Chapter Text
Dee had dreamed about Peter Nincompoop before she had seen him in the flesh, his large white body storming through Paddy’s in a haze of iridescent light as she slept against Charlie’s shoulder in his foul-smelling apartment. Even Frank’s insistent snoring couldn’t have broken the spell that laced the eyelids of Deandra Reynolds who slept so deeply that at one moment, Charlie worried that she had died. Still, it was peaceful as Dee dreamed of that white stallion that came zooming into their world to rescue her from a lifetime of torment and personal failure. If she could have gleaned anything from such a dream, perhaps Dee would’ve realized the safety felt when striding alongside Charlie Kelly, who held her when she wanted or looked her in the eye without the sudden need to look away — how he instructed Peter Nincompoop to walk one way and then the other with a firm, deliberate hand as her own palms clutched around his waist for support, their stride so purposeful that Dee felt overwhelmed with sudden affection. And yet, it had been but a dream, a dream that followed a second (!) night at Charlie’s place.
Of course, it didn’t take long for the usual happenstance of the Gang to affirm their place in the world; what with the tentative North Korea situation down the road. And though they had coaxed confidence and wellbeing from being alone (even with Frank by their side), neither made a single mention of those nights spent in glorious sleep — for all Dennis had witnessed were their fights, their nonsense marked by the foolish endeavors to one up one another. It had meant nothing, it had been but their past replayed day in and day out… never had he realized how deep things had grown; but then, his own head was swayed by what lurked beneath the surface for his other friend, for the absolute brute Mac who either pushed his head in where he was not allowed, or remained like a stubborn splinter prod into skin.
“Well I feel better about myself,” Dee had smirked, her ego inflated by the loss of her regret, by the hope that Charlie had (once again) topped any embarrassment she had endured to her pride.
“Why?” Mac asked, clearly and evidently denying her the benefit of the doubt.
“Uh all I did was sleep with…” Dee began to answer, the reality of what had transpired during their half-baked scheme to one-up the Korean place down the block suddenly dawning on her, the words stammering behind her teeth for just a heartbeat before she took control of herself in a vain attempt to win just one fight over the Gang’s lousy decision making. “...a toothless, oily busboy for a recipe! Charlie banged a twelve year old,” she finished, turning somewhat valiantly towards the latter, as if nothing could topple her from the shining pedestal she had reserved for herself.
“No I didn’t,” stated Charlie, his confidence so stained with honesty that there was no point in denying it, that he had not made some foul error of judgment was all too awakening to Dee who’s own mistakes seemed to grow larger with each passing second. But if he had not, then what did he think was going to happen!? He had proposed to her! They were engaged! He and… whatever her face was called! Sex happened, sex was all that mattered, wasn’t it? To think that Charlie hadn’t even… or well… even thought of it… She stammered as his face fell with discern, as Dennis and Mac looked between the two of them with wavering attentions — both bored by Dee’s effort of gaining some footing within the Gang’s respect.
“W-what?” She answered, her confidence crumbling by the second.
“Yeah, I didn’t even kiss that girl,” Charlie recalled, suddenly all too proud and aware of how good it felt to be far from the interest in such a gross, wet act. “Like, nothing happened!” He continued with such pride as Dee fell further into doubt, their separate views on relationships and sex suddenly spread out between them in black and white.
“Really?” Dee asked once more, her brows creased with self-doubt as she turned to stare out into the leaving crowd before Charlie answered once more, his own feelings made painfully aware to both Dennis and Mac who remained silent, but in constant observation.
“Yeah, absolutely. I can’t believe you banged a toothless busboy,” Charlie laughed, forcing the stubborn ache that blossomed in his chest down with his cheer as he influenced the other two guys to join him, the three of them taking some peace and merriment in Dee’s downfall from grace (though, when had she last been seen as graceful? When she had been thirteen, perhaps).
When Dee and Charlie had gone to the business sector of Philly in some vain hope to sell their drugs, neither of them had put a true sense of logic to the sudden employment of Cricket; because, hey, even if they were at the rock bottom of the ladder, it seemed that the fallen priest had lowered himself somehow far deeper than anyone else. It didn’t help that it had just so happened that Cricket had continued to nurse a deep set kind of love for Dee for some particular reason that Charlie couldn’t quite understand. And yet they chose to use him, to give him drugs to sell to the connections he had made out on the street, to be the so-called middle man so they could retire back to the bar with the leftover cocaine in their hands — after all, almost from the moment they had been alone with the small white pouch, they had been rubbing the powder into their gums in the same spirit one would then taking water in a desert.
