Oh shit, he knew better than this! He knew better than to leave a drink unattended and then finish it off, especially in a place like this. Looking out at the half naked men moving to the thudding beat under deep, colorful lights that seemed like signs of violence - bruise purple, blood red, cyanotic blue, decomposing green - he could almost believe he was looking at some kind of underworld gathering, a stag party in hell.

Roan knew he was disconnecting. His mind felt fuzzy, and his skin continued to prickle, but in a way that was pleasurable. Much, much too pleasurable; just a breeze against his skin verged on eye rolling ecstasy.

Ecstasy. Oh shit. This was ecstasy, wasn’t it? Or some chemical equivalent. He shouted for Dylan as the drug continued to make reality seem glassy, like a pond coated with a thin sheet of translucent ice. Dylan came over and started to ask what was wrong, but then he looked at his eyes and his expression transformed into a mask of shock. “Are you high?” he asked in disbelief.

“Who was near my drink?” he asked, holding on to the edge of the bar as if he might fall off. And he was afraid he might.

Dylan shook his head. “I don’t know. I was at the other end of the bar. Somebody drugged your drink? Was it a roofie?”

“I dunno. I think it might be something like ecstasy. I’d better get outta here.” He slid off his stool and tried to walk to the back, but he found standing and walking at the same time surprisingly difficult. Maybe because the floor seemed to be moving.

He leaned heavily on the bar, and Dylan slipped out from behind it - part of it opened, which Roan had hardly noticed before - and he quickly draped Roan’s arm over his shoulders as he put his own arm beneath them, and he didn’t so much help him into the back room as drag him. At least Dylan was pretty strong. “Cover for me,” he said to Luis before kicking the door shut, leaving some of the music behind, but only the treble.

There was an equipment locker shoved up against the wall, and Roan didn’t sit on it more than he collapsed, feeling the last of his sense drain away. Oddly, he didn’t have that much to lose.

“We have ambulances standing by,” Dylan said, and Roan belatedly realized he’d been talking for a while. “You know how these things go. It’d be easy to get some EMTs in here -”

“And have it get back to Dee? Fuck that. I’ll be fine.”

“Who cares about who it gets back to? If you’ve been overdosed -”

“I haven’t. Anyone who wants to kill me with drugs has a fight on their hands. I’m an infected - we have a drug tolerance that would make Keith Richards jealous.” He pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes, and watched the colors explode inside his eyelids with a strangely pleasurable feeling attached to each and every one. He knew he might be putting too much pressure on his eyes, but there was no pain. Only the pleasure center of his brain seemed to be functioning right now.

Dylan grabbed his hands gently and pulled them away from his eyes, probably worrying that he was inadvertently hurting himself, but his touch seemed to send an electric current through his arms, shooting up his spine and raising goose bumps on his skin. When had someone’s touch ever felt that good? Dylan crouched down in front of him, holding his hands between his, giving him a worried look. “What if I take you to the ER, huh? Get you checked out?”

Roan shook his head. “I’m fine, really. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I felt this good.” He slid his hands out from his, enjoying the friction, and realized what an idiot he had been.

Roan had never been good at the game, at picking up guys, which was probably why all his boyfriends - Connor, Paris, Diego - were really quite excellent at it. They played the game so he didn’t have to. All this talking with Dylan, even though it didn’t really seem like it … it was flirting, wasn’t it? No wonder everyone was under the impression they were fucking. They were giving off signs of interest, only he hadn’t realized it. Wow - some detective he was.

Dylan’s concerned look didn’t go away. “Okay, no. You know it’s the drugs.”

“That’s most of it,” he admitted, and grabbed Dylan’s face and kissed him. It felt much better than he could have ever imagined; it was like a straight shot of ecstasy right into his brain, electric and intense.

Dylan was shocked, and it seemed he tensed under the contact, pushing him away and holding him back at arm’s length. “Whoa. Okay, you don’t mean that.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean. You can’t say you don’t want me.”

He looked confused. “Roan, you’re completely stoned right now. The drugs make you horny, which is why everyone uses them in a place like this. It’s why you can often find an orgy in the bathroom by the end of the night.”

Roan grabbed him by the back of his head, his hair as soft as silk. Dylan did have really nice eyes, chocolate brown and almost feline in shape, deep and dark, suggesting something a bit exotic in his genetic background. Dylan grabbed his arm, but Roan knew he could easily overpower the normal Human if he really wanted to - no matter how muscular you were, you were still Human, and he didn’t have that limitation. “Did you know that attraction has a smell? It does. When you’re attracted to someone, there’s a shift in body chemistry, which is a shift in your smell. It’s subtle, no one ever really notices, but I can pick up pheromones. They taste like adrenaline, you know? Metallic. I know you want me, but the weirdest thing is, I didn’t realize I wanted you. I didn’t want to realize it. It’s like cheating on Paris.”

