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indent A week had passed since the dreams had begun to turn on him. It had become so bad he was often awoken at night, hurled from some nightmarish world. For a week, he had been living in a bizarre waking life—even in the middle of the day he saw the faces of the dead, roaming restlessly through the forests. They weren’t ghosts because he could smell them. They weren’t real because they made no noise. So Ahren did what he long ago learned to do to escape the survivor’s guilt that plagued him each time he saw his son’s face in his dreams; drowned him in a bottle.
indent Alcoholics have a pattern, and few of them ever escape it. Ahren, whose family was laced with addictive behavior, was no exception. The problem was that the bottle was not the only escape. It had been a stupid choice but he had made it. The belt, the needle, and the sweet black abyss that the heroine brought. He knew where to find it, how to make it, how to use it. That was how he had survived many nights alone, shaking in the dark. That had been two days ago. He had lost himself since then, and slept in his dark place for as long as he could.
indent Woken by a powerful sense of dread, as powerful as a thunderclap, he sat up. His right arm ached, but the fur hid all of those track marks, left from years ago, from days ago, from hours ago. There was no smell, no obvious sign—he stunk like whiskey and looked like hell anyway. Rubbing his face and finally looking around, Ahren realized he was in the church again, his mother’s church, and swore. He leaned back against one of the pews, seated on the dirty red carpet, and lit a cigarette. This was pattern. This was nothing new.
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There had never been a time alcohol had done him any good. Even during all the lonely summer nights when he had just been trying to drown away the loneliness and the taunting whispers of better times -- even then. The black emptiness that met him at the other end of the dusty bottles never lasted long enough and sometimes even they would laugh at him. The comfort wasn't real and neither was the delay. It was not an escape anymore than the demon in the back of his skull was; they were false symbols, grown stronger and more persistant by a troubled soul.
It was cold outside, so he had ducked inside, not knowing or caring where he was. These were the nights he was the weakest and any idiot assassin with his head screwed on halfway would have been able to kill him where he stood if he didn't end up doing it himself, if the edges of the roof didn't seem too appealing and the snow down below didn't look too beautiful. If the wind wasn't strong enough and the ghost voices in his head weren't loud enough. He had forgotten where he'd left the bottle, but the drink was the only thing warm he could feel, still swishing around in his otherwise empty stomach and empty head.
The main of the church was a dark empty chasm lit by a cigarette. His weary feet took him to its source and he half sat, half collapsed against the wall beside his friend, shivering, maybe from the frost and snow, maybe from the too-much-drinking, maybe from the things in his head, maybe from the thousand other things wrong with him. I hate the cold, he mumbled, staring into the darkness.
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indent The demon in his head never spoke to him. Ahren didn’t even know he was real. All he understood was the here and now and the fact that there was comfort in that darkness, as temporary as it was. The inability to communicate with anyone, to look to the dead and the missing and tell them anything, that drove him to isolation. The drugs drove him further, along a spiral where a dragon flew. It hid the truth, it shed reason, and it allowed him a moment of peace. Even that was not enough. Nothing could ever be enough.
indent Quite suddenly, someone was at his side. Ahren didn’t have to open his eyes to recognize the voice, but he did anyway. Laruku had never looked completely fine, and tonight was no different. Something had changed in him, had changed in them all. Each scar told a story, each story was another pointless, worthless excursion down the path of misery and misgivings. So life went, heedless of their drama and their sickness, joys and sorrows. Cocking his head back, he laughed; a pathetic, false thing that did not sound half-so desperate as he felt.
indent “Me too,” he said, shuffling closer to the soaked male. “Jesus, you’re half frozen.” Though he was not aware of it, he was not speaking clearly—a drunken, heavily accented thing. Unable to feel his fingers, the wolf shut his eyes again, head pulsing.
