— for wordslinger, who has some editing to do.

hi hello, i'm momentarily back on my bullshit.

The whiskey runs smooth and warm down Erza's throat. She swallows the aftertaste and grimaces at its acrid coat on her tongue. Everything about this was a bad idea. The alcohol thins her wallets and doesn't help blur out the lyrics of every pop love song playing too loud overhead in the bar. Her mind isn't as foggy as she would like and her thoughts and feelings increasingly consume her even more than they already did.

"Fuck," she says out loud, to no one in particular.

"Totally," a voice to the right of her replies.

A guy. It's always a guy with a smart ass comment.

Normally she spits back fire. She snarls and asks if it's really so funny to see a cute redhead like her curse. But tonight she can't even spare the energy to pick a fight. She simply lifts her eyes and gives the voice's owner a cold look.

He doesn't flinch. "You look like you're having a great time," he deadpans.

"An excellent time."

"Just stellar."

"The best I've ever had," she retorts quickly in challenge, suddenly feeling the spark of competitive spirit warming inside her. She stares at him, waiting for his response. She hasn't broken a blink since he first opened his mouth.

He snorts, forfeiting eye contact and looking down at his half-empty beer glass. She can't help but notice his long and thick eyelashes. His lips crack open as if he's about to say something, but whatever the words were, they don't come out. He rotates his glass over a coaster, giving the amber liquid a half-hearted turn and a swish before he returns to her eyes.

"What series of unfortunate events brings you here tonight?"

She thinks for a moment, but it doesn't actually take her that long to come up with an answer. "Impatience," she declares, tilting her head back to finish the last of her alcohol. She shifts her eyes to him, throwing the conversation back at him. "You?"

"Seeking a brief escape," he replies.

She doesn't really want to share anything, so she's quick on the next question.

"And you chose this place?" she asks mockingly. She's very aware of the irony in her question.

Briefly, he looks over his shoulder at the rest of the bar — the loud circle of chattering people and masses of un-synchronized swaying bodies — before shrugging. "Reminds me there are many other kinds of hell."

She finds this funny, but she doesn't laugh. She can't think of anything to say and honestly she doesn't want to talk anymore, and so leans against the back of the chair and exhales to herself preemptively, expecting him to restart the conversation.

He doesn't. More than ten seconds pass. Then another thirty. He rotates his body back to the bar and stares up at the color TV screen above. He takes another sip of his beer.

Relieved, she takes a deeper breath, allowing herself to drift off again in her thoughts. But her thoughts are the problem in the first place. She reminds herself this when the first things her mind stumble upon is the memory of a warm body lying in bed against her back and the feeling of soft breath fluttering down her neck, the way a kiss on her head feels through a layer of her hair, how her heart settles to ease when she wakes up in the middle of the night, turns around and can see the shadow of a body on the other side —

No, this is what she was trying to get away from. The remembering and the longing.

The waiting.

She closes her eyes, trying to drown out her thoughts. She sinks into the thrum of the music, and but after a few seconds, the words come on and she can't tolerate how fucking excited and happy the singer is about a newfound love something or the other because it's naive and sickening and she can't help but get angry at it all.

She inhales sharply with frustration, pushing away from the bar and landing on her feet. A wave of lightheaded ness hits her and she grabs hold of the arm of her chair to steady herself, looking over to her right for that guy with the long eyelashes.

He meets her eyes, and this time, he doesn't look away.

With the grace of half-sobriety, she grabs the arm of his chair and whirls her body around to face him, her free hand taking the back of his neck and bringing his face down to her. As her lips meet his, she hears his beer glass fall onto its side and feels his hands circle her waist. She closes her eyes and opens her mouth and breathes this stranger into her. He tastes like hoppy beer and smells like over-the-top cologne.

He's completely different from what she knows and what she wants.

Her body pulls backwards. "Mmm, never mind," she exhales as she releases herself from him, stepping back and catching herself before she stumbles into her chair. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, a streak of lipstick staining her knuckle.

He looks confused but also empathetic. "You okay there?" he asks her. His lips are smeared with her red.

"Just tired," she replies.

"Tired," he repeats. He doesn't believe her.

She nods. "Yeah." She turns around and takes her handbag, throwing it over her shoulder and heading out the exit. She ignores his "seriously, are you okay?", sidesteps his attempt to grab her sleeve, and spills out the door into the street as fast as she can.

She doesn't want to be at the bar anymore.

But then as she's swallowed into the night air, the yellow amber streetlights making long stooped shadows out of her figure, she suddenly realizes she doesn't have anywhere else she wants to go either.

Home is where she just came from, and she can't go back because then she'd return to the cold empty loneliness she was trying to escape in the first place. The bar is where she just left, and she can't go back because then she'd have to be around people she doesn't want to see or hear. She could crash at Mirajane's apartment or she could go visit Lucy, but she's tired of talking about the same things, tired of hearing the same sympathetic statements, tired of feeling like she's wasting their time but they're too nice to tell her to get over it.

She doesn't want to talk, she doesn't want to think, she doesn't want to do anything but time is moving so slowly it is driving her mad.

She gets home because her feet don't know where else to walk. She gets into bed because her body doesn't know what else to do. She lies there — too tired to get out, too tired to think, too tired to do much else, yet too tired of staring at the ceiling, too tired of sleeping, too tired of doing absolutely nothing because she's too tired to do anything at all.

She's tired of passing time when there is nothing to look forward to. Tired of silence when her thoughts are too loud. Tired of trying to feel whole when her heart is so far away. Tired of love when he isn't here for her to love.

"Fuck," she says out loud, to no one in particular.

No one replies.

thir13enth