“You should go to bed,” Charlie told me, looking exhausted himself.

“I won’t sleep anyway.” I tapped my fifth cup of coffee on the table, noting the shift in the way light fell on the table. “Besides, it’s already morning.”

“Fuck.” Charlie put his head in his hands. “I have another shift at one.”

“Come on.” I stood. “Let’s get you home.”

“You’re gonna be alright?”

I paused. “Honestly?”

“Always, Ewan.”

“I don’t know.”

He stared up at me. “You need to stay away from this lad. For your mental health. Fuck, for your sobriety. He’s bad news.”

“No, Charlie, that’s.” I pressed a hand to my face, feeling the way it shook. “I think that might be just the problem.”

He stared at me.

“Being around him isn’t what’s fucking me up. It’s not being around him.”

“The last time you went near him you got high!”

I made a face. “He didn’t drug me. Hell, I didn’t drug me. And if he’d been with me in the morning -”

“What, you wouldn’t have begged him for some pills? Had him call up his dealer, gotten him back into his shit as you fell back into yours? Fuck, Ewan, you know how you can make people do what you want them to. You know how fuckin manipulative you can be with that gift of yours.”

That hurt to hear, especially coming from Charlie. I turned my eyes away and crossed my arms, trying to put some distance between his accusations and my body.

“He’s bad news, Ewan.”

I ran my tongue over my teeth, feeling how solid they were. How sharp. Thought about how it would feel if someone had talked about me like that, had given up on me like that. Knew that so many people had.

Knew, somehow, that he never would. Or maybe that was hope. It was hard to tell the difference between the two for him.

“Fuck you,” I still told Charlie. I left him there in the morning sun and went over to the counter to pay.

***

Morning brought with it exhaustion and such an overwhelming feeling of soreness that I wasn’t sure that I would be able to move.

Fine. I’d become one with the couch then, turn to dust motes and air, swirl through the room and exist in periphery to myself until someone came and scattered me.

I hoped they’d make it quick.

Cooper’s friend came out and fed me breakfast. He said very little as I ate my eggs and bacon. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had real food, not just scraps from the bar’s kitchen or whatever I could steal from convenience stores. The shit Jimmy would feed me these days so I’d “last” for his buddies when they came over. I was always kinda shocked when they actually paid him for use of me; I would have done them for free.

But you know, capitalism works in mysterious ways. I wasn’t in charge of who I was doing, or for how much. And I was doing them for free in the end. It wasn’t like any of that cash was making it’s way to me.

I got drugs. I got fucked. What more could I fucking ask for?

“You okay?” the friend asked me at one point. “Your neck looks kinda bruised.” I shrugged and took another piece of bacon. Gotta get while the getting’s good; who knew when the next time was that I would have real meat.

“I gotta go,” I told him when I was finished. I put my plate in the dishwasher and stood, wincing as I did. I think I noticed him wince with me; idiot. There’s enough pain in the world without taking on someone else’s. “Ta for the food.”

“Anytime.” He looked me over. “I mean that, kid. Anytime.”

I shrugged again. I wouldn’t take him up on it, and I think he knew it. I grabbed my shit and headed for the door.

As I reached for the handle, I heard keys jingle. Voices. I slowly withdrew my hand, taking a step back.

“Shit,” I heard the friend mutter. I guess this had not been the plan.

“- you don’t even know his name,” I heard.

“I fucking know, Charlie,” the familiar voice said, and a chill swept through my very core. I think it was the first thing I felt in weeks. “But I think I have a little more self control and goddamn self respect than -”

The door swung open and I was face to face with him. Those green eyes were wide open with surprise, his lips slightly parted, his muscled arm holding the door open. We stared each other down for a moment before I took advantage of that open door and slipped into the hallway.

“Ewan!” I heard behind me, but I didn’t turn around. Then a hand was tight on my arm. I let him pull me to a stop.

“Wait.” His voice was soft. Breaking. Fair. It was his fucking turn, now wasn’t it? I had had already broken for him, so many times. “Just wait...”

He pulled me back, settling me against the wall. I refused to look at him, refused to feel how similar this was to the things we had been that night when he’d let himself - when he’d been high. When he’d made a mistake. I stared over his shoulder.

His fingers were light on my shoulder, moving up to my neck. I couldn’t hold back the shudder that passed over my body at his touch. “Your neck,” he said, sounding amazed and heartbroken all rolled up into one. “Did someone hurt you?”

I didn’t need his pity. I didn’t need his comfort. I needed to stay like this so I wouldn’t break anymore, needed to stay down so I could no longer fall. He got my hopes up. He fucked me up so fucking bad. “I need to score,” I told him, brushing away his hand and all the things it promised. I ducked under his arm and started back down the hall. “Cheers.”

Fucking cheers.

***

I stood in the hallway watching him disappear and just hating myself. Fuck but he’d looked terrible. Had that been a handprint on his neck? And the way he’d walked, like he was limping…

A hand landed on my shoulder and I jumped. “Lad,” Charlie said, and I leaned my head against the walls. “That’s your good thing?”

“Fuck,” was all could muster. That had just completely gutted me. Completely and utterly dropped my stomach out from where it had been sitting, let me empty and hollow and just.

Fuck. What the fuck had he been doing?

“Let’s get inside.”

Bren was waiting for us when we got there, a determined look on his face.

“He was sleeping in his car, Coop. His car. And I couldn’t just, with the way that place is, and -”

“I’m not mad at you,” I cut him off, meaning it. Bren had always been the one who hadn’t wanted him in the house, not me. “Just wasn’t expecting it was all.”

He bit his cheek. “I thought he’d be gone by the time you got back.”

“Yeah.” I sat down at the counter and put my head on the cool granite. “He looks so fucking.” I didn’t have the words.

Bren sat down opposite me. “Did you notice his neck?”

I nodded. How could I not?

“Do you think he’s alright?”

“No,” Charlie said. “He’s not alright. He’s an addict. He’s got it bad. He’s hollowed out and filling that space with whatever the fuck he can right now, and probably doesn’t give a shit how he gets it. You remember, Ewan. Not a pretty place to be.”

I covered my head. I remembered. It physically hurt to think of him like that, the things he might be doing to himself. And I knew, god I knew that he was, the way he carried himself, the way he spoke like he was empty, the way he’d just stared over me like I wasn’t even there…

I knew all of that. I knew the way he carried it on his body, all the things that made it different from the way I had carried it, angry and hot and disastrous. I knew how close, then, how fucking close he was to emptying himself completely, becoming nothing but a shell and then scraping at even those walls until they became so thin they collapsed, until he quietly fell for the last time in a pile of dust and bones as a shadow of the fiery thing he once was…

An idea of him, I reminded myself angrily. I held an idea of him inside of myself and the real person was out there, hurting. “We need to help him.”

“No,” Charlie said. Bren was conspicuously quiet. “You’ve got the same shit inside of you. You can’t go waking it up on some rescue mission.”

“It’s dead,” I lied. “I killed it, and I can show him how to do the same.”

“The monster never fucking dies, Ewan. It sits in your gut and it waits ‘til you’re weak so that it has a chance to take over again.” Charlie leaned in close. “Don’t go fucking weak on me, lad.”

He walked out the door before I could come up with a response.

Bren put his head in his hand. “What are we going to do?”

My breath filled my lungs. I let it leave again. I didn’t fucking know. I didn’t fucking know.