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lb_leeWhatever Gets You Through the Day
Prompt: ‘Drink’
Summary: Biff and M.D. deal with things in different ways. Biff deals with them badly; M.D. deals with them not at all.
Word Count: 3877
Notes: Takes place before ‘After the Fall’ and ‘Bust It Up and Let It Go,’ back before M.D. gets obvious.
Biff’s window was shut and locked, so I wasn’t surprised to find his place empty when I arrived. I jimmied the window anyway and raided his fridge for a Tupperware container. At this time of evening, his neighborhood wasn’t one I wanted to wander around in on my own, and hey, he had spaghetti.
I scarfed the pasta after giving it only a cursory heating, and sat on his windowsill to wait. I twiddled my thumbs for a while. Then I washed the Tupperware, dried it, put it away, and twiddled my thumbs some more. The sun went down, the sky got as dark as it ever got in Vaygo, and Biff still didn’t show.
I was just starting to consider that Biff might not be coming home that night and that I should head back when something fell against the front door with a heavy whump, then started scratching at the lock. After a couple minutes of thuds and fumbling noises, just long enough to make me consider incompetent robbery, the door was successfully shoved open, and Biff stumbled in.
I wrinkled my nose. My sense of smell wasn’t as good as the average Earthling’s, and I could smell the alcohol from across the room. Not that I needed to; the amount of ethanol Biff had consumed over the years could probably fuel a serial arsonist, and this was the first time I’d seen him stagger like that. God only knew how he’d made it up the stairs.
Biff somehow got the door closed after a couple of tries, though it seemed more through chance than any understanding of door mechanics. The effort made him reel backward a couple paces, where he gazed at the door as though to make sure it wasn’t going to try and open by itself. His jacket was hanging off one shoulder, and I could see bruises rising on his cheek and knuckles. Well, at least that meant he'd probably exhausted his temper.
Carefully staying out of arm's reach--Biff had a lot of temper to exhaust--I sidled into his range of vision. "Hiya, Biffy," I said. "Rough night?"
Biff raised his head and squinted at me for a long moment, as though trying to recall who I was and what I was doing in his apartment.
I smiled brightly and waved.
I expected him to groan, complain, and try to get me ejected. But he didn't, just stood there and stared at me. His expression seemed eerily vacant, and after a second, I realized why: the habitual look of surliness was missing.
I’d seen that once before. It wasn’t a good sign then either.
"Remember me?" I prompted. "M.D.? Kid? The alien who climbs in through your window periodically?"
He didn’t seem to hear me. "Ha' you ever," he said, with the painstaking enunciation of the royally smashed, "wan'ed ta die?"
I stopped smiling. "How much have you had?"
He just laughed a horrible tombstone laugh and wheeled towards the fridge. Presumably he’d gotten kicked out of the bar after the fight but before he’d finished killing brain cells, so he’d come back here to finish the job.
His coordination was such that I wasn’t sure he’d succeed at getting the fridge or the booze open, but it wasn’t a chance I was willing to take. So while he struggled with the fridge door, I came up, grabbed his jacket by the back of the shoulders, and yanked backwards.
Normally, it’d be like shoving a stack of bricks, but Biff was at the level of intoxication that he stumbled back. He kept from falling over, but only because he partially banged into the counter and lost his momentum. If I hadn’t gathered enough proof already that something was seriously wrong, he didn't even try to punch me. He tried to clumsily push me away once or twice and then just went back to trying to get to the fridge, as though he’d forgotten I existed.
"Biff, come on," I said, trying to navigate him to a chair, "you don't need more pickling, science won’t want your carcass, work with me here..."
I expected him to either deck me or shove me out of the way. Instead, he lurched into an about-face, grabbed me, and put me in a headlock.
"Why’re you still ‘live?" He bellowed, making it into three sentences.
It wasn't the first time he'd put the question to me, but it was the first time he'd said it to me in that tone of voice.
I struggled against his arm. "Ow! Biff, what have you been drinking, you smell like rubbing alcohol--"
Resistance just made him grip me tighter, which meant his headlock was getting dangerously close to a chokehold. I kicked at his shins and thrashed, but unfortunately, BAC had no effect on his upper body strength. I only made him crash backwards into the fridge.
"Tell me!" He shouted, trying (unsuccessfully) to shake and headlock me at the same time. "Tell me why ya fuckin’ ‘live!"
I gasped for breath. "Well, you see," I rasped, "there are these miraculous organs called the heart, the lungs, and--"
I should've known better than to sass. With a growl of frustration, Biff freed up a hand to grab one of my wrists, and proceeded to try and yank off one of my gloves.
That freed up my lungs a bit, but only got me thrashing harder; Biff’s booze-addled mind was nowhere I wanted to be right then. "Biff, no, what the--"
He grunted at me, but otherwise didn't respond. Unfortunately, his dexterity wasn't up to tearing off my glove one-handed, especially with me flailing; he fell over sideways with a crash, taking me with him.
