One night Billy decided to record the effects alcohol had on him, if only because he needed to know if there was any risk of him.... embarrassing himself. Content with his findings, he would drown his sorrows that following night. Sleepy-drunk he could deal with. Three drinks in and he was sleeping like a baby with blissfully blank dreams.

School hadn't started yet, so there was no homework to distract him, so as soon as he was done with the day's events, he'd quickly take to his liquid sleeping pill. There was no fight club tonight to keep him from it either. Pity. He could have done with some roughing people up. It was the only downside to his passive energy gathering method here in Fatesville.

There was nothing to keep him from his dreamless slumber.

Nothing to stop the short fade to black.

Occasionally he would awake with a start, and look around as if he had caught a glimpse of something familiar, or heard something. It was all in his head - petite black figures walking around in the corners of his vision, soft whispers like sighs... Wishful thinking. Sometimes he'd simply see a set of green eyes and that would jolt him awake just long enough to realize it was nothing.

It was nothing.

He didn't want to believe that.

He wanted to believe that he was on the couch at Ladon's apartment, hazy and drifting to sleep after a long hard night of patrolling, or sparring in the Rift. He didn't wan't to believe that things were over, or that they maybe never had been. It had to be real, or else why would he be in the place he was now, so far from himself?


A third bottle opened, and already the silver-haired boy was swaying, pink eyes practically shut.

That same bottle, half consumed, was carelessly sat on the glass coffee table. Obviously Billy felt he had enough, and began the slow walk to his nearby bedroom where he'd burrow in to the dark sheets - the quilt and the comforter, bury his head in a mass of pillows with another held tightly, a habit still left over from the last bed he'd slept in, only instead of a pillow, it had been a warm body. In a comforting delusion maybe it was. Just another thing he'd have to thank the alcohol for.

Before he could question it though, he was asleep - drawn in to a dark, imageless, world, where he flew far away from himself, from memory, from life. So far, far away.