Save Me from My Dark Side
Chapter Eight
Turbo wasn't sure how he made it to his front door. Hell, he wasn't sure how he even made it out of the bar. He hadn't meant to drink as much as he did but each round just made him feel so much better and before he knew it, it was a seemingly endless cycle of refills. Some ducks quacked and scurried to get out of his path as he slowly stumbled through East Niceland, having to stop a few times to get his wits about him before starting on again. Somehow he made it up his stairs without falling over and he fumbled with the doorknob to open it. The lights in the house blinded him and he had to shield his eyes with an arm while he groped the wall for the light dimmer, roughly twisting the dial all the way to the darkest setting.
Since he could only focus on one thing at a time, he completely failed to notice Rosie coming up and giving him a hug while he was fooling with the lights. She'd been so anxious for him to get home that she didn't even pay attention to the fact that he was drunk at first. She had her arm wrapped around his chest for a full hug and had her chin rested in the crook of his neck.
"I wasn't expecting you to get home this late," she admitted to him, still not noticing what state he was in. "I was starting to get worried."
Turbo felt himself sway slightly and he awkwardly wrapped his arms around her to help keep steady. Doing so brought her slightly closer to him and instantly his inebriated mind went straight to the gutter. He cracked a lazy grin and raised his hands up to comb his fingers through her hair. Without warning, Rosie felt her head being pulled back and a hard kiss was planted on her lips, almost to the point of hurting her. She could smell and taste the alcohol now and the smallest ring of a warning bell went off. Turbo had her head firmly stabilized so she couldn't pull herself back, so she had to deal with working her arms back towards her to get in between the two of them and push back like that. She gave her head one good solid shake to get his hands off her and she set a pair of angry eyes on him.
"The hell you think you're doing?" she asked him, right when he made a grab for her shoulders to pull her back.
He laughed a moment as if he thought this was funny. "Come on, don't play hard to...hard to get."
Rosie dodged her head to the side when he tried to kiss her again. "Damn it, I'm not playing nothin' with you when you're like this," she bit, twisting her shoulders so she could get his hands off her again.
He didn't seem to understand that she was being serious. He made another grab at her, this time getting his arms all the way around her so her arms were pinned down to her sides. Rosie didn't know what to do; she could have easily performed one of her basic karate tricks on him to make him get the hint to back off but she didn't want to hurt him either.
"What's wrong?" Turbo asked slowly, his eyes swimming slightly as he tried to focus on her. "Isn't it your...job to...cheer people up?"
Okay, that was blatantly offensive.
If looks could kill, the one she was wearing would have certainly done the job. She had enough wiggle room to bend a knee up and stamp him hard on the foot, resulting in both him yelping and loosening his grip on her, then she shoved him backwards off of her. He ended up slamming into the wall and a painful grimace crossed his face.
"Don't you dare try to cheapen me!" Rosie spat out bitterly.
She had just physically hurt him and now she was yelling at him. That was enough to swing his mood around from being lustful to pissed off.
"The hell's your problem?" Turbo growled out, his eyes glowing like mad in the darkened room.
Her jaw dropped slightly in disbelief then she went back to being defensive. "My problem? My problem? You're the one that came home drunk and started acting like I was just a personal whore! And what were you doing at the bar anyway, what happened to-"
He actually rolled his eyes at her. "Don't lecture me, it's not like I've never done this before."
Rosie was briefly taken aback. "No, you haven't," she corrected him insistently, saying that he'd never acted in such a manner while drunk before. "Now, I don't care if you go off and get slap-happy drunk at a party somewhere, but you don't need to be doing it while you're not feeling right."
She knew quite well how easy it could be to try to find the answers at the bottom of a bottle; she'd done that the first ten years following Turbo's "death". She'd almost gotten herself killed because of it, and now she was worried that he might end up doing the same thing, if he was going to keep this up. The racer, however, didn't seem to want to listen to her.
"I got nearly roasted by an overgrown freak turtle-dragon, thank you very much," he snapped, rubbing his forehead where a headache was developing. "So sue me if I wanted to take my mind off it for a while!"
Rosie's defensive stance cracked when she processed that. "Bowser spat fire at you?"
"Yeah, it was quite the shits-and-giggles fest, let me tell ya."
