Chapter Text
September 15th – present
Cotton wool.
If someone had asked him to describe the feeling of a hangover, he would have answered like this: it's almost like having cotton wool in your mouth, a dry tongue and a bitter sensation on the back of your tongue. It must also be said that most of the time, the ability to clearly describe the feeling you get after having downed half a distillery is a bit lacking; they should have asked him when the excruciating headache – an army of infernal demons busy razing everything in his skull to the ground – had passed, after a black coffee, an aspirin and a few more hours of blackout. Then yes, perhaps they would have had a coherent answer.
It certainly wasn't new, that's it. Nothing he hadn't already experienced more times than public decency – and his liver – could tolerate.
What was certainly new, however, was that bed; never, in his entire life, had he slept in sheets so soft and so... Bizarre. They were silk, judging by the consistency under the fingertips with which he was rubbing them, and against the beard-scruffed cheek that he raised in a half-grimace to roll onto his back and try to focus on the ceiling, the situation, his life. One thing at a time.
Only no, it wasn't possible. The effort of understanding the above and below had already been challenging enough, but the moment he tried to turn onto his back – ignoring the need that his stomach was screaming at him to stay still and the weight he felt right there – he encountered an obstacle.
He struggled to focus on a plastered ceiling, definitely not the one in his apartment – a crucial crack was missing from the parts of the chandelier that the previous tenant had mounted incorrectly – and a little voice in his head made him assume it was the one in his old house.
About his old life.
The pounding migraine didn't help one bit with understanding accurately.
He muttered something unspecified, struggling to put together two words that made sense and was about to put a hand over his eyes to shield himself from the light that filtered through the curtains of a window to the left of the mysterious bed - a light even too intense for his current tastes.
He tried to raise his hand and move on those wrinkled silk sheets, but at that moment he realized the second news of that morning: he was naked. And except for a dark red tie with the knot still tied although loose, he was stark naked.
“..What the-“
He turned his head to the right, confusingly following the sound of low, quiet breathing that he hadn't registered before, revealing the third, exciting detail: the weight he felt on his stomach was tangible, in the literal sense of the word; upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a pale, decidedly masculine, freckled arm, with vague blond fuzz and quite a few beaded bracelets, lying across his belly and connected to an equally freckled shoulder belonging to a reclining young man next to him, face buried in the pillow and a mop of blonde hair all disheveled. A final glance highlighted how he too was naked and the sheet twisted around his hips by mere chance did not leave even a little room for the imagination.
Henry Husker stared transfixed.
There was something that had to be done, at times like these, something important. Something he was desperately trying to remember but the temporary shock had made him remove.
Husk gasped, unable to stop staring at the Naked Man to his right, who stirred in his sleep with a sigh that precedes waking; as he moved, he rubbed the arm planted on Husk’s belly, making him shiver.
As he tried to remember what the hell he was supposed to do, that arm moved again, unconsciously, towards the strip of black hair connecting his belly button to his lower belly. Dangerously downwards.
He grabbed his hand – the Naked Man's nails were lacquered a questionable shade of purple – to stem the inevitable clash with his morning hardon, which that tickling under the navel and just above the cock had certainly not helped. On the contrary.
It was at that moment that the Naked Man opened his eyes, blinking a couple of times and allowing Henry to focus on a still slightly sleepy hazel gaze, the black pencil a little smudged under his eyes but the languid air of someone who instead seems well aware of himself. And aware of where he was.
“Good morning, gorgeous.”
The Naked Man's malicious smile, half hidden by the pillow, struck him with the force of a mallet against the temple. The glimmer of a golden canine – was it really golden or a hallucination? – made him blink and take in a sharp breath.
It was there, right then, that the dawn of understanding decided to rise and sweep away the hangover fog.
What should you do when you find yourself in bed with a stranger, without knowing why or how?
To ask.
“.. And who the fuck are you?”
September 14th – seventeen hours earlier
There is a motto, in every casino in Las Vegas or in the known world: the house always wins. At the end of the evening, every effort and every bet made, every penny earned, will still be very little compared to what the gaming room will have managed to squeeze out of you, amidst the sparkling lights and tinkling noises of slot machines.
The game is also here, isn't it? Trying to win something impossible.
That's what he always said to his players, dealing out the cards with consummate croupier skill and observing them as they put everything they had up for grabs.
