Chapter Text
The bar smells like old pennies and spilled beer that never really dries. Like the place sweats regret right through the floorboards and calls it ambience.
It fits the mood of the night.
The bartender doesn’t ask if I’m sure. He stopped asking after the third shot, and that was - what - an hour ago? Time gets syrupy in here. It drips instead of moves. It clings to the underside of things. It lets you pretend you didn’t notice it passing.
He slides the sixth shot toward me like it’s a peace offering.
The glass it wet. The liquor spills over the edge, gathers, runs down the side in slow little trails like it’s trying to escape.
My stomach curls in protest the second the liquor hits my nose. Hard liquor, sharp and clean and mean. My body has this reflex now - this tiny recoil - like it remembers I’m not supposed to do this.
Like it wants to save me, even when I won’t.
I take it anyway.
No hesitation. No ceremony. I knock it back with the kind of practiced impatience that should embarrass me, but doesn’t. The burn is immediate, the way it always is - this quick, hot line from my mouth to my gut, a flare of heat that makes my eyes water.
My throat constricts. I swallow it down like a dare.
Then my stomach lurches, and for a split second I think I might throw up right here onto the scarred bar top between the sticky napkin dispenser and someone’s forgotten keys. I grip the edge of the counter until the feeling passes, until my insides stop trying to climb out of my mouth.
The bartender watches me the way people watch stray dogs they’re not going to bring home.
His pity is almost worse than the burning.
“Beer,” I tell him, because I’m nothing if not resourceful. “Get me a beer.”
He hesitates - just a beat too long - and I feel something sharp rise up under my ribs. The old familiar anger. The one that’s always there now, like a bruise you keep pressing because you don’t know what else to do with your hands.
He sighs. Reaches under the counter. Pops the cap off without looking at me and sets it down like he’s making a deal with the devil and hoping the paperwork is wrong.
It’s cold. The bottle sweats against my palm.
I drink.
The first pull tastes like nothing, which is perfect. I’m not here for taste. Taste is for people who want to be present. I’m here to be gone. I’m here because my mind is a room that won’t shut up, and alcohol is the only thing that wedges itself in the doorframe.
Silence, even artificial, is still silence.
The bartender slides a bowl of pretzels toward me like he’s offering a life raft.
I stare at it.
“You think I’m gonna die if I don’t eat?” I ask, my voice already a little thick. There’s a mocking lilt to it, a cheap imitation of charm. “Is this your big hero moment?”
He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t rise to it. Just looks at me like he’s already decided what kind of night this is, and what kind of person I am, and how it’s going to end.
“Eat something,” he says. “Or don’t. But you’re not puking on my floor.”
I roll my eyes like I’m eight and being told to brush my teeth.
Then I eat the pretzels anyway.
They’re stale. Too salty. They scrape against my tongue like sandpaper. I chew them without tasting, swallow them without thinking, chasing them down with beer. Auto-pilot. My body taking care of its stupid little needs while my brain works on self-destruction like it’s a job.
I look down at my hands and realize I’m on my second bowl already. I don’t remember finishing the first.
Time does that to me lately. It slides around when I’m not watching. It steals little pieces. It leaves me holding things I don’t remember reaching for.
I blink hard, because everything keeps wanting to double. The neon beer sign behind the bartender pulses like a heartbeat. The room hums with noise - low laughter, clinking glasses, a song I don’t recognize pushing through tiny speakers - but it all feels far away, like someone turned the volume down on the world and left the static.
The bartender appears in front of me again like he’s never left, like he’s been there the whole time and I just forgot to see him.
“Another?” he asks, and there’s disbelief in it. Not judgment, exactly. Just…a quiet, sad surprise.
I glance at my empty bottle, genuinely startled. Like it’s betrayed me by being empty already.
“Yes, obviously, is that even a question?” I slur, and I can hear myself slurring and I hate it and I love it all at once.
His mouth tightens.
