Sorrow Knows How to Swim (Door/Open)

[Dimitri]

Nodding to the bartender, Dimitri tapped the space beside his empty glass and watched as the liquid filled it once again. Normally when he was upset, or confused, or angry he did something physical. He would run or shoot hoops or even punch a sandbag around for a while. It got the aggression out, gave him something else to focus on and sometimes even cleared his head.

Not this time. This was not something he could run from, and he could box until his hands bled and it wouldn’t take away the pain he was feeling, wouldn’t help him see anything more clearly. Nothing could help, not tonight, not with this, so for the first time in years he had turned to drink. Maybe the first time ever.

Usually Dimitri wasn’t one to drink. His business, his life, had always depended upon being in complete control. He had to remain in control of himself, his faculties, and the entire situation at all times or things could go south real quick. He had to be able to think quick on his feet, to improvise when needed. He could never afford to compromise himself, to confuse his thoughts, with any foreign substance. Control; a proper con was all about being in control

Never, in his life, had he felt control so far from his grasp than right now; the alcohol could hardly make it any worse. For once he didn’t care about keeping his mind clear; he wanted it muddled, he didn’t want to think. He didn’t care about retaining his composure; why should he care about that now? He had fought monsters, been stabbed by some mystical blade, seen people put under sleeping spells, but somehow he had accepted all that. This he could not accept. If this place was screwed up enough that something like this could happen... screw control.

Downing his drink, his eyes already a bit glazed, he called for another.

[door]

Door had been drunk once. It was in the London Below and it was off of angel wine. She had drank a single sip and was left warm, elated and calm. Her mind was spinning and she wasn't clear what was going on, but she was thrilled with it. It was probably the happiest, most spiritual moment of her entire existence.

Scotch was not angel wine.

Somewhere in the back of Door's mind, she knew why she picked Scotch. She didn't drink it but some other version of her did. Some other version of her drank it with Caz. So why the hell not? But she didn't want to think about that. She didn't want to think about what it meant for her to have seen those things. She didn't want to think about what it meant that she couldn't forget them. She didn't want to think about the fact that every day she had to struggle not to go to Plum and wish them away.

So, instead, she thought about the fact that she didn't want to remember. She thought about how much easier it would be to ignore the whole thing. And she thought about the fact that she didn't want anyone that she knew to find out about it.

Hence, The Stab Wound. Plus, they didn't card.

Door had been drinking in the corner, hoping to nurse the drinks and go slowly. She discovered that this wasn't going to be the case. So, after a few fills, she went back up to the bar and sat down next to a bloke who looked as gone as she was.

"Scotch." She pointed to her glass, reminding the bartender what she was drinking. Door tucked a bit of hair behind her ear. She turned to the man next to her. "Do you drink Scotch?"

[Dimitri]

Dimitri sat with his arms crossed on the bar and his head bowed, his hair falling forward to hide haunted brown eyes fixed on the scratched counter. He should never have let her go. He should never have let her go alone. She had told him to stay, that she hadn’t wanted him to lose his job by asking for an unknown amount of time off after only just starting. He had agreed, he hadn’t tried to push the matter because no matter how true that was, he knew there was more to it. They had been having problems, she had wanted some space; she wanted to talk to her grandmother alone, wanted some time to think. She had never said any of this, he had never asked, but he knew it and he had let her go.

Never for a moment had he dreamed she wouldn’t come back.

Finishing off another drink, he wanted to throw the glass, wanted to hit something, some sort of aggressive gesture, just for a moment, but all that would get him was thrown out. He was almost to the point of not caring either way when someone sat down on his left and spoke to him. Turning his head to the side, Dimitri peered out through his hair to see a rather small woman with short hair beside him. She barely looked old enough to be going to school here let alone drinking, at least to his foggy mind. Considering her question a moment he shrugged his shoulders.

“Sure, why not.” At this point he would probably drink turpentine if it would take away the pain, guilt and regret that was eating him alive.

