there's a {martyr} in my bed tonight .:. south

I'm not really sure of where I'm going. Until him and everything he stands for I had always been so solid in my direction, but he's got this way of turning your life inside-out and making you question everything you ever were or could be. I couldn't stay in the house after all of that, the hateful syllable of no, no, no echoing off the walls until all that heartbreak turned inward and drove me mad(der). So I left. Not headed anywhere, not with any particular mission. Directionless, just like I've been from the day Colt Hanlon walked tripped into my life. I left.

Somewhere in the dead of the night it began to snow, and now it's turning into an all-out storm. The cold soaks into my bones, chilling me to the marrow, and I don't really remember when that started feeling so wrong - cold used to have a home in the hollow spaces at the core of me, but once a creature of darkness discovers the warmth of the sun it can never truly go back. The impending blizzard chills but the ring burns, the fires of rejection fueling a searing ache that starts at the golden band tucked into my pocket and radiates outward. Maybe hurt wouldn't be such a bad thing if I knew how to deal with it, but the walls I built so many years ago to protect me from this sort of hollow throb in my chest also kept me ignorant of how to heal. I feel raw, like my soul has been flayed and then mercilessly exposed to the elements, and something about the knowledge that I could walk until my feet fell off and it still wouldn't stop only serves to make it worse.

I offered him the only thing I had - forever. And he said no.

I used to laugh at rejection. Rejection was funny when I was the one doling it out, holding spun-glass hearts in my hand and watching them shatter into pretty fragments. There was something beautiful in watching people wilt and fade to nothing under rejection's corrosive touch, and I think that maybe if I had a mirror to look into, all of this pain might make me into the closest thing to beautiful I've ever been. Everything in me feels like it's convulsing, rejecting the rejection, and something about the irony in that would make me laugh if I didn't feel like the tiniest motion would tear me apart at the seams, scatter me to the frigid winds until there was nothing left of me.

(There isn't anyway. I've been an empty shell for a while now, and the one thing holding me aloft has just cruelly cut my strings.)

My feet carry me into the nicer part of town, the houses growing bigger and the lawns more pristine with every step I take. When I finally look up, my first thought is that the Shore mansion might look like something from the front of a Christmas card if one didn't know better about what happens inside. It's not until my feet are finding a solid placement on the trellis up the side of the house that I realize where my subconscious was taking me. Third window to the right. Alyssa's not here, and so I am seeking solace in the only best friend left to me.

Beryl's asleep when I shimmy in through the window, landing in a silent, catlike crouch on the lushly carpeted floor. I don't know why I'd imagined he wouldn't be. Poor kid's been running his ass off for the past two weeks; if I'd been doing his amount of legwork, I'd be sleeping too. If I had a fiancee right now I'd be sleeping, curled up in a tangle of limbs under threadbare blankets with a satiated smile and a commemorative necklace of bruises, starved lungs and a flooded soul. All of a sudden, I feel so much colder.

I'm not really aware of the high thread-count sheets or the plush softness of the mattress so much as I am of the presence beside me (although I can't quite fool myself into thinking it's the one I want), lanky limbs curling inward around the nearest heartbeat I can find since my own no longer feels real. A stitch in time, and Beryl finally stirs. "Ave, I'm trying to slee-"

"He said no." Even the words sound hollow. I wonder if there's anything about me that's whole anymore.

Beryl flails in a way that might be comical, flailing around until the lamp flickers on and he flops over to stare at me, looking a mixture between affronted and shocked. "Dempsey? What are you doing here?"

"He said no," I say again, as if repetition will make it stop feeling like someone's driving a railroad spike through my chest. Something hateful and rebellious burns along the backs of my eyes, my voice cracking despite my hardest effort to maintain composure. "I asked him to marry me, and he said no, and I couldn't… I couldn't stay there, Beryl. I didn't have anywhere else to go."

The admission sears through my veins until it's overwhelming, and without really being conscious of it I curl in on myself, trying to smother the ragged bloom of pain behind my sternum and not let him see how broken-to-pieces I really am. We're friends; Beryl's probably the only male I could ever call a best friend, but at the end of the day he's still a member of the army that Ella and I shaped with our dirty, determined hands. And what soldier would follow a commander so easily broken?

