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Kieran watches his partner root through the pantry, energized despite their recent weeks of all-nighters and life-threatening experiences. For the first time in a long while, Lauren seems almost excited.
“Kieran.” He cocks his head to the side in inquiry as she emerges from his sparse collection of food and drink. “You know I hate cabs,” she gripes. She holds up an unfamiliar bottle; it’s his fault for not recognizing it, for not paying attention to the archaic belongings of the apartment from when he assumed it years ago.
Unfazed, Kieran simply shrugs as Lauren returns to the pantry.
“Ooh! This merlot is nice though,” she says.
Propping the bottle on the island, she scrambles over to the cupboards, rifling through them all in her search for glassware. He watches, amused, from his stool as the auburn-haired detective grins in delight and climbs the counter to reach for a long-untouched, dusty shelf.
It’s nice to see her unbound and more lighthearted, hair down and collar unbuttoned. Lately, the two had been worked to the bone, worn out and stress-riddled. Last he checked, there was even a strand or two of white among his dark hair. But for now, Lauren is simply an entertained guest climbing on his counters and (presumably) trying to get the two of them drunk. And she probably deserves it. With a big mission coming up, it could be their last days alive. Kieran wants her to be as carefree as she can be.
Maybe he wants it for himself as well. The thought of needing to comfort her in her last moments (again?) makes him want to vomit. Imagining the life in her eyes dimming, the blood…better to vomit from alcohol.
If only their problems only ever consisted of whether or not he had enough wine in his apartment.
Lauren’s smile turns mocking. “Wow, only burgundy glasses.”
“Detective, as luxurious as my tastes are…” Kieran passes a quick glance around his dim and drab kitchen. “They do not extend to drinks within my own home. You are lucky I have wine glasses at all.”
“Excuses, excuses.” She sets the dusty drinkware on the counter as well. “Kieran!”
“What?”
“Can you use your sword for sabrage?” Her eyes glitter mischievously.
His brows furrow; Lauren is acting uncharacteristically lighthearted, so much so that it nearly knocks him off balance, plunges him out of his depth. “No.”
“Fine.” She rinses out the glasses and wipes them clean, then hands them to Kieran, who has opened the bottle. “Pour.”
“No ‘please?’”
“No.”
He chuckles and takes the bottle, steers it steadily to fill her glass halfway and does the same for himself. When he slides the dark and richly spiced drink to her, she delicately takes the glass and swallows a small swig of it, evaluating the taste, before downing nearly half the liquid in her next go.
“More.”
Kieran raises an eyebrow. “Please?”
“More, please.” At her behest, he complies. The two sit, drinking, reminiscing. He jabs at her recent outbursts and slip-ups. She reminds him of her superiority. As the sun dips lower toward sunset, a warmth spreads to his extremities from the bubbling cloud in his chest. Or he could be imagining it. Regardless, it’s a feeling he recognizes from whenever the two of them get to enjoy each other’s company without a looming, nauseating peril.
A bottle in, Kieran glances at his empty glass mirroring the empty bottle and gets up to grab another from the pantry.
He sits back in his stool next to her as she prods him for more wine yet again.
“Not drunk enough?” he asks.
Lauren groans, rolling the glass between her fingers and watching the rich maroon sink down the walls of crystal. “Vodka would be so much faster.”
He pokes a finger into her cheek, head tilted. “Ah, but we’re in so deep already.”
“Sunk-cost fallacy. Get the shot glasses.”
“Darling. What shot glasses?”
Lauren groans again, louder. “Such a mood killer, I swear. But I forgive you.”
“You better. Aren’t you drunk?”
“I think so.” She giggles, a somewhat foreign sound to both their ears. “Are you?”
“I think so too.”
She laughs; it sounds like it comes from somewhere distant, around the corner, down the hallway. It sounds sparkling. “We are so dying.”
“Don’t say that,” he murmurs into his glass. There it is. The thought of vomiting again. He pushes it down by throwing back the rest of the wine in his hands.
“It’s a possibility.” When he turns to look, Lauren also has a wistful but steadfast sort of visage, slender fingers elegantly grasping the rim of her glass. “Succeeding is obviously priority number one. I don’t want to die.” She stops, awkwardly.
