Could've Been the Whiskey, Might've Been the Gin

[Dimitri]

Snaking one arm around her from behind, Dimitri buried his face in Anya’s back between her shoulder blades, enjoying the warmth and the softness of her skin. He had been having a terrible dream, but just having her here, being able to hold her close, he was able to reassure himself that that was all it was: a dream.

Then, slowly, wakefulness began to settle in, bringing with it a myriad of feelings and sensations, most of them being terrible. There was the excruciating pain in his head that made it feel like it was going to explode (and him feel like he might welcome it just to end the pain), and the churning in his stomach that was promising all kinds of bad things. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, which felt like something had crawled in it and died.

And those were only the worst feelings. All in all, he pretty much wanted to die at this moment. That feeling was not helped along by the sudden realisation that the warm, half dressed body that was in bed with him was not, in fact, Anya. Starting abruptly and completely awake, he pulled away from her as if he had been burned, so quickly and fully that he managed to throw himself off the side of the bed and onto the floor with a loud thud. It only made his head hurt worse, and at this point the pain and sickness was so bad he couldn’t even string together a coherent curse in any language. All he could manage to do was lay on the floor in a heap and moan pathetically.

[door]

What exactly was rousing Door was unclear, but she was starting to pull out of her dream. Which was too bad, she liked this one. She and Caz (eighteen year old Caz) were in the London below and she was showing him everything under the sun. She showed him the Market, she showed him the Velvets. She introduced him to the Marquis. They kissed as the sun was coming up. It was, all and all, a very good dream.

And she was being reluctantly coaxed out of it. Well, it was a coaxing until someone fell out of bed.

Wait. What was someone doing in her bed?

Door shot up, only to let out the longest groan of her life. Oh God, right. She had been drinking all night. The order after order of Scotch, she had lost count of how many, how frequent and for how long. And her head was making it very clear that she wasn't going to get to do math for some time.

She reluctantly opened her eyes and saw a man on the floor. Who the hell...oh right. Dimitri. She had drank with him last night. She had offered to help him with his girl trouble.

None of this explained when she was in his bed. She looked around for a moment, noting what was around (despite the difficulty of moving and thinking). Most of her clothes lied in a puddle on the floor, save her tank top. She slowly turned to the man on the floor, noting his own level of clothing. It was comparable to her. "Am I wearing your...um...your boxers?" she asked, squinting her eyes. She felt like she was going to vomit.

[Dimitri]

Oh God, why was she yelling? It was so loud and his head already felt like someone was taking a sledgehammer to it; her voice was like adding a wrecking ball into the mix.

“Please, stop yelling,” Dimitri whispered, but even that hurt. Trying to open his eyes enough to look at her, he managed a glance long enough to recognise her before squeezing them shut again and pressing the heels of his hands into them. It was his drinking buddy with the stupid name, he remembered that much, but he didn’t remember leaving the bar with her. In fact, he didn’t remember leaving the bar at all, nor anything else that came after it. This was not good. Her words did give him another fright, though, when they finally clicked in and he quickly checked out his own attire. He may have been wearing very little, but he was still relieved. If nothing else, at least he could assure himself that they hadn’t swapped. He was still wearing his own boxers, though he didn’t dare open his eyes again to see if she had somehow ended up in another pair.

“Too bright...” he whined. Crawling across the floor toward the window, Dimitri groped blindly for the cord to lower the blinds, but it seemed to be fighting back. After a bit of a struggle it finally released... only to come crashing down on his head.

Once again he was reduced to a groaning lump on the floor.

[door]

Door was going to assure the man that she wasn't yelling but the feeling his voice banging around in her head was too much. God, this was horrible. Why had she done this? Ignoring everything else about this situation, she was hating life for no other reason than she had to deal with that throbbing in her head.

She had planned on being sympathetic when she saw the curtains come banging down on top of his head but the loud crash made her close her eyes and hold her forehead in the palm of her hand. She leaned back down (slooooooowly) and stared up into the darker room. How had this happened? Yes, there was alcohol, lots of it (lots lots lots), but how had they ended up in bed together. In...um...varying states of undress. Why hadn't she just gone back to the dorms? She was happy, she remembered that much. She was happy that she had made him happy...

Door had to stop. The thinking wasn't helping. And God knows how long she had been lying there in silence.

"If I was going to vomit...where would the optimal place for such a thing be?" she whispered.

[Dimitri]

Pushing the blind off of his head, Dimitri pulled himself over to the wall and sat up partially, leaning heavily back against it. Ah, blessed silence; it was definitely welcomed, though it did give him the opportunity to actually thinkg, and that just wasn’t a good thing right now.