I'm beginning to wonder whether they've stopped looking at me with fear and started looking at me with pity. The idea's so sickening that my body actually threatens to throw up for a few seconds. I screw my eyes shut until the wave passes, drawing in a shaky breath and willing my face back into its normal deadpan before they open again. "I'll leave. It's your night off; you don't want me badgering you."

And yet something keeps me there curled under the blankets, every fiber of me aching for one person, just one, a single voice that instead of giving me no will offer a fragile, quiet no, stay.

"Oh, cry me a river, Dempsey. Honestly, you’ve caught me off guard with this. I wasn’t aware you even had a heart to break in the first place." Beryl looks at me like I'm something pathetic, and it really makes me want to punch the smug little smirk right off his stupid face. But before I can shoot him a middle-finger salute and tell him to fuck off, he's jumped out of bed, fumbling around for his clothes and leaving me at a confused impasse.

"It certainly is my night off, Dempsey. And I’m going to spend the remaining three hours of it doing what I do best – hustling half-drunk and poverty-stricken derelicts out of what little money they have in some shoddy pub with the most trashy, unsavory, and often STD-ridden characters in the District, and maybe get shit-faced while I’m at it." I blink once, twice, unsure of where he's headed with this. So the spoiled Career prince likes to go slumming sometimes. What does that have to do with the fact that I've just had the lining of my soul scooped out and handed to me on a silver platter? "Care to join, General? Who knows, you might even make some friends."

"You do know who you're talking to, right?" I deadpan from my blanket-nest, hating how even the snappish scorn that would usually color my voice manages to sound sullen and defeated. There was never much color in my world besides stark black and white, and now what little vibrance I managed to find has been leeched out again, leaving me curled on this monochrome island of feathered down completely alone (if these sheets were the space between Colt and I, I'd fold them end over end to bring us back together, but life isn't as simple as creases and apologies to someone who doesn't even care). I don't want whatever it is that Beryl Shore is trying to offer me, the assertion that I can just get up, brush myself off, and move on. He has no idea. He doesn't have a single fucking clue. "Don't know if you remember, but me going into a bar typically doesn't end very well for the other parties involved."

I don't want some rowdy guys' night on the town with the hopes of raising my nonexistent spirit, don't want to smile and laugh and pretend I'm okay. I want to forget. I want to blank out the past year of my life and go back to who I used to be, because although there was no love or comfort in being a monster, there was security. There was stability. There was everything that Colt's ripped out of my existence and crushed between his bare hands. I don't know how to forget. My entire life has been based around holding onto every travesty the world's dealt me, letting it simmer until I can annihilate it with icy vengeance and a knife-edged smile. Forgetting is a concept I've never allowed myself to become acquainted with it.

Dad was pretty good at forgetting. Some pictures hidden to collect dust in the attic, a bottle or so of Jack a day, and it was as if my mother had never lived at all. The only stubborn reminder of her existence was me, and for the first time in my life, I begin to see his logic. Of course he hated me. I was the only thing keeping him from sinking into a comfortable numbness, a place where he didn't have to spend every waking moment reliving the mistakes that led to the death of one of the few people who was ever stupid enough to love him. I don't have any pictures to hide, don't have a threadbare wedding dress to pawn for booze money or a stack of home videos to dove in the basement. What I have is Beryl Shore, looking at me with a jackal's grin and the promise of enough liquid forgetting to maybe blank out a little of the hurt.

It'll do. What's losing a few more of my beliefs over the course of today? At this rate, I'll never believe in anything again. That doesn't sound like such a terrible way to live.

"Actually, strike that," I mumble, rolling out of the bed with as much grace as I can muster and standing up, trying not to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. It doesn't work. I look wrecked, twenty years older than I did when I woke up this morning, a dejected slump to my shoulders and a kind of bone-deep hurt behind my eyes so powerful that even the reflection of it aches. It looks like I haven't slept in years, like I've been carrying around the weight of the world for longer than I can remember. The person in the mirror isn't Kaelen Dempsey. He's something significantly less, all visible heartbreak and a lost will to move forward, all his dreams wrapped up in a silly golden ring and crushed beneath the hard weight of a reality he didn't see until it was too late to save himself. Add a few more pounds of muscle, two or three days of stubble, and a penchant for using people as punching bags, and I could be staring at my father.