The three had been in her kitchen as they schmoozed a plan into action, as Charlie took Dee’s finger and rubbed Cricket’s gums with the tip in order to coax him to their side and mis-matched tactics. It had been an easy sell, a barter that made Charlie feel as if he were… Well, someone real smart. It was Dee who eventually hushed Cricket from her apartment, pushing him into the stairwell to begin an odyssey towards the back alleys where he could conduct his business.
Then, they were alone again.
To be with Charlie Kelly was a feat that few could manage, more than often someone would be too freaked out or indeed just simply bored of his constant movements and unending tongue. But Dee liked it, and to be high with Charlie, to scrub the bottom layer off the hierarchy side by side was quite enough to feel almost akin to being home. As she turned back into the room, Charlie had already hunkered down into her small couch, a single finger slipped between his lip and gum as he rubbed the cocaine into his wet flesh, sucking on the tip like a kid with candy — the image almost made Dee laugh till she joined him in the action, taking her place by his side as she soaked the cocaine into her own pink gums as they had been doing all day long.
They had remained like that for nigh on hours, their bodies switching between limp sacks of bond and wild electrified nerves that bounced from wall to wall. Momentarily they would pause if only to offer the other a fingertip full of white power, the two rigid in the middle of her living space as they shared the drug. Charlie had offered first, his boundless need to do what he must overpowering the anxious matter of doing what was wrong or what was right — he had grabbed her shoulders, claiming her bones beneath his hands with wild eyes that darted over Dee’s face, her features sharing the same rebellious look that seemed to tell Charlie that he was indeed allowed to do what he may. Without structure he dug his finger into the pouch, raising it to her mouth as he slipped his fingertip past the full curve of her lip in order to rub against her red, wet gums. But there was more to it than that.
Indeed, their pause was riddled with second guesses, the action when stripped back almost sexual to a normal person — Dee, herself, couldn’t help but read his finger in her mouth in entirely the wrong way as her mind buzzed from the line they had crossed. Without much hesitation, she tightened her lips around his finger, sucking against the skin both to urge him to finally make some silent move towards her and to get all that she could from the dab of cocaine, the hunger for the drug almost too much to bear as her ice-blue stare met his green one, the two entranced in a silent tornado of ‘could bes’ before Charlie, suddenly plunged into cold water, widened his eyes before pulling his finger from her mouth in quick, dishonest disgust.
“Ew! What the fuck, Dee!?” Charlie exclaimed, before he innocently put the wet sucked on finger into his own mouth to rub whatever leftovers he could into the skin where his gums met what was left of his teeth, his eyes falling without mercy to his own feet in silent, unheard contemplation — for despite his outrage he could taste her saliva, the flavor akin to soda water, or some kind of bubblegum and past-it’s-due-date milk that soured against his tongue. Nothing could have prepared himself as he looked back at her, removing his finger from his mouth in one sober expel — though she refused to look hurt by his disgust, Charlie couldn’t help but feel something rigid that passed between them, some truth of what lay beneath sparkling beneath the surface in one silent yelp.
His exit had been abrupt and without warning, his smaller stature absconding as fast as he could with the somewhat lazy excuse of running back to his place — the need to keep from Dee’s seye as important and clear cut as the need for a piss. But at least he had gone, even if her room still felt rotten with what had occurred — his unwashed stink had found a warm embrace in her cushions, her couch alone a mere crust of what he once was.
Alone at long last Dee settled into her own peace for an hour or two, finally relinquishing the grip of her skinny jeans as she folded herself into her bed, her arms outstretched as her head swam from the cocaine that loitered in her system — as if cast underwater she wavered, her dreams verging on the obscene as she began the slow descent from reality to sleep as her eyelids grew heavy. By some drug fever induced dream she envisioned a white creature stride into her apartment, its shining white coat almost blinding to the pair of eyes that rarely ever saw the light. Crossing a hand across her brow she tried to make sense of the beast that loitered, that huffed and puffed with large nostrils in some fit of frustrated impatience. In an aloof stance they stared at one another as if in stubborn contemplation, both person and animal refusing to side step for the other’s convenience till Dee’s concentration was broken by the knock at her door.
