Re: #8: Aubrey and Jude
Unseen in the dark had often been the worst circle of hell Aubrey could dream up whilst in the throes of particularly narcissistic fits of alcoholism and self-loathing, but from up on the (relative, arguable, etc) safety of the shop’s floor while Jude was suspended in some fucked up dino-in-a-tar-pit limbo, he could have kissed the darkness. Could have sucked the darkness off to completion with an indiscernible smile, as long as he still had that woodgrain texture of floorboards marking up his knees and shoving unsympathetic splinters into the work-hardened skin of his palms.
But the granting of sexual favours to seemingly sentient absences of light and senses (and reality or just general laws of physics) that made any sense in familiar context could wait until after he’d lit a funeral pyre for his goddamn designer shoes that supposedly had it out for him, and the shoes themselves could wait until he figured out how to get Jude back. Or, okay, tried to figure out how to try and get Jude back. Ideally before that disembodied voice spiralling up from the depths below got any more hazy and hair-raisingly reticent.
“Fuck finding the door,” he made a face, eye-roll and thick sarcasm (still defence numéro un in the kingdom of Rois, svp) again unseen but audible still in the shuddering weight of the air being hauled in and out of his lungs. Aubrey was as close to the edge of the hole as he dared get, fingers curling at the second knuckles in order to grasp at the serrated edges of the floor (or the world, or just this particular dimension maybe?), but it wasn’t enough. “I’m not letting you go down as the goddamned martyr, Jude.”
He swallowed again around the press of glass shards or rusted blades in his mouth, tasting bile and blood and the lingering threat of panic coagulating at the back of his tongue. It wasn’t enough, he needed to get closer, get further out over the deep. “Besides, there could still be a vengeful mob waiting for me out there. I need someone with shorter legs than mine that I can beat in a footrace. Keep talking, okay? I need time to think.”
But there wasn’t time, was probably barely enough to act, and Aubrey was already sitting back on his heels and shucking off his coat as his mind worked furiously against the smog of suffocating, cancerous fear that pressed in from all sides.