daniel webster (occupation: recluse) (ex_published349) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2014-01-23 22:03:00 |
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Entry tags: | beast |
Who: Just Daniel
What: Drowning! Just kidding. Well. Kind of kidding.
Where: His room.
When: Recently.
Warnings/Rating: Daniel is an alcoholic and there are some ghosts.
It was a deep, deep tub. It wasn't something Daniel would have purchased for himself, but he was used to seeing it, set up in the corner with its curving shadows and gleaming chrome. He usually used it as a makeshift laundry basket, the spigots at the churching spouts left ignored and empty until someone eventually penetrated the fortress of the master bedroom just long enough to clean. Sometime in the last week he must have left the room unlocked when he was passed out somewhere else, because as he stumbled across the cold tile, he realized the bathroom was clean. The veined marble gleamed, bringing to mind the color of old Florence churches, and for a moment Daniel wobbled on his feet, trying to remember why he was there.
His stomach heaved, and the taste on the back of his mouth was whiskey and sour vomit. He dropped to his knees and leaned against the edge of the sink, catching his weight on his locked elbow and dropping over the counter so hard that his entire spine seized. Oh, right. Sick.
Some interminable time later, Daniel rolled over onto his back. The cold marble was sucking everything out of him, heartbeat to brain, and he wanted a drink even though the last one had just tried to drown him in his own stomach juices. He wondered if Sam was awake, or dead, wondered if Lin would be pounding on the locked door. Daniel had spilled a couple piles of books across the entry in some halfbaked, whiskey-sodden idea that he could keep the bad news out. He was pretty sure he had made sure the cat was outside the blockade, but he couldn't be absolutely sure. The white ball of fur was nowhere in sight, so that was good.
Daniel felt gritty and filthy. His skin seemed to grind on his bones as he moved, and when he blinked acres of sand crunched under his eyelids. His head screamed at him to end it, and his guts were twisted. He hadn't been through Henry's door in weeks, and he was starting to feel the consequences of a alcoholic's habit, sans fairy tale solutions. There couldn't possibly be a better punishment than this one, right? Perfect. The tub was half-full before Daniel noticed he'd turned the tap on, and he kicked off the old jeans and tipped his aching body into the hot water. His skin was so pale it was blue, and he felt disgusting and fragile. He was grateful no one was watching as he rolled over in the translucent water, still drunk enough to float without thought when he wasn't retching.
The pipes murmured reassuringly, and water eased as he kicked at the pigot with one foot. The remaining water made a rushing, gentle sound, and Daniel drank some of the tap water as he sank bank, thoughts of Italian nouns like fontana blending together with the memory of Sam's skin wet in the tub with him, then, in water meant to be faster and louder, Lin's voice and hands and lips, and finally just the tongues of the dead, bloated and blue in rotting death, all trying to taste a little more of his misery.
All the people he'd left dead came out of the dream water, gentle at first, easing forth. J.B. was at the edge of the pool, which was bigger now and set with rougher stone in brighter sunlight. Sewer water was coming out of his suit and hair, staining the tub, but he didn't speak. A dark Venus sans seashell, Carlita spread her dark hair out like cold silk, her eyes milky, her fingers cold. She pushed him flat in the glass surface above him, one cool hand on his chest, and he breathed in, thinking that she might taste as she had in life and not the cold butcher shop smell she had now.
Daniel's lungs filled up with lukewarm bathwater. Both organs seized, contracted, rejected, and then fired immediate breathe or die signals up his spine and into his brain. Exploding into waking, he tried to breathe again, automatic this time, and his body went into survival mode, yanking him out of sleep and out of the surface of the water. The spigot was still tippling a constant stream into the water, and now the surface of the tub was full to the brim and splashing waves over the side of the fiberglass as Daniel's head broke the surface. Pain ripped up through his chest and throat, water pouring out of his hair as he gasped and choked and vomited up more water, shaking with new fear. A brush with sober (ha) death, just a nap in a full bathtub and that would have been that.
Daniel gasped again silently, clutching the too-smooth edge of the tub. Why he wanted to live so much all of a sudden, he didn't know. Now he hurt more than before. It hurt to breathe, hurt to move, hurt to gasp, but he had no choice in the matter. Daniel pressed a wet hand into the sharp edge of his cheekbone, pushing, pushing up toward his brain to hold everything in where it belonged. The water slid down his knuckles in cold rivulets. He looked back for Carlita, then up for J.B. The dead were gone. Sam had not come with them.
The bath had gone cold.