Blinking into a half-dozed state, the blonde wannabe actress squeezed her eyes to an almost close, fingering her way to the end of the bed as her ears pricked for the sound that called her forth. Her name? Was that her name? It sounded like a cat clawing at her door, a rat squeaking for the attention of anyone who could save it from some glue trap. As the time passed in ones, twos and threes it became clear that the noise was Charlie telling her it was time to get a move on in his sudden return, his high-pitched nature ringing through her ears like an alarm bell. Fuck. How long had she been asleep? Where had the monster gone? Struggling to her feet, she pulled her jeans back on and went to the door, to reveal an equally subdued Charlie Kelly.
“Come on Dee, we have to find Cricket!” He called, as if their break from one another had been but a renewal of their senses, the gray coloured sludge of the sewers coating his elbows and pants as the malaise of the city lingered in her doorway. Wrinkling her nose at the smell, Dee almost slammed the door shut in his face, some sentiment of her fractured ego begging her to finally cut the cord and get some freaking rest. Alas, Charlie was yet to come down from his own high, and with one quick reflex he shot his arm out to stop her, presenting his head stash from his pocket in a thin walled baggy that seemed to hold far less than it had done when she had last seen it.
Yeah, perhaps she should’ve taken charge of its ownership.
But like a moth to a flame she, without much pre-thought, stuck a finger into the bag in order to rub what was left back into her gums, the shooting euphoria and electric current that shot through her veins almost too good to bear as she followed him out into the street without another word. If only they had kept some stock back, but who were Charlie and Dee but two souls daring to dive deep before anyone asked them to do so?
By the time they reached Cricket, Dee had finally realized what had changed about Charlie bar from the amount of cocaine in his system. His pants. Shocking white, almost as blinding as the beast that had appeared in her dreams, Charlie stood out — even as they strode downtown in order to apprehend an outrageous Cricket, Charlie walked as if he had something to say, as if during their down time he had done something almost too insane and important to believe. Dee knew this, and yet she hooked herself alongside him for the ride, even upon the realization that the two-timing loser priest had double crossed them with his two upturned trash cans he claimed were ‘sweet-ass’ kettledrums.
With Cricket in the bar writing his seventh act of the musical he had grown devoted to, Charlie and Dee fled to the back office — taking fabs of the white power between frequent prayers for mre, the two were almost at the drop of their knees by the time the drug resembled little more than dandruff shaken from an old man’s head, their minds a haze of questioning that seemed to rumble between their years like rock music. What were they going to do? Where had all the cocaine gone? Where was their money!? As Dee trembled, Charlie bolted into action, remembering some scene from a movie he had watched when he had been with Dennis and Mac where the bad guys had cut their drugs with flour for profit — whatever movie it was, Charlie couldn’t have told her, but at least he had a plan.
“O-okay, I think this’ll trick them,” Charlie slurred as he weighed the packet in his hands before tipping it without patience onto the desk, the quantity of the faux-white powder falling with a thud that submerged what little there had been left of their own pure cocaine. Dee, who had long since reached the point beyond the flimsy confidence the drug offered, shook with quaking nerves whilst she watched in silent horror as Charlie slowly met her on a similar, shocked level; the two frozen in time and space as the last drop of their matching highs melted into the whites of their bones. As silence wove itself between them, Charlie looked at Dee, his lips rolling together before he found something to say. “That’s too much, huh?”
“That’s too much flour,” Dee concurred quickly, her voice having risen by an octave or so to match his own with a squeak as she turned towards him, as she began to flail and fail at all hope of common sense. It was Charlie who took the upper hand, as he began some mechanical thought process to save them.
“Let me think,” he whispered both to himself and Dee, who’s squeals rose into a bird-like sing-song — the makings of a common gull, perhaps.
“Oh God! They’re gonna kill us!” She squawked, looking between Charlie and the heap of white substance as a noise akin to a groan and a yell erupted from his mouth.
“N-n-no, no, no!”
“We’re dead!”
“No! Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Charlie announced, his face pale from a growing second skin of sweat, a color hindered by the dark shade of his shirt that was, by all accounts, cleaner compared to his usual stance.
“We’re dead, ‘cause of the flour!” Dee yelled, the last thread of her sanity loosening by the second as Charlie began to make his own conclusion, as if he had always had some plan in mind from the very beginning.
“No, no! We’re outta here,” Charlie commanded, his voice dropped to a stern yet secretive whisper — almost akin to a hush as he stared at Dee, as his eyes widened and narrowed with an aloof concentration. Dee paused, if only in some dire hope that Charlie really knew what he was doing.
