Darcy’s friend is coming today.
She’s perfectly fine. Maybe a little nervous. Okay, perhaps she’d spent the entire week anxiously deep-cleaning her entire apartment with a toothbrush, but she figured that was probably a relatively normal reaction, yeah? She’d been communicating with them for a few years now, after… accidentally mailing a pen pal letter to the wrong address, and Nark had never seemed uptight about anything. She figured that if they were going to take issue with some microscopic speck of dust on the cheap linoleum of her bathroom, then that would’ve been beyond her control anyway.
He’d said he might be visiting family in the area as well, and might bring a few around- hang for a while, then go out and eat… maybe. Nark had never been good about describing things, and the terms that he tended to use were confusing and esoteric. It didn’t help that the guy was a chronic doodler, and would constantly sketch these weird lines and symbols along the edges of his reply letters. Not that she thought that was particularly weird or anything; honestly, it was part of the charm of the guy.
She slapped the couch cushion one last time with a tennis racket she’d dug out of her closet, producing one more faint cloud of dust, then straightened and cracked her back with a groan. Had she played tennis at some point? Probably during college. If she did, she didn’t remember in the slightest. She turned the racket over in her hands, then set it down leaning against the outside wall before leaning down to pick up the cushion. And then she hesitated.
Between the bars of the railing, and across the street, she sighted something. Dark and shifting unnaturally, its cloak billowing in the wind, the hooded figure watched her beneath the shadow of a tree. She’d only sighted it because of the flash of glowing yellow from the inside of the hood, moving and catching her eye for the barest instant. She stared at it for a few moments, something like dread settling in her stomach as she thought…
“Holy shit.” She whispered to herself. “I should not have taken that much.”
Look, it was a nervous situation, and there were big bad people coming that she valued the opinion of very much. It made perfect sense that she was highly anxious about it, so who cared if she… imbibed a little… something. You know, just a bit, a few milligrams to take the edge off so that she didn’t drive herself around the bend and come off as a complete psycho to, presumably, the friends and family of a person that she felt she was very good friends with.
Of course, now, she was seeing a writhing figure watching her from underneath the dark shadow cast by a tree, who apparently had glowing eyes or something. So, uh, she may have overdone it a little? Because, whuff, she was pretty sure that she wasn’t supposed to be seeing things like that. Maybe she was having a bad reaction.
She stood up, blinking. The figure stubbornly remained. She closed her eyes and counted to five, then opened them again… gone.
“You can’t get me, hallucination demons, I can ignore harder than you can scare!” She whooped, then froze. “Oh shit. I have to pretend to not be high as a fucking kite in front of Nark.” Her hands went to her cheeks. “I have to pretend to not be as high as fuck in front of Nark, and Nark’s friends. And Nark’s family.” Her hands ran over her face and her fingers intertwined with her hair. She considered her next word very, very carefully, selecting from the thousands of words in the English language for the perfect term that summed up her entire position and how she felt about it.
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“Fuuuuuck.”
Yeah, that would do.
She took a deep breath in, and out, then wrapped her hands around the couch cushion and lifted it, carrying it inside. She pushed the door closed behind her with her foot, nervously flicking her gaze across the room for other… odd sights. Which, of course, was when she was jarred from her thoughts by a knock on the door.
“Ah shit-” she said, her stunning intellect working to produce the perfect excuse for her delay. “HANG ON, I’M- PEEING!” She was a genius.
Quickly, she stuffed several magazines under the couch cushions, lobbed an offending object whose functions she wouldn’t elaborate on behind the TV, kicked an offending charger underneath a chair where it couldn’t cause problems. She swore quietly as she remembered the tennis racket leaning against the outside wall, but she supposed there was no helping it now. Quickly, she corrected her clothes, trying to fix her hair as best she could with hands and maybe just a little spit. Desperate times called for desperate measures. She did what she could, then took a deep breath in, let it out, and walked up to the door. She nodded to herself, adopting a casual expression, and wrapped her hand around the door knob, pulling it open.
She froze, because holy shit she was even higher than she thought.
Instead of her perfectly normal friend on the other side, there was a creature. A black beak poked out from underneath a dark hood, and as it reached up to push the hood back, she realized that the hands were raven’s claws concealed underneath a dark cloak. Feathers poked out of the sleeves, and as they pushed back their hood, glowing yellow eyes opened up and examined her- three of them. It opened its beak, and holy shit it had teeth, that was unnerving as hell.
“Darcy, I presume?”
Okay, Darce. You’re tripping all of the goddamn balls that you don’t actually have, and your friend looks like a goddamn psychic crow god or something. Calm the hell down.
“Yep, that’s me!” She winced. Too chipper and desperate. “You’re, uh, Nark, right?”
He blinked at her, seeming somewhat surprised, but for what reason she had no clue in the slightest. So she was just going to pretend that everything was fine and thus it would work out entirely.
“... Yes, I’m Nark.” He stood in the doorway awkwardly, and looking down, she saw the tips of wings behind the cloak, and raven’s legs much like the arms that had come out of the sleeves. “Aren’t you going to, erm…?” He gestured.
“Oh. Shit. Yeah, sorry.” She shuffled to the side, then awkwardly waved him in, smiling. “Yeah, make yourself at home.” The response seemed to confuse him further.
“... Charmed.” He said, stepping past her and into the entryway.
As he passed, her eyes traced down the four different wings sticking out of the back of the cloak, all the way down to what she realized were tail feathers sticking out of the bottom. She blinked, then pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. She didn’t feel too weird, so she didn’t think she should call poison control or something. She inhaled and exhaled, then pushed the door closed and followed Nark into the living room area.
The raven-bird-creature stood in the middle of the room, glancing around like he wasn’t sure what exactly he should do. When she came in, he rounded on her, and the wings spread out behind him. She didn’t even spare them a glance, instead gesturing to the couch. He blinked at her, blinked at the couch, then shuffled over and sat down. She spared a sudden thought for the magazines underneath the very cushion he was sitting on, and hoped desperately that he wouldn’t take a look. Man, she hoped he was actually here, rather than some kind of hallucination.
They spent the evening like that. Nark was strangely hesitant and cagey at first, but slowly opened up as the night went on, talking about friends and family. Apparently, he had a number of kin- his word, not hers- that lived in the nearby woods. She’d mentioned that she’d never seen any houses out that way, and he’d simply chuckled and said something about liking their privacy. She inquired about some of the details of his job that he’d always been hesitant about revealing, but he still wasn’t particularly forthcoming, teasing her with details like ‘clandestine group’ and ‘private gatherings’.
Still, the time passed pretty enjoyably, and she found herself getting more and more comfortable with the thankfully consistent hallucination that covered up her friend. Eventually, when he had to leave, promising to come back tomorrow, she was actually pretty sad about it.
“Alright,” she said, closing the door in his wake, “I need to figure out what the hell I took.”
The pill bottle was still in her bedside drawer where she’d stuffed it.
The words were clear on the side.
Ibuprofen.
“Wait. What the FU-”