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He could have buried himself in the snow that beautiful night almost two years ago now and been a frozen statue by morning. Snowflakes and graveyards always reminded him of then and he avoided them when he could, but the long winter months would always come, no matter how much he tried to ignore them. And being numb had no real advantages either, just like the drinks -- that he couldn't feel much physically didn't change the coldness and the shivers and it never seemed to extend into the confines of his mind where sometimes things felt even more real when he was very much intoxicated. They were hallucinatory visions and metaphors come to life, a disease of life itself, prompted by everything that had come to pass. And like all great diseases, there was no cure and death had a habit of slipping through his fingers like sand. Or melting away like snow.
Laruku closed his eyes when Ahren spoke; maybe two pairs of demon eyes was just too much for the dark church. And he laughed too, though it didn't sound anything like a laugh really -- just a strange noise that fit in no other category. 'Hate bein' half-frozen too, he said, Better to be warm or completely frozen, but we can't all have what we want. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say, no one could have what they want. And wasn't that beautiful? No need to be jealous of anyone else, right? They were just as fucked up and miserable as you, even if they had a perfectly happy facade and a wonderful everything. Deep down, they were all the same. But maybe he didn't really believe that. All the same, he felt better if he pretended to believe it. Denial was the only medicine he had and it kept him alive.
He shuddered again, pulling his frozen knees to his frozen chest, wondering if his heart would stop if all the ice didn't melt. He opened his eyes again too, but there was nothing to see.
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indent There were words, several words, but Ahren didn’t understand them all. He felt as though his body and his mind were traveling away from each other, as if he was outside on the street rather then sitting next to his ruined friend. They were both ruined, though; they were both mistakes and fuck ups. Shuddering against the cold, he drew smoke in his lungs and opened his eyes, unable to deal with the spinning sensation and the vertigo.
indent Out into the air went the smoke, and even though he could have made a fire, should have made a fire, the thought never came. He watched the scarred man (a stranger, his brother) move in the dark. Faintly, the snaggle-toothed wolf smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. One arm hooked around Laruku’s shoulder, and he drew the hybrid in. Ahren sniffed the air in, feeling a deep ache in his arm. “Can’t ever get what we want,” he coughed, sucking down another breath. “Once you do it just goes away.”
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So w'd'y'think then, he wondered, S'it better to have had it once or never at all? To have loved and lost than to never have loved at all? The hybrid grappled with the question too often but remained parked on the fence. Some days, it felt like nothing mattered, regardless of how awful or how wonderful it had been. Some nights, the three seconds of bliss from the past still seemed worth it, even trapped in between years of other less pleasant things. And other nights still, the pieces of shimmering light were completely overshadowed by the things in between. Maybe tonight was one of those nights. He was lonely.
He reached for the other's cigarette, missed once because hand-eye coordination was shot to hell, then snatched it for a long drag. Too long, maybe. He coughed and sneezed at the same time and sighed, passing it back, half-laughing and half-choking. The smoke and fire in his mouth felt warm, but it only seemed to make the rest of him feel colder. And Ahren's hand on his shoulder was just as icy as his own; it didn't seem like either of them had warmth to lend the other. Two red-eyed men, battered and broken in the empty winter night. Laruku again for no reason, Should just stab it and kill it so it can't go away. Stupid answers from stupid people.
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indent He had considered these things a thousand times before; each time coming to another stupid conclusion that meant as little as the first one. But his head was not his own now; the dragon, the dragon who was not a dragon, it watched and considered and influenced him wholly. Something was taken from his hands and he wondered where he had gotten the cigarette from, listened to the reasoning that made no sense but found some comfort in the idea. If the things one held onto were there, even dead, no one else could touch them. For a brief and whole moment, he thought of Matinee with another man, and he growled deeply in his throat.
indent Unfocused, his eyes had gone to the floor. Now they returned, with the sound in his chest gone. It didn’t matter. She was gone. She wasn’t ever coming back. That fact stabbed him in the heart over and over, and over, and over, and over again. She wasn’t ever coming back. His head pulsed, spun, and the earth grew dimmer. Ahren drew his arm back, needing to touch the ground, and tried to stand—his legs shook and he stumbled, only managed because he found support on the back of a pew. “There’s blankets upstairs,” he heard himself say, though what really came out was ‘die bettdecke nach oben’, though even this was incorrect. Haphazardly, he began to make his way towards the stairwell, towards the room that held all of his terrible dark secrets.
