The Morning After
Chapter 1: Blurred
It was Sunday, cloudy, calm and strangely silent, so laziness was accepted without buts by most people. The real question was, though, what was he fucking doing awake at seven (or six?) in the morning on such a lazy day. Maybe it was the never-ending annoying sound of his alarm clock, or maybe his subconscious, which despite being numb by the mother of all hangovers, reminded him that he'd done something very, very horrible, denying him his deserved rest.
It was to be expected. Had he ever woke up feeling relieved or happy about something he did or happened to him the day before? Why did it always have to be horrible things, anyway? Damn, his head was spinning and a headache was never a good omen.
"I should still be napping... fuck it." He groaned thickly, obviously to himself, the only one who was there to hear what he had to say. He was unsure if he should feel relieved or distraught at the lack of company, given the fact he was naked (okay, no, he lied; he was half-naked), there was no one next to him and he'd never had the habit of sleeping with only his underwear on.
...Well, at least it didn't look like a glittery hoe had pulled a trick on him, but he still would have liked this shitty morning more if he had woken up to a certain black-haired huntress instead of being alone in a frozen bed... but things never went the way he wanted them to. It was okay, really; he had convinced himself that Lady would forever stay as his recurrent unreachable fantasy and as he had this brief inner monologue with himself, he nodded in bitter agreement. Reality was such a bad bitch. It seemed like the dreams were the only way he would have her.
Little images came to his mind as he tried to fill in the plot-holes of his memory, images of alcohol and lasers and a grinning Lady, way too happy about a job well done. Something about it seemed kind of... off. It wasn't like he was a lightweight, yet his head hurt like hell. Ugh. A bad omen. This had to be a bad omen. He never got too drunk. Ever. At all. Scratch that. He never got drunk.
Regardless of what happened the previous night, the tired half-devil knew that thinking about something he couldn't remember wouldn't help in the slightest, and it wouldn't make the problem, if there was one, go away. It took him more than he thought it would, but he finally got up from the bed after some moments of thinking and adjusting to sunlight and went to the bathroom with the hopes that taking a shower would calm his pounding headache. He was still oblivious as to how he was able to do such a deed. He felt oddly proud of himself. However, he also thought that his great achievement had been in vain, because... well, the headache was still there, like a curse, still reminding him how fucked up he must be. The cold water was of no use. The drip, drip, drip of the water hitting the marble-floored shower irritated him, sounding like a bomb exploding in his head.
He wasted no time on turning off the tap immediately after he was done, feeling the sudden cold hitting him hard like a ton of bricks. His head continued to pound as steam filled the space, wafting into his nose. He took a towel, dried his hair and body as fast as he could, warped it around his midsection and went to his room again and took the first he saw on his closet that was laying in a heap.
If he stayed in his room any longer, he would feel like sleeping the day away, so the wisest thing to do, he decided, would be to go downstairs and wait for calls and something profitable to do.
Dante sat on his chair, but instead of propping his feet on top of the desk as he would usually do, he buried his head in his hands and gave out a long sigh that was later accompanied with disbelief laughter.
Seriously, since when did he not know how to hold his alcohol? What the fuck happened to him?
"...Gruug... … Fuck. My head, my legs..."
Dante jumped.
That... was unexpected. He was really in a bad shape if he hadn't realized that someone was sleeping on his couch. His low laughter had awoken someone, but Dante didn't remember having taken someone with him last night. Then again, his memory was heavily damaged. He didn't remember anything from last night aside from talking about something unimportant with someone, drinking with Lady, the loud music... Oh, the dubstep, had he mentioned the dubstep? The shitty dubsetp, that offense to the sound that made teenagers bounce in night clubs like retards.
...After this little moment of reminiscence, Dante went back to the current time he was in, and the thought that there was a person that should not be there with him, who was invading his 'lovely' red couch came back to him.
"Enzo?" Ugh. His voice didn't sound the way Dante wanted it to sound. It was as though he just swallowed a bunch of lit up cigarettes. Fucking… fuck. He sounded like a stoner.
The aforementioned man gave a grunt as a response and rolled to his side to keep on sleeping, giving his back to the devil-hunter in the white sweater. Dante frowned at him.
"Dude, get up; I don't want you to ruin my couch with your drool."
Despite the pain in his head, the white-haired hunter got up from his seat and took some steps towards his invaded couch. Not in the mood for politeness, he shook his manager awake with his left foot -at least he could still keep his balance. That's good, that's very good. He felt very proud of himself.
"How you got here, fatty?"
"Tas' a good question." He agreed, but didn't answer the half-demon.
