Chaos Theory (Part One)
Who: Alexander Wolfgang, Crawford Sands, Avari.
Source: (Age 33) Trial By Fire (Log: Rev, Sara, Jen)
Summary: Still convincing himself that this isn’t much more than a dream or a bad trip, Alexander decides to test out a certain theory. Crawford comes along and helps out with that. The only way Crawford knows how.
Rating: R for language, an epic fail attempt at suicide, and graphic violence-Crawford and Alexander style.
In layman’s terms, the chaos theory would basically be a random, impossibly unpredictable happening that couldn’t be precedent in any way. There was all this complicated and mathematical shit that his professor babbled on about back in college, but Alexander got a better idea on the theory from his own experience.
There was this girl Alexander knew back in high school. Sweet girl, nice ass. Lousy in bed. One time she told him that, while walking on her way home from the bus stop, she wound up getting hit by lightning. She stumbled, picked up her bag, and started running, when she was hit by yet another bolt of lightning. Staggering towards the last block home, a third bolt hit her. Hell, what Alexander wouldn’t give to be struck by lightning only once, just to know what it felt like... but no. Not only that, but when this girl, she went to have herself checked out at the hospital, and as it turned out, the one they assigned her to was a Dr. Struck.
If there were such a thing as Fate, bet she’d be fuckin’ laughin’ her ass off at that one.
Alexander coughed, which could have been easily mistaken for being a scoff.
All right, all right. So a better example would be that that same girl died six months later. But not from the aftermath of having been struck by lightning three times. No sir. Imagine she was out taking the trash while in an alleyway when, unexpectedly, her bracelet falls off, rolling behind the dumpster. Cursing and spitting at her dumb luck, she squeezes behind the dumpster. In that unanticipated moment, a drunk driver comes by while the girl is scuffling sideways between the building. Taps the dumpster. Just barely. But enough that two thousand pounds pushed the weight of the five hundred fuckin’ jaws of death, crushed that poor girl’s spine. She falls over and tumbles into the mouth, into a pile of garbage, so that when the cops came to the scene they were investigating a murder and not some poor bitch having the worst fuckin’ day of her life.
Now, imagine this: The odds of some guy like him, just another fucked up average steck, landing himself up in a city with gods whose idea of a good time was a panty raid and angels who dressed like fuckin’ bondage kings from the Queen’s Club back at home. That wasn’t something anyone could anticipate, except that Alexander happened to be a steck that was a magnet to these kinds of fucked up things. He just couldn’t get away. Story of his life.
“‘Kay, so, for the sake of the argument, let’s just say for this one fuckin’ moment that I’m not dreamin’.”
Talking to himself. That was a surefire way of proving his sanity. At least when alone, it seemed like a saner thing to do. Especially after downing a few gulps of the Southern Comfort that the damned leprechaun had given him the other week. Alexander took up the bottle, drank some more, forced a watery cough and then staggered over the ledge of the rooftop off a building he had climbed his way up upon. He could see Zelda’s housing from way up here.
Hell, he was surprised he managed to make it all the way up here without getting his ass killed by one of those things. He’d seen them on the streets. There were plenty of them around.
Everything seemed all too surreal to be real. Like a dream. But if this were a dream, then would Alexander have any idea that it was? Most dreams you don’t fall into and think Hey, I’m in a dream! Unless this were a lucid one, that is, in which case it’d make more sense, but...
“Let’s say I’m wide fuckin’ awake and this is actually at least a fifty foot drop.” Pause. If he was trying to consider suicide, he was going to have to give this some thought, after all. “Given the speed and distance, it might not even be enough to kill you. You’d need higher ground.” He looked down and took a swig of the Southern Comfort, briefly made a face, and looked down. “Dumbass.”
He jumped down from the ledge, landing not so gracefully on the floor of the rooftop. His legs faltered. Yeah, he was drunk, and yeah, he was contemplating the physics of a drop that would kill him so he could mull over suicide in a dream.
“Theoretically, it’s impossible to die in your dream. You either wake up or...” He scratched the back of his head while he walked around the rooftop, carrying the mostly-empty bottle of booze. “Or it just winds up shifting scenes.”
Alexander was no expert in dreams. Was never part of his study. But it didn’t have to be in order for Alexander to kind of understand the obvious that betrayed him. A normal dream wouldn’t be so linear like this. It would be shifting. It would change. He would be alternating from place to place to place. Changeover. Scene cut.
“Sssooo in that case... It’s a random chance. You’re actually up on the rooftop in the middle of fuckin’ No-Manville. There’re angels here. This is Hell. Think I’m startin’ to get it.” He looked up at the darkening, afternoon sky and downed the last bit of his St. Patrick’s drink. That a leprechaun gave him. His lip twitched as the aftertaste hit him. A leprechaun gave him this drink. This drink was given to him by a little green man on St. Patrick’s Day. “...I don’t get any of this shit.”
Not one bit.
Alexander turned his head a moment, covering his mouth while he coughed. He was still tending to his own injuries since he had first arrived. His clothes were still raggedy; he bathed, but didn’t feel like finding anything new. Same damn jeans, same damn turtleneck, same damn shoes. These were his world-walkin’ shoes and he wasn’t going to change it.
Well, if this was a dream, it sure as hell was a pretty long, drawn out one, and his subconscious had a way of fuckin’ with him in that case. Wouldn’t be the first time it’d done that. It would be possible if he were back in Delial Park, drugged up by his brother. “Hell, would it be possible to even get drunk in a dream?” He glanced at the empty bottle he now had in his hands. The words wouldn’t stay still. Alexander blinked his bleary eyes and shook his head. If he was sober, he sure as hell wouldn’t be talking like a goddamn psychotic on the rooftop of some building in attempt to rationalize suicide in a dream. “Well, if it ain’t... sure as hell crazy enough to be a dream.”
March 23rd. It was never a good day for Crawford. Even if he had not realized the date had been looming so close, it had been a dark cloud over his already sour mood all week. With everything that had happened, the actual date itself had slipped his mind. But after nearly twenty years, the date was engraved deeply upon his mind and soul. It wasn’t until the unfortunate comment from Yuusuke that he even realized the date. The fact that he had not been consciously aware of it only made things worse.
He should have been angry, he should have punched holes in the walls. He should have gotten so drunk he couldn’t remember his own name. But he couldn’t do any of those things. He couldn’t destroy his room when Zelda had been so kind to give it to him. Remembering that day with her, that they had come here, only made things worse. She knew what weakness lurked inside him. And despite that, he just wanted that feeling back. The feeling he’d had when his mother kissed his scraped knee. The felling when Zelda knelt to help him after the flashback. That flooding relief of ‘everything will be alright’ in a way only a mother can provide.
That left getting drunk, and there were only two options of that. One had strippers, and he would not go near that. The other had Lucifer. Despite his attitude, he would not go near that place, either. Lucifer scared him. Not because the man was Lucifer but because the man made him feel inadequate. Not only could the man easily make good on threats to smite him, but he could protect his own brother for anything and everything in existence. While Crawford was struggling to protect his own from just one man.
That left him with very few options. There was really only one thing he could do.
That night, he shut off the communicator and stayed in his room. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t take his pills. For once, he wanted to feel it. All of those aches and pains, the painful way the scars pulled and rubbed. The discomfort of nicotine withdrawal. He should not have slept. Such behavior kept him awake all night, but he found himself falling asleep and he found himself having the strangest dream. He only played a small part, in plucking a rose from a vast field of the same. It had no significance to him, until he began to hear squabbling about the dream. That provided a temporary distraction, but it wasn’t enough.
He went out.
Lingering outside his room, he had a cigarette. That was never one that lasted long for him, because he always had them in his pockets. The pills were easier to avoid. He had left them in his bag, in his room.