Her face softened at the realization that he had gotten, once again, humiliated in front of a group of people. She almost felt bad for yelling at him. Turbo made an attempt to move to bar area so he could rest his upper body weight against it,his elbows propping him up; he was still rubbing his head as the pain there increased.
"Oh, champ, I'm sorry-"
"Damn it, stop being sorry for me!" he yelled at her, causing her to tense up considerably. He was so sick of hearing that. "It makes me feel worse when you do that!"
Oh that hurt. She felt some tears forming in her eyes as sadness enveloped her. The idea that she made him feel worse was a devastating blow.
"But I...honey, I can't help but feel bad for you," she told him truthfully, her voice getting quiet. "I don't like seeing you get hurt."
"Well, it was real smart to talk me into going into a room chalk-full of people that have more than enough means to kill me then, wasn't it? Thanks for the suggestion, by the way, I feel a lot better about myself knowing that not even villains think I'm worth the air I breathe."
The way he said it made her feel like he was blaming her for what happened, as if she somehow knew something like this would happen. The bundle of nerves in her stomach grew larger as her own self-doubt flooded her senses, and she hugged her lower abdomen in attempts to calm down.
"I...I was just trying to help," Rosie whimpered, feeling some tears slide down her cheek. "You know I wouldn't put you in harm's way on purpose...I love you."
She loved him. As much as he appreciated that, why she did was still a mystery to him. He dropped his head down with a thunk as the front part of his helmet hit the counter, preventing his face from coming into contact with it.
"I'm not the same person anymore," Turbo said gravely.
"What do you...what are you saying?"
"I'm saying there's nothing to love about me," he growled impatiently. "Maybe there was something back then, when I was somebody, but I'm nothing now."
Her heart stopped in shock at hearing this revelation. "For God's sake, don't talk like that!"
He felt her trying to hug him, which was a bit awkward due to how he was leaning against the bar counter, and he could also feel her start to shake a bit from holding the full extent of her emotions in.
"You're most certainly not 'nothing', you're everything to me!" she was telling him through her tears as she tried not to openly cry on him. "And I don't care if you don't have any of the things you had before. I fell in love with you! Not your popularity or your trophies or...or any of that other stuff. I loved you for you, and that still stands today. You could have been the least popular guy in the arcade and I still would've loved you because of who you are inside."
Turbo felt his heart swell a tad at the honest, loving words. However, the problem was that he didn't love himself, so it did very little to affect his mood to hear it from someone else. It didn't help that he wasn't exactly sober either, otherwise he would have responded to her a lot more appropriately.
"Honey, please, I'm too tired for this right now," he said instead, raising his head from the counter slowly. "I just want to get some sleep."
Rosie's heart was broke at his dismissal of what was a devout outpouring of love from her. Even that hadn't made him feel any better. She felt like such a failure. Reluctantly, she released him from the hug she had him in and Turbo made an attempt to move forward, shoving past her so he could at least try and get to the stairs. All he wanted was a bed to lay in and sleep and hopefully not have any dead twin dreams. The mood he was in, if he were to have one, he might be tempted to kill those two morons again.
Initially, he had some trouble with his footing on the stairs, slipping on one step a few times before being able to keep it there firmly in place so he could pick up his other leg. He had a death grip on the stair rail, which he was now thankful they had decided to have put in. Naturally, Rosie wanted to help him up them but she didn't want him yelling anymore. She didn't know how much more of that she could take. So she stayed at the bottom of the stairs, glancing up every now and then to make sure he didn't fall, trying to tell herself that once he got some sleep he'd feel better and maybe even apologize. After all, she had said some pretty mean things when she had gotten drunk during her time of depression. Maybe this wasn't any different.
Maybe.
He never once said he loved me back, a little voice in the back of her mind told her, and she got teary-eyed again.
Turbo finally made it up the stairs, yet the light from the kitchen was blinding him so much that he had to both squint his eyes shut and throw an arm up in front of them.
"Damn freakin' lights," he muttered, raking his hand across the wall to find where the switch was.
By completely accident since he had his eyes shut, he ended up bumping into the table in his quest for the light switch. Already aggravated about not being able to open his eyes without blinding himself, he grew even more irate at this interruption.
He never even saw the cookies on the table.
With one arm, he flipped the damn furniture on its side to move it out of his way, the contents of it crashing loudly onto the floor. Rosie heard the commotion from downstairs and her heart jumped, thinking that he'd done hurt himself. She jogged up them and when she saw the mess he made, she put her hands up to her mouth to muffle a tearful gasp.
Turbo's hand finally located the light switch and the whole house grew dark instantly, and his eyes were finally able to have some relief. He stumbled back the way he came, trying not to trip on one of the chairs that had been toppled along with the table and shuffled his way down the hallway to the bedroom, slamming the door closed.
Rosie stayed there in the dark for a moment, not wanting to see the mess again. Finally, she decided she couldn't very well stay that way forever so she carefully inched her way along the wall so she could turn the lights back on. It was even worse seeing it a second time. Her poor cookies that she'd worked so hard on lay in a strewn pile on the floor, the plate they'd been sitting on smashed to pieces, and the treats themselves broken and crumbled in places.
So much for cheering him up.
She tiptoed her way around the table and knelt down to start picking up the debris, large tears falling on the floor as she did so. All she wanted was for him to go back to the way he was, his normal happy-go-lucky self, and nothing she had done had been enough to do that. Her bottom lip quivered as she tried not to sob, but she couldn't handle the pain anymore. A combination of sadness and anger rose in her and she threw what she had already gathered in her hands back to the floor and ran out of the house.
Felix was just coming back from visiting with Q*bert and sharing some pie with him when the sight of someone sitting on the bench by the duck pond caught his eye. Out of curiosity, he squinted his eyes to see better and recognized the person as being Rosie. Now normally, Felix would stay as far away from the duck pond as possible as he had certain...issues with being around them (the whole trying to kill him during the game thing, you know). However, something told him that there was a problem and being the nice guy that he was, he felt it his duty to at least ask what the deal was.
Thankfully, most of the ducks were not present, although there were two in the pond itself and one of them had taken to nesting in Rosie's lap. She had her head down and was stroking the top of its head with one of her fingers. It didn't take a genius to tell that she definitely was not in a cheerful mood.
Felix didn't wish to go anywhere near the...duck...so he stood a few feet away and cleared his throat instead to get her attention. Rosie turned her head at the noise, and the duck went flying off of her to go into the pond with its friends. The girl wiped her eyes and dropped her head back down to her lap.
"Hi, Felix," she said quietly.
"What's the matter?" the handyman asked out of concern.
He went to go sit down now that the duck was gone, but he kept an appropriate amount of space between them so not to give any wrong ideas. Couldn't be too careful about that no matter where you were.
"Everything," Rosie sniffled, hugging herself with her arms. "It-it was horrible. Turbo came home dr-drunk and started raving like, like a lunatic. I...I tried to calm him d-down, but he...he said I made things worse."
Felix's eyes bugged out. "He said that?"
She nodded sadly, slumping slightly more on the bench.
"I...I can't believe that," said Felix, scratching his head in confusion. He couldn't even imagine Turbo yelling at Rosie like that; he had always known him to treat her like she was one of the stars in the sky. "Well...what did he say when you gave him those cookies?"
Much to his horror, Rosie started crying more. "He-he knocked them on the f-floor."
Felix turned his head towards Rosie's house and then back at her. He knew it wasn't any of his business but it really irked him to hear that. His "hero nature" wasn't going to let him just sit idly by and watch his friends' lives fall apart like that, especially if one was starting to hurt the other.
"Is he still at home?"
Rosie couldn't do much else but nod, then curled her legs up to her so she could lean her face against her knees and cry that way. Felix hopped off the bench, a determined look in his eyes.
"Just stay here, I'll try to fix what I can for you," he told her kindly before bounding off.
Stay there? Why bother? Why stay somewhere that made her feel as shitty as this? She couldn't handle anymore heartbreak right now. After wiping her face yet again, Rosie got herself up off the bench and tried to collect herself. She winced at the mere thought of even going back home. Even if Felix did manage to talk some sense into Turbo, would that really make it all right? Even if he apologized to her, would that really be enough to undo the damage he caused?
She wasn't sure. She loved him, but unless he did some major straightening up, she didn't know if this was going to work out. The very idea that her still very new marriage could be falling apart was enough to send her over the edge again but she choked it down. No, she wasn't going back in that house. At least not right now.