Fucker was right: you do have a lot of glass to pick up when you go back home.
It’s all scattered right around the door, multiple broken bottles and absolutely zero alcohol. Did Fucker have any of this? Was it all you? Did you... seriously drink until you blacked out again?
That’s the second time since you came home from rehab.
This time, you weren’t alone when you blacked out. This time, a dark and disgusting part of you lashed out and hurt people... or at least that’s what Dolch and Fucker told you. You hit Dolch. Fucker had to incapacitate you. You were screaming in Russian, they told you, aggressive and violent, and you don’t remember any of it. Just like you never remembered what exactly you did to Di to make him leave. Just like every other time you’ve forgotten how to speak English and needed to intimidate someone.
Fucker said the Xanax wasn’t working, since it gave you bad dreams and you had to double down on it for relief, which just gave you worse dreams in the long run. But you don’t trust the pill Fucker gave you to take in its stead. What you do trust is vodka, which you can’t let yourself touch ever again if this is really what it does to you.
When you walk in, yeah, there’s more damage. Clawed up armchairs, a ruined sofa. Your TV is off-kilter and your Switch is still idling in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Little shards of glass prick through your socks to lodge in the soles of your feet, but you barely feel it compared to the gnawing hole in your chest and the heavy weight on your shoulders.
Here it is, the last bottle you remember. Broken like the others, a little off from your mark of the recycling bin (or front door, hard to piece together without any memory of having thrown them.) You slice open your fingertips when you reach for it that clumsily. A bad aesthetic. You won’t be able to play the piano properly for a few weeks now.
This entire place reeks of booze and hash and regret. You blacked out last night, haven’t eaten anything today, but you won’t feel any better if you retch, you know that much for sure. All you can do is sweep up your mess and open the windows.
You could have killed Dolch. That’s what he says, and you wish you had a reason not to believe him. He’s terrified of you now. He won’t ever say it openly, but he’s never been so panicked when talking to you before. He wants you to get help--so does Fucker, and Fucker saw all of it, reached into your brain while he had your Soul in his hands to keep you from destroying all three of you. Fucker had the cruelty to tell you what he’d seen in you, but not the decency to tell you what the fuck was wrong with you. Says you need to figure it out yourself, go to therapy, even though that has never worked for you before.
Everything just hurts so much. You’re not so entombed in toxic masculinity that you’ve forgotten how to cry, but you can’t remember the last time you’ve collapsed like this, shutting yourself in the bathroom with the water running for a bath and sobbing with your back barring the door shut. The heels of your hands dig into your eye sockets, like you could scrub history clean again if you could just unsee everything that ever happened.
This is 30. This has to be rock bottom. You’re a fucking mess, and you need help.
You come home already a little bit shitfaced, having gone out with an entirely different Dirk and hopped around to a few different bars. You “behaved yourself,” got only mixed drinks even if heavy on the vodka, did some flirting, kissed a few people by the restrooms and in back alleys. No big deal, just your birthday, time to celebrate, yeah?
Fucker’s waiting for you back in your apartment, already a thick cloud of smoke wreathing his head. It doesn’t take much for you to pick up a blunt and join him on the Switch, alternating between Splatoon 2 and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. This feels good. This feels nice, taking a load off, trusting yourself not to get too fucked up. What does it matter that you’re taking swigs of vodka right out of the bottle now? This is familiar, this is safe, this will make you feel good.
Until it doesn’t.
Until, getting up from the couch, you start staggering to the kitchen gradually slouching towards Bethlehem, holding onto the counters for balance. Until a swig turns into two swallows, three. Until the edges of your vision start closing in, like blinders put on, and until a stumble makes you brain yourself against your freezer door none too gently. Everything’s doubled, duplicated, more woozy than usual…
~
He gets back from the kitchen, surly, and sees a new friend, still nearly a stranger, sitting on the couch like he lives here. A new wave of rain is batting at the windows, an insistent pattering percussion. The coffee table is littered with empty bottles (vodka, beer, tequila) and assorted cannabis paraphernalia. Did he seriously hit a dab? Doesn’t matter. He ignores the man on the couch—he can take care of that later, no threat as of right now—and starts to tidy up, muttering darkly to himself. “ты не можешь пригласить себя вот так. опасно оставаться слишком поздно.”
Fucker just blinks at him lazily as he pokes his fingertips into bottle openings, starts tossing them all towards the front door of his apartment. “You ok there? Sit down, take a load off. Here, I have you queued up for Samus.”
“я не хочу.” He doesn’t look up from his task, tossing the glass garbage idly, fumbling with a drunk hand for more.
“Some fucking party so far. Seriously, dude, you’re just standing there throwing shit, come s—“
The vodka bottle that was in his hand gets abruptly tossed against the wall. The glass shatters in a comically loud noise, cracking into two main pieces, the material at the fault line exploding into little shards. It’s a bad idea to order him around when he’s like this. “не говори мне что делать,” he says with his back still to Fucker, back visibly corded and tensed under his shirt.