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Laruku had long accepted that the thing he wanted most would never come to pass and every extra day he lived made it even more true. There had been a line and maybe sometimes, because of stupidity and idealism and naivette, it had moved and shifted so that forgiveness could fit in and so things could last a few moments longer, but though the stupidity remained, the other two things faded with time and age, with experience, with life. And so he had crossed the line. Once, twice, three times maybe because he had lost count also. It was because he wasn't good enough, 'cause he was too fucked up in the head and because he was still too afraid of everything to even try to make it right. And it didn't matter now. He hoped to heaven someone that he would never see Tsunami again.
A tattered ear twitched at the other's words, another language or gibberish; either way, he didn't understand it. You're drunk, the hybrid observed slowly, distantly aware that he had to be as well because he couldn't remember how he had gotten there or why (though these symptoms actually weren't that unique anymore). All the same, the stood and followed the other because he didn't want to be left alone with darkened stained glass windows and a room full of echoing ghosts. His steps were just as uneven and staggering and he reached out often for walls that weren't there. And then his temples pulsed suddenly, because of the movement or the swaying room, or just for no reason at all because they were prone to fits sometimes. Where're'y'goin'?
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indent Three women come and gone, three strikes and three scars over his heart and soul. He didn’t even wear Matinee’s ring anymore. He had it, of course, in the pouch that never left his side. As incoherent as his thoughts were, he knew that she was out there, she was gone and he had to accept it, no one was ever coming home. His family was dead, his kids hated him, he had absolutely nothing. The throbbing sensation in his right arm did not stop, and he saw the ground rise and tumble as if gravity had gone wrong. He had to close his eyes and regain some sense of direction, stumbling on his feet.
indent If he heard the first comment, he did not realize it. While he did hear the second, the question, his friend’s voice, it didn’t mean anything. He heard words but they didn’t matter. Grabbing at the handrail, he began to climb the steps, stumbled hard and caught himself, finally reached the top. He didn’t even know if Laruku was still following him. Stupid hands fumbled at a door, and he somehow managed to open it, to get into the room that had long ago been his own. Scattered papers, a broken desk, signs of struggle, of old blood, a pile of tattered blankets and the obvious signs of a heroine user (scattered in the windowsill, a life on display) and alcoholic, they were all there. It was sanctuary, this place. It always had been.
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Often, the coyotewolf was too caught up in his own monsters to recognize anyone else's and with all of the self-isolation he had put himself through, much of him had forgotten what it was like to be sympathetic, to expression concern, to care about other people. It was safer to not give a shit, but it was lonelier too. He didn't know where they were going, but there was familiarity in front of him and shadows behind him and it seemed like common sense to continue following. Marching up the stairs made him dizzy and confused though and his temples throbbed even more. Laruku collided with the other red-eyed male and they both stumbled haphazardly into the room.
His vision had blurred by then, but the room smelt musty and old in a different way than the rest of the building. In another timeline, he might have been able to piece together the scene better than he could now, but aside from not being able to focus very well, the hybrid had long ago diverged from the path of scholars and intellectuals, but neither had he fallen too far down the path of drugs and other ways to escape from reality (falling away happened readily enough without any additional help) and so he could not recognize the signs. Though he knew Ahren had his demons, he had never believed that he was privledged enough to learn of them.
You used't'live 'ere, he mumbled, unable to retrace the path he'd followed to that conclusion, but believing in its truth anyway.
