She finds him on the edge of the cliff.

 

“I thought you quit.” She says, through a damp haze of smoke. A note of disappointment slips into her voice despite her best efforts and she curses herself for appearing like she actually cares about him and his health. She doesn’t. 

 

He takes the cigarette out of his mouth and throws her an unreadable glance. “Ellie.”

 

“It’s Eleanor to you.”

 

He grins. His eyes are emotionless. “Eleanor. It’s been a while.”

 

“Not long enough.”

 

“How’s your drinking?”

 

She cuts him down with a warning look. “Bold card to play.”

 

A pause. He drops the stub of his cigarette and ignites a new one with a decisive click of his lighter. “Sorry.”

 

“Why are you here?” She asks, impatiently.

 

For the first time since she began talking to him, she sees some semblance of emotion flicker in his eyes. She tells herself that she’s imagining it, because there was no way that he was feeling anything, being the cruel, cold-hearted, conniving liar and backstabber that he was.

 

He flicks off some ash on the end of his cigarette. She resists the urge to knock it out of his hands. “Why else? To attend the funeral of a dear friend, of course.”

 

She swallows back rage. 

 

“Friend?”

 

Alarm flashes in his eyes. He recognises this tone. Anyone that has spent more than ten minutes in Eleanor’s presence knew that tone. ‘The timer voice’, they called it, because by the time she finished speaking like that, something was bound to explode.

 

“The audacity to return,” she continues, and her voice slips into something quiet and low, almost a whisper. She all but hisses her next words. “It’s almost as if you’re asking to be shot.”

 

Their small clearing at the edge of the cliff begins to echo with the unmistakable sounds of metal machinery sliding into place. To them, who dealt in violence and crime and in his case, betrayal, the sounds of guns being loaded are unmistakable.

 

His shoulders tense. “Ellie—”

 

“Eleanor.”

 

“Eleanor.” He corrects himself smoothly. And now he’s using his old demeanour, the relaxed and slick-haired one, the persona he used when he was trying to charm a couple of cigarettes from some bartender unfortunate enough to be the victim of his charisma. “Let’s talk, alright? Put the guns away.”

 

“So you can stab me in the back again?”

 

He runs a hand through his hair with an air of frustration. His eyes are calculating. “It’s not what you think it is.”

 

She tightens her hands into fists. Calm down, calm down. “You tried to kill us.”

 

“You wouldn’t have died from that. I know you. We grew up together, didn’t we?”

 

Yeah. They did.

 

Sixteen years old. Behind a bar. Three teenagers with guns tucked into their belts and cash sewn into their jackets. Nowhere to go, no one to turn to. A girl all but drenched in the smell of beer. A boy obsessively smoking cigarette after cigarette. 

 

And their glue, the one that held them together. The boy with the wild hair and the brown eyes and the wide, open smile and the firm words telling them to put aside their differences because there really aren’t that many, alright? You two are more similar than you think, and if you just stop playing mind games with each other you could probably be best friends! Come on, guys. We’re criminals running from the law here. The least we can do is help each other out.

 

So they did. They helped each other out. They robbed a dozen stores across their city with an ease that no teenager should be able to manage. They worked well together, the chainsmoker, the alcoholic, and their sun. 

 

Until that chainsmoker with the dead eyes tipped off the police about the whereabouts of some thieves hiding from the law before he left them in the middle of the night. No note. No explanation. No guilt. At least, not the genuine kind.

 

And now he’s here to attend the funeral? Her hand itches for a gun.

 

He speaks again. “How did he die?”

 

 The hand holding the cigarette shakes a little. 

 

She scoffs at the blatantly fake display of emotion. “You know damn well how he died. Why are you still here?”

 

“You want to know why I left.” He said.

 

“No. I really don’t.”

 

“Ellie—”

 

“Eleanor.” She snaps.

 

“Just listen for once, can’t you?” His eyes flash. She feels a vague satisfaction from provoking a reaction out of him. “I made a deal with the police, alright? They told me that if I turned myself in, you two would get away scot free after being in custody for a couple of weeks.”

 

“Well they lied.” She spits. “And now you work for them.”

 

“I didn’t have a choice!”

 

“You could have stayed!”

 

She heaves in a breath and they both fall silent. In the distance, a seagull shrieks shrilly, striking a jarring note against the crashing waves in the distance. Both their gazes follow the small white smudge as it dives into the ocean, a thin streak against the dreary grey sky. 

 

“What do you want?” She asks, calmer. No less dangerous.

 

He pauses. A microscopic white dot that could be the seagull reappears on the horizon. She feels an unexplainable sense of relief upon seeing it again.

 

“That question was genuine.” He said.

 

She waits for him to explain.

 

He opens his mouth. Asks again. “How’s your drinking?”

 

She slaps him. The cigarette falls out of his mouth and extinguishes on the damp ground. His eyes are brimming with shock. She shakes out her hand and before he’s given a chance to recover, she begins patting up and down his pockets, looking for the rest of his stash with actions that were easy and familiar because she’s done them a million times before. 

 

“I hate you.” She says. She pulls out the pack of cigarettes from the inside of his jacket, where he used to sew in his emergency cash, and hurls it ferociously out into the air, and they both watch it fall slowly and pitifully towards the rocks and the water below, disappearing as if it had never existed in the first place.

 

She dusts her hands off. “That better be the last pack. He’d hate you too if he knew that the first thing you do after he dies is smoke, for god’s sake.”

 

He blinks and recovers from the onslaught of attacks. “Same goes for you, if you drank.”

 

“So what if I did?” She asks, challengingly. “I thought that was obvious. Why would I talk to you if I was sober?”

 

He laughs. It’s a shadow of a shadow of what it used to be. “Don’t drink any more.”

 

“It’s almost like you care.”.

 

He wisely refrains from lying and saying something ridiculous like I do care, but the expression on his face is almost as bad. She closes her eyes. The first pelt of rain hits her eyelids, and she lets the water run down her face in steady streams. If some of it is salty, she blames the ocean breeze.

 

“Leave.” She tells him. “Get out of my sight.”

 

“Ellie,” he says. She doesn’t bother to correct him this time. “Let’s be friends again. Can we be friends again? Or, I don’t know, frenemies or—”

 

She interrupts him before he could start rambling properly. “We weren’t friends in the first place.”

 

“Stop being difficult for once.” He says, as if she’s the one being difficult. His cheek is pink from when she slapped him and his eyes are genuine, and too late, she feels some kind of sentiment creep up around her with terrifying speed. He holds out a hand like he wants her to shake it. “He would’ve wanted us to be friends. Do this for him. Not us.”

 

“There are fifteen guns aimed at your head.”

 

He’s still holding out his hand. His eyes are still genuine.

 

“I could kill you right now.” She says. “Leave.”

 

And then, softly, exasperatedly, she takes his hand and shakes it.