[pm] Hey Ms. Betty, I just wanted to see if there was a time we could meet up and talk about what happened last week when I did yard work for you. I'm a little hazy on the details, but I know you probably saw something you shouldn't have. Thank you for being real sweet, and I enjoyed that glass of lemonade you made me. I've got some fresh tomatoes and squash for you in return.
TIMING: a week or so after to the grave.
LOCATION: a dive bar in wicked's rest.
PARTIES: @appalachiannightmare & @vengeancedemon.
SUMMARY: not long after watching him die in an alley, hazel runs into emilio in a bar.
CONTENT WARNINGS: implications of alcoholism.
The weather had been beautiful and luckily for Hazel it was a day off from Video Vault, so that meant one thing. A motorcycle ride through town. It was one of her favorite things to do. Aside from going for runs, riding her bike felt freeing and like she was flying. And it gave her time to focus on other things going on rather than sitting at home dwelling on past events, like the night of April 9th and the days following.
Ever since she had witnessed the man’s demise, she had set her sights on local newspapers and articles. Frequenting the library often. But it had been the strangest thing. There hadn’t been any kind of reports that she could find. It was as if everything had just simply vanished to the point that Hazel was beginning to question herself, and if it had all been a trick of her mind. But she had seen it all. Watched the group of men stab him and throw him in a dumpster. She had seen his lifeless body stiff with rigor; the darkened blood staining his lips and teeth. Smelled the beginnings of rot and decay. It made no sense.
But on this beautiful spring day, that same man, or so she full-heartedly believed, almost made her wreck her Honda Rebel.
“What the…It can’t be…”
Slamming on the brakes, she maneuvered the motorcycle into a small parking lot quickly shutting off the engine and pulling her helmet off; an expression of disbelief spread vastly across her features, “Hey…Sir. SIR!”
Keys in her pocket and helmet in her hand, Hazel chased the familiar looking man into a nearby bar. Drinking had not been her thing nor had bars, but if she hadn’t approached him, Hazel was going to be haunted by his death for the rest of her life; if it had been, by some miracle, him.
The smell of cigarette smoke quickly encircled her head and encroached down into her lungs as she adjusted to the dim lighting and let out a slight cough, “Sir, excuse me. Can I talk to you?” She had hoped he had heard her, because the stares of all the other patrons were quickly starting to make Hazel feel uneasy.
—
One might assume that dying in a dingy alley outside a bar would be enough to convince Emilio to swear off such establishments altogether. Wouldn’t it be fair for him to never step foot in another bar again? Anyone who knew what had happened at the Wormhole wasn’t likely to question the decision at all; they’d all think it completely reasonable. And yet, for whatever reason, he found himself drawn to them, still. Not to the Wormhole — he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to stomach the thought of stepping foot back in that particular bar — but others. Maybe it was the way whiskey was the only thing that seemed to be able to get the memory of the taste of blood out of his mouth, or the fact that his body seemed to yearn for the burn even now that it was dead. Whatever the case, Emilio found the pull hard to resist, and he wasn’t really interested in attempting to resist it. What did it matter what he did now? The worst had already happened. There wasn’t much left that could startle a dead man, weren’t many threats that could still leave him shaking in his boots.
So, he was going to the bar. Hands tapping absently at his side, eyes darting around to make sure no one was looking at him too closely, lungs empty and heart still. He was dead. He’d rather be drunk and dead, if he got to choose.
The barstool felt more comfortable than his sofa at home, more familiar. He’d already drained one glass of whiskey and was working on a second, eyeing the bartender and waiting for him to turn so that he could preemptively order a third. There was a quiet chatter going through the bar, a familiar hum of conversation that faded into the background. Emilio sat with his drink, hoping no one would try to include him in theirs. He didn’t care for small talk with strangers, but strangers never seemed to get the memo.
Case in point — the kid tapping on his shoulder. It was lucky that she’d approached him from the right side; if she’d been talking to him at his left, with his bad ear, he doubted he would have heard her over the crowd. As it was, he turned to face her with a cautious eye, squinting suspiciously. “I don’t have any money to buy what you’re selling,” he told her. “Try the table over there. He looks rich.”
—
It was like talking to a wall, and Hazel was just about to give up, when she finally caught his attention. Though he did look worse for wear, he didn’t look as bad as he had the night she watched him die. But now that he was looking at her and interacting with her, the young woman didn’t exactly know what to say. It was as if she had wanted to freeze up. That or drop to her knees at the sight of a resurrected man.
