InsaneJournal

Who: Dan Ketch. Narrative.
What: Dan decides to try making a wish. It does not go as planned.
When: Late night 12/22/11/early morning 12/23/11.
Where: Random out of business autoshop.
Rating: PG-13 for language.

Sobriety sucks.

Dan Ketch hadn’t been well and truly sober in a very long time. Not since coming to his senses and seeing Zadkiel for who he truly was. Even during the period where he was trying desperately to clean up his mess, he was usually operating with at least a heavy buzz. Hell, he’d been three sheets to the wind when he’d beaten Master Pandemonium to the brink with a baseball bat in order to get him to call up his boss, Lucifer, on that portal to Hell in his belly. Before then he’d been sober, but he’d had a purpose then, as fucked up as it was. For that brief period of time Dan had felt like himself again. For the first time since Stacy left him, Dan had been able to look at himself in the mirror. Horrible as it was, he’d genuinely believed that the souls of the other Ghost Riders were bound for destruction unless he took their power, consumed it completely. He’d never really felt good about the killing, but viewed it as a necessary evil to save their eternal souls.

Of course, like so many other things in Dan’s twisted mess of a life, that was just another lie.

In truth, he wasn’t just consuming their power. When he took in that which gave them the power of the Rider, that part of them that was the Spirit, he also devoured their souls. Memories of lives he’d never lived rattled around in his head on any given day. Most repentant killers said they saw their victims faces every time they closed their eyes. For Dan, just seeing their faces would be a Christmas miracle by itself. Every time he closed his eyes he saw some other memory from some other Ghost Rider. Sometimes he remembered a trusting Japanese boy’s first steps into the occult mystery that was the power of the Rider, sometimes he remembered Baron Skullfire fondly looking out over his people, or a thousand other memories from a hundred other lives.

Sometimes he remembered his brother standing stoically at the funeral for his wife and two children, and when that memory crept its way to the surface Dan had no choice but to tip his head back and let the alcohol pour in or else lose what tiny fragmented pieces were left of his sanity.

The dreams were the worst. Painful as the memories of his victims’ lives were, they were barely wisps compared to the angry ghosts that confronted him in his dreams. Memories couldn’t scream or shout, they couldn’t tell him the life stories of the orphaned children or widowed spouses or grieving parents. The ghosts that haunted his nightmares, not skeletal monsters but flesh and blood people, could do all these things and more. The worst, though, the worst was when all of the ghosts finally grew silent, and then one, that most damning one, Johnny Blaze himself, the Abel to Dan’s Cain, simply asked, “Why wouldn’t you listen?”

The question was what haunted him the most. There was no good answer. “I was used,” his dream-self would sometimes say, only more stutteringly and haltingly, like a child scared of his own voice. That wasn’t the truth, though. While no one could deny that Zadkiel had used him, Dan knew, deep down in his secret heart, the one he buried underneath booze and rage and hate, that he’d only been able to use him because Dan had let himself be used. He’d been in a bad place; lost, alone, hurting from Stacy’s betrayal and his brother’s death, hopeless for a better life after having to remerge with the Ghost Rider to save a city of faceless innocents that probably thought he was a monster. All he had to keep him going then was the single-minded belief that once he could finally break free of the Rider for good, things would get better for him. It was the stupid hope of a child, but it was all he’d had back then, and he’d pursued it with a nearly obsessive passion. The flaw in his logic was so obvious he didn’t see it staring him in the face until it was too late. If all he had left was defined by the Ghost Rider, what would he have once that was gone, too?

Nothing. Nothing was what he’d had left after Mary Lebow’s exorcism, nothing but his own empty soul and the shattered ruins of a life that could have been something if fate hadn’t twisted quite the same way. It was a stark and bitter realization that first night, coming home to an empty apartment with nothing but a TV dinner, prime time TV, and an up-to-then unopened bottle of whiskey for comfort. Somehow he’d convinced himself, in his single-minded passion for ridding himself of the Rider, that it was the source of all his problems and once it was gone, his life would magically restart. And then, of course, there was the truth at the heart of the mystery, the truth at the heart of all the lies the Caretaker told him about how the Ghost Rider worked. Though Noble Kale was just the ghost of a dead ancestor, he wasn’t really the Ghost Rider. The Ghost Rider was the Spirit of Vengeance, and it didn’t have a personality as such. It wasn’t its own being. The human hosts of the Riders were just as much spirits as they were men, and how could you exorcise the one without harming the other?

