A/n: This is the first bead on the string. Warnings: alcohol references, a single word of profanity, a certain something that I suppose could be categorized as self-mutilation, maybe a little squick. Nothing graphic, though.

It's obtuse. It's erratic. It's meandering. These are deliberate elements, so if you don't like this one, try the next one. Last time I checked, chapter two was sober.

Ah, yes, and the disclaimer. Naturally, I claim ownership of nothing but the disturbing little notion birthed when encountering a certain character at a bar.

Guile

Debauched:
Uncomplete

The moonlight poured in through the window and pooled on every flat surface of my small but cozy inn room. Where it touched me its dim, cool radiance made my already pale skin seem translucent, milky; my arms, shaded from the sun by long sleeves, were even whiter than my hands. For a moment I waxed imaginative—in a drunken, fuddled sort of way—and fancied that I was some sort of romantic poet, writing the greatest works of the modern era while starving to death on opium and dreams.

Then the vision shattered, and I laughed as I took another drink of the whiskey, sitting in its crystal tumbler on the windowsill a few inches from my right hand. I almost knocked the glass off the narrow ledge; had been any more inebriated, I might have, indeed. Then I would have owed the bar downstairs the price of one purloined, smashed crystal whiskey tumbler as well as three days' room and board. Interesting phrase, "room and board." I hadn't stepped out of the room for three days, and I forbade anyone but the girl who brought the whiskey to step into it. As for board, I had dwelt upon the idea, pondered it for several hours yesterday, and so far I hadn't been able to come up with an activity I had engaged in within this room that was raw enough to deserve that moniker.

But I didn't—drop the glass, that is. It tottered on the edge of oblivion for a few seconds, and while I was drunk enough to want to whisper that it mustn't defenestrate itself, I wasn't quite drunk enough to let the words pass my lips. In all things self-control, I thought to myself; words to live by. In the end it didn't matter, because, with or without my encouragement, the glass righted itself, and I managed to move it a few inches to safety without compromising things—reflexes, for example, or perhaps dignity—overmuch.

I couldn't help but wonder what those with whom I traveled would think of me now. I suspected I was hardly recognizable as the usual face I put toward the world: my jacket hung over the back of the chair where I sat; it is a real bitch to clean, and alcohol, particularly fine whiskey, shows up very well on white fabric. The shirt I had on under it was unbuttoned over my collarbones, the sleeves rolled up past my elbows. My hair was coming unraveled from its confinement, creeping its gradual way toward the puddle of moonlight on the table as if unaware that I would let it fall if it wanted to do so that badly. Gravity, after all, must always have its way, is that not so? If not for its influence, I couldn't be sitting here coming uncompleted, now could I? Ah, more pearls of wisdom. And they say drinking is bad for one's thought processes.

There was only a swallow left in the glass which had just moments ago very nearly been a tumbler in the most real sense of the word, which led me to contemplate the whiskey bottle, standing sentry in front of me on the tiny table. The bottle stared back at me with the implacable stare of a veteran gambler. In the end I decided that maybe a refill was not the thing just yet. Best, I concluded, to finish the things that were already here before inviting in any more. Yes, I was a veritable oracle tonight: Guile, the Drunken Oracle of the Nearly-Defenestrated Glass. I had to smile again at my own wit, although there was no one in the room to impress with either thing.

I held the tumbler above my head and gazed up into it, peering through the thin haze of alcohol at the bottom. Everything wrong with my life was hovering in this liquid amnesia; all my problems hung suspended here in too-real animation before my very eyes, playing out on the backdrop of the ceiling. As I stared at it, becoming dizzy from staring, tipsy, at the pulsing ceiling, I pondered the meaning of the word uncomplete. I know incomplete is a word; it means "never finished," or "missing a piece." But uncomplete, now that is a bit different. I say it intending it to mean "having once been completed, but now missing a crucial piece; something which has been undone just enough to be unfinished." Uncomplete, as in, "someone sitting at a tiny table in an inn far from home drinking himself too far down to converse with his mind in a rational way, for reasons he cannot even speak aloud no matter how drunk."

Enough of that. Self pity is unbecoming. Don't just sit here like a helpless fool. Do something.

I knocked the rim of the glass against the edge of the table, breaking off a chip from the rim, and thereby uncompleting it, whereupon I discovered that crystal will cut like glass when given the proper incentive. Blood welled from the wound, easing its way down my palm and sliding into my life line—or perhaps my love line, I couldn't remember. I tilted my hand and allowed a drop of blood to fall into the amber, where it floated like a legless centipede, spreading into swirls and inquisitive tendrils. Inspired by this sight, I dripped another drop into the glass, repeating the swirling motion until it was spread like the first drop, but neither was quite fully dissolved. Mesmerized, the liquor interfering with the voice of caution, I dipped my finger into the concoction, letting some of it fall into my eye in order to better see what the world looked like through the lens of uncompletion.

It was disappointing; it stung like hell, and I barely got to see anything before my eye watered the offending substance away. But for a moment the inside of my head got some air, and that was worth the trouble of looking like some two-faced god, crying for the futility of mortality: to be alive is to be alone, kept from true congress by a prison of flesh.

In the end, I decided that, in spite of the edifying experiment, in order to get the fullest benefit from incorporating whiskey into ones faculties, it was still best to take it as it was meant to be taken. Unsteady with one eye screwed shut and whiskey-loosened limbs, I went for the ice in the bathroom—I needed some water.

A/n: Belated apologies to those who stumbled into this story before I included the warning, and found themselves a little bothered by it.