“But?”
“But I wouldn’t want to die unprepared.”
He doesn’t know what he can do besides what he does: empty his glass and give her other outstretched hand a quick squeeze. His eyes feel like they are drooping. Alcohol tends to make him think, and of course his thoughts are always on the ones who fell at his blade, the ones he had doomed.
And the ones yet to die. At his hand, directly or through his endless foolishness.
She’s not dying, not dying.
Imbecile, why would you think that? Unprompted, too.
More wine can’t help, but a man can hope. Or, rather…blackout drunk could be the solution.
“Please,” he whispers with an imploring smile, both hands holding his glass out to her. Who is she to turn down such an innocuous and polite request?
Lauren swirls the bottle in her hand, their second one, and tilts it lackadaisically toward his burgundy. In her intoxicated, weak hand, the red sloshes out awkwardly past the lip but she manages to rein it in and keep most of the liquid in the glass. Some of it.
She shoots him a look and orders, “Do not drink it off the counter.”
“My,” Kieran responds, the usual swagger dampened by his slowness. “I can’t believe you’d expect such barbaric behavior from me.”
“I don’t,” she says with a wide smile splitting her face, and for some reason he can’t bear to rip his eyes away from her lightly flushed cheeks, her brilliant eyes squinting in bliss. The scene around her blurs, her face glowing. If he could keep them in this moment, encased in glass, so that they didn’t have to return to the adrenaline and the sorrow, the sleepless horror-filled nights…
But alas. The lives they were dealt are not meant to live in a display.
He downs the glass she filled—horrendously, at that—and turns towards her, feeling full off of wine and murky-eyed. Dulled, he looks at Lauren and again can’t pull his eyes away. Her cheeks are rosy with blood and alcohol, burning bright red in the reflection of her fiery hair. She continues smiling.
He knows he shouldn’t. But he wants to and he has no self-control at the moment, so his fingers reach out and streak across her undereye, tracing the lashline. The gold in her eyes seems to follow his finger then tear away to look at him.
“I’ve never seen you like this,” Lauren says. She leans forward onto her hand, nails sweeping through her hair.
“Well, we’re not exactly in a lot of alcohol-appropriate situations.”
She purses her lips and muses, “Well…the party…”
“I can’t afford to drink around people. You, on the other hand—”
“You think I drink around that lot?” She starts wheezing in uncontrollable, silent laughter, even though it isn’t that funny. “I have—I have a reputation to protect.”
“Liarrrr, you don’t have much of a good reputation at all.”
Lauren throws her head back, cackling, then looks at him. “True.”
“But you’re drinking with me.”
“Of course,” she says in a matter-of-fact manner, suddenly lucid. Her eyes flutter, half-shut and gazing at the counter, as she brings the nearly empty glass back to her face and inhales the aroma. “I trust you.”
Hm. Kieran’s hands suddenly feel fidgety, as if he doesn’t know where to put them. He pulls them back. “Perhaps you shouldn’t.” There was never a good reason to trust him. Whatever stain she could cast on her reputation, he was a million times worse.
“I should. I do.”
“Really?” he says hoarsely.
“M-hm,” she hums. She seems almost placid now, far from her crippling laughter from just moments before. “It’s me you shouldn’t trust.” Her voice is slightly colored with some melancholy. “You know…”
He faces her, nose-to-nose, watches her peer at him curiously. “Hm?”
“You have a rather pretty face.”
So her tastes have not changed. His eyes find hers, her gilt and lucent gaze.
“I’m always afraid,” he says. An abrupt change of topic in retrospect but his mind sits addled in the moment.
Her hand reaches up in a surprisingly steady manner. A shiver echoes down his spine upon her thumb’s glide across his cheekbone. Characteristically succinct. She says lowly, “Of what?” Her eyes twitch down at his wine-stained lips. “Of me?”
Kieran’s breath catches, just a hint. “I fear what all this—what I—might do to you. I fear in the end you will be lost. I don’t know what might still pass, and I don’t know what I’ll do if something happens to—mmfph.”
Lauren grips his collar and kisses him, firmly.
