Shoutout to Lyssa for helping me get my shit together and start doing the things I love again!
Also a special shoutout to COVID-19 for giving me the time I need to get shit done! YAYYY QUARANTINE AND UNEMPLOYMENT!
Sam's relationship with alcohol was a complicated one. Most of the time, drinking helped augment good vibes and good times by helping her loosen up and get more comfortable. Most of the time, she drank to have fun but didn't drink too much. She was totally in control of her actions. Sometimes, however, things got out of hand.
Today was sometimes.
"Shit, Sam!" Lara shrieked somewhere off in the distance. Sam sluggishly let her head loll to the side from where she lay on the ground, "Are you alright?!"
Lara's concerned for me, Sam thought dimly to herself with a smirk, how sweet.
"Is she okay?" Asked someone else in the background.
"I'm not sure," Lara replied, and Sam felt a light rapping on the side of her face, "Sam, can you hear me?" Sam's eyes lazily flickered open, and she beamed crookedly up at Lara's face, which was barely distinguishable when contrasted with the light coming from behind...above her? That's right. She was on the ground. She fell. She was looking up at Lara.
"Oops," Sam giggled.
"Oops?" Lara's face was coming into focus just enough to Sam to distinguish a frown etched upon her features, "Alright, come on. We're leaving."
"Noooo…" Sam whined, "We're just getting started. Let's go out somewhere."
"You've had enough already. We're going back," Lara's voice was stern, commanding, and so hot. Sam was figuring out how best to make a move on Lara when she realized the latter had grabbed hold of her arm and was pulling her up.
"No!" Sam pouted, letting herself go completely limp beneath Lara's grip.
"Damnit, Sam, come on…" Lara panted, muttering something to the two people sitting with them...what were their names again? Kay and Betsy?
"Alright, up you go," Kay said, grabbing hold of Sam's other arm and hoisting her up while Betsy gripped her beneath the armpits.
"This is just rude," Sam slurred.
"I'm sorry, she's not normally like this," Lara was saying. Sam scowled and ripped herself free from their grasp.
"Now that's actually fucking rude," she spat, "I don't have to take this." She made for the door but was hindered by several defending chairs on the front lines, "god damnit!" She kicked one of them away.
"Sam," Lara barked, "enough of this already. Let's please just go home."
"No!" Sam fired back, staggering out the door past a wide-eyed waitress and several onlookers. Lara was a party pooper. Molly was more fun. She was going to go to Molly's place. She emerged out onto the sidewalk and scanned the area around her. Which way was Molly? The right, maybe? She began walking with confidence at a brisk pace, coming to a stop at the crosswalk and looking both ways before crossing the street-
"Sam!" Lara screamed at the top of her lungs from behind before her voice was drowned out by a deluge of sound. Sam looked to her right and saw two bright lights glaring at her before she felt herself being yanked back roughly, "Will you stop and calm down?!"
"Oh that's right," Sam giggled as the car sped past them, "traffic goes the wrong way here."
"What is wrong with you?!" Lara demanded, and Sam became acutely aware of the fact that she was wrapped up in Lara's arms. Ordinarily, she would have been thrilled at the great opportunity presented to her. Now, however, she just wanted to put as much distance between herself and the Party Pooper as possible.
"Piss off," she said, peeling herself from Lara's grasp and roughly shoving Lara away from her, "I'm just trying to have fun, dammit! Let me live!"
"Come on," Lara pleaded with her, "let's go back to the dorm. I'll make some tea and we can watch Gossip Girl." Sam stuck her tongue out at Lara and tried to cross the street again, this time with greater success. But where was she going again? Did London have Taco Bell? No, forget that. Taco Bell gave her too much gas and food would just soak up the booze. Wherever she decided to go, however, she needed to shake Lara first. In that case, maybe the Tube could be of assistance? "Where are you going?"
