Chapter Text
So, Dee loved ecsatcy.
Mac had the hook up, and much like the crack she and Dennis would find later in life, it became everything.
The little printed pills gave her everything her mother, her father, her own black shard of a feeling heart never gave her. Suddenly every song was her favorite song and every person was too, with all of their fucked upness. Because she could understand it then, in those small moments of clarity. Who they were. Who she was to them.
In retrospect, she took the mantle too eagerly - unaware of what it would cost her well into her forties. But, take it she did. Dee, the glue. They hurt her because they were hurting themselves. And god damn did they need her. They needed her in every way a person needs a scapegoat so the dont see the cracks in the mirror. Each and every one of them, a reflection of the other.
She understood. Understood Mac and how he needed his religion and his Dad and Dennis, how Dennis needed her and sex and control, to be feared. How Charlie needed chaos and looked at the broken things the way anyone and everyone should if the world wasn't molded for everyone but them.
But it was, and for some reason she could only see it when she could feel the drug- in her, him and all of them, a pulsating living thing. That's what shared truth is.
The strangest thing- was that nothing needed to be said. She knew, they all knew. Piled together on Dennis's bed, talking on nothing and so much more than everything could ever be.
She doesn't know yet, that this is the last time any of them will feel safe. In the world and with eachother. And they will build brick walls around themselves to keep the world out. Drink and drink until there are walls between what's left of them.
Dee isn't stupid, though. Their talks and givings on this shit weren't real. It was all drug induced. Did that really make it unauthentic? When mid conversation with Mac, Dennis glances at her, eyes down cast a beat and then back to her with something heavy behind them- she knows he asks himself the same thing.
To this day she struggles with that one. That's what came up when she tastes the gasoline in her mouth from the pill. She remembers. Above all. How much of this- this shared space that means more than any one of them could ever mean- is real?
Charlie's back is plastered against the door, and they're panting, staring at eachother. Deer in headlights, the both of them.
Charlie's face splits wide, smiling ear to ear, "Whoa".
"Can you believe we let those fucking horses go?" Dee's eyes were wide as saucers and the rush still trilled in her ears, blood thick with drugs and adrenaline.
"No, I really can't. But I'm glad we did, cause fuck those lawn jockeys man. Those guys are dicks."
"Yeah that cock you spray painted on the box car-"
Before she can finish, Charlie reaches for her.
She let's him. She snakes her arms around his neck, buries her face there, curving her lips against the skin. His hand is splayed across her rib cage, the other threaded in her hair. It's feels like his hands are always in her hair when he's like this, but she doesn't mind. Doesn't mind the way it feels like his finger tips are dipping right past her scalp and touching her thoughts- the very deepest parts of her. She can feel the warmth of him through his clothes, the solid mass of his body. Feels his hands knot at the back of her head and he rocks her languidly as they each break into a fit of giggles. He mumbles something into her hair.
"What?"
He pulls away to look at her, pupils blown wide. Up close like this he looks flushed, wistful. Soft in a way that can't be real.
"You're beautiful, Dee."
She hadn't expected that. And the not understanding, not knowing how to respond is strange. It's strange the way it makes her feel. She's been called beautiful before, hot, sexy- by random men and its loaded with expectation, not a thing freely given.
But not from Charlie. Never Charlie. And that makes it intimate in a way she can't reconcile with. It adds a weight she's not sure either of them could bear. Sober, even browned out this would be unthinkable. They would reel apart, leaving a chasm wider than ever before without hope of crossing ever again. But here, now, is just the two of them. Her apartment is a universe apart from the world outside that wasn't made for them. Vaguely, she wonders if Dennis has ever felt this before. And suddenly her heart breaks for him, how he'll never know that real intimacy isn't bred by proximity.
(a cold voice tells her, or drugs)
"What?" She asks again. She feels her face bloom, because it shouldn't feel so good, but it does.
His fingers finally release her hair, ghost along the shell of her ear and stop at the corner of her mouth.
"You have the prettiest smile."
And his head is kind of tilted back, lidded eyes, like he's in awe. His voice is distant. He's not even really talking to her, more to himself. Like he's musing on some priceless sculpture, centuries old, in a gallery both of them would likely be kicked out of.
He looks at her like she's everything and enough.
She suddenly finds herself pitying the waitress, how blind she is, how she doesn't get how lucky she is to be loved. To have someone that would lay the world at her feet. (and Dee would do anything, anything for just an hour of that sort of love)
He closes the space between them, then. Pressing his forehead against hers. The skin there feels electric and warm, like he's melted into her, and there is no separation between what she is and what he isn't. His hands cup her cheeks, thumbing the skin beneath her eyes. And again, it's him who crosses the final space, to meet his mouth with her.
She isn't surprised when he pulls away
"Oh shit. " He says, and Dee isn't even offended. She throws her head back and let's out a throaty laugh. And then he is too, and their doubled over, because of how utterly ridiculous, how impossibly unfair all of it is.
She feels his hands like a band around her waist, and before she can register what's happening she's flat on her back. Bed beneath her, and Charlie above eyes boring into her own, like they're other people, in another place.
She looks at his hands, still on her waist. They're strong hands. Hands made for breaking, and she thinks maybe hers are too. Maybe they were all made that way.
But his hands are strong and so are his arms, Dee finds she likes that, and without thinking, she's ghosting up his arms along the chorded muscle, and settling tenativly on his shoulder. Acutely aware that she has never, never touched this way, but refusing to peer over that edge
The atmosphere is suddenly different. It's heavier. She can feel it weigh in her heart and in her belly. It's the most heady kind of aroused she's ever been. That can't be right.
"Why did you do that?" She asks.
"Just seemed easier." And he's not looking her in the eye, rather down, tracing along the planes of her body.
Finally he met her eyes, and she could see him asking. That was the thing with Charlie. He was all contradiction to what she knew. Dee always took, and they all took from her. No one ever asked. No one ever called her beautiful or held her without motive behind it. Dennis taught her that himself, and she might've thanked him for it. Even before other men came along to prove him right, because he had been, no matter how often she told him otherwise.
She remembers how in highschool, Charlie's fingers were in her hair then too. And after the first few times they got high as shit, she found him doing it more often sober- when it was just them.
All of these little moments, unlocked as he straddled her on the bed.
"Dee." He said low, dipping his head down, mouth on the column of her throat. She feels oddly exposed. Pad of his thumb on her pulse point, then he's ghosting a knuckle along her collarbone, down between her breasts, before settling just below where she really wants him to touch. He thumbs at the flesh there, asking still.
She writhes at the missed contact. Feels him shiver, and she struck with the realization that he's catching himself. She didn't know he had it in him to hold back. Never pictured Charlie Kelly capable of holding back anything. She thinks back, at all of his half attempts at getting her in bed, and all their shared moments before the bar, before each of them made a decision to keep down the path to hell and never look back.
The warmth that floods her core at his touch, the way he has told hold back, takes her takes her by surprise.
But it shouldn't have, not really. After all, if there is one thing she knows about Charlie, it's how fiercely he loves.
(it's easy to confuse love with drugs, and that's what they'll both tell themselves)
Suddenly she's pulling his shirt up and over his head, and rising up to crash against his mouth with a fury that felt alien. Her hands were in his hair now because it wasn't fair. It never was. She wanted him. Wants him to want her. Wanted to not be herself. Wanted him to want anyone, anyone but her. Only her.
Against his mouth she's frantic, answering his question in a brand against the seam of his lips, his tongue, his teeth. (and how good it felt)
Yesyes.yes.