This is what Colt reduces me to.

"Get me drunk, Beryl. Get me so damn hammered that I can't even remember my own name." The climb down the trellis is a little harder than going up, the whirling snow starting to make the creaky wooden rungs dangerously slippery. I nearly fall and bust my ass twice, glowering at the stupid thing once my feet are mercifully back on solid ground. For once in my life, I follow someone else's lead, falling into step beside Beryl's brisk pace and fumbling for a cigarette so I can have something to occupy my hands. There's this awful urge to reach into my pocket and cradle the ring like a holy relic, but I refuse to give into it.

"I think we broke up. Did we break up? I don't know. He said… we both said some pretty rough stuff. It got nasty," I shrug, too inexperienced with silly human things like relationships to know what the subtle implications mean. Besides, it wasn't all that subtle. Colt screaming "I hate you" across the room seems pretty final to me. The fresh memories feel like a white-hot knife in my chest and I grimace against the pain, taking a drag on the cylinder between my fingers and letting the hot roughness of impending cancer make a futile attempt to wash his ghost out of my lungs.

"And you know what?" I say, trying to sound vicious and self-satisfied. It's like a kitten trying to roar and sound like a lion. "Fuck him. I can have anyone I want. Anyone. I don't need him."

I’ll take advantage of Tarqin's wide-eyed hero-worship, I'll see if Ella's up for venting some physical frustration, I’ll find a world of boys and girls who'd do anything for a few hours with a piece of my infamy. I’ll have a different someone for every day of the week. And they will love me. They will all love me. And I won’t love him. That manipulative little fucker, playing me like some sort of sick puppy-love symphony. How fun it must have been for him, weaving his clever little web of lies, but oh god I miss him, no, no, this isn't what I wanted, baby, come back, please -

I realize I’ve started falling apart again. Struggling to pull air into my starving lungs, I wipe the stupid, traitorous wetness from my cheeks – No. We’re done with that, Kae. No more tears. They will do you no good - looking up to see the facade of a seriously grimy-looking dive bar. Not one I visited before, that much is a small mercy. No one will even recognize me. If my defeated posture and haunted expression weren't enough of a change, the lack of smeared kohl around my eyes and the fact that my hair's grown out longer than it's been since I was a little kid should be enough. In low lighting, I could probably pass for Riley. That's a decent alibi. For some stupid, arbitrary reason, something almost like nervousness pools in my gut. So I've never had a drink in my life. So I swore I'd never touch the stuff. So what? I've never had my heart broken, swore I'd never fall in love. I'm nothing but a bundle of broken promises, so what's a few more?

"All right, Shore," I grumble, listening to my cigarette hiss as I drop it into a puddle of slush. "Time to go compromise my entire moral structure. No big deal."

and it's all alright
i guess it's all alright
i've got nothing left
inside of my chest
but it's all alright

The crumbling facade of the building all but screams a tale of degradation and neglect, a story I know all too well. I grew up with everything falling down around me. While other kids went off to school with goodbye kisses and sandwiches with the crust cut off, I went with fresh bruises and the sensation of my stomach gnawing on my backbone to sustain itself. The wreck before me even smells like my childhood, the sticky-sweet tang of whiskey mixed with the stale regret of burning nicotine and desperation. Everything about this place makes the space beneath my skin ache with phantom abrasions, whispers of a long-dead ghost slurring through my ears.

"It’s just a bar, Dempsey. Quit being dramatic and come on," Beryl says with a skyward roll of his eyes, ducking through the doorway and into the swirling half-dark beyond. Following him shouldn't make me as nervous as it does. How many times have I slipped into places like this, the avenging force of destruction that was feared by all? Perhaps the difference now, the reason I feel so much more powerless in this place in time is that there is no vial of liquid death concealed in my palm. I'm in the midst of one of the District's most vile dens of depravity, with no defense against the corrosive forces I'd always sworn I would never touch.

