//downward

sickeyes:

_{3 pills.
  30 minutes.
     3 more pills.
       30 more minutes.}

_{Delsin ground his teeth until his jaw was sore. 
He felt everything.
The sickness in his chest, in his stomach, in his head.
There was no fog, no haze, no relief and the shaking had started not long ago and he was at the point of clawing at the skin on his arms. It needed to stop. stop. please stop. Things were starting to come back that didn’t need to. Where he was. Who he was. What he was and what he had done.} 

_{“Oh my god,” he groaned, curling up on himself and pulling in a long, shaky breath. Delsin had taken so many things that he couldn’t recall what he had actually taken. He was sure that last night, he had swallowed a hit of molly that Fetch had slipped him the day before along with his painkillers, and that’s why he had actually felt something. And when washed down with a few beers, It was amazing. Things were numb, he was numb, and everything was beautiful. The colors danced, his vision swam, and the cartoons he had settled on watching were fucking hilarious. It was great. Everything was g r e a t.}

_{Except now, nothing was great, it was all terrible, horrible, reality was rolling back over him wave, after wave, shake after shiver and no, no he couldn’t deal with this anymore.}

_{His fingers trembled as he scrolled through his phone book and called the person he knew could make him feel better. Delsin shouldered the phone as he lay on the couch, teeth chattering with anxiety, stress, needing a fix, and everything between. “Pick up,” he bit out to himself, squeezing his eyes shut.} 

_{Brent woke up, head pounding to the beat of the slow tempo song blasting from the speakers of the stereo, played on repeat for who knows how long. His body on the verge of writhing from the left over pain, his eyes hurting whenever he blinked and cottonmouth drying up every last bit of saliva his mouth could produce, it only meant one thing. That whatever he had taken, whatever concoction he had mixed up was good. Real good.}

_{He extended his arm to blindly search the nightstand next to him, knocking over a plastic bag of a pack of 100 capped sterile syringes into the grimy carpet, tinfoil, a half filled can of beer, and an empty whiskey bottle as he searched for his phone, anything to tell him the time. Anything that might point to how many days he’s been knocked out for falling in and out of the haze, it wasn’t that it mattered, if it was more than 24 hours there was no actual way to tell since he had no idea what the last day he remembered was.}

_{It didn’t actually matter, the only thing that counted was him waking up and as long as that happened, nothing else mattered. Groaning as he propped himself up on his elbows on the bed, the rusty coils of the cover less mattress creaked beneath him, Brent looked around at the trashed room he now lived in. Dealing had given him a steady flow of cash, it might not be the best of places but it had the basics and as long as it had a wall to wall carpet he was good, passing out on the floor would be at the very least more comfortable than falling onto something tiled or faux hardwood. The desk where he used to sit at and draw was overtaken with a tiny weight scale and giant ziplock bags with smaller baggies inside of them, each labeled with what they held. Prescription bottles, white powders, small capsules filled with liquids, and water droppers that did not have water in them, everything there was a part of his new business and it was going better than he ever expected.}

_{There weren’t as many cops on the streets and the people, they were getting so desperate.}

_{For something.}

_{For anything to help them escape from what they couldn’t control. Everything that was once there from his short previous life was buried under what had taken over his new one. Self destructing slowly. T-minus 5 minutes. Oh yeah, phone was in my pocket, I need to charge it.}

_{After he plugged it in, the 27 year old walked to the bathroom to brush his teeth, the only source of light in the room flooding in through the small crack between the door and it’s threshold being his guide. The light nearly blinding him when he opened the door, he walked in with his face all scrunched up as his vision slowly adjusted to the brightness, the sharp pain that ran from his eyes to the back of his brain dulling slowly with each throb. Brent watched himself in the dirty mirror with the toothbrush in his mouth yet he wasn’t able to recognize the man that was right in front of him.}