He missed the city. Where he could get so high he could no longer make out people on the street. Things made more sense up there, where you could see to the horizon. Where the wind always seemed stronger and colder than on the ground. This building wasn’t nearly tall enough. But it was one of the tallest he could see, and that was good enough for now. He just needed to get his head cleared. To get himself straightened out, so he could focus on what really mattered.
But as he pulled himself onto the roof, he found it was not exactly empty. The crack head that he had seen at the fountain a week prior. In realizing who it was, he just grumbled, “....figures...”
The chaos theory further seemed to prove itself applicable in a setup such as this: In which the odds of Alexander finding himself in the unwanted, absolutely undesired company of his fellow not-so-appealing man. Of all the rooftops in this city, of all the people to have come across, it truly was a small world. Or a small city. Or whatever the hell this place was to begin with. Whatever it was, it was something that Alexander couldn’t even begin to describe. So he stuck with the chaos theory of arbitrariness instead. He much preferred that one much better.
Not to mention the way the guy looked at Alexander... Hell, a lot of people looked at him funny. Alexander was a sight for sore eyes, so to speak. He knew how this must have looked to a lot of people, and he couldn’t care less. He was far from healthy looking. Emaciated beneath the worn and tattered clothing, shrunken skin so dry it could have peeled clean off, pupils that never did dilate right even when being in the right light... Sometimes it hurt to even move.
On some nights, he couldn’t sleep. He wished he hadn’t sleep the night prior. The wakefulness was sobering. The Southern Comfort was not. It also wouldn’t help keep what food he had taken in his stomach when he would start vomiting up blood hours afterwards. That was always an appealing trait.
If he stuck with his good dream premise, it at least made himself feel better if anything, even if it was wrong. If it wasn’t a dream, then, well, death wasn’t real in this place anyway. Still, that didn’t mean he was looking forward to rushing to it either way. The idea alone made him feel uneasy. Dreams were dreams. Death was real on the outside of it, but it certainly wasn’t in a place like this, so, then, it couldn’t be real. In real life, there was no reset button, no do-over. What’s done was done.
That’s how it worked. If there was a reset button, maybe he’d have gone far back. So far back. Too far back.
Back to the desert before he was even born.
Now those were also sobering thoughts that Alexander could deal without. Heh. Well. What a depressing matter. Certainly didn’t help with the unwanted company up on the roof. What was this guy’s name again? Crawfish? Crawdad? Something like that. Alexander was never really good with any names. Didn’t help the fact that he had a horrible sense of memory. Oh well.
Still, his presence here, in this way-up place, made Alexander uneasy. It was bad enough being up here with his own drunken thoughts. It was another having to deal with a maniac who seemed to solve his problems punching the teeth out of every man in sight. Yeah, Alexander knew the type. He was practically raised around the type. He also knew they were the type to walk all the fuck over you if you didn’t want your ground.
“Dibs. I was fuckin’ here first.”
A little annoyed, Alexander stumbled over to the ledge of the rooftop and took a seat. That Crawfish guy looked even less pleased to see him here. Wishful thinking said that it would be a nice thing if he just turned and walked away. Find some other rooftop, why don’t you? But Magic 8-Ball says that the sources were not so likely.
Goddamn. What was he doing, thinking about all of this after downing a quarter of a bottle of what remained of Southern Comfort? This place really must’ve been Hell after all if he could hold his alcohol intake as well as this.
Feet crunching on the slush and debris that had collected on the flat surface, Crawford didn’t go far. It may have warmed up enough for the snow to melt most of the way, but it was still cold. And, like anyone else who had spent more than ten years abusing their bodies with physical trauma and loading it full of their addictions, he ached. Joints stiffened, tendons complained, tender flesh turned to ground up glass. He didn’t mind, right now. It helped keep his head clear. But the idea of climbing back down was not appealing.
He stayed near the access point, for now, watching Alex with a cold, hard gaze. So far, he had only met three people that didn’t hesitate when he looked at them like that. And two of them weren’t human. In fact, one of them claimed reign over the infernal realm of eternal damnation, so no surprise there. It was look of pure hatred. But it went behind even that. It was the look of someone accustomed to standing their ground, regardless of circumstance. Of someone who had given far more than they should have been able to give, left empty inside. Then again, he’d never had reason to use such a look on someone of such similar lot in life. The redhead was very much unaware of just how much the two had in common, down to substance abuse and fearing others seeing what their bodies had become.
Pulling from his pocket a rather crumpled thing that had once been a thin cardboard box.Shaking it, he peered down at it to find only three little sticks left. He had one more pack and then he was out of luck. Others smoked. There had to be someone with a supply. Deciding ‘screw it,’ he pulled one out and put the others back into his pocket. Next came a lighter, as he pushed the thing between his lips. The lighter was an old, beaten up Zippo. Rather plain, silver, save for a four leaf clover etched into the bottom corner on the front. Flicking the thing, he lit the end of the cigarette and inhaled deeply before at last looking back to Alexander.
He had wanted to be alone, with his thoughts. Alone in a place that he didn’t need to worry about being seen, or worry about someone finding out. Maybe that was part of the torture of this place. Being alone was impossible. And if you got away from the people, there was some sort of nasty creature lurking in the shadows.
“You could leave,” he said gruffly, moving closer to the center of the roof, “Or I can help ya find your way down. Can’t guarantee a safe landing, though.”
That look was far from being unfamiliar; Alexander knew it all too well. There had even once been a time where he was surrounded by them. Killer’s gaze, killer’s hands. Someone who wouldn’t take back on their words when they said they were going to slit your throat. Yeah, he knew those types. Dangerous fucks. Not forces to be reckoned with if you could help it. Oftentimes in the past, though, Alexander found himself on the other end of that reckoning.
On the other hand, rolling over and just letting them push you around wasn’t ever a good idea, either. Showed that they had control over you. Give ‘em that control, they’ll use it. Again and again. Alexander had spent enough years on the streets of Ophelia, been to enough riots and bar fights and street fights to know your enemy first. When Alexander looked into that face, it was almost like being back home again. Almost comforting, in that there’s-no-place-like-home sort of way.
If only home wasn’t the kind of place that involved getting your stomach pumped full of lead. Running. Fighting. Each day a battle towards hunger and decadence. And yet humans, stubborn and stupid as they all were, still struggled on and on for survival.
dont cry dont feel you wont die anyway not here
He paused a moment, eyes on the cigarette and lighter. Christ, it had been awhile since he last had a smoke. Finding one back at home wasn’t easy, either. Same thing with finding good rum that didn’t always taste like fermented piss and moldy socks mixed with stagnant water. There weren’t that many things in Ophelia that could necessarily be considered a delicacy.
Dumbass. Stand your ground you piece of shit. He said nothing of it, though. His addictions, or his vices-the slow-killing cancer. A piece of that was already eating him up inside, and it showed. Alexander didn’t look much. He looked like he could barely hold his own body parts together.
“Or you could find some other roof and leave me the fuck alone.” To him and in Alexander logic, it made sense. Finder’s keepers. First come, first serve. He wasn’t in the mood for being the crumbling, panicky, wired dumbass that most people took him for at this point. Today would be a nice day, confrontation-free. As that usually went, through, the prospect did not seem to be so likely anymore.