I figured the fall would distract him, but apparently Biff was too drunk to focus on more than one thing at a time, and for the time being, he’d given that honor to me. Keeping his grip on me, he rolled us over, twisted my arm up my back, and sat on me to keep me from going anywhere, which also served to knock the wind out of me and shut me up. While I wheezed into the linoleum, he somehow got my glove off without touching my skin, and shoved my own hand three inches in front of my face.
"Y'see this? Y'see?" He shouted.
At this point, I didn't care about anything except getting Biff off me. If that involved agreeing with him, sure, whatever, fine. "Yes!” I gasped. “Yes, I see it!"
Biff pulled my hand back towards his face to squint at it, nodded once with satisfaction, then pushed it back in my face, pointing to the scars without touching.
"'Ese here. 'Ey ain't here cuz you wan’ed ta die," Biff said, painstakingly, as though he was determined I understand every word through the alcohol. "Y'never wanted ta die. Huh?"
I stopped fighting. He was staring at me intently. He honestly wanted the answer to this.
"No," I said through my teeth. "I didn't." Close enough. Not like Biff was capable of discerning subtleties in his current state.
I could read the expression on Biff's face now: it was pain. I didn't recognize it without the anger. "Why?" He demanded, giving me a half-hearted shake. "Tell me why."
I got it now. I looked at the leather armband on the forearm currently holding him upright. What had brought this up in his head?
I answered him honestly: "I don't know."
Apparently that wasn't what he wanted to hear. He groaned, lurched off of me, groped for the counter, and tried to pull himself up. He made it about halfway, then crashed down to the floor on his rump again, and there he stayed, staring into the ether with a look of perplexed dismay.
I sat up, rubbing my throat. No soreness. By Biff's standard, he'd been gentle. Or maybe just sloppy.
"I liked you better as an angry drunk," I muttered.
The words didn’t sink in. He just kept staring into nothing, shaking his head.
"Y'been through everythin'," he slurred, rubbing his face so I couldn't see his eyes. "Fuckin' everythin', and y'ne'er wanted ta die." He waved an arm at his crappy apartment, as though it symbolized everything wrong. His arm smashed against the edge of the counter, but he didn’t appear to notice. "Look a' me. Couldn't even do it right, an’…" He made a sound that may have been laughter, if it'd gotten its wires crossed from crying. "'M just a faggot..."
He said that word all the time, but that was the first time it made me flinch.
Apparently he’d spent all his vertical points; he slumped and let himself fall backwards, hitting the floor with a thud I would’ve found alarming, had he not been half-tranqed on liquor. As it was, I doubted he felt a thing.
I sighed, got to my feet, and went to fetch a bucket. Getting him to the bathroom might’ve been a possibility while he was on his feet, but there was no way I was getting him up now, and I didn’t trust him to keep his stomach contents where they belonged if I tried.
A search through the cabinets didn’t turn up a bucket, so I grabbed the biggest pot out of the sink instead, though it still had the remnants of spaghetti sauce lining the bottom. Whatever, it wasn’t like it needed to be clean for this purpose.
Biff was still flat on his back, hands over his face, when I got back to him. I looked at him and shook my head. No wonder he stayed furious all the time, if this was what he was like without. I strode over to his section of floor--carefully, in case he remembered me and tried to grab my ankle. “Hey. Got you a bucket.”
He didn't appear to hear me.
I prodded him in the ribs with my foot. “You shouldn’t compare yourself to me, you know. They made me not to break.”
Still no reaction.
I squatted at his side and balanced the pot on my knees. "Come on, living hurts. It's--" dear god, I was trying to comfort Biff, he was going to murder me if he remembered this in the morning, "You’re still here."
He made that horrible laughing noise again. I waited, but he didn’t give me an explanation.
"You all right?" I asked.
He shook his head.
"Less so than usual, I mean."
"Think I'm gonna throw up."
"Ah." I held up the pot. “You’re in luck, I’ve—”
He looked through his fingers, saw that I was trying to use his precious culinary metalwork for menial tasks such as vomit containment, and glared at me so fiercely he almost looked sober. “Fuck no. Gotta crapper.”
Great.
Through a lot of stubbornness, dragging, and well-placed shoves, I somehow got Biff into the bathroom in time. I watched long enough to rest assured that yes, his body was purging itself properly, then left him and the porcelain god to sort it out. I had seen too much of him at his most broken-down already; he deserved a little peace and privacy.
Between retches, I thought I could hear him giggling. Or maybe crying. It was hard to tell.
I shuddered and parked myself on the couch. Forget the Jaunter's League; I was spending the night here. I wasn’t particularly concerned for Biff’s body—his liver had surely endured worse—but his mind, I wanted to keep an eye on.
