numb

She stared long and hard and deep into the bottle she clutched in her hands. The bitters within called to her, that their burn as they went down her throat might keep her numb to everything a while longer.

She hated herself. She hated her life’s situation.

The scent of vitae on her breath was all any wolf needed to identify her as what she was. To many, she was tainted and enslaved, even though she knew better. She chose her sister over her purity and she paid for it. She was cast out of sept and city and dragged her sister with her. A tiny shard of her mind, a seed of doubt she tried her best to extinguish, wondered if she wasn’t just destined for the Spiral.

She had been run from sept and city and her bonds to the pack that adopted her were dissolved, but she still had her bonds to her tribe. Cockroach hadn’t given up on her. The stories of Ronin that she had heard suggested that their tribe’s totem turned its back on them too, which hadn’t happened to her.

Why hadn't that happened to her?

She had come close, the nagging doubt argued.

Half the bottle went into her mouth at once, just to shut up the nagging voice. She found that since the fight, this was becoming a more and more frequent thing. She awakened the spirit of her alcohol because it was the only way it made a dent in the first place. In a weird way, it kept her going long after she should have given up. She had immense trouble falling asleep these days, so when the voices in her head kept her awake, she took to it to shut them up. It was the only thing keeping the voices away from her, from telling her what a mistake she was, how badly she'd fucked up by letting her sister come to harm, and her girlfriend, and everyone.

It had been weeks now since she had last slept, and she was staring to feel it in the worst way. She pretended to sleep just so her sister and her brother in law would believe things were fine. They had enough problems with themselves to worry about her. It was more important that they start to mend. She wasn’t as important as them, not by a long shot. She dreaded falling asleep for the things she might see and feel, and they would put her to sleep if she didn’t pretend. She would lose herself when she did this. She wondered if she wasn’t slipping into some half sleep twilight state.

She saw things out of the corner of her eye. Dark things, evil things. Even though she knew they were hallucinations consciously, she still jumped, and that paranoid part of her mind still started screaming. It told her that the horrors that had abducted her sister had come back for her. It told her that the Wyrm was here to claim its prize.

She drank to scare those shadows away too. When she started to feel it, the shadows melted away, or perhaps she didn’t mind them quite as much.

Above all, she drank to scare away the pale specter in the mirror next to her bed.

It looked like a cruel mockery of her. Her copper skin had been nearly drained of color, her cinnabar hair was a matted, tangled mess. She looked like she had lost weight and her eyes had sunken in. Sometimes she swore that reflection spoke to her. It whispered evil things, about how this is what she had become. About how she should just lock herself away. About how she really was nothing more than Spiral bait, just like that part of her brain said.

It loved to remind her that the only reason she had this house was being at the right place at the right time, and how easy it would be to lose it. It whispered about how she still could barely afford food after all the utilities, yet she lived in this beautiful place. How could you do that to Midnight, it asked, how could you give her a place to live but not the other basic needs she was hurting for, for so long?

The other half of the bottle went down. Shut up, she growled in her head.

The numbness began to set in.

It was blissful in some ways, but agonizing in others. The whispering specter and the fragments of her mind finally went away. The shadows dissolved from the corners of her vision. The weed wasn’t strong enough on its own anymore, not now that she’d slid down this far.

But on the other hand, she would lay there for hours, unsure if she was even alive. She would resort to carefully hidden, precise cuts to remind herself that she was still here. Slashing across her arms would never do, not anymore. Not now that she was watched by a trained medic at night. She had to hide the marks. They were small, veiled in places that no one would see.

Well… no one but Jackdaw.

She knew he wouldn’t abide this. But he’d been away for a while, leaving before she started spiraling out of control. It felt like the voice calls they had were some of the only things keeping her heart from stopping due to sheer tiredness. Perhaps not physical tiredness, but emotional, and mental exhaustion. He kept promising he would come back up to see her and his sister soon, but there was no telling when ‘soon’ was in vampire time. She knew that.

The next time she became aware of herself, the golden light of a sunset filtered through the blinds of her bedroom window. She stared at the bottle in her hand and the ones scattered across the floor. It was an automatic process by now. Pick up the bottles and slowly lower them into the outside garbage. It was her responsibility to take it out every day. They had told her to do it in hopes to get her out of bed at least once a day. She did it while the sun was out, so that they wouldn’t cotton on. She buried the bottles underneath the few bags of mundane garbage that actually left the household. That secret was between her and the trash man.

They would be awake soon.

Once the floor was clear, she pulled herself into bed and covered herself up. This would do, this would do just fine to make them believe things were okay. It’s a depressive spiral, you’re not doing anything wrong, she half-lied to herself. She slipped away into a haze of shadows and twisting colors doing battle for dominance of her mind.

The sound of her window opening dragged her out of the haze and into fight-or-flight mode. She sat bolt upright in her bed as a man climbed through from what was now a cloudless, if nippy night into her bedroom. Her body projected the sting of electricity on her to wake her up, both from the gecko-creature on that horrible night and from her sister’s fits of fugue during the political turmoil. She sat there, and she let her beat the hell out of her, because it was all she knew how to do. The memories made her whole body bristle, and she instinctively bared her teeth at the intruder.

It took her a moment to recognize him as he straightened out.

“… Jackdaw?”

“Hello, love, hope you didn’t miss me too much-” As he looked her over, his calm smile slowly fell into a frown. “Love...”

“W… what...”

“What’s happened to you since I’ve left?”

“I’m… fine. I swear. I’m fine.”

“You aren’t fine. You look as if you’re wasting away. I smell alcohol.”

She really should have known she wouldn’t have been able to hide it from him. His Clan tracked by scent, he would be able to smell the whiskey on her breath from across the room.

“I wasn’t expecting you to actually come tonight...”

“I told you I was coming soon, poppet.”

“I- I’m sorry-”

“Shhh. It isn’t important that you try to explain yourself now. I have a proposition for you.”

“What…?” That nagging voice made her dread what was going to come next, even though she had no reason to fear him.

“Stay with me for a few days. Just because it’s been so long since we’ve seen each other.”

“But- sister...”

“She’ll be fine. She’ll just be a walk away. Please, let me take care of you, just for a few nights.”

“You won’t let me say no, will you...”

“Not a chance, love.”

“Fine...”

He began to gather her clothes from around the room as she resigned herself. She should have known. Even the others probably knew something was wrong. Just because she could hide the bottles and the smell from them, didn’t mean the specter in the mirror wasn’t her. She looked like a walking corpse. She looked like a vampire. She knew there was a reason that she had been made to see the therapists they knew lately, maybe she just didn’t want to admit it.

Maybe it didn’t register, because she had sunk beyond even wanting suicide, into deep, dark numbness.

It occurred to her that the only reason she hadn’t been caught drinking before this point was that she was banking on no one coming to see her being Ventrue.

She was such an idiot.

Before her inner monologue was allowed to continue, she was swept out of bed and carried out the window, and set gently in the back of a nicely-furnished, well-kept car.

When sister found out, she would throttle her. But he wouldn’t tell her… right? It didn’t have to come to that, right? It felt like being taken home by the police, in a way, even though she knew it was very much the opposite. Maybe it was only a metaphor.

She had really fucked up, this time.