The lighter was slipped back into his pocket as Alexander answered him. Crawford had never been the one for killing. At least, not before coming to this place. Back home, he always managed to find that last flicker of restraint, just enough to let go of the man before bashing his head into the wall one last time. Assault was swept under the rug easily. The evidence was washed away when the victim was rushed to the hospital. Memories got fuzzy. Bar fights happened. Murder wasn’t so easily excused. It had crossed his mind more than once. Give the old man a heart attack by landing himself in prison for murder. The shame would at least ensure the man never got elected again. But it would all be taken out on Donavin, and he could never do that. Now that he was here, if he were to kill someone, would it matter back home? There were constant flickers, here and there things that made him question this places. At the back of his mind, there was this looming notion that perhaps it was all just a mass hallucination. He kept seeing people that struck him as familiar. That John guy from the river looked like someone he knew. And just the other day, he’d thought he’d seen Nick-the only other person Donavin trusted. The blond kid was certainly loud and hyper enough, but in the end, it wasn’t him. But he found himself asking: what if it was? Was he just seeing the world through some strange filter?
But by now, all of this was far from his mind. Trying to puzzle it all out made his head ache. So he decided he was going to just ignore the hallucination idea. Alexander certainly had the market on that one. Anyway, if this were just the world through a filter, there would be a way out, and the town would be much, much larger. Manhattan, though only a few miles in either direction, was massive both in size and scope. Where all the pleasures of everything were available to anyone who could pay for it. He had once heard tell of a strange club in which rich boys, usually teenagers or young twenties, would pay large sums of cash to be beaten up. So they could experience it, someone had said. Crawford had responded with something along the lines of being willing to do it for free, just to say he had done it.
With the date weighing heavily on him, Crawford just wanted a distraction. And as much as he despised the man, on sheer principle, he was glad he refused to leave. A perfect opportunity for a fight. Pressing one fist against the other palm, he gave his knuckles a loud crack. “Have it your way, then,” he growled around the cigarette between his lips before tugging it out just long enough to exhale a blue gray cloud. Replacing it, he moved slowly closer toward Alexander.
More often than most, Alexander had a tendency to act with suicidal inclinations. His lack of concern for this guy who was clearly much bigger and much more adapt in the strength department, proved to be one of them. Survival, on the other hand, had always taken a higher place. It was the reason he was even alive. That preemptive instinct that kicked in, like having your head thrown under water and you’re flailing, thrashing, gasping for air only to have the water boiling and filling your lungs.
Death wasn’t anything new. Pain certainly wasn’t anything new. Alexander had nearly drowned once. He had been shot, stabbed, beaten to a point where he could have been considered clinically dead for a good long while if only he had ever cared enough to consider it. He didn’t buy into the idea that death was not real in this place, assuming if he was actually lucid. He knew what it was like.
Maybe, when you get down to it, this was all back to the whole dream theory again. Pain and death did not exist in dreams. You wake up shortly beforehand. Alexander was still here. He was still dreaming. He was not awake yet.
While not much of a fighter, in dreams or in the waking world, there was that lingering primal instinct. Like an override in a computer program, except he was only human. Alexander did what he needed to survive. Even if it meant killing someone, he had always done what he could. And Christ knows no one could live in Ophelia without the killing and the death. Alexander practically drowned himself in it every day.
Which was why, as Crawford started suddenly approaching, the front had changed. They were not men. To him, they were dogs. Bearing vicious teeth and snarled and snapped. One pounding his fists together in the initiative steps. The other making what appeared to be a shuffle away, retreating with his hand bent slightly behind him.
Debris. There was plenty of it in this place. Practically covered the entire damned rooftop. His eye caught a glimpse of something, until Alexander then considered the bottle he had in hand. Sharp. Glass. Glass cuts nicely. It would do. It wasn’t his dagger, which he hadn’t seen for a long, eight years... but it would do.
Glass shattered with a nice little ringing clash as Alexander smashed the bottle against the ledge of the rooftop, holding it at his side with an offensive approach. His eyes did not change. Because Alexander was an Ophelian, and no one from that place could be considered remotely human. Morals and instincts went beyond that. Right now, he was a dog of Ophelia, with fangs bore and there they were, each sharp, shimmering teeth, in his hand. Come and get it, Sparky.
Crawford lowered his hands slowly, watching Alex through that hazy screen of blue smoke. He was far too accustomed to the way things worked at home. Tourists saw the glitz and glamor of the city. But whenever you crammed that many people onto a small island with only a handful of exits, things were bound to get a little sticky. People said that even though the crime rate was the highest in general, it was lower than it seemed-on a per capita level. But Crawford knew that was utter bullshit. He didn’t know exact numbers, names or any hard-fact details. But there was no way all of the rapes and murders and robberies were being documented and accounted for. Not with the Senator and Osiris pulling so many strings. Osiris himself had many people disposed of that were never found, never reported, never accounted for.
It was a city of thugs and murderers with a thin layer of glitter and neon lights to distract the general populace. Crawford lived on the other side of that layer, and when one of these darker moods struck him, the look he had given Alexander had frightened off more than one weapon wielding would-be mugger. Too bad he didn’t know the sort of place that the other had come from. A place that would make even the darkest corners of Manhattan seem merely dim.
Everything hurt, having not taken a pill since the night before. But it went beyond physical pain. There was a tightness of his chest and his head that felt like a weight. Regret, guilt, shame, loneliness. All of those things he never took the time to find a way to cope with. They swirled in his head, turning everything sour. He just wanted to be alone to sort it out. And here was this strung out junkie-or so he thought-standing in his way of that. It didn’t matter if Alexander had been there first. He wanted the space. He could have just stepped down and left. And had he been a better mood, he would have. A rooftop was not worth a fight. But he just wanted to hurt something. He wanted to find the gods that had trapped him there, away from his brother, away from his mother’s grave, away from his friends. Away from the last remaining ties to his sanity and his final reasons to keep trying to survive. But gods were not easy to find, so he was going to have to take it all out on Alexander’s face.
As the sound of shatter glass rang through the hazy afternoon, Crawford threw the cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his boot. He dropped down into an offensive stance. One foot going back, hands coming up to chest level, fingers not quite curled into fists. “I’ll break you in half,” he growled. He was in no mood to wait around for an attack as he normally would. There was no longer a need to claim to have been provoked, or to have attacked out of self defense. The stance barely lasted as long as the words. With the final word barely gone from his lips, he dug his boots into the grimy and grit of the roof and hurled himself forward, toward Alex. Get him to the ground, was his only thought.
Chaos theory had taken on its own shape, and in that it was fluid. Formless. Undeniably misshapen and red, red, red as the world turned to liquid around him. Chaos. The whole fuckin’ world was chaos now. It was a tidal wave in a sea storm. A screaming maniac in a crashing airplane as it went down. Colliding with the earth. And all it was, was in his hands. In the hands of a man. That was the entrance to the chaos. Give a dog a gun and he thinks he can take on anything. Give him a bag of Molotov cocktails and he can sweep the entire fuckin’ city block in pillars of smoke and mortar.
Movements were brief. Inhibited. Moving. Towards. Forward. Blurred movements. Vision crowded with mist. Words stolen by an air of wind that picked up, maybe from the altitude, maybe. Maybe it was one of those damn gods. If they were here, watching this, drawing them in inconvenient locations... Well, wouldn’t that be just fuckin’ cute? Them watching, rooting on one or the other, or maybe hoping that the two dogs just rip each other’s throats out. That would be very much like them. Like anything of their color.
Sick fucks.
He stood. His feet planted. When he could collide with the bigger man, he would fall. But the way he held the broken end of the shattered liquor bottle, he wasn’t going down without the glass going in deep into the guy’s ribs. Down he would go and blood would go spurt and spray across the glass like a momentous piece of art. It was going to sting. The fall was going to hurt. For both of them, what did it matter?
What did it matter? Death wasn’t real in this place, anyway. They could fight until the end of the world and it wouldn’t matter. You just lose a memory. It’s just a memory. He could afford those. Even the happier ones. They were gone now, anyway. All of them gone along with the broken Link planted inside his fuckin’ screaming, sadistic, bugshit mad brain.