_{The dark circles grew worse with every waking moment, the guilt that he once felt about everything he had done in the past was washed away with the number of innocent people he had turned into junkies, exactly like how he was when he was on the run with Abigail. Living from high to the next, depending on the dealers for that one thing that would keep them going. Smokeable, insufflatable, injectable motivation to live long enough to see the next one. It didn’t matter how, as long as they got it. He didn’t care about what everybody else had to do to fund their habit, as long as he was the one in control of the most important thing in their lives. It was all he needed from them, their freedom and their money. Nothing else mattered. The man he had become destroyed the person that used to be, twisting him more than ever—changing him into the very thing he hated the most. But the reflection looked at him after washing his mouth with a hollow stare and a grin stolen from nightmares, all screamed one thing. I don’t fucking care.}

_{I want nothing more than your pain. Nothing less. A broken sense of revenge fueling him, he’ll never be the same again.}

_{The continuous noise of the text tones going off from his phone gave him a vague idea of how long he was gone but it he paid it no attention as he searched through piles of clothes on the floor for a clean shirt until he had gotten a call, with Delsin’s ringtone, the one he uses for priority calls.}

_{“Yeah.” Brent answered the phone, tossing clothing behind him and onto the bed, “What do you need?”}

12:54 8 May 2014 || 23

_{Three days until he could say he’s been on the streets for a month, 27 days where Brent had fought tooth and nail against other people who were far more experienced in the realm of homelessness than he was. The world was rugged, unforgiving and with a conduit under his wing, it was even worse. Never fully realizing just how fragile trust was and how easily he had placed it in others prior to this entire experience. Before this, he was never fully betrayed and unable to understand the depth of just how deep a vein of trust was buried. But that was before.}

_{At this point he and Fetch no longer slept at the same time but rather in shifts, a couple hours each, in case there was some scum bag after their jackets and whatever little belongings they’ve acquired through lifting off of innocent civilians along with muggings and robberies.}

_{It was late now; Fetch was sleeping all curled up on the cement walkway underneath the bridge which was where most of the people in Nebraska that had nowhere to go went to get sleep after fruitlessly begging on the streets for extra change. In an economy like this, people weren’t willing to give anything for people who have obviously fucked themselves over so badly that they would have to rely on strangers to provide them with some sort of pay. People would write lies on the pieces of cardboards, a woman standing on the side of the road for a year straight stating that she was pregnant with no actual physical changes in her body. The people that have seen her every day on their way to work and school, they know she isn’t, if she’s lying then every person who’s begging must be lying as well. We were all just dirty parasites feeding off of society anyways.}

_{He watched her as the faint streetlight shined off of the damp pavement and her skin, giving her a sickly orange glow that was mainly attributed by their poor diet and living conditions. With his body growing restless Brent glanced at his sister once more before deciding that maybe it was time for a short walk, nothing more than five minutes, it couldn’t hurt and besides everybody there was already dead asleep. Walking up the pathway to the over pass part of the bridge he paced back and forth, trying to keep himself awake and yet at the same time trying to get rid of this migraine that had begun pounding in his head.}

_{Light. Sound. Anything and everything. It all hurt so bad. Everything hurt.}

_{It wasn’t long before he decided to head back, the street lamp’s dim yet direct glow bothered him more than he could ever imagine and even the slight rumble of the engines of the cars that occasionally passed by were too much. His vision had grown wary, balance thrown off, the palms of his hands tingling like crazy. It was almost time for him to fall asleep; it was time for him to walk back}.

_{Now in the darkness, with the reflections and silhouettes of the sleeping bodies on the ground he searched for Fetch, finding her with a body looming over her. Watching her sleep. Probably wanting to do much worse than that, the anger raised up from the pain in his skull as he instinctively grabbed a brick, creeping up behind the man.}

_{Looking back at that moment now, it was impossible to tell if he had deserved it. If he deserved dying with a shattered skull and a rock lodged into his head, but after that he woke Abigail up and told her to run. They had to wash away the splatters of blood that covered Brent’s face, and his jacket. Hands red.}

_{“No, don’t worry. It’s not my blood.”}