"This… is exceedingly difficult to believe."

My hand wasn't shaking as I swiped the bottle of rum off the table and downed about a quarter of it in one shot. No, if anything, it was deathly calm. My other hand, on the other… hand, was numb in its position, clamped around a newspaper hard enough to tear the pages.

It had been shaking a minute ago. Now, I could barely feel it. If I hadn't downed over a litre of rum already, I might have been somewhat worried.

"You'll never reach my age if you keep drinking that, you know."

In defiance of the old man tittering at me from my own couch, I upturned the bottle into my mouth and gulped down what was left of it in three swallows. I then flipped it back around and slammed it onto my table, hard enough to leave small cracks in the wooden surface. Oops.

"You know what, you're absolutely right." Pushing my chair out, I wobbled onto my feet, stumbling my way into the kitchen and flinging open the cabinet I'd set aside for all my booze related needs. Needless to say, it was both large and fully stocked. "I'm gonna need something way fucking heavier after finding out that not only do superheroes exist, but they've somehow been flinging yo-yos and shit in broad daylight without me noticing!"

The old man, who still hadn't had the common decency to tell me his name (instead opting to walk past me as though I didn't exist and dump a newspaper proclaiming the existence of magic onto my dining table), hummed distractedly. I turned around to face him just as the lady he was watching on my T.V- Gak!

"Oi, turn that shit off!"

"I cannot. The remote seems to be missing." The words were mournful. The tone and utter indifference in his actions were not. The little smartass then had the audacity to look at me with a raised eyebrow, as though his excursion here was all my fault. "However did you not notice Ladybug and Chat Noir's work in Paris? Their exploits are famous, even overseas."

Great, the rock I'd been hiding under up until this point was actually a boulder. That really made me feel good inside about living in a massive city that I'd never been to before.

All I could do was shrug at him, before turning to the second half of the possible meltdown I was currently experiencing. The turtle spirit was looking up at me with a small smile, in between sipping from a carton of vegetable juice that I had found in the back of my fridge. The straw it was using had more twists and turns than I would have pills left over after this was all said and done.

"Odd." Yeah, you're one to talk, you cockroach-lookin' fuckhead. The old man may have barged his way in first, but I hadn't invited you in either. It shifted forward slightly, pushing the straw out of its face to look me over with narrowed eyes. "You seem to lack any and all magic that a person should possess."

Unlike anything I'd said, that seemed to spur the old man into action. He sprang to his feet, paused a moment to rub at his lower back, and then circled around my couch. I took a seat on one of the two bar stools lined along the outside of my kitchen counter, still towering over him even as I slouched and cracked the seal on my precious bottle of absinthe.

"So I won't get a letter for my eleventh birthday, heartbreaking." The packet of straws I'd opened for the fairy was still on the counter. Fishing one out, I stabbed it rather bitterly into the open neck of the bottle, pinching it near shut around the middle before bringing it to my mouth. Even if I planned on finishing it all in one day, I knew from experience how much alcohol poisoning sucked. "Now why the fuck are the two of you in my apartment again?"

"There is only one reason why someone would lack any magic at all." I yanked the straw out of the bottle before the words had even finished echoing and tipped it upside down. Fuck the poison, I wanted out. "You sensed it too, Wayzz?"

Glug…glug…glug…

Just had to… hold my breath a little bit longer… maybe that way I could make myself… pass out-!

What felt like a pair of handcuffs clamped down onto my wrist. I gasped at the sudden sensation, which had the unfortunate side effect of ejecting absinthe right back into the bottle. Through the opening that was nowhere near large enough to handle the flood I'd just tried to shove through it. Needless to say, for a few seconds, there was a localised green rainstorm in my kitchen. The old man didn't seem to mind all that much, apparently far too focused on holding onto my pulse like it was the kill-switch for enough TNT to level Paris.

I decided, in that moment, that I wasn't going to hold onto the bottle any longer. Not because I'd just lost a quarter of it to the tiled floor, or the fact that it was a bit too slippery to grip properly and would likely end up making even more of a mess when I inevitably dropped it. No, I pushed the bottle away from me, because right then and there, I was seriously considering smashing it against the counter like I was christening a new boat, and then shoving the largest shard of glass left over from the carnage down the old man's neck.

Damn it, I was not going to kill anybody while in Paris, even if it killed me!

