#cas asked me to grab gin's little speech for him and so i have

[keikakudori]

did you think you could simply bury me under superior numbers and brute strength? HOW NAIVE.

personals do not reblog.

requested by @godkilller

[if-you-built-yourself-a-myth]

Heaven’s High - Chapter One

idea courtesy of @beaniebabyrobbe

A crazy night out with friends and a harmless little prank on a doctor come together to match soulmates.

Sander didn’t mean to get so wasted after work. He never did, really. He was more the kind of guy to go home and draw pictures of the view from his window, maybe watch some TV or something, and maybe prepare a late-night snack. There was a television program on Discovery channel, Naked and Afraid, that came on almost every night. The concept of survival in remote locations fascinated Sander. He liked to enjoy an episode or two most nights before going to bed around one.

Contradictory to his bad-boy exterior, Sander disliked parties. He wouldn’t have been in the bar at all had it not been for his friends (and coworkers, but that part wasn’t as much of a factor). Théo and Céleste both had to deal with nasty clients in the tattoo parlor that day, and had enlisted Cas as their designated driver so they could get fucked up. Cas said fuck that and called Sander. Sander, technically speaking, was not allowed to drink, so he should have been the perfect match for the needs of the group. How he ended up knocking back another shot of vodka while Théo chanted in the background, he’d never know.

He did know, however, that it felt fucking awesome. So awesome, in fact, that Théo texted Sander’s roommates, Skyler and Michaël, to join in on the fun. Céleste ordered them all another round, and another thing became clear: there was no way he’d be able to drive Théo’s beat-up station wagon back to the apartment complex where they lived. No way in hell. Too bad.

“If we’re going to have to walk home,” Cas slurred, waving around half a gin and tonic, “I’m going to fucking kill you. Do you understand that, Driesen?”

In one sense, yes, Sander understood. In another sense, he found himself obsessed with the way condensation beaded on the outside of the glass in tiny droplets. He picked one at random and rooted for it to win as it trickled downward. Shit. Lost twice.

“Do you hear me?”

Yes, in one sense, Sander heard.

“These are new shoes. Can’t be… walkin’ and shit.”

Wasn’t that the purpose of owning shoes, though? Like, they were invented so that people could walk and shit on top of nasty stuff that would hurt their feet without them. Sander didn’t think he would wear shoes at all if they weren’t necessary.

“We’re gonna walk,” he assured Cas. They both finished their drinks.

Sander gazed across the bar. Though his vision was shaky and unstable, he could tell Michaël was sitting near the door. Things weren’t the same between them anymore, a reality he knew he would have to face at some point… but not today. Michaël spotted him staring and nodded; clearly, he wasn’t as drunk as Sander. Sander liked being drunk. It made him into more of himself than he got to be when his medication was stable. It allowed him to think about things that he actively pushed away when he was sober. Like Michaël. 

Vodka recreated a picture of them underneath the strobing lights.

For every ten disjointed, garbled thoughts, he thought one thing coherently. The first coherent thought was: did I like him when I kissed him, or are all of my feelings fake? Without alcohol, the question would have killed him. With, he hardly noticed the sting.

Skyler gathered the group together with a wave of their hand. “I know another club. It’s getting boring here.”

Sander disagreed. The bar walls were full of paintings, photographs, and postcards, and the windowsills boasted a large array of antique beer bottles. There was plenty to stare at. He was coming up on the introspective stage of drinking where one calls their ex to ask what went wrong, and he didn’t want to waste it by walking to a club. The others overruled him.  

“Hell yes!” Céleste yelled. “Train or bus?”

“Better not be a fucking dive bar,” said Théo.

What was wrong with dive bars? Besides the smell, and occasionally the food poisoning, Sander thought they were pretty great. He met his ex-girlfriend at a dive bar.

Michaël threw an arm over Cas’s shoulders. “So long as there’s dancing, I’m in.”

“New shoes!” Cas said, for no reason at all.

They scrambled out the front door. Sander concentrated everything into not tripping over his own feet as the world pitched and spun around him. The trees planted on the sidewalk swirled in technicolor circles. The stars streaked across the sky and mixed into the streetlights like running watercolor paints. It would make a really good photo.

He was unsure of the exact volume he’d consumed in the bar—the best estimate was a lot—and now it fought in his stomach to come back up. Skyler remedied this problem with a tiny flask they passed to the others. Sander managed to hold himself upright for a whole five blocks.