The atmosphere in the room still doesn’t change; Fucker still has a lazy, nonplussed grin on his face, blinking at him slowly through the haze he made in the living room. “How about you untape your dick from your asshole and sit the fuck down.”
“нет!” This time, he reaches down impulsively for another bottle—larger, tequila—and throws it with the entire strength of his muscular arm. The noise is even louder, the shards of this mess sharper and more scattered. From miles away, thunder rolls “убирайся отсюда,” he shouts, guttural, as he wheels around on Fucker, balling his fist. “не мешай мне, тебе здесь не место—”
Something changes in the set of Fucker’s eyes behind his green translucent shades; the set of his eyebrows would give it away, too. He puts down the controller, a little too smoothly, and stares right up. His voice comes out low and smooth, at first. “Is this how you want to play it?” Then, fanged, nearly spitting out the consonants with a buzzing sound behind it, “ǝɯɐƃ ǝƃɐnƃuɐן ǝɥʇ ʎɐןd uɐɔ oɥʍ ǝuo ʎןuo ǝɥʇ ʇou ǝɹ'noʎ.”
It’s a clear threat. He doesn’t have to know the language to be able to tell by the tone, the way the words hit his skin. It’s a signal in response to what he’s been sending, the same underlying message: back off. Of course, this is his apartment, this is his space, this is his sanctuary, and to him, this is some entitled little asshole parking his ass on the couch like he somehow deserves to be here. There’s a snarl under Fucker’s voice that he recognizes, because the same feral warning growl has been under his Russian the whole time.
The calculation gets made in a split-second, in the same amount of time it takes for lightning to fork out of the clouds and strike a few buildings away. “убирайся, пока я не сделал тебе больно.” A promise—Fucker is stacked, but short, and there is nothing Fucker can do to physically best him that he hasn’t already seen from Dolch (or even Dimitri). If it’s to be a fight, he can fight, his body almost aches for it, for the kind of violence that will let him unleash everything in him. As the cracking boom of the close thunder echoes off the walls, he reaches back, opens his sylladex, feels the grip of a warhammer slide easily between his fingers—
Fucker rises from the couch, almost too fast for his eyes to track. He reaches out with his left hand, his fingers glowing brighter as he reaches forward, until the bright white of his reach is nearly all he can see. A neon pink glow bathes his fingertips and radiates even hotter as the reach goes somehow beyond physical, reaches inside of him to touch—oh, shit. That’s Heart powers. Something he’s never had to contend with before, and this scathing exploration of his soul catches him off-guard. Fucker has these powers honed, weaponized, in a way he can’t possibly hope to counter. “ʇ!s. ʞɔnɟ ǝɥʇ. uʍop”
~
Those fingertips reach further than your heart, creep down to the curl of your gut feelings and spread up to the folds of thought in your mind. You didn’t want—this wasn’t—“Don’t,” comes out in English, finally, after so long, and your hammer falls to the floor, out of your grip, smashing through the hardwood of your living room to embed itself in the planks. Your own hands reach forward, humming neon blue, and your powers reach desperately into Fucker’s lungs. If you take his Breath, you can make him stop, he’ll choke on his own breathing and lose his animus and calm down—
It gets pushed away as effortlessly as he’s searching your everything to twist it against you. Like he’s had practice playing with Breath powers already, like he’s possessed someone like you before to deploy your aspect like a nuclear blast. Out of your control, your body whumps down ass-first into an armchair, even as you’re still reaching out with heated ineffectual hands to get control back over this situation. “ǝɯ ɥʇ!ʍ ʞɔnɟ ʇ'uop,” comes out in a bugmash of hard, almost clicking sounds, before Fucker reiterates himself in English. “Don’t fuck with me.” He might be a 5’5 manlet, but he’s not fucking around, and next your arms get pinned to the arms of the chair. You can still dig your nails into the leather, but just barely, before he takes that from you, too.
This, of course, is when Dolch swings around again. He’d already told you he didn’t want to be around when you were drinking, and now that everything’s gone completely pear-shaped, you can kind of understand why—though you’re not entirely sure how you got from off-your-ass drunk to being mind-controlled by Fucker. “No mames,” comes out of his mouth as the front door of your apartment sweeps over crackling, broken glass and he crunches in over it, “what the fuck did I just walk in on?”
You open your mouth to answer; Fucker closes it. As the haze of Heart powers sweeps through you, the last thing you can sense is the two of them starting a conversation as Fucker explains, “He just had to test me.”
~
Volition, cut. Sensation, cut. Speech, hearing, cut. Taste, smell, cut. Sight, cut. Like so many puppet strings, your connection to the outside world gets blocked, and you get trapped here. Inside your mind. Your least favorite place to be. And you’re not alone—Fucker is in here too, rummaging around through whatever is laying around in here, uncovered and unprotected.
The last thing you think, before that awareness gets obliterated, too, and Fucker subjugates you to his will, is: Hope he hates what he finds.