"He appears to still be alive, Master." The turtle-fairy-sprite, presumably Wayzz, hovered about my head. I flicked my hand at him instinctively, sending him twirling through the air around my kitchen. He made it a full lap and a half before he finally stopped spinning, doing a good impression of someone stumbling about drunkenly even if he was still in mid-air. "He appears to be angry, Master!"

The old man tugged at my arm, almost pulling me out of my seat completely. I fell sideways, catching myself awkwardly with one foot as he raised his free hand to my face. For a moment, I thought he was going to backhand the shit out of me, until he gently took a hold of my eyelid and stretched it as wide as it could go.

"Hmmm." He hummed, tilting his head this way and that. Before I could say anything, he let me go, turning to Wayzz as I tried desperately to rub away the feeling of someone else's fingers far to close to my eyeball. Seriously, did they not have personal space in whatever century he'd grown up in? "Perhaps he is only dead on the inside?"

"Alright, look. I've been remarkably patient up until this point. Y'know, for me." The woman on the television chose that moment to moan once more. I had already picked up my bottle and was halfway through the motion of throwing it through her face before my booze-addled brain caught up and stopped my arm. Seeing as I would have been looking at five digits in damages, that was probably for the best.

The old man hadn't taken a single step back when I surged to my feet. Looking down at him now, I don't think it would have been an exaggeration to say that I was at least twice his height. The look he was giving me was one that I couldn't quite explain. Even though I'd been the one to hit him with my car, I felt like the one who was caught in the headlights.

It shook me, more than I was happy to admit.

"If you would be so kind as to tell me what you fucking want from me, if anything, and then leave so that I can get back to my life, that would be swell."

Heedless of the fact that I had company and the fact that I was in an enclosed space, I stuck my hand in my pocket, pulling out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. People had always said that the habit would kill me sooner rather than later, but I'd never really felt like I was all that lucky.

The old man said nothing as I managed to light up with shaking hands and take an even shakier breath. Wayzz flittered out of my view for a second, though judging by the sounds of pedestrians and cars that were suddenly flooding my apartment, I could guess fairly accurately that he'd cracked a window. I waved at him when he came back into view, before sinking to the ground and sitting with my legs crossed and my head resting against the front of my counter. I'd taken the soaked bottle of absinthe with me on the way down.

At least the carpet on this side was comfortable. And clean, for however long that would last.

For a moment, all was silent, aside from the hustle and bustle of the outside world. My gaze drifted to the ceiling, counting the particles of dust in the air if only to stop myself from thinking.

A quiet grunt of effort got me to uncross my eyes. The refocused on the old man as he clambered down onto his knees in front of me, his cane laid out across his lap. He didn't look too uncomfortable, despite the position, which made me decide that it wouldn't really be my place to say anything to him about it. Wayzz drifted down and landed on his Master's shoulders, giving me a look of pity that didn't suit his face in the least.

I took another long drag of my cigarette, burning it a quarter of the way down to the filter in one go. Tilting my head to the side, I blew the smoke away from the old man's face as he cleared his throat, fixing me with another long stare.

"A long time ago, there was a man much like you." Well, there went my theory that there was nobody else quite like me in the world. I chuckled humourlessly and tipped the bottle back, keeping it as quiet as possibly so I could hear what was being said. "It was said that he lacked magic within himself, and so he decided to make enough magic for everybody else around him. Perhaps he was the one who was magical all along, but that answer has been lost to time."

He sent a look at the fairy on his shoulder, drawing my attention back to Wayzz along with him. Wayzz looked between the two of us, a bit helplessly if I was correct in my assumption, which made me a bit curious. Surely this wasn't the first time this had ever been brought up between the two of them?

After a moment, Wayzz's single antenna drooped ever so slightly. "I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I've forgotten which way around it was. But it's been a really long time since then, so much has happened in the world!"

"So, you're ageless, or something?" I said, without pausing to think. Seeing Wayzz's mouth open, I hastily tacked on, "Wait, no, don't answer, I don't want to know. Just keep talking, please."

I gestured at the old man with my bottle, which, looking back, may have come across as me offering him a drink. It would explain why he'd shaken his head and waved the bottle away with a tired looking smile.

