2019-11-17 - Black-Out Drunk

"Jesus fucking christ!"

The glass hits the floor, shatters, and its contents splash everywhere.

"Well, that was wasteful."

Patrick stares, breathing like he's just run a marathon. He can feel gin seeping into his socks, an unpleasant sensation, but nothing compared to the terror that sends his heart racing. Sounds keep failing to come together as actual words. He's just going, "Y- y- y-"

"Yeeees? C'mon, Patty. Of all people, you've got nothing to say?"

For the second time tonight, Patrick practically jumps out of his skin, whirling toward the sound of the voice behind him. "You're dead. You're both - "

They laugh. Not cruelly but gently. "We're both ghosts."

Patrick feels his knees buckle, and then he hits the floor in a way not entirely unlike the way the glass did a moment ago. When he comes to, a few minutes later, it's with two faces peering down at him. Painfully familiar faces.

"That was dramatic."

"It really was."

Stained with gin, feeling the knot and the blood on the back of his head from hitting the kitchen floor, Patrick scrabbles away till his back comes to rest against the lower cupboard doors, staring at these two apparations. "Why? Why would you - "

"You're our baby brother, Pat."

"And," there's regret behind this comment, like they're sorry to have to say this but it needs to be said, "after Sue... Pat, you should've stayed. You should've been here."

Patrick has already had a day by this point, so forgive him for getting misty at that. He looks up and between the two of them, nodding silently, because they're not wrong. "Trust me, I've been told," he manages to get out between grinding teeth.

"So here we are. You didn't come for us, so we've come for you."

Eleven hours later, Patrick wakes on the floor of the kitchen. He takes stock of the situation: an empty bottle of gin, a glass broken on the floor, a mat of blood in the back of his hair, and a goose-egg beneath it.

Groaning, peeling himself up off the floor, he tells no one - because there's no one else here, there was no one here last night, and there's no one here now, because Sue and Mikey are dead. He had a disappointing night, he came home, he got black-out drunk, and that's all that happened.

Anyway, he tells no one (BECAUSE THERE'S NO ONE ELSE HERE), "I'm getting too old for myself."