“Roan -” he began warningly, and Roan was picking up conflicting scents from him. Fear, lust.

“You shouldn’t be scared of me. I only want what you want.” He drew him back into a kiss, hard and passionate, and Dylan’s resistance crumbled almost instantly. He responded with a kiss as hungry as his own, and he felt bad for the kid that he never read the signals he was giving off.

That was one thing he didn’t get about heterosexuals. In most cases a man could accidentally hurt a woman, couldn’t he? He couldn’t kiss her as hard as he wanted to, for fear of inadvertent harm. But you could kiss a man as hard as you wanted and he could kiss back just as hard - there was no holding back. In most cases, you had a partner who could give back as good as they got.

He stood up, feeling a bit more sure on his feet, pulling Dylan up with him, and shoved him against the wall, the feeling of his hard, warm body far more pleasurable than it had any right to be. Dylan tasted like the mints he’d been chewing all night, a cool taste like ice water. Roan reached up under his shirt, as he had to feel his skin, and it was like sweet electricity running up his arms once more as he touched the long, smooth muscles of Dylan’s back. Sweat was pouring through Roan’s pores at such an alarming rate he could smell the drugs in his own bloodstream, and the scent was confusing, enough so that Dylan was able to push him back again, although not as far this time. “Okay,” he gasped, panting for breath. “Okay. Roan -”

“Don’t deny it,” he said. Had he growled? Belatedly, he thought he heard a growl in his voice.

Although Roan thought he smelled a spike of fear coming from Dylan, it didn’t show on his face. “I’m not. It’s just -”

“You want me.”

“Not like this.” He cupped his face gently in his hands, and looked him straight in the eyes. “Let me get you home, okay?”

The feeling of his skin on his remained electric, sending a shuddering pleasure through his nerves. “Fine. Let’s go to my place.”

He grimaced, almost smiling. “Damn, that did sound like a come on, didn’t it? Not what I meant.”

“I mean it,” he said, and then bit his neck. Not hard enough to break the skin, just hard enough to let him know he was serious, to let him know he was marked. Dylan let out a gasp of surprise more than pain, and he felt his fingers briefly tighten on his biceps. God, it felt good; even the smell of his fear was arousing.

He remembered leaving the warehouse only as a cessation of noise and smells, giving way to cooler night air that initiated a cascade of pleasure all its own. Who knew a temperature shift could feel this good? Blood pounded through his head, an echo of drums like machine guns, and his shirt was so wet with sweat it was like he just walked out of the bay.

(Somewhere, vaguely in the back of his mind, he remembered something about dehydration being a serious consequence of ecstasy, and some people actually dying from it while on the stuff. But only vaguely, and he didn’t really pay attention to it, as he couldn’t. His mind was pulsing with energy, and his skin was just one raw nerve.)

The drive home was a colorful blur of lights that felt like a caress. Dylan occasionally said something, mostly along the lines of “You still with me, Roan?” which he thought was a funny thing to ask. Where else was he going to go?

Dylan had to unlock his front door, because for some reason he had some problems with the key. “You need to drink something,” Dylan said, taking a minute to figure out where the light switch was.

“Beer’d be good.”

“No, you need water.” He headed to his kitchen like this was his place too, and Roan just leaned against the wall, amazed that this felt good. He now knew why people did ecstasy, even if it did burn your brain out faster than a Brady Bunch marathon.

Dylan brought him a bottle of water from the fridge, and asked, “Why are there nametags on your appliances?”

“I can’t have pets. I might eat ‘em.” He took the bottle from Dylan, painfully aware that he was standing arm’s length away from him, out of reach. “You really that scared of me?”

“I’m not scared of you, you’re just not yourself right now.”

He took the cap off the bottle and gulped the water down, the sudden cold feeling like the world’s best orgasm. Holy shit, what a great drug this was. He didn’t realize he was thirsty until he had the water, and now he was incredibly thirsty, guzzling the water like it was the last bottle of the stuff on the planet. He finished it off and gasped, suddenly realizing he needed to breathe, and when he could talk, he told Dylan, “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head dismissively. “You have nothing to be sorry for. The drugs -”

“No, not that. I’m sorry I didn’t realize I was kinda leading you on. Was I doin’ that to Matt too? No, I don’t think so in his case.” He felt unsteady on his feet, so he sank down the wall and sat on the floor, letting the empty bottle drop there. “I’m so fucked up. I’ve been fucked up since I lost him, you know? I’m not sure I know how to live without him. Isn’t that awful? How someone can just come in and upset your entire life.”

