Neil is the Sahara Desert.

His tongue is a lump of sandpaper in a mouth stuffed full of cotton. Every centimeter of his skin is hot and beading with sweat, like meat sizzling in a pan. Light filters in through a window somewhere off to his right and it's searing red and yellow fire into the back of his eyelids, the piercing pain shooting through his retinas and taking a hammer to his brain with a massive pounding. An attempt to swallow down the dryness makes the walls of his esophagus stick together, his throat bobbing, and he becomes immediately aware of an additional problem.

He needs to throw up. Bad.

Thrashing in a tangle of sheets that wrap around his ankles, he jolts forward and goes careening down. His body hits the floor with a heavy thump and a new form of pain pulses through him, rattling extra hard in his skull. Although, as his stomach rolls and acid climbs up his throat, he charges forward, tearing himself out of the blanket trap and stumbling into a room he vaguely recognizes as his hotel bathroom.

He doesn’t even bother with the light switch, dropping to his knees in front of the toilet and projectile vomiting into the bowl. His head roars and he finds himself fading in and out of awareness as he continues to heave up the contents of his stomach. The gagging and coughing continues for only a few minutes until his system finally decides to settle down. There's still a threatening lurching in his belly and a tightening in his throat, but it’s significantly weaker than before. Everything burns or throbs and in a moment of bleary delusion, he wonders if this is how dragons feel everytime they spit up lava and fire.

With a heavy, shuddering sigh, Neil rests his head on the rim of the toilet, the cool porcelain giving some relief to the heat radiating from his skin. His eyelids fall shut and he waits for the pounding headache to calm down, yet this takes longer and doesn't dull enough for him to feel any better. A disgruntled wheeze squeezes past his lips as he just sits there.

What in the world did he do last night to get himself so totally destroyed?

All he can recall is the few days since he arrived in Las Vegas. Sitting in on meetings and seminars, getting introduced to different people in marketing, touring a handful of major companies, attending a few group dinners, and… and then what? Saturday… What did he do Saturday?

He just barely remembers that the students partaking in the department trip had the day off to explore because it was the last day before heading back to campus. Yet, for the life of him, he can’t remember how he spent it. Hopefully he didn’t do something stupid. He trusts himself well enough to know he wouldn’t do anything to get in trouble, but he’s human and any human who gets drunk enough is at risk of doing something incredibly stupid that they’re likely to regret the next morning. Except he doesn’t know if he did something he regrets because he can’t even remember anything he did after lunch!

A gurgling grumble leaves him as the thumping in his head gains momentum when he tries to force his memories back into perspective. Immediately he lets them slip back into the abyss of darkness if only to avoid worsening the wicked headache he’s nursing. One thing is for sure, he went somewhere and drank enough to land him with the most crippling hangover he’s ever had in his twenty three years of life.

After an indescribable amount of time, the full body aches, pains, and encompassing nausea eases enough where he can peel his eyes back open and stare out at the shower curtain to his left. On the bright side, he recognizes what little he can see from his spot on the floor to know he was, in fact, in his own hotel room. It could be worse. He could’ve gotten blinded by heartbreak and ended up with- wait. He wouldn’t have… there’s no shot.

Off the top of his head he didn’t notice anyone sleeping beside him, but that wasn’t exactly his primary focus upon waking up. So, gritting his teeth and moving with the speed of a sloth that just took a sedative, he lets go of the toilet and pushes onto his feet. It’s stop and go as he waits for a wave of nausea to pass over or the raging headache to dim back down. There’s nothing he can do about the body aches, but it isn’t bad enough to stop him for assessing the damage his drunken self caused.

Getting himself out of the bathroom and into the bedroom is like what he imagines how it feels to be on a boat at sea during a storm. It’s a slow process, maybe one of the most difficult things he’s had to do this week, but he makes it. Neil pauses a few steps away from the bed and squints against the light, the way it feeds the pain in his head makes his jaw clench tight enough he can feel an extra ache from it. From what he can tell, there’s no clothes scattered anywhere, not his or anyone else’s, and most importantly there’s no extra body that shouldn’t be here.

Relief washes over him as he drags himself the rest of the way to the bed and lowering himself to the edge, laying back down and facing away from the cursed light of the window. Honestly, what could he have possibly been thinking that justified him getting so smashed. He knew he had to travel today, he knew he’d need to be properly prepared so the flight goes as smoothly as he can make it. 'Yesterday Neil' was on something and 'Today Neil' wants to have a few colorful choice words with him.

Something buzzes just beside his head and though he lacks the energy to jump, his hand flies back to search for the source of the sound. He gropes around the sheets for a bit until he grabs something, pulling his hand back and seeing his phone with two sets of notifications lighting up the screen that seems like it’s earned itself another crack through the center. Great.

Not thinking much of it, considering he feels like he can’t think much of anything right now, his brain a buzzing mass of white noise that’s willing to let in very few coherent thoughts, he swipes it open. The first one he taps on is a message in the group chat from the group leader. It's a reminder to everyone about breakfast and what time they are expected to be packed, ready, and on the bus back to the airport. He groans at the mere idea of having to stand back up, and goes to the other notification hoping for something better. It is not better. Well… as he continues to read, he acknowledges that it could be worse.

There are a total of eighteen messages from Kash, and all of them share the same sentiment of distress. Neil scrolls up, reading them backwards from the most recent until he reaches the text that triggered this spew of spam. As he goes he catches things like ‘wait please’ and ‘where are you’ and ‘can we talk’ and even one ‘I’m worried,’ which is interesting. When he gets to the last message, which turns out to be one he sent himself, his eyes go from squinting to blown wide open.

Well, that explains one mystery of how Neil spent his drunken Saturday. He broke up with Kash over text. 

What he specifically said was; ‘Happy Botrhday B! I din’t get u a present so u can have my blessing!’ Then, along with a confetti emoji, ‘Happy offical breakup day! Hope I never see u ever again <3.’

Neil blinks, eyes stinging from lack of moisture. He blinks again and sees how nothing changes. So he definitely isn’t hallucinating. The further he explores, he sees that drunk Neil went so far as to block Kash. He shouldn’t be this surprised about this, but he can’t help but blue screen as he processes what he’s done.

He broke up with Kash.

In this moment, and only this moment, he’s suddenly grateful to be hungover enough not to have his full faculties about him. He can tell there’s a broiling emotion crawling around within his chest cavity, but it’s clearly being overpowered by the prodding pain and nausea. He doesn’t understand the weight of it right now, but what he knows is that it’s been done. It’s over, no take backs. Neil and Kash are no longer in a relationship.

He stares at the phone for a minute or two before he lets his hand flop back on the bed beside him, taking the device with it. This is something he can worry about later. Right now he has other, more immediate things to deal with. Mainly having to pack what's left of his belongings while still feeling like he's on the verge of passing out and preparing for the most grueling flight ever.

On a seperate note, he caught a glance at himself a second after catching up on the notifications. He’s dressed in the exact same clothes he wore yesterday, except for a new, bubblegum pink tutu circling his waist that he has never seen before and has no recollection of getting. There’s a faint blue stain on the right edge of it.

Neil decides then that he is going to swear off drinking after this.