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Manipulation is an instinct, rather than an impulse.
To Ewron, it's something primal, raw—it's the difference between baring your neck to a predator or latching your teeth onto prey, and Ewron is all teeth. He's a Swiss-knife personified: a man of many faces, all of them sharp. Apathy is thinly veiled behind the hike of Ewron's lips into an off-beat smile, rising a little too far on one side and never meeting his eyes, chin angled just enough to portray an unwelcoming edge. He presents a fractured, pale imitation of warmth. Everything about him is calculated. Serpentine, in a way.
Now, though, a breathless obsession outwits him.
It doesn't matter how hard he tries, he can't exorcise the seething flames that are set alight in his chest—suffocating, charring, so, so horrible—when he thinks of her. Not even through all the self-soliloquising he ordains himself with. Not even through all the sardonic tirades he performs to ice the simmering between his ribcage; even through distancing himself from his obsessions' muse; even through making an enemy out of her.
Keeping her close, though—deluding himself into thinking she's his, that she belongs to him, settles the fire.
Survival instinct is overridden by impulsive desire when Katie is in the equation; he manipulates her and plays with her feelings because he wants to, rather than needs to. As an impulse, rather than instinct. Ewron isn't a man who indulges, but the asphyxiating drive of his obsession has him returning to baser instincts. She makes him impulsive, makes him want the very things that he uses against others.
Makes him feel almost like a person.
Katie is a meteorite crashing into his orbit, tearing apart the very structure of his universe and rewriting the trajectory of his moral code, of his desires, of his whole entire life. She's become the single constant he revolves around, a burnt-up star orbiting the centre of the universe. Ewron doesn't need her, doesn't need to play with his food, but Katie has a gravitational pull. Some force of attraction that draws you in, catalysing manic episodes of ugliness and wild spirals for however long they're able to last before their next 'breakup'.
He wants to keep her under his thumb. Not out of necessity, but just to soothe that whirlwind dancing manically in his chest. It's a primal instinct, a prey drive of sorts, to keep her close—he's a hurricane with no current. Unmoving, trapping them both in its eye.
(It's the closest Ewron will ever get to domesticity, in its own off-beat, fucked-up way.)
"I already stole it," he says, his deadpan a flatline heartbeat, lips threatening to pull into a smirk.
Teasing is a way for him to maintain that illusion of control. So, when the opportunity arose, he'd taken an item of hers. Again with that impulsivity.
"Bestie—" In Katie's eyes, Ewron can see his own reflection. What's left of the moonlight is cast upon them in jagged cuts, his lashes casting a deep shadow onto his cheekbones, made sharper by the low lighting—cruel-looking. The dark sits unpleasantly on his face: harsh, in both appearance and demeanour. Katie's voice has a manic edge. She's a desperate thing, his ontological polar in regards to how they present themselves—he'd never allow himself to appear so pathetic. She'd really do anything for attention. "Bestie, bestie, bestie, bestie."
Pausing in faux-thought, his brows set low and sardonic, Ewron allows the silence between them to drawl.
Even with his mean streak, right now he's all temperance and no temper. Total control over the situation. Katie's desperation paints a nice contrast.
"Bestie," Katie stresses, the vowels high in the attic of her throat—Ewron's eyes are latched onto it, the slender curve of it and the concave of her larynx, and he thinks about how easy it'd be to shut her up. These violent, intrusive thoughts aren't something he revels in—his cruel streak and the psychological implications of it are a tender bruise that he doesn't make a habit of pressing on, and so the thoughts are exiled to the backburner of his mind where they're left to simmer caustically until he can release them into whatever plot or sabotage he's working on.
There's a laugh somewhere in his words, buried deep enough in his throat to vibrate: "Ask me nicely," he says, rolling his breath on the words, letting them linger in the air between them.
Jaw hanging briefly in hesitation, Katie's lips close into a tight curl before managing to parse words through: "Best friend, pl-ease. Please give it back. I need it so bad, I've been opening them non-stop 'til I got this one. It took forever." And again, as though a mantra, "please."
She isn't taking it wholly seriously, Ewron can tell. She never does. Katie doesn't understand the extent of his obsession nor reciprocates it in full. Ewron will have to fix that—he cares about her like nobody else can. They only have room in their hearts for one another.
(He'd considered her a pawn in his chess cavalry, before. Inconsequential, disposable; that couldn't be further from the truth. Katie isn't a chess piece: she's the other player. Ewron is dependent on her like an addict to their drug of choice, withdrawals setting deep within his veins without her presence. Still, he intends to keep her pliant, submissive. For Katie to know her place, a leashed dog that will roll over and expose its throat at its master's will. Whining for his attention, holding her own leash in her jaw by prey-blunt canines, always at his beck and call.)
"Say my name."
(She'll wait outside in the cold for him until her lips are blue because she won't know any life outside of him, outside of what he allows her to see. That's the way things should be.)
"You're—" Her fingers twitch in an aborted motion to grab his shoulders. Something visceral settles in his chest—maybe she is learning her place. "Ewron. You're my best friend ever. I love you so much, o-kay? Please hand it over."
Love. The word doesn't hold as much weight to her as it does to him, Ewron intones; it's a throwaway line that she'll spew to whoever will listen, everyone who doesn't understand nor respect her as much as Ewron does. To Mike, to her poor fucking boyfriend, to all of the factions she's thrown herself headfirst into. Humiliating herself and throwing away all dignity for even a sliver of attention, completely oblivious to the fact that she'd get everything she wants and more if only she'd just listen to Ewron and play along with him nicely.
A pleased smile dances on his lips at her response, a soft hum resounding from the back of his throat. Still, a dog learns through operant conditioning, and behaviour is modified by its consequences. A punishment of sorts, he sets her up for inevitable failure: "Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz." Baritone of his accent deviating from its regular English drag, the syllables sharpened.
And, bless her fucking heart, Katie has a go at it.
"Uh. Gregorsh Guh-shick buh... visch," stumbling over her words, the pathetic crease of her brows into an unspoken plea (even if it's more of a performance than genuine sorrow) has something visceral and violent pry past Ewron's ribcage—he needs to put her in her place, needs to ruin her life, needs to isolate her from all her little friends until she understands that Ewron is her whole world.
Ewron grins. Cuteness aggression, he internally muses.
With a final, resounding "Nuh-uh," he teleports away, repressing the disappointment that he didn't linger long enough to watch Katie's expression crumble. It's left to seethe on the backburner of his mind with the rest of his introspective self-musings that fly too close to the sun, that come too close to labelling whatever his feelings towards Katie are.
He'll give Katie the item back. He knows he will—it doesn't benefit him to be needlessly cruel at the moment, but he indulges his power play for a moment longer regardless. His feelings towards Katie are disjointed, malformed—oxymoronic concepts that shouldn't coexist, and yet do. Adjacent to bloodlust, brimming with affection.
Neither of them are in control, in this dynamic, but Ewron lets himself get lost in the fantasy that Katie is held under his thumb.