To be good at your job you need to study it and try it. Get to know it.
That's how he started, his father – who he believed it was, at least, his mother had never wanted to delve deeper into the subject – had explained it to him.
What they should have explained to him in detail, however, is that the first moment you pick up a deck of immaculate cards to shuffle it, feeling the rigid rustle between your fingers and watching the colored suits promise wonders, something inside you changes. Something that you probably already had inside you, in some way, and that, recalled by the wink of a Queen of Hearts, quivers and begins to whisper in your ear.
They should have also explained to him that the moment you push the chips onto the green table – colored circles of frosted plastic, glittering promises of money, dreams and hopes – and look your opponents in the eyes to try to read them, knowing you don't have nothing, you are also putting yourself at risk. That you can lose the game – lose yourself – and no one will ever give you back what was taken from you. That you can end up screaming and wake up at night, bathed in sweat, that you can break your knuckles against the mirror of the toilet where you locked yourself so as not to wake your wife and save the shreds of that relationship that you insist on calling ‘marriage’ even if the woman in that bed now only looks at the ghost of who you once were.
Which, after all, he also did it every day, in front of the same broken mirror that he had promised to repair, without success. An empty, haunted shell inhabited by the ghost of a man who had done nothing but follow the unwritten rule of gambling: the house always wins. And that damned piece of soul you inevitably bet will never come back.
“…Henry?”
A blink, Henry's amber gaze lifted from the still untouched glass of water in front of his intertwined fingers, so tight they dwarfed the knuckles of a pair of large, tawny hands. The constant ringing in his ears – he no longer knows if it really exists or if he imagines it every time – slowly faded away, while the reality of where he was enveloped him again, leaving him vaguely stunned.
The Davis Polk & Wardwell lawyer studio. The meeting room. His lawyer, sitting next to him, watching him with a mixture of impatience but silent understanding. The lawyer of who would soon be his ex-wife hosted across the table. His wife – no longer, not for long – with teary, angry eyes, filled with all the things she could have shouted at him instead of just looking at him one evening at dinner and crying, over yet another take-out dinner, that she wanted divorce.
“Henry, shall we continue?”
Henry Husker forced himself to tear his gaze away from the woman he had once loved so much that he had built her a silly swing in the living room, ‘ because in Manhattan there are no houses with gardens ’, to stare at his lawyer, a man ten years younger than him and the face of someone who had already arrived in life or was at least on the right path.
Not like you , giggled that annoying and unbearable little voice that had never left him since that day. Since the Accident. Since what had forced him, his wife and daughter to move elsewhere, to leave the lights of Las Vegas and the Nevada desert behind them, in a hurry and without looking back.
Henry cleared his throat, loosening his fingers and sticking his hands under the table, straightening his posture and cracking his neck in a thick, slow sigh to release the tension. He just nodded, yanking his gaze back to stare stubbornly at the window beyond his wife's head.
Both lawyers nodded in return, turning towards the mediator seated at the head of the table, who in response rearranged for the millionth time the bundle of papers and documents to be signed in which the marriage of Henry and Lidia Husker had become just that: wastepaper.
“Great, I'd say we're almost done. Mrs. Husk– ahn .” a distracted, vaguely embarrassed rustle, while the mediator was looking for the maiden name of the now almost ex-Mrs. Husker. “Dixon. Mrs. Dixon, do you want to add anything to what your lawyer has already expressed?”
Lidia looked again at Henry who, in response, didn't even bother to lower his amber eyes to peek at her, even though that look burned him like she was pressing it against him.
You've always been a coward, Husky.
He could only hear Lidia sniffling, as if she were holding back a half-sob. Whether it was anger, dissatisfaction, or simple sadness, he couldn't tell.
“You can see Caroline whenever you want, if you want.”
Henry's fingers tightened again, under the table, and only then he found the courage to slide his gaze back onto his ex-wife. Lidia had always said that she would have loved for their little girl to have his eyes – “ You are so beautiful, Henry, they look like they are made of amber .” But Henry had always secretly loved that the two women in his life had the same way of looking at him: a pair of bright brown eyes. On the other hand, Caroline Husker had certainly taken his hair, which in Caroline's case had become a mane of black ringlets that not even the toughest combs would have been able to tame. Husk's were slightly disheveled black waves, longer sideburns on the sides, a now salt-and-pepper quiff and silver-brushed temples, which very well underlined his forty years.