...
Biff spent the night on the bathroom floor. If the hours spent on hard tile caused him any trouble, he didn’t let on, and by noon, he was awake and sober again--and wickedly hungover. I never thought I'd be pleased to see him in such a state, but I would take Grouchy Biff over Depressed Biff any day of the week.
He came damp out of the shower to find me boiling eggs on the one functioning burner on his stove.
"Your pilot light is broken, just so you know," I informed him, sucking on my burnt finger. "And you need matches."
He looked at me. He looked at the pot. He shuddered.
"Hey, come on. I’ve seen you eat; you can handle eggs." And when his expression didn’t change, “And I can cook eggs too. Now shut up and eat them.”
That apparently didn't even warrant a grunt from him; he just shuffled to the fridge instead, clutching his forehead.
"Good afternoon, by the way," I added.
He gave me the finger and bent over to open the fridge. The door blocked my view of the upper half of his body, but what I could see stiffened.
“Oh, right, that reminds me," I said, snapping my fingers. "I threw out your hooch."
He straightened up and gave me a baleful, bloodshot glare. "Why?"
I think he meant to sound angry and dangerous, but in his condition, he just sounded whiny and sick.
"Because you're too hungover to kill me," I replied, giving him a thumbs-up. “Now how about these eggs? I cooked, like, eight of them, no way I can devour that many chicken gametes myself…”
He let his forehead fall against the fridge door with a thunk and a groan. "I hate you."
"I hate you too, Biff. But I wanted to talk to you sober."
He bent over and pulled a squeeze-bottle of Gatorade out of the fridge. I paused in the midst of watching my eggs to lob a bottle of aspirin at him; he caught it out of the air one-handed without looking up.
"Are you okay?” I asked.
“You’re still here,” he replied. When I stared at him blankly, he added, “So no.”
I rolled my eyes but kept going. If he could manage sarcasm, he could communicate like a normal human being. "Come on, Biff. I've seen you pickled many a time, but I've never seen you like that."
He glanced at the pills in his hand, glared at me like it was my fault he needed them, then drank them down with the Gatorade. He didn't answer.
I sighed and turned off the stove burner. "Am I going to have to grab you and open your mind? Because now that you're sober, I will."
He made a face that he probably hadn’t made since elementary school and gripped his temples like he was trying to keep his brain from bursting through them. He made a sound that would’ve threatened violence, if he hadn’t been so obviously miserable.
“You think my voice is painful now? Think what it’d be like inside your head.”
He gave me another baleful glare, then leaned against the counter and appeared to take great interest in his Gatorade. "I was drunk."
I lifted the pot of eggs and spun to pour the water down the rusty sink. Biff turned his head away with a grimace at the smell. "That’s nothing new. More importantly, you were depressed. What happened?"
He gave me a sardonic look. “I was real drunk.”
I rolled my eyes. “You know you've got a carton of milk gone bad in the fridge right, right?”
He chugged Gatorade and pretended to ignore me.
“I could make your entire apartment smell like it. How you think your gut would like that, wise guy?”
The face he made was everything I’d hoped for. Still, I expected prying the information out of him to take at least half an hour and a fistfight, so I was shocked when he dunked the bottle down and said flatly, "Had one of your nightmares again."
"Oh." I winced. "I--I'm sorry."
He shrugged and pulled his cigarettes out of his pocket.
"But, uh, Biff? You've had my nightmares before. What--"
"I know what you been through," he interrupted. His voice was tired. "And you didn’t break." He glanced in my direction, then looked away before he made eye contact. "I did. That's why."
He pushed off the counter, took his bottle, and shuffled off, probably more to get away from me than because he had anything he needed to do, and I just stood there staring after him, pot of eggs still steaming in my hand.
Well, he was sober, but his mood didn't seem to have improved much. Figuring out what to do next gave me enough time to absorb the heat off the eggs and stick them in the grumbling fridge, and then I went to the window to go chase him down.
At first, he seemed to have disappeared, and I figured he'd cut and run out the fire escape, but then I smelled cigarette smoke and looked up to find him sitting a floor above. He didn't throw the Gatorade bottle at me, so I crawled out the window and looked up to the rusting grate above me. The stairs had long since rusted through and fallen; presumably Biff had jumped and pulled himself up through pure virtue of upper body strength. I figured I’d have to climb, but Biff reached out a hand without looking at me, so I pulled my sleeve down, we caught each other's wrists, and he gave me a pull up.
"Thanks," I said.
He grunted and went back to staring out over the Vaygo skyline. The sun was out high, and the heat made the traffic below shimmer like a mirage. Children ran back and forth in sandals and shorts. Sweat damped his shirt.
I pulled off my sweatshirt and elbowed him in the ribs. “Hey. You’re not broken.”
Biff was a master at expressing derision, but I’d never heard him snort with such contempt.
