UPRISE

022

As she heads into the Complex, she spots Wren. Viola runs to catch up to him, loops his arm in hers and begins to drag him into the Complex.

Wren takes control, because this is his world after all. He leads her to the very back of the Complex, to the barbed wire fence. There, he pulls himself free from her grip. As he snaps his fingers, she is already pulling out a cigarette.

"How do you cope?" Viola asks, as she lights the cigarette and passes it to him.

He takes a hit and then looks at her. Viola's face, though delicate and pristine, always has wide, emotionless eyes. "With?"

Viola's eyes flicker down to his hands. Wren follows her, looking down to notice that his free hand is shaking. The skin on it is peeling off and blood has crusted on it, from his repeated gnawing on his hands.

"You know, my hands might shake, but it doesn't make me an addict," Wren tells her. "I am an addict, unrelated. Why are you acting like it's some big secret?"

It unsettles her stomach, churns it inside out, how casual he is being. "I didn't ask if you were an addict."

Right, he remembers. He asks her how he copes with it. "What? Like, what prevents me from slitting my wrists every night? I don't know. Maybe because I failed once."

It frustrates Viola that she can't have a conversation about herself. She's the one who needs to apologize or to comfort. She is the one who gives, never the one who takes. Rinn needs comforting, and then Pluto has her head so far up her own ass that it's beginning to disintegrate from the high alcohol content of her stomach. Now, Wren is being a jerk.

"Stop sharing everything with everyone like what you say isn't upsetting," she snaps.

Wren shrugs. It isn't the first time someone has gotten mad at him for speaking his truth, just the first time someone believed him and was still angry. "Well, what do you fucking want me to say, Vi? That I cured myself by going clean here? Once you're an addict, your always an addict. What advice do you want me to give you? I'm out here, barely alive, while you barely seem to give a damn about sobriety."

"It's hard," Viola counters, her face turning red. More than she hates his words, she hates how calm his tone is. Every sentence breathed out, lighter than the smoke from his cigarette.

"Well damn, anything worthwhile is hard," Wren sighs. He imagines Reagan, on the park bench, reading a book by an author that Wren barely knows. "Doesn't mean you get to scare people away instead of trying to help them."

~~~

Pluto, while her roommates are out grabbing guns, grabs all of the alcohol in the apartment. Their collection, having taken several months to amass, sits in a garbage bag on the floor as Pluto smokes the last of their weed. Whatever is left, she washes down the sink.

Carefully, she brings the liquor down to the elevator, listening to the glasses clink in the most dissonant orchestra she has ever heard. The liquid sloshes in each bottle as the elevator moves down. Pluto barely manages to sneak around to the back of the building without being seen by her roommates.

There, she takes the first bottle. Winding it up in her hand, she grabs it and chucks it against the ground. It bounces off the snow, rolling over and over a few feet. Pluto scurries over, snatches it, and smashes it once more.