knights_say_nih | Fic: LSD- Or, WHAT NOT TO DO.

Breaky. Scary. R. Written right after reading the scenes with Rinaldo-Merlin and then watching Dead Man which put me in a bizarre headspace. Warnings for consumption of human beings and other such fucked up hallucinations.

“You wanted t’see me?”

Ramon turns away from the window and looks back at his effective second in command, well, asides from Random that is, of course.

“Yeah. I heard fighting downstairs a few minutes ago. We got cops?”

Carl shakes his head, and reaches for a pack of cigarettes.

“Just a fight. Someone thought it’d be funny to slip one of the musicians something. Guy threw a fit. God knows why though, if you asked me, I’d have said ‘Thanks.’”

But Ramon doesn’t hear the last part. He’s got eyes only for the man who’s standing in the door frame, worrying his bottom lip and looking queasy.

“Go find the fucker who did it and shoot him.”

Carl looks at him, incredulous, then back over his shoulder at Random. Pieces connect, and the man- who Ramon quite honestly likes, he’s got good instincts- leaves quickly, quietly, and without question.

When he’s gone, Random takes a few tentative steps forwards, and Ramon practically vaults over the desk to get to him and wrap him up in his arms.

“You’ll be alright, amarente. No matter how much it scares you I’m here.”

Random’s laughter has a tinge of hysteria to it, and Ramon’s eyes widen as the world around them swims, flashes through photonegatives of itself, eventually distorting in size. The sky bleeds in through the window, curling in wisps around their feet and climbing up their legs and it burns.

“No. Let go of me baby.”

Even with the sky bleeding and burning, he doesn’t, just staggers with him backwards to his desk and lifts them onto it, away from the stinging.

“Ramon, let go.”

More insistent now, pushing at him and from outside the window comes a roar of some kind of creature. The ground shakes, as something takes a step and Random takes advantage of Ramon’s surprise to shove and scrabble away.

When Ramon reaches for him again, he gets a sharp strike to the chest that knocks him away. As he staggers back his eyes close, his back connects painfully with the edge of his desk, and he falls to the ground.

He looks up again in time to see Random fall in turn and clutch his temples.

And then, vanish.

* * *
Let the wild rumpus start!

And all around him it does.
A grab, a snatch, a voice in his ear.
Jungles with things that slither and creep and crawl and pinch and twist
But not really. Really a desert. But only in his imagination. Except that that’s all there is so now the blistering, burning, aching desert isn’t so dry anymore.

Drip
dripdrip
Drip
Dripdrip

Because he’s in a cave with water on the ground not dissimilar to the water in his mind and around him except every instant another droplet flies to the ocean on the ceiling.
Breathe too deeply and it’ll come crashing down around you, Random.
The minute that thought is there it does and now he’s being rushed about by a tide that gets faster and faster until it batters him against the walls of wherever he is.

The hands that pull him out of the pool have talons and a sharp beak traces along his throat before the crane-like bat-thing discards him as useless, dropping him in a heap beside the table, landing on the cobble-stone floor.

The checkered table cloth brushes his shoulder and another crane-bat looks dispassionately at him while the stones beneath his back begin to sing in fluting voices and it snacks cheerfully on a human hand, fried in batter till it’s crispy-looking and the smell of cooked meat makes Random retch.

His vomit sinks into the sand he’s now lying on, back in his desert, though now it’s night. No, not night, day, but he’s surrounded by the darkness of a crowd of faces all staring down at him in silence and condemnation. Some of them have fallen from the sky he knows and some of them were projected upwards by the water in his mind and all of them are silent. Not saying anything, just staring staring staring until finally the sun sets in the red and white checkered tablecloth sky and then, then they lurch for him and he screams.

There is no sound in this place, it seems, so his cries are mute and the noise of a thousand footsteps can’t be heard though he can feel the vibrations in the sand under his body. No, not the sand, the water sloshing around him except not water, no, it’s blood.

Random wonders idly if he’ll drown in the stuff and immediately there’s no breath in his lungs and someone laughs.

And the wild things come and do not stop.

* * *

Random is hardly aware of anything when someone lifts him off the front steps of the building he’d barely recognized except that it was half familiar.

Carl made the phone call quietly and discreetly, and managed to get most of the blood off the man and out of his hair before Ramon’s steps were heard pounding up the stairs and he burst into the little room.

The blankness in Random’s eyes is positively frightening. The expression of pain in Ramon’s even more so.

Carl slips out again, with a quick promise to send up food and water.

Ramon doesn’t hear him.

* * *

It’s a day or so before Random starts responding to things without suspicion in his eyes. A week before he ventures out of Haven, longer before he makes it to the bar and longer still before he tentatively gets back to work in the club.

The place has been scrubbed free of the drug trade- Ramon’s using it as a clean front now, for laundering money, and a few people are resentful and a few people are relieved but all of them are glad to see their drummer back.

The first few nights he plays, he has an unwavering audience of one man in a back booth, whose eyes don’t leave his.

Late one evening, Ramon pulls him off the stage and gestures for someone whose face he doesn’t care enough to recognize to take his place. The two dance, and when Ramon leans in Ramon turns to whisper in his ear and promise he’ll keep him safe from now on and tell him he’s sexy.

Random smiles, and so does the barman and the guitarist and the waitress and dancer who’re all watching the couple- their couple because Random’s something of the darling of the place.

Carl shakes his head and orders himself another drink.

The things these two get into.