[door]

"One for him too." Door ordered. Why the hell not? She had her job and she had the bartender's ear, she might as well spread the love. Particularly since she could feel the same bloody cloud over him that she felt over her. She didn't know the man sitting next to her, on another day she might have had an inkling but she didn't today. He had the same look that she did, though, the same look of someone who wasn't used to handling what they were going through. She wasn't going to go out on such a limb to say that they were alike...but they definitely had similarities on this night.

Door brought the tumbler to her lips and took a long pull of the brown liquid. At the beginning of the night, she had been making faces at how this alcohol tasted. But she was liking it better and better throughout the night. The burn felt at home on her lips and the feeling of the liquor in her belly and brain was just what the doctor ordered.

"I bet it's a woman." She said out loud. The man next to her would be correct in assuming that she was speaking to him but, then again, there were a lot of people whom that could apply too. Door might have been looking to forget that night but she wasn't really looking to be alone.

Besides, she was picking it up off of him so loudly that he might as well have been screaming it.

[Dimitri]

He probably should have offered to pay for his own drink, or maybe both of their drinks, he was the man after all, but it hardly seemed to matter at this point. It wasn’t like this was a date and besides, if she was looking to match him in drinks then he could pay for the next round... and the next... and the next.

“Spasiba,” Dimitri said with a sad, crooked smile. Taking the drink, he didn’t down it in one like the others, instead just taking a sip this time. Scotch wasn’t a drink to be guzzled, especially when purchased by someone else. Hardly showed appreciation to swallow it with barely even tasting it.

So now what? They share their drinks in silence? Apparently not. She ventured first, but she didn’t ask his name or what he did or even what brought him here. No, she jumped right to speculation, hitting the nail on the head in one.

“Isn’t it always a woman?” he asked. Lifting himself partially off the bar, he turned his stool partly toward her, still leaning on one elbow to help hold himself up. “Or a man,” he pointed at her with one finger of the hand that still held the glass. If she could guess his problems then hers were fair game as well. Besides, in Dimitri’s experience, the top reason people came to a bar to drown their sorrows usually had something to do with love. Simultaneously the greatest and the worst thing in the world.

[door]

There it was - men and women. Constantly the issue. She was fairly sure that this wasn't how things were supposed to be when it came to love...or, at least, that this wasn't what she had been sold. Her parents had been happy and in love for years before her mother died and she had always been convinced that her own love life would be somewhat simple because she feel what others felt. Fat lot of good that was going for her right now.

Door nodded when the man next to her agreed that it was a woman (and he even threw in man for good measure). She sipped her scotch again, working on God knows what number this was. She hated the idea reality of this situation. She hated that, for the first time in her life, she was in love and this was how she was celebrating. She turned to the man next to her.

"Is this how it always goes? The falling in love thing? Does it always end with you on a bar stool working to kill some brain cells?" Other people fell in love multiple times in their life and the man next to her was clearly older than she. And he wasn't a bad lookin sort. Maybe he had some sort of insight.

[Dimitri]

Dimitri leaned his head on his hand, enjoying the swimming sensation in his brain. He was well on his way to “you’ve had enough” territory, if he wasn’t there yet, and he wasn’t planning on stopping any time soon. He finally understood why others did this. It made his brain fuzzy, his thoughts unclear, and his tongue loose.

All the reasons he never did this.

He laughed at her question, a dry, humourless chuckle. There it was: love. Not just love, but falling in love, obviously for the first time. Oh, if she only knew.

“Ah, Любовь,” he sighed, speaking in his native language more the more he drank. “I guess that depends on how I take the question.” Finishing his drink he ordered two more. When she was done her current one there would be another waiting. “When love ‘ends’, I’d say most the time people wind up here,” he continued, obviously misconstruing her question. “As for the falling part, I guess that depends on who you fall for.”

