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.
This place is a lot less... clean, for lack of a better word, than the pictures they put online. The building this therapist is in seems newer, but the waiting room is dingy, latticed aluminum ceiling holding up popcorn gray panels and yellowing fixtures for fluorescent lights. There’s a rack in the corner holding worn children’s books and a tired-looking wooden train set abandoned behind a set of threadbare office chairs.
There’s also no receptionist behind the front desk, just a window with a sign that says, in both English and Spanish, “PLEASE WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE.” The lights aren’t on back there, but there are forms and a sign-in sheet waiting for you on the ledge.
This is stupid. You scratch your name and the time, take the loose leaf papers, and get started.
Yeah, yeah, basic demographic information. Insurance—well, technically you’re still on your dad’s, but he doesn’t even live in this country anymore, and fuck if you can remember the information. Family history? You don’t know anything about this. Personal medical stuff? The only time you’ve been in the hospital was for rehab. They want to know what medications you’re on, too, which is awkward, because you don’t know the name or the dose of what Fucker gave you, you just know it’s not working.
Underneath those basics are questionnaires, Becks something or other. All of these questions are stupid. You score a 31 on the first one (kind of depressing) and a 22 on the second (not so bad, really). After circling all the numbers and x-ing all the boxes, you don’t really have anything else.
So you wait.
Click the pen a little bit in your hand, twirl it around your fingers. Your dexterity got thrown off a little bit again by last weekend’s events, but you’ll get it back eventually, right? You jiggle your leg, crack your neck. One of the lights is humming obnoxiously. There’s a fly trapped under one of the busted metal quarter-inch blinds. With this much time, you let your eyes trace out patterns in how the dirty linoleum peels up from the floor at the seams.
You’re almost nodding off when the door to the office opens. “Oh!” a female voice says softly, keys jangling. “Are you early, or am I late?”
“Are you Alex?”
“Yes, hello!” She’s already looking in her phone. She might be a few years older than you if you had to guess, brown-skinned with long black hair, wearing floaty clothes in neutral colors with long gold earrings. Damn it. You had been hoping for a dude—and that tiny expectation takes you by surprise. You make a mental note of it for later. “Oh, I was late, I’m so sorry. Please, follow me.”
You stand up—had your feet really fallen asleep?—and get ushered into a tiny side room, only just wide enough to fit a full-length overstuffed couch with too many tasseled throw pillows. When you take a seat, it wheezes. The corduroy feels crumbly under your fingertips.
Alex shuts the door behind her, blocking out the dead, clinical light of the waiting room. It’s much darker in here, only lit by a nightstand lamp with maybe a fake candle bulb in it. Alex sits down in a large armchair, her bag landing heavy on the floor when she drops it and starts looking for something. “You’re a new client, right?”
“Yeah. I filled out all this paperwork.” You offer her the stack.
“Oh, yes, thank you.” She apparently had been looking for a pen and a clipboard, because your papers get neatly pinned and she starts taking notes immediately. “So, John, how did you find out about us?”
You shrug. “I did a Google search. This was the only place that had an appointment this fast.”
“Oh, that’s because I had cleared my schedule for Good Friday.” Shit, you’re so out of it that you forgot it was a holiday weekend. “I’m glad you came in. Now, what brought you in to see us?”
You freeze.
You were expecting this question, yeah, got dogged by it for four hours last night while you were unable to sleep and worrying about Dolch. That doesn’t mean you have a good answer for it. You’re pretty sure you filled out a thing online for this place (or maybe it was for one of the ten other places you tried to get ASAP appointments). Why can’t she look on there? Whatever. You pick the simplest answer first. “I went to rehab and they said I needed to keep doing therapy when I got out, so I thought I would start.”
Alex’s pen stops. “Rehab? For a... drug addiction?”
“Alcohol.” Dead and clipped off.
“Oh, right.” Like it wasn’t as serious as Percocet or heroin. “Well, we don’t really do addiction counseling here—or alcoholism counseling, whatever—but I can see what else I can do to help you today. Maybe get you a referral. How does that sound?”
Something in that guarded, hopeful part of you deflates, an already-drooping Mylar GET WELL SOON balloon destroyed by a dart. “Fine.”
“Oh, you didn’t fill out this section of the form.” She tilts the clipboard towards you and gestures to it with her pen.
“That’s because I don’t know.”
“Don’t know your family medical history?”
“Not really.” Is it that surprising? “We didn’t really talk about that stuff a whole lot.”
“Ah, right, gotcha.” She sounds like she got a bunch of insight about you out of that last sentence. “Did you bring your medications with you?”
