When he stumbled back into the apartment he'd been forced to leave twelve hours earlier, he was exhausted, and still a little disoriented. His hands were no longer tacky, but it felt somehow as if paint remained flecked onto them.
Perhaps more than any other time, the times after the hotel had grabbed him and yanked him somewhere were times best suited to a drink. He didn't often drink whiskey, but he'd had it in the house since the time when he no longer needed to clear his living space of alcohol, just in case. That man was gone, and those days were gone, and what did he have to show for his life now?
He didn't bother with the lights. He knew perfectly well how to get himself a glass and feel out the neck of the whiskey bottle in the cupboard in the dim, though he had to hold the label up to the thin light coming through the window. He poured himself a drink and sat down at the dining room table, looking through the gap in the curtains. What did he have, now?
He had a nice apartment, there was no doubt about that. He had the sort of wealth to fall back on that allowed him to do his job as and when he pleased. He could charge large amounts of money to do his job, based on his professionalism, reputation, and the usual wealth of his clientele. And he had a family that was as splintered as he could imagine one being. Some of them he hardly knew. The ones he knew best, well, that was where things were worst.
He knew his Shakespeare. Hadn't read it in years, but didn't everybody in school? Puck was a lighthearted creature who acted as servant and purposefully mixed things up to cause mischief. He set his journal down on his kitchen table, sliding through entries until he came to the most recent, scrawled by the hotel.
He rubbed a hand across his mouth. A secret.
He didn't think it was a secret that he was a failure, not anymore, but maybe it was a secret that he felt like one, that he felt like that failure defined his life these days. Every time he tried to help someone who needed him, he found a way to cock it up. That person would go back to jail, or fall back into drugs, or try to kill themselves, or get assaulted again. Often his failure was out of his control, but he couldn't help the feeling that if he only took each try a step further, did it differently, people he cared about would stop being hurt. They'd stop hurting themselves. Other people would stop targeting them, because they'd know people cared enough to protect them.
But no one knew that. His success rate was one in a thousand. Instead of a normal web family and friends leading decent lives without grief, it felt like everyone sank deeper each day into nightmarish danger and despair. He'd had to cut someone out of it, too, leaving a hole where she'd once been, their clan missing one. His temper and badly suppressed anger jumped ahead of him half the time, making him so blind that he just did worse damage. The other half, he failed by incompetence, or by trying too hard, pushing help at all the wrong times. So Puck was him. Boundless optimism and a relentless will to serve even when help wasn't wanted, coupled with low burning rage and an inability to cope with the mounting failure landsliding down to bury him.
He inspected his fingernails, finding not the slightest glimmer of fairy dust. He should get the hotel on that alone. It was like a particularly harsh jab, insult to injury. Make the fairy a fairy. Good one. Hilarious, really.