David North: Overdose

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A catatonic North becomes increasingly drunk during his first day home

Warnings: Drug abuse, drug overdose, and brief reference to a child’s death.


Mental Note #1: Change the apartment locks

The doorknob rattled stubbornly once, then twice before the lock slid open with an audible ‘click’.

David stepped into the apartment and deposited the lock-pick on the table by the door, dull blue eyes briefly scanning the apartment for potential threats. He locked up, drawing the chain into place before slowly shuffling into the kitchen. A bottle of whiskey stood on the counter and he grabbed it without thinking, pouring a generous four fingers of the lukewarm liquid into a tumbler retrieved from the cupboard.

Alcohol in hand, frame trembling, and brain still firmly shut off, the precog made a beeline for his desk. He fumbled around the drawers, an unbidden sigh of relief slipping past dry lips when fingers closed around a small, cylindrical bottle. Two pills were popped into his mouth, washed down with a mouthful of whiskey that burned all the way down to his empty stomach.

For a long while, David stood there, eyes closed and insides churning.

Images pounded against his skull – memories, not visions – and, alone, he could admit that he did not have the mental gumption to push them away. Not tonight. So he leaned heavily against the desk, bowed his head and gave in to them as they flicked past his mind’s eye, each incomplete scene moving too quickly to the next to really make sense of.

There was no need to. It all came together in one large, twisted picture of death, fire and pain.

The story of his life.

Mental Note #2: Unclog the sink

Sometimes, David wished he had punched in the bathroom mirror when he first moved in to the Brownstone. As he shaved, he stared blankly at the tap, focused on drawing even strokes down his chin with an unsteady hand. The overgrowth of facial hair would probably clog the sink, but he washed it down anyway.

When shadowed blue eyes unintentionally drifted to his vague reflection on the shower stall glass, the greying man reached for the scissors in the medicine cabinet and started hacking off chunks of too-long hair that had fallen past his ears and almost brushed the top of his collar. Each clench of his fingers was accompanied by a loud ‘snckkkt!’ and the drifting of brown and grey strands to the tiled floor. He worked methodically, and unflinchingly, not stopping until most of it was gone, swirling down the drain.

Then he emptied a can of shaving cream onto his head and took the rest of it off.

As he washed off the remnants of shaving cream from his face, his gaze travelled down to the borrowed clothes he had on, hanging almost limply off his too-thin frame. Mouth pressed into a straight line, he walked into his bedroom and retrieved the knife he kept by his bed. Then, roughly pulling the material away from his neck, he dug the sharpened knife through the thin material from the outside and jerked it down, listening to the satisfying loud rip with a strange smile on his lips.

For the next ten minutes, he sat naked on his bed, haphazardly shredding the shirt and the pants until all that remained were tatters of black and white material lying on his bedroom floor. Blood dripped to the floor from the accidental slash he made to his palm, and a deadened gaze watched as it seeped from the wound, down too-pale flesh. The sound of droplets hitting the lacquered floor made for a strangely hypnotic rhythm.

The trembling had not stopped, so he swallowed another three pills with the rest of the whiskey, one after the other, and ignored the way his heart seemed to palpitate out of his chest.

He washed the blood down the drain and taped up the cut, but it took a good half hour under a scalding shower spray and all the shower gel in the half-full bottle before he felt remotely clean. Clean, he muttered to the empty air beside him as he pulled on a pair of boxers and sleeping pants, was relative.

It was an argument his mother had never bought. But then she had died, her husband standing by and doing nothing, abandoning her teenage sons to the tempests of a war-torn world. Exposing them prematurely to the poisonous taste of power and might, of cruelty and domination, and to the fragility of life that they could crush so easily in their fists. His mother had not married an evil man, no. She made merely married a man who lacked compassion and the knowledge of how to raise two rambunctious teenagers.

David shook his head and the abrupt memories of a lifetime ago fell from the forefront of his mind as he retrieved another bottle of whiskey from his cupboard.

Mental Note #3: Clean the apartment

Floating. An excellent state to be in. It was like being adrift at sea as he drew his last breaths under a dying sun. There was no room for thinking, no space for remembering details. All he could do was lie there, and allow himself to be awash with sensations and feelings that lapped persistently at him, refusing to let go. Just like the smell of death that would not go away.

There were so many things clinging to him, weighing him down, he mused with a strangled murmur, absentmindedly dragging his trigger finger through the thin layer of dust that coated his coffee table and everything else in the apartment. His heart almost hurt from the combined weight of death and destruction and pain and heartbreak and betrayal and responsibilities and unending confusion that started when he was a young man and simply never stopped.

Yet it could not be. Years had passed since his heart felt pain. Because all the pain he rerouted straight to his brain for logic and rationalizing to deal with.

Deadened heart. David North had no heart.

It had died with young, foolish Christophe Nord.

And it was the only way he could keep breathing.

Inhale. Exhale. One breath in after the other. The way countless number of people he had killed could no longer do. His best friend and teammates and the hundreds of other nameless faces adding to a count he had lost track of decades ago. Oh, he never killed for fun or in cold blood. But, just as he had told a roomful of mutants just last week: “I kill people.” Just one step shy of being a megalomaniac psychopath, maybe.

Perhaps ‘assassin’ would be a better title for him than ‘spy’ or ‘soldier’ or ‘veteran’. One could even put all those together to form the word ‘monster’. Mastodon certainly preferred that last title when he featured in his dreams, haunted grey eyes accusing as blood leaked from the bullet wound in his head. Monster, his best friend said, chanting the words over and over until the blood gurgled in his throat and the words bled into a choked scream.