He was certainly a testament to that. The ‘falling in love thing’ had been terrible for him because he had been sure at the time that nothing could come of it. Anya was royalty and he was nothing so they could never be. He had walked away, then spent an entire year pushing her away when fate brought them together again. Eventually he had realised it didn’t matter and for a while things had been wonderful... or as good as it could be for people like them, at least.

And now he was here.

[door]

What was that language? She didn't actually know it but there was something familiar about it. Who knew? Maybe it was just the alcohol in her body and mind. But was willing to believe the lies that the alcohol was telling her about her understanding a language if it would keep dulling the ache in her heart.

The last of her scotch was barely down her throat when the man had ordered her another one. What a gentleman. She lifted the fresh drink towards him in a mock cheers, but didn't wait for any tap of a glass before diving back in. "Thank you." It could barely be heard around the ice and glass.

She listed to him as he spoke about the 'end' of a relationship. She could see how all of that would be the case. She knew that the breakups were typically horrible things but that wasn't what she was really talking about. Hell, she was the kind of girl who could happily accept the bad with the good...or at least, she always thought she was. "And what if it barely started? What if it didn't start? What if you're sitting here before the whole bloody thing happened!?" She sipped again. She was always a talker and she was sort of surprised to find that she was getting more quiet the more she drank. Was that typical?

She looked hard at the man next to her, sensing barely anything. So that stopped when she drank too, huh? That would have been good to know a few months ago. "Is that why you're broken, my friend? It ended?"

[Dimitri]

So she was here, drinking her face off, and nothing had even happened yet? Sounded like a classic case of unrequited love.

“Well, in that case,” Dimitri said, offering a sympathetic grin, “bottoms up.” Repeating her gesture, he lifted the glass in her direction before taking a swig himself. He didn’t feel the burning of the alcohol before; he wasn’t sure he felt anything anymore. No, that wasn’t true: he still felt the same soul-crushing, heart-breaking pain, guilt and loss that had been threatening to suffocate him since he had left her but it was... somehow further away.

Then the girl had to go and ask about it, ask about his pain, about why he was broken. That was the perfect way to put it. He wasn’t sure he had ever been whole, there had always been a part of him missing, pieces he couldn’t quite put into place. He thought he had overcome that with Anya, but then again it was easier to look back on everything now and only see the good parts, to forget about the bad. The truth was, there had been a lot of bad too, but he couldn’t think of any of that right now. In fact, he could barely think at all.

“Ended... nothing ended,” he said, shaking his head, a hint of anger in his voice. “She’s just gone... but she’s not. She’s here but... it’s not her.” He wasn’t making any sense, but then none of it made any sense. Setting his glass on the bar, Dimitri rubbed his hands over his face, then dragged them back through his hair. “She doesn’t remember anything. No, that’s not right.” The whole thing was crazy. He sounded crazy. Maybe he was. “For her it didn’t happen.”

[door]

The man's smile actually did a bit to comfort Door. It was better to be doing this with someone rather than alone in the corner. She shouldn't have been surprised honestly, she always preferred company, but it was nice to have someone to commiserate with who seemed to understand.

Wait...did he just mention experiencing something different from what his love did? That his love was different? How much did this guy understand?

Door reached out and hit the man on the arm, excitedly, four times in a row. She swallowed the gulp of booze that had been in her mouth. "I know that! That's happened to me! I had to shut my mind off just that I wouldn't see it anymore!" In her drunken state, Door was convinced that this man was speaking about the same phenomenon she had been dealing with in the past (though there were so many other plausible answers). He had seen his love in another world and he was dealing with the same thing she had been once upon a time.

Huh. Interesting. She wasn't as depressed about the other worlds she had seen anymore. She was aware of them, aware of how they played in to all of this, but when she was trying to put out the burning in her, it wasn't from that glimpse of some other Caz that she had loved. It was...it was from the forty something year old man in the eighteen year old's body. Damn.

