Chapter Text
You meet in a bar.
If it were up to you, it wouldn't be here. A sterile clinic with shoddy fluorescent lighting and a rude receptionist. A dimly lit hospital room and a doctor with no license. A back-alley room with dirty needles and bad bedside manner. Any would be preferable to here, but the informant told you beggars can't be choosers, and you might as well be on the verge of begging.
Laine smells like smoke and honey, singed at the edges. Pale yellow irises charred a dark sienna under the nauseating glow of the club's lights, flickering from his entourage to where you're sat next to him, arm around your shoulder in faux familiarity. A dragon tattoo drags up and down his forearm to his shoulder, staring back at you from where it feels like its burning your synthetic skin.
He knows why you're here. He has the power to dance around it for as long as he wants, because it's not like you'd have anywhere else to go, so he orders a round of shots for his cronies and when he asks you if you want anything, the tug of a smile on his face that doesn't reach his eyes, you say no.
A minute or so later, a couple flicks of the snake's tongue, and he's guiding you how to properly hold a champagne flute while a faceless follower pours it rough enough to overflow the glass and drip it over your fingers. Sleepers aren't meant to have alcohol, it all gets processed either way, but the ghosts of what little memory remains associates it with lightness and ease, he says. You don't have it in you to call his bluff.
You were never meant to experience luxury or mirth in this way, in these forms. Maybe you would have wanted to one day, when you had stability, freedom in your grasp and the assurance not to look over your shoulder. Luxury was for the living, safe behind titanium walls in high-rise apartments, not a care in the world nor a worry on their mind. An existence so paradoxical with your own that the attempt of envisioning yourself in such feels like trying to recall a fleeting dream. Out of grasp, a paper cutout on a film photograph, a square peg in a round hole.
Maybe it was your life once. Maybe you were sleeping in cardboard boxes at the foot of those high-rises. It doesn't matter anymore.
Maybe that's why a taste of proper alcohol, brewed solar systems away and fermented and meant for the tongue of the finest, burns your throat like sulfur and brimstone. The way you cough and hack up what came down makes Laine laugh. He pours you more.
When the topic finally comes up, he holds up the vial between two fingers and lets the light reflect off the glass. It colors the substance within red, like blood, like plasma, like ambrosia, and he knows he's gotten your attention. Laine holds it up to your face, explaining the terms of what he wants out of this deal. Out of you.
It's dehumanizing. It's humiliating. It doesn't matter, because he knows you need him more than he could ever need you, and yet still the arm on your shoulder doesn't move from the hook around your neck.
Below the thumping of the music, below the gazes of his gang, it's just you and your lifeline, a few inches away and held in the hand of the devil himself. If he wasn't aware of the reputation he holds, he wouldn't be here, out in the open, so willing to speak to someone he knows has nothing else.
You have nothing, so you have nothing to lose. In the hands of one group to another. Essen-Arp to Utsubo property. The cycle begins anew.
He buys you a drink. And another. And another. Toast after toast of a newfound partnership.
Five drinks and a shot of stabilizer in, your optics feel brand new, and you're laughing like hell.