The unnatural calm shattered, and the feeling of floating dissipated. In its place was the familiar one of drowning.

Bringing his finger to his face, David blew gently at the dust clinging to it. For a moment, glazed orbs watched as the finger shook, almost tauntingly, at him. Then the marksman sighed and brushed it off, heaving himself off his IKEA couch to retrieve another bottle of whiskey from his IKEA cupboards and his trusty bottle of pills from his IKEA desk.

He had kept it together for so long. For too long? … It did not matter. He had earned the right to let go for a while. Just for that one night until he had to wake up and face the loveless world again. To stop thinking about things that he needed – but not necessarily wanted – to do, for the sake of other people. After all, he was the best kind of operative there could be in a war – a soldier with nothing left to lose, save for that shred of humanity that gave him enough purpose to keep pushing for the right cause.

But not tonight, his brain told him. Tomorrow you can go back to pretending that you are all right.

David scoffed aloud at his brain and drank deeply from his tumbler.

“Deluded,” he slurred in his mother tongue, aiming for and missing altogether the usual practiced inflections in his tone. “What is there to pretend?”

Mental Note #4: Contact dealer

Toss and catch. Toss and catch. The last pill rattled in its opaque container, the fake prescription label flashing at him as he threw it lightly into the air and caught it in his hand even as he sat slumped against the couch cushions, breathing heavily through his mouth.

For the life of him, David could not remember how many pills he had started with that day. It could not have been that many; his last drug run had been more than a month ago. The thick, opaque haze of alcohol settled in his mind, a welcome respite from a week of having his powers active and running for the better part of the days. Every other vision in the last week had been about his death. And for every other vision he changed, someone else paid the price of it with their life by his hand.

He shook the last pill onto his palm, and eyed it. The shaking was beginning to wear off, he thought blearily, raising an unsteady palm to eye level as if to prove it to himself.

Suppressing the withdrawal while around so many mutants had been difficult and exceedingly painful. But no one needed to know what he had realized only two days into their capture. No one needed to know that he was a drug addict. They had better – and bigger – things to worry about.

Like the little girl and her screams. Like their begging that went unheeded. Like the breaking of their conscience and the staining of their hands with the irremovable taint of crimson blood. Like the consequences of their failures, and the heavy prices paid for their triumphs. Like necessarily leaving their morals at the door…

There were things David had done in his life that he was not proud of. Most (although unfortunately not all) of them had been necessary, involuntary or on the orders of men who held the power. He could not afford to regret. Because once he started down that path, the road would wind on forever, leading into the horizon and beyond with no end in sight to the regretting. How could he regret choosing that outcome where he was captured with Marie-Ange, when it meant allowing Emma and Lucas Bishop to escape where they would otherwise all have perished? How could he regret young Layla Miller’s first trigger-pull and kill when she had saved the life of Adrienne Frost? How could he regret leaving that gun in a teenager’s unskilled hands when it meant self-protection and saving her life? How could he regret revealing his decision to kill Sarah Vale to Angelica Jones if it meant achieving the mission objectives and getting the rest of his team out alive?

He could not regret. And he would not regret. Because David North was doing a job and he was doing it to the best of his abilities. He would bear the heavy weight of the knowledge of sacrifices that he sometimes consciously made in battle. Of telling people what they should do without explaining to them exactly what he had seen and which outcome he had chosen. This was his burden. The others had theirs. They bore it without complaint, and so he did too.

They had fought for their freedom and the freedom of others. They had paid the price and won. And now things could go back to what passed off as normal.

Yes, the shaking in his hand had stopped.

Fumbling with the pill bottle, David dropped the last pill back into its bottle with a rattle, tossing it onto the table with clumsy fingers and an uncoordinated throw, and ignoring it when it rolled right off the glass surface. He brought the tumbler to his lips and drained it.

Perhaps now he could sleep. And maybe the exhaustion and unending thinking would finally stop.

Mental Note #5: Replace handguns... and shoot the Naked Lady

He never made it to his room.

Rather, he lay sprawled on the floor, bare chest pressed against the tiled floor that had heated under his skin. In his hand was a set of battered and scratched dogtags – the only possession Genosha had returned to him, his firearms lost amidst the chaos. Funny how the metal tags always made their way back to him, reminding him of what he had been trained to become.

The fact that he was lying face first, half under his coffee table, did not bother David in the least, and he settled in to sleep, hoping against hope that he was too intoxicated to have to suffer through another nightmare.

But then, he was a little too tired to care. And his brain was too heavy; saturated with all the remembering. The dam in his head had imploded, unraveling all the control and the compact compartmentalization of his mental faculties. But there was little to it; things would be back in place as they always were when he woke up. After he dealt with his hangover, changed the locks on his doors, unclogged the sink, cleaned the apartment and contacted his dealer, he would head back to the office to file his report and reconnect with intelligence webs; return things to normal.

If his unfailingly coherent subconscious noticed the spasming of his muscles, or the heaving of his chest as his body tried to draw in more oxygen, the message never made it to his limited consciousness.

As his heart rate plummeted, and eyes slipped further shut over dilated pupils, David noted with a violent twitch that Adrienne Frost was shouting in the building. Probably visiting her sister and staying the night for comfort. He would have thought she would be with Vanessa for that. But his Katzchen was probably losing it in private or taking a snooze with someone else she trusted while the Naked Lady raised hell in the Brownstone.

And then, quite abruptly, David knew no more.