Thread: The Beginning is the End is the Beginning (SevenxSwitch)

Suffocating. He felt like he was fucking suffocating. The New York night air was hot as hell and the shitty little fan on the table was wheezing its way through every spin, stuttering and spraying dust from where it had collected at the base, flecking Blake's sweat-soaked torso with grit. But Blake didn't notice he was already covered in too much dirt to care - silt and sediment from the day's fight, filth and grime from the street. Sweat. Tears, but not his own. Blood. So much blood - blood on his fingers and his wrists but not on his knuckles because liberal jaws were too soft to break his skin. Blood on his face from where it had sprayed after he'd hit that molotov-tossing socialist right in the teeth, effectively ending his days of granola-chawing. Blood on his pants, thick on the soles of his boots from where he'd kicked one of those hippies in the face, because for an instant he could have sworn the guy was one of those skinny fucking little Charlies from 'Nam, waving an RPD at him and it wasn't until he was on the fourth - fifth? tenth? - kick that he realized he was hammering his heel into the face of an American. It had stopped mattering by then, though - slopeheads, coolies, liberals, the inside of their skulls all looked the same. Blood on his cigar - even the smoke tasted of it as he rolled it out of his mouth and into the air. Smoke and ash and cider, it tasted like war. It tasted like fucking glory. Blake closed his eyes against sight in general because his vision was rippling like a pond he blamed lack of sleep - it had nothing to do with the bottle of Jim Beam he had been watching over, because he wasn't drunk. He wasn't drunk, though by all rights he should have been because the bottle was down to its last jigger but he was still thinking - nothing seemed to stop it. Nothing worked anymore. The only time it stopped was when he was in the midst of it, when the blood was fresh on the air and there was a weapon in his grasp, or just his big goddamn mitts if that was all he had. He stood at the window of his high rise, staring at the city that sprawled out in front of him as a play of shadow and light, and the smell hit him. The smell of the city. The fucking smell of the rats that crawled and grovelled and snivelled around the streets, too shit scared to do anything except go to church and buy their white-picket fences for their suburban homes and have kids that they would raise to go to church and want white picket fences around their suburban homes, too. And when the real world landed on their lawn wrapped up in the daily newspaper, they would blame the guys who kept them safe, pitch their home-made bombs and trash cars because they thought they were making a point. They thought they were making a difference. They weren't. They didn't. They never would. Shit. Blake griped, and pitched the empty bottle off of his balcony, waiting until he heard it smash several stories below before stumbling back into his apartment. He crash-landed on his couch, in a restless, drunken haze that wasn't quite sleep but he knew he wasn't fucking awake either, because that Vietnamese girl was dead, she wasn't standing in his living room, staring at him with empty fucking sockets and that big, swollen pregnant belly. That was all in his head. He closed his eyes and wished her away. He told her she wasn't real. She left, just like she always did, and when he opened his eyes to an empty room again, he laughed low and hoarse in his chest, not because anything was funny, but just because no one got it . And no one ever would. That was part of the joke.