"You young people, so impatient!" The old man chuckled under his breath, at what may have been his own joke, I couldn't tell. I wasn't feeling all that impatient in that moment; if anything, everything around me was finally slowing to a pace that I could manage. "That man came to be known as the Mage, and it was he who gave humanity and Kwami the ability to properly interact with one another. You share this characteristic with him, yet you were unaware of magic even existing at all…"

I got another long look after that one. It led to me trying to look as busy as possible, mainly by cracking the bottle open and taking a draught that was long enough to make me fear for the continued functionality of my diaphragm.

Damn it, it wasn't working, and I needed to breathe.

"Look man, I dunno what to tell you." A few embers landed on my pants as I waved the hand holding my cigarette carelessly. These pants were pretty much ruined anyway, old and frayed as they were, so a little more damage was hardly going to push them over the edge. "I just came to Paris for a fresh start, I wasn't expecting magic as soon as I stepped off the damn plane. I've never heard of any Ladybug or Chat Noir, I've got no idea what a Kwami is or how it would possibly have an impact on my life. Hell if I know what that Hawkmoth dickhead wanted from me earlier-"

The elderly gentleman on the floor with me straightened up so quickly that I was genuinely concerned he'd hurt himself with the movement. He'd even managed to dislodge Wayzz in that second, sending the poor turtle spinning through the air for the second time in what could have been as many minutes.

"You spoke to Hawkmoth?" Whoever-sama gave no indication of the multiple fractures that now resided in his spine. Then again, considering that I'd laid him out flat with a car earlier that same day, and he'd just gotten up afterwards and hobbled away like the five pieces his ribcage was now in meant no thang, I'm not too sure why I was even surprised. "When was this?"

…Shit, when had that happened? There had been so much that went down between then and now. I'd hit someone with a car, possibly married a goat, and did you hear that magic was apparently real and took the form of a yo-yo? Totally batshit crazy, dude, I'm telling you.

"Uhh, on my way into Paris, I think? Yeah, yeah, my car broke down, I got severely pissed off at life, then I saw a butterfly, and the next thing I know there's a neon sign slowly grilling my eyeballs to a fuckin' crisp." The utter lack of indication that I was going to get a response from either of them spurred me on to keep talking. "Uhh… He offered to fix my car, then told me to go fight Ladybug and Chat Noir. Which is kind of weird, now that I know what they are."

I flung my hand in the direction of where the newspaper had slipped to the ground. Absinthe splashed out of the bottle with the sudden movement. I was beginning to think that I'd maybe had a bit too much a bit too quickly.

Some of it got a little too close to the cigarette for comfort. Without much thought, I flicked the still smouldering stick upwards and slightly back, waiting a second before hearing the telltale dink of it landing perfectly in the sink. How that ended up working, I'll never know. My best guess was cartoon physics, or perhaps divine intervention.

"Seriously, they look like they're in their early teens. Anyway, I said no, he got annoyed, told me to go take their Miraculous', and then pissed off when I told him that I was just going to call a tow truck."

Even just remembering that conversation, I couldn't help but shrug. Knowing magic was involved made it a bit easier to write off, but it also made it far more difficult to explain. Such was the quandary of dealing with the supernatural, I suppose.

Colonel Sanders' ambiguously Asian cousin was staring at me. I was guessing that he was shocked, seeing as he didn't actually seem to have retained the capability of closing his mouth. It flapped uselessly a few times, almost in perfect unison with the gentle breeze blowing in through the open window.

"You… are unaffected by his abilities?"

"Eeh, if he can mind control like I'm thinking he can, then I'd say I'm more…" Thinking back on the unholy amounts of anger that I been feeling in those moments, I waved a hand around with far more force than I'd been going for, "…Heavily resistant. Why, is that important?"

I then proceeded to slap myself, once again, with far more force than I'd been going for. This time, I probably deserved it, because of course something like that would be important, fuckwit. I could already hear how that must have sounded in their ears; Durr, Hockmoff tried to maik me do stuffs with mehgik and I did not what he wants, am me troubled?

Idiot.

General Tso and his newest option on the menu looked at each other, twin expressions of alarm on their faces. "No, no, it is more influence…" They both blinked, very slowly and in very creepy accord with one another, before the old man grabbed Wayzz around the middle and sent me a smile so plastic it may as well have come with an exclusive dreamhouse. "Excuse us for a moment, please."

They then proceeded to rotate around. Wayzz was in the air and thus had an excuse for the movement, but after the old man flicked around while still on his knees like he was sitting on a spinning tile, I decided that I'd definitely had too much and that I would have to work on sobering up while I still fucking could.

