Chapter Text
Drown your sorrows before you drowned in them, they say.
And that was exactly what the girl was doing, that night. That night, that hot and humid summer night. The town she was in, only one town over from her own, had little open places at that hour. Eleven-thirty, PM.
The bar was, though. After ordering a drink too many, yet at the same time not nearly enough, flirting with the hot bartender-Riley, their name tag said-, she went back in her car at one-ten.
She would need a place to stay for the night, the rational part of her thought. She couldn’t keep sleeping in her car. But she wasn’t feeling rational. Besides, who needed sleep? She wasn’t even tired. She drove around the town for a while. Thank God no one was out driving at this hour, so she could avoid an accident. At one o’clock in the morning, there weren’t many things for her to do. The grocery store was open, but what would she do there? She could doomscroll until dawn. But she didn’t want to sit in her car. She wanted to move.
At one-thirty she found an abandoned building at the edge of the town. The girl squinted to see the sign bearing the building’s name. C&A. She parked her car a good distance from it, in case she got caught for trespassing or something shit like that. Though, she mused, trespassing would be the least of her worries if the police found her. At that thought, her mind went back to that moment, just three days from then, when her life had come crumbling down. She still remembered, clear as day, etched into her brain, her mother’s face when she... when she....
No. She would not be thinking about that. Not now. Not ever. She was going to explore an abandoned building, with her mind clear of any memories of her fuckups. Abandoned building. Focus on that.
She went inside the building, using her phone flashlight to guide her in the darkness. So far, she had found cobwebs in the corners, shattered windows, and desks layered with a thick layer of dust-it seemed to have been an office building, in its prime-, but nothing of interest. Just standard abandoned building stuff. Not that she had been in many -or any- before.
After exploring the majority of the first floor, she tiredly went up the staircase to the second. The second floor looked like the first, for the most part. But she could have sworn she saw a rat near the one of the chairs. It was dark, so she couldn’t make it out very well, and when she shined on it with her flashlight it wasn’t there.
The girl was getting tired, both in the literal sense and of the repetitiveness of the building, so she blasted vocaloid music in her ears to keep things interesting. And her awake.
After an eternity (or so it seemed) of wandering the building, though, she was exhausted. Why had she even come here in the first place? It was a mistake. She regretted it more and more each second that went by. The time on the phone read three AM. She needed to get out of this building, go back to her car, and get some sleep. Only she didn’t know how to get back. She didn’t remember the path she took, and every minute she grew more and more lost.
Three-forty. She was this close to just sleeping on the floor. Whatever remained of her dignity was appalled at the notion, but what could she do? She was tired, drunk, and in the dark. It would be better to sleep now and find a way out later, when it was brighter. Still she wandered the halls.
It was at four AM when she saw it. A headset, next to a computer, just lying there on the desk. How come nobody had stolen it? It didn’t make sense, but it could have been a figment of her imagination. Great, now she was hallucinating things. She walked over to the chair next to the desk, and sat down. She longed to just put her head down on it and rest. The headset would serve as a nice pillow, she thought. And a nice sleeping mask.
So she put it on.