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indent He had used to live here. When Azathoth was still very real, when his mother lived, this had been their home. They had slept here and she had told him a great many things; war, disease, the promise of a new day. She had cried, laugh, sung, prayed. She had gone into fits he could not understand and often he did not want to be with her. Once she had died, though, he had regretted it all. He wanted her back and he still wanted her back—had Damian never come, his life would have been better. Had he never set foot in Chimera, a thousand things would have changed.
indent When he was older, this place became welcoming. No one dared its ruined walls or dark secrets. In this building he had lost his virginity, lost his mind, and lost his way. He had done more drugs then he could remember, drowned in a bottle so deep even now he was drowning, torn up holy books and cursed the sky. All of that remained in a haze, a dim world he dared not tempt while sober. Things had changed, though, as they always do. Repression leads to regression and so the cycle went on and he came back, unable to remember his steps here or his reasoning. Safety. That was the only thing he could recall; this place was safe.
indent It was safe even if his demons refused to leave.
“Yeah,” he said lowly, moving without feeling the ground, moving until he had wound up on the floor and had a blanket around his shoulders.
“It’s safe,” he heard himself say, though this was jumbled in the German and the Latin he did not fully understand.
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He wasn't sure that he had ever had any single place he considered safe, or even a home. After Ceres had revealed the truth of his parentage, he had taken to the tombstone as a place of comfort because his mother was nothing more than a symbol to him, something that was supposed to be good and whole, the only thing anyone had ever testified to him as good and whole. But after Ceres herself had died, the clearing became a real graveyard and the small sanctuary was gone. Burying his predessor there had opened it up to all of her children and grandchildren and distant relatives and it was not a private place anymore. Besides, as the months had gone all, he had racked up far too many misdeeds to ever be able to face them now.
There was no safe place. He was too ashamed of himself to be able to find comfort in his surroundings anymore. Memories destroyed everything, even when he forgot what they were. Laruku blinked and momentarily forgot where he was; his head hurt and his stomach was still swishing with vodka and wine, tequila and whiskey. He was still shivering but didn't notice. The scarred man sat down on the bed, but only briefly before joining his gibberish-spouting friend on the floor with another blanket. And he said nothing this time because English was all he had ever known and part of him wondered if maybe he was the one spouting gibberish and the other was the one with the real words. Maybe this was another dream.
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indent There were no graves for Ahren to mourn. Not Thavardo, her bones strewn in the wastelands of Chimera, or Damian, whose ashes had been scattered to the wind. Only Ihakta and Baneesh, buried on lands he was unable to walk. Ahren would not set foot on Inferni lands. Segodi was gone, this was true, but he knew the rules of the place better then anyone. It had, once upon a time, been his home. All he had were objects, symbols, scars…and this church, in some strange way. It was the only place no one could detach him from. The day it burnt down, he would not mourn. He would, more then likely, be the one to bring it to the ground.
indent At his side the hybrid sat, shaking. Ahren sniffed, stared ahead blankly. When was the last time he had slept? Had he slept? He didn’t know anymore. All that remained was the addiction; all that ever had remained was the addiction. It would never leave him. It would never find fault in his motives or ways and curse his name, run screaming into the night. Perhaps it was not such a bad thing, a dependency, a need, a want. It kept him real.
indent Ahren coughed violently, tasted blood, and groaned inwardly. He shuffled closer to his companion, felt a meager amount of warmth from their combined heat, and shut his eyes.
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The night was quiet now. The empty church offered no settling creaks or groans or any other pretentious signs that it was alive. Instinctively, he pulled the blankets closer around himself and moved closer to Ahren as well. It was warmth, among other things. Companionship, friendship perhaps, if they still wanted to call if that. He appreciated it, even when there were no more words like tonight; they had too much in common and so little at the same time. They could talk about everything and yet, neither knew the details of the other's life. Maybe it didn't matter after all, everything they each had done and all the phantoms that hung in the backs of their minds, demons and monsters and ghosts that spoke when no one else was looking. The thought that they didn't matter to someone else was comforting to some degree, even if he claimed to be a nihlist. But those thoughts were too heavy and his head felt weighted enough with the dull, pulsating throbs. Laruku sighed and did not think when he burrowed his face into Ahren's shoulder, exhausted and suddenly asleep.
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