OOM: The chains we forge in life

[obligatoryass]

After Trina told him he wasn't welcome in her home in his state, Logan had the cab drop him off at the nearest beach, but not before making a pit stop for a bottle of vodka. He's long since depleted the small flask he's carried with him since discovering Milliways Bar, and his buzz is wearing off quickly. He just needs something to dull the pain, make the ache in his heart go away. Just for a little while. He'll deal with it.

Just...not now. Tomorrow will be soon enough to pick up the pieces of his life. (If he were honest, he'd admit the unlikeliness of that being true, but honesty isn't something that the self-medicated are normally capable of.)

Hey pays his fare with what's left over from the liquor store purchase - enough to cover the fare, but not a tip, as he's told as the cab driver roars off in a storm of swearing. Like Logan cares.

Logan strolls (stumbles, more like) down to the beach, where he stares at the ocean for a long moment before turning back to the lights of the city, feeling distant, floaty, just the way he likes. Not wasted, not messed up, just cushioned from the blows of the world. He can't even bring himself to care (much) that Trina's just told him he's too much of a screw-up to come in at Christmas - he's just where he likes to be. Comfortably numb.

Logan laughs and kicks off his shoes as he hums the Pink Floyd song by the same name, but pulls up short when he sees a shape in the sand. At first he took it to be a turtle or something - one of those damned sand sculptures people like to make. It looks like - is that a face?

He moves closer to it, then stumbles backwards. Surely he's imagining things. Surely that's not the face of his dead father, stretched into a cruel smile?

In his haste to move away from the face, Logan falls to the ground, and that's the last thing he knows for some time.

Comments

[obligatoryass]

Logan looks stubborn, as if he's about to argue the limits of his understanding, but then thinks of Milliways, thinks of trying to explain a pan-dimensional pocket universe to anyone who hadn't been there, and he lets it go.

"I'll take your word for it."

[supportingroles]

It is ever, ever, ever so much farther than Milliways.

"You should. And take my word for it, too, that without these visits, you will wind on the same path I'm treading. Without rest, without pause.

"Remember what I've told you, Logan.

"Mark me," he adds . . . and then stops, and shakes his head.

"Sorry. Wrong literary ghost."

And with those words, he turns, and begins to walk back up the beach, growing more transparent with every step.

[obligatoryass]

Scale becomes different when you're dead, it seems.

Logan gapes after him for a minute before plopping down in the sand, intending to think about what Aaron had to say, but falling asleep instead.

He doesn't waken until much later, when he feels a hand wiping sand out of his eyes.