"It can be really hard. Seeing things that you don't get to actually experience? Knowing that somewhere, where ever that is, you're happy?" Her enthusiasm had died somewhat as she started to think about those places again. She had worked so hard not to think about them and now...they were just there. "It's so hard to see one place and live here."

[Dimitri]

When someone makes a drunken confession that borders on crazy, the last thing they expect is for the person they are confessing to to suddenly get excited about it. And the hitting; he hadn’t expected the hitting either. Jumping at the first strike, he had a hard time registering that this wasn’t a one time thing because she just kept hitting him.

“Hey, hey!” he protested before she finally stopped with one last, her forth, hit. Rubbing his arm, even though he was the one questioning his sanity a moment ago, Dimitri definitely had an expression on his face that made it clear that he was wondering if she was crazy at that moment. On top of the ‘are you crazy?’ look, his bottom lip was just a millimeter away from pouting. “What the hell?”

She wasn’t listening, though. She was rambling on about... oh, hey, maybe he should listen to this. She was claiming that the same thing had happened to her. She... she knew what he was talking about; she understood. He wasn’t crazy, it had really happened.

Somehow that wasn’t a comfort. Crazy seemed like a better option then this horrible theory being true. She wasn’t exactly making sense, either, not that he could see, at least not where it related to him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, sounding a bit annoyed. Now he was going to have to try harder to explain it, and the effort was just... not really appetizing at the moment. Hmm, appetizing didn’t seem like the right word there, but he wasn’t sure what the right word was at this point. He was pretty sure it stared with “app”, though. Turning his barstool so he was facing her fully, he leaned forward, because that always helped in explaining complicated things. So did speaking loudly and slowly.

“I haven’t seen another place, and neither has she... or, well, the place she’s from is another place I haven’t seen.” This was already going swimmingly. “Okay, my Anya... she went home, and then she...” God, it hurt to say it. “she never came back. But now there’s another one who looks like her, same name, everything, but... not her. I don’t know where she’s from, she doesn’t know how to get back, and my Anya...”

He didn’t know what to say about her. He didn’t know... he just didn’t know.

[door]

Had Door not been as thrilled about the entire thing as she was, she might have heard the man's pouting about her smacks. She might have called him a baby and told him that they weren't all that hard. But she had moved on instantly and his cries or pouts didn't matter much to her at all.

She listened, nodding eagerly as he spoke. Okay, so it wasn't the exact same thing as she had experienced but, in her alcohol fueled haze, she had no problem believing that one could go from place to place. It made perfect (drunken) sense! If she could see through whatever barriers there were, why couldn't someone walk through them? And if this girl, this Anya, had been his love before, she would surely have to be another form to move so quickly past him.

"I'm telling you, these things happen! I've seen other places and they're filled with people just like us. Sometimes they look different or they act different but they're just us. Maybe this is what happened with your Anya. Maybe she's from some other place where you and she never happened." Door was speaking with such earnestness, such honesty. She hadn't told anyone about this sort of stuff before...and here she was laying it out for a stranger.

Ooooh, alcohol.

"Does that make any less sense than a woman you loved going away and coming back without a memory of you?"

[Dimitri]

For a long moment Dimitri was silent as he came to terms with this information and, in doing so, came to a realisation. There was so much magic in this place, and most of the people here really should not be able to be here at the same time, but they were. They had travelled by magic portals from ancient Greece or Medieval England or even from the new millennia, more than a lifetime into the future in Dimitri’s world. Was it harder to believe that this Anya was a different one all together rather than the one he knew and loved sans her memory of him? No, but it was harder to accept. If it was just a spell, then they could reverse it; if she had lost her memories then he could help her get them back. But if this was some other Anya that had never even met him before... what could he do?

“Alright, let’s say that this is true,” he replied slowly, words slurring slightly. “If this Anya is from some other world, how do I get her back there and get mine back? We’re from the same world, so can I just go back and her her? Why didn’t she come back on her own? Is it because the other one is here?”

