Ander - Part 5: Subchapter 4
4
- in my bar!"
That voice startled Kiana out of her daydreams and slammed her back to earth with an almost audible thud. She looked around, trying to figure out who had shouted so strongly, and then the door to Othello's banged open to the strangest sight she had seen in weeks. Othello, heaving a drunkard out his door by the shirttails, which wasn't so abnormal by itself, but the heave-ee in this case was none other than -
"Oh gods, not again," Kiana whimpered, wishing that a trapdoor would just magically open beneath her feet. She wouldn't even care what was at the bottom as long as it could get her the hell out of here.
Othello didn't push Mateo particularly hard, but in his equilibrium deprived state, he went sprawling anyway. Into the dirt. Face first. And then he just... lay there, slowly writhing in place like a giant slug.
"You can come back once you clean yourself up! And no more good-fors from your father, either!" Othello said, brandishing his finger at Mateo's back like a sword. He saw Kiana staring from across the road, tipped an imaginary hat, said, "Morning, Miss Kiana," and then disappeared back into the gloom of his tavern, slamming the door behind him and leaving her alone out here with semi-conscious slug Mateo.
Go go go! Just keep walking! He hasn't seen you yet, so get out of here!
She was about to do just that, but then Mateo uttered the most feeble moan she had ever heard in her entire life, like he was on the verge of dying.
Oh I just know I'm going to regret this, she thought. "Um... Mateo? Are you all right?"
No answer. Unless you could count "Uuuueeerrr..." as an answer.
Despite her better judgement, she started toward him, berating herself with every step. She was almost right on top of him when the smell hit her, stopping her dead in her tracks. It was like a bushel of grapes that had been wrapped in dirty laundry and then left in the sun for a week to mellow. She switched breathing from her nose to her mouth and tried to sound pleasant. "Mateo, are you all right? Are you even conscious? Hello?"
Mateo raised his head (it was like watching a caterpillar reaching for a leaf that was just a tiny bit too high), and blinked his eyes, not quite in sync.
What happened next made Kiana thankful for the noxious odour which had stopped her from coming any closer than she already was.
"KianAAARrrrrghhh!!!" What started out as her name turned into a torrent of reddish black vomit. Kiana jumped back, lifting her dress at the knees, and almost went sprawling herself. She backpedalled, trying not to breathe in any of... whatever the hell was coming out of him.
"By the gods, Mateo, ewww!!"
Mateo burped loudly, looked down at the black puddle on the ground (which was only an inch away from the tip of his snout) and said, "Oh..."
"Yeah. 'Oh' is right..." Kiana said, not quite sure what to do in this situation. Should she help him up? She'd rather not touch him, or even come within twenty strides of him, for that matter. Should she go get help? She looked around, but the road was deserted, which was good for Mateo, she guessed, but not so good for her. Damn, she just had to choose this particular road at this particular time, didn't she?
"Kiana..." Mateo grumbled and slowly started to get back up, moving with the deliberate care of the righteously intoxicated, each movement of every joint carefully planned out.
Had she ever seen Mateo drunk before? Kiana thought back to all the Year-end festivals and Nights of Souls they had shared growing up, but she couldn't remember him having even a single glass of wine or a single shot of brandy, and now he was stumbling about like a veteran souse?
"Kiana..." He finally found his feet, nearly stumbled, regained his balance, and stood looking at her with his bloodshot eyes, with vomit clinging to his chest and his stance horribly askew.
"Mateo." Kiana didn't know what to say, so she latched onto the only material thing she could see, insignificant though it may be. "Where is your shoe?"
"Mysh...?" he said, looking down at his feet as if he were trying to figure out the mysteries of life itself. "One of 'em is in Angie's cleavage, I think. Betwixt her bosoms."
"Ah, I see." Kiana started to inch her way down the road in what she hoped was a discreet manner, or at least subtle enough so his wine raddled mind wouldn't notice.
"Keena, wait..." he said, holding his hands out in front of him as if he were clutching an invisible box.
"Um... I'm kind of in a hurry, so..."
"Please wait just a wait, 'kay? Pleeeese?"
Oh, I am so going to regret this, Kiana thought yet again, looking at the way the recycled wine was dripping down his shirt. "I guess I can wait a minute."
