Danny Ketch (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} heavensfool) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} wariscoming,@ 2010-10-30 02:02:00 |
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What: Danny MAY have gotten drunk and burned his mattress with hellfire…
Where: The complex, somewhere between Danny’s room and the lobby.
When: Tonight!
Rating: PG, probably.
Status: In Progress
All was quiet in Danny’s room. It was pretty surprising, really. Danny mostly stayed holed up in his room when he wasn’t out tracking down someone he’d seen earlier that needed some vengeance, but there was never much noise up there. Maybe some background noise from the TV, or a little music occasionally, but by and large there wasn’t anywhere near the kind of commotion you’d expect from a guy that spent most of his day in there. Neighbors could probably hear occasional bumps and thumps from time to time, but without knowing him, there was no way to know that those were actually him stumbling around drunk.
It was only a matter of time, really. Danny should’ve known that. He really shouldn’t have expected this miraculous trend of not fucking something up to continue. Good things didn’t happen to him for long, not without some hellish double edge that cut him on the backswing. But he did. For a few days, he really believed that maybe he could pull this off without anything going wrong. So when he groaned and slowly started to come around from his latest bender, he didn’t immediately think something was wrong when he smelled smoke. “Fuck. Did I try to cook?”
He heaved himself over onto his stomach, instantly regretting the sudden movement as his head swam and the room spun. He grumbled a few swears and staggered to his feet, still a little wobbly. He had to actually brace himself on the back of his couch to keep himself from falling over. Finally, when he was sure he was ready, he opened his eyes and stumbled into his kitchen, holding his noise just in case whatever horrible thing he was cooking was bad enough to actually rip open a hole into a dimension of greater horror than man was ever meant to know. It really was that bad normally.
And then stared in horror at his spotless kitchen.
“OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT! OH FUCK! WHAT DID I BURN?!” He tore out of the little kitchen area like a bat out of hell, probably making all kinds of noise, and began sprinting around the little apartment, looking for what could possibly have irked his drunken wrath. Sadly, this was not the first time he’d burned something in a drunken bender, but usually it was motel stuff and he could just ride the hell out of there after putting it out. He actually had to STAY here after this. On the plus side, it must not have been burning for long, because no alarms were going off. On the downside, that meant he couldn’t chuck it out a window and pretend it was just something burning somewhere close to the complex but unrelated to him. “Oh son of a bitch,” he moaned through clenched teeth, doing his damnedest to fight off the wobbling room and the pain in his head.
It wasn’t until he got to the bedroom that he saw it. For a moment he could only stare, dumbfounded, at his mattress, or rather at the smoking remains of something that was vaguely mattress-shaped. Without missing a beat, he lifted his hand, palm held out towards the burning mattress, concentrated for a second, and then snapped his hand closed. The fire went out almost as if it had never been there, with the only clue being the blackened and entirely unusable remains of his mattress. Once it was out, he dropped his hand to his side and just stared at what used to be the mattress. For a moment, just a moment, he felt the fleeting urge to just climb on and fling the both of them out a window, but he shoved that little thought back into the back of his mind where it belonged. He wasn’t ready to go there yet.
Instead he just let himself topple back against the wall and sink down into a sitting position. He buried his scruffy, unshaven face in his arms and took a few deep breaths, trying to get the torrent of self-hate and shame under control. He was going to have to drag this burnt out carcass down to the garbage before someone caught wind of it and came to investigate. The last thing he needed was someone here finding out that his drinking habit was more of a full blown problem, or that he was so pathetically out of control of himself that he awoke to burning mattresses with no memory of actually burning them.
It took a few more deep breaths to get himself under control and reapply his “I am mostly okay and not losing my mind or drinking too much or maybe a little suicidal” mask, but once it was on, he shoved himself to his feet and wobbled over to the mattress. “Alright, mattress. I’m gonna drag you down to the garbage, and you’re not gonna make any more noise than a ninja. Do we have a deal? Great.” Without bothering to consider what it said about him that he was now talking to inanimate objects, he bent down, hauled the mattress up awkwardly into his arms, and began the slow trek to the dumpster.
Or rather, the slow trek to his door. His head felt like that X-guy with the screams had just screamed right in his ear. His feet seemed to be getting incredibly delayed and often incorrect messages from his brain. The mattress wasn’t exactly heavy, but it wasn’t exactly light either, and it was awkward as hell considering how big it had to be to fit a giant like him comfortably. By the time he got to the door, Danny felt like he was going to pass out again, but he pushed through it and, after a few awkward and noisy moments, managed to get his door open. From there, he tried not to fall over on his way towards the stairs…which is where he stopped, realizing he had a really big damn problem.
When a flat floor wasn’t staying still, you could still kind of stagger around in a roughly upright position, if you took breaks to lean on some walls to get your bearings. When the floor was actually stairs, well, that was an entirely different and much more dangerous animal. “Stairs. I hate you, stairs.” Okay, how was he going to do this? Was he going to try to stagger down like he’d done the hallway? Maybe he could put the mattress down and just sort of sled down the stairs? Leave the mattress up there, crawl down the stairs, transform, then hook the mattress like a fish? In the end, he blew a little bit of unkempt, sweat-dampened hair out of his eyes and tried for the stagger approach.
Bad idea.
He and the mattress went tumbling down the stairs, hitting every single step along the way. Danny refused to make a sound, so instead he just bit his lip until he drew blood, although maybe that was after his face collided with the stairs. He wasn’t entirely sure. Things were still a little confused, and the sudden sharp pain from bouncing off the stairs didn’t exactly clarify anything.
He ended up sprawled at the bottom of the steps, wincing a moment later as the mattress smashed down on top of him. If the breath hadn’t been driven out of him by the mattress landing on him, he’d have sighed in defeat and just started lifting his head and letting it fall back down onto the ground. Instead he just decided to lay there for a minute to catch his breath and maybe regain some kind of coherent sense of direction. Laying there smooshed under the burnt out mattress, he only had one thing on his mind, which he vocalized without realizing it.
“I hate stairs.”