Thankfully, he had actually said something to her to snap her out of the daze she was in, “What?” Hazel glanced over towards the man at the table before looking back to the man in front of her, “No, I’m not sellin’ anything.” Putting her helmet down on the counter, Hazel awkwardly pulled the bar stool closer to him, but with such an ease that most people hadn’t even noticed the loud scraping of metal legs across the floor.
“Look I won’t take up too much of your time, Sir, but…I…” How did she tell this man she had watched him get stabbed to death and saw him prone in a dumpster? “I saw you. April 9th I think it was. You were…” She leaned in closer and lowered her voice, “You got stabbed, and…I’m sorry I didn’t do anything. I got scared, and then…” She vaguely remembered the berserker taking over and leading her off somewhere else, “I ran off. When I came back, you was…your body was in that dumpster out behind the Wormhole. But-” She let out a sigh of surprise, “But you’re alive. I don’t know how or why? But it’s a miracle.”
Hazel leaned back away from him and nervously chewed on her bottom lip. This guy was either going to think she had lost her mind and deny everything she said, or he was going to confirm it right then and there. She just wasn’t sure how, and if it would be a danger to her. Or worse…a danger to him.
—
Not selling anything. His mind cycled through alternative reasons she might have approached him. Without the old, familiar slayer sense that gave him a head’s up when someone was undead, he had no way of knowing she wasn’t… like him. She looked young, looked like a kid, but she could have been older. Was she someone he’d wronged, somewhere down the line? He didn’t recognize her, but that didn’t mean anything. When you were responsible for as much destruction as Emilio was, it was impossible to recall every face that might want you dead.
Usually, though, the people who wanted you dead didn’t approach you in a bar and tap you on the shoulder. Usually, they waited until you stumbled outside, drunk and belligerent. They lurked with backup to grab your arms and pull them behind your back, sneered into your face as they shoved your own knife into your chest. They shoved you into a tight space, they left you alone to —
He shook the thought away, swallowing around the lump in his throat. This girl probably didn’t want him dead and, if she did, she was a little late to the party. She was speaking, he realized, about to explain what it was she wanted from him. He tuned back in just in time to hear it. April 9th.
Emilio’s whole body went still, as if his muscles remembered the rigor mortis that had stiffened them into place in that dumpster and were trying to recreate it now. You got stabbed, she said, and he bit back a bitter, angry laugh. Yeah, he wanted to say, I remember. But it got stuck somewhere in his throat — the words, the laugh, all of it. He didn’t need to breathe, and that was probably a good thing; he couldn’t imagine any air making it into his lungs right now, anyway. It felt like every goddamn ounce of oxygen had been sucked from the room.
Forcing himself to lift the glass to his lips, Emilio took a long swig of whiskey, letting the burn slip down his throat and into his chest. “I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” he said carefully. “Wrong universe, really. People stay dead when they die, kid.” The still heart in his chest was proof enough of that.
—
People stay dead when they die, kid. The words echoed around in her mind. She, of all people, knew pretty much how death worked, having time and time again come around covered in blood just to either wretch up other people’s hair and bone or to see what remained of the torn apart corpse that lay just at arm’s length. And to literally live with the taste of regret in her mouth, while her devil was happily sated by another’s misfortune. But he had been so casual and cool about the whole thing. Like nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened; something that didn’t feel right to Hazel.
“Um…well, do you have a twin brother or somethin’ cause the guy I saw looked an awful lot like you, sir. And if you do, I’m real sorry for your loss.” She wasn’t going to berate the man even if what he said did seem like a lie. He was going through something. Whether it had been the loss of someone he knew or his own death, Hazel wanted to be there for him. It was the least she could do, especially to find him sitting in a bar day-drinking alone. His previous life must’ve been something impossible, to be in a bar after dying outside of a bar, “Is there at least anything I can do? Buy ya a drink or some food or somethin’?”
Hazel let her eyes shift away from him and to the bartender that had made his way back over, “I’ll have a Sun Drop, and I guess the next drink he has is on me.” Sun Drop? “I guess you don’t have that up here. Coke’s fine.” Can I see some ID? “Huh? Oh, yeah. Sorry.” She hadn’t been carded too many times, but without waiting any longer, she pulled out a small leather wallet with flowers embossed on it and handed her Tennessee license to the man, before he slid it back across the bar to her, “I’m Hazel, by the way. Just if you ever change your mind and need somebody to talk to.” She slipped the card back into her wallet, before shoving it back into the pocket of her ripped bluejeans.
—
The idea that someone had witnessed his death didn’t sit well with him. His stomach lurched at the thought, and there was something funny about that. A dead man struck with an anxious nausea was the kind of contradiction that shouldn’t have been possible at all, the kind of obvious oxymoron that was almost laughable. What could make a corpse’s stomach clench? What could make its breath catch? Emilio disliked the question almost as much as he disliked the conversation that had led to it.