"Great! I nnn... I know I'm not quite the best at... being right now... BUT!! But..." He pointed at something. Kiana didn't know what, exactly, since his finger kept swaying around in loopy figure eights. "I jus- just wanna say... I am not in my head up my ass!"
"That's great, Mateo, good for you. Now I really have to -"
"And also! I am a man! And you are a vixen! And I jus wanna say! You... an... an you..."
Please let him pass out, please let him pass out, please let him pass out...
"... an me... Me and you... we us, should get back together. Because! Because..."
Kiana held up her hand. "Let me stop you right there, Mateo. I do not intend to get back together with you, because we were never really 'together' in the first place, and also -"
"Because of the Wolf, right?" Mateo said with a smug, knowing grin. "Because you and my mother like 'em biiig, don't you? Just like Angie said it."
"Go home, Mateo. You're drunk."
"Nah nah nah, I wanna talk to you sommore. I know you and whatsisname... Ander, you go visit him up in that dirty shack of his every livelong day. Eeeeeverybody knows. 'Course I say 'visit' -" he mimed a pair of slanted quotation marks with his fingers, " - but what you really do is -"
"That's enough, you jerk! I tried to be nice because Mother told me you were having a hard time, and for one infinitesimal moment I almost felt sorry for you, but you can take all that and shove it!" She turned on her heel and walked off with her head held high and her carefully mended dress rippling in the wind. It would have made a grand exit, if only the road wasn't straight and smooth enough for even a fall-down drunk to follow.
"Kiana, wait!" he called after her, but she refused to acknowledge him. The sounds of his lurching footfalls were so random it was almost funny, and with only one shoe it sounded even weirder: slap-thud... slap-thud... slap-slap-thud... THUD.
"Ow..."
Don't stop!
She stopped.
Don't turn around! For the love of all the gods don't turn around!
She groaned, ran a hand across her face, and turned around.
Mateo was lying on the ground again, struggling to get back up. "Kiana, I'm so sorry, please please wait!" he said, reaching out to her like a drowning man.
She folded her hands across her chest and Mateo, seeing that he would get no help whatsoever, laboriously made it back to his feet on his own, now with a layer of dirt clinging to his vomit-sticky shirt. It was a huge improvement, actually.
He held his hands out in front of him, slowly raising and lowering them as if he were trying to calm down a hysterical child, which didn't even make any sense. "I am sorry serious now, 'kay? Real sorry. Seriously, there's just this one more thing I wanted to say to you from me so please don't storm off, I beg of you..."
Kiana rolled her eyes, but she stayed put. It would be better for him to say whatever he wanted to say and get it over with. The last thing she wanted was for him to follow her to Ander's place in some misguided drunken attempt to win back his honour or somesuch.
"Okay... um... Let me just gather my thoughts real quick..." Mateo held up his finger (What was with him and all these gestures all of a sudden?) and stared off at the mountain for a good ten seconds. "Okay! Um... Okay, the thing is, Kiana... Kiana, I just wanted to say, that... although I kinda knew you weren't too... thrilled, let's call it, with the whole engagement thing... I just wanted to say that, when your parents agreed to the dowry, that was the happiest moment of my life, and I just thought you should know that."
"Oh Mateo, don't -"
"Please let me finish, you don't have to do anything, you can even pretend like I didn't never say anything afterwards, just please let me talk while I'm still drunk enough to courage enough to say these things but not so drunk that I fall on my face, 'kay?"
Kiana sighed. "Okay."
"Okay. And erum... I know the short while you were my fiancée didn't mean anything to you, no matter how much I try to tell myself otherwise, I get it. I tried real hard to make you happy those few months, really I did, but even though it was so, I jus wanted you to know... it meant something to me."
By the gods, this was so awkward! Forget about walking away with her head held high, right now all Kiana wanted to do was sprint for the hills as fast as she could! But Mateo was standing there looking so pathetically defeated, with his ears and his tail hanging limp, his head bowed sort of crooked and looking up at her with the saddest eyes, like he might break down and cry at any moment.
"And um..." He looked away and scratched the side of his face, his fur all stuck together in sticky clumps. "I'm sorry I almost killed you that one time. I've been felt really bad about that. And also I'm sorry for all the things I did to make you call me a jerk. Every time you said it it was exactly what I was being, and I'm really sorry, Kiana, really really sorry..."
"Oh, that's okay," Kiana said, taking a step backwards. Why did she have to be downwind from this guy? Why!?