“Don’t start,” he says, like he knows me, like we’ve had this conversation before. Maybe we have. Maybe he’s seen me crawl in here on nights like this and watched me try to down myself inch by inch.
Or maybe all drunks look the same in the right light.
He sets another bottle down anyway, but he doesn’t let go right away. His fingers stay on the glass for a second longer than necessary.
“Slow down, kid,” and the way he says kid, a little kind, a little worried, makes my skin prickle.
There it is. The line. The boundary. The moment where the world tries to stop me from doing what I came here to do.
I laugh, because if I don’t laugh I’ll do something worse.
“Slow down,” I echo, tasting the words like they’re foreign. “What do you think this is? A wine tasting?”
He doesn’t flinch. “Maybe you’ve had enough after all.”
I lean forward on the stool and the room tilts toward me, eager, like it’s trying to lie down. My head feels too heavy for my neck. My limbs feel delayed, like my body’s moving through water.
I take a long drink anyway.
The beer is colder than my thoughts. That’s the nicest thing in my life right now.
“You don’t get to tell me what’s enough,” I say, and it comes out sharper than I mean it to. I don’t mean it at all, really. I mean everything and nothing. “You don’t-”
My tongue trips over the rest. My mouth feels numb at the edges. My lips don’t belong to me anymore. My face is a mask with no sensation, like I’m watching myself from across the room.
That’s the point.
That’s why I’m here.
I want to sink so far down I can’t hear myself think. I want to go heavy and quiet. I want the part of me that keeps replaying it - keeps looping it like a punishment - to finally run out of tape.
The bartenders’s pity is back. It’s sitting on his face like a smudge he can’t wipe off.
“What are you celebrating?” he asks, soft as a dare.
Had I told him I was celebrating?
My laugh turns into something uglier.
Celebrating.
Like this is a party. Like there are balloons somewhere. Like the world isn’t a ruined thing and I’m not the one holding the match.
“My brother,” I say. The words feel too big, too important, too dangerous to be said out loud in a place like this. They wobble in the air between us. “I’m celebrating my brother.”
Something shifts in his expression. The pity depends into something like understanding, which is worse. Understanding makes it real. Understanding means I’m not just some drunk asshole. Understanding means there’s a reason.
I don’t want a reason. I want oblivion.
“Okay,” he says quietly. “Okay, man. But you’ll have to…celebrate with water next.”
The way he says it - like he’s sorry, like he hates it - doesn’t matter.
What matters is the refusal.
The door shutting.
The world saying no.
My chest tightens. Heat floods my face. Anger rises fast and hot, quicker than the alcohol, because anger is easier than grief. Anger is a weapon. Grief is just a hole.
“Back off,” I snap, and it’s slurred and ugly and I can hear how pathetic it sounds, which only makes me meaner. “I’m fine. I’m-”
I gesture vaguely at myself like I’m presenting evidence in court.
“I’m fine,” I repeat, even though the room is swaying and my stomach is roiling and my hands are trembling around the bottle like I’m afraid I’ll drop it.
He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t lecture. Just reaches for the bottle, and that small motion - his hands moving towards something that belongs to me - sets off something feral inside my ribs.
I pull it back to my chest like a child hoarding candy.
“Okay,” he says, steady. “But I’m still cutting you off. You can sit. Drink water. Eat pretzels. Or you can leave.”
Leave.
The word lands like a shove.
My pulse thrums loud in my ears. The neon sign behind him flickers, and for a second I can’t tell if it’s the light or my eyes.
I look down at the bar. At the pretzel crumbs. At the ring of condensation my bottle left behind. At my own hand, too pale under the sickly overhead lights.
This is where I wanted to be. This is where I came to disappear.
And now I’m being asked to exist somewhere else.
Fine.
I shove the stool back with more force than necessary. The legs scrape against the floor, loud and sharp, and a couple heads turn. I don’t care. Or I care too much. It’s hard to tell the difference when you’re this far gone.
I stand.
The world spins.