Dylan sat down on the floor, still remaining safely out of immediate reach, folding his long legs beneath him in an easy lotus position. He probably did yoga; it probably went along with being a Buddhist. “I’m not going to lie to you and say it gets easier, because it doesn’t. It’s just that you get used to it. The Human animal has an amazing capacity to get used to almost anything.”

“But you almost killed yourself.”

Dylan visibly flinched and looked away, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “You dug that up too, huh?”

“No. I saw your scars tonight.”

Dylan looked down at his exposed arms. In full light, they were harder to see; they were almost invisible. But now that Roan knew they were there, they were impossible not to see. “It wasn’t actually Jason that made me try it,” he muttered, his voice lowered to a whisper. “After his death, and after I got out of the hospital, I wasn’t sure I could function or even wanted to. But then I poured everything into vengeance; I wanted to make sure Steadman paid for what he did, hitting us and killing him. But as the court date kept getting put off, and the charges kept getting bargained down, I got obsessive and furious. That fucker was gonna do only a couple of years for taking all of the rest of Jason’s life away, and he never even seemed remorseful. As the hearing approached, I went out and bought a gun, and started to plan how I would get it in the courtroom and take him out. I had a friend working janitorial at the courthouse, so I had a way to get it in, and in my mind I had worked it all out. I could see myself killing him, blowing him away, his brains coating the wall like a Jackson Pollock. And that’s when I realized I was seeing my mother’s brains splattered all over the bedroom wall, and my father’s. I thought … shit, I was turning into my dad. I was a monster, just like he was. I just … it scared me so much, I couldn’t bear it. I grabbed the first thing I saw, which was an X-acto knife, and sliced my arms open. It was better to die than to be another monster like that. But Sheba found me before I totally bled out, and I was in the hospital when Steadman was sentenced, which was surely for the best. When I got out, I chucked away the Prozac and found Buddhism, hoping against hope that it would save me from becoming like him.” He rubbed his eyes like he was trying to hide tears, which was something Roan knew all too well. Even through the drugs, he could remember that self-loathing, that fear, that lingering stain of abuse.

“I was afraid of that,” he admitted. “I still am sometimes, that I’m gonna turn out just like my foster parents, the bad ones. But it’s not true. I’m not them, and you’re not your father. You’re one of the sweetest men I’ve ever met. And I have scars too.” He knew he could see the one that sliced his eyebrow in half - everyone could see that scar - but he peeled his shirt off, so he could see his largest scar, the one along his collarbone. Since he was sitting against the wall, he’d never see the bullet hole scar - more of a pockmark really - on his back, but that was a minor one anyways. “We all have scars. The ones you can see are easier.”

Dylan stared at him for a very long moment, his eyes eventually finding the long whitish scar made by the saw, and then moved slowly back up to his face. For a very long time, his expression was unreadable. “Paris used to talk about you all the time,” he said. “When he came into Panic. I always wondered why he never hooked up with anyone, and yeah, I was attracted to him too, although I knew better than to hit on him. After flirting for a while and getting too many guys’ hopes up, he’d sit at the bar and wax rhapsodic about you. God, he loved you. He told me that you had a brusque exterior that some people found off putting, but if they got to know you, if they got in under your armor, they’d fall instantly in love with you. I think I know what he meant now.”

Bringing up Paris now was disorienting. He missed him; he missed him so fucking much he didn’t know how he could stand it. But the drugs were filling in all those empty places, smoothing away so much pain that all he could feel now was need. “Stay with me.”

There was a long silence as Dylan thought it over.

****

Roan woke up with a pounding headache and a taste in his mouth like it had been reupholstered with dirty sweat socks. Since when did ecstasy give you a hangover? Maybe it was dehydration - he had absolutely no spit left.

He took a long shower, washing the drug stink off his skin, and took three Excedrin, considering vicodin and rejecting it. He’d had enough hard drugs for one weekend.

Vaguely, fragments of last night started coming back to him. Someone slipped him a mickey at the circuit party - god, how fucking embarrassing. He pulled on some sweatpants and went downstairs, his aching stomach now taking precedence over the pounding in his head, and he let his hair drip down over his face, enjoying the mere feeling of water. He was probably lucky he hadn’t fatally dehydrated.

Or maybe it wasn’t luck. He found a couple of empty water bottles just beyond the base of the stairs, as well as the shirt he’d been wearing last night, sweat soaked and discarded. That’s when he remembered Dylan, and froze. Oh shit, oh holy shit, did he fuck him? He desperately searched his aching brain for memories, but there weren’t many forthcoming.

