about Matthew.

As much as he didn't want to talk about him at the moment, he still put his slice of pizza down without taking another bite from it and looked at the young man who'd spoken.

His name was Collin, and he was what Eli liked to think of as unfairly tall — but then again, most people he knew fell into this category, for some reason. He needed to find shorter friends.

Collin was dark skinned, with a friendly look in his brown eyes. They'd met because they shared a few classes and had become friends after a while, bonding over their constant complaints on classes and the lack of sleep they suffered through because of said classes.

Collin was also a really smart guy and pretty funny, so it made studying with him a much better option than studying on his own. That was exactly what they were doing that day: studying. Though it was more like they were pretending to study while eating pizza and watching a show about what basically amounted to videos of people doing stupid — and very often, painful — things. It was what Eli called a good day.

He almost forgot he never could have an entirely good day.

"No, I don't really watch the news all that much," Eli lied. Matthew had told him he'd be going back to running around the city without any regard for his safety. Eli had told him he could go jump off a bridge for all he cared. Of course, by that point, he didn't think either him nor Matthew believed he was serious.

"How do you not watch the news when they actually have something interesting to talk about," Collin asked. Much to Eli's disappointment, he seemed to have joined the Vigilante fanclub. He sincerely hoped Collin never met Michael.

"I'll have you know, I'm a very busy person," he said, only to have Collin laugh at him.

"Yeah, sure you are," he said. "All that coffee won't make itself."

Eli huffed indignantly before picking up his pizza slice. He was all too used to having Collin make fun of his job. Apparently, it was too cliche for a college student to work at a coffee shop. Eli wondered what the hell he was supposed to do instead.

Just as he was about to answer with what would most likely be a snarky response, the door opened and Collin's roommate — Tucker — walked in with a plastic bag in his hand. Tucker was what most considered a jock. He was good at sports and relatively smart, but mainly he was good at sports — which explained why he was so tanned and in much better shape than Eli. Unlike what most people thought, however, he was also a genuinely good guy, even if he failed to accept that his friends were jerks who could not be left alone with food.

He paused in the doorway to assess the scene in front of him before glaring at Eli and Collin with eyes of a light brown tone.

"You jerks seriously started eating without me?" he asked, and both Eli and Collin wondered why he made it sound like this was a completely unexpected development.

"We were hungry, and you were taking your damn time getting the soda and chips," Collin said before taking a bite of his pizza while looking right at Tucker, practically showing off the fact that he had food.