"You hate me, don't you? I can see it. You're disgusted."
"No, I don't hate you!" The disgust she couldn't explain away so easily, but hopefully he wouldn't notice she had skipped over that part. "I forgive you, so please don't worry about those things anymore. They're all in the past."
"They're killing me, you know."
"The...? Your past?"
"No."
His eyes hardened and his mouth turned down into a horrid sneer, and suddenly Kiana realized she was out here in the middle of a deserted road, all alone with a crazy-drunk Fox who was (as her mother so euphemistically put it) 'under a lot of stress'. She wondered how quickly help would come from Othello's if she were to start screaming...
"It's these fantasies in my head that are killing me, Kiana," he said, taking a lurching step towards her. "I'm always thinking about what would have happened if I was a better Fox for you, or if you weren't so damn picky. About how our lives would have been if you hadn't thrown it all away... About the little cottage we could have had, just you and me... away from all the crap of this world..."
Kiana started to back up. She was confident in her ability to outrun him as he was now, but she'd rather not let him get any closer than he already was.
Mateo took another lurching step, then stopped, his head cocked off to the side, as if in deep thought. "No... that's not quite right..." he said, staring right through her with his glassy, unfocussed eyes. "It's not the fantasies that are killing me. It's waking up from them that's killing me. It's snapping back into reality that's killing me. It's reality that's going to make me end up killing myself. You know why, Kiana?"
Kiana slowly shook her head, her fear deepening.
"Because reality is terrible! That's why I've been drunk for... for... hell I don't even know how long... A week! So I don't have to snap back into this putrid festering reality where I'm all alone! I just want to be numb, Kiana! I just want to curl up and die and it's all your fault!"
Kiana was speechless. No Fox had ever yelled at her like that, not even her mother.
Mateo looked her in the eye for a moment, and she saw he was crying. Perhaps realizing this, he turned his face away and looked down at the ground instead. "I shouldn't have said that. I'm sorry, I just..." He angrily wiped his tears away. "You can go. I shouldn't have stopped you." He turned his back and shuffled down the road, making that odd slap-thud... slap-thud... with his half-clad feet.
"Mateo, wait."
Mateo looked back, his left ear halfway perked. "Yueah?"
"Your house is the other way."
"Oh." His ear fell back down. "I mean, yes, I know that, of course, I just... I need to... retrieve my shoe from Angie's bosom first. If you'll excuse me..."
Slap-thud... slap-thud... slap-thud...
Kiana watched him go at a snail's pace, his route filled with more inadvertent curves and twists and loop-arounds than even the most convoluted of warrens, not quite sure why she was still standing there. She briefly tried to tell herself she just wanted to make sure he'd actually reach Othello's door before passing out and drowning in his own vomit or something, but ever since she came to know Ander she's found it harder and harder to lie to herself, maybe because he was making her know herself better, too.
By the time he made it halfway back, she couldn't stand it anymore.
"Mateo, wait." She closed the meagre distance he had eked out before he could even turn around fully.
"What's it, Kiana? I'm sorry I yelled, just please leave me alone. You pain me being here."
"_That's_the problem! Don't you see?"
Mateo narrowed his eyes at her. "I see you."
"And it won't be the last time you see me either. In case you hadn't noticed, Ander is your mother's son, same as you! And he's in a bit of a weird place right now when it comes to family..."
"He's not _my_family," Mateo grumbled, but Kiana went on like she hadn't heard him.
"Like it or not, you're going to be seeing a lot of him from now on, and that means you'll also be seeing a lot of me. What are we supposed to do? Make a massive schedule beforehand so we never bump into each other?"
"What're you shuggesh... propo... saying we do? I know I'm a mess right now, okay? I get it! You got your wonderful Ander..." Mateo twiddled his fingers like he was spreading fairy dust. "Wonderful wonderful Ander, big as a... dander."
"'Wonderful wonderful Ander' has tried several times to talk to you, you know. But Sarah always said you were off 'hunting'. And from the looks of you, the 'game' has been plentiful. You should be ashamed, making your mother lie like that."
"Lying is nothing compared to the stuff I heard you and that Wolf have been doing up in that shack of his..."