Lately, I seem to have been breaking every promise I ever made. Don't forget your divinity. Don't get attached. Don't fall in love. Don't trust someone enough to let them hold your heart and then crush it. Don't ever touch alcohol. Another broken promise can't send me any closer to rock bottom, I muse as Beryl shoves a glass of clear something into my hand. Frowning skeptically, I raise the smudged vessel up to the dim light, examining it closely (I once made a habit of never eating or drinking anything I didn't prepare myself, but now there's the somber knowledge that I could be drinking pure chloroform and not even care). It smells sharp, almost astringent, like someone should be cleaning with it rather than ingesting it. Beryl seems almost amused at the dubious look I shoot him. "Vodka. A low cost and effective engine fuel, industrial solvent and common cause of kidney failure. People also like to drink the stuff. You want to forget, Dempsey? This is what you’re looking for."

Scowling, I turn on my heel and make for a table in the corner, safely wrapped in shadow. I don't like the look that the barkeep was giving me. The sooner I'm out of sight, the better. The glass hits the table with a hollow thud, ripples skating across the clear liquid inside, and I stare at it for I don't know how long, my eyes glazing over the deeper I sink into my thoughts.

You swore you'd never sink this low.

I enjoy playing games with people. I was just using you.

You're better than this.

I don't want a thing from you, Dempsey, not a damned thing. Just get out of my sight.

This makes you no better than Dad. Is that what you want?

You always wreck everything, Kaelen. Why did you do it to me?

It just… It hurts.

I hate you.

Shuddering, I grab the glass from the table and pour half its contents down my throat. Holy shit, it burns. By sheer force of will I manage to not spit the vile stuff all over Beryl and myself, swallowing what feels like a ball of fire before launching into a coughing fit, clutching at my scalded throat with moisture swimming in my eyes. "Ripred, it tastes like turpentine. How do people like this swill?"

But despite how horrible it might taste, there's a noticeable warmth that's blooming in my stomach, snaking outward through my veins and painting my skin with an odd sort of flush. It's not an altogether unpleasant feeling. I'm so used to being constantly cold that any measure of warmth is a rare comfort. Blinking slowly, I take a smaller, measured sip, still grimacing at the bitter, biting flavor but managing not to hack up a lung in the aftermath. Another wave of heat settles in my bones and I sigh, propping my elbows on the table's grimy surface and surveying Beryl over steepled fingers.

"Still can't believe a handsome devil like you hasn't gotten pulled into the shitstorm of love yet." My own voice sounds different, magnified and soft around the edges. Not a drunken slur, exactly, but different. My usual speech pattern has a careful eloquence to it, a focus on pronunciation and diction. This is something looser, a little closer to my hood rat roots, dropped consonants and lilting rhythms coloring the usual sardonic drawl. "Advice from someone who knows - don't. Love is bullshit, Beryl. You just give and give and give, and they take until there's nothing left of you, and then they ask for more. And you keep on giving, because you just fucking love them, and in the end they just leave."

Laughing humorlessly, I snatch the glass back up and tip it skyward, draining the rest of it in one go. This time, I relish the burn, because it makes me feel alive, my eyes drifting shut as another flame lights up behind my chest, as close to truly warm as I'll ever be. When the dim interior of the room crosses back into my vision, everything seems a bit softer, and an inexplicable, stupid grin stretches lazily across my lips. "Y'know, I think I could do with another one of these. I haven't forgotten yet."

ouch, i have lost myself again
lost myself, and i am nowhere to be found
yeah, i think that i might break, lost myself again and i feel unsafe
be my friend, hold me, wrap me up, unfold me
i am small and needy, warm me up and breathe me

"At the rate you’re going, that won't be much longer," Beryl snorts, waving the pretty girl behind the bar over with two more glasses. He looks far more amused than I'd like him to, less like a friend offering the only consolation they can and more like someone who just bought tickets to the best comedy show on earth.

"Shut up," I snipe, nursing my drink resentfully. "I'm a fucking stick insect, if you haven't noticed, and I've never touched this stuff before. Of course I'm a lightweight."

Maybe that's a good thing. Having a lower tolerance means a quick ticket to getting plastered and having a hope of this awful, searing pain in my chest flickering out of existence. The stories of picket fences and happy-ever-afters never talk about this, about the wrenching pain when it's all over, how you feel like you've been cut loose and left to drift off to sea. I wish I'd known. But the sad part is, even with the knowledge that this would be the end, there's something masochistic and stubborn in me that would do it all again. What was it about "it's better to have loved and lost…" I can't really remember, but the basic sentiment is there. I still would have kissed Colt for the first time all those months ago, even if I'd known of the poison waiting on his lips for me.