Not gently. Not politely. It whips around me like I’m a top someone flicked with a finger and forgot to catch. The floor rises, then drops. My stomach climbs into my throat again.
I grab the bar with one hand, my nails biting into the wood, and for a second I just…hang there. Pretend it’s casual. Pretend the room isn’t tilting.
Pretend I’m not one wrong breath away from falling apart completely.
“Hey,” the bartender says, like a warning. Like he’s trying to keep me upright. Like he hasn’t already decided I’m a lost cause.
I push away anyway.
My shoulder clips someone behind me - solid, warm, real - and it jolts through my body like an electric shock.
“Watch it,” someone mutters.
“Yeah,” I snarl, too quick. “Maybe don’t stand-” I gesture again, uselessly. “There.”
The person steps back, and I half-turn, ready to throw more venom, ready to make it their fault, ready to make anyone else carry this weight for a second-
And then I see him.
It’s not really him. It can’t be.
But my brain doesn’t care about logic when it’s drunk. When it’s desperate. When it’s starving.
Blond hair. That familiar careless sweep. Broad shoulders. The way he moves like he owns the space he’s in, like the world is something that will always make room for him.
My lungs lock.
The room goes tight around the edges, like someone pulled a drawstring and cinched it closed. The sound drops out. The laughter turns into a dull roar behind glass. The neon sign pulses once, twice, like a monitor.
My vision tunnels.
He’s already walking away. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t have to. My body recognizes him like a bruise recognizes a thumb pressing down.
My heart rate spikes so hard it hurts.
For a second I’m not in the bar anymore. For a second I’m somewhere else - somewhere with headlights and wet pavement and a sound like metal screaming.
I blink hard, but the tunnel doesn’t widen. It tightens.
My mouth goes dry. My hands go cold. My legs forget how to hold me.
He keeps walking.
Not fast. Not slow. Just…away.
And the part of me that is still alive - still stupid enough to hope, still cruel enough to want proof - lurches after him like it’s the only thing keeping me upright.
“J-” I start, and the sound dies in my throat, strangled.
Because I don’t say his name.
I can’t.
If I say it, it becomes real again.
If I say it, I’ll shatter right here on the sticky floor between the bar and the exit, and everyone will see what I really am.
So I swallow the sound.
I follow anyway.
I don’t think. I just move.
My feet carry me before my brain decides. They move me to the back of the bar, where the lights are dimmer, the air heavy with smoke, and the harsh crack of pool cues hitting balls is louder.
He’s there. The back of him. The shape of him.
My hand reaches out before I can talk myself out of it.
My fingers close around his shoulder.
Solid. Warm. Real.
I yank him around.
For one single breath, my heart convinces itself it’s possible.
That the universe cracked open and handed him back.
That I can undo-
He turns, and the illusion dies so fast it’s like someone slits it open.
It isn’t him.
It isn’t him and it never was, and the guy’s face is wrong in every way that matters - different eyes, different mouth, different jaw. The resemblance is just enough to be cruel. Just enough to make my body react before my brain can stop it.
His eyebrows shoot up. Shock, confusion, the quick flinch of someone grabbed by a stranger in a dark bar.
“Hey - what the hell?” he says, and then his expression changes, softening into something I don’t want. Concern. Pity again. Like the bartender. Like the whole damn world tonight. “Man, are you - are you alright?”
Alright.
The word skitters across my ribs like something alive.
My stomach drops. My throat tightens. My eyes sting, and for a second I’m teetering on the edge of something wet and bottomless - something that isn’t anger.
Something that would swallow me whole if I let it.
So I don’t.
I grab the nearest weapon I have.
Anger.
My vision is still tunnelling, still wrong, and the alcohol makes everything feel slightly delayed, like I’m watching my own life through bad reception. The guy steps closer - because he’s decent, because he’s human - and my brain translates it into a threat.
He’s mad.
He’s going to shove me.
He’s going to say something.
He’s going to look at me like I’m pathetic-
“I’m fine,” I snap, and it comes out slurred and ugly, the words thick in my mouth. “Don’t - don’t touch me.”
