WHO: Mad Sweeney & Laura Moon. WHAT: A reunion! WHERE: The Mandalay lobby, Laura's room, and the Luxor. WHEN: Backdated slightly starting on the 27th. RATING | STATUS: Violence, bad words. | Done.
When the mini bar in his room was good and emptied it didn’t take Mad Sweeney long to decide that the risk of braving the pollen to raid the bar downstairs was well worth it. There was no word yet on whether or not the sleepers would ever wake up but that was a chance he was willing to take. There were worse ways to die and in this unfamiliar place where no one was likely to leave offerings for him and his lack of luck promised a stay that could only end in some grisly death at some point, anyway, he figured why the fuck not. Standing at six foot five and built like a brick shithouse, he also reasoned that he could probably withstand the pollen long enough to complete his task and so what if he was wrong.
He was shoving bottles into his jacket, pinning them against his chest with his elbow, marveling at just how awake he still felt. Sure, he was feeling a bit drowsy and definitely looking forward to getting back to his room but, at this point, he was confident that he’d be fine. With his free hand, he twisted the cap off a bottle of Southern Comfort he’d set aside earlier and took a long swig. As he tilted his head back and his eyelids fell shut, that mild drowsiness became something else all at once and overtook him before he knew what hit him. He fell asleep somewhere between slowly pitching backward and cracking his head hard against the counter behind him, the bottles he’d hidden smashing onto the ground around him.
It was easy to find the idiot. Passed out at the bar, actually on the floor. There were a couple of others. He was the biggest, and something - someone - was struggling to get traction in moving him. Laura gave them a wide smile that might have been pretty, if you were into that sort of dead, "I'll take him from here."
She hooked her pinky finger around the leprechaun's denim collar and proceeded to drag him back the way she'd come. There was still no one to greet her in the elevator, which was just bad customer service. Whichever God had dumped here here sure hadn't sprung for five star treatment. Laura bunched the muscles in her chin up to stop herself from sighing. No breathing, not even for long-suffering reasons.
Laura slammed Sweeney's head against the pad of elevator buttons. It took three more slams before his head hit the right clutch of buttons. He was still out cold. Barely even bleeding. Well, these things were their own reward.
Leprechaun in tow, she strode past a long line of doors until she got to the door with her name on the plaque. She'd read somewhere on the laptop that their own rooms were thought to be safe from the pollen. After a moment's deliberation, she threw Mad Sweeney into the ensuite bathroom and went to smoke a cigarette.
When he stirred into consciousness he was first aware of a rotten, sickly sweet smell he knew too well. Was he rotting? Was he dead? Eyes still clenched tightly shut, he slowly brought a hand to cradle the back of his aching head and decided that he was in far, far too much fucking pain to be dead. With his eyes closed and his head throbbing, the world seemed to be rocking around him and combined with that stench he could nearly imagine being back in that frozen hellhole of an ice cream truck all over again. Mad Sweeney kept his eyes closed, allowing himself a moment to savor the sensation. Then he shivered - it actually was extremely fucking cold in here. And where exactly was here?
What he saw when he opened his eyes caused them to immediately narrow. He was lying on the bathroom floor of his room, that much was clear, but he didn't remember getting back here. Did Shepard find a wheelbarrow and dump him off? The bathroom was sort of a shitty place to toss him, he thought. Every one of his nearly four thousand years clambered to make themselves known in his sore joints when he went about the overly complicated business of getting to his feet. Leaning against the sink, he turned the water on and half heartedly splashed his face. And his shirt, too, but that was an accident. His still-damp jacket sleeve reeked of alcohol but he used it to dry off, anyway.
It wasn't until he turned away from the vanity that he realized this bathroom was backwards and most definitely not his. And seriously, what the fuck was that smell? Rubbing the back of his head again, he whiffed his armpit to rule it out and then opened the door cautiously. His aching head was completely forgotten when he saw her sitting on the bed with her pallid face illuminated by the glow of the laptop. What came over him was a wave of relief so immense his knees weakened and he didn’t trust himself to stand on his own two feet. He wanted to believe it was her, that much was abundantly clear by his fool grin, but what the hell were the odds? What if it was the pollen?
He ignored an overjoyed swelling he felt deep in his chest, trying to hold off on being so quickly persuaded, and pretended his legs weren’t wobbling like jello when he approached the bed. He sat down heavily, nearer to the edge than perhaps he might have if he were entirely convinced. "I thought it smelled like you, dead wife," he told her, grin faltering with the rise of his skepticism, "But this place is a mind fuck.” He wanted to get a peek down her throat because nothing could confirm it was her like the sight of his lucky coin but he decided not to lead with that.
Being reminded that she had a distinct rotting smell by a hungover leprechaun who had, in all likelihood, pissed himself while drunk. Such was her afterlife. Laura brushed a fly out of her hair and considered ignoring him, as was more or less her default thought process when he opened his mouth.
She cast her eyes up from the laptop to scrutinise him. He looked too happy. Much too happy. Did she want to ask why? No. She really didn't. “Who here can help me?” It was the only question she wanted to ask; she already knew Shadow and that shitstick Wednesday weren't here.
