Who: El Llorano What: Reveal When: Secrets plot Warnings/Rating: Language?
The weeping ghost of a collecting nightmare had gone wandering around the rest of the party, and found another glittering piece for the shelf he'd built in the pool. The boy he picked was very 20s, blonde with thick frame glasses, and he'd reminded the weeper of someone so much that he needed to keep him just as he was. People were better than photographs, better than memories. He'd always wanted this kind of power, deep down. He wanted to keep them all just as they were, keep them his.
When he reached the pool, the girl he'd kept was gone. He couldn't comprehend it. He had built this cage of his own corruption so that the things he put in would be weighed down. They could never leave him. That was its purpose.
He was insane with sadness, bloody tears pouring down his face in double streams. The pool was black with a rainbow sheen like opalescent oil on its surface, but empty, empty down there. The drunken boy he brought with him was afraid of this sudden shift, and by the time the weeping boy noticed his prize was fleeing it was almost too late too catch him.
But there were no limits to him, not anymore. He had let the girl go, but this boy who looked like someone long dead, he could never leave. He was on him in seconds, had him by the leg, one wire strong arm coiled around his calf. The boy screamed as he dragged him to the pool. His nails pulled up dirt and grass, then slid wet, without purchase, across the tiles.
The weeper tossed him in, and the screaming stopped. He went in after, pulling the boy down to the bottom. Down, down. His prize began to breathe the water that wasn't water. Slowly, he stopped fighting, grew still. And the weeper felt his dead heart slow, and he took the boy by the chin to kiss him. They would stay here, and he would keep the boy with the glasses as he was now always.
Then the sun was up, and he was outside the hotel. He stumbled and nearly fell down the steps after losing the sensation of floating, jarred by ground under his feet. He was disoriented, and sat down hard. A compulsion tugged him to walk, though, and he only had a few seconds respite before he had to get up again.
Fuck a duck. Fuck it right up its ass.
He'd been about to leave his place when the compulsion struck the night before, thank god. At least he didn't have to go wander back to some nameless club at the crack of dawn. All he wanted right now was a bed, and maybe a whole bottle of something fucking...really, stupidly expensive. And at least one hooker. Maybe two. Buying a roomful of hookers really was not everything it was advertised to be. That shit took work and some coke to get through without just getting really fucking exhausted after an hour or two. He just wanted a slow, long fuck to get the taste of sweet black swamp water out of his mouth.
There wasn't much else to do on the longass walk back to the apartment, so he pulled out his journal and saw the page on it where it tritely summed up his fucked up experience. He nearly threw the thing into the fucking bushes. He wasn't going to analyze that. It shook him to even edge around that big, black thought. It was in the category of things he left alone, locked tight in a file cabinet at the back of his mind. All it was going to do was make him down, right? Or freak him out. No one wanted to think about how deep the gash went, how dark it was at the bottom, how little light penetrated. No one wanted to think about how damage festered when unhealed over years, how it curdled, the desperation it created. No one wanted to think about what they might be capable of, what kind of darkness was dug in deep. He wasn't the only one.
Ten minutes from the apartment he fished out his cell phone. He'd skip the hookers for tonight. He had a semi-regular fuckbuddy across town who liked to drink expensive champagne while fucking, and have people lick it off him because he'd seen too many rap videos. Normally it kind of made him roll his eyes, but this morning it sounded like all he wanted to do, until his tongue ached and his mouth was so sore he couldn't drink from a straw. Today's problems could be left for tomorrow, he figured. Say that during enough todays, and tomorrow never came.
He passed the buzzer with its B.Thorne on the nameplate in impressive gilt, and the doorman asked him how his night was when he let him in. The smile on that tired face cracked, spread, and went on for miles. The best. The best night. Always.