“Really. I mean, you’re still here, right? You’re not dead. I mean, unless you’ve been eating rat poison on the weekends without me noticing, you haven’t even tried, not since—”
“Want to know why?”
Something in the way he said it made me hesitate. There was almost a challenge in his voice, and he was holding my eyes now, a twist to his lips like he planned to give a punch-line that probably wouldn’t make me laugh. Whatever it was that got him through the day, it wasn’t because he had yet to cook the perfect fondue, for sure.
I eyed him sidelong. “Why?”
He shifted on the grate, sending a little red flurry of rust flakes. “So I’ve fucked my life pretty good, right? I’m a little shit who beats on people for bread. Big pain in the ass.”
He wasn’t saying it like he was fishing for reassurance or sympathy. It was simple flat fact. “Uh huh.”
“Fucked up my family, ditched ‘em in Georgia eight—naw, it’s nine years now. Ain’t sent word since. And now I live here in my shitty-ass busted up apartment with a busted sink and no hot water.”
“Uh huh…” I still didn’t see where he was going with this.
“Shit life, right?”
“A bit.”
“Yeah. Probably ain’t gonna get better either.” He inhaled carcinogens and added, “but it’s still better’n Hell.”
“Thought you said you didn’t believe in God anymore,” I said.
“Nah. Still believe in Hell, though.”
“And that you’re headed there.”
“Oh yeah.”
“You seem very certain.”
He chortled. “Where the hell else would I go? Florida?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never died. Though I sure hope that if there’s an afterlife, it’s not Florida. Now, if it were Montana or something, that’d be a nice plot twist…”
Pause. “On your planet, they got a Hell?”
“I have no idea. I wasn’t exactly raised with religion, as far as I remember. Not that I remember much. Knowing them, the afterlife was probably having all the water you could drink, all the arable land you could see, and your own personal fanatical army to defend it from all the other dead people.”
He grunted but otherwise made no response.
I stared out at the cars with him. “I lied to you last night.”
He didn’t express curiosity or look at me, but he did glance for a moment in my general direction.
“I did try to off myself once on Della. I was really young, not really capable of understanding what exactly it meant. I just thought it was the unstoppable jail break.” I shrugged. “Obviously, I didn’t succeed, didn’t even get close. It was a really long time ago; my memory is really fuzzy of it.”
Biff paused. “Why didn’t you try again?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. Presumably they fixed me.”
“Fixed you.”
I tapped my temple. “Up here. So I wouldn’t do it again. I mean, I was expensive. Can’t have me self-destructing. It’s not like it was beyond their capabilities, what with all the rest they were trying to cram into me. Just reroute the urge to die into something more useful, suppress a few things here and there, put in a couple coping mechanisms…” I shrugged again. “So you really shouldn’t compare yourself to me. I was made for this.”
Biff tilted his head. He took a pull on the squeeze bottle. Looked me over, like he was mulling something over.
“You ever think about your brother?” He asked.
I paused. “Why? Were you an only child?”
“Two sisters.”
That brought me up short. “What, really?”
He nodded.
“Really?”
He gave me a look of contempt.
“I just… you never struck me as someone who could share a playpen.” Honestly, the idea of Biff as a child at all was terrifying. “Older or younger?”
“Younger. Six years.” He shook his head with annoyance and held up a hand. “Look, it don’t matter, ‘kay, I wanna know how you deal with ditching ‘em.”
I stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“I ditched my sisters, you ditched your brother. Tell me how you deal with it.”
I just stared at him.
“Well?”
“I… I don’t understand.”
He gave me a funny look. “Your brother.”
“Yeah. What about him?”
He was speaking slowly now, like I was a few eggs short of a dozen. “You left him.”
“I… what?”
“How you deal with that?”
“I think you need to practice your English, dude, start learning to put sentences together that logically follow each other. You’re getting a bit aphasic on me.”
He smacked the railing with one hand, sending a flurry of rust down with a shriek of metal. “The hell’re you on about, I wanna know, how the fuck you handle your shit? How you still walking around?”
“I told you, they fixed me, they don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore—”
Biff was starting to look aggravated, but not like usual. It was like he was too confused to be angry. “I don’t mean that shit, that’s old shit, I mean the new shit, the shit now. Tell me how you do it!”
Shaking my head, I got up and took my sweatshirt from the hot metal, shook the rust flakes off it. “If you’re just going to play word salad games with me, I’m out of here. Eat your eggs, I put them in the fridge for you. Enjoy your hangover.”
Biff just stared at me, watched me as I crawled down the wall, brow furrowed, cigarette forgotten in his hand. He didn’t even try to stop me; it was almost like I’d taken him aback or something. I didn’t recognize the look in his eyes but I didn’t like it. It was too much like when he’d been drunk the night before.
“You don’t, do you?” He asked after me.
