One Rainy Night

The Prophecy

Well, Vegas officially sucks.

Stanley knew, because he knew himself way too well, that sooner or later he'd probably change his mind about this, the next time things started looking up for him here.

But right now, laying in the gutter with the newly-acquired certificate of divorce in his pocket, his precious car keys (barely rescued from the greedy claws of his new ex-wife) clenched so tight in his hand they were probably breaking the skin, and a headache performing a drum solo on the inside of his skull, he hated Vegas.

And then, because the world hated Stan Pines, it started to rain.

And not just a soft, wet drizzle either, oh no, that would have been nice and merciful so of course it didn't apply to him. It was a full-out downpour that had him soaked through within seconds.

At least he still had his car, so he had somewhere to go to dry off.

With a groan, Stan finally sat up, and after a long moment where he waited for the tiny drummer living in his head to stop beating the cymbals he began the agonizing process of getting to his feet.

He sighed, brushing his shaggy hair out of his eyes, and began the arduous walk to where his car was.

It probably should have bothered him more than it did that he wasn't even that upset about finding out that Marilyn had just been going after his car this whole time. But somehow, well...you got used to being abandoned and rejected, after a while. It didn't hurt any less when it kept happening, but after a while it stopped being a surprise.

He stopped at an intersection of two equally grimy, dirty alleyways, and frowned in thought. He'd hidden his car down one of them when he first got to Vegas, he knew that. Covered it with a bunch of trash, made it look less appealing to anyone who might come sniffing around-and then stupidly bragged to Marilyn about how great it was, so she'd married him and tried to persuade him to tell where he was hiding it, until he finally caught on to her little scheme and nipped it in the bud. But right now he was still kind of hungover, so he couldn't quite remember the right alley...

Reaching into his pocket, Stan pulled out his last quarter and flipped it. Heads, he'd go for the one on the left. Tails, the one on the right.

In some universes-many of them, in fact-Stan got tails. He went in, found his car right away, changed into dry (albeit grimy) clothes, and curled up in the back and moped himself to sleep before driving off the next day, already planning out another get-rich-quick scheme.

In this one, however, the quarter turned up heads. And Stan caught it quickly, before it could bounce away into the gutter or something, stuffing it back into his pocket, and trudged into the corresponding alley.

***

He realized soon enough that his car wasn't down here.

Grumbling to himself, he was about to go back the way he'd come, when a voice warbled, "Care to learn your fortune, young man?"

Stan jumped what felt like a foot in the air, and whirled around, digging into his pockets for his brass knuckles in preparation to fend off-

A tiny old woman dressed in clothes even more ragged than his, sitting cross-legged on the ground, using half a cardboard box as a makeshift tent (that he could tell wasn't going to last much longer if the rain kept up like this), with a deck of cards being shuffled between her bony hands.

Stan let out a relieved laugh, snorting at himself for being scared so easily, and turned away shaking his head. Just hearing that phrase made a small coal of nostalgia burn in his gut, and he didn't need anymore painful reminders of how much his life sucked today, thank you very much.