"Love’s less than bullshit. It doesn’t exist," Beryl says, his voice flat and factual as he finishes off his glass and grabs for the next without hesitation. "True love, at least. It’s a myth, a lie fabricated by the sad, desperate people of the world who can’t cope with the thought of being alone. All it is is an empty promise and a cruel game with no winners, one that I’d rather not play. No offense to you, Dempsey, but in my opinion, love is for the weak."

Rather than snap back at the implication of my own weakness (maybe it's something about the fact that he's right, I am weak, I've been reduced to less than nothing by a boy who didn't care at all in the end), I simply sit and ponder his statement for a while, quietly picking up my second glass and taking a small sip. The more of the stuff I drink, it actually starts to taste not so much like paint thinner. Beryl's is exactly the attitude I used to have, believing the worst of a world that had never shown me anything to prove me wrong. It was easier to justify my actions in a world where love wasn't real, easier to wipe the board clean of any useless pieces and impurities. I was so sure that I had everything figured out, and then Colt came along, a mess of easy smiles and precious heartbeat that overturned my world of pawns and kings and careful strategy. And that, the way he took everything I was and held it in his hands, had me to the point that he owned every fiber of my being before he sent me careening into oblivion? That was real.

"Love exists. That's the scary part." I don't like the heavy sort of sadness that weights down the edges of my words with leaden regret, so I drown it under another oversized swig of vodka, making a concerted effort to not think about how in the end the apple doesn't fall far from the tree - my father hid from the pain of a wasted love, too. Maybe the Dempsey men are just doomed to run from the things that can hurt them and turn into monsters in the process. And yet despite how I've spent years demonizing the bitter liquid searing down my throat, the ache at the core of me is gradually starting to edge away, a lightness filling up my bones in a pleasant contrast to the way I've been feeling like there are anvils in my shoes for the past… forever. Maybe that's the point, I muse. The alcohol doesn't kill the pain of Colt destroying me, because that would be like putting a band-aid over a bullet wound, but it dulls it. Reels it back in to the point where I can almost function. The old Kaelen had no need of that sort of emotional crutch. The new one can't even exist without something to hold him up. And that is what love does. The pathetic state I've sunk to is more than enough evidence for the existence of love.

"It's easy to live without love. Comfortable, even. There's a vague sense of something missing, I guess, but you learn to deal with it. And then love just falls out of the sky and hits you one day, and everything changes. There's good things, and there's bad things. The good is great, it's all the songs and poetry you've ever heard, and feeling complete, and smiling for no reason. The bad is… destructive."

Oh, I seem to have lost my filter. How quaint. In a distorted stretch of time and silence my second glass is gone, and there's another one replacing it in a sluggish blink. How do you explain love to someone who doesn't believe it's real? It took falling headfirst over the edge to make me understand. Words have always been my willing soldiers, and yet they seem to fail here, leaving the entirety of the last beautiful, horrific, wonderful, torturous year of my life summed up in three simple, soft-edged words. "It… it consumes you."

I laugh then, a sort of breathless giddiness rushing through my head that I can't stop. There's something about it that's just so funny all of the sudden, a mixture of delicious irony and the fact that I've been the fool in all of this, never realizing until it was too late. It's real laughter, not the bitter or derisive kind that I'm used to, and it swells up along the backs of my teeth, pouring over my lips until my stomach aches and the sound peters out to more silence, a brilliant, actual smile around the rim of my glass as I knock back another large gulp and beam at the form across from me, so innocent and untouched by the ravages that have torn me apart. It strikes me as funny that Beryl could ever seem innocent of anything, and just like that I'm laughing again, polishing off my third drink and starting to sluggishly muse that hey, this stuff isn't bad. "But see, you're smart. You won't ever let yourself get drawn into it. Me? I was stupid. God, I was stupid. It's hysterical how stupid I was. Love exists, Beryl Shore. And there is no weapon on earth that's half as dangerous. So don't go messing with it, or you'll end up like me."

i may never sleep tonight
as long as you're still burning bright
if i could trade mistakes for sheep
count me awake before you sleep
i'll stay awake till i trade my mistakes or they fade away