Survivin' - [B.C.]

Chapter 32: Strange Breed

The muscles in my cheeks twitched as I started playing.

"I want to turn everything upside down..."

========= SURVIVIN' =========

So freeze the frame: it's about 11:00 PM and the Cumberbatch Mansion is full to its trim with all sorts of celebrities and friends of Ben and Sophie that I didn't even know they had. There are LED lights everywhere, displaying strobing light shows and making very hard to fight off oncoming headaches. But everyone here is happy, and it was starting to rub off on me, too.

I was only on about my fifth Shirley temple, while everyone else, of course, had their various alcoholic drinks. I think it was the first ever legit adult party I'd ever been included in. When I was younger, my dad would have some work parties that he would always go to, but my mom and I would only be there long enough to pick him up and drop him off, save for the few times that he would endearingly introduce me to his co-workers.

Speaking of, most of our guests now were enthralled with the prospect of Ben and Sophie having a child around. Not even a baby who you could never converse with, but a fully-fledged teenager. I kept getting handfuls of new people who would come up, we'd introduce ourselves, and then they would basically interrogate me. How I was, how I liked living with Ben and Sophie, and how I got my cannula. All sorts of questions that made me feel like I was on trial. Even with all the things I was telling these strange new people, what kept occurring to me in the back of my mind was the fact that the three of us had done a total mood switch; we went from grieving and fighting to partying and laughing like the entire half of a year we spent together was half of a lifetime ago. And maybe it was. Blinded by the light of the promise of a new life, I'd lost the ability to count.

I hung around Martin mostly, being he was the closest with Ben and Sophie since the filming of Sherlock, and he felt the most like family. He didn't even mind that I was clinging to him like a lost puppy — he didn't seem like it, at least. We stuck together and made our rounds, bopping our head to the music and high-fiving each other when something rad happened. And when Mr. Brightside came on, the two of us gave each other these knowing looks and simultaneously said "oh yeah."

"Hold my drink," Martin yelled at someone over the music. Without saying anything, I quickly did the same and he and I began to bounce and head bang furiously to the music.

"Coming outta my cage, and I've been doing just fine
Gotta gotta be down because I want it all
It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this?
It was only a kiss, it was only a kiss..."

Martin and I screamed the lyrics and we did various hand signs and pumped them through the air as we jumped. I felt like projectile vomiting, but it was very fun.

When the song was over, everyone in our immediate vicinity gave loud whoop-whoops for us. We definitely showed the most spirit out of the lot of them. The spirit didn't end there, though.

At around 11:45, the music lowered (much to everyone's dismay) and I started to notice Ben out of the corner of my eye grabbing a chair and dragging it to the middle of the foyer. Me and Martin were sitting halfway up the stairs by this point, so we got a great view of him once he stood on top of said chair.

"What the hell is he doing...?" Martin muttered.

"Everybody, everybody!" The people crowded in the foyer all looked up at Ben, who now had one arm raised that held a barren wine glass. He lifted the other to beat this wine glass with a fork, which gathered the attention of the others who hadn't already looked his way. A certain sort of dread filled a pit in my stomach as I worried what he could possibly say, and I'm sure Martin felt the same thing. Sophie filed into place next to her husband and watched him with a knowing smile on her face.