There were many memories Crawford could do with out. So many that he tried every day to escape. But there were others, others that kept him going. A small handful of people, events and memories with out which he would become little more than an empty husk. Unfortunately, the two were wound so close together, he couldn’t separate the bad from the good. And in some ways, the bad memories kept him going just as much as the good.
The broken glass cut through his sweatshirt as if it were tissue paper-and it might as well have been for how thin the thing was. His features twisted, not fully registering what was going on just yet. But his body responded, several steps ahead of his mind. His weight had not fully come down yet. Knees hit the rough mess of the roof, gnawing away at the denim over his legs. His body came forward as the glass bit deep. He pitched away from the pain, one shoulder aiming for the ground instead of all of it coming down at once.
He rolled away, tumbling, clutching at his side. He roared in pain as he came to rest on his back He didn’t bother to check the damage. Rage washed over him, forcing all else out. His hand found a long piece of wood, a sturdy timber that had not been ripped to splinters in whatever destroyed this place. Nails stuck out at odd angles. The heel of his hand caught one of these as he grabbed it, but it only fed into his aggression. Blood seeping from his side, he staggered to his feet, gripping the thing like a baseball bat.
He had no words. His features were drawn into a wild snarl, teeth exposed. He didn’t charge. Not yet. His stance was too unsteady.
Memories. Dreams. Life. Death. What did it matter anyway? In the end, it was all the same old bullshit. Everyone was going to the same place. There was no reason. No drive. No purpose to live. Except for that animal that crashed its sides and banged its bloody claws against its steel cage, ripping and snapping and shrieking.
If there was any window to his soul that could be open then, it would be that nameless screaming creature that demanded freedom. Instead it just fought within its prison as he held out the bottle. Sharp edges of the glass dripping with blood. Man’s blood. Piece of cloth clung to it. The grip did not let go even as he fell. Tumbled across the ground against the weight hurled against him. Knocking him sideways. Roll. Pain. Pain was good. There was blood. He could smell it. Hear it. Taste it in his mouth. He had bitten his lip upon the fall.
Head went smack against the pavement. Not there for much longer. Couldn’t stay down. The other had something. He had something... a plank. Swing and fast and sharp with nails jutted out at the end. Ooh, and it would hurt so bad, too; swung fast and hard enough to eject brains and scalp. Ooh. The animal let out something that sounded much like a laugh, or a grunt, as it swung its legs to stand rigid.
Nimble. Almost like a dancer. Once down. Now up. He stood.
In this city of piss and grime and blood and shit, death to honor and politics, a broken system, a shattered society... in the bedlam of the corrupt and the weak and the powerless, you stand there and you ask me my name. You’ve been hurt. You’ve been killed. You’ve been deceived. And in the end of it all you still ask me who I am. And when I watch each pillar of your sanity fall, by the smoke and worms I will greet you. Here, Alex, I will tell you who I am-
The face was not a face anymore, but a distortion of a lost society. Hand twisted back, the blood splaying off the tips of the broken bottle as the dog lunged forward with speed and agility that betrayed his apparent state of health. Glass ready to collide with that very dog’s face bearing his teeth at him.
scream and cry and beg
I AM THE FUCKING MONSTER IN YOU.
You can’t win; think it over again. The words rattled through his head as his eyes narrowed. I can’t win; look at the trouble I’m in. A song he didn’t have the mindset to recall the name of. Lyrics rolling through his head as easy as any soundtrack in the movies. We can’t win and we’re stuck here together. His fingers tightened on the board. Yeah, I hope it will last forever. The song rolled through his mind, unbidden. To him, it had no relevance. Nothing to do with the matter at hand. Music mattered more than words. He heard only the tones of the singer, carved deeply into his mind, the beat of the drums that came with it. The words were incidental to him then. The music at the back of his mind swelled as Alex charges him.
Had he been in a state of mind conducive to coherent thought, he would have thought the man’s sudden rush strange. No hesitation. But words were rapidly dissolving to gibberish. Words never carried their true meaning. Words were useless. He had no need for clear thoughts in complete sentences. Ideas. Bursts. Images. Impressions. His head was a buzz with all of them. Most of them bloody. And beyond the rambling music, which was always present in his head, there were no words.
Alex grew closer. He lifted the wood higher, tightening his grip. A batter watching the pitcher wind up. His feet slid further apart. He saw the dull winter light catch on the ragged edges of the bottle. It was just glass. Glass shattered. It sliced deep, but didn’t last long.
Dangerously close. He swung with all of his strength. It was a wild swing, as he had never trained himself in the art of aiming. The wound in his side robbed him of some of that strength, as the arc of the swing pulled hard at the still bleeding gash. Perhaps there was still glass in there, cutting deeper as he moved. But it was still a strong swing, enough to knock out any normal person. But Crawford had yet to realize: Alex was no normal person.
Music, while a dominating element in his existence, was blown away by the every-present throbbing in his brain, easily mistaken for the rhythmic war drum. Beat-beat. Beat-beat. Someone is laughing. Someone is laughing. They’re singing a sing-song laughter and their teeth are red-white. Nothing made sense except for the high-pitched shrieking of a song and it’s coming from the wind speed and distance...
Swing.
The blow impacted with full force. That much registered. Given the velocity, the pace, the stance, at level with the colliding blunt edge of the plank, it should have been enough to throw off any person. Kill them? Most likely. Blunt force trauma to the head. He’s seen it before. In fact, it was enough to invite trauma. The guy had the right idea in putting the dog down in one fell swoop. Would have been good.
That end impacted the pale-side of his face. Ringing out a dull CLANG
(clang?)
and then. Just. Nothing. His head reared back with the blow, his running charge hindered by the strike. That was not a throw that should have only staggered him back. It should have taken off a huge chunk of his skull altogether.
Staggering drunkenly, retreating a few paces, he caught balance. Equilibrium ready to give out. Then no. Still standing. Just barely. For awhile there was just that dead ringing that sang to him inside. Dead, forever gone, forever present. Here to stay, here to stay. Sing!
The bottle dropped. It clattered, pieces of glass chipped off as it rolled, rolled on away and was gone. There was some blood. A little of it, maybe more of it; his animal brain couldn’t be sure; it spattered across his forehead. The raw brunt made a mark across his face.
He hung there. Back in a catlike arch. Arms dangled deadlike, before his head slowly raised. Neck craned, as if each bone down his spinal cord made a crackling crack! sound. The bloodied face that should have been more mangled by that blow was not as badly misshapen if the impact had claimed any other part of his head. And then a slight, twist of a smile that was more of a monstrous sneer coming from the waste of an animal. Just another pile of shit to throw out. That’s all.
Clang.
As the sound rang through the air, leaving confusion in it’s wake. He’d heard all sorts of sounds made by people being hit by various things. Wet sounds, crunching sounds, cracking, snapping, ripping. The hard, wet slap of a fist pounding into a sweaty cheek. The right pipe, at the right angle to the skull might bring about a dull tone that sounded almost metallic. But a clang from nail-studded wood? The stun was apparent on his face, for as long as the sound lasted. That wasn’t natural.
But the rage that consumed him like a mad beast chased off the confusion. The sounds didn’t matter. What mattered was that the mutt was still standing. His hands stung from the impact. His forearms tingled from the vibrations of it. How was the man still standing? This needed to be fixed. Immediately.
He lurched forward, raising the piece of wood with both hands, hefting it straight over his head. “Just fucking die, already!” He yelled loud enough to be heard at ground level. The second strike was not nearly as solid as the first. He brought the thing straight down, his stance not as firm. No wind up. No anticipation. The wild flailing of a furious man, desperate to be rid of an irritating insect. At least the stinger had been removed.