Enzo didn't seem particularly annoyed at his constant shaking yet. He looked like he was more focused on sleeping, but Dante wouldn't let that happen until he got his answers. Stupidity was a trait of his that magnified when he got wasted. Hell, he proposed himself to a mop one time. That said a lot of things, didn't it? Enzo crashing in his couch wasn't something good, not at all.
"One I would like you to answer." Dante flipped away some rebellious strands of hair that were getting in his eye's way, blurring his vision. The sudden movement made his head spin painfully, but he endured the pain like the man he was. "What the hell's goin' on? C'mon, you're the guest here, show me some manners."
"Let me sleep!" He moaned painfully.
"Why? This is my place. I set up the rules, ain't that right? And unless you forgot, it's my couch that you're staining."
"You're an asshole."
"Gee, thanks." Dante applied a little more pressure and shook him faster. He raised an eyebrow at the insult and let himself grin a little. "Do you kiss your mom to sleep with that mouth?"
"How funny."
"I know. Man, I'm such a genius~." His grin widened despite the throbbing in his head.
"Ou, leave me!" The Italian brought both his hands to his ears as if to diminish the pounding in his head. It didn't quite work and Dante didn't stop his poking. He was decided to get Enzo up from his couch, regardless if he had to repeat the same fucking process of poking him with his foot for an entire hour or more.
"Geez, Enzo, you just sound like a wounded walrus. If only you stopped that annoying sound... I can't hear myself thinking with all that noise."
"What the hell d'you want, Dante?" he whined.
"Huuuush, Enzo, huuush. That's what I want. Calm your tits down," the hunter said as both his hands went to cover his ears.
"Who are you to order me around, my momma?"
Dante groaned as he glared down at the Italian man, his headache getting worse the more he listened.
"All right, you tubby bastard, let's make a deal. I'll let you alone only if you stop yelling and tell me what happened last night for you to be here, being a tumor."
Lazily, Enzo glanced up towards Dante, squinting his eyes to minimize the pain in his corneas due to the overexposure to morning light.
"Dunno, man. You burst through le chat noir like, all happy and stuff because you received one good sack of money for a job. You were with that lady you always moan about." He yawned and grumbled. "She ordered some drinks, I came over. The pretty waitress invited you. Made you some special stuff. The round was on the house."
"Did she now?"
"Yep. We drank and so on, man, but I dunno how I got 'ere."
...Ah, right.
He remembered that job, yes... He remembered more the money than the job itself, to be honest, and how Lady took most of it away from him with a big smile on her face... But that still didn't explain what he was doing naked and why his manager had passed out on his couch.
"And what more? C'mon, speak with those fat lips of yours."
"'Mmm', I dunno." He whined, repeating the same choice of words again. "You got like, really drunk. I was, too. Don't remember anything."
"You, drunk? Color me surprised."
"Ya were gooood, anyway. The lady was still there. She was trying to hold ya back as ya knocked the drinks of one hot girl down. You were clinging to her and when I called you to come back, she ignored me and she dragged your sorry ass outta that bar. I lost sight on you, then. I swear I don't know anything!"
With that, after mumbling some other incoherencies Dante couldn't quite decipher, which was okay since he didn't care in the slightest, he fell asleep again.
That wasn't what Dante expected to hear. He just wanted to know why he had a fat man sleeping in his couch, but received more, much more. Dante felt surprisingly compelled to blink in confusion, and he did, trying to process all this new information slowly.
"Huh, ain't that interesting..." He mumbled to himself as he stopped swaying Enzo with his foot, scratching his chin as he thought of what he's been told.
So he got drunk and whilst being intoxicated, before passing out on the bed he's woken up in this morning, he... brought Lady with him? No, she brought him home, wasn't that right? ...Shit, he didn't like the sound of that... Knowing Lady, she would have bitched him for trying to drive her precious motorbike while drunk, and way too surely, he would have just accepted her to take him home so he wouldn't have to hear her constant bitching. Right. That kind of made sense... but why would he wake up naked if...? ...oh fuck.
Finally, like an ephemeral, revealing and undesirable hunch, Dante realized he had screwed up, somehow. Little flashbacks came to him about last night, of him, of Enzo surrounded by hoes, of loud shitty dubstep that would make Skrillex's anus get Parkinson, of alcohol, of a grinning waitress and a pleased Lady... ...And then...
...Every so often, when things like these happen, Dante has an epiphany, and when that happens, he has to lay still and think, and everything suddenly clears up, eventually.
"...C'mon, Dante, it can't be that hard if the fatass did this as well."
"I heard that, you moron." he mumbled, half-asleep. "Gon' kill ya..."
Dante was not stupid, not the kind of stupid man he made people think. Perhaps he was no academic and had not been schoolarized the way a normal person would have, and it was true that he preferred action over a book, but that didn't make him less smart... in his own way. As soon as he heard Enzo's very vague story, Dante's mind immediately lined up several important facts and made some hypothesis to cover up the plot-holes and came to a disheartening conclusion.