“I’m not-” he starts, hands coming up, palms out. “I just-”
Something in my chest surges. A hot, vicious pulse. Not grief. Not guilt. Something simpler. Something that doesn’t ask anything of me except impact.
My fist clenches.
I have this brief, floating thought - I could hit him - and it’s like the thought itself flips a switch.
One second I’m thinking it.
The next second I’ve done it.
My knuckles collide with his face with a sickening, satisfying crack. The sound lands in my bones. A flash of pain moves up my hand and I barely register it. The guy stumbles back, crashing into the table hard enough to rattle the beer bottles on it.
His mouth opens. His eyes go wide.
And then there’s red.
Blood on his upper lip, bright and shocking under the low light.
My body hums.
It lights up like a live wire, like someone plugged me into an outlet and finally - finally - I can feel something that isn’t the slow suffocation of remembering.
Violence is clean. Violence is simple. Violence doesn’t ask me to replay anything. It doesn’t ask me to name what I did.
My mouth is smiling. I don’t remember telling it to.
“Jesus - what the-” he chokes out, wiping at his face, and I see the smear on his hand, and it makes something in me bloom. Ugly. Warm. Relived.
I step forward.
He tries to put a hand out, like he can stop me. Like he can reason with a drunk stranger in the back of a bar.
I swing again.
My fist hits flesh. Hits bone. The second punch lands with less clean satisfaction, more desperation. His head snaps to the side. He makes a sound I’ve heard in my nightmares - half pain, half surprise - and my stomach twists.
But I don’t stop.
Because stopping means thinking.
Because stopping means feeling.
“Hey!” someone shouts, and suddenly there are voices behind me, footsteps, bodies. They crowd around us fast.
Hands grab my arm. Someone curses. Someone yanks me backward.
I jerk, fighting them with blind fury, adrenaline and whiskey turning me feral.
“Get off me!” I spit, and my tongue feels thick, my words sliding around. “Get-”
The guy lunges forward, face smeared red, eyes glassy with rage. He swings wild and desperate.
His fist catches my cheek.
It should hut.
It should hurt so much.
Instead it’s just pressure. A dull impact against numb skin. My face is cotton. My head is full of static. The pain is far away, like it belongs to somebody else.
I laugh - actually laugh - and it sounds wrong, too loud and too bright.
That makes the guys holding me tighten their grip. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” one of them snarls, hauling me back like I’m a dog by the scruff.
The guy wipes his mouth again, breathing hard, blood staining his fingers. His friends crowd around him, shouting over each other.
“This guy just fucking attacked you-”
“Call the cops-”
“Hey dude, what’s your problem-”
The bartender barrels over like a storm in human form.
“Enough!” he roars, voice cracking through the chaos. “That’s enough!”
He points at me like I’m a stain. Like I’m something he wants out of his building, out of his sight, out of his life.
“You!” he shouts. “Get the hell out. Now.”
“He hit me!” I protest, because my brain is still trying to make me the victim. Still trying to rearrange the story so I’m not the monster. “He - he hit me!”
The bartender’s eyes are furious. Not pity now. Not softened. Just blunt, exhausted anger.
“You started it,” he snaps. “You grabbed him, you swung first, you’re done. Out. Or I’m calling the cops.”
Something cold flashes through the alcohol haze at the word cops.
No.
No, no, no.
Not tonight.
Not with my name. Not with my face. Not with anything that makes me real in a way I can’t take back.
I wrench free on pure panic and stumble toward the exit like a newborn deer. My shoulder clips the doorframe. The world tilts again, delighted.
I take the stairs too fast.
The front door slams behind me, and the night air hits my skin like a slap. It’s cold enough to sting. The neon lights spill onto the steps, painting everything sickly and unreal.
My foot misses a step.
For a heartbeat I’m weightless-
Then I catch myself on the railing, half falling, half dragging my body upright before gravity can claim me.
