The Stains Beneath Our Skin [mxm] ✔

31 | Ruins

The music pounded in Casper's skull. Too loud. Always too loud. Crowd your hell out with grinding static and vanish on the white noise scream. His arm stretched out before him on the bar he slouched behind it, and the track marks studded the inside of his elbow like stars.

Only the wheel was real, but Casper sprinted at the bottom until his lungs seized because through the translucent plastic, he thought he could glimpse hope. It was a lie. It was always a lie. And Casper was the worst liar of all of them.

He could smell himself on the air. The rot under his skin. And it burned his nose thicker than the alcohol ever could.

He'd gotten this job when Jess caught him skulking back at work. Waiting for a dealer he knew swung by. She'd looked good. Fresher. Hugged him and told him she'd been worried about him, offered him a place to stay and told him about a club she knew looking for a new bartender. Casper stayed on her sofa for one night, long enough to get a shower and wash his clothes, before heading back out.

He nodded off on the bus across town while he watched rain drops trickle over filth on the window. Dark. Murky. Like the black ooze that slithered over his skin.

Every time he showered, he showered boiling hot and scrubbed until it hurt, but the filth was inside him now. It seeped out of his nose and his mouth and his pores.

For a while, one of the guys at the bar decided they liked him enough to move him in. Food and a roof and a shower so long as Casper laughed at his jokes and bent over when he asked. At least he got used to this one. Usually he was too deep in the opium dream to remember how much he hated him.

Remember himself—

Remember Jack—

Remember Cain—

It hurt to remember Cain.

Took three more weeks for the guy to realise what filth Casper drowned in when he wasn't at home. The guy beat him and—

Casper shuddered and stood up.

That was a week ago. His new boss had let him sleep in the back since he staggered in bloodied to fuck and passed out on the floor. She was nice. She cleaned his face and told him it'd be okay.

It wouldn't be okay.

Casper quivered right on the edge of breaking, and deep in his gut, he knew tonight he was going to snap. Maybe he'd leave. Maybe he'd die. Maybe he'd do it to himself.

Maybe things would go better in the next life. Maybe he wouldn't have been born just to hurt.

They didn't water the alcohol here. CCTV glared down at the bar and the till, little red light blinking like god's disapproving eye, but it didn't stop him pouring shot after shot after shot for himself. Someone came to the bar, and with the drink-slinging instincts honed into his bones, Casper pushed past the other bartender whose name he didn't know to serve them. Two steps away, he froze, nausea churning through his gut.

Redhawk.

"Casper!" Shit. Mechanical, Casper closed the distance and stood with his arms over his chest two steps back from the bar. Redhawk was bluehawk now, and he slouched over the counter with a sleazy, hammered grin on his lips. "Hey, cutie. Where've you been? I thought you went off-grid."

Casper shrugged. "For a bit. What do you want?"

"Had been thinking four vodkas, but now I'm thinking four vodkas and—" He broke off and rolled his eyes over to the exit like Casper knew what that meant. Of course he knew what that meant. Casper did it for free or for drugs a lot of the time now – just to feel something, just to feel sick – but Redhawk had always paid.