"To have fun!" She made her way to the nearest Subway entrance. Bumbling down the steps and bobbing and weaving her way through the crowd, she knew it would take a miracle for Lara to catch up with her. She suppressed a toothy grin when she found an open train just waiting for her to get on, and sprinted across the platform, jumping on board as the doors were about to close. The train began to depart, and she turned to take a seat with a self-satisfied smile, which was quickly erased by the sight of Lara standing there with her hands on her hips. "What the shit?!" Sam exclaimed, falling back on her rump and drawing glares from nearby passengers.
"It's going to take a lot more than that to lose me. I'm from this country," Lara admonished, "now do you want to give me an explanation as to why you're behaving so erratically?"
"Big words, no comprendo." Sam plugged both her ears with her fingers and smiled cheekily while Lara continued to talk to her from above, "I can't hear youuu…" Lara knelt down, roughly grabbed hold of Sam's hands, and removed them from Sam's ears.
"Really?" Lara asked with a raised brow, "What's going on, Sam? Why are you doing this right now?" Sam's only response was to ignore Lara and pointedly stare down at her Facebook feed on her phone. "Alright, so be it."
"Good," Sam snarled in response, and she could hear Lara let out a small sigh. Three stops. She would wait for three stops and then make a run for it. Let Lara try and follow her then. The first and second stops came and went, and even though Lara kept glancing over out of the corner of her eye, Sam could tell that she was beginning to let her guard down by how relaxed her posture was. Perfect.
The train stopped a third time, and Sam immediately bolted out the door, knocking some pedestrians aside in the process. She ignored Lara when she heard the latter call her name out, instead diverting all of her focus and attention to sprinting through the platform, up the steps, and onto the busy night-time London streets. She stopped and doubled over to catch her breath, and only then heard someone panting and wheezing right behind her. Gritting her teeth together, she whipped around on the spot to face Lara once more.
"Why won't you leave me alone?!"
"Because-" Lara coughed and cleared her throat, "you're clearly under some duress even though you won't tell me why." Sam said nothing and continued on her way. Every so often she'd look back over her shoulder to see if Lara was still following her, as she had gone noticeably quiet. Sam figured that she should have been flattered to have such a fine specimen of a woman follow her so dedicatedly, but all she could feel right then was a niggling irritation.
"Are you even trying to stop me anymore or are you just following along for the ride?" Sam demanded as they walked alongside a river.
"I'm just making sure you don't do anything reckless or get yourself hurt." They continued walking for what felt like hours to Sam, whose only motivation was the hope that Lara would eventually get tired and give up. If there was one thing Lara was, however, it was persistent.
"Don't you ever give up?" Sam snapped.
"No," Lara stated simply, much to Sam's chagrin. Silence ensued between them once more, and Sam found herself wondering why she left the bar in the first place. She stopped in her tracks and took a moment to think. She was going to go somewhere initially. Was it Taco Bell? No, it was something before that.
"God damnit," she sighed, leaning back up against the railing to her left. Nowhere. She was going absolutely nowhere. She pursed her lips and gazed longingly into the distance, over in the direction of Tower Bridge a ways down the river.
"You know they're giving it a facelift? It's great that our country takes so much pride in preserving our history, but it's a shame that I'll never be able to observe that bridge as it appeared when it was built in the late nineteenth century." Lara cleared her throat and leaned against the railing right beside Sam, "Well, not that I would have seen it in its original form anyways as this obviously isn't the first facelift it's received. But still." Sam stared at her blankly.
"What? Where did that even come from?"
"Just trying to make small talk," Lara scratched the back of her neck sheepishly.
"...That's your idea of small talk? Why do you know so much random stuff?" Sam asked. Lara raised and lowered one shoulder.
"It's what I'm interested in," She replied. Sam bit her bottom lip and let her gaze drift downward, "...Look, I of all people understand wanting to keep certain things private, but I'm going to ask again. What's going on?"
"I'm fucked," Sam responded robotically.
