Shirtless, I catch my reflection in the mirror of the private bathroom off my office. My eyes follow the delicate tendrils of ink that curve down the whole of my right arm. The sleeve that covers and hides the cigarette scars; the sleeve I've carefully and deliberately added to over the years since that night when Logan came for me.
They're all going to be mad, but they'll understand; they must. I have to do this.
I think of Bryce's face; he's not just being bossy, he's just still watching out for me, and that might hurt worse. There was feeling there once, but - no. There wasn't a chance there, only room to get hurt or hurt each other. No good comes of two broken people deciding the other is the fix. They just shatter more off the broken edges of each other until there's nothing left but a bigger mess than they started with.
I close my eyes for a moment, pushing the thoughts away. I can dwell on that another time, but I have so much more to think about right now.
I walk back to look around my brother's office once more, my face growing grimmer by the second until I focus on the picture of him and Quinn, smiling and happy.
I'm coming for you, Logan; I swear.
6
Bryce
P A S T
“So, you got the cash?”
I roll my eyes at Matombo; “Have I ever not, buddy?”
He grins slowly, his teeth yellowed and his dark lips cracked from smoking the stuff. Fuck that. Give me a nice bump or a hit through a vein; I'm not smoking any of this crap.
This shit is poison, you know?
“I'm just fuckin with you, pal.” He cackles out the rattling laugh of a junkie and steps aside to let me into the hovel of a home. It's the shittiest, most run-down hovel in the shittiest, most run-down slum in Kinshasa, which happens to be in - you got it - the shittiest, most run-down city in all of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
You know what, let's just call it the worst fucking place on Earth, and I'm here to shoot poison up my veins.
“You gotta try this, friend.”
Buddy, pal friend; all rules of the game with junkies like us. No one uses real names, because real names make the fact that you're selling to and injecting each other with slow death a bit harder to stomach. I call him buddy, he calls me pal, and when one of us inevitably flatlines, it'll just be easier. You can say, “oh, yeah, that buddy was a real pal,” and just move on. It dehumanizes it, which makes sense because doing heroin is just about the quickest way to shed your humanity I can think of.
The real fucked up irony here is that we use names like “friend” to describe people we barely know or give a shit about, who’ll be ghosts before we even know it.
I'm buzzed from the half-pint of vodka and the Percocets I popped on the walk over, and I blink to try and focus on the bag of grey powder in Matombo’s hand; “I think you got sold shitty coke, man.” I frown, eyeing the sketchy looking powder. It's not heroin, that's for sure.
He grins; “It's a mix, my friend; special blend.”
I make a face; “Fuck that, it looks fucking disgusting.”
“It's devil-powder.”
“Huh?”
He grins again, those cracked, yellowed teeth gleaming in the candlelight of the apartment hovel; “Coke and gunpowder.”
Fuck. That.
“I'm good, man.”
“Try some.”
“Seriously, I'm good. Lemme just get that H and get goin-”
The nickel-plated gun in his hand also gleams in the low light, albeit a little differently than his teeth; “Don't be rude, friend. I invite you into my home, I offer you some refreshments-” He nods at the gunpowder-coke; “You really going to disrespect me like that?”
Gee, where are my manners?
“Fuck it, let's do this.” And really, at that point, it's not even because of the gun. At that point, it’s because the demon inside is roaring at me for a hit of something, and I honestly want it.
I'm out of my Goddamn mind later, yelling like a fucking rabid dog as I run through the dark slum streets of Kinshasa, banging on walls, tearing at my own clothes and looking like a fucking maniac. My blood is on fire, my brain chugging along like a freight train without brakes. I think I fight someone on the way back to the Blackriver barracks - someone crazier than me obviously to want to fight a guy that looks like me - but I'm not totally sure later.
All I know is that in those moments, when I can block out the rest of me and bury everything else about myself deep inside and cover it with substances and poison, I find peace. It's a broken, shattered, tainted peace, streaked with blood, drugs, and the last remnants of my humanity and spirit, but fuck it, I can sleep.
Besides, who needs their humanity when they're going to be dead soon anyways?
P R E S E N T
The ding of the seatbelt bell rouses me from sleep, and the memory of my slow self-induced death march back in Africa. The taste of that night is still bitter on my tongue, and I blink and rub my eyes as I sit up.