@emeraldhellfire | meme | accepting

     EVEN ON HIS days off, he can’t quite escape the pull of music. It pulls him like a magnet, luring him like a siren song into bars and clubs that has a bass beat you can hear from the outside. Well, that and boredom. He should be working, there’s a massive backlog sat on his laptop waiting for his attention and there’s an anxiety-inducing amount of messages left in his voicemail but he’s been ignoring those for three days now and another two won’t hurt. The only person he’ll respond to is his mother - you don’t keep Russian women hanging if you want to keep your limbs intact, after all - but there’s been nothing but silence on that front since he made the promise to swing by home on his way to Toronto. Even now, with the beat of the music muffled through the restroom wall, he hear the faint chimes of his phone in his back pocket. He was supposed to have turned that onto silent too. His hands shoved under the running water and covered in soap, there’s not much he can do until he dries them anyway. 

The reflection in the mirror is avoided until he can’t any longer, pale eyes flicking up to catch the image of himself, looking like he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards, staring back at him. It’s met with a grimace and he shakes the water off one hand to pull his hair back into something that no longer resembles a bird’s nest. The bright fluorescent strip lights do him no favours, the pale purple sheen to the tips of his hair catching his attention and causing him to lurch forward with a volley of colourful curses to inspect the pinch of hair he’s pulled down into his face. Five days. From what was supposed to be permanent hair dye. It’s costing him a fortune. “Fuckin’ brilliant.” It’s muttered as he pushes the hair back and removes himself from the basin to dry his hands and leave the restroom, wiping the damp off on the back of his jeans before fishing his phone from his pocket.

Eight missed calles and twenty seven messages. Another muttered curse as he weaves his way back towards the bar, only pausing to pass a mildly alarmed expression towards the DJ booth at the far end of the building when the rookie at the decks mixed in from a low BPM to a high with no skill at all. No one else noticed or were too drunk to care. Quietly he slips into a free space at the bar, still thumbing through his phone while noticing the dirty look the bartender shot him in his peripheral vision as she all but stomped down the other end and flashed a fake smile at the customers there. It probably took him too long to realised that he was being addressed and he blinked dumbly at his phone before looking up at the woman off to his right. Confusion flickered over his features momentarily before his attention switched to the back of the bartender, still a ways off. “I’m…sorry?” His phone chimes again and immediately he puts it onto the silent mode it was supposed to be on in the first place. “If you’re talkin’ about the bartender, she’ll be back soon enough. She kinda hates me but she’s gotta do her job so…” he trails off with a loose, one-shouldered shrug. “If you mean someone else then I got nothin’.”