The questions were flying fast and furious. Here was someone that knew what she was talking about... or at least claimed to, and that was more than he could do, and more than he had expected to find tonight. Answers, she had answers, and suddenly she wasn’t the only one overcome with (drunken) excitement.

“I saw this movie once where two of the same person from different worlds would... melt together or explode or something if they were in the same space. Is that true?”

[door]

The questions were coming a bit fast for Door and, truthfully, she didn't have many answers. But she was drunk and semi-wild speculation sounded like the right thing to do. "Shhhhhh! Shhhh! You're going to fast. You need to go sloooowly." Door held her hand out in front of her and pushed it forward as she said slowly to denote the pace.

Door started contemplating the human fushion. "I don't think you get melty. I mean, I didn't get melty and I saw me. But-but it's not really seeing. I didn't see," Door pointed to her eyes and then moved her finger to her head. "I saw. You know?" The man's look made her thing that no, he didn't know.

She started again. "Okay, I open things. I open doors and people and doooors and sometimes I think those doors aren't just our doors. Maybe they're doors to other places. Other worlds." This seemed to be much clearer. She rewarded herself for her clarity by downing the rest of her scotch and smacking the bar with her hand, ordering two more. "But I can't go through them. I mean, maybe I can, I haven't tried but I haven't yet. I more see things. Like um...like a window!" Door stopped suddenly and looked up, pondering something. "Should my name be window?" she whispered.

When the next round arrived, she took another long sip off the liquid. "Look, I have magic friends. Well, really I have magic friend but she's good magic. Good good magic. And I guess technically the magic professor likes me." Door shook her head and turned her attention back to the man next to her. She put a hand on his knee, trying to be supportive. It came down with a loud THWAK. "I bet they can help you with your Anya. They can get it so you guys can love each other again." Her voice became soft in those last sentences, clearly invested in the idea.

[Dimitri]

Dimitri leaned back a little when the girl pushed her hand toward him. It was nowhere near touching him, but his depth perception was a little off at the moment. Quieting down, he slowly drew his eyes from her hand back up to her face as she explained things.

Or tried to at least. It sounded like she was talking about seeing things that weren’t there, and there were hand gestures that he didn’t get and when she pointed at her head she might have been telling him she was crazy, but she wasn’t twirling her finger around like people normally did to denote crazy. Then she asked if he knew. He could have nodded. He could have shook his head. Instead he just stared at her. He didn’t know what he knew, but he was pretty sure he didn’t know what she was asking if he knew.

Right, she was starting again. Leaning toward her again he really tried to listen this time, really tried to make sense of what she was saying.

He still had no idea what she was talking about. He could open doors too, it wasn’t really hard. He wasn’t sure how to open people, though, but it sounded unpleasant. The ‘other worlds’ bit, though, he kind of got that. So she was like... a living portal? Or she could make portals? But then she was retracting that because apparently she could open doors but she couldn’t go through them and what good was that? That was like that stupid saying about ‘having your cake and eating it too’. That had never made any sense to him, because who the hell wants cake if they can’t eat it? It was stupid. What was also stupid? That she hadn’t even tried to go through these doors. Why the hell was she opening them? To get some air?

He also had no idea what this had to do with her name. It didn’t matter, though, because she was hitting him again. Why was she always hitting him? Narrowing his eyes at her, he accepted the next drink as an apology for that, whether it was meant to be or not. Finishing off his last one in one shot, he took a sip from the new one before realising he hadn’t paid too much attention to anything after the hitting and the drinking. Something about magic...

...and love.

“I don’t think you get it,” he said finally, picking her hand up off his knee and setting it down on her own. “Nobody can make her love me again because she never has, and I still do so I don’t need a spell. Love her, not me. I don’t love me, I pretty much fail at life.” He was losing his train of thought there. Back on topic! “I don’t need a love spell, I need a working... portal... thing. Send this Anya back where she came from and bring mine back here.”