“Where we going?” She asked in a gasp, the question almost inaudible to Charlie who had began his tirade.
“We-we’re gonna skip town! We’re gonna go up to the mountains!”
“We’ll go to the mountains!” Dee hissed with relief, her fingernails clutching at what piece of hope she could grab at.
“We can’t tell anybody, we just gotta go —” Charlie explained on a level of peaceful meditation that only seemed to heighten Dee’s insanity. “We just gotta go, we just gotta go. We’re gonna have a fresh start,” Charlie continued as he bounced his weight from foot to foot as Dee joined him on his level, the two rising to such peaks that neither had seen before.
“We gotta get outta here, Charlie!” She echoed, her hands held between them before Charlie took her upper arms into his touch, his grip not particularly unwelcome yet certainly a surprise as her eyes mapped the features of his face, as if his touch was something of a healing balm to the center of her sense of gravity, her nerves fleeing in place of some phony confidence that the cocaine had yet to fully relinquish. “T-they’ll never find us!”
“We’re gonna have a fresh start,” Charlie hushed as Dee bobbed to his height, meeting him at eye level in their haze of excited accomplishment.
“We’ll start over!” Dee nearly cried, rising back to her full height as Charlie’s gaze widened into two large round saucers. Living in the mountains with Charlie wouldn’t be (or couldn’t be) so bad, she absently considered, deciding that if he could remain so merry when down in the sewers that there was at least some potential to survive on their own elsewhere — in some blind spot at the back of her mind she considered Dennis and Frank (Mac remained somewhat unimportant)... would they look for them? Would they even question their absence? Surely they’d think of Charlie, and where he was or what he was doing, but they wouldn’t have ever questioned Dee’s whereabouts or whether or not she was alive or dead. No, no. they’d do so fucking well up in the mountains, just Charlie and her — Charlie and Dee. The mountain guys.they could do it! As if he read her mind, Charlie gave way to a nod of agreement, his soft voice almost off putting and unusual compared to his usual demeanor that would’ve been squeaky and damn right annoying.
“I like that —” he claimed, his softness quickly overtaken by his own hysteria that took center stage, his grip around her arms fallen to her elbows as he tightened to hold her in place, as he reached the pinnacle of his point — the very reason why he had envisioned a life for them on the mountains in the first place. “Okay, it’s just gonna be you and me and Peter Nincompoop,” he affirmed, the announcement suddenly halting the progress between them as Dee fell into a sudden confusion, the weariness of their everyday interactions then bleeding through their nerves and hysterics to reveal itself in blunt, ugly shapes — to cast him back to the ground, Dee steadied herself, clasping her hands together as if in prayer for some confirmation that she had misheard him.
“Who’s Peter Nincompoop?” She asked, the idea of theri shared reality having suddenly crashed around them like cymbals fallen from the sky, as if a storm had broken under the horizon in violent bursts of thunder. By his faux-confidence, Charlie led her to the back door out into the sunshine, and there she was met with the very beast from her dreams.
A horse. It was a horse. A very real horse from that freaking Country Club they had tried to sneak in before! As if death had suddenly reared its head, Dee struck true, and told Charlie to get rid of the animal if they were to ever find a second chance at their survival, and like a mouse following the leader, he tearfully did what he was told — choosing, without thinking about it, Dee over the horse he had wanted his entire life.
Though Peter Nincompoop was not mentioned again, not even thought about due to the ongoing hijinks of their lives, Dee continued to dream of the horse barging into her apartment without warning. Even during the night before the dance marathon she had awoken to the dread of the beast eating out of her fridge — perhaps he was some ghost of that afternoon, or what could’ve been up in those wild mountains, but either way Dee felt haunted and had, as such, been more grouchy than usual.
That was why she had looked on with disdain as the Waitress entered the marathon, her usual tirade of getting her own back only met by Charlie’s effort to grind on her as the music played. The whole set up remained a sordid, stupid affair settled by Charlie’s illiteracy, and though Dee would’ve normally overlooked the boys and the bar in the hope of getting elsewhere, the idea of winning ownership of Paddy’s Pub remained an enticing thought. By the sixth hour the gang had split into areas of expertise — Frank had been double crossed to bow out of the competition, Dennis would seduce a woman in order to break up a couple (his ego, once more, doing little good for the Gang as a whole) and Mac would tire the Waitress out with his ‘awesome’ dance moves. That left, well, Charlie and Dee again.