Getting off the ground was a monumental challenge, but I faced it head on. By which I mean I pushed myself to my feet, turned around, stumbled over my own limbs, and damn near brained myself on the very stool that I'd been sitting on before. Largely unfazed with such a blatant betrayal, I danced the deadly dance of death around all the pointy edges of my counter, and slapped my fridge a few times to show it who was boss and totally not because I kept missing the handle.

Somehow, in the middle of all this, I ditched the absinthe. Fuck if I knew where it went, one second it was there and the next it was gone.

Eventually, I suppose the fridge took pity on me, and allowed me access to the sweet nutrients within. With all the grace of a three-legged rhinoceros, I reached in and grabbed a loaf of bread, along with the entirety of the crisper. Opening it only a little bit was out of my league at that moment, if you know what I mean.

The next step was to get a knife, which I managed to do with some level of competence. If you're wondering why I decided it would be a good idea to have something deadly in my hands in the state I was in, well, that would make two of us. Seriously, what the fuck was I thinking?

"You two want a sandwich?" I waited for either of them to acknowledge me… which they utterly failed to do. Shrugging to myself, I got to work shredding the shit out of some lettuce, all the while trying to be as quiet as possible so I could eavesdrop on their conversation.

It wasn't exactly like they were being quiet, after all. No quieter than me simultaneously trying desperately to stay on my feet while also not making any attempt to stay on my feet. Look, I can't be held accountable for the shit that Drunk Lukas does, the dude's a moron.

"Master, this is not a good idea, at all!"

"Wayzz, we cannot ignore a boon like this when it is sitting right in front of us."

Simultaneously, both their heads turned to look at me. I chose that moment to attempt to chop a tomato in half. The bloody thing slipped around the knife, rocketed off to the side, bounced off the wall like it was made out of rubber, and hit me right in the eye when I turned around to see what the fuck it was doing.

They shifted back around while I was busy figuring out if I would ever see again.

"Master, I may not sense much darkness within him, but I do not sense much light either! You're talking about putting him into an environment like that, surrounded by-!"

"There have only ever been eight people recorded that could resist Nooroo at all."

My finished sandwich dropped to the ground during a new wave of wooziness. I may as well have dropped my firstborn if the noise I made when it hit the tiles was any indication. Like a wounded howler monkey attempting to call down a meteor and trigger the second extinction event.

"Only two of them could resist the transformation in its entirety. I have already vowed that I would never be wrong again, my old friend, now I ask that you trust me once more."

All conversation had ceased, not that I'd been paying attention to it. My eyes were glued to the ruined sandwich, splattered at my feet in a gruesome vegetable massacre. Realistically, it had been some strips of extremely poorly shredded lettuce and a whole tomato between two pieces of bread. To my dumb drunk ass, it was the end of the world, and proof that life was no longer worth living.

I sank to my knees, bracing myself with both hands on either side of the thing that probably didn't even constitute a meal. The tomato must have burst when it hit the ground, as there was an ever-expanding red puddle originating from underneath the top piece of bread. A seed slowly slid over and tapped against my left index finger. I nearly burst into tears.

"Mr…?"

I glanced up, eyes clouded and bottom lip quivering. The old man's expression was fairly neutral, but in my raw emotive state, it was one of the most sympathising faces I'd ever seen. I stared up into the aether for a moment, until it registered in my sluggish and incredibly drugged brain that I'd been asked a question.

Immediately, my mood soured. Apparently, I'd been feeling elated up until this point, because even after losing my precious sandwich, I'd still make and drop a thousand of them before choosing to revisit those memories again.

"…Lukas." I dropped my head, and most of the theatrics, and pushed myself back up to my feet. The kitchen was an absolute mess, but Wayzz seemed to be steadily taking care of the leftover lettuce in his own time, so I figured I would just clean up after he'd already knocked himself out. Grabbing the much lighter crisper, I shoved it back into its position in the fridge, slamming the door on the only bit of work I would be doing until the headache began to abate. "Got no last name, so don't bother asking."

No amounts of sagely wisdom or indecipherable looks would be enough to drag that story out of me. Not this soon.

"Lukas, then. I am Fu, but everybody calls me Master Fu." Finally, a name to go with the face. Good to have now, before I slipped up and actually offended him. "What qualifications and skills do you have?"