1. He'd drunk, very drunk. He could tell as much.
2. Lady had been with him at the time they arrived to Le Chat Noire, as she'd been the one who had the idea to come over, and had been drinking with him as well. A waitress invited him to some alcohol heavy drinks and he somehow got very drunk with them.
3. Lady was his bitchy friend and a business woman wannabe, but she was also his recurrent wet dream with whom shared an odd relationship of love and violence.
4. In Dante's perfect world, shaped by alcohol, Lady would either:
A. Leave the aloofness aside and be the bitchiest woman in earth, as both of them knew the bitchy attitude was just a wall of fat lies. She wouldn't hit him as much as she currently did, either.
B. Scream, a lot, but because of sexual euphoria. Would probably wear a school uniform. Yeah.
5. Lady was with him that night. She, presumably, brought him home and if Enzo's explanation was right.
6. He woke up naked.
7. Shit.
Shit, no.
A pissed off Lady was hardly something good, but facts seemed to be crystal clear and he could not dispute them. He couldn't get away from them and had to stare at them and deal with them, even though he only had a hypothesis and the testimony of his manager, which wasn't very reliable, but still... Again, the memory of his younger days and who he got as wasted as to propose to a mop came to think, so everything could be possible; being an asshole with Lady was one plausible possibility...
He felt a ting of fear creeping in the darkest corners of his mind, that he would always ignore due to his aversion to rejection. Had he been that bad that she didn't want to stay with him? Or maybe she just felt pity for his drunken ass? Aw shit. Why couldn't he remember anything? What the fuck did he drink yesterday that knocked him out?
No... Those weren't the good questions at all...
Several images of his near future came to his mind, an none of them were good at all. As if his headache wasn't bad enough... this didn't look good, certainly not good at all...
"Well, fuck me..."
The part of his brain that valued life without dismemberment tried to think about a way to make it up with Lady today so she wouldn't want to cut his manhood and turn it into sashimi, all the while trying to prepare himself for the worse. Knowing his luck, the worse was the only thing he could expect to happen.
Today had gone beyond the typical "not my day" into the realm of "waking nightmare" in less than a hour. He had to do something for her, ask her what happened or... he didn't know. What the hell could he do now and how he would do it so Lady wouldn't hit him in the head?
Ah. What did he say about reality being a bitch?
Dante went back to his seat, already thinking about something to do while Enzo kept staining his couch. Several ideas started to form in his head, but wasn't sure which one would be the best. Hmm.
That would take a while.
"Now, what is this?" She asked him, but taking it in his hands all the same. She shook it up and down, but couldn't guess what was inside.
"Don't ask." He replied, frowning. "Just give it to her. Say it's a present. I don't know, you're a woman. Think of something. You're supposed to be smart and shit."
She rolled her eyes.
It took him some hours to get a half-decent idea, but that was to be expected. If he had good ideas, he wouldn't be such a trouble magnet and he would live a calmer life. It wasn't until noon that he called Trish, nearly hyperventilating, gracing her with a small package in his hands when she came... … When she saw him in such a state, the she-devil didn't was mildly confused. She had her reasons to feel like that.
He called her like some Pandemonium was about to happen only to give her... this?
She took the bag, anyway.
Trish left Dante's shop frowning. She wasn't anyone's messenger, but he looked so shaken, so pale and so... giddy, that she couldn't say no. She looked at the very thin box in her hands again, the one that she had to give Lady. She thought about opening it, but then considered that it would be funnier if Lady opened it herself and see the look in her face.
She wondered what happened between those two now... They would never let her live alone.
Tch.
Trish started her bike, seemingly content with the reasoning that it would just be the usual lovers quarrel everyone was used to witness. She didn't care a rat's ass about his sex life... or whatever this was about, but if Dante asked her to deliver that thing to Lady in such a vehement way, then it should be important for him, and thus she would do this for him, but she would owe her. That was obvious.
A/N: This was a one-shot, you know, but it was waaaay too long and I feared that it might get too boring to read, so I divided it in two to keep some of the 'tension' Ho-hohohoho. Aaaah, reviews are most appreciated. Next chapter will, of course, explain Dante's fan-fucking-tastic adventure with Lady :D
I hope I can keep it entertaining. For now, I just can say it's pretty DxL heavy, as the summary implies.
What happened the other night? What did Dante give Trish that she should give Lady? How did Dante get drunk out of his ass? What does Lady think about all this and how will she react to her present? What did Dante do? Is he right, or is his little hypothesis wrong? All questions unanswered until next chapter~. I'll post it next week, promise! After all, I'm almost done with it :D
I'm off~! Thanks for reading~.