InsaneJournal

Who: Danny Ketch and open!
What: Dealing with the slow realization that he has a problem.
When: Tonight, late. Probably at least midnight.
Where: The roof of the complex.
Warnings: Let’s go with PG-13 for potential language.
Status: Incomplete. Or narrative, if nobody jumps in.

Damn Kitty Pryde. Damn her and her stupid theory. Danny had been fine before she put that stupid, incredibly wrong idea in his head. His life had been working fine, aside from the whole yanked into an alternate world going through an apocalypse thing. Yeah, he had a few drinks sometimes, but who didn’t? It wasn’t like he was always drunk. So what if he usually had at least one beer a day? So what if it was usually more than one and most nights he couldn’t quite remember what he did? It worked for him, and given the kinds of horrifying sinvisions he was struck with just walking around, he felt he more than deserved to have a few drinks. He wondered how well Kitty would handle getting to witness the worst acts of humanity all the time.

Just a few hours ago he got to see a guy beating the hell out of his ten year old kid while trying to buy a damn burger from a fast food place. Then there was the rapist at the book store and the nurse from the nursing home that was abusing his patients at the dollar store where Danny bought the glue he needed to fix the mirror he’d thrown across his room in a fit of mostly irrational rage. Such was the curse of the Spirit of Vengeance. The only real comfort he had was that he’d be paying each of these wastes of flesh a visit at some point during the week. It was a commentary on his life that the thought of leaving each of these people in comas while the Penance Stare scorched their souls with hellfire actually was a comfort to him. If he really thought hard about it, he could kind of remember a day when he’d been horrified about the way Noble operated. He could remember it but he couldn’t really identify with the memory. He was young and stupid then, naïve enough to believe that something good could still come out of this mountain of crap he called his life. Even though they were his memories, it almost felt like he was remembering a completely different person. It was part of why he drank. To blot out the horrible visions for a couple of hours and make him not care that he’d fallen so far. There was nothing wrong with that. Lord knew people did worse things than drink for the same reasons. But tonight he couldn’t drink, because he had to prove to Kitty that her stupid theory was just that: A stupid, completely inaccurate theory.

Except he wasn’t sleeping so well now. Now that he couldn’t pass out into the blissful black void of blackouts, he was finding his nights plagued with nightmares. Nightmares about his kid getting its throat torn out by Blackout, like the vampire had done to Danny’s sister Barbara. Nightmares about Zadkiel escaping from Hell and visiting his own vengeance down on Danny’s kid, or worse, his whole family line. Nightmares of any one of his other rogues gallery finding his kid and making his or her life a living hell. Nightmares of the kid being used like a pawn in the grand cosmic game just like he and Johnny had.

A lot of his nightmares focused on his kid, actually.

So he couldn’t sleep. He got to see enough horrible in his waking hours, he didn’t need it in his sleep, too. And he couldn’t drink until he passed out, at least not until Kitty quit being a jerk and admitted she was wrong. And she was wrong. The headaches he’d been getting since he stopped were just headaches from constantly seeing the worst things people could do to each other. The nightmares were perfectly normal, under the circumstances. The mood swings and jumpiness were just as natural for a guy in his situation. The lethargy was an extension of the nightmares and not being able to sleep, not anything else. He didn’t have a problem. This wasn’t withdrawal. It wasn’t.

And sitting up here on the edge of the roof, he wasn’t giving half a thought to jumping off. He was just sitting. Just killing time since he couldn’t sleep and trying not to think. And if he occasionally wondered what he’d look like pancaked down there in the complex lot, well, that was completely normal for someone looking over the edge of a really tall building, right? Didn’t everyone think about that when they saw how far below the ground was? Of course they did. It was normal. It was all perfectly fine and nothing to be concerned about.

Christ, he needed a drink.

He probably looked a mess. His palms were sweating like some WoW dork on the 13th hour of some big raid, his skin was a shade too pale and a little too green, his hair was a mess, and his fresh shave had left a few cuts behind due to hands that he refused to admit were shaky. There were heavy bags under his eyes and, barely noticed because of his current unhealthy pallor, he had a white knuckled grip on the edge of the roof. He felt a sudden surge of white hot anger and growled out a gravelly, “Fuck you, Kitty Pryde.”

And then as quickly as the anger came, it faded and was replaced with guilt, and he just sighed and flopped back on the roof, careless of the fact that his legs were still dangling over. Quietly, so quietly even he could barely hear it, he mumbled, “Fuck you for being right and fuck me for…” He trailed off for a moment, trying to pin down one specific thing he’d done that he could rage at. The list was just a little too long. “Fuck me for every goddamn thing.”