The words weren’t worth responding to. I just left.
Prompt: ‘Drink’
Summary: Biff and M.D. deal with things in different ways. Biff deals with them badly; M.D. deals with them not at all.
Word Count: 3877
Notes: Takes place before ‘After the Fall’ and ‘Bust It Up and Let It Go,’ back before M.D. gets obvious.
Biff’s window was shut and locked, so I wasn’t surprised to find his place empty when I arrived. I jimmied the window anyway and raided his fridge for a Tupperware container. At this time of evening, his neighborhood wasn’t one I wanted to wander around in on my own, and hey, he had spaghetti.
I scarfed the pasta after giving it only a cursory heating, and sat on his windowsill to wait. I twiddled my thumbs for a while. Then I washed the Tupperware, dried it, put it away, and twiddled my thumbs some more. The sun went down, the sky got as dark as it ever got in Vaygo, and Biff still didn’t show.
I was just starting to consider that Biff might not be coming home that night and that I should head back when something fell against the front door with a heavy whump, then started scratching at the lock. After a couple minutes of thuds and fumbling noises, just long enough to make me consider incompetent robbery, the door was successfully shoved open, and Biff stumbled in.
I wrinkled my nose. My sense of smell wasn’t as good as the average Earthling’s, and I could smell the alcohol from across the room. Not that I needed to; the amount of ethanol Biff had consumed over the years could probably fuel a serial arsonist, and this was the first time I’d seen him stagger like that. God only knew how he’d made it up the stairs.
Biff somehow got the door closed after a couple of tries, though it seemed more through chance than any understanding of door mechanics. The effort made him reel backward a couple paces, where he gazed at the door as though to make sure it wasn’t going to try and open by itself. His jacket was hanging off one shoulder, and I could see bruises rising on his cheek and knuckles. Well, at least that meant he'd probably exhausted his temper.
Carefully staying out of arm's reach--Biff had a lot of temper to exhaust--I sidled into his range of vision. "Hiya, Biffy," I said. "Rough night?"
Biff raised his head and squinted at me for a long moment, as though trying to recall who I was and what I was doing in his apartment.
I smiled brightly and waved.
I expected him to groan, complain, and try to get me ejected. But he didn't, just stood there and stared at me. His expression seemed eerily vacant, and after a second, I realized why: the habitual look of surliness was missing.
I’d seen that once before. It wasn’t a good sign then either.
"Remember me?" I prompted. "M.D.? Kid? The alien who climbs in through your window periodically?"
He didn’t seem to hear me. "Ha' you ever," he said, with the painstaking enunciation of the royally smashed, "wan'ed ta die?"
I stopped smiling. "How much have you had?"
He just laughed a horrible tombstone laugh and wheeled towards the fridge. Presumably he’d gotten kicked out of the bar after the fight but before he’d finished killing brain cells, so he’d come back here to finish the job.
His coordination was such that I wasn’t sure he’d succeed at getting the fridge or the booze open, but it wasn’t a chance I was willing to take. So while he struggled with the fridge door, I came up, grabbed his jacket by the back of the shoulders, and yanked backwards.
Normally, it’d be like shoving a stack of bricks, but Biff was at the level of intoxication that he stumbled back. He kept from falling over, but only because he partially banged into the counter and lost his momentum. If I hadn’t gathered enough proof already that something was seriously wrong, he didn't even try to punch me. He tried to clumsily push me away once or twice and then just went back to trying to get to the fridge, as though he’d forgotten I existed.
"Biff, come on," I said, trying to navigate him to a chair, "you don't need more pickling, science won’t want your carcass, work with me here..."
I expected him to either deck me or shove me out of the way. Instead, he lurched into an about-face, grabbed me, and put me in a headlock.
"Why’re you still ‘live?" He bellowed, making it into three sentences.
It wasn't the first time he'd put the question to me, but it was the first time he'd said it to me in that tone of voice.
I struggled against his arm. "Ow! Biff, what have you been drinking, you smell like rubbing alcohol--"
Resistance just made him grip me tighter, which meant his headlock was getting dangerously close to a chokehold. I kicked at his shins and thrashed, but unfortunately, BAC had no effect on his upper body strength. I only made him crash backwards into the fridge.
"Tell me!" He shouted, trying (unsuccessfully) to shake and headlock me at the same time. "Tell me why ya fuckin’ ‘live!"
I gasped for breath. "Well, you see," I rasped, "there are these miraculous organs called the heart, the lungs, and--"
I should've known better than to sass. With a growl of frustration, Biff freed up a hand to grab one of my wrists, and proceeded to try and yank off one of my gloves.
That freed up my lungs a bit, but only got me thrashing harder; Biff’s booze-addled mind was nowhere I wanted to be right then. "Biff, no, what the--"
He grunted at me, but otherwise didn't respond. Unfortunately, his dexterity wasn't up to tearing off my glove one-handed, especially with me flailing; he fell over sideways with a crash, taking me with him.