With the moment of their fingers wet by one another’s mouths long gone, stashed away as moments to be forgotten, everything had more or less returned to normal. In some order to strengthen her resolve she had looked on with frustrated annoyance as Charlie danced around her with childish excitement of simply having a good time, his movements erratic against Dee’s own efforts to conserve her energy — it hadn’t helped that he smelled of excess sweat and something sour. It had long since became obvious that his level of hygiene had simply fallen of the scale, his routine something of a dream that no one liked to think about — as she looked at the back of his neck she could’ve sworn that she saw little dots move, a shift caught by the trick of the light she innocently assumed, as she tried to skuttle aside. Nonetheless, Charlie prevailed, for four hours they danced together, sharing offshoots of conversation between Dee’s rambles about being ranked last in the order of Paddy’s employers. Charlie hadn’t cared for the topic, but at least it gave him enough room to mentally search for the ongoings of Mac and the Waitress. How four hours had passed was entirely illogical, but no one seemed to moan all that much — for all were too eager to win the bar despite the reality of its financial success. Without Frank, after all, it was but a sinkhole waiting its final hurrah.
Charlie’s skinny arms hung around Dee’s neck for support by the end of the fourth hour, his body lucid and tired from dancing with such excess earlier. She had all but fallen for his stench and uncleanliness in some last ditch hope of using it to her advantage — to twist the Gang against each other as they always did in a rare spark of logic. By the time Charlie taught Dennis how the cream always rose to the top, the play was set… and that, really, was all Dee remembered as she lay in her bed half-passed out on over the counter painkillers.
Freaking Cricket, freaking shattered knee-caps! By Dennis’ call, however, he reminded her that at least she was no longer ranked last. That the hierarchy had once more settled into place, and that Charlie had finally taken her role as a Number Five. if only she could have remembered the hour of redemption, if only her lousy bad luck had allowed freaking Cricket to do what he was told. Still, it wasn’t so bad if it meant that she could dream deeply, to think of the fever dream that had been the last week or so spent high as a kite. Almost asleep, she had continued to dream of the last shadow of Peter Nincompoop and the life she had almost built with Charlie in the mountains — a life that seemed comical now that time and space had healed the chasm between them.
She had been dreaming of the horse and the wilderness when Frank and Charlie had come by to check on her after a day of no contact, her quasi-father almost fearing that she had died and that they would have to clean out her place without the intrusion of the cops. Running by with black mags and a mop, he was followed by Charlie, who remained somewhat unaware of the situation at hand. Her apartment, after all, had been a safe haven during their cocaine fueled hours and had long since been a place of retirement compared to the world at large — so to visit wasn’t as bad as it could’ve seemed to him at least, as they stomped into the apartment with wagging tongues.
“Deandra! Dee-an-dra! Are ya dead?!” Called Frank, his voice severing the dream she had created as his daughter’s lids rolled back to reveal an all too close vision of Frank Reynolds who hung over her head like some cruel ghost.
“Ugh — what!? What are you doing here?” She squeaked, her squash piercing the two who lingered by her bed.
“We’re coming by to check on ya! It’s what a Father does!” Frank exclaimed with tired eyes, as if the intention had been clear, before he went back to the other room to do a once-over. “Number Five, she’s good! Let’s go!”
Number Five, a still somewhat sedated Charlie, lingered by the edge of Dee’s bed like a shadow, his eyes fixed on the blur of blonde hair that stuck out at all possible angles like a cartoon character drawn by a bad hand. “You good?” He asked in a slur, the drug fueled brownie that she had fed him at the marathon still doing its number on a body that had always become quite a large pool of drugs.
“I guess,” Dee answered, looking back to Charlie as she rose to sit up, her back hitting the headboard as her cover slipped down her chest to reveal a Garfield printed top. It all seemed like a moment of deja-vu, as if they had been in that exact position before.
“Charlie! C’mon!” Frank yelled from the front door, leaving Charlie to shrug his shoulders with a soft wave of his hand in her direction.
The Number Five and Number Four would constantly change position, but only between the two of them. They both knew that, they both feared it, but if they could only manage it… In some look of mutual understanding, Dee gave him a nod, leaving Charlie to turn his back and slope towards Frank insead. What a strange affair the whole week had been, but at least in the New Year there'd be a chance to turn things around again.