He’d missed that power, even though he hated it. He missed it the way a junkie missed the needle. No matter how much he hated himself for it he wanted to feel that fire again, the fire of judgment from heaven itself, because without that fire he had nothing left to keep him warm. Without that fire he was just a cold dead thing, living out the motions of a life he no longer recognized. He was still angry, angry at the world for being such a filthy rotten thing that it needed Spirits and angry at God for even making them, angry at himself both for missing it and for getting rid of it. It was a horrible mix of emotions that he was in no way prepared to deal with, and so one addiction swept in to fill the void of the other. If he couldn’t have the fire and passion of the Rider, he would have the comforting numbness of the bottle. When he drank, everything was okay. The problems were still there but he didn’t give a fuck anymore, and to a guy with no way out of the wreckage of a would-be life, even that false comfort was better than the alternative. Then came Eleven and Zadkiel and Mary’s death, and then a lot more death and blood and sorrow that he still wasn’t ready to face.

Dan Ketch hadn’t been sober for a very long time because Dan Ketch couldn’t be sober any longer. When he was sober the pain and guilt and hate was too great, and now the rage from the Spirit wasn’t being filtered through the ghost of an ancestor, now it was full blast in Dan’s own consciousness and drinking was all he could do to stay even remotely sane. It made him feel normal when nothing else did, and he couldn’t lose that feeling, not now when it was the only thing holding his scraps of flesh together.

Except he was sober now.

He was sober now, in the garage of an abandoned body shop. He’d quietly moved out of Felicia’s place when he realized that her not coming around was the closest he was going to get to being booted. It didn’t feel right staying there anyway. After what he’d done – and now that he was completely sober he could see it for what it was, not what the booze-tinted glasses made it out to be – it just felt awkward. So he’d driven around on his bike until he saw the boarded up shop. Apparently it was out of business, which meant that it was perfect for his needs: Rent-free, and without any people around to harsh his buzz and make him see the horrible mess he’d become.

So why had he chosen now to be sober, sitting in the dark of the back garage, with the only light to speak of being the little newspaper fire he’d started in a steel drum he’d found in what used to be a supply closet? Because enough people were talking about their wishes coming true that he was beginning to think that maybe these things actually worked. Maybe in this world miracles could really happen. Maybe he could finally get the thing he’d been secretly hoping for since he’d found Stacy’s note, engagement ring, and pregnancy test in an otherwise empty apartment, and if that time was finally here then damnit, he wanted to meet it with sober eyes, not that he would be a pleasing sight to see. Since moving out of Felicia’s he hadn’t had a working shower, and only sometimes been able to convince a convenience store clerk to let him use their bathroom for a road trip shower. His face was dirty, with two days of grime caked on it. His hair was a greasy, tangled mess, and his long beard hadn’t had a comb through it in a long, long time. His coat had somehow acquired a few new stains, most of them grease from various puddles in the shop and one of them blood, after an unfortunate accident while cobbling together a folding table into something nearing functional. The shallow cut on his hand would heal with pressure, he knew, so he’d done little more than clean it with some bottled water he was able to steal from a vending machine and tie a strip of his filthy coat around his left hand. His boots were dirty with oil that he’d stepped in around the shop, and possibly last night’s vomit that he hadn’t quite been able to scrub off, and his jeans sported a few new holes. Underneath the grime his complexion was waxy and pale, and there were dark bags under his eyes that spoke of more than one sleepless night. He hadn’t eaten much in the last few days, and so far today had only managed to lift a bag of Cheez-Its from a convenience store two blocks south of his current hideout.

That was okay, though. In a second, none of that would matter anymore.

“Okay,” he grumbled out through the curtain of untamed beard that had claimed his face from the jaw down, “let’s see if you’re worth all the hype.” He was currently sitting on the concrete floor, both legs splayed out in front of him, leaning lightly back against a concrete block once used for cars. Across the room from him was the aforementioned folding table, lined with bottles of liquor of all different types. That was where the $150.00 he had on him when first arriving went, instead of toward any kind of conditional rent agreement or anything of the sort. The steel drum fire was practically right on top of him, but somehow he still couldn’t quite get warm. Sober Dan was pretty sure that had nothing to do with the actual temperature, but that was another one of those things he couldn’t look at yet. Between his legs was the centerpiece of his attention right now, the little singing bauble that he’d railed so passionately against just the other day. Hope was a hellish, torturous thing but after reading the messages posted on the network, it somehow managed to sneak back into his mind.