My pulse is a drum in my throat.
I laugh again, breathless, because I’m alive and I’m leaving and the cops aren’t here and nothing matters.
I stagger down onto the sidewalk and the street feels too wide, too bright, too loud even this late. Cars hiss by in the distance. A wind pushes at my jacket.
I start walking with no destination.
Just away.
Away from the bar. Away from the guy’s blood. Away from the bartender’s voice calling me what I am without using the word.
My face feels numb and huge, like it’s swelling by the second. I lift a hand to my cheek and my fingers meet warmth.
I swipe under my nose, clumsy, and when I pull my hand back there’s red smeared across my knuckles.
Blood.
It takes me a beat to decide whose it is.
I stare at it like it’s art.
Like it’s proof.
My stomach rolls, not with guilt - not anymore - but with the sick, sluggish churn of too much liquor and too much adrenaline crashing into each other in my gut.
I’m so drunk.
Good.
Being this drunk is a mercy. Being this drunk means I can’t feel my face and I can’t feel my chest and I can’t feel the hole where the world used to be.
But the numbness is already thinning at the edges. The alcohol always does that - gives me a blanket and then yanks it away when it gets bored.
I need more.
Not a bar. Not another room full of people with eyes and opinions and pity. People keep pissing me off tonight, their existence too loud, their kindness too sharp.
I want quiet oblivion. The kind you can pour yourself without anyone watching.
My thoughts stumble in a crooked line and land on something steady.
Home.
I have a bottle there.
Whiskey, tucked in the cabinet like a secret I keep failing to stop telling.
A quick stop, I think, the idea forming with sluggish confidence. Just a quick stop. I’ll grab it, take it with me, and then-
Then I can keep walking to nowhere with my hands wrapped around something that burns.
Then I can keep sinking.
I turn in the direction of my apartment like my body remembers the route even when my brain doesn’t, and I start moving faster, shoes scuffing the sidewalk, blood drying tacky on my skin.
The night opens its mouth.
And I step into it.
I don’t turn on the light.
I don’t need it.
The moon through the windows throws pale light across the living room, and that’s enough - enough to see shapes, enough to navigate the familiar wreckage of my own making. Enough to pretend I’m not coming home to myself.
The door slams behind me with a sound that feels too loud for the hour.
It echoes.
My apartment is small in the way used spaces are small - every surface holding something, every corner carrying evidence that someone lives here and doesn’t want to.
The coffee table is buried under empty takeout containers and paper bags that still smell faintly like grease and soy sauce. Crumpled napkins. Cutlery with dried food sticking them together. Receipts folded into sharp little squares like I was trying to make them disappear by making them neat.
Books everywhere. Stacked by the couch, by the door, on the floor like stepping stones. A few are laying down open-faced like they died mid-sentence.
There’s a pile of burned-out matches beside the couch.
A little graveyard of thin wooden bones and blackened tips.
I did that last night. Or - earlier. Whatever this counts as. I remember lying there in the half-dark, my head heavy, my body too loose to hold itself together. I remember lighting matches one after another just to watch something flare and die. Just to have a tiny controlled burn. A tiny proof that I could still make something end when I wanted it to.
My shoes scruff against paper on the floor. I catch myself on the back of the couch and keep going, moving through the room with the dull confidence of someone too drunk to be careful and too practiced at this to be scared.
The kitchen is worse.
Dishes are stacked in the sink like a collapsing city, plates leaning against each other at precarious angles, cups with rings of old coffee, forks half-submerges in cloudy water. The smell is faintly sour. It sits in the air like an accusation.
I blink at it, slow.
Then I open the cabinet without thinking, because my hands know where the bottle lives.
Whiskey.
Dark glass, half-full. A weight that promises weightlessness.
My stomach does that little curl again - the protest - and I ignore it like I ignore everything else that tries to keep me alive.
I wrap my fingers around the neck of the bottle, pull it free.
The glass is cool against my palm. Solid. Reliable.