I figured the fall would distract him, but apparently Biff was too drunk to focus on more than one thing at a time, and for the time being, he’d given that honor to me. Keeping his grip on me, he rolled us over, twisted my arm up my back, and sat on me to keep me from going anywhere, which also served to knock the wind out of me and shut me up. While I wheezed into the linoleum, he somehow got my glove off without touching my skin, and shoved my own hand three inches in front of my face.
"Y'see this? Y'see?" He shouted.
At this point, I didn't care about anything except getting Biff off me. If that involved agreeing with him, sure, whatever, fine. "Yes!” I gasped. “Yes, I see it!"
Biff pulled my hand back towards his face to squint at it, nodded once with satisfaction, then pushed it back in my face, pointing to the scars without touching.
"'Ese here. 'Ey ain't here cuz you wan’ed ta die," Biff said, painstakingly, as though he was determined I understand every word through the alcohol. "Y'never wanted ta die. Huh?"
I stopped fighting. He was staring at me intently. He honestly wanted the answer to this.
"No," I said through my teeth. "I didn't." Close enough. Not like Biff was capable of discerning subtleties in his current state.
I could read the expression on Biff's face now: it was pain. I didn't recognize it without the anger. "Why?" He demanded, giving me a half-hearted shake. "Tell me why."
I got it now. I looked at the leather armband on the forearm currently holding him upright. What had brought this up in his head?
I answered him honestly: "I don't know."
Apparently that wasn't what he wanted to hear. He groaned, lurched off of me, groped for the counter, and tried to pull himself up. He made it about halfway, then crashed down to the floor on his rump again, and there he stayed, staring into the ether with a look of perplexed dismay.
I sat up, rubbing my throat. No soreness. By Biff's standard, he'd been gentle. Or maybe just sloppy.
"I liked you better as an angry drunk," I muttered.
The words didn’t sink in. He just kept staring into nothing, shaking his head.
"Y'been through everythin'," he slurred, rubbing his face so I couldn't see his eyes. "Fuckin' everythin', and y'ne'er wanted ta die." He waved an arm at his crappy apartment, as though it symbolized everything wrong. His arm smashed against the edge of the counter, but he didn’t appear to notice. "Look a' me. Couldn't even do it right, an’…" He made a sound that may have been laughter, if it'd gotten its wires crossed from crying. "'M just a faggot..."
He said that word all the time, but that was the first time it made me flinch.
Apparently he’d spent all his vertical points; he slumped and let himself fall backwards, hitting the floor with a thud I would’ve found alarming, had he not been half-tranqed on liquor. As it was, I doubted he felt a thing.
I sighed, got to my feet, and went to fetch a bucket. Getting him to the bathroom might’ve been a possibility while he was on his feet, but there was no way I was getting him up now, and I didn’t trust him to keep his stomach contents where they belonged if I tried.
A search through the cabinets didn’t turn up a bucket, so I grabbed the biggest pot out of the sink instead, though it still had the remnants of spaghetti sauce lining the bottom. Whatever, it wasn’t like it needed to be clean for this purpose.
Biff was still flat on his back, hands over his face, when I got back to him. I looked at him and shook my head. No wonder he stayed furious all the time, if this was what he was like without. I strode over to his section of floor--carefully, in case he remembered me and tried to grab my ankle. “Hey. Got you a bucket.”
He didn't appear to hear me.
I prodded him in the ribs with my foot. “You shouldn’t compare yourself to me, you know. They made me not to break.”
Still no reaction.
I squatted at his side and balanced the pot on my knees. "Come on, living hurts. It's--" dear god, I was trying to comfort Biff, he was going to murder me if he remembered this in the morning, "You’re still here."
He made that horrible laughing noise again. I waited, but he didn’t give me an explanation.
"You all right?" I asked.
He shook his head.
"Less so than usual, I mean."
"Think I'm gonna throw up."
"Ah." I held up the pot. “You’re in luck, I’ve—”
He looked through his fingers, saw that I was trying to use his precious culinary metalwork for menial tasks such as vomit containment, and glared at me so fiercely he almost looked sober. “Fuck no. Gotta crapper.”
Great.
Through a lot of stubbornness, dragging, and well-placed shoves, I somehow got Biff into the bathroom in time. I watched long enough to rest assured that yes, his body was purging itself properly, then left him and the porcelain god to sort it out. I had seen too much of him at his most broken-down already; he deserved a little peace and privacy.
Between retches, I thought I could hear him giggling. Or maybe crying. It was hard to tell.
I shuddered and parked myself on the couch. Forget the Jaunter's League; I was spending the night here. I wasn’t particularly concerned for Biff’s body—his liver had surely endured worse—but his mind, I wanted to keep an eye on.
...
