[Reaction]
He’s not yet horizontal when the next one hits, although he at least got a few minutes’ reprieve. His shirt is wet against his chest where the liquor dripped down and all he can smell is juniper (seriously, it’s still in his fucking sinus passage). He’s tilted back on an elbow though, head tipped to stare at the pockmarked ceiling and the stains of water damage that he should probably get around to fixing the next time the fucking sky isn’t falling. The bottle is propped between his thighs and he’s middling way to tipsy, mostly warmth spreading just under his skin and doing fuck all to numb the sharp pinpoints of Marta’s memories where they press against the soft, vulnerable places that hurt the most. He’s pretty sure that’s the most he can fucking take, yeah? He should probably start getting used to how these memories feel, splatter-painted up against the fuzzy curve of suburban skull.
When it hits, he’s both ready and not. He’s somewhat prepared, okay, for his own issues, but not necessarily another's. He can feel the tell-tale approach only because it’s been - four? Five, now? - in the last hour and he at least knows the difference between the blinding of liquor in his veins and what feels like looking through somebody else’s back fucking window. Anyway, he hooks one ankle behind the other so that the bottle doesn’t slip between his thighs and down to the floor while he reels back a little. It only lasts a second, maybe five. Ten? He doesn’t know, but he’s able to push himself up to lean against his knees again, except this time it’s with a more significant sense of vertigo and he has to forcefully focus on the grain of the wood floor between his boots so that he doesn’t think about his churning stomach.
There have been hours of stretched muscles that filtered the sweet, milky-white of lactic acid between fibres and down, steadfastly leaking around his tendons and the light-lace-stain of off-white that marks where his bones have learned to retract like elastic bands in the race. Maybe the biggest thing is that he never had that teenage period either, yeah? Had always dismissed the sitcom suburbia bullshit as just that. Apparently, it didn’t matter that he's had flashbacks of the New York sort of confidence. Even with the sideways glances at the guys who are there in their sexuality and make up the class, that one he dragged himself out of bed at five AM for - he’s not sure that he’s ever even heard a lawnmower in person until he lived in Repose, because the Bronx, and then Vegas, and then Manhattan? Was pretty fucking sparse for lawns.
And the formative years were usually waking up to sirens, to kitchen clatters as his brother made cereal, or the blare of cartoons. And then it was different group homes, or foster homes, and by that point he was busy making money and trying not to get kicked out too often, so he woke early because it was shared bedrooms with four or five other kids who snored and talked in their sleep and cried too easy. So he was always tired and for a couple years he sometimes went to school hungry, but then he started learning how to provide for himself, and it got easier. He got up earlier, and maybe he was afraid a lot more. But nah, it was never just backyard pools and Mr. Rogers doing yard work. And really, how much of it fucking mattered? He was pretty sure, pretty goddamn confident that the context for his siblings that he didn't really know, they hadn’t been that accurate.