Forty-two, Husky, don't lie.
Only after a few moments in which he stared at Lidia in silence – lost in those reflections that had started to come to him at the most inopportune moments – he shrugged his shoulders with the usual nonchalance. Dull, drained – anesthetized with all the alcohol he could get his hands on. At least at today's meeting he showed up sober.
“When you need it.”
He had never lost his Nevada accent; not even with his alleged father, a proud man from Louisiana, and his constant criticism of the way his mother had taught him to pronounce words. Not even after he had gotten out of the way. Or to say it better, that Henry had gotten out of the way – when he wasn't a coward, when life hadn't yet emptied him and everything tasted like whiskey, impudence and hope.
He had grabbed it with his fists, that possible future, the same fists that that asshole had used on his mother – only to not be able to use them anymore, when Henry had broken both of his father’s wrists. What use can a card-dealing wizard who can no longer use his hands have?
He never really knew what happened to him after their last fight.
Lidia looked at him again, her eyes this time no longer just shining but full of those tears that Henry had ignored so many times – he had listened to her sobbing into the pillow until she fell asleep, without having the courage to turn towards her.
The mediator at the head of the table cleared his throat again, while Lidia's lawyer cautiously stretched out a hand to caress her shoulder in a professional but understanding manner and Henry, once again, slid to look at the glass window of the skyscraper, overlooking Lexington Av.
“Custody of the minor will be entrusted to the mother, Mrs. Dixon, until further decision of the court. A social worker will come regularly to check that Mr. Husker's home is suitable to accommodate a minor. The child's visits will take place once a week, unless the mother forbids it. Mrs. Dixon will receive a maintenance allowance in the amount-"
All the following bureaucracy became a background buzz in Henry's head, as he listened to twelve years of marriage – twelve years of their lives – tabulated like a list of assets given away, divided up, shared. Twelve years of love, family and memories torn to shreds by judicial procedures and agreements signed between the two parties on an anonymous dotted line.
The house was owned in Lidia's name – she had always been the rich one between the two, and her father-in-law had never failed to point out how absolutely unsuitable Husk was for his daughter from a good family. Henry has always been an annoying whim that had stuck with her after her rebellious period as a dancer in Las Vegas.
The new Henry’s lease, a squalid apartment on the sixth floor without a lift in Brooklyn, which the social worker would certainly not have found up to standard for a little eight years old girl.
Twelve years in which they had become strangers and the only thing Henry could think about in that moment was how much he wanted to get out of there and drink something until he drowned that horrible feeling of having lost everything – again – in several glasses.
Pathetic, as well as cowardly.
“Oh, shut the fuck up.”
Judging by the way everyone at the table looked at him, the thought hadn't been that much silent. Fuck.
He sighed, rearranging himself in the chair for the umpteenth time and inserting the middle finger of his left hand under the knot of his dark red tie, which until then had been tightened around the collar of a white shirt that had seen better days, to loosen it slightly.
“Sorry. Can we sign these papers and leave? I'm in a bit of a hurry.”
He had never liked goodbyes, let alone when he was about to walk out of Lidia's life without looking back. The same Lidia who, at the moment, was dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief that came straight from the hands of her lawyer.
Fuck her and make her happy , Henry thought resigned, I wasn't capable of doing that anymore.
Another rustle of papers, a pragmatic mumble, a black pen. Husker signed where the lawyer wearily pointed, before sliding what was left of their marriage across the polished, expensive wood of the conference room table towards his wife. He didn't even look at her as he got up from the chair, picking up his black suit jacket from the back of the chair and wearing it over his now slightly wrinkled shirt.
“Well, all done here. Mr. Husker, Mrs. Dixon, it was a-”
Pleasure.
The mediator's outstretched hand, accompanied by his parting words, remained hanging in the air as Henry left the meeting room with a vague nod to those present – including his ex-wife – heading towards the elevator as if he had the devil on his tail.
The ding! of the doors that opened first on the thirty-seventh floor and then in the lobby informed him that he had reached his destination, without him remembering anything about the descent.
He let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding in the crisp New York September air as he patted his jacket pockets for the pack of cigarettes – a tremor in his fingers that had nothing to do with the temperature, still rather lukewarm.