It took him three tries before he gave up. Every time he would start and stop, unable to stutter out more than a few syllables of the wish before his voice broke and he had to look away to regain what was left of his composure. It wasn’t fear that stopped him, though. Jacen was wrong about that much. He wasn’t afraid he couldn’t do it. That wasn’t what was stopping him. He was afraid he’d try and botch it up, like he’d botched up everything else in his life. The fear that gripped him now wasn’t of what he was wishing for, it was of what he would do if it didn’t work, if he allowed himself to hope that just once, just once something might go right…and it didn’t. Finally steeling his resolve, he closed his eyes tight, unable to look at the bauble as he made the wish for fear of losing his nerve again, and whispered the wish on the cold wind from the busted out window off to the left.

“I wish I was dead.”

Silence. And then, as he tentatively opened his eyes and saw the garage as he’d seen it a moment ago, hope gave way to a hollow pit of fear. Reaching one shaking hand up to his throat, he checked for a pulse, praying harder than he had in a long time that he hadn’t just somehow become undead. When he felt a steady thrumming in his throat, the hollow pit filled up with rage, a rage so powerful and sudden that even if Dan had wanted to control it, he had no hope of it. “FUCK!” He bolted to his feet and spun, smashing the steel drum over and spreading the burning newspaper all over the floor. Screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs so loud that God himself might hear them, he grabbed up the concrete block and in a vicious, swift two-handed downswing, brought is smashing down onto the bauble. When that didn’t destroy the thing he dropped to his knees and did it again, the screams from his raw throat now faded to wordless, piteous wails. He struck again and again, until the concrete block began to crack and collapse under the pressure of repeated blows against the ground. Snarling in disgust, Dan threw the block away, not caring that it landed in part of his newspaper fire. Staggering once again to his feet, he kicked the little trinket with all his might, sending it skittering off into the far wall of the room some ten feet away. His rage not yet abated, he stormed over to the folding table, the only other thing in the room he hadn’t yet attacked in some fashion, and in one quick motion lifted it up with both arms and hurled it bodily into the wall. It was the accompanying sound of shattering glass that finally managed to pierce the haze of rage.

It was right about then that his rage was suddenly and abruptly replaced by panic. The booze! He’d been so lost to his rage that he hadn’t even remembered the booze sitting on the table. Letting out a pitiful little whimper, Dan threw himself at the wreckage of the table he’d bled to put together, scrabbling around in the darkness on hands and knees, deliriously hoping there was some chance of saving the booze. He didn’t even feel it when the shards of glass cut into his hands, arms, and lower legs. All he cared about in that moment was finding a bottle of whiskey, vodka, tequila, beer, anything that had survived the sudden throw. It took him tense minutes but he did, finally, find a mostly intact bottom from what felt like the square bottle of Jack Daniels Old Number 7. It was empty, but it still had part of a handle, the bottom, and all three sides. Maybe he could scoop some of the other booze up into it and it would keep, at least for a little while. Ten minutes of frenzied scooping later, he was pretty sure he’d done all he could, and still obilivious to the shards of glass sticking out of his body and the blood dribbling down his arms, hands, and lower legs from multiple cuts, he staggered to his feet and proceeded over to wear the still-smoldering ruins of paper fire were giving off the faint ghosts of light. Once again he dropped to his knees, holding the broken bottle, now more of a ladle really, of booze over the embers to see if he’d managed to save anything.

What he saw was a disgusting mix of booze, grease, and blood. He daintily picked out a few assorted pieces of glass, but seemed to have gotten oddly lucky in that regard, as there were few in it. It was barely enough to fill two shot glasses, but it was there, and it was booze, and right then and there that was enough. Hating himself as he did it, Dan tossed his head back and downed the whole mess, and then with a groan threw the empty glass ladle away, hearing it smash against a wall. He turned his body and let it fall onto his ass, more of a slump than actually sitting down, and it took him a second to realize he needed to scoot a little forward or risk his coat catching on fire from the nearby embers. He tried to stand but found himself inexplicably weak, and after several failed attempts instead just resorted to crawling across the room to slump heavily against the far wall. Numbly, he became aware of sharp pains in his arms and hands, and looked down in confusion to see the various shards of glass embedded there amidst dirt and grime and grease. How had that happened? Glancing down at his legs he saw that they, too, were inexplicably wounded. He continued to stare at the wounds in confusion for a few minutes before an idea finally occurred to him. “Should probably have those looked at,” he muttered into the darkness, and if it sounded like less a concern and more a robotic attempt at going through the motions, that’s because it was.