In Between The Lines Of Vice

Chapter 8: The Dust In The Fallout

Life was a fickle thing, he thought after the fact.

It twists and turns, never ending up where anyone expects. People except this as fact, that life is difficult and no one knows what to do. They already expect going into adulthood, life was going to fuck them over one way or another. The phrases like 'You only live once', or 'Life is a gift' made it all the more apparent.

But life wasn't a gift, live was a prison sentence, or at least that was what it felt like. They all know that life will deal them the shit stick, so they want to make up for it in a misspent youth filled with transparent fun which covered up the fact that they would never feel joy again.

That was what life never felt like for him, it seemed. Fun. He doubted that it ever would again. He wasn't complaining, but simply pointing out the same pattern that already repeated several times. Love, loose, repeat. He loved, then he lost. One of these days he wouldn't have anything else left to loose. Which he had an inkling of a feeling that it was the current repetition which would finally end it. A man has hits limits after all.

The search for the apparent Norse god had run cold, it seemed like he showed up every few months to cause chaos, death and destruction, and then he vanishes into thin air. At least according to twitter, that was how it happened. The one interaction he had had with him was all, and then he had never saw him again. It was like backpedaling, traveling in reverse and he had done that to himself.

Then again, he really didn't have a purpose anymore, and didn't know if he would ever be able to handle the pressure of being the hero. He had this thought in his mind that he would finally get it together once he had gotten the nerve to go and actually see his mom. That chance was stolen from him like everything else in his life. To loose was a way of life, he supposed.

That night after the agent had released him and then never contacted him again, he stared into his fridge for what could have been hour. The fact that there was a 6 pack case of Budweiser and a half drank bottle of some sort of hard liquor he couldn't remember buying, that and two slices of craft American cheese. He stared at them for so long he started not to care that he was happy about the fact that this was longest time he had been sober in a year, or the fact that he hadn't ate in 2 days.

He picked up the bottle of liquor, not even caring what off brand, cheap poison it was. Even coming from the fridge, it felt warm in his hands. They were shaking. He was shaking. He unscrewed the cap and tried to chug it down like medicine that he know deep down wouldn't fix any of his problems, but it burned unlike anything he ever felt on the way down. Like acid that his stomach refused to accept and he immediately threw up into the sink.

He was crying, he knew, when he threw the bottle at the wall. When he grabbed the 6 beers and lobbed them at the wall, a piece rebounded and put a deep cut into his cheek, he couldn't care. He didn't feel numb, didn't want to feel numb anymore. The numbness seemed like a default to resort back to, but know it stung like an alarm clock that played the same song every morning, the song, even then, starts to feel like acid, burning down their throat. No, he didn't want to feel numb, but he didn't know whether feeling like this was any better.

That feeling you get when you can't stop crying.

The panic. The seize of the chest. No one is around, no one to cry to. it's a cry hoping others would be there, but they're not. They never were.

Wasn't that life really? Finding someone to cry to, and then losing that and then finding someone, something else. An endless cycle of losing and gaining momentum until everything stops and everything is still.

Still...still. Slowed down to a stop. Cold and dead. Maybe absolute zero, where in the coldest temperature, everything stops still.

He sure knew dead, and cold. Felt it on his skin, like a frozen wind ripping away his skin. Cold as a tomb, seeping into his bones and throwing icy tendrils in his vein, grasping to reach his heart and suffocate him.

He couldn't breathe, like his head was underwater but he couldn't breathe through it. As if he were at home and the home became a warzone, a hurricane, fearful, empty.

His life was empty and he had nothing to show what he had done. Save Olympus, sure. Save the world, whatever. None of it mattered, he didn't matter. He couldn't even save the things that mattered most to him. He couldn't even save himself!

He was screaming, crying and screaming. Those two were intertwined, bound together. One entity defined by agony.

The wind picked up in the shithole apartment, and icy rain surrounding him in sheets like a miniature thunderstorm. The couch scraped against the floor with the sound like nails on a chalkboard as it was flung back against the wall. Paint peeled off the walls in pieces along with glass that flung itself across the wind in deadly imitations of rain.

The edges of his vision began to blacken. Numb, if felt numb. He didn't want to feel the numbness, not anymore. Never again.

Percy.

A voice, smooth, dangerous. A voice like ice on a freeway. Looking normal, but then the black ice comes and makes it hell. The voice that you slip and fall to, not knowing until your already on the ground.

He knew that voice. That voice haunted his nightmares.

"Get out of my head!" He screamed.

The windows blew out, like an explosion that littered glass down onto the street 5 stories below.

Percy, stop.

"Get out! Get out!" His voice was hoarse, thick and full of loathing, desperate loathing.

You're hurting them.

Everything stood still, you're hurting them. Who was he hurting? What? You're hurting them.

And then he looked around. The walls of peeling paint, the smashed windows. The panicked screams weren't just his own. You're hurting them. He was hurting someone, someone innocent. The people that lived in the building.

You're hurting yourself, Percy.

He sunk down the wall, curling his knees to his chest.

The world was crumbling to dust, because despite the man being a murderous psychopath, he was right about one thing.

He closed his eyes and tried to breathe, deep and forceful.

He put his head on his knees and sobbed.

Crumbling.