He stills with a sharp inhale, letting her grasp his jaw, letting her hand drift down to the base of his neck above his buzzing pulse. Her lips push against his, soft, supple, like the velvet fruit of the merlot on her tongue. Everything, all of it, overwhelms his lungs with softened edges.
The wine, the back of his mind says. The front of his mind, however, hums that perhaps it’s more because he wants her in some way, somehow. Maybe wants her to be free of him, and also maybe wants to keep his hold on the light that she’s given him.
She retreats a hair’s breadth with her eyes turned down, breathing thickly. The motion makes Kieran sink towards her, wanting to pull her back to himself. “Don’t. Don’t think about that,” she begs.
“But—”
Her lips close over his again and his concern dies.
Stomach swirling, he tangles a hand into her hair and pulls her closer, her holding his face solidly. Time melts; it’s fast and slow and spinning like the crest of a wave and then dreamily still as the wave crashes over everything. Liquid gold swims behind his eyelids.
If he were more clearheaded, he would have thought she was trying to distract him, distract herself. But she feels so earnest, so he just hopes she feels the same pull he holds in his stomach.
Lauren shifts away gently then. She focuses her eyes on his. “Can we just…just the wine tonight, okay? Don’t think about everything else,” she whispers. Her eyes are averted, a stray strand of her now-tousled hair drifting before her face. And with that, he considers maybe the thoughts make her sick as much as it does him. Maybe she doesn’t want him to be hurt either.
Or it’s the wine. Again. Again and again, all over again.
But she’s right; all to escape for a night.
The next thing he knows, he’s leaning too far forward and toppling off the stool onto the hardwood.
“Kieran—” The words stumble out of her reddening lips; she grabs his arm, only to be pulled down to the floor as well with a yelp. They fall into a melted heap. He regrettably feels a bruise-to-be blooming against his knee but it’s not that bad. The lights are bright. She’s giggling again with her laughing expression buried into his shirt.
With some resistance, she rises up.
“Are you okay?” he asks, brow twisted in worry.
“Yes, yes,” Lauren laughs, and her head slides down to his shoulder. “As long as you are.”
“Did you mean to do that?” Kieran inquires. Suddenly, his body remembers to flush his face warm and searing.
“What, fall?”
“Yeah,” he responds, lying almost instinctively. Not caring that she knows.
And she knows. “Kissing you?”
“Yeah.”
He can’t see her face, only feels her shift her face to look up at him. “Complicates things, doesn’t it?” Silence from him. She groans, “Aghh, I shouldn’t have drank so much…but I wanted to…”
“Did you mean to do it?”
“I wanted to,” she says. It sounds like she says it with a smile. As if she can’t help it, she presses a quick, fleeting kiss to the burning slope of his neck. He should be shocked at her boldness but their recent weeks of emotional intimacy take the edge off enough.
“Lauren,” he murmurs, a hint of a reprimand.
“Sorry.” She continues, “I wanted to. But…”
“Not a good time?”
A fast hesitating breath. “Did you want me to do it?”
“Yes,” he says, so quietly he can’t even hear himself.
“And I would offer again, but…” Despite her momentarily teasing tone, Lauren sits up once more, lazily, and her smiling face turns morose.
“We can’t afford to be worrying about each other too much right now,” he finishes. Should he be hurt in this moment? Perhaps, but the emotion doesn’t rise up. There’s too much lingering ecstasy sitting in his gut, still startled at her. And it’s true; he really can’t afford that.
But he really should bring the wine out more often.
Her face takes on an embarrassed and slightly mortified look as reality sinks in through her drunken stupor. “Oh, god, I shouldn’t have…I’m sorry.” She steps to her feet and offers a hand to pull him up.
He takes it, squeezing reassuringly. “Then forget it until this is all over then.”
“Until then,” her voice says, sounding distant in his ears again, her nails grazing down his forearm. She grins a little as she stumbles over to the couch. Kieran follows suit, and he can hazily see the half-full glasses on the counter but he can’t bring himself to care.
The alcohol makes him think. It also makes him hope a little, hope for a little more. Tomorrow, they will act in self-preservation and work towards one goal and one goal only.
Today, they finish the second bottle of wine—sort of—and sleep it off on his couch.