The first puff with which he asphalted his lungs had the same taste of the bitterness with which he had witnessed the end of the marriage as if it wasn't really him, the one in the meeting room. It wasn't him who had signed, the one who had looked at his wife with indifference and who had dismissed seeing his daughter with a vague "as needed”.
The truth, Husker thought, puffing smoke from the left corner of his lips – without even taking the cigarette out of his mouth – with his hands deep in his pockets, is that it all hurt too much. A fucking pain, as if that last signature had torn something else from his chest and the void had widened a little more. The truth, he then reflected, raising a hand to stop a yellow taxi, is that he could run away as much as he wanted from Las Vegas, from the Accident, from that whole situation; he knew perfectly well that the steps would take him nowhere anyway.
September 14th – twelve hours earlier
If someone had told him, just a month earlier, that he would find himself tipsy – no, let's face it, completely drunk – in a random club somewhere in Brooklyn arguing with the bartender about having another glass of whiskey and thus being able to end that glorious day with his head in the toilet, he would have said: “shit, that's really me.”
Yeah, cause there was nothing new in the way Husk had chosen to drown his frustration – the temptation to gamble everything and leave Lidia without a cent out of pure, selfish and irresponsible satisfaction – in a glass. In several glasses, to be precise; so many that now the aforementioned bartender, a brute with an octopus tattoo on his shaved neck and looking rather exasperated, had denied him another round.
The man with the octopus tattoo reiterated the concept again, shaking his head and starting to walk away along the rather filthy counter of that place where Henry had landed after giving up the money to the taxi driver and telling him “ take me to Brooklyn, wherever the fuck you want .” The taxist had driven for a while, without a specific destination, before abandoning him on a completely random street when the taximeter had reached the amount that Henry had put in his hand.
End of the line.
To be honest, Husk's apartment wasn't too far from where the taxi driver had dropped him off, but he didn't feel like going back and drinking a six pack sitting on the floor still littered with boxes to empty and with the flood of intrusive thoughts who would follow him into the silence of what he had to start calling "home".
So, Black Dot it is.
“Look man.”
That phrase came out more slurred than Husk would have liked, even though the grip with which he reached out to grab the bartender’s elbow was firm. Ready. A legacy of muscle memory that still endures, despite the blood alcohol level.
The bartender, probably accustomed to such scenes, simply stared at him with a vaguely menacing but controlled look; someone who wasn't at his first rodeo.
Husk cleared his throat, as he pushed the empty tumblr onto the counter right towards the hand of the arm he had grabbed.
“I'm paying, so I’m fucking right to want another one. Just one, then that's it.”
The man, unperturbed, gave a polite tug on his arm – Henry let go, without much resistance, but leaned forward a little on the counter, ending up on his chest, perched a little hunchbacked on the stool; the black suit jacket badly crumpled on the seat next to him, the lace-up men's shoes hooked to the footrest and the shirt sleeves rolled up, all wrinkled, up to the elbows. The dark red tie miraculously still around his neck – although at least a couple of collar buttons had said goodbye a couple of hours ago.
“I said no, man.” the bartender repeated, mocking him, before whistling – in the chatter of the place, under which some rock-country music was playing, Husk barely heard him. The buzz in the background was just that: an indistinct and confused noise, the clinking of glasses, the cracking of billiard balls from the three tables piled up at the back of that tavern, the loud laughter of the customers. A place frequented not exactly by Manhattan's crème de la crème.
He didn't see what the bartender was whistling at – or rather, at whom – but when he put his left cheek on the counter to look where the bartender had ended up, he saw him talking to another thug dressed in black and looking like he was the one taking annoying customers and kicking them out. And Henry knew it well: when he worked as a bartender, in the period before becoming a full-time croupier – that youth when he spent all his tips on Las Vegas dancers – he had had a lot of talks like this with bouncers.
Since when had he become the troublesome drunkard to be chased away?
Grumbling, Husker pivoted on his hands to lift himself off the counter he was slumped over to stumble off the stool and walk away; or perhaps leave directly from the club and crawl home, if his feet started to cooperate.
Completely forgetting about his balled up jacket, he headed towards the exit, regardless of possibly bumping into any other customers in the club. And in fact, as it happens, without looking he ended up taking in a guy a little shorter than him, with an infinitely more angry look, stuck in a leather flying jacket with studs on his shoulders. A guy who had three pints of beer in his hand – and sure enough, the crash! that reached Husk's ears confirmed that "he had". They had just all fallen to the ground.
