Seven: Repercussions

*thanks to Head_in_the_clouds for your support!!**

***

Sage woke up the day after his thirtieth birthday with a gasp, shooting up in bed. He had dreamed about being chased through the mall by Lich – an incident that happened several months ago, but still made Sage shudder to remember.

Nothing had happened, really. It went in much the same way as the encounter at the house. No bodily harm occurred. Psychologically, though, there were probably a few bruises. Sage thought he would probably have that same nightmare on repeat for the rest of his life.

Subsequent encounters between Sage and Lich weren’t quite so tense. Usually. Mostly this was because Sage got the hell out of dodge the moment Lich showed his stupid veiled face. It got to the point that Sage was too paranoid to go out and cause trouble, because he knew Lich would be there waiting to catch him. Sage thought that Lich was tracking him somehow – he had to be. How else would he know where Sage was twenty-four seven?

Sage was over it. And honestly, he wasn’t sure what he was still doing this for. Ever since Lich showed up in his life, Sage hadn’t been able to pull off a single successful heist.

So Sage decided he was going to quit. His family was doing well financially, and so was he. It would be best to just give up while he still had some semblance of dignity. He wasn’t going to quit cold turkey though – Sage had a plan. A good one. A last hurrah, if you will. But he needed time to figure out the details.

But it could wait. Sage was hungry – ravenously hungry, which was odd for him. Especially in the morning. And he had a headache. With a groan, Sage tried to get out of bed – and dropped to the ground, knees giving out. Pain shot up his back like someone cracking a whip over his spine before gathering into a dull ache in his…  a very sensitive place.

Oh…fuck.

Sage curled up in the fetal position on the floor as his memories of the previous night came flooding back in…

***

Sage’s friends made him go drinking for his birthday. It was the weekend, thankfully, so he wouldn’t have to worry about waking up early tomorrow. Still, Sage was initially leery of going out, specifically because last year’s birthday celebration had ended with Sage and two of friends, Carolyn and Abe, passed out drunk on the roof of Abe’s ex’s house. Sage’s birthday and their breakup had happened to coincide last year, so their drinking party was half for Sage and half to help Abe get over it. Sage was still blurry on exactly how they got onto the roof and what their plan was, but he did know that only Carolyn’s smooth-talking got them out of jail time. Abe’s ex reluctantly agreed not to press charges, mostly because while they did break and enter, they hadn’t actually destroyed anything, passing out before they could, presumably, break everything in sight and pee in the rooftop pool.

Well, they probably hadn’t peed in it. Sage didn’t remember. But if they had, Abe’s ex would have deserved it.

This year, however, Abe promised a tamer birthday experience. Sage wasn’t sure he believed that, but whatever. It had been ages since he went out for fun rather than crime. After thinking it over, he decided he wanted to get drunk, dammit!

So they went out. They went to a little bar not far from their workplace and drank… a lot. Carolyn, with her superior alcohol tolerance, remained sober the longest, but even she was starting to stumble by the time they were ready to leave. They clung onto each other in an odd tangle of limbs. It was uncertain who was holding who up, but they managed to walk a few blocks like that.

Abe kept slurring ‘happy birthday’ to Sage as they walked, to which Sage replied ‘thank you’ each and every time, as if they both had short-term memory loss and forgot what they’d said the second they said it. Carolyn, for her part, was ignoring them both quite effectively while humming something that could have been the theme from Jurassic Park, or perhaps nonsense.

They were all going to head to Carolyn’s house to crash. Or at least, Sage is pretty sure that was the plan. It was hard to remember.

However, as they turned down a dark side street on the way there, Sage spotted someone passing by, and abruptly stopped. He blinked once. Twice. And then flung himself from the braid of arms around him to stumble after the person he’d seen.

Carolyn and Abe both stopped too, looking after Sage in bleary-eyed confusion.

“Where you goin’?” Abe slurred. Sage mumbled something about seeing a friend and waved them off.

Usually, being that both Abe and Carolyn were good people and good friends, neither one would have let Sage wander off on his own in that state. However, both were equally blitzed out of their minds and seemed to trust that Sage knew what he was doing, continuing to stumble away.

Sage, now on a mission, walked as fast as his drunken self could manage after the person he’d seen, feeling some sense of urgency that he couldn’t rightly name the reason for.

Thankfully, the other person wasn’t walking very fast, and Sage managed to catch up to him – at which point, the cloaked person heard Sage lurching up behind him and turned. Had Sage been watching this interaction from afar and not drunk, he would have found it funny how lost Lich looked when Sage tripped right into his chest.

Sage squinted up at his veiled face, thankfully too intoxicated to freak out about Lich’s considerably buff arms being the only thing holding him up.

“I got a bone to pick with you,” Sage said, and then immediately started giggling. “Heh. Bones. Get it? Cause you’re a necromancer?”

Lich said nothing in response to this, which sober Sage wouldn’t blame him for. Drunk Sage, however, became instantly upset.

“Hey!” he shouted, and then slapped Lich’s chest. “Pay attention!”

Lich remained frozen, holding Sage the way one might hold an angry kitten who was hissing and clawing at you, thinking they were fierce as a lion when they were really about as intimidating as a sock.

Becoming even more enraged, Sage then ruined his own life, with a few simple words.

“Dumb hero, thinking you can do whatever you want to me just because I’m a villain. Seriously, what the hell did I do to you?”