“Just the one.” You were careful to bring this in your jeans pocket, so no one would have to see you manipulating your sylladex to get to the goods. The pills you got from Fucker look pathetic in this little snack baggie, but it’s all you had. “I lost the bottle, sorry, I forget what this is.”
Alex peers at it under the low light, then draws back into her own space. “Looks like a low dose of sertraline.”
“What now?”
“Generic Prozac.” Oh, wow. Fucker really put you on an antidepressant. Like that’s supposed to help with whatever has your brain this rustled. “Just a baby dose,” she says, like that’s supposed to make you feel any better. “How long have you been taking it?”
“Just since Sunday.”
“Any side effects?”
“Not much of anything, really.”
She clicks her tongue. “That’s too bad.” What the hell does that mean? She flips over to another piece of paper in your makeshift chart, tapping her pen down the page until she turns to the next one. “Thirty-one, yes, same number. Oh, dear, that’s not good.”
“What does that mean?”
“That’s in the range for severe depression, Jonathan.” Ugh. You hate it when people try to get cute with your name. “And the anxiety inventory, this is in the moderate anxiety range. Good thing you got an appointment!”
“Yeah, no kidding.” There’s no mirth in your voice, yet no sarcasm, either. No one told you therapy would be this boring.
“Well,” And Alex jingles her wrist to shake her bracelets away from her watch, “that might be all the time we have for an initial appointment like this. I’m sorry we can’t take you on long term, but if you’d like, I can send on your name to another practice. Oh, and, credit card, please.”
She plugs a chip reader into her phone port as you fork over the plastic. You feel a little nonplussed. You’re pretty sure you scheduled for an hour, and you’ve been here for much longer, but you could have sworn this whole thing in this room only took a few minutes. “I guess,” is all you really have to say.
Alex is focused on her phone again, then smiles as the app resolves the transaction. “Great!” she says, far too chipper. “Well, check your portal, and by the end of next week, you should have a message from us about next steps.”
“End of next week?” Full offense, but you’ve already been waiting long enough for an appointment when you’re in so much emotional pain it literally feels like it’s cracking your sternum in two.
“Yeah, all referrals take at least 72 hours and it’s a holiday weekend. Thanks for your time!” She’s already standing, opening the door to usher you out.
Good. You don’t want to be here any longer. “Thanks,” you tell her, an automatic politeness, but as you leave the office and take the elevator down to the building lobby, all you feel is confused. And kind of laughing at yourself for how seriously you took it. If it’s all going to be bullshit, at least you know what to expect for next time.
Teleportation, to a clean room all in brightest bleached white, holding his hand. The devil in pink, smiling, having caught a mortal in his web. “You broke the rules” (taste of lips on lips, fingers letting go). “You know what that means.”
You don’t. He does. Goes to the devil, subjugates himself on his knees. Pleading, in tone and body language. Laughter from the devil. “Sit.” At a table, plate in front of him. Already taken his arm for fealty, about to take more for punishment.
The devil reaches into his soft, unprotected stomach, rends it apart with his nails. Draws out an organ. Kidney in his fist. First one, then the other. On the plate. The man traumatized with the devil’s bloodlust, and you standing at soldier’s attention, unable to tear your eyes away but unwilling to watch.
And so you, yourself, elide somewhere else.
Each grisly piece is held up with gory hands, chewed and swallowed. The devil mocks him. You, from a place far away, speak in guttural English with Russian grammar, telling the devil this is distasteful. Every bite swallowed down with obvious disgust and nausea as the devil’s teeth glint. Every bite makes you want to rend the devil limb from limb since the devil thinks he can do this with his toy. Like he is unpersoned and even his individual organs have no use besides humiliation.
The cooing from the devil is the worst part. The encouragement to debase himself, to keep partaking of this unholy ritual until every bite is swallowed, until he has consumed himself entirely to atone for this most minor sin. As he loses consciousness, you take him in his arms, and your last words before you leave are to threaten the devil with the loss of his life if he ever comes for the two of you again.
Once the two of you are in the safety of your home, he collapses into your bed. His arm will heal him. He vomits up raw chunks of his own undigested organs painfully and sloppily, takes in a glass of water as the gory holes of his abdomen begin to close before your eyes, regrowing the small beans of his kidneys as they go. You make sure he is taken care of and safely sleeping before you go yourself to throw up at what you’ve seen, putting yourself so ultimately second to this, powerless to do anything while it was happening and powerless to change anything about it now. Even if you could retcon the experience out of his mind, he will still have to heal from this, will still wonder why his mouth tastes like his own blood and gristle.
You return, kiss him on the mouth, and you are teleported to a clean room, holding his hand...