Biff spent the night on the bathroom floor. If the hours spent on hard tile caused him any trouble, he didn’t let on, and by noon, he was awake and sober again--and wickedly hungover. I never thought I'd be pleased to see him in such a state, but I would take Grouchy Biff over Depressed Biff any day of the week.
He came damp out of the shower to find me boiling eggs on the one functioning burner on his stove.
"Your pilot light is broken, just so you know," I informed him, sucking on my burnt finger. "And you need matches."
He looked at me. He looked at the pot. He shuddered.
"Hey, come on. I’ve seen you eat; you can handle eggs." And when his expression didn’t change, “And I can cook eggs too. Now shut up and eat them.”
That apparently didn't even warrant a grunt from him; he just shuffled to the fridge instead, clutching his forehead.
"Good afternoon, by the way," I added.
He gave me the finger and bent over to open the fridge. The door blocked my view of the upper half of his body, but what I could see stiffened.
“Oh, right, that reminds me," I said, snapping my fingers. "I threw out your hooch."
He straightened up and gave me a baleful, bloodshot glare. "Why?"
I think he meant to sound angry and dangerous, but in his condition, he just sounded whiny and sick.
"Because you're too hungover to kill me," I replied, giving him a thumbs-up. “Now how about these eggs? I cooked, like, eight of them, no way I can devour that many chicken gametes myself…”
He let his forehead fall against the fridge door with a thunk and a groan. "I hate you."
"I hate you too, Biff. But I wanted to talk to you sober."
He bent over and pulled a squeeze-bottle of Gatorade out of the fridge. I paused in the midst of watching my eggs to lob a bottle of aspirin at him; he caught it out of the air one-handed without looking up.
"Are you okay?” I asked.
“You’re still here,” he replied. When I stared at him blankly, he added, “So no.”
I rolled my eyes but kept going. If he could manage sarcasm, he could communicate like a normal human being. "Come on, Biff. I've seen you pickled many a time, but I've never seen you like that."
He glanced at the pills in his hand, glared at me like it was my fault he needed them, then drank them down with the Gatorade. He didn't answer.
I sighed and turned off the stove burner. "Am I going to have to grab you and open your mind? Because now that you're sober, I will."
He made a face that he probably hadn’t made since elementary school and gripped his temples like he was trying to keep his brain from bursting through them. He made a sound that would’ve threatened violence, if he hadn’t been so obviously miserable.
“You think my voice is painful now? Think what it’d be like inside your head.”
He gave me another baleful glare, then leaned against the counter and appeared to take great interest in his Gatorade. "I was drunk."
I lifted the pot of eggs and spun to pour the water down the rusty sink. Biff turned his head away with a grimace at the smell. "That’s nothing new. More importantly, you were depressed. What happened?"
He gave me a sardonic look. “I was real drunk.”
I rolled my eyes. “You know you've got a carton of milk gone bad in the fridge right, right?”
He chugged Gatorade and pretended to ignore me.
“I could make your entire apartment smell like it. How you think your gut would like that, wise guy?”
The face he made was everything I’d hoped for. Still, I expected prying the information out of him to take at least half an hour and a fistfight, so I was shocked when he dunked the bottle down and said flatly, "Had one of your nightmares again."
"Oh." I winced. "I--I'm sorry."
He shrugged and pulled his cigarettes out of his pocket.
"But, uh, Biff? You've had my nightmares before. What--"
"I know what you been through," he interrupted. His voice was tired. "And you didn’t break." He glanced in my direction, then looked away before he made eye contact. "I did. That's why."
He pushed off the counter, took his bottle, and shuffled off, probably more to get away from me than because he had anything he needed to do, and I just stood there staring after him, pot of eggs still steaming in my hand.
Well, he was sober, but his mood didn't seem to have improved much. Figuring out what to do next gave me enough time to absorb the heat off the eggs and stick them in the grumbling fridge, and then I went to the window to go chase him down.
At first, he seemed to have disappeared, and I figured he'd cut and run out the fire escape, but then I smelled cigarette smoke and looked up to find him sitting a floor above. He didn't throw the Gatorade bottle at me, so I crawled out the window and looked up to the rusting grate above me. The stairs had long since rusted through and fallen; presumably Biff had jumped and pulled himself up through pure virtue of upper body strength. I figured I’d have to climb, but Biff reached out a hand without looking at me, so I pulled my sleeve down, we caught each other's wrists, and he gave me a pull up.
"Thanks," I said.
He grunted and went back to staring out over the Vaygo skyline. The sun was out high, and the heat made the traffic below shimmer like a mirage. Children ran back and forth in sandals and shorts. Sweat damped his shirt.
I pulled off my sweatshirt and elbowed him in the ribs. “Hey. You’re not broken.”
Biff was a master at expressing derision, but I’d never heard him snort with such contempt.