PART TWO
Source: (Age 33) Trial By Fire (Log: Rev, Sara, Jen)
Summary: Still convincing himself that this isn’t much more than a dream or a bad trip, Alexander decides to test out a certain theory. Crawford comes along and helps out with that. The only way Crawford knows how.
Rating: R for language, an epic fail attempt at suicide, and graphic violence-Crawford and Alexander style.
In layman’s terms, the chaos theory would basically be a random, impossibly unpredictable happening that couldn’t be precedent in any way. There was all this complicated and mathematical shit that his professor babbled on about back in college, but Alexander got a better idea on the theory from his own experience.
There was this girl Alexander knew back in high school. Sweet girl, nice ass. Lousy in bed. One time she told him that, while walking on her way home from the bus stop, she wound up getting hit by lightning. She stumbled, picked up her bag, and started running, when she was hit by yet another bolt of lightning. Staggering towards the last block home, a third bolt hit her. Hell, what Alexander wouldn’t give to be struck by lightning only once, just to know what it felt like... but no. Not only that, but when this girl, she went to have herself checked out at the hospital, and as it turned out, the one they assigned her to was a Dr. Struck.
If there were such a thing as Fate, bet she’d be fuckin’ laughin’ her ass off at that one.
Alexander coughed, which could have been easily mistaken for being a scoff.
All right, all right. So a better example would be that that same girl died six months later. But not from the aftermath of having been struck by lightning three times. No sir. Imagine she was out taking the trash while in an alleyway when, unexpectedly, her bracelet falls off, rolling behind the dumpster. Cursing and spitting at her dumb luck, she squeezes behind the dumpster. In that unanticipated moment, a drunk driver comes by while the girl is scuffling sideways between the building. Taps the dumpster. Just barely. But enough that two thousand pounds pushed the weight of the five hundred fuckin’ jaws of death, crushed that poor girl’s spine. She falls over and tumbles into the mouth, into a pile of garbage, so that when the cops came to the scene they were investigating a murder and not some poor bitch having the worst fuckin’ day of her life.
Now, imagine this: The odds of some guy like him, just another fucked up average steck, landing himself up in a city with gods whose idea of a good time was a panty raid and angels who dressed like fuckin’ bondage kings from the Queen’s Club back at home. That wasn’t something anyone could anticipate, except that Alexander happened to be a steck that was a magnet to these kinds of fucked up things. He just couldn’t get away. Story of his life.
“‘Kay, so, for the sake of the argument, let’s just say for this one fuckin’ moment that I’m not dreamin’.”
Talking to himself. That was a surefire way of proving his sanity. At least when alone, it seemed like a saner thing to do. Especially after downing a few gulps of the Southern Comfort that the damned leprechaun had given him the other week. Alexander took up the bottle, drank some more, forced a watery cough and then staggered over the ledge of the rooftop off a building he had climbed his way up upon. He could see Zelda’s housing from way up here.
Hell, he was surprised he managed to make it all the way up here without getting his ass killed by one of those things. He’d seen them on the streets. There were plenty of them around.
Everything seemed all too surreal to be real. Like a dream. But if this were a dream, then would Alexander have any idea that it was? Most dreams you don’t fall into and think Hey, I’m in a dream! Unless this were a lucid one, that is, in which case it’d make more sense, but...
“Let’s say I’m wide fuckin’ awake and this is actually at least a fifty foot drop.” Pause. If he was trying to consider suicide, he was going to have to give this some thought, after all. “Given the speed and distance, it might not even be enough to kill you. You’d need higher ground.” He looked down and took a swig of the Southern Comfort, briefly made a face, and looked down. “Dumbass.”
He jumped down from the ledge, landing not so gracefully on the floor of the rooftop. His legs faltered. Yeah, he was drunk, and yeah, he was contemplating the physics of a drop that would kill him so he could mull over suicide in a dream.
“Theoretically, it’s impossible to die in your dream. You either wake up or...” He scratched the back of his head while he walked around the rooftop, carrying the mostly-empty bottle of booze. “Or it just winds up shifting scenes.”
Alexander was no expert in dreams. Was never part of his study. But it didn’t have to be in order for Alexander to kind of understand the obvious that betrayed him. A normal dream wouldn’t be so linear like this. It would be shifting. It would change. He would be alternating from place to place to place. Changeover. Scene cut.
“Sssooo in that case... It’s a random chance. You’re actually up on the rooftop in the middle of fuckin’ No-Manville. There’re angels here. This is Hell. Think I’m startin’ to get it.” He looked up at the darkening, afternoon sky and downed the last bit of his St. Patrick’s drink. That a leprechaun gave him. His lip twitched as the aftertaste hit him. A leprechaun gave him this drink. This drink was given to him by a little green man on St. Patrick’s Day. “...I don’t get any of this shit.”
Not one bit.
Alexander turned his head a moment, covering his mouth while he coughed. He was still tending to his own injuries since he had first arrived. His clothes were still raggedy; he bathed, but didn’t feel like finding anything new. Same damn jeans, same damn turtleneck, same damn shoes. These were his world-walkin’ shoes and he wasn’t going to change it.
Well, if this was a dream, it sure as hell was a pretty long, drawn out one, and his subconscious had a way of fuckin’ with him in that case. Wouldn’t be the first time it’d done that. It would be possible if he were back in Delial Park, drugged up by his brother. “Hell, would it be possible to even get drunk in a dream?” He glanced at the empty bottle he now had in his hands. The words wouldn’t stay still. Alexander blinked his bleary eyes and shook his head. If he was sober, he sure as hell wouldn’t be talking like a goddamn psychotic on the rooftop of some building in attempt to rationalize suicide in a dream. “Well, if it ain’t... sure as hell crazy enough to be a dream.”
March 23rd. It was never a good day for Crawford. Even if he had not realized the date had been looming so close, it had been a dark cloud over his already sour mood all week. With everything that had happened, the actual date itself had slipped his mind. But after nearly twenty years, the date was engraved deeply upon his mind and soul. It wasn’t until the unfortunate comment from Yuusuke that he even realized the date. The fact that he had not been consciously aware of it only made things worse.
He should have been angry, he should have punched holes in the walls. He should have gotten so drunk he couldn’t remember his own name. But he couldn’t do any of those things. He couldn’t destroy his room when Zelda had been so kind to give it to him. Remembering that day with her, that they had come here, only made things worse. She knew what weakness lurked inside him. And despite that, he just wanted that feeling back. The feeling he’d had when his mother kissed his scraped knee. The felling when Zelda knelt to help him after the flashback. That flooding relief of ‘everything will be alright’ in a way only a mother can provide.
That left getting drunk, and there were only two options of that. One had strippers, and he would not go near that. The other had Lucifer. Despite his attitude, he would not go near that place, either. Lucifer scared him. Not because the man was Lucifer but because the man made him feel inadequate. Not only could the man easily make good on threats to smite him, but he could protect his own brother for anything and everything in existence. While Crawford was struggling to protect his own from just one man.
That left him with very few options. There was really only one thing he could do.
That night, he shut off the communicator and stayed in his room. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t take his pills. For once, he wanted to feel it. All of those aches and pains, the painful way the scars pulled and rubbed. The discomfort of nicotine withdrawal. He should not have slept. Such behavior kept him awake all night, but he found himself falling asleep and he found himself having the strangest dream. He only played a small part, in plucking a rose from a vast field of the same. It had no significance to him, until he began to hear squabbling about the dream. That provided a temporary distraction, but it wasn’t enough.
He went out.
Lingering outside his room, he had a cigarette. That was never one that lasted long for him, because he always had them in his pockets. The pills were easier to avoid. He had left them in his bag, in his room.
