Audemus Dawnspark

4. Dessert

He gets a suite out of habit and because what's the point of money unless you can throw it away on frivolities? Doesn't intend to share the room with anyone, and doesn't mean to stay longer than a night, but the amenities are nice and there's always a balcony in case he wants to throw himself off of it later.

Two things are set aside, the room’s selection of herbal teas and coffees dumped into the trash so he can make use of the tray they are arranged on. Just him, alone, third wheel to this pretty little pairing for his ugly little conscience. A metal tin, four little sachets of powder within, and the small blue vial. There’s a nebulous reminder flitting in the back of his mind to take as directed for the sake of his health and, yes, here it comes, the monster of his distinct lack of self-preservation that has picked up on the scent. Four of them now.

Now it’s a party.

He pries up the wax sigil that acts as a seal on this vial and studies it. Meaningless, but, curious, and he’s nothing if not a slave to his inquisitiveness; tucks this away in his belongings along with her card, wolf and raven, because he knows he won’t have the wherewithal to do it later. Two tablespoons. No spoons available, but he does have two eyes: it’ll do.

The blue of the bottle lifted to his lips reminds him of the late afternoon sky (cloudless, breezy), of the Tol Barad shoreline (dark ocean, jagged rocks), of the veins in his wrist (pulsing, hungry) that catch his eye as he swallows down the tincture. Two tablespoons, more or less.

Chemically induced serenity, good, good, his haze of despondency bleeding away into giddy amusement. Strips himself nearly bare in front of a floor-length mirror, down to tussore silk breeches and nothing else, even rids himself of his nagging little companion of a sling. His eyes are drawn to the perfectly-done row of imperfections marring his flesh: sutured shut line along his right clavicle, ever-present reminder of something that had seemed like quite a good idea at the time but now he’s not so sure because when has he ever been one for heroics?

Black stitches like the barbed wire of a shepherd’s pen, four lost little sheep that need to be guided home (what, or where, is home?) but he can’t even guide himself towards a path that doesn’t involve self-destruction, fuck, he’s the one lighting the way. He plucks a stitch from his flesh that’s not ready to be taken.

He thinks of her wolfish smile. A grin that is all teeth and no soul, thinks of her words — won’t feel it unless someone punches you. So, he does just that. It hurts.

A reminder of his illusory fortitude.

But he’s got just the thing for that, right? Iridescent powder calls to him, neat little rows of it, and it’s only five or ten or twenty iterations of just a little more.

Snarls at the housekeeper that interrupts somewhere in between — only doing her job, expected the room to be vacant after a single stay — and is throwing profanities and gold to get her out out out. It’s a very belated realization that the night has been impossibly long because it’s not night anymore.

Tomorrow, or tomorrow’s tomorrow, he’ll have ridden out the crash and wash up on the shore of temporary sobriety. Bathe, fence one of his luridly expensive pieces of jewelry so he has a plausible reason for his disappearance in monetary form. Evidence of this lapse of judgement hidden, accounted for.

Nobody needs to know.