“Really. I mean, you’re still here, right? You’re not dead. I mean, unless you’ve been eating rat poison on the weekends without me noticing, you haven’t even tried, not since—”
“Want to know why?”
Something in the way he said it made me hesitate. There was almost a challenge in his voice, and he was holding my eyes now, a twist to his lips like he planned to give a punch-line that probably wouldn’t make me laugh. Whatever it was that got him through the day, it wasn’t because he had yet to cook the perfect fondue, for sure.
I eyed him sidelong. “Why?”
He shifted on the grate, sending a little red flurry of rust flakes. “So I’ve fucked my life pretty good, right? I’m a little shit who beats on people for bread. Big pain in the ass.”
He wasn’t saying it like he was fishing for reassurance or sympathy. It was simple flat fact. “Uh huh.”
“Fucked up my family, ditched ‘em in Georgia eight—naw, it’s nine years now. Ain’t sent word since. And now I live here in my shitty-ass busted up apartment with a busted sink and no hot water.”
“Uh huh…” I still didn’t see where he was going with this.
“Shit life, right?”
“A bit.”
“Yeah. Probably ain’t gonna get better either.” He inhaled carcinogens and added, “but it’s still better’n Hell.”
“Thought you said you didn’t believe in God anymore,” I said.
“Nah. Still believe in Hell, though.”
“And that you’re headed there.”
“Oh yeah.”
“You seem very certain.”
He chortled. “Where the hell else would I go? Florida?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never died. Though I sure hope that if there’s an afterlife, it’s not Florida. Now, if it were Montana or something, that’d be a nice plot twist…”
Pause. “On your planet, they got a Hell?”
“I have no idea. I wasn’t exactly raised with religion, as far as I remember. Not that I remember much. Knowing them, the afterlife was probably having all the water you could drink, all the arable land you could see, and your own personal fanatical army to defend it from all the other dead people.”
He grunted but otherwise made no response.
I stared out at the cars with him. “I lied to you last night.”
He didn’t express curiosity or look at me, but he did glance for a moment in my general direction.
“I did try to off myself once on Della. I was really young, not really capable of understanding what exactly it meant. I just thought it was the unstoppable jail break.” I shrugged. “Obviously, I didn’t succeed, didn’t even get close. It was a really long time ago; my memory is really fuzzy of it.”
Biff paused. “Why didn’t you try again?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. Presumably they fixed me.”
“Fixed you.”
I tapped my temple. “Up here. So I wouldn’t do it again. I mean, I was expensive. Can’t have me self-destructing. It’s not like it was beyond their capabilities, what with all the rest they were trying to cram into me. Just reroute the urge to die into something more useful, suppress a few things here and there, put in a couple coping mechanisms…” I shrugged again. “So you really shouldn’t compare yourself to me. I was made for this.”
Biff tilted his head. He took a pull on the squeeze bottle. Looked me over, like he was mulling something over.
“You ever think about your brother?” He asked.
I paused. “Why? Were you an only child?”
“Two sisters.”
That brought me up short. “What, really?”
He nodded.
“Really?”
He gave me a look of contempt.
“I just… you never struck me as someone who could share a playpen.” Honestly, the idea of Biff as a child at all was terrifying. “Older or younger?”
“Younger. Six years.” He shook his head with annoyance and held up a hand. “Look, it don’t matter, ‘kay, I wanna know how you deal with ditching ‘em.”
I stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“I ditched my sisters, you ditched your brother. Tell me how you deal with it.”
I just stared at him.
“Well?”
“I… I don’t understand.”
He gave me a funny look. “Your brother.”
“Yeah. What about him?”
He was speaking slowly now, like I was a few eggs short of a dozen. “You left him.”
“I… what?”
“How you deal with that?”
“I think you need to practice your English, dude, start learning to put sentences together that logically follow each other. You’re getting a bit aphasic on me.”
He smacked the railing with one hand, sending a flurry of rust down with a shriek of metal. “The hell’re you on about, I wanna know, how the fuck you handle your shit? How you still walking around?”
“I told you, they fixed me, they don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore—”
Biff was starting to look aggravated, but not like usual. It was like he was too confused to be angry. “I don’t mean that shit, that’s old shit, I mean the new shit, the shit now. Tell me how you do it!”
Shaking my head, I got up and took my sweatshirt from the hot metal, shook the rust flakes off it. “If you’re just going to play word salad games with me, I’m out of here. Eat your eggs, I put them in the fridge for you. Enjoy your hangover.”
Biff just stared at me, watched me as I crawled down the wall, brow furrowed, cigarette forgotten in his hand. He didn’t even try to stop me; it was almost like I’d taken him aback or something. I didn’t recognize the look in his eyes but I didn’t like it. It was too much like when he’d been drunk the night before.
“You don’t, do you?” He asked after me.
The words weren’t worth responding to. I just left.