There was a certain level of violation to the feeling, though there shouldn’t have been. This kid had witnessed something awful, Emilio knew, something that would likely haunt her for some time to come. Any other day, Emilio might have felt guilty, felt bad for her. But he was more angry now, nonsensically so. All he could think about was the way he’d felt in that alley, the anger and the fury and the fear he’d choked on in the end. It was bad enough that his murderers had seen him in such a state; the idea that a stranger, too, was aware of it didn’t sit well with him.
“No,” he snapped, “I don’t have a twin brother. You’ve got me confused for somebody else. Or you had a dream or something, I don’t know.” It wasn’t a very convincing lie, but what would be? The only thing less convincing than a lie, in this situation, was the truth. I was murdered in an alley, yes. But I came back after. Well, I woke up. I didn’t come back. I’m dead, still. Do you want to feel my chest? No heartbeat. You’re seeing the same corpse now you saw then. If she knew about the supernatural, there was a good shot she’d chop his damn head off. If she didn’t, she’d probably have a full blown panic attack. Neither option sounded like something he wanted to deal with in a shitty bar.
He’d take the drink, though. The bartender refilled his glass with a wary glance towards the kid, as if Emilio was in charge of her or something. He scoffed, rolling his eyes. Not my problem, he tried to communicate without saying. The bartender just shook his head. It is now. His jaw twitched. “Emilio,” he replied, throwing back the drink. “You don’t come to bars often, do you?”
—
Hazel jumped at the loud No being shot in her direction. She could feel her devil wanting to come to the surface defensively, but she managed to push the beast back down. No. Not here. You’re not killing people today. Her jaw clenched momentarily, before her face relaxed again and her fists, that had unknowingly become balled up, loosened themselves up naturally, “Sorry. You don’t have a twin brother.” So it was you then. She let out a slow sigh as she watched the bartender fill up Emilio’s glass, before grabbing another glass and filling it up with the dark carbonated beverage.
When the cold liquid had been placed in front of her, she stared into the glass momentarily, before answering Emilio, “No, I don’t. Not much for drinkin’ myself. Prefer to just keep to my own devices, for the most part, unless someone else is involved.” Case and point of the man sitting next to her regardless of if he was dead or not. “What about you? I’m assumin’ you’re a regular right? Considerin’ the way you can throw back that whiskey without flinchin’.” She nodded to the empty glass sitting in front of Emilio, “I’d buy you another, but I don’t know what you got goin’ the rest of the day.”
If her family had seen her now, sitting in a bar, talking to a stranger, they probably wouldn’t even recognize her. But life on the run had seemed to harden her up probably more than she liked to admit; that and constantly waking up from random murder sprees she usually knew nothing about until it was too late. Still, not enough to lose some of the most important values she held. Like not drinking, abstaining from sex, and even cussing like a sailor. Though there were days when she longed to let the swear words fly, “You been in Wicked’s Rest long?” She took a sip of her drink.
—
A quiet surge of guilt shot through him as she jumped back away from his words, though he made no attempt to fix his tone. Something in her expression told him that his insistence that he wasn’t the corpse she’d seen in an alley wasn’t doing much to convince her, and there was something almost brutally funny about that. Shouldn’t it be easier to convince a stranger he wasn’t dead? He’d struggled to convince anyone who knew him, but shouldn’t it be as easy as just saying it to a stranger? It must have stuck with her, his corpse in that dumpster. He wondered, a little morbidly, what he’d looked like. He didn’t remember closing his eyes. Had they been open, still? Had his face been frozen in the snarl he’d aimed at his killers, or had it relaxed when there was no longer a soul to twist it up? He thought of Juliana’s body on the floor of their living room in Mexico, thought about how she’d looked angry even in death. He didn’t know how much of that had been his own interpretation of the scene and how much had been real. Maybe, to a stranger, she would have looked peaceful. Maybe he had, too.
He stared down at the glass he’d already emptied, already longing for it to be full again. “Regular at some places,” he confirmed. “Not this one, usually.” Usually, he went to the Wormhole, or the 3 Daggers, sometimes. Neither was an option now. The Wormhole would make his hands shake, and stepping foot in the 3 Daggers was pretty goddamn likely to earn him an ax to the throat. This bar was neutral ground… or it was, until a stranger started questioning him about his murder. After this, he might mark this place off the list of acceptable options, too. “I’ve got nowhere to be. You want to buy another, buy another. Not sure what you’re hoping to get out of it, though.”
