i can take care of myself. i've done it for a long time. (🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄)
“And you’ve done such a great job,” he says through a snarl, hauling her up from the floor with a too-tight grip on her upper arm. She’s a mess. Sure, when isn’t she, but this is different. This isn't holding her hair back while she pukes up last night's takeout and too many vodkas, or getting her home when daylight's coming and she's too high to know where she is or who's with her. The chronic downward spiral she's been in since long before he met her is different; it's manageable, even if it will probably kill her in the end. This one is acute and out of control, and it feels like it's his fucking fault even though it isn't.
It's just that if he hadn't asked Morpheus to let him go back to her in those early days--would she have been grateful enough to trust him long enough for the rest to follow?
You warned her, says the spiteful thing in the back of his skull. You told her over and over again. Even before he was going to die, you told her.
It is a voice he doesn't need right now. He banishes it and drags Frankie into the bathroom without stopping, without yielding to the scratching of chipped fingernails or the way her feet drag on the floor or the way he is turning into every man she's ever known, willing to get violent as soon as she doesn't do as he asks.
Morpheus made him a monster: let him be monstrous, then.
"You're going to shower, and you're going to sober up," he says flatly. His jaw is clenched so tight that his eyes have to do the talking for him. "If you don't--"
The threat dies, because there's a tugging inside him, like a thread being pulled somewhere deep in his essence. It is a sensation older than he himself is. The Dreaming--Dream--is calling him home. Do they know what he's doing? They must know he's gone, and he only ever enters the Waking for one thing these days. One human.
The Corinthian drops her, not gently. He snarls at no-one, talks to the empty air. Instead of the usual saliva running down his cheeks, there is blood: red, wet, frustrated tears that he doesn't even notice.
"Now isn't the fucking time!"
