Reaper's Touch

Lucas: Another Loss

"Friendship is delicate as a glass, once broken it can be fixed but there will always be cracks."
- Waqar Ahmed

After getting kicked out of Ember's, Gus withdrew into the dark depths of the city, leaving Lucas on his own. He still visited every week or so, but it wasn't like the daily, comforting routine of friendship that both of them had developed and were used to.

Lucas had bought a thousand dollars worth of smack before Gus left, and now he was shooting up every day, lonely and depressed and isolated, even from Nora. She noticed something was wrong but chalked it up to his depression: the slow, shuffling walk, the short naps that became four hours long, and the loss of appetite and interest in anything.

"You know you can talk to me about Jeff, or about anything, baby," she would say as they laid there together at night.

Lucas would just shake his head. "I'm good. I promise."

Only he wasn't. He was falling asleep at work, nodding off mid-sentence, nodding while standing in front of the soda machines or the microwave, taking afternoon naps with his head on his desk, losing documents and filing N folders with the A's. And his mind was stuck in a perpetual cloud of misty rain. No one and nothing could break through that numb fog. It seemed like he spent more time being yelled at by his boss than actually working these days, and Marcus was mad at him for that too. The second he came home, he would shoot up and float on the brief euphoric high before sinking into total relaxation for the night.

One evening, he was so relaxed he even forgot to pick Nora up from work. She walked home alone in the dark and kicked open their bedroom door to find Lucas curled up under the covers with his earbuds in his ears. She yanked them out.

"Forget something?!" she shouted.

Lucas sat up, rubbing his eyes. When he saw her, it dawned on him. "Nora! Oh God I'm so sorry, baby! I fell asleep and-"

Nora's eyes blazed. "STOP LYING!" she shouted.

She started to cry. "I know you're high! I've known it for weeks but didn't want to face it. You're using again!"

Lucas hung his head, feeling awful. There was nothing he could say to defend himself.

"You think it hasn't been hard on me too? I lost Jeff! We both lost Gus and Hex, and now I'm losing YOU!" she continued.

"Nora..." Lucas whispered.

Nora ignored him, closed the few feet between them and pushed up the sleeve of Lucas's shirt so she could examine the needle marks.

"How long?" she demanded.

"Since Jeff died. Gus and I both started using again. I don't know about Hex," he mumbled, hating himself.

"Did you think this would fix something? Bring Jeff back? Make the grief go away? What the hell were you thinking?"

"I don't think anything anymore," Lucas said softly. "I'm numb. I don't even know if I'm alive anymore."

Nora sighed. "Don't say that. That's your depression talking. We'll get through this, baby. You and me."

Lucas looked up at her and cautiously wrapped his arms around her waist, resting his head against her abdomen. She was still angry and hesitated a few moments, but she eventually put one hand on his back and stroked his hair with the other.

"Life gets hard," she murmured. "But drugs don't help. You know that, baby. It just makes it harder for you to slog through the grief, and it takes longer to get out of it. We're not kids anymore. We have to face the bad stuff. It'll make us stronger."