I'll Just Stand Here and Watch You Go

Chapter 3

His clothes were soaked.

Alec felt his way through the darkened corridor, hair in his eyes. His vision weaved in and out. So did his steps. He'd only had one shot. He hadn't taken anything. There was nothing to justify this stagger.

"Alec! You playin' with us tonight, man?"

He shook his head, making everything worse. Whoever it was merely shrugged. "Well, if you change your mind - "

He was shaking. He shook all the way to the dance floor. The throng pressed in on him, inescapable, suffocating. Voices wheedled, gushed, screamed, complained. They pounded into his head. He couldn't fight them off. He couldn't do anything.

One particular voice slithered into his ears. "You need loosenin' up, kid?"

An odd sensation began somewhere around his stomach. He looked down, at someone dropping pills into his hand. An assortment. Indeterminate. Uncountable.

Take them. Take them. Takethemtakethemtakethemtakethemtakethemcowardcowardcowardcoward

Another voice cried out, somehow cutting through the din. "No!"

A smaller hand lashed out, bird-like, dashing the pills from his hand. He watched them spill among the heels and boots and scattered glowsticks. He could have cried for them. But he couldn't feel anything. He couldn't even feel himself beginning to collapse.

The same hand that had struck his took hold of his shirt, its twin pounding on his chest. "For God's sake, stay with me!"

He followed the hands with his eyes, up the unfamiliar arms, right up to the unfamiliar face.

Blazing eyes locked onto, smoldering coal.

All at once, awareness needled into his body, a sudden zip right into his brain. Every sensation suddenly clarified itself. The muddling fog dissipated.

The hands gripping him disappeared – she was drawing away. He stayed upright, still locked into the girl's eyes. Barely realizing he was reaching for her, until his hands were on her face.

With his lips on hers, he was insensate to the writhing dance floor again – but he was back in his body.

Suddenly there was nowhere he'd rather be. Than right here, right now, kissing this strange girl with the eyes that knew him.

She broke away, horror and something else sliding over her expression, then turned and ran.

Alec, now fully possessed of his faculties, had no problem following.

He shouted, "Hey, wait!" and gave way to chase that was actually fruitful.

Slipping through the crowd with practiced ease, the girl managed to free herself, and took off further down the dark, to a corridor, Alec knew, that only had a back exit. He cornered her easily.

"Wait! Don't leave, please."

The girl whirled around and tried to run past him. He grabbed her by the shoulders. "Please!"

Eyes trapped wide open, the girl stopped resisting. She put her hands up. "Fine, fine."

Alec released her, leaning back against the opposite wall. He opened his mouth, but the girl beat him to it.

"I'm sorry I kissed you out there," she said hurriedly. "I know you have a girlfriend."

That hadn't even crossed Alec's mind at all. "Oh, right. Thanks... for apologizing."

Didn't I kiss you?

He shook his head, trying to focus. "Who are you? Why did you do that?"

She shrugged. Helplessness, like a haze, settled over her features. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"I'm just asking for your name," he said, strangely affected, a heaviness building in his gut.

"It doesn't matter." It was almost a moan. "I shouldn't have done that."

"Shouldn't have... thrown all those pills from my hand?"

She straightened then, from defeat to certainty in the space of an eye-blink. Those eyes that knew him held all the foreboding of a storm. "That much would have killed you."

The numbness began to creep over Alec's bones again. No, not numbness – a cold knowing, the surety that he would have sealed his fate with just a handful of innocuous pills.

He almost felt angry.

"Why did you do that?" he repeated, trying to make sense of the anger.

"I don't know," she moaned again. "I don't fucking know why I was sent here, of all places. And you, of all people - "

Abruptly she regained her height, though only in the figurative sense. From Alec's view, she hardly stood more than five-foot-two. "Well, it is what it is now. You're saved. And I will be gone."

The anger halted. Alec ran his hair out of his eyes with one hand. "What does that mean? Who are you?"

A scream lanced upward beyond just the noise, so distinctly out of place it raised immediate alarm. Alec glanced at the girl just once more. She met his gaze for half a second.

He took off then, searching desperately for his family. The throng became a stampede. He felt himself pulled every which way and merely kept his head above the fray, looking around for them.

He spotted Colin in the booth, searching for him too. He could tell."Colin!"

His brother stood to attention, spotting him in the rush. Relief broke across his face. "Alec!"

Far too panicked to think clearly now, Alec began to fight his way through the throng, and saw clearly why everyone was fleeing.

The bar was on fire.

The glass shelves, with their bottles and bottles of expensive liquid, looked almost beautiful in the conflagration. The glass bar top reflected the flames, ungutted just yet, even as the fire worked steadily toward engulfing most of everything else.

It's slow. Alec fought his way free to Colin, who by now had been joined by the rest of the family.

"Are you all okay!" he shouted, skidding to a halt, catching his sister Angel around the waist unconsciously.

"We're fine, let's get the hell out of here!" Davy shouted, shielding Colin's and Amy's heads from any falling debris. The wrecked bar, built around a pillar supporting the place, was beginning to threaten the ceiling. Any minute now it would cave.

Alec's voice flattened. "Move, move!"

He shepherded his family to the door, vigilant, watching for any threat as they joined the piles fighting to get out. And succeeding. Cool air tried to rush in and was instantly suffocated; smoke got out.

Gradually the throng began to thin, and the fire climbed higher and higher and licked away the floor under their feet.

"Help!" A girl's voice shrieked from the bathrooms.

Alec whipped his head around, trying to see through the smoke. Two figures were coming out of the bathroom, one clearly slumped on the other.

Looking back, Alec met Liv's eyes, flashing a warning. He didn't heed it.

A woman was dragging her friend out of the bathroom, the latter quite obviously dead to the world. Tear tracks divided the soot on the woman's face. "I don't know what she took!" she wailed.

Wordlessly Alec scooped the prone girl into his arms and carried her back to the entrance, to Davy waiting, holding the door open. "Hurry up!"

The lucid woman was fighting, hysterical now. "There's still someone in there - "

Alec cursed and took off, for the yet-unscathed bathrooms. Choking on smoke, he kicked the door open and scooped up the prostrate form of another girl. Cursorily he glanced at the other stalls. Nobody in there.

Fortunately the girl stirred in his arms, the blaze shocking her awake. She blinked, and then blinked harder, the smoke stinging. "What - "

He set her on her feet, none too gently. "Go! Run! Exit's that way!"

She twitched as if dodging a firecracker and went. Alec turned, surveying the place one last time.

A ceiling beam crashed overhead.