What the hell had he been thinking?

Everything had been going great. Perfect, awesome, fan-fucking-tastic. He'd been getting clean, right? Remember that, Jeffy? Sober and straight and working shit out. Wasn't that fun for a few months? Things were all shiny and happy and people were giving him the respect he wanted. It felt good. On the outside, it all felt great, honestly.

There was still that part of him underneath that ached, though, the part that wanted to ruin everything for the hell of it. It wanted to blast his brains into infamy and giddy, sappy weed-scented putty. It wanted to smash him down into that silky black pit of booze where he couldn't quite breathe right anymore. He wanted his pulse to pound, his ears to ring. It weighed him down and made his tongue feel heavy when it crept up on him, like it did all at once without warning, telling him what he knew he couldn't, shouldn't, would never do anymore.

But Brooke was beautiful in that tight white top. The lines of her, hyper-accentuated in a way that likened each curve to pleasantly impossible perfection. They'd done shots at the first bar, the heat of the room pressing in on them and pushing them together with the sealing seer of salacious synthesizers and thudding into his heart like a heavy fist. It had been so long since he'd had a drink that he could barely feel his lips after the second one.

Damn it all, when did he become a lightweight?

The thought was funny to him, so much so that he coughed up a chuckle, a diseased sound that carried more spite than mirth. The sheets under him where hotel-fresh, hotel-weave, hotel-cold-and-soaked-with-sweat. They were not, however, the color of the bedding in the room where he was staying.

He had done something very bad last night. Worse than fondling his boss's newlywed daughter in an oppressively grungy bar in full view of her husband, a man who'd likely be scheduled to take his title after this. No, it was the second bar. That was what did him in.

"Jeff."

Hearing Punk's voice makes the memories quicken.

It was strange, walking the uncounted blocks between venues with a gangling pack of people he forcibly labeled as friends, the clinging weight of would-be snow a slick on his windbreaker. He'd been curling into himself recently, fighting back the desire to indulge but every day sinking back toward his habits a little more. The pressure of success was just as bad as the weight of failure, but somehow the urge to purposely fuck it up made that awful voice in his head cackle and leap like the flames he put to his effigies, and there were more and more of those these days, it seemed.

There is a palm on his brow, then the back of a hand testing the warmth of his cheek, knuckles dragging gently against the soft skin of a jowl.

He just felt strange.

There were no memories of entering the bar, though he pushed his brain and clawed at the cloying darkness for a shred of light. Nothing shone in his mind's eye but the scrabbling, cold night of the street being sucked from his lungs as more stale barroom air crept in to replace it. The sensation was there, but no idea of why, or how, until he remembered standing face to face with Punk.

"I'm pretty certain Mark's about to kill me."

They were his words, but he couldn't feel his mouth make them, nor did he know where exactly they'd come from. He felt wedged into the back of his head, his face projecting about ten inches away from him as his consciousness clung to the inside of his skull. In the slow-motion elasticity of his inebriation, for a moment it seemed like Punk was nodding at him, but the assentment continued past the regular bob of the head, into a bow, then a lunge, and as arms flung out past his midriff, a shoulder impacted his sternum, the force of Punk rushing against him sped up time until it seemed to excel the normal pace of reality.

They crashed into the far wall, his back slamming against the concrete surface and bouncing just slightly, the back of his head making a wet, sick crack as his neck failed to catch the blow. He cried out shallowly, cinched his eyes shut, slid down the wall until his ass struck cold, sticky floor, knees pulled up to a right angle before one flopped flat on the floor. He stayed like that for an indeterminate amount of time, voices and lights flashing around in his head like an egg whisked too hard with a sharp-tined spork - not everything could come through the filter, and what did was jagged and fractal.

For a brief moment, he saw house lights raised, voices peak, a tattooed man with spiked, brown hair in a tight white shirt kneeling in front of him, half turned, screaming at a big man with a baseball bat. There was a hand on his chest, over his heart. It beat so hard and leapt so high, crashing against his ribs, aching to burn the entirety of him to the ground. It felt like Punk was trying to hold it in his chest, protecting that last part of him as Mark LoMonaco towered over them and threatened to become the next Barry Bonds.

Yup, Mark definitely wanted to fucking kill him.