Chapter Text
The first time Kili set his eyes on Fili was when he was standing behind the counter at the car rental facility Kili was at, early one morning. He briefly assisted Kili in getting a rental before handing him off to someone more experienced at the job, who helped Kili with the rest.
The first time Fili set his eyes on Kili was the very same night, when the man walked into his 24-hour coin operated laundry at 2:38 AM. There was one other customer in the shop as Kili let himself in, struggling with his arms full of a large, round, beige plastic clothes hamper. An old CRT television sat on a shelf and was playing the nightly news.
Fili glanced up at him when the chime at the door went off, but otherwise paid him no mind, quietly sweeping up dust bunnies on the other side of the room. Kili did a double take, trying to figure out where he had seen those tired blue eyes before, but then he remembered why he was there and quietly slunk into the furthest corner. He hurriedly dumped his clothes and sheets into the washer and shut the lid, a little too loudly, and began fiddling with the options. But then he stopped and looked up and around. He stared at the wall for several seconds in deep thought, pondering about how he probably looked very suspicious taking the very corner washer.
Quickly, he gathered his things and dumped them back into the basket, and scurried to another, less inconspicuous option. He repeated the process of throwing his items in the machine.
“Hey,”
Kili was startled so badly he almost hit the ceiling. He whipped around and stared at the store owner like a deer caught in headlights.
“Don’t put your sheets in a top loader.” Fili said, gesturing to the washer and then to a sign hanging on the far wall, which read PLEASE DO NOT WASH RUGS OR SHEETS IN TOP LOADERS. “It’ll ruin my machines,” he added, “put them in the commercial washer,”
Kili’s gaping mouth shut with an audible clack, and he rotated his bust around in a joint stretch-and-look maneuver, hoping to catch a glimpse of the special machines. He collected his sheets and scrambled over to another corner, where they sat. He threw in the sheets then stood and stared, trying to figure out how to make them work.
He only tried to figure it out for a few seconds, instead coming up with a brilliant idea to perhaps get close to the cute owner. He turned around and found the blond, who had returned to sweeping up the floor. Kili cleared his throat, thrice, increasing in volume each time after the man didn’t appear to hear him the first two. Finally, he stopped sweeping and looked up.
“Do you need a cough drop?” he asked stoically.
“Uh,” Kili began intelligently, “… No. Um… I don’t know how to…?” he gestured weakly to the big, bulky machine. Fili sighed and rolled his eyes, gently leaning his broom against the wall. He shambled over next to Kili and stared hard into the washer, analyzing the situation. Kili’s gentle enjoyment of the attractive man’s scent (laundry soap, cheap-but-pleasant-enough smelling deodorant, and coin change) ended immediately when he noticed the man looking in at his sheets. As an ice cold bucket of dread splashed him right in the face and ‘accidentally’ slammed the washer door shut with his knee, much too forcefully.
Fili’s turned his head to look at him, irritated. Instead of berating Kili, he asked, “Do you have soap? And bleach?”
“Uhhh…”
Fili sighed in agitation and pointed to the far wall, where a large dispenser of chemicals hung. “Soap and bleach, you need both to get the blood out,”
“What!” Kili yelped, leaping in front of the washer’s door in an attempt to hide the contents from Fili.
Fili’s eyes squinted. “Your sheets have blood on them. It’s normal to wake up with a nosebleed, I get it. The best way to get blood out of cloth is soap, bleach, and cold water,” he explained.
Kili nodded slowly. “Oh, okay,” he said. Rifling through his tight jean pockets, he fished out more coins as he walked over to the dispenser to buy the required chemicals. He hurried back over and poured them in, looking at Fili expectantly afterwards.
“Now just change the option to cold water and press start,” Fili told him, turning and walking away. “And don’t forget the rest of your things in the other washer or I’ll throw them away when you leave,”
“Ah shit,” Kili muttered under his breath, having done exactly that. After starting the industrial washer, he dashed over to the chemical wall, then back to the top down washer. He dumped in the chemicals and accidentally dropped the lid, causing it to slam shut loudly and earning a glare from Fili across the room.
“Er… cold water for blood, right?”
“Yes,”
“Thanks mate,”
The wait for the washers to finish their cycles was tense and awkward for Kili, and even more so was the wait for the dryers. He spent the time hiding his face behind years old magazines, while Fili moved around the shop cleaning up after people and then reading a book. Finally Kili got out the door with a quiet thank you to Fili and a pile of slightly damp clothes.