It seemed a fair thing to wonder, really. Even if he did admit to being the corpse she’d found, what then? What did she walk away with beyond the knowledge that she’d been right? Emilio would have thought that plenty enough for himself, but other people tended to think differently. Other people didn’t pester strangers in bars for their secrets — if anything, they hired Emilio to do it for them. So what was in it for Hazel? What did she stand to gain? He shifted his glass absently, watching the way the ice cubes knocked into one another. “Couple years now,” he replied. “You?”
—
It was small talk, she’d admit. She had gotten her answer pretty quickly about if it had been the same guy she had seen that night at the Wormhole. It was, but he didn’t have to know anything else about that. Death was a hard enough thing to deal with when it was someone else, but she couldn’t imagine her own death. Would she come back to experience grief of her own life first hand? Was that a thing around here? He had been the first walking and talking corpse that she had seen, and she had hoped he would be the last…for now anyways. But that was another internal debate for another time.
“This place seems…nice.” She scanned the bar with her eyes. It was smokey, dark, and sort of dank. The perfect place for getting lost in a bottle of alcohol and watching your troubles melt away in a liquid haze. And while she could see the appeal, it was nothing she had found her way too yet. And hopefully she never would.
Turning her attention back to the bartender, Hazel motioned to Emilio, “Another for my friend here.” Were they friends? Probably not. She definitely didn’t want him snapping at her again, but she did genuinely care for him. Maybe partly out of guilt for not being able to do anything, but also because he was a human being and everybody deserved to have someone there for them; even if most days it felt like she didn’t. She never wanted anyone else to feel that way, “A little under a year. Was oddly just kinda drawn to this place after movin’ around quite a bit over the years. I like it so far though.” Hazel shrugged her shoulders before picking her own drink back up and taking a sip.
At the sound of a sudden loud crash, Hazel jumped causing the glass to slip out of her hand and break on the counter, “What in the Holy buckets was that?!” She quickly turned around to find one man laying in a heap of broken wood while the other man who had done it, walking towards the injured one.
—
He snorted at her assessment of the place, glancing around. “It’s a shithole,” he said flatly. In fact, the only bar in town that was probably worse than this one was the Wormhole. He gripped his glass a little tighter at the thought, and there was no danger of the glass cracking beneath his hand. Back when his heart still beat, he had to watch his strength, had to be careful not to hold things too firmly. He wondered if some might consider it a blessing to no longer have that problem to worry about. To him, it seemed like anything but.
This entire situation was harrowing, and he’d thought it couldn’t get any worse. But now? The idea that someone had witnessed his death made his stomach churn, half angry that someone had seen him at his absolute weakest and half upset that his trauma had, in turn, traumatized someone else. He wanted, not for the first time, to have it all undone. To go back to that alley and try again, to be less drunk or less stupid, to win the fight instead of losing it. But there were no do-overs, were there? Not for him, and not for Hazel, either.
At least she was buying his drinks. He might have felt a little bad about that — having to watch a guy die and then buy drinks for him after seemed like a lot — but he couldn’t really afford his tab and he wasn’t looking to get kicked out of another bar. “Think it’s like that for a lot of people,” he commented, unable to bring himself to look at her. He’d felt drawn here because it had seemed like a decent place to die. He hadn’t imagined he’d get up after. Maybe he should have seen it coming. “You really like it?” After watching a stranger die in an alley? After running into the same guy in a bar later? That didn’t ruin the town for you?
A sudden crash interrupted the flow of conversation, and Emilio was almost relieved. Small talk wasn’t something he really got, but this was far more familiar to him. “Bar fight,” he commented lazily, nodding as the bartender refilled his glass again. “Probably won’t kill each other or anything.”
—
Shithole. He said it. Not her, but she did have to agree with him. It seemed like there was a lot in her life that she could have the same view on. Her cabin had been a shithole, until she had made it her own. Her life had been a shithole, until she embraced it for what it was and kept pushing forward. There was some kind of indelible strength to Hazel, and years spent thinking it was from her parents or her granny had started to falter. No. This was something deeper than that. Not a learned behavior. Her will to survive and keep going had been tied to her devil. Yes, life was hard. And yes, it sucked most of the time, but there had been a lot around her to be thankful for. It was hard seeing this man down on his luck, and maybe he despised her for knowing what she knew. But that will to keep moving forward could be contagious if you let it, and she wasn’t about to give up on this man who had just lost the most precious thing you could lose…your life.