He missed the city. Where he could get so high he could no longer make out people on the street. Things made more sense up there, where you could see to the horizon. Where the wind always seemed stronger and colder than on the ground. This building wasn’t nearly tall enough. But it was one of the tallest he could see, and that was good enough for now. He just needed to get his head cleared. To get himself straightened out, so he could focus on what really mattered.
But as he pulled himself onto the roof, he found it was not exactly empty. The crack head that he had seen at the fountain a week prior. In realizing who it was, he just grumbled, “....figures...”
The chaos theory further seemed to prove itself applicable in a setup such as this: In which the odds of Alexander finding himself in the unwanted, absolutely undesired company of his fellow not-so-appealing man. Of all the rooftops in this city, of all the people to have come across, it truly was a small world. Or a small city. Or whatever the hell this place was to begin with. Whatever it was, it was something that Alexander couldn’t even begin to describe. So he stuck with the chaos theory of arbitrariness instead. He much preferred that one much better.
Not to mention the way the guy looked at Alexander... Hell, a lot of people looked at him funny. Alexander was a sight for sore eyes, so to speak. He knew how this must have looked to a lot of people, and he couldn’t care less. He was far from healthy looking. Emaciated beneath the worn and tattered clothing, shrunken skin so dry it could have peeled clean off, pupils that never did dilate right even when being in the right light... Sometimes it hurt to even move.
On some nights, he couldn’t sleep. He wished he hadn’t sleep the night prior. The wakefulness was sobering. The Southern Comfort was not. It also wouldn’t help keep what food he had taken in his stomach when he would start vomiting up blood hours afterwards. That was always an appealing trait.
If he stuck with his good dream premise, it at least made himself feel better if anything, even if it was wrong. If it wasn’t a dream, then, well, death wasn’t real in this place anyway. Still, that didn’t mean he was looking forward to rushing to it either way. The idea alone made him feel uneasy. Dreams were dreams. Death was real on the outside of it, but it certainly wasn’t in a place like this, so, then, it couldn’t be real. In real life, there was no reset button, no do-over. What’s done was done.
That’s how it worked. If there was a reset button, maybe he’d have gone far back. So far back. Too far back.
Back to the desert before he was even born.
Now those were also sobering thoughts that Alexander could deal without. Heh. Well. What a depressing matter. Certainly didn’t help with the unwanted company up on the roof. What was this guy’s name again? Crawfish? Crawdad? Something like that. Alexander was never really good with any names. Didn’t help the fact that he had a horrible sense of memory. Oh well.
Still, his presence here, in this way-up place, made Alexander uneasy. It was bad enough being up here with his own drunken thoughts. It was another having to deal with a maniac who seemed to solve his problems punching the teeth out of every man in sight. Yeah, Alexander knew the type. He was practically raised around the type. He also knew they were the type to walk all the fuck over you if you didn’t want your ground.
“Dibs. I was fuckin’ here first.”
A little annoyed, Alexander stumbled over to the ledge of the rooftop and took a seat. That Crawfish guy looked even less pleased to see him here. Wishful thinking said that it would be a nice thing if he just turned and walked away. Find some other rooftop, why don’t you? But Magic 8-Ball says that the sources were not so likely.
Goddamn. What was he doing, thinking about all of this after downing a quarter of a bottle of what remained of Southern Comfort? This place really must’ve been Hell after all if he could hold his alcohol intake as well as this.
Feet crunching on the slush and debris that had collected on the flat surface, Crawford didn’t go far. It may have warmed up enough for the snow to melt most of the way, but it was still cold. And, like anyone else who had spent more than ten years abusing their bodies with physical trauma and loading it full of their addictions, he ached. Joints stiffened, tendons complained, tender flesh turned to ground up glass. He didn’t mind, right now. It helped keep his head clear. But the idea of climbing back down was not appealing.
He stayed near the access point, for now, watching Alex with a cold, hard gaze. So far, he had only met three people that didn’t hesitate when he looked at them like that. And two of them weren’t human. In fact, one of them claimed reign over the infernal realm of eternal damnation, so no surprise there. It was look of pure hatred. But it went behind even that. It was the look of someone accustomed to standing their ground, regardless of circumstance. Of someone who had given far more than they should have been able to give, left empty inside. Then again, he’d never had reason to use such a look on someone of such similar lot in life. The redhead was very much unaware of just how much the two had in common, down to substance abuse and fearing others seeing what their bodies had become.
Pulling from his pocket a rather crumpled thing that had once been a thin cardboard box.Shaking it, he peered down at it to find only three little sticks left. He had one more pack and then he was out of luck. Others smoked. There had to be someone with a supply. Deciding ‘screw it,’ he pulled one out and put the others back into his pocket. Next came a lighter, as he pushed the thing between his lips. The lighter was an old, beaten up Zippo. Rather plain, silver, save for a four leaf clover etched into the bottom corner on the front. Flicking the thing, he lit the end of the cigarette and inhaled deeply before at last looking back to Alexander.
He had wanted to be alone, with his thoughts. Alone in a place that he didn’t need to worry about being seen, or worry about someone finding out. Maybe that was part of the torture of this place. Being alone was impossible. And if you got away from the people, there was some sort of nasty creature lurking in the shadows.
“You could leave,” he said gruffly, moving closer to the center of the roof, “Or I can help ya find your way down. Can’t guarantee a safe landing, though.”
That look was far from being unfamiliar; Alexander knew it all too well. There had even once been a time where he was surrounded by them. Killer’s gaze, killer’s hands. Someone who wouldn’t take back on their words when they said they were going to slit your throat. Yeah, he knew those types. Dangerous fucks. Not forces to be reckoned with if you could help it. Oftentimes in the past, though, Alexander found himself on the other end of that reckoning.
On the other hand, rolling over and just letting them push you around wasn’t ever a good idea, either. Showed that they had control over you. Give ‘em that control, they’ll use it. Again and again. Alexander had spent enough years on the streets of Ophelia, been to enough riots and bar fights and street fights to know your enemy first. When Alexander looked into that face, it was almost like being back home again. Almost comforting, in that there’s-no-place-like-home sort of way.
If only home wasn’t the kind of place that involved getting your stomach pumped full of lead. Running. Fighting. Each day a battle towards hunger and decadence. And yet humans, stubborn and stupid as they all were, still struggled on and on for survival.
dont cry dont feel you wont die anyway not here
He paused a moment, eyes on the cigarette and lighter. Christ, it had been awhile since he last had a smoke. Finding one back at home wasn’t easy, either. Same thing with finding good rum that didn’t always taste like fermented piss and moldy socks mixed with stagnant water. There weren’t that many things in Ophelia that could necessarily be considered a delicacy.
Dumbass. Stand your ground you piece of shit. He said nothing of it, though. His addictions, or his vices-the slow-killing cancer. A piece of that was already eating him up inside, and it showed. Alexander didn’t look much. He looked like he could barely hold his own body parts together.
“Or you could find some other roof and leave me the fuck alone.” To him and in Alexander logic, it made sense. Finder’s keepers. First come, first serve. He wasn’t in the mood for being the crumbling, panicky, wired dumbass that most people took him for at this point. Today would be a nice day, confrontation-free. As that usually went, through, the prospect did not seem to be so likely anymore.
