Love Me, Harm Me

(I wish) I knew Better

"you are, I know better
you are pieces of cork floating in the wine glass
you are the morning after
whose name I can't remember
still in my bed" - Exit wound, Jeanann Verlee

.☀.🌑.☀.🌑.

For too long he sat there, downing gulp after gulp, bleary-eyed and logic hazed. An empty glass. A full bottle. Another thirty minutes spent trying to blank it all out.

More and more, block it out, drown it out - erase every trace of it all. Soon there was nothing but a foggy, heady daze in his mind, clouding his thoughts and jumbling his memories into flimsy veils of mist. Just how he liked it; just how he needed it to be in order to forget about her. Drown her out.

Silver smiles and gentle hands. Slippery voices and playful nudges. Meaningless words, actions that have so much more weight than she'd ever believe. All of her, every little damn thing, was blocked out by the haze, the alcohol - and Meliodas needed it to be that way. To shut up the voices, to get rid of the memories, he must black it out; he must remove all traces, all the lovely memories and precious moments, from his working memory. Each and every one of them.

Deep down, deep, deep down, they'll go. Far away and locked up tight, at the bottom of the chest, beneath the nested knot of chains, shoved right between his shitty childhood and even crappier adolescence. Yeah, that's where she'll go - where she'll stay. Down there was where she'll remain until he was ready to dig her up again.

"Hey stranger," A familiar voice, buzzing about his mind. Desperately, he tried to match it to a face - a name - but Meliodas came up with naught. He was all tapped out for the night.

Beside him they sat, face distorted like frosted glass, sculpted from clay and with two piercing eyes that wavered between pale blue and celery green. Dark hair twisted over their shoulders, messy and curling in stormy swathes, loose strands that fell into mysterious eyes. Comfortable, assured, they perched upon the bar stool, drink in hand as they nodded toward the empty counter, sipping from their glass.

"Been a while, hasn't it?"

'Has it?' Meliodas found himself musing, 'Has it really been that long?'. Right now he was so plastered that he couldn't even remember why he'd gotten so shit-faced in the first place. Something told him that it was about someone he knew, someone close and personal who had the power to dictate his entire world. Move entire planets and solar systems in his tiny little universe. But it was only a small something. Tiny, small and niggling, it knocked away at his skull, pounding and pleading as it tried to pry open the heavy chest lid and push apart the fog. Powerless - it was. Completely powerless.

All night long it could try to win him over. Niggling away, nibbling away, but never making much progress. Until the morning, when his head would pound and the memories would come back in the form of stunted visions and dreams, that something would keep on knocking on a door to nowhere.

"I guess so," Meliodas found himself saying, not at all bothering to be suitable company to the stranger beside him. Instead he took solace in the mountain of empty pint glasses beside him, already working on beating his previous record of a dozen. A pumped stomach was no big deal to him now, after all.

"So..." The voice did not stop its pestering. Instead the owner turned to him, leaning on their elbow as they raised a keen brow. Their lips were an eye-catching scarlet. "What exactly are you doing here tonight? Didn't Elizabeth strictly advise you to stay away from pity drinking?"

"Pity drinking," Meliodas scoffed, hiding the cringe the seized his body at the name. Elizabeth. Such a common name, a plain and ordinary name. Yet that name spoke volumes to him, shocked his entire nervous system with a jolt that even the electric chair could never hope to compare to. Elizabeth. That name was like a summon - a bell. Something sacred that he cannot say. But for the life of him, he could not remember why.