“So we’re headed to…?” prompted Céleste.

Skyler dismissed her with a wave of their hand. “It’s not much farther. All you drunks should be fine.”

“Debatable.” Cas looked at Sander.

Sander could feel the group’s eyes redirecting to him. At least that meant one of his senses was still intact. They all knew that he wasn’t allowed to be drinking, even though they were the ones passing him shots and flasks, and perhaps they felt guilty about it for a second. He didn’t so much care.

“I’m good,” he thought he said. He would later find that what came out of his mouth was closer to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture than an actual sentence.

The last thing Sander remembered from their night out was Skyler beside him, hand on his shoulder, asking, “Doesn’t lithium make you get drunk really, really quickly?” to which Sander replied, “Yes, it does.” After that, his memory faded into pretty much nothing. That was his favorite part.

*

He was in a curtained-off room, surrounded by Cas, Céleste, Théo, Michaël, and Skyler. His body felt like someone had filled it with cement, specifically his head. Prolonged ringing overtook his right ear before dissolving into a thrum in the back of his consciousness. He blinked a couple times. The sound dampened and disappeared.

Théo stood the closest to his bed. There was blood on his hands and in his dark, curly hair, worked into the spirals like hair gel. It would be stiff to the touch. Cas, Céleste, and Michaël engaged in a game of Uno on the floor, not that Sander could see the cards. When Théo saw Sander’s eyes were open, he laughed and clapped a hand on his bed railing… when did Sander get into a bed? Why did it have rails?

“Good morning, sleeping prince! I thought they were gonna have me for manslaughter.” It wasn’t a funny thing to say, but he appeared to think it hilarious. Still drunk, most likely. “No need to worry, we did your paperwork.” Everyone else snickered.

Footsteps sounded from close by. Cas whispered, “Oh fuck, you’re just in time, here he comes…”

A man entered through the curtains (considering the context, a doctor). To Sander, it hit like a slap in the face. He had never seen anyone so striking or memorable. This scene was what he pictured before he drew portraits of people he didn’t know and the feeling he felt when he painted places he’d never seen. The emotion hit him too fast to be real, he thought. He was around sixty percent sure that Théo was covered in blood because Théo had committed his murder and the man before his eyes was God Himself. That, or whatever the fuck he drank at the bar before had given him some serious rose-colored glasses. There was no way this man could be a real person.

He wasn’t ready to see something like that so soon after waking.

“I’m sorry,” said the doctor, immediately pulling a one-eighty to leave Sander’s curtained section. “Wrong room.”

Théo snickered. “Who are you looking for?”

“I’m not allowed to give names.”

“Could it be…” Théo dragged the reveal out like a drumroll. “…Sander Driesen?”

The doctor halted five steps away and turned back. His looks mesmerized Sander. He had short brown hair, messy in a sort of endearing way, concealed almost completely by a bandana covered in teddy bears holding lollipops. He wore pink scrubs patterned with the dogs from the hit children’s show Paw Patrol. Sander had spent enough time channel-surfing to know the dominant motif was Skye, the cockapoo. The earlier thought needed amending: he was ninety percent sure he was hallucinating.

“Is this…?” The doctor walked back through the curtain. He crossed to the bed and looked down at Sander’s bleeding forehead and the fresh-blossoming bruise. “Are you Sander Driesen?”

Sander, ever the romantic, could think of only one response. “You’re gorgeous.”

The doctor blushed slightly, but he didn’t let it stop him from launching into his speech. “Hello, Mr. Driesen. I’m Dr. Robbe Ijzermans. I am the pediatrician on call tonight, here to see if your brain is doing okay.” He said it all slowly, which was alright for Sander, who didn’t understand a word of it anyway. “Although, judging by this little stunt, I have determined you might not have one. You don’t look like a six-year-old.”

Skyler burst out laughing. They stopped when Céleste shot them a pointed look.

“I suppose you didn’t do the paperwork.”

Skyler stifled their giggles again.

“So,” Robbe continued, “Can you tell me where you are?”

Sander’s mind was a blank slate. All he could process was the fact that Robbe was now coming closer to him with a penlight ready to shine into his eyes. The doctor had brown eyes. There were freckles, faint as hell but definitely there, clustered close to the bridge of his nose. Sander’s vision blurred, cut in and out. He wondered how he could even hold a picture of Robbe’s face in his mind. And a burger would taste really good right now.