Kiana seriously considered punching him right in the face. She even went so far as to curl her hand into a fist, but one thing her father always taught her was to never get into a fight with a drunk unless you were drunk yourself. It was an odd bit of advice she never thought she'd have occasion to heed, but now that she was actually in such a situation, it did make a queer kind of sense. She used every bit of self-control at her disposal and her hand slowly relaxed, albeit under protest. Rationality and reason might go to waste on the inebriated, but she thought she'd give it a try nonetheless. "Mateo, I can assure you that anything you've heard about me and Ander is just mindless gossip spread by mindless vixens who have nothing better to do than sit around twittering like stupid birds."
Mateo shrugged. "Mayhap so, mayhap no. What do I know? Hehehe... Oh urg, I've been spending too much time with Othello..."
You could have just walked away, but noooo, you had to come back, didn't you? Could have been with Ander by now, but nope. You're here, talking to your ex-fiancé, who smells of vomit and pipe weed. Good choice.
"As I was saying," Kiana soldiered on, "I don't want things to be like this between us. I want to -"
Mateo belched loudly, and only covered his mouth after the fact, like his limbs were operating on a timetable roughly five seconds slower than the rest of him. "Sorrs..." he mumbled.
"I want to make peace," she finished, trying to ignore the smell of his breath, which wasn't nearly as bad as the smell of his vomit, but still just as nauseating.
"Peace?" Mateo looked confused, as if he'd never heard the word. Although to be perfectly frank, Kiana was amazed he was still capable of understanding even rudimentary speech. "How woo... I don't think we can do that. I mean, it'd be nice, sure it would be nice, but I don't think. Too much has happened Kiana, too much... stuff. Bad stuff. Blergh stuff. Just blergh."
Just 'blergh'. Yeah, that about summed it up. Kiana laughed, knowing she shouldn't, but laughing anyway.
Mateo joined in, laughing so hard Kiana feared he might topple right over, or even worse, barf again. It eventually died down, but she stood back a little, just in case. "I'm being serious, Mateo," she said, giving him her most winning smile. "Isn't there any way we could stop this foolishness? I hate walking on eggshells, and I'm sure you hate being... um... like you are now."
"It's not ideal, no..." Mateo admitted.
"Yay, we agree on something!" Kiana said and clapped her hands.
"No no no." Mateo wagged his finger. "I understand what it is you want. You want to skip around with Ander, and you want me to happy about it. Impossible. I'll never be happy about that."
"Gods!" Kiana threw her hands in the air, since apparently gesturing was now a requisite of getting your point across to morning drunkards. "I'm not asking you to like it, I just want you to stop destroying yourself over it!"
"I'm perfectly fine. I don't need your conshern."
"Now you're just being stubborn on purpose. Look at you! Seriously, look! You're covered in vomit and dirt! And it's not even noon!"
"I don't - Wha?" He looked down at himself, at the drying mess of wine and sand sticking to his shirt in filthy, crumbling splotches, and he said: "When the hell did that happen?"
He looked so confused, Kiana didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "Come on, Mat. Let's get you home."
"I don't... but, my shoe...?"
"Forget about your shoe. Come on." Supressing her revulsion, she tugged on his sleeve just hard enough to get him walking. "Careful now, don't go tripping over every pebble." She should probably try to support him in some way, but dammit she was already going out of her way. Waaaay out of her way. Damn lush was lucky she didn't leave him to pass out in the snow.
"Immakay, Kiana, I can."
"You sure?"
He nodded, and Kiana let go, but she stayed close enough just in case she needed to (gods help her) catch him if he fell.
He tottered a bit, but thankfully stayed on his feet. They walked in complete silence for what felt like ages, prolonged even further by the way Mateo kept zigzagging first to one side of the road, then the other, and Kiana realized a ten minute walk under normal circumstances might take as long as half an hour this way, and she sighed an internal sigh, wondering if she would ever get around to seeing Ander today.
"Kiana?" Mateo asked softly, his eyes down on the ground, carefully focussing on each step.
"Yes, Mateo?"
"There really is no chance of us ever getting back together, is there?"
No! By all the gods and my living Soul, no no no!! Never ever!
Kiana smiled a sad little smile. "I'm sorry Mateo. It just isn't in the stars."
He nodded, still looking down at his feet. "Okay. I understand." They walked a while longer, then: "Hey, Kiana?"
"Yes?"
"How's your sister doing? She's single, right?"
"Oh my gods!" Kiana couldn't believe her ears.
"What? I'm just asking..."
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