However, her willingness to pep talk him quickly faded as a beer bottle went sailing past her head and hit the wall behind the counter, “These two are seriously dumber ‘n a buncha rocks! An’ I ain’t gonna stand for this shit, if it happens ag–” About that time a stray whiskey glass went crashing into something else, and Hazel could feel her devil start to stir. No. Not here. We ain’t doin’ this here, devil. Not around these people.
Hazel quickly finished off the glass of coke she had been sipping on and pulled $30 that had been wadded up in her pocket, out and slammed it down on the counter. The anger and the berserker’s need for something bloody was starting to come out, which was easily taking hold of the once soft demeanor the twenty-three year old usually held. But it was the two men moving dangerously close that forced a low, guttural growl from her throat that meant if she didn’t leave soon, no one else would, except maybe Emilio, “Look. It’s been real nice gettin’ to know you, Emilio. And if you need to talk, I’m always around town. I work at the Video Vault. Whatever’s left from that thirty bucks, maybe put it towards food.” And with a soft head nod and a sneer in the other men’s direction, Hazel quickly found her way out of the bar just in time to find a quiet spot near the side of the building to calm herself down.
—
She looked like she wanted to say something else, maybe something inspiring or hopeful, and Emilio gripped his glass all the tighter as if waiting for a bullet to strike his skin. Hope, in a state like his, was the most painful thing a person could offer you. It was the worst thing you could hold, because it never worked out the way you wanted it to. When he’d been dying in that dumpster, it was the anger and the rage that had brought him back, but that wasn’t the thing he’d been choking on in the end. The thing that took him by the throat, the thing that sent his heart sputtering for the last time and made every part of him ache, was hope. Hope that someone might happen upon him and stop the inevitable, or hope that the inevitable would happen but that there’d be something left after. Hope that Juliana’s voice calling out to him wasn’t the final firing of synapses in his brain trying to give him something kind to die beside, hope that the flash of Flora’s hair in the corner of his eye was real. Hope that he’d been forgiven, somehow, in the end. If the rage had brought him back, it had been the hope that had killed him. He didn’t want any of that here.
So it was a good thing, he thought, that a bunch of idiots couldn’t keep themselves from fighting in a bar. It was a good thing that they sent bottles flying, that they interrupted whatever it was Hazel was trying to say. Hope was a bitter thing, but violence was familiar. Violence made sense, held him in a way that hope never had. He understood violence. And maybe Hazel did, too.
There was a flash of something from her. He wasn’t sure what it was, didn’t understand the experience, but it swirled in his gut in a way that felt interesting. It was somehow familiar and foreign all at once, but he knew it was a part of the inhuman parts of him, so he quickly closed himself off to it. Whatever it was, he didn’t think Hazel liked it much, didn’t think she enjoyed the violence the way he did. She stood, clearly unwilling to stay in the bar now that it had gotten rowdier than she felt comfortable with. He felt half relieved at the idea of her departure, even if there was still some quiet ache behind it. (Everything ached, anyway, all the goddamn time. What was one more thing to add to the fucking pile?) “Sure,” he agreed, offering her a nod. He knew he wouldn’t seek her out, knew he wouldn’t allow himself the small comfort of someone who was willing to listen. As she left, with the money on the table, he sighed. Put it towards food, she’d said, but the emptiness in Emilio’s stomach would be utterly unaffected by anything he could eat here.
And so, when the bartender came back after yelling at the fighting men, he gathered the bills, and Emilio ordered another drink instead.
[A small package is left at Emilio’s door with a note. Inside the package is a really nice hunting knife. And the note reads: Merry Christmas, Emilio. I know I’m probably more trouble than I’m worth, but thank you for being my friend and for taking care of me this year. Yeah, I said it. Thought you could use this when things get messy. Hope the next year is better. And take care of yourself. - Love, Hazel]
[ Emilio is of the opinion that a person can never have enough knives, and this is a nice knife. He feels a little guilty at the note -- both because Hazel thinks she’s more trouble than she’s worth and because she seems to think he wouldn’t consider her a friend. He vows to do better at setting her straight about both of those things in the new year.]
@appalachiannightmare replied to your post “[pm] I drew your big breasted cheese woman. Now...”:
[pm] I swear you old bog witch, don't expect to come back to my place looking for handouts or asking me for help anytime soon. And I'd watch out too. There's some hoarder with a gazillion tents living around here. I'm sure they're waiting to snatch you up for one of their creepy collections. Saw a buncha Big Mouth Billy Bass toys you'd fit in perfectly with.
[pm] My, what a tongue. I'm just shaking in my Prada right now. [...] What do you know about these tents.
Child. Speak. What do you know about these tents? How dare you? When did you see these tents? Why did you see these tents? Don't you know not to go looking at tents, you insolent brat.