“Big white room,” said Sander.

“Where is this room located?”

Sander scanned the room, the bright lights overhead, and the cute guy in pink scrubs standing in front of him. “Heaven?” He made eye contact with Robbe. “Are you an angel?”

Now the rest of Sander’s coworkers dissolved into hysterics. Cas almost fell over, grabbing an IV pole for support. When it rolled, he went down with it. If Céleste had wanted to shut them up this time, a look would not have done it. Michaël, the least inebriated of the group, gave Robbe an apologetic shrug.

“You’re in the hospital,” Robbe said. His voice remained steady, though he’d blushed even deeper red. “Do you remember what happened to you?”

“Huh?”

“I kicked you in the head,” Théo supplied from the floor beside Cas, “and then you threw up and passed out on the sidewalk.”

What the fuck?

Robbe glowered at Théo. “You kicked him in the head?”

“We were at a bar.” Théo shrugged. “He fell over while dancing and I kicked him in the head.”

Now that they mentioned it, Sander’s head retained a ghost of an image. Michaël, under strobe lights again. Head connecting to concrete. In this lens, though, it all seemed like a caricature.

Robbe put his hands to his temples as if he’d never experienced stupidity at such a magnitude before. “Then he threw up on the sidewalk?”

“Yep.”

“And he passed out?”

“Yep.”

“Is that where the blood on your head came from?”

Théo brushed his fingertips over the scarlet crust adorning his forehead. “Oh, yeah. I leaned down to check if he was breathing, y’know?”

Huh, suddenly Sander felt nauseous… no, tired, really tired… time to take a little nap…

“Mr. Driesen,” said Robbe, jarring Sander back. “Do you remember any of that?”

Sander decided to intact some subtle flirting so the angel would let him sleep. “I’m in love with you.” Nailed it.

“No, Mr. Driesen, do you remember being kicked in the head?”

“Your eyes are pretty.”

“Mr. Driesen?”

Céleste held onto Sander’s bed railings to keep herself upright. “He’s not gonna know.” She pantomimed tilting a beer back.  

“You use conditioner, don’t you?” said Sander, because it seemed like the natural direction of conversation.

“It’s not really my job to do this.” Robbe shined the light into Sander’s eyes. “Please follow the light for me with your eyes not your head.”

Sander stared him down and didn’t move an inch. “You don’t?”

“How does your tummy feel?” He was talking like he would with little children, going through the motions, Sander guessed. It was a good guess. He could be a very good guesser once the alcohol started to wear off. “Does your stomach hurt?”

Sander was too busy thinking about his guessing prowess to answer the question. The alcohol was not, in fact, wearing off.

Robbe took a step away from the bed, as if considering another test to determine the extent of injury. He thought better of it. “This isn’t my job. I’ll refer him through to the specialist. And you—” He stared daggers at Théo. “—should put the correct age on paperwork. Are we clear?”

“He acts like he’s six,” Théo offered.

“If something more pressing was wrong, mislabeling his age could lead to the hospital being under-prepared to treat the ailment.” Robbe’s eyes returned to meet Sander’s. Sander felt sparks travel through his fingertips… or maybe he was just cold. “Some symptoms mean more when in children than in adults, and you could have panicked an entire ward over a lesser problem.”

“If it was so bad,” Cas protested, “The guy at the nurses’ station would have shut us down! He let it through.”

Robbe, while maybe a little flushed, had kept everything together until that point. As soon as the words exited Cas’s mouth, he made a face like a key in his head had turned and everything had clicked. Without another word to Sander or his friends, he turned on his heel and stormed out of the hospital room.

“Jens!” Sander heard him yell. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Sander’s coworkers burst into crazed laughter for the umpteenth time that night. When they recovered though, there was a wordless agreement that it was time to head back home and leave Sander with Michaël for the remainder of the tests, since they were roommates. He was glad for it; everything in his body wanted him to lay very still for the next three hundred and fifty years. The blankets were soft. His eyelids were heavy. There was blood on his face and a gash that someone would have to wake him up later to stitch. He had earned a good night’s rest by now.

One by one, they filed past the curtains. Sander was concussed, and maybe a little drunk, and the least credible source for information on body language. That said, he could have sworn that Michaël took his hand at some point when the new doctor came in.

No need to care about that. When he drifted off, he imagined kissing Robbe under strobe lights, even though he knew the infatuation would dissipate before morning.