“Christ on a stick, watch where you're going, you fuckwad!”
Henry focused on him, gliding over the burn scar that took up much of the right side of his face, and silently wondered why he had to bump into the seemingly most brawling person in the whole place. Except that he didn't react as one should react on these occasions, with a sincere “sorry” and a retreat.
Oh no, not even a little.
“Fuck you.”
“Oh you, you ugly–”
“Whiskers, where the fuck were you?”
A male voice that Husk had never heard before – Brooklyn accent and somewhat high-pitched, nasal tone, someone that used to chewing syllables and choosing how to pronounce them – interrupted the potential punch that the angry leather shortie threatened to slam in his face. Literally, given that Henry turned his head in the direction of that call at the same time as the guy in question, who in the meantime had grabbed him by the front fabric of his shirt to pull him closer and take better aim.
Whiskers?
Husker raised his thick right eyebrow, looking deeply perplexed.
He focused, at least four inches above his line of sight, on a tall, lanky young man with a mop of blonde hair and lots of freckles on his nose. The young man – clad in a pair of tight black shorts and an unlikely eco-bio-something fuchsia teddy jacket, seductively slipped over the left shoulder – stared at him with a dazzling smile and a wrinkle of his nose.
Was that a gold-encapsulated canine?
The brawling shortie tightened his grip on Henry's shirt, who in response leaned forward a little more in a sudden dizziness, his attention still focused on the blond who was currently approaching them, stopping the Black Docs with equally fuchsia laces there, in the pool of beer on the floor that framed the scene – which for the record, the bouncer still at the counter was observing very carefully.
“Oh, don't make that face!” the blond boy continued the act, waving his left hand with an almost flirtatious air, as if he were chasing away an annoying fly. “I went for a piss for like three seconds and you disappear.” he clicked his tongue against his teeth a couple of times – like you do with a somewhat grumpy cat.
Husk, increasingly confused but sufficiently accustomed to getting out of uncomfortable situations in whatever alcoholic state he found himself in, had the good sense to keep quiet.
The shortie didn’t.
“Is this old drunkard with you?” he asked, skeptically.
The little voice inside Henry growled that he wasn't that old, but thankfully his mouth didn't cooperate.
“Yup! Sorry, he becomes a mess when he drinks. But you know how it is, a difficult day, a boss who takes your soul and makes you work noon and night, things like that.” the blond rattled off, with consummate nonchalance, inventing a potentially valid version.
So valid that the brawler let him go with a final push, clicking his tongue between his teeth in a sort of hiss and walking away muttering something incomprehensible.
The dazzling and disarming smile of his savior slowly disappeared as the other walked away, transforming into an annoyed half-grimace that had nothing malicious about it.
“This place is filled with dickheads. Are you okay, sweetheart?” he asked directly to Husk, who in the meantime was still staring at him without having moved from there.
He blinked, struggling to connect his brain and metaphorically ruffling his fur.
“It was none of your business.”
“You're welcome, it was my pleasure to help you!” the blond chirped promptly, in an ironic tone. Then he chuckled a little, shaking his head and sighing.
“Look, to make this story believable you have to at least pretend to sit down with me.”
He pointed with his thumb behind him to the counter, a little further away from where Henry had been sitting before – Husker followed the direction of his gesture, framing the stool where his crumpled jacket should have been.
Yes, it should have.
“Shit.”
The blond raised his left eyebrow, crossing his arms over his chest and resting the weight on his right hip, in the sharp image of disappointment.
“Just say no, dickhead, there's no use insulting me after I saved your drunk ass–“
“No, I–“ he absentmindedly pointed to the counter behind the other's back, struggling to put together a meaningful sentence. He sighed, surrendered, running his fingers through his silver-streaked locks and disheveling it even more.
“I believe they stole my jacket.”
His savior sucked the air between his teeth, in a not exactly happy half-grimace.
“Ouch. Sorry, whiskers. At this point, a shot is a must.” commented the blond, moving forward and catching Husk with an eloquent look – without even realizing it, he ended up following him.
“The bartender no longer serves me alcohol.”
“Oh, but you don't know my power of persuasion. Trust me.” he gave him an understanding wink, glancing over his left shoulder.
“I'm Anthony, by the way. What's your name?"