Kili held the phone between his head and shoulder as he quickly tried to hole himself up in the nearby broom closet, pulling along the tangled up cord as he went and nearly avoiding a piping hot pizza to the face.
“Hey, watch where you’re going!” he shouted to the clumsy delivery girl. “I have an important order to take so don’t bug me,”
Once sufficiently hidden, he whipped out his tiny, beat up .89 cent spiral notepad and a blue ball point pen and sat on a small stool.
“Okay I’m back. Name? Uh-huh,” he said into the phone. “’Kay… Address? ‘kay Uh-huh. Any special details I should know about? …’Kay. Excellent. ‘M-uh-huh, ‘kay, yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, not a problem,” Kili scribbled down several notes onto his notepad, continuing to listen to the voice on the line.
“Okay, so we’re clear on the price, then? For a special order it’s 30…” his eyebrows furrowed, not liking the tone the customer was beginning to take on, “Look, mate, it’s a minimum of 30, additional special requests cost another 10 – 15, I thought the online menu made that clear enough,”
As he listened, Kili pulled out his phone and opened up his online banking app, checking on his balance activity.
“If you’re going to argue with me, I can just cancel the order and instead send it over to my good ol’ pal at RIPD, right down the way, who I know will appreciate the tip… Or, you could accept what we offer,”
Kili grinned maliciously as the voice turned frantic and apologetic. Just as he thought, his app pinged to let him know there was a new deposit in his bank account.
“That’s what I thought. Thank you very much, sir, it’s been a pleasure,” Kili said in his best customer service voice before standing to go hang up the phone.
Six hours later, the sun had gone down and Kili was closing up shop. As a closing manager, it was his job to make sure everything was clean and prepared for the following morning. When he finished mopping the floors in the kitchen, he took off his apron and tossed it into the little laundry hamper before heading to the front. He stopped short, though, when he had a thought. He turned and went back to the kitchen, grabbing all the dirty aprons from the hamper and bringing them to his car, where he tossed them lazily into the filthy back seat. He ran back to grab a small box of cheesy breadsticks, then locked the pizza parlor doors behind him and climbed into his car.
From his back pocket, he pulled out a crumpled up sheet of paper – ripped directly from his tiny notebook, from his back pocket and placed it on his thigh as he started up the vehicle. He read over the details on the note, booted up his GPS and sped off, eating the breadsticks along the way.
Just before he arrived at his destination, he turned off his headlights to blend in better to the dark neighborhood, and then parallel parked to the best of his ability a block away. Rifling through the glove box, he found a pair of rubber gloves to yank on, and then reached into the back to grab the pizza box that had been buried beneath all the filthy aprons from the day.
He peaked into the box, turned off his car then began his trek towards his destination, checking his surroundings constantly as he went. On the doorstep, he rang the doorbell once and knocked twice before taking a step back and putting on his best smile.
The time was approximately midnight, and it showed on the man’s face as he opened his front door. Perfect, for Kili.
“Wha-?”
“Delivery for you, sir!” Kili interrupted, his brilliant smile causing his eyes to squint near shut, “I’ve got a special order just for you!”
The homeowner’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion. He didn’t order a pizza… or did he? What time was it? He had been drinking earlier, maybe he really did and went to bed having forgotten entirely.
“Uhhh, let me just get my wallet…” he told Kili, still very drowsy from sleep. He turned away in his bathrobe and slippers to go back into his kitchen, where he left his money. He didn’t get far at all. The light from the doorway disappeared quickly and quietly, too fast for him to notice. A heavy, blunt object hit him brutally across the back of his head, stunning him and sending him tumbling over an end table and onto the floor.
The glass in the small table shattered, slicing open his legs and smashing his wife’s porcelain babies as they hit the ceramic tiles down below. He fell on top of the lamp, burning his cheek on the light bulb for an instant before it smashed beneath his weight, cutting open his face.
A hand grabbed a fistful of what was left of his thinning hair. The tip of a severely sharp knife pressed against the side of his neck, then was jammed in fiercely, killing him instantly.
Kili pulled the knife out of the man’s neck and let his body drop, an ugly, fleshy sound emitting as the lifeless body hit the wood frame of the expensive end table. He took a deep breath and plopped down on the arm of the couch just next to the table, checking his phone for the time. That didn’t even take ten minutes! It was practically a new record for Kili.
Proud of himself, Kili had a quick smoke break before turning on a fan and starting the cleanup process. Three hours later, he pulled into a parking space at a 24-hour Laundromat.