"Skills…?" What was this, a job interview? Fuck, I was way too far gone to think about this sort of shit. "Uh… You probably wouldn't guess it, but I suppose I'm decent with talking to people."

I began to tick down on my fingers, mainly because I knew for a fact that one hand of them would be enough. "Let's see… I'm good with writing and cooking… uhhh…" Wait, he'd said qualifications too, hadn't he? "There's a psyche degree in there that I mostly earned? I say mostly because I took some of the classes, but had to bail before I could finish it all, and then forged the papers to give myself an easier time in the future and why am I telling you this?"

Well, shit. Time to get back behind the wheel and finish the job before he could snitch on me. Alcohol, you have betrayed me yet again.

Fu nodded, seemingly ignorant of how that last statement had ended. I just knew this would bite me in the ass one day, there was no doubt in my mind about that. "Do you have anywhere to go back to after whatever happens in Paris?"

I chuckled under my breath, losing my balance briefly and slamming a hand down onto my counter to regain it. Wayzz and the knife I'd been using both jumped. Across the room, the newspaper on the ground flipped a few pages in the breeze, eventually settling on a headline about dark butterflies and monsters that went bump in the boulevard.

Fu was still waiting for my answer, so I looked at him. I mean really looked at him, examining him from head to toe, with vested interest that I didn't typically reserve for people. He looked human, had all the fingers and toes that a human was supposed to have, but he also had a pet fairy and the knowledge of a functioning system of magic.

"To be honest with you, Master Fu… I doubt I'm even on the same planet anymore." I'd wanted a new start from Paris. This wasn't at all what I'd had in mind. "Besides, everyone I cared about is… gone. I'm pretty much just biding my time until I get to see them again."

Fu nodded his head, not looking all that surprised. I suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to vomit.

I had to claw my way across the counter to get to the sink, seeing as my legs had apparently decided to stop working. Yanking the plug out was a jerky enough motion to almost send me over the edge, my breaths shallow and stomach in riot.

Movement from the corner of my eye made me turn my head. Fu had climbed onto the stool that I'd been sitting on, resting his elbows on the counter and his chin atop a single thumb. His attention, sharp and piercing, no longer felt welcome. Now, the only comparison I had was… eerie.

"Have you ever considered giving your own life to save another?"

I blinked three times in quick succession, memories playing out behind my eyelids every single time. Flashing blue and red lights, the resigned faces of the only family I'd ever had, the pin from the only grenade I'd ever seen between my teeth, everything going fuzzy as something heavy slammed into the back of my head, the ground shaking as everyone screamed at one another, waking up much later with all the money from our final job, nothing but loneliness for the next five years-

Alcohol surged back up my throat, painting my sink a neon green that seemed to glow in my eyes. It tasted like absinthe.

I had to brace myself against the counter, my hands gripping the sides of the sink like my life depended on it. My legs were shaking too much to hold my weight. I almost fell twice as I cleared my throat and spat the gunk into the rest of the mess I had made.

My throat burned. My teeth ached. My lips stung as they curled up at the corners.

"I guess I have, yeah." My reflection smiled up at me. It was murky, disgusting; still that same stupid kid that had nobody. The same prick who never wanted anybody in the first place. "I'm not exactly very good at it, though."

Something poked me in the shoulder. Too exhausted to even move my neck, I let the arm that had been tapped slump, locking my other elbow as my entire weight crashed onto it. Wayzz hovered there beside me, a half-filled bottle of water in his tiny hands. He was clearly struggling with the weight, if the strained smile on his face was anything to go by.

I forced my deadened arm to move, plucking the water bottle out of his grasp. The rest of me couldn't be convinced so easily, so I just stuck the cap in between my teeth and unscrewed it with them. It was painful, but I barely felt it. The tap creaked slightly as I turned it on full blast, swishing it back and forth with the end of my water bottle.

Master Fu kept watching me as I set the tap directly above the drain and washed my mouth out, spitting a third of the water into the sink in a fruitless attempt to wash away the taste. His cane tapped a staccato tune against the leg of the stool, the noise foreign amongst the ringing in my ears.

He was smiling.

"I believe you will be perfect."

I coughed weakly, wiping my mouth on the back of my sleeve as I glared at him tiredly through watering eyes. I was about two seconds away from passing out, and I had a feeling we both knew it. "Perfect for what?"

The last thing I saw before I slumped to the floor was him winking at me.