A lifeline, if you’re allowed to call something that drags you under a lifeline.
I turn back toward the door.
My keys jingle too loudly in my hand. The lock takes two tries. My fingers feel thick, clumsy, like someone swapped them out for strangers’ hands.
It finally clicks shut when I hear footsteps on the stairs.
Up. Up. Pause. Then the soft click of someone reaching the landing.
Alice.
She comes into view with the kind of quiet tiredness that comes from being out late but not falling apart. Dressed up a little - dark coat, hair done, earrings catching a sliver of moonlight when she tilts her head. She doesn’t look drunk. She looks…normal.
That makes me hate her a little.
Her gaze lands on me.
On the bottle in my hand.
On my face.
Her eyes widen.
“Oh my god,” she breathes, taking a step closer before she seems to remember she’s not supposed to. Her concern is immediate, instinctive. The kind that comes from someone who’s been watching you slowly kill yourself from a safe distance and hoping you’ll get tired of it.
“Alec - are you alright? You’re bleeding.”
I can feel the smear now that she’s said it, like my skin remembers how to hurt only when someone points at it. I lift the back of my hand and wipe under my nose again, and of course there’s still blood. Thin and sticky.
I look at it like it’s a surprise.
“Am I alright,” I repeat, my voice thick with a laugh that doesn’t reach anything warm. “Yeah, Alice. I’m fantastic. Just out here living my best life.”
She flinches like I slapped her with the sarcasm.
“I’m serious,” she says, softer now. “Did someone - did you get hurt? Do you need-”
“Need what?” I snap, and the anger comes too fast, too sharp, because her worry feels like a hand on my throat. “A babysitter? A lecture? You gonna call someone? My mom?”
The word sits in my mouth like poison.
Her expression tightens, not offended - worse. Sad.
“No,” she says, “No, I wasn’t - I just-”
I tilt the bottle toward her like I’m showing her proof.
“This is all I need,” I say, and there’s something ugly in the way I say it, something I can’t quite swallow down. “So you can stop looking at me like that.”
“Alec,” she whispers, like my name is something fragile.
I can’t stand it.
I push past her, shoulder brushing the railing as I take the steps too quickly, too unevenly. The bottle knocks against my thigh with every lurching step, steady as a pulse.
Behind me, I hear her exhale.
I don’t look back.
If I look back, I might see pity again.
And pity makes me want to break things.
Outside, the night air is cooler than the apartment. Cleaner. The streetlight makes everything look drained of colour, like the world it tired.
Good.
I raise the bottle to my mouth and drink like I need it to breathe.
The whiskey burns down my throat, hot and vicious, and I welcome it. I welcome anything that can drown out the sound in my skull. Anything that can blur the edges of the memory trying to claw its way up.
I keep walking.
No direction. No plan.
Just movement. Just the rhythm of my feet on pavement and the bottle lifting and lowering like a metronome. I drink, swallow, exhale. Drink, swallow, exhale.
The whiskey becomes a kind of oxygen.
I pass dark houses with lit windows, strangers’ lives glowing behind curtains. I pass parked cars that gleam like sleeping animals. I pass nothing and everything.
Eventually the buildings give way to trees.
A park.
The grass is dark. The path is a pale ribbon under the moon. The air smells like wet earth and old leaves.
I drift toward a bench like it’s calling me, like my body has finally decided too stop pretending it knows what it’s doing.
I sink down hard, the wood cold under my thighs, and lean back until my head rests against the back slat.
Above me, the sky is wide and indifferent.
Stars scattered like someone spilled salt.
My chest tightens at the sight of them - at how beautiful it is up there, how quietly the universe keeps going even when your whole life ends on one night and never starts again.
I lift the bottle toward the sky.
A toast.
My arm wobbles a little.
“This one’s for you,” I say, voice rough, words spilling out without permission. “You hear me?”
The night doesn’t answer.
I tip the bottle, pour a little onto the ground beside my shoe. The whiskey darkens the dirt, disappears immediately like the earth is thirsty.
Like it’s swallowing it gratefully.
“Happy…whatever,” I mutter, and my laugh breaks in half on the way out. “You were always the one trying to get me to drink.”
My eyes sting. I blink at the stars until they blur into small white smears.
“Well,” I say, raising the bottle again, “looks like you got your wish.”
I take a long swig, angry at the way the whiskey warms me from the inside, angry at how good it feels, angry at how easy it is to fall into it.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and taste blood and alcohol and salt.
“You don’t have to forgive me,” I tell the sky, like I’m speaking directly into his ear, like he’s still somewhere he can hear me. “It’s fine. It’s not like anyone else has.”
My throat closes on the last word.
Anyone else.
My family. Their faces flicker through my mind like photographs held too close to a flame - moms’s tight mouth, dad’s silence, Izzy’s eyes wet with something I couldn’t stand to look at.
They hate me.
They have to.
Because if they don’t hate me, then I did this for nothing.
Then I’m just…broken for free.
“They all think I’m worthless,” I say, and the bitterness in it tastes familiar. “A piece of shit.”
The whiskey bottle rises again, almost of its own accord. I drink like I’m trying to rinse the words out of my mouth.
“I don’t forgive me either,” I add, quieter, because that one is the truest. The one that sits behind everything, heavy and unmoving.
I swallow and the burn crawls through me.
For a minute the alcohol holds me. Wraps me in that false soft numbness. Makes my limbs heavy. Makes my face distant. Makes my mind slow down.
But the pain doesn’t drown.
It floats.
It waits.
And then it starts to pull me under anyway.
My brain tilts toward the memory like a tongue worrying a loose tooth.
No-
I squeeze my eyes shut, but the dark behind my eyelids isn’t empty. It’s full. Full of lights. Full of rain. Full of that split second where everything changes and you don’t know it yet.
My stomach clenches.
My hand tightens around the bottle until my knuckles ache.
I can feel it coming - the way my mind always drags me back, determined to make me watch it again, determined to make me pay again.
I take another angry swallow.
As if the whiskey could erase time.
It hits my stomach like a stone.
For a second it sits there, heavy and sour, and then it rolls, slow and mean, like my body is finally deciding it’s had enough of being ignored.
I breathe in through my nose.
The air tastes like damp grass and metal.
I breathe out, and the sound comes out wrong - too loud in my own ears, too thin.
The stars above me seem…closer. Not brighter, exactly. Sharper. Like pinpricks in black silk. Like eyes.
I blink.
They smear. They snap back into place.
I blink again and the sky tips, just a degree, like someone touched it with a finger.
No.
No, this is fine. This is just drunk. This is just the night being too quiet and my brain being too loud.
I tighten my grip around the bottle because it’s real. Because I can feel the glass. The cool. The weight.
Anchors. You’re supposed to use anchors when you’re going under.
My tongue feels too big in my mouth. My jaw aches dully, a bruise blooming under numbness. I swallow and the back of my throat tastes like iron.
Blood.
My stomach lurches again, sharper this time, and I lean forward on the bench with my elbows on my knees, head hanging between my shoulders like I’m trying to fold myself into something smaller.
A tremor moves through my hands.
My heart is going too fast.
Not the warm drunken thud from earlier - this is frantic, tight. A trapped bird beating against my ribs.
I take another sip because that’s what I do when everything gets too much.
The whiskey burns down and for a half second it helps-
Then it doesn’t.
It doesn’t help at all.
The air shifts.
Not like wind.
Like the world inhaled.
I lift my head slowly, because something in the dark moved - something I felt more than I saw. The park is empty, shadows pooled under trees, the path pale in the moonlight. There’s a streetlight a few yards away, buzzing faintly, its light making a small circle of safely that doesn’t reach me.
I’m outside that circle.
Good.
The darkness is thicker out here. It presses against my skin. It fills my ears.
And then-
A laugh.
Soft. Familiar. The sound of something bright and stupid and alive.
