Who: Dan Ketch and Felicia Hardy What: Danny’s getting food and has no idea why! When: 12/03/2011, after this Where: Starts in the park Danny arrived in, then probably back to the complex for foods. Warnings: Besides Danny’s dark mental state, probably none.
The park on the corner of Lincoln hadn’t changed much in eleven years. Then again, Dan supposed it hadn’t quite been eleven years here. Time had progressed, but nowhere near that much for this place, this universe so similar and yet so different from his own. How long was it really? Months? The calendar said years, but Dan Ketch had been through enough supernatural rodeos to know that there were things out there that could make calendars obsolete with the snap of a finger. It was funny, though. The place itself hadn’t really changed, but when Dan looked at it, he saw something totally different than he’d seen the first time, or every other time he’d visited back when he was still a young and stupid eighteen year old. Back then he’d been fresh faced and full of hope, despite the sudden sharp detour his life had taken. Back then he could look at a place and see the potential it had.
Back then he hadn’t learned that the world was a dirty, rotten place full of blood and death and deep, soul-crushing horrors, and back then he hadn’t known that he was one of those horrors.
Once upon a time he’d liked this place a lot. That was back when he looked at it and saw a place of peace and happiness, a place with kids playing and laughing and gently falling leaves. Now, as he leaned against his bike near the entrance, waiting for Felicia to show up, he couldn’t see how he’d ever liked the place. The pitter-patter of little feet were annoying and their laughs were like nails on a chalkboard, and the leaves were flaky, rotten out things that got stuck in your hair and your beard and on your windscreen. The quiet wasn’t peaceful or tranquil, it was oppressive and overbearing, and he found himself deliberately coughing just to ease some of the tension the quiet night worked into his muscles.
What the hell had he ever seen in this place? A place of peace? This world, his own, it didn’t matter, they were all just balls of dirt that took and took and took and left you with nothing, a hollow shell of pain and rage and need and nothing else. There was no peace to be found anywhere except the grave, and even there you’d only find it if you were one of the lucky ones. Dan knew he wasn’t one of those. Even before he sold his soul to the devil he’d been bound for hell. He was a murderer, a betrayer, a disgusting junkie and a monster. Where else could he have ended up? These days the only peace he could find, the only peace he still had any belief in at all, was the serpents lie hidden at the bottom of a bottle. Dan knew it was truly no peace at all, no more real than a snake-oil salesman’s questionable cure-alls, but at the end of the day, if a lie was the only way to escape the constant pain that was his life, then he’d happily let the bottle lie to him for whatever was left of eternity before his liver gave out. These days, the lie was the only thing that kept him moving around on two feet and at a reasonable level of functionality. He knew that without it, the vengeful ghosts of the past would catch up with him and snip what few thin threads of his sanity remained.
It was why he had to turn away from the park in disgust. It wasn’t that it really disgusted him, not really. It was true that Dan told himself that to feel better, it was true that he plastered the sneer on his face as if leering at the world would somehow make it less of an excuse, but deep down Dan could no more run from the truth than he could the gravity well of an encroaching black hole. The truth was that the park was a beautiful thing of light and life, and it burned the eyes and the weakly pulsing lump of shredded muscle that was once the heart of a monster like him. So he sneered and he rolled his eyes and he told himself it was just a stupid little park for annoying little brats to run amok while negligent parents sat with their noses buried in their phones, and he glared at anyone that looked at him funny for it, and he reached for the flask of 190-proof Everclear he always kept with him when he needed to lie to himself. It smelled terrible and the fumes alone could be used to strip paint, but when Dan popped the cap and tipped it back, and the fiery burn hit his throat like a million angels wreathed in holy fire, it drove out anything and everything except itself and let Dan convince himself for just a little longer that it was a dirty rotten world that had turned him into a monster, and not that he himself was just rotten to the core.
In the meantime, to keep his thoughts from wandering back to a light he wasn’t ready to look at, he busied himself with trying to figure out just why the hell the Black Cat was cooking for him. One hand dipped into the pocket of his duster while the other, holding the flask, came up for another swig. The tip of the flask was quickly lost in his beard, which right now was somewhere between Zach Galifianakis and Tom Hanks in the later island scenes in Castaway. Shaving wasn’t the highest priority on Dan’s list anymore. Nor was a haircut, if his shoulder-length locks were any indication. Gone was the dignity he’d once carried himself with in days gone by. In the place of a kid that had once stood as tall as a man without even trying was a raggedy bum with a permanent slouch, faded clothes, and tired eyes. His clothes amounted to a pair of beaten up motorcycle boots that looked like they’d seen better decades, faded jeans with a hole in the left knee for less than stylish reasons, a t-shirt and sweater combo that had in fact been picked up used at a thrift store for less than a dollar together, woolen gloves missing their fingers not so much to be stylish as because they had been torn off, and a duster with worn out trim and threads sticking up here and there along it.
He ran through the theories every which way he could and decided that somehow, someway, he must have inadvertently helped Pete at some point recently. There was the thing with the bomb, but that was years ago, and it wasn’t something that would really be appropriate to celebrate, considering it had forced him to remerge with the Ghost Rider after his first blissful period of being free of it. So what was it? More importantly, why was he here, waiting in front of a stupid little park for a woman he really barely knew, when a very large part of him wanted to go to that Roadhouse place that Kim mentioned. Why wait at all? They weren’t friends. Dan didn’t have any friends and didn’t think monsters really got to have any. “Fuck this,” he grumbled, taking one more swig of Everclear before dropping the flask back into an inner pocket of his duster and starting to rise. Why bother with this nonsense? He needed a drink, and there was no reason to waste the Everclear if there was perfectly good beer at the bar. Felicia could get there now or not at all.