Tender Fireside Poetry?
[Takes place at end of Personality Switch plot]

The Slayer had spent at least ten to fifteen minutes staring at her phone after the somewhat... disturbing voicemail from her partner had finished.

Several thoughts went through her head: "What the hell was he on?" - "We go much longer without talking" - "Is he unwell?" and finally but not at all least, "He's wearing my t-shirt... has he started cross-dressing?" Sufficed to say the Slayer was both confused and concerned, wondering what could have happened to Darian to make him sound like some sort of emo-horrific teenager?

Deciding that she was going to get to the bottom of this Bethany pulled on a jacket and slipped her feet into her heels, picking the keys up from Ralphael on the way out of the door. She didn't even bother stopping to answer his questioning gaze.

It didn't take her very long to arrive at the Dealmaker's apartment and with a few decisive strides she came to a smooth stop in front of his door, rapping her knuckles against the door. Hopefully he was in and hadn't gone out in his condition, whatever that condition was.

Beyond the door, the apartment was poorly lit. The only source of light was a lamp that had been draped in a shirt because its bulb was too bright to suit Darian's mood. The window blinds had been drawn, too, blocking out an upper-floor view of Chicago's downtown. Music came from a sound system he couldn't have owned more than a few days, because, simply put, Darian didn't like music enough to take a leisurely listen. At the moment, it played Barber's depressing 'Adagio for Strings'.

On the floor in front of his couch, he sat in jeans and a button-down, black shirt, open at the throat. Blank pieces of typing paper were meticulously stacked on an end table. Periodically, he got rid of whatever he was writing (literally burning the pages in effigy with a Zippo and tossing them in a metal bin) and grabbed another page. A disconnected smoke alarm sat on the couch, its empty underbelly exposed.

"Come in." He drank from a bottle of Maker's Mark whisky and set it on the floor.

Bethany reached for the handle, surprised to find the door open. She stepped inside and closed it behind herself, squinting briefly at the very poor light. "Darian?" She called, heels clicking against his floor.

She eventually came across him on the ground and lifted an eyebrow at the sight. "Did the smoke alarm do something to upset you?" Bethany asked as her gaze caught sight of its stripped underbelly on the nearby couch.

"Yes. It kept going off." Darian raised the latest of his eloquently-written but stodgy declarations of love and suffering. He struck the flint and watched a line of hungry, orange fire eat the words. There was a cramp in his hand; he couldn't recall the last occasion when he wrote anything by hand.

Once the paper was a ball of flame, he dropped it in the bin, which smoked up the air. Twice already, he had singed his arm hairs, but that was fine, because the stinging pain had been an appropriate accompaniment to the agony of rejection he felt inside.

Darian took another page and scrawled 'Epiphany on the Cruel Nature of Affection and the Wisdom of a Hardened Heart' across the top in black ink. "I wondered if you'd call." He sniffed.

Bethany slid her jacket off her shoulders and rested it over the arm of the crouch, settling her weight on those pinprick heels as she brought herself more to his level. "What's going on, Darian?" She'd seen the scrawling and barely kept her eyebrows from climbing towards her hairline. "You seem very out of sorts."

She smoothed her palm over those singed arm hairs and closed her fingers around the arm itself. "And if I recall correctly, you like a woman who doesn't need to call every five seconds, it's part of my charm is it not?" Something was wrong, very wrong. Darian was nothing like the Darian she had come to know and love.

"Darian," Bethany murmured. "What happened?"

He stopped writing and looked up, debating how to answer the question. Darian set his pen down; it rolled into his lap. "Nothing," he said, though the rational part of him knew that couldn't be true. However inflated his emotions had become, he could still recall what he normally felt and thought, and this was far from it. "Everything."

He rubbed his eyes and sighed. All the 'caring' was growing tiresome, and yet it was entrenched in him now and seemed entirely beyond his control. "For the last two weeks, I've been thinking about my life, and how it's this... open, festering wound of deceit and dysfunction. I can't be around my clients, they--" He swallowed because his throat was tight. He gestured erratically. "Do you know how hard it must be for a single mother to raise three children in Chicago? I couldn't take her money, Bethany. When I think about all the nights she's stayed up crying because of me, I can't even look at myself in the mirror." The disgust on his face morphed into depression.

"I can see that," Bethany murmured as she lifted her hand and raked her fingers through Darian's hair. "You're not at all yourself."

The mention of his clients brought about a tilt of her head, wondering if any of his clients had seen him this way and if any of them had thought to take advantage of it. The idea brought about a hot feeling in the pit of her stomach, she'd knife anyone who thought to make good on this odd behaviour from the Dealmaker.

She shook her head and turned her fingers in slow circles across the back of Darian's neck. "She had a choice, Darian. She could have looked elsewhere for help but she didn't, she came to you. It's her own fault that she's in the predicament that she's in. You gave her what she needed, she owes you, it's the way things work."

"Is it?" he implored. A moment later, he shook his head. "No," he said, "I tricked her. I always trick them. This is my doing."

Darian dumped the papers off his lap and got onto his knees. When he wobbled, it was obvious that he was a little drunk. He buried his face in her thighs and wrapped his arms around Bethany's waist.

Bethany blinked but shifted her weight to accommodate Darian's movements, threading her fingers back into his hair. "People are their own worst enemies, Darian. If you hadn't come along they would have found somebody else." She rubbed her palm over the back of his neck and leaned down to press a kiss to his temple.

"Shall we get off the floor?"

Next to them, the trash can continued to smoke and fill the living room with the acrid scent of charred paper.

He breathed heavily against her pants and mumbled, "Alright."

Darian slowly hauled himself onto the couch, as if it were a Herculean feat. He picked up a throw pillow that looked brand new from under-use and wrapped his arms around it. Bleakly, he stared at his lap. Was he... was he cuddling it? No, that was ridiculous. The stress-inflicted stomach ache simply felt better with pressure on it.

"I don't know what's happening. The other night at the ring, I had to bar myself in the office to keep from calling off a match. The brutality of it, the complete and utter disregard for suffering... It was barbaric. I don't understand how humans block out all this emotion," he said and looked at her suspiciously. "You're human. You don't seem to have difficulty with it."

"Never really had a problem," Bethany remarked with a shrug of her shoulders. "Guess you could say I was born this way."

She rose to her feet slowly and walked over to the still smoking trashcan and then looked around herself, deciding to take herself through to the kitchen that came as part of the apartment. She filled a glass with water and returned, pouring it out onto the still burning mass. Hopefully that would put it out for good.

"And the ring is a purely consensual thing," Bethany pointed out as she joined her partner on the couch where he'd practically curled into himself, looking like some recently heartbroken sweetheart, all that was missing was ice-cream.

"That's true." On a cognitive level, Darian knew that. When he recreated the facility in Chicago, he made what he considered improvements to the original model, and one of those was that fighters opted into the bouts. In Las Vegas, that wasn't always the case, which brought about sticky legal implications and missing persons reports.

Still, he had been thunderstruck the other night to realize how much dischord he sewed in his existence.

That was supposed to be the point. Why it bothered him now was a mystