C H A R L I E
Late Twenties | Male
Mentions: Sadie, Khufu
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His little sister is bullying him again, just five seconds after she woke from her quick nap. He thinks that this is some sort of new world record. No, actually, after he takes a second to fully mull it over, he realizes that it is; with his left hand, Charlie pulls his phone out from his pocket and opens his notes app, taps on a file, scrolls for what feels like millenia… Annnnd, yeah, there it is: his most recent update states that she bullied him merely seven seconds after she woke up. That needs changing. He tosses his baked potato on his lap to free his other hand, and quickly jots down a new entry: [ 6:01 PM, XX/XX/XXXX | 5 secs after awakening :: “Why do you still even bother eating? You eat more than our entire family’s weight combined and still look like a feather could shatter all your bones. You’re just wasting food, really.” ].
“Hey, I can see that you don’t have your earphones in!” He feels her feet collide with his (he admits) rather thicc thighs, a painful kick so incredibly, unexpectedly powerful for someone her size that anyone who wasn’t as used to her casual violence as he is would have yelped at 169 decibels. “Don’t ignore me!”
He ignores her.
For extra measure, he leisurely grabs hold of his baked potato (it’s half-off of his lap now, thanks to a certain someone) and takes a massive bite out of it, cheeks puffing out like a chipmunk. He elects to moan in delight, just to get on her nerves more, allowing his eyes to flutter closed, and revels in the disgusted noise his sister makes. Surprisingly, after his little show, she doesn’t try once again transforming her feet into the most lethal weapon in all of history; instead, she simply asks, “Where’d you get that? The potato, I mean.”
“The ether,” Charlie immediately tells her.
He feels her shift at his side, sees the blur of a bony hand swipe at his feast. With an “uhn-uhn,” Charlie holds his snack out of reach, much to Sadie’s dismay. But, again, to his surprise, she does nothing more besides muttering, “What airport sells plain, baked potatoes anyway?”
(He had over three hundred counters at the ready for whatever quip was about to get thrown his way. She must be really tired, then. Shame.)
“This airport, apparently,” he answers her, and she only huffs in response.
He chances a glance at her—chances, because she could just be pretending to be oh-so-calm in an effort to get him to look her way, and right as he does, she’ll fling something at his face and break his glasses for the fifteenth time. But she’s merely rearranged herself into a sitting position, blinking tiredly into the abyss. With her distracted and more than likely unable to conjure some method to threaten his mortality, he takes a moment to look her over. She, frankly, looks like absolute shit, near-black purple bruises hanging under her eyes. If the dark hues were on her eyelids instead, they’d’ve complemented the crystal pale greens of her irises; instead, they simply make her look as if she hasn’t gotten a lick of sleep in three years. Her hair sticks out in all sorts of odd angles, looking more like chunks of rough coal thrown haphazardly in an engine than anything that belongs on a teen’s head. Even her skin’s different: pale, almost ashen, nothing like the healthy ivories and pinks it was just the other day when he’d kidnapped her from her high-school.
It makes him wonder what he looks like. In all honesty, on any given day, his eyebags transcend reality and his hair looks to be something Satan would happily lay eggs in, but with him having not slept in two days straight… He probably looks like a dead man standing. Ugh. The fact that Sadie isn’t bullying him for his disastrous appearance is only proof of it; even in her tired state, she’d’ve commented on his looks (she always does, really) and thrown out a cheeky jest that’d have him rolling his eyes and pummeling her with half-a-dozen comebacks, but he must look so terrible right now that she, shockingly, would find saying anything about his current shittiness to be too mean.
Unless… Unless she thinks something is wrong. Maybe that’s why she isn’t acting like he’s used to, like she should. Dread pools deep into his belly, and his hands turn clammy, fingers on the verge of turning his potato into mere mush.
She’s suspicious of something, isn’t she? She knows something’s going on. Of course she does. The story he’d given her as to exactly why the fuck he’d bought tickets to Montana, where her mother and father were staying at that pretigious skiing resort for their anniversary, wasn’t… wasn’t… something. Fuckfuck, what’s the word? Foolproof. Infallible. He’d thought before that she was just happy that she was being given three days off of school, that she was going along with everything because she was ecstatic about not having to deal with homework. But, fuck, she’s perceptive under all that immature I-will-kick-you-to-hell B.S.; he fucking knows this. Of course she’s aware that something’s wrong. What parents want their kids to be right with them on their anniversary, the time they spend together with no other parties involved, anyway? Let alone after they’d already discussed with Charlie that he would be watching over Sadie during the time they were gone. And their family isn’t one for last-minute decisions; they’re organized, and they’re not the kind to just suddenly go, “Oh, let’s have our kids over! Screw those plans we spent days butting heads over! Screw those weeks of convincing Sadie that she one hundred percent needs a babysitter! Screw those days we spent bullying Charlie into not killing himself at work for a few days! Now, go buy the cheapest plane tickets in all of mankind and get them over here!” And given how strict her father was with her academics, there’s no way in hell that he’d let Charlie just… fling her out of her classroom and throw her into a plane; hell, even in a worldwide emergency, he’d force Sadie to stay the fuck in school, and both Charlie and Sadie know this extremely well. And… And that’s just— That’s just— Shit, shitshitshit, Sadie hasn’t caught on, hasn’t she? She can’t catch on. She can’t figure this out, she can’t know that something is wrong, she can’t be suspicious that there is something wrong. Charlie isn’t ready to explain—
“Why are you looking at me like we’re in Alabama?”
Her soft, bell-like voice throws him out of his spiraling thoughts. He recoils ever-so-slightly, quickly processing her words, hiding his flinch (she can’t ever know she can startle him; she’ll turn into even more of a demon than she already is) as him leaning away from her in repulsion. With a wrinkled nose, he says, “Ew. Ew. Sadie, why? Why do you keep on saying that? You so need Jesus in your life.”
She grins toothily—like the spawn of the devil that she is. “I know.”
For a little while, as he teaches himself to breathe again, he watches her fight her earphones into not strangling her to death. (He offered to buy her airpods once, but she refused, looking at him with so much revulsion that he wondered if, in his sleep-deprived state, he’d accidentally asked her what the world would be like if trees had genitalia and needed to put them to use in order to reproduce. But he’s quite sure that he didn’t, so it’s her loss; now, she has to suffer with thin wires constantly attempting to smother her into the afterlife.) When her little brutal battle with them is over, she moves on to packing away her U-shaped neck pillow.
“So,” she says, struggling to keep her poor, poor distended backpack from exploding all its contents onto the airport floor (why the hell she brought so much with her, Charlie has no idea. He took a peek in there earlier, too; it’s all useless stuff. She can be so strange sometimes…), “why didn’t you get me one of those?”
He tilts his head. “The potato?”
“Yeah.” She declares WWIII on the backpack’s zipper. “I’m hungry. You know I’d be hungry when I woke up. Why didn’t ya get me some?”
His eyes roll to the skies. “I can’t read minds, Sadie.”
“Yeah, but you know how I am. Now, get me some.”
“No.”
She looks affronted, and huffs her offense. “Why?”
“Because,” he says, making a vague gesture, “the store’s, like, fuck meters away.”
She is victorious, and flings her battered backpack somewhere to the side. “What’s that in feet?”
He gives her a Look. “Sadie, I’m not abusing my toes just to get you a potato.” He shakes the item in question around in his hand. “And you literally hate potatoes. I know you’re only asking me for this because you want me to suffer. I’ve done enough cardio today.”
She relents—but only in regards to the potato. “There’s, like, a coffee thing-store-whatever somewhere close by. Their shit’s cheap. I saw them showing off a buncha their sandwiches. Get me somethin’.”
“So commandeering.”
She looks him in the eyes, deadpan. “Please feed my bitching belly.”
Charlie takes a long, deep breath through his nose. “It isn’t too far from here?”
“Nope.”
“That’s the truth?”
“Yep.”
He eyes her suspiciously. “Sadie, if I’m gonna end up walking for thirty minutes—”
She punches his shoulder. Charlie doesn’t even wince; he’s used to her fists. “You won’t.” She flashes him an innocent, beaming smile that does nothing to alleviate his distrust. “Really, I mean it,” she continues. “It’s just aways over—” she points in the direction of the other shops— “there. You won’t be able to miss it. It’s got this big sign out at the front. ‘Coffee Shop.’ Seriously.”
Charlie exhales through his nose. Gives her another Look, one that she returns with a Look of her own.
“You’ll only end up killing your feet if you get lost.” She crosses her arms, juts her chin out. “Which I won’t be surprised if you do, given your absolutely deplorable directional skills.”
Charlie stares at her for so long that Jesus contemplates if He’s accidentally stopped time.
Sadie stares at him back.
“I’m choosing to trust you.”
She grins at him brightly.
“Watch our things,” he tells her, getting to his feet. “I’ll be right back.” He pats down his fanny pack for his wallet. Once he confirms it still exists, he turns back to her and says sternly, “Don’t go anywhere.”
She tiredly throws him a peace sign.
—————
Sadie lied to him.
It wasn’t nearby.
He realized this about fifteen minutes into walking, and he proceeded to vibrate like an angry chihuahua. That little shit, he thought after he finally reached the damn place. I am SO gonna get back to her on this.
Now, he’s well aware that he could’ve just… turned around at any point during his march, headed on back, and attempted sororicide right then and there, but… he’s only had one tiny cup of coffee today, on the connecting flight from their home city of Phoenix to this dinky airport in Sacramentos, and he hasn’t had a healthy sleep schedule since… probably the day he was born, actually… But, point is, he’s not quite in the right mind, he isn’t thinking straight, and that led him to not consider the option of simply spinning on his heel and merrily skipping back to where he left her on the carpeted floor of some secluded corner of the airport. His common sense only returned to him after he’d taken his place at the end of the line.
…He’s gonna strangle Sadie. He swears. He will.
It’s a good thing they weren’t in a rush. Their flight was delayed fourteen hours, and he and Sadie decided to stay overnight in the airport instead of risking a stay at a nearby hotel. That’d make it the sixth time the flight was delayed; first, it was delayed an hour, then one and a half, three, four, eight, and finally fourteen, announced just thirty minutes ago, right as Sadie had started stirring from her hour-long, much-needed nap. A whole bunch of other flights had been delayed, too, due to “many complications,” much to the consternation of quite literally almost 90% of everyone in the airport. It explains why there were so many people out and about, congregating where the stores were; no one wants to hang out at their gate for hours on end, doing nothing more besides hovering over charging stations and taking occasional trips to the restrooms nearby.
So, yes, it was a good thing their flight wasn’t about to board in, say, fourteen minutes. In which case, Charlie would have to sprint all the way back—through a sea of impatient, hungry humanity, no less—despite his virtually nothing levels of energy. He’d be completely fucked. Sadie, too, considering how he didn’t trust her with her passport and the boarding passes; she’d just have to… awkwardly stand there and watch as everyone boarded without the two of them. Although it’d have been her fault that they’d have missed the flight in the first place, he’d only find himself feeling all the more guilty. She’s already exhausted from the previous flight, and he wants her to be with her mother as soon as possible.
Especially given the circumstances.
(…He still has to inform her about what happened.)
They can’t miss this flight.
They can’t fucking miss this flight.
But it’s fine. Everything’s fine. He can’t really breathe, but screw his lungs. They can malfunction all they want. He just… He needs coffee. That’s what he needs. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. They won’t miss the flight. It’s fine. It’s cool. Everything’s handled. Things have been dealt with. It’s fine. He just needs to stop thinking. He needs to stop imagining what-if scenarios, and needs to stop thinking about all the ways everything can go wrong. The flight’s just been delayed. His sister doesn’t know anything yet. His mom’s okay. Everything is A++. They won’t miss the flight. It’s fine.
…Anywho.
Aha, he really loves being so sleep-deprived! Spiraling thoughts and all. Aha…
Charlie clears his throat, as if that’ll clear his mind. It doesn’t, obviously, but at least the sharp sound startles the barista in front of him into action; she’d been staring at the counter, as if in a haze, lost in thought, her skin blanched and sickly-looking. Stressed. Most likely because there’s so many people around. Charlie gets that; it’s why he’d allowed himself to stay standing here in the first place, giving her a chance to get herself back together (and then ended up zoning out himself andalmostthrowinghimselfintoapanic—).
“Hi, sorry,” the barista mumbles. She lifts her hand to her face, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Uhhh… what can I get you?”
He elects to keep his voice as gentle as possible when he orders. “Just need a cup of coffee,” he says with as polite of a smile as he can summon in his fatigued state. “Largest size, whatever that’s called ‘round here. Espresso.”
“Okay…” She still looks… lost. Confused. A bead of sweat runs down her forehead. Charlie narrows his eyes. Now that he thinks about it, she looks… afraid? Strange. “To-go?” He nods. “Anything else?”
“You got any sandwiches?” (He can’t go back to Sadie without something for her to devour; she’ll probably end up biting his arm instead. Cannibal.)
The barista's hands are shaking. “Yeah.”
“I’ll take the cheapest and most filling you got.”
She nods, a quivering, jerky movement of her head. Up. Down. “Name?”
“Charlie.”
She mumbles again, this time something about getting back to him soon enough. And then she’s gone.
He doesn’t get much time to think about it all too much (not that he really wants to; he has enough shit to kill his brain cells over) because in no time, he’s got a pitcher-sized cup of coffee in his hand (for him) and a paper bag of some sandwich in the other (for Sadie. He’ll stuff it down her throat and then strangle her). There’s a longer line behind him now, all impatient people, and he hurries away.
Back to his demon of a sibling he goes…
But, first: coffee.
Charlie shifts to cradle the paper bag in his arm, practicing his fortified finger gymnastics in the form of popping open the paper cup. With years of experience on his side, he manages to get the bastard ready to pour its contents right down the column of his throat, and, hastily, as if someone from the crowd will steal his treasure, he tips his head back—
MmmmmmMMMMMM.
This is just what he needed…
Unfortunately, because the world despises him so very much, right before the euphoria of satiating his caffeine addiction fully settles in his bones, he crashes into someone.
He hates everything.
It’s his fault, really; he wasn’t exactly looking where he was going. It’s only through God’s grace that his edible jewelry doesn’t spill all over the floor, and he doesn’t break his face on a trashcan. He rushes to regain his balance, dropping the paper bag to free a hand and latching onto the person’s arm. Once he isn’t on the verge of dislocating his such-and-suchs, he quickly shoves the cap back onto the coffee cup to lessen the chance of him giving the janitors even more problems to deal with.
“Shit, man—” Ah, it’s a kid. Teen, actually, if the undoubtedly young features are anything to go by. He rushes to correct himself: “Kiddo. Sorry. I’m a bit off-kilter today, aha~ My neurons… aren’t really functioning right now. Woops!” He offers a light-hearted, please-don’t-blow-up-at-me-and-make-my-week-suck-even-fucking-more chuckle alongside a bright totally-not-completely-dead-inside-and-utterly-exhausted grin.
And then…
Charlie kind of just.
Stands there.
When you bump into someone, you simply move on (unless one party decides to be an attention whore and ruin the days of everyone in their vicinity. Some people love hearing the sounds of their voices a little too much, see). Instead, Charlie, the sleep-deprived blue-screening disaster that he is, stays rooted to the spot, blinking slowly. Maybe it’s the hair that breaks him: dyed a soft pink, the roots a jet-black, it’s an unexpected hue in this clusterfuck of blacks, browns, blondes, and gingers. When unexpected things happen in the presence of a Charlie who has not slept in 68 hours, his brain does this funny thing called taking a break from attempting to process reality.
Charlie hasn’t let go of the kid’s arm.
Actually, he’s held on even tighter.
This is weird. Yep, this is actually weird. No, this goes beyond weird and yeets straight into creepy territory. Charlie should’ve let go by now. He should’ve picked up his paper bag and smiled a little more and then promptly fucked off back to terrorize Sadie. He should’ve downed all his coffee in one gulp and then bought himself a casket to have a heart attack in. It’s the stress, he’s sure. All the events of these past couple of days and the existence of hair that is different from all the rest has finally fried his brain into oblivion. Mayhaps he will live the rest of his days as a vegetable. He wouldn’t mind that all too much, actually, if it gives him the chance to finally be done with the anarchical, mayhemic cesspool that is the cosmos.
He needs to let go of this kid’s arm, but his fingers seem to enjoy disobeying him. A few people are looking at them oddly now.
No, he actually needs to let go of the poor kid’s arm. He needs to go back to Sadie and bully her. He needs his caffeine. He needs his brain to work again. He needs the airport to not be so loud. He wants that plane to come now. He wants to go back to work and get his coworkers to stop spamming his phone about their biggest project yet. He wants to be in Montana now where he can get to directly dealing with… things. He wants his mother. He wants this entire week to reset. He wants to breathe.
He wants to let go of this kid’s arm.
Instead, his eyes fly down to the drink in the boy’s hand, and his mouth asks, “Aren’t you too young to be drinking coffee?”
Wow. That’s what leaves his mouth after almost a minute of staring at the poor kid? A question so hypocritical, considering how Charlie’s been drinking coffee since he was fuck-years-old, that he worries God is going to disown him on the spot?
Charlie huffs through his nose. Something floods into his system, an emotion that is a conglomeration of whatever the hell else is already clogging his entire bloodstream. It’s enough to get his grip to loosen, finally, and his hand falls limply to his side, where it belongs. His eyes take interest in a point above the boy’s shoulder. “Ignore me,” he says. “I— Fu— Uhhh, I’m… Not enough sleep. Haven’t slept in a while. Stressed. Doing crazy fu— things. Things.” He sighs again. “I— Damn— Darn it.”
He wishes he had the ability to dig a hole and die in it.
He has to explain this now. Him. Him and his inability to articulate things properly without having to insert fifty analogies and go on a long-ass tangent and whack in all these jokes and— Fuck. Fuck all of this. He wants to go home. He badly wants to go home, where his best friends will be down at the ready to harass him to death over Discord. He wants to go back to his apartment, where all five of his computers are, and beat his crackhead coworkers to hacking the CIA database first. He wants to just… get the fuck out of here. He could probably just walk away now, right? Turn around and sprint right off. It’s not like this kid is ever gonna see him again. And Charlie can pretend none of this ever happened.
He should probably just do that.
He purses his lips. Hums noncommittally. Turns his head down and to the side, in the direction of where he’d dropped the paper bag. Crouches down to grab the container of what will make Sadie not electrocute him in his sleep. Stands back up. Puts the cup of coffee in the paper bag. Skillfully turns around. Tunnel vision, tunnel vision. He cancels out the noise of the people around him, maps out the path he’ll tread. Calculates the bounce in his step, the distance between his feet. He will walk away casually. His movements will be relaxed and open. Uninhibited. Nothing happened. Everything’s fine. He doesn’t feel eyes boring into the back of his skull. Everything is normal. This is just… okay. Yep. A+++. He psyches himself up and lifts his head.
Charlie takes a step forward—
—and immediately gets bowled over right on his ass.
He lands hard (and painfully; linoleum floors are nowhere near soft), his bones bitching immediately, teeth crunching against each other and sending shockwaves of ouchouchouchouchouch echoing through quite possibly his entire damn body. It takes several moments for the white waves in his vision to flutter away into nothingness, and he has to drop the paper bag again to bring his hand up to his face and cradle his jaw. Ow. Fuck, way to not make him look even more like an idiot, universe.
What is it with today, anyway? Why does everything hate him?
Brows furrowed angrily, he snaps his eyes open and jerks his head up to confront the person who dared challenge his skeletal system’s durability. This person-to-person impact wasn’t on him, this time. No, he had the right-of-way. He doesn’t care if the jackass is in a rush to catch their flight; that doesn’t give you the right to shove people aside so hard that they get knocked the hell over. It’s just rude. Charlie’s gonna give this idiot a piece of his mi—
Oh.
At first, he thinks it’s just an overenthusiastic reunion. Although it’s uncommon for meet-ups between folks to be… passionate, it’s not entirely out of the picture. Charlie can attest to this. Once upon a time, when he was even more of an idiot and in college, Charlie jumped one of his close friends, Caelum, in a parking lot right as they both came back from summer break. Niven, his other close friend, has the whole thing recorded on every single one of his gadgets; he has it saved to his cloud, even, just so Caelum screaming bloody murder is indubitably immortalized. Charlie’s maniacal laughter and Caelum’s screeching pleas for help were so inhumanly loud that they could be heard all the way up on the second floor. Even after Caelum figured out that it was Charlie who’d spooked him, he kept on screaming, and Charlie kept on laughing, and then blue and red lights assaulted their eyeballs. It took a while for the three friends to awkwardly tell the police that nothing was wrong, that, yes, they were friends, they were simply goofing around, they were little jerks who liked to take things a little too far, and we’re so sorry for bothering you!
So, when the guy that threw Charlie on his butt gets tackled by some other dude merely ten seconds later, and that same guy starts shrieking, the first thing that Charlie thinks is, Some friends really are a little too silly.
But when Charlie feels something warm splatter across his cheek, sees a pool of red paint the floor, he thinks, Oh.
He thinks, Oh, fuck.
Suddenly, there’s more than one scream piercing the cold air. Charlie’s may or may not be among them.
Winter 
Night 
Clear Moon: 