"Alright...how so?" Sam's throat constricted as she tried to choke back tears, and she clenched her jaw shut in an attempt to regain her bearings. In spite of her best efforts, she started trembling uncontrollably. Her brain was a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off, and she didn't have enough time to clip the red wire before-
"Nothing's in my fucking control lately!" She shouted out of nowhere, "I'm in a foreign fucking country with no clue what I'm doing or where I'm going, meanwhile my fucking ex is having a wonderful fucking time in Philadelphia and I'm here, and we can't even talk that much because she thinks it'll make things harder-" Sam balled her hands into fists and let herself crumple to the pavement, "and I try to not think about it, I don't think about it, but all I want to do is just fucking hear her voice and talk the way we used to! Why can't things just be the way they used to be?!"
"Sam…" Lara began from above, but the flood gates were too wide open at this point for Sam to stop.
"A-and my dad wants me to fucking take over his company and I don't want to study business, and the moment I start taking control of my shit and doing what I want, he finds out I'm not studying business-probably because he paid some asshole off at the university to get my private academic information," Sam smacked her fist into the railing beside her as hot tears started streaming down her face, "what the fuck am I gonna do if he cuts me off?! I have no clue what I'm doing! I can barely remember that traffic flows on the left side of the road, how am I supposed to navigate a foreign university completely on my own?! How?!" She screwed her eyes shut and heard the sounds of clothing shuffling as Lara took a seat beside her.
"Do you want me to answer honestly?" Lara asked tentatively. Sam opened her eyes lazily and looked over at Lara.
"I just want someone to tell me what to do." Lara folded her hands together in her lap before speaking.
"You just...do it. Prove to your family that you're going to do what you want, regardless of what they say. And it's hard, believe me, it's really hard. You have to budget your time meticulously and worry about paying your bills on time and just...a bunch of shit. But once you've figured everything out, you won't believe how liberated you'll feel. I know I feel liberated not being constrained by the expectations of the estate," a halfhearted smile crept upon Lara's face at this, but smiling was the last thing Sam felt like doing at the moment.
"How do you keep track of all of that though? How do you function? I've always struggled with that when I was younger, but the only solution my therapist had was to send me to a doctor, pump me full of Concerta, and be done with it."
"Concerta?"
"It's a medication they give to people with ADHD. Honestly, it's fucking terrible and I haven't taken it since getting here for school. That's probably why I'm so fucked up right now, honestly. I took that shit for years and just stopped taking it cold turkey." In spite of herself, Sam laughed, "Jesus Christ, I'm a hot mess."
"You are," Lara agreed, "but everybody's a hot mess at one point or another. On the bright side, you at least have someone who's willing to help you work through this rough patch."
"Oh?" Sam raised a brow at Lara, "And who might that be?"
"Me, you goofus." Lara stood up and held a hand out to Sam, "Now, you wanna come home with me or are you going to continue to get completely pissed and wallow in factors completely beyond your control?" A sheepish smile crept upon Sam's face as she took Lara's hand and clambered onto her feet.
"When you put it like that, I kind of sound like a jackass, huh?"
"Codswallop. You're not a jackass, just someone who doesn't handle stress in the most productive fashion. But we'll work on it." They walked down the street together while Lara kept an eye out for a cab to flag down. Sam, all the while, chewed the inside of her cheek guiltily as her brain finally registered the wringer she'd just put Lara through-at Lara's place of work, no less.
"...Hey, Lara?" Sam began tentatively sometime later.
"Don't," Lara cut in abruptly, "like I said, everybody's a hot mess at one point or another. I know you'd have my back if I ever went barmy, right?"
"Right," Sam smiled softly, "still...thank you. I know I'm not the easiest person to deal with sometimes."
"You're lovely," Lara replied calmly as she flagged a cab down, "and don't let anyone make you question your self-worth. You'll get through this, I promise." The cab pulled off in front of them, and the driver put on his hazards and opened one of the back doors for them.
"I know I will. I know. I just gotta keep moving," Sam said as they got in together.
"Just keep moving," Lara nodded in agreement.
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