The lighter was slipped back into his pocket as Alexander answered him. Crawford had never been the one for killing. At least, not before coming to this place. Back home, he always managed to find that last flicker of restraint, just enough to let go of the man before bashing his head into the wall one last time. Assault was swept under the rug easily. The evidence was washed away when the victim was rushed to the hospital. Memories got fuzzy. Bar fights happened. Murder wasn’t so easily excused. It had crossed his mind more than once. Give the old man a heart attack by landing himself in prison for murder. The shame would at least ensure the man never got elected again. But it would all be taken out on Donavin, and he could never do that. Now that he was here, if he were to kill someone, would it matter back home? There were constant flickers, here and there things that made him question this places. At the back of his mind, there was this looming notion that perhaps it was all just a mass hallucination. He kept seeing people that struck him as familiar. That John guy from the river looked like someone he knew. And just the other day, he’d thought he’d seen Nick-the only other person Donavin trusted. The blond kid was certainly loud and hyper enough, but in the end, it wasn’t him. But he found himself asking: what if it was? Was he just seeing the world through some strange filter?
But by now, all of this was far from his mind. Trying to puzzle it all out made his head ache. So he decided he was going to just ignore the hallucination idea. Alexander certainly had the market on that one. Anyway, if this were just the world through a filter, there would be a way out, and the town would be much, much larger. Manhattan, though only a few miles in either direction, was massive both in size and scope. Where all the pleasures of everything were available to anyone who could pay for it. He had once heard tell of a strange club in which rich boys, usually teenagers or young twenties, would pay large sums of cash to be beaten up. So they could experience it, someone had said. Crawford had responded with something along the lines of being willing to do it for free, just to say he had done it.
With the date weighing heavily on him, Crawford just wanted a distraction. And as much as he despised the man, on sheer principle, he was glad he refused to leave. A perfect opportunity for a fight. Pressing one fist against the other palm, he gave his knuckles a loud crack. “Have it your way, then,” he growled around the cigarette between his lips before tugging it out just long enough to exhale a blue gray cloud. Replacing it, he moved slowly closer toward Alexander.
More often than most, Alexander had a tendency to act with suicidal inclinations. His lack of concern for this guy who was clearly much bigger and much more adapt in the strength department, proved to be one of them. Survival, on the other hand, had always taken a higher place. It was the reason he was even alive. That preemptive instinct that kicked in, like having your head thrown under water and you’re flailing, thrashing, gasping for air only to have the water boiling and filling your lungs.
Death wasn’t anything new. Pain certainly wasn’t anything new. Alexander had nearly drowned once. He had been shot, stabbed, beaten to a point where he could have been considered clinically dead for a good long while if only he had ever cared enough to consider it. He didn’t buy into the idea that death was not real in this place, assuming if he was actually lucid. He knew what it was like.
Maybe, when you get down to it, this was all back to the whole dream theory again. Pain and death did not exist in dreams. You wake up shortly beforehand. Alexander was still here. He was still dreaming. He was not awake yet.
While not much of a fighter, in dreams or in the waking world, there was that lingering primal instinct. Like an override in a computer program, except he was only human. Alexander did what he needed to survive. Even if it meant killing someone, he had always done what he could. And Christ knows no one could live in Ophelia without the killing and the death. Alexander practically drowned himself in it every day.
Which was why, as Crawford started suddenly approaching, the front had changed. They were not men. To him, they were dogs. Bearing vicious teeth and snarled and snapped. One pounding his fists together in the initiative steps. The other making what appeared to be a shuffle away, retreating with his hand bent slightly behind him.
Debris. There was plenty of it in this place. Practically covered the entire damned rooftop. His eye caught a glimpse of something, until Alexander then considered the bottle he had in hand. Sharp. Glass. Glass cuts nicely. It would do. It wasn’t his dagger, which he hadn’t seen for a long, eight years... but it would do.
Glass shattered with a nice little ringing clash as Alexander smashed the bottle against the ledge of the rooftop, holding it at his side with an offensive approach. His eyes did not change. Because Alexander was an Ophelian, and no one from that place could be considered remotely human. Morals and instincts went beyond that. Right now, he was a dog of Ophelia, with fangs bore and there they were, each sharp, shimmering teeth, in his hand. Come and get it, Sparky.
Crawford lowered his hands slowly, watching Alex through that hazy screen of blue smoke. He was far too accustomed to the way things worked at home. Tourists saw the glitz and glamor of the city. But whenever you crammed that many people onto a small island with only a handful of exits, things were bound to get a little sticky. People said that even though the crime rate was the highest in general, it was lower than it seemed-on a per capita level. But Crawford knew that was utter bullshit. He didn’t know exact numbers, names or any hard-fact details. But there was no way all of the rapes and murders and robberies were being documented and accounted for. Not with the Senator and Osiris pulling so many strings. Osiris himself had many people disposed of that were never found, never reported, never accounted for.
It was a city of thugs and murderers with a thin layer of glitter and neon lights to distract the general populace. Crawford lived on the other side of that layer, and when one of these darker moods struck him, the look he had given Alexander had frightened off more than one weapon wielding would-be mugger. Too bad he didn’t know the sort of place that the other had come from. A place that would make even the darkest corners of Manhattan seem merely dim.
Everything hurt, having not taken a pill since the night before. But it went beyond physical pain. There was a tightness of his chest and his head that felt like a weight. Regret, guilt, shame, loneliness. All of those things he never took the time to find a way to cope with. They swirled in his head, turning everything sour. He just wanted to be alone to sort it out. And here was this strung out junkie-or so he thought-standing in his way of that. It didn’t matter if Alexander had been there first. He wanted the space. He could have just stepped down and left. And had he been a better mood, he would have. A rooftop was not worth a fight. But he just wanted to hurt something. He wanted to find the gods that had trapped him there, away from his brother, away from his mother’s grave, away from his friends. Away from the last remaining ties to his sanity and his final reasons to keep trying to survive. But gods were not easy to find, so he was going to have to take it all out on Alexander’s face.
As the sound of shatter glass rang through the hazy afternoon, Crawford threw the cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his boot. He dropped down into an offensive stance. One foot going back, hands coming up to chest level, fingers not quite curled into fists. “I’ll break you in half,” he growled. He was in no mood to wait around for an attack as he normally would. There was no longer a need to claim to have been provoked, or to have attacked out of self defense. The stance barely lasted as long as the words. With the final word barely gone from his lips, he dug his boots into the grimy and grit of the roof and hurled himself forward, toward Alex. Get him to the ground, was his only thought.
Chaos theory had taken on its own shape, and in that it was fluid. Formless. Undeniably misshapen and red, red, red as the world turned to liquid around him. Chaos. The whole fuckin’ world was chaos now. It was a tidal wave in a sea storm. A screaming maniac in a crashing airplane as it went down. Colliding with the earth. And all it was, was in his hands. In the hands of a man. That was the entrance to the chaos. Give a dog a gun and he thinks he can take on anything. Give him a bag of Molotov cocktails and he can sweep the entire fuckin’ city block in pillars of smoke and mortar.
Movements were brief. Inhibited. Moving. Towards. Forward. Blurred movements. Vision crowded with mist. Words stolen by an air of wind that picked up, maybe from the altitude, maybe. Maybe it was one of those damn gods. If they were here, watching this, drawing them in inconvenient locations... Well, wouldn’t that be just fuckin’ cute? Them watching, rooting on one or the other, or maybe hoping that the two dogs just rip each other’s throats out. That would be very much like them. Like anything of their color.
Sick fucks.
He stood. His feet planted. When he could collide with the bigger man, he would fall. But the way he held the broken end of the shattered liquor bottle, he wasn’t going down without the glass going in deep into the guy’s ribs. Down he would go and blood would go spurt and spray across the glass like a momentous piece of art. It was going to sting. The fall was going to hurt. For both of them, what did it matter?
What did it matter? Death wasn’t real in this place, anyway. They could fight until the end of the world and it wouldn’t matter. You just lose a memory. It’s just a memory. He could afford those. Even the happier ones. They were gone now, anyway. All of them gone along with the broken Link planted inside his fuckin’ screaming, sadistic, bugshit mad brain.