He shrugged, "Only one god here as far as I can tell but undoing dead's not his field." That and Loki had almost completely blown him off, anyway. Gods did that. Looking down, he brushed shards of glass from the back of his pant leg onto the floor, "Met a demon, though. Could maybe sell your soul to her if you had one. Some kind of little witch running around, too, magic staff and all." It wasn't the good news he wished he had for her - if this even was her.
"A lot of people here from a lot of places, some of them can do things I've never seen before. I might have asked around but I didn't think you'd show," he continued, staring at her now like something about her might conveniently choose this exact moment to betray this clever ruse but if this was a trick then nothing gave it away, "Still don't really know that you showed, this could be fucking anything." It just wasn't his kind of luck anymore for the exact person he wanted to see to show up. As much as he wanted to believe it he wasn't about to take it at face value. Sweeney looked pointedly at her mouth, "Open up, let me have a look."
Disbelief made itself a home in the death-worn grooves of Laura’s eyes, the lines by her mouth. “You don’t trust me.” The absurdity of it bended her voice, no longer soft like grave dirt but deeper, twisting at the ends. “You killed me, sacrificed me like a lamb, no, like a twenty dollar buy-in for a game of poker you’re destined to lose. And you don’t believe me.”
Mad Sweeney huffed with frustration, tightening his lips and rolling his eyes. The stab of guilt he felt at the description of his misdeeds was outdone only by the following stab of annoyance. "It's this place I don't trust, it ain't got fuck all to do with you," he said, wincing as he scooted nearer to her. Not that trusting her would be especially wise, anyway. Laura Moon had plenty of reasons to fuck him over and he knew it even without her helpful reminder.
He waved a fly away from her face and then shut the laptop in front of her with considerably more force than necessary. "Open up," he repeated sternly, tempted to just force her mouth open himself but the memory of his balls nearly being squeezed out of the sack was too fresh to inspire such a bold move. Instead he glared down at her in a way that might have been perceived as intimidating to anyone who couldn't cleave a man in half with a well placed kick. It sure as hell seemed like this was Laura but if this place was pulling from his memories then of fucking course it would. He needed proof, he needed to see his lucky coin tucked away just where he'd put it.
Laura arched her eyebrows, considerably unimpressed with the show of bluster in front of her. She could have slapped him back and kept her mouth tightly shut (and it would have been for petulence’s sake. Not fear).
Instead, she fastened her fingers around the leprechaun’s throat; a physical warning that didn't require a verbal one. Tilted her head back, maw wide open.
Laura could crush his windpipe like it was a plastic straw, otherwise he would have found the threat of her small hand on his neck hilarious. He was careful to hold his breath when she opened her mouth, wanting very badly to avoid the reek he knew would come with such a direct line to the inside of her rotting body.
Sure enough, a familiar golden glow caught his eye and there it was, the key to his salvation resting in the guts of who he felt very much right now was his savior. Sweeney thought for sure he was doomed to die a luckless death sooner rather than later but the tides were turning. "Oh, we'll get this figured out, dead wife," he promised in gravelly near-whisper, now thoroughly convinced of her identity. He nudged the underside of her chin with the crook of his finger in order to shut her mouth and then breathed a sigh of relief despite her cold, dead hand still gripping his throat.
Her jaw shut with an audible click, her hand she loosened from around his throat. This time, like the first time, he hadn’t made a move to take her coin from her. It had been a deduction of Laura’s that she had to give it to him freely, and an assumption of his that she would do, if he helped her come back to life. They'd both been wrong. Giving up Shadow’s last present to her had been doubtful from the start, possible in the middle and had shrunk down to a ‘fuck you’ as soon as the leprechaun tried to snatch it from her broken chest when she was yet again sprawled on a road in front of him. Her lucky coin. Her lucky coin.
Did she need his help to be resurected? He’d already told her he didn’t know anyone here. Laura pursed her lips, and decided on ‘maybe.’ She couldn’t go out in the desert heat. She also couldn’t throw him out of a 57th floor window and expect him to survive. And yet he was useless to her if he kept getting hit with solid slumber. “Not here.” She picked her laptop up and slid off the bed, looking for a bag to pack her new belongings into. “Get me another fucking hotel, ginger minge.”
Some time later…
He left Laura all the money he had in his jacket pocket before he left to do as he was told. It was somewhere around two hundred dollars which was really nothing compared to what he still had hoarded away in his room from his visit to the pawn shop. Had he been carrying more he would have given that to her, too, fucking sucker that he was.
Mad Sweeney was beginning to think that all elevators were conspiring against him. He paid for a room at the Luxor but he just couldn't seem to get to the right floor. In fact, this was exactly the twenty sixth time the doors opened to the rooftop from the lobby. His blood was boiling and his face was red with rage. For what felt like the thousandth time, he repeatedly pounded the button for his desired floor. The doors slid shut again and Sweeney's jaw clenched when the elevator came to a hard stop just before he assumed it’d have reached the lobby. Not this again. "Son of a bitch," he spat, kicking hard at the steel doors several times.