your name on my tongue /benji, clue

The kitchen is empty. Warm yellow light falls from a vintage stained glass lamp hanging low over a table for four and buttercup yellow-tile acts as a backsplash behind a deep-set sink with a white stone basin. Yellow rubber gloves hang over a tall faucet, water drips slowly off the fingertips to land with a soft kerplunk into the basin below.

But the kitchen is empty, the back door secured shut against the dark and the bonfire still burning outside. Benji stands there in the doorframe for a long moment, assessing. He's a thinker, always thinking almost too deeply according to Stella. How many times has she pressed her pointer finger against the crease between his brows as if she can turn his brain off for him?

The concept is nice but he's experienced mindless oblivion enough times to know that it's not for him.

He slips into the kitchen, glancing over his shoulder into the dark living room just once before abandoning it. He rests the firepower against a cupboard door within reach and then places a hand down on the granite countertop, fingers coming away slightly damp, filmy almost, from the residue of a cleaning agent.

Benji looks up to look out through the window over the sink but it's too dark, all he sees is a faded version of himself staring back at him, framed by the warm glow of the lamp. His expression shifts as a sliver of pain shoots through the back of his head. The migraine continues to form slowly, exasperated by the beer and all the excitement.

Something in his reflection catches his eyes and Benji turns around to spot a coffee machine on the counter along the opposite wall. He crosses the floor and opens whitewashed, pine cupboard doors until he finds an open bag of ground coffee hiding behind a canister of hot chocolate mix.

Almost mindlessly, Benji sets the machine to brew a pot.

While he waits for the coffee to brew, he leans back against the kitchen sink with his arms crossed, the fire poker still close enough for him to grab quickly if he needs to. His gaze flicks back towards the door into the living room and the darkness laying in wait just beyond the halo of light peeking out from the kitchen, once, twice, again.

A shiver runs down his spine as the coffee brewer hisses and spits stale coffee grounds into the pot below and Benji turns to the side to pull a knife out of the block sitting on the counter nearby. There are already a couple missing from their places and he tries not to think about that, how he isn't the first to enter the house tonight.

And how it's so quiet when only moments ago, someone was screaming.

Would he have even come in here if Stella hadn't?

"No," he answers the empty kitchen, but it's hard to say how true that really is.

The boy sitting at the fire with his friends half an hour ago couldn't bear the thought of losing any more of them, but the Benji here now isn't quite so sure he can even trust them anymore.

The killer has to be someone that they know and the idea it could be one of them feels like a knife in his side, but it's a knife he's become used to living with, it's almost too easy. He was raised to never trust anyone, not fully. His family has enough money that they had to learn to protect it from those who might worm their way into their lives just to taste some of it.

Raised in a house like that, it's hard to accept that someone could love him without motive.

Maybe that's why it'll always be Stella and him in the end, at least with her he knows where he stands.

The coffee machine signals the completion of its job and Benji pushes himself off the counter, knife in hand, to pour himself a mug. The sweet, toasty scent fills the kitchen, cutting through the smell of disinfectant that had been hard to notice before without anything to compare it to.

And though the knowledge had begun to form since the moment he entered the room, Benji pauses with the rim of the mug stalled against his lip as he finally understands.

He's standing in the middle of a crime scene.