There were many memories Crawford could do with out. So many that he tried every day to escape. But there were others, others that kept him going. A small handful of people, events and memories with out which he would become little more than an empty husk. Unfortunately, the two were wound so close together, he couldn’t separate the bad from the good. And in some ways, the bad memories kept him going just as much as the good.
The broken glass cut through his sweatshirt as if it were tissue paper-and it might as well have been for how thin the thing was. His features twisted, not fully registering what was going on just yet. But his body responded, several steps ahead of his mind. His weight had not fully come down yet. Knees hit the rough mess of the roof, gnawing away at the denim over his legs. His body came forward as the glass bit deep. He pitched away from the pain, one shoulder aiming for the ground instead of all of it coming down at once.
He rolled away, tumbling, clutching at his side. He roared in pain as he came to rest on his back He didn’t bother to check the damage. Rage washed over him, forcing all else out. His hand found a long piece of wood, a sturdy timber that had not been ripped to splinters in whatever destroyed this place. Nails stuck out at odd angles. The heel of his hand caught one of these as he grabbed it, but it only fed into his aggression. Blood seeping from his side, he staggered to his feet, gripping the thing like a baseball bat.
He had no words. His features were drawn into a wild snarl, teeth exposed. He didn’t charge. Not yet. His stance was too unsteady.
Memories. Dreams. Life. Death. What did it matter anyway? In the end, it was all the same old bullshit. Everyone was going to the same place. There was no reason. No drive. No purpose to live. Except for that animal that crashed its sides and banged its bloody claws against its steel cage, ripping and snapping and shrieking.
If there was any window to his soul that could be open then, it would be that nameless screaming creature that demanded freedom. Instead it just fought within its prison as he held out the bottle. Sharp edges of the glass dripping with blood. Man’s blood. Piece of cloth clung to it. The grip did not let go even as he fell. Tumbled across the ground against the weight hurled against him. Knocking him sideways. Roll. Pain. Pain was good. There was blood. He could smell it. Hear it. Taste it in his mouth. He had bitten his lip upon the fall.
Head went smack against the pavement. Not there for much longer. Couldn’t stay down. The other had something. He had something... a plank. Swing and fast and sharp with nails jutted out at the end. Ooh, and it would hurt so bad, too; swung fast and hard enough to eject brains and scalp. Ooh. The animal let out something that sounded much like a laugh, or a grunt, as it swung its legs to stand rigid.
Nimble. Almost like a dancer. Once down. Now up. He stood.
In this city of piss and grime and blood and shit, death to honor and politics, a broken system, a shattered society... in the bedlam of the corrupt and the weak and the powerless, you stand there and you ask me my name. You’ve been hurt. You’ve been killed. You’ve been deceived. And in the end of it all you still ask me who I am. And when I watch each pillar of your sanity fall, by the smoke and worms I will greet you. Here, Alex, I will tell you who I am-
The face was not a face anymore, but a distortion of a lost society. Hand twisted back, the blood splaying off the tips of the broken bottle as the dog lunged forward with speed and agility that betrayed his apparent state of health. Glass ready to collide with that very dog’s face bearing his teeth at him.
scream and cry and beg
I AM THE FUCKING MONSTER IN YOU.
You can’t win; think it over again. The words rattled through his head as his eyes narrowed. I can’t win; look at the trouble I’m in. A song he didn’t have the mindset to recall the name of. Lyrics rolling through his head as easy as any soundtrack in the movies. We can’t win and we’re stuck here together. His fingers tightened on the board. Yeah, I hope it will last forever. The song rolled through his mind, unbidden. To him, it had no relevance. Nothing to do with the matter at hand. Music mattered more than words. He heard only the tones of the singer, carved deeply into his mind, the beat of the drums that came with it. The words were incidental to him then. The music at the back of his mind swelled as Alex charges him.
Had he been in a state of mind conducive to coherent thought, he would have thought the man’s sudden rush strange. No hesitation. But words were rapidly dissolving to gibberish. Words never carried their true meaning. Words were useless. He had no need for clear thoughts in complete sentences. Ideas. Bursts. Images. Impressions. His head was a buzz with all of them. Most of them bloody. And beyond the rambling music, which was always present in his head, there were no words.
Alex grew closer. He lifted the wood higher, tightening his grip. A batter watching the pitcher wind up. His feet slid further apart. He saw the dull winter light catch on the ragged edges of the bottle. It was just glass. Glass shattered. It sliced deep, but didn’t last long.
Dangerously close. He swung with all of his strength. It was a wild swing, as he had never trained himself in the art of aiming. The wound in his side robbed him of some of that strength, as the arc of the swing pulled hard at the still bleeding gash. Perhaps there was still glass in there, cutting deeper as he moved. But it was still a strong swing, enough to knock out any normal person. But Crawford had yet to realize: Alex was no normal person.
Music, while a dominating element in his existence, was blown away by the every-present throbbing in his brain, easily mistaken for the rhythmic war drum. Beat-beat. Beat-beat. Someone is laughing. Someone is laughing. They’re singing a sing-song laughter and their teeth are red-white. Nothing made sense except for the high-pitched shrieking of a song and it’s coming from the wind speed and distance...
Swing.
The blow impacted with full force. That much registered. Given the velocity, the pace, the stance, at level with the colliding blunt edge of the plank, it should have been enough to throw off any person. Kill them? Most likely. Blunt force trauma to the head. He’s seen it before. In fact, it was enough to invite trauma. The guy had the right idea in putting the dog down in one fell swoop. Would have been good.
That end impacted the pale-side of his face. Ringing out a dull CLANG
(clang?)
and then. Just. Nothing. His head reared back with the blow, his running charge hindered by the strike. That was not a throw that should have only staggered him back. It should have taken off a huge chunk of his skull altogether.
Staggering drunkenly, retreating a few paces, he caught balance. Equilibrium ready to give out. Then no. Still standing. Just barely. For awhile there was just that dead ringing that sang to him inside. Dead, forever gone, forever present. Here to stay, here to stay. Sing!
The bottle dropped. It clattered, pieces of glass chipped off as it rolled, rolled on away and was gone. There was some blood. A little of it, maybe more of it; his animal brain couldn’t be sure; it spattered across his forehead. The raw brunt made a mark across his face.
He hung there. Back in a catlike arch. Arms dangled deadlike, before his head slowly raised. Neck craned, as if each bone down his spinal cord made a crackling crack! sound. The bloodied face that should have been more mangled by that blow was not as badly misshapen if the impact had claimed any other part of his head. And then a slight, twist of a smile that was more of a monstrous sneer coming from the waste of an animal. Just another pile of shit to throw out. That’s all.
Clang.
As the sound rang through the air, leaving confusion in it’s wake. He’d heard all sorts of sounds made by people being hit by various things. Wet sounds, crunching sounds, cracking, snapping, ripping. The hard, wet slap of a fist pounding into a sweaty cheek. The right pipe, at the right angle to the skull might bring about a dull tone that sounded almost metallic. But a clang from nail-studded wood? The stun was apparent on his face, for as long as the sound lasted. That wasn’t natural.
But the rage that consumed him like a mad beast chased off the confusion. The sounds didn’t matter. What mattered was that the mutt was still standing. His hands stung from the impact. His forearms tingled from the vibrations of it. How was the man still standing? This needed to be fixed. Immediately.
He lurched forward, raising the piece of wood with both hands, hefting it straight over his head. “Just fucking die, already!” He yelled loud enough to be heard at ground level. The second strike was not nearly as solid as the first. He brought the thing straight down, his stance not as firm. No wind up. No anticipation. The wild flailing of a furious man, desperate to be rid of an irritating insect. At least the stinger had been removed.
PART TWO