There was movement on the couch, he heard it as well as saw it out of the corner of his eye, and looked to see Dylan stretched out there, the blue plaid throw half covering him and half on the floor. He was still wearing his clothes, although he‘d kicked his shoes off. Roan breathed a sigh of relief, although it belatedly occurred to him that maybe Dylan just got dressed before he decided to sleep it off. Seemed unlikely, though.

He padded quietly to the refrigerator and drank pineapple orange juice directly from the carton. He gulped down most of the quart without taking a breath - he couldn’t remember the last time he was this thirsty. He grabbed another bottle of water to have while he put the coffee on, and heard a sleepy voice say, “Good morning.”

Roan glanced at the clock on the microwave display before glancing at Dylan, who was sitting up and stretching his arms over his head. “Technically, it’s afternoon.”

“Is it?” Dylan dropped his arms and rolled his head like he was working kinks out of his neck. Maybe he was; there weren’t any pillows on the couch. “Well, parties take it out of you.”

“Yeah. Um … did we … ”

“No, we didn’t,” he said, getting up. “Can I use your bathroom?”

What a relief. “Knock yourself out.” This proved how noble Dylan could be, because he wasn’t sure, if the situation had been reversed, that he wouldn’t have taken advantage of him. He was an attractive man beyond a doubt.

As he went off, Roan searched around to see what he could nuke for a quick breakfast, but there wasn’t a lot. He needed to go shopping again, although this time he should bring a car. There were some croissants he nuked to warm up, and by that time the coffee was done and Dylan had returned. “What do you take?” he asked, gesturing at the coffee.

“On days like this? Way too much sugar.”

“Got it.” He searched the cupboards for a full minute before coming up with a couple of sugar packets that must have been leftovers from some fast food restaurant past. “This is all I’ve got.”

“I’ll take it.”

They sat on opposites sides of the breakfast bar and had croissants and coffee, and Roan realized he was shirtless. But Dylan didn’t seem to care.

They ate in silence for almost five minutes, and then Roan decided he couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’m really sorry -”

“Don’t,” he replied, shaking his head. “It wasn’t your fault, there was no damage done. So don’t be sorry. How do you feel?”

“Besides completely fucking humiliated? Better than twenty minutes ago, but not as good as last night.”

“I wouldn’t recommend doing ecstasy as a lifestyle.”

“Fuck man, don’t worry. It was fun for a while, but I need all the brain cells I have. Besides, I don’t like getting out of control like that. The lion could come out, and no good ever comes of that.”

Dylan studied him for a moment, and Roan knew now that he wasn’t wearing colored contacts. “Would that ever happen? You really seem like the stronger of the two.”

“Usually I am, but I have moments of weakness. You saw some last night. I’m … okay, I can’t apologize without you telling me not to, so I won’t. Assume it’s implied.”

He finished his croissant and his coffee and set his plate and mug aside. “What happens now?”

Roan considered pretending he didn’t know what he was talking about, but even Dylan wouldn’t believe he’d lost that many brain cells. He set his dishes aside, and folded his hands together on the breakfast bar. “I don’t know. What … what do you think?”

He didn’t have to think about it for too long. “I don’t want to be your rebound guy, Roan.”

He nodded, totally understanding that. “It’s not something anyone wants, no. I -” Roan paused as Dylan stood up and came over to his side of the breakfast bar, where he leaned down and kissed him.

It was a very chaste kiss on the lips really, but he kept the contact for a long time, and it just ached with tenderness. Something about it seemed strangely erotic. Roan let Dylan break the contact, as it was the absolute least he could do after last night. “I want more than that,” Dylan told him, his voice and expression both questioning and kind. “Is that possible?”

There was no other term for it really - he felt gobsmacked. After all that, he still wanted him? And for more than a quick fuck? Weird. It kind of scared him. “Give me time.”

“Absolutely.” He then gave him a gentle kiss on the forehead before quickly taking his place on the other side of the bar. “Do you want to finish getting dressed? I can drive you back to the parking lot so you can pick up your car.”

Oh shit, he’d forgotten all about that. That wasn‘t a great area of town either, so he hoped no one had ripped it off. “Oh, yeah. Thanks, I’d appreciate that.”

“No problem.” Roan was half way up the stairs when Dylan added, “Oh! Crap, I forgot to tell you last night. I found out Ginger Snapp’s real name. It’s Bryan Dodd; he used to work at the Blockbuster on Jameson Avenue. Is that a help?”

He looked down at him, and knew why he was scared. This shit was always scary, interacting with people, but even more troubling was the idea that there might be life after Paris. But there probably was, whether he liked it or not. “It’s a big help, Dylan.”

And Dylan was too, although he didn’t know if he’d ever tell him that.