This was why he didn’t drink. A conman always had to be sharp, always had to be in complete control of all his faculties. Not only had he lost complete control of his senses last night, but he had also lost his memories of much of it and now he felt like he might lost his stomach contents as well. As far as he could remember that consisted only of alcohol. He also had a sinking feeling he had lost all of his rent money in this excursion as well. Of course none of this even touched on the half dressed girl in his bed, who was talking again.

“Next door over, on the right. Bathroom,” he replied. With his eyes still closed he pointed in the general direction of the door that led out into the hallway. “You sound like you feel about as good as I do.”

[door]

"Yeah...there's no way I'm gonna be able to move all that way." This had been one of the largest mistakes she had ever made - and a lot of her past mistakes almost got her dead. But this, this right here, this was bad. She would be waaaay more comfortable with death right now than she would be with the implications surrounding this particularly scenario.

She couldn't think, she couldn't breathe, without being in intense pain. She felt like she was going to throw up...basically forever. She had no idea how they had gotten back to Dimitri's apartment and there was that whole 'weren't you just spooning me' thing that she really wasn't wanting to touch right now.

"Okay," she kept her tone low and her eyes closed. She tried her best to focus. "What's the last thing you remember about last night?"

[Dimitri]

She had a point. The bathroom might only be the next room over, and the entire flat as a whole wasn’t really that large, but it could have been miles away considering how he was feeling right now. He was pretty sure that moving an inch right now would be too much.

“Trash can,” Dimitri offered an alternative, pointing to the bin on the floor beside the bed. Even though his room was small it still looked very far away.

Clutching his pounding head in his hands, he tried to put pressure on it as if that might help, but he could probably crush his own skull and not feel any better, or any worse. It might be welcomed at this point. This was possibly the worst he had ever felt in the world. The blow to the head that had knocked him out when he had been a kid hadn’t left him in this much pain, and at the moment he would almost take the aching, itching he’d experienced in his hand after that freak had crushed it over this. He knew that this would pass much sooner than that had, somehow deep down he knew that, but he really didn’t feel it right then.

She was asking another question now, he should probably listen. Oh man, she was asking him to think. Thinking was bad. It hurt worse. “None of this,” he said, gesturing between them with his hand even though both of them were currently sitting with their eyes closed and couldn’t see it. “There was a bar, and there were drinks... ugh, so many drinks...”

That was as far as his train of thought got before it derailed.

[door]

Door looked over at her compatriot and saw that he was still sitting. She tried to shake her head and then remembered that moving was very very bad (this was, of course, the same thing that made her not turn to find that trashcan). She just stared at the ceiling instead. "Lie back," she offered. "Makes this better." It didn't help by a lot but it definitely did help. If she had been sitting up all this time there would definitely be some issues by now.

At the mere mention of drinks, Door was afraid she was going to start retching. She managed to hold it together though, simply covering her mouth with one of her hands and closing her eyes again. She mentally soothed herself, reaffirming that if she just stayed still and horizontal she would really be okay. It was starting to sound more and more like a lie but screw it.

Okay, so he didn't remember how they got in this situation they did either. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Did that affirm that nothing happened and did that mean that no confirmation could take place? Di they just have to wander around this situation without anything concrete?

The quickness of Door's thoughts made her head ache harder, splitting at her skull. "Ooow." She let out a low, painful groan. She struggled to regain her focus. "W-we were talking about...names. And a girl..." Door groaned again, putting a hand on her head. "And there was a bit of a kiss..."

[Dimitri]

Lying back sounded like decent advice, but that would involve moving much more than he really wanted to, so instead Dimitri carefully slid down the wall to lay on his side, curling up into a very undignified ball. Anya probably would have laughed at him and called him a big baby for this and...

Anya...

Somewhere in the back of his mind he could hear Door’s words. They had talked about a girl, about Anya. They had talked about what had happened to her, and how he could get her back. The conversation was rushing back to him, along with the events of the previous day. For a moment he had forgotten what had happened, he had forgotten what had driven him to the bar in the first place. She didn’t remember him... no, she wasn’t her. Confusing terms started dancing around in his head, like ‘alternate universes’ and ‘portals’ and it was all overwhelming his already... whelmed senses. It was all too much to deal with at once, and before his brain even seemed to register what he was doing, Dimitri was stumbling for the door. He made it out into the hall and out of Door’s view before he fell to the floor and had to crawl the rest of the way into the bathroom, so he was spared that slight bit of dignity, but there was certainly no dignity in retching in the toilet, which was exactly what he did next.

Both physically and emotionally miserable, never before in his life would he have actually welcomed death had it come knocking, until now.