My blood turns to ice.
It’s not loud. It’s not even close. It’s the kind of laugh you hear from behind you in a hallway and turn, expecting to see someone you love.
I don’t turn.
I can’t.
My throat closes like a fist.
I stare straight down at the dirt by my shoes, at the dark stain where I poured out whiskey like an offering.
My fingers go numb around the bottle.
The laugh comes again, clearer this time, and my stomach drops so hard I think I might vomit.
No, no, no.
That’s not real.
That’s memory. That’s grief. That’s my brain being cruel. That’s-
“Alec.”
My name.
Not shouted. Not spoken loud. Just…breathed, like it’s right against my ear.
My whole body jolts.
I whip my head to the side so fast the world blurs. The bench, the trees, the stars - all of it smears into streaks of light and shadow. For a heartbeat I’m convinced I’m falling, like the ground dropped away and forgot to warn me.
I clutch the bench with one hand, nails digging into the wood.
Nothing.
There’s nothing there.
Just the dark.
Just the buzzing streetlamp. Just the empty path. Just my own breath ragged in my chest.
My pulse is a siren.
I swallow hard, and the motion makes my stomach heave. Saliva floods my mouth. I lean forward, gagging, the whiskey sloshing in my gut like poisoned water.
I cover my mouth with my hand and breathe through my nose, sharp, quick, desperate.
The stars tilt again.
This time they don’t tilt back.
The sky slides sideways like a sheet being pulled off a bed.
The edges of everything start to go soft.
The tree line wavers, the trunks bending like they’re made of paper. The streetlamp’s circle of light stretches long and thin, like someone smeared it with a thumb.
My hands don’t feel like mine.
My feet don’t feel connected to the ground.
I’m floating an inch above my own skin, watching myself from somewhere slightly behind my eyes.
It’s happening.
This is the part where I leave.
“Stop,” I whisper, but it comes out like a prayer. Like begging ever did anything for me.
The laugh threads through the dark again - softer, right at the edge of hearing, like it’s coming from behind the trees.
Like it’s coming from inside me.
My vision tunnels.
The world narrows down to the bottle in my hand, the black sky, the stain on the dirt.
My stomach rolls, and a hot wave of nausea surges up so violently my eyes water.
I brace both hands on my knees and cough, trying to drag air into lungs that won’t cooperate.
My ribs hurt.
My heart hurts.
Everything hurts in a way I can’t name.
“Alec,” the voice says again, and this time it’s not my ear - this time it’s my chest, vibrating with it, like the sound is coming from the inside out.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
It’s still there.
The sound doesn’t stop when I can’t see.
My brain starts to stutter, skipping like a scratched record.
Rain.
Metal screaming.
I jerk forward with a strangled sound and the bottle tips, whiskey spilling onto my jeans, onto the bench, onto the ground. The smell blooms sharp and sweet and violent.
I can’t do this.
I can’t do this again.
I bring the bottle to my mouth with both hands and drink.
Big gulps.
Greedy.
Desperate.
I drink like drowning is preferable to remembering. Like if I pour enough fire into my throat it will cauterize the part of me that keeps bleeding.
The whiskey goes down wrong.
I choke, coughing hard, throat burning, eyes streaming.
For a second I see spots - white pinwheels against the dark - and the laugh becomes a ringing in my ears.
I can’t tell what’s sound and what’s my own pulse anymore.
The park tilts. The bench tilts. The world tilts-
And then, finally, it starts to go.
My limbs grow heavy. So heavy.
My eyelids don’t want to lift again.
My head falls back against the bench, and the wood is cold and hard, and it feels like the only honest thing tonight.
My fingers loosen around the bottle.
It slips, thuds softly against the ground, rolling until it stop against my shoe.
I stare at the sky, but can’t focus on any one star long enough to keep it sharp.
Everything swims.
The laugh fades to a whisper.
The whisper fades to breath.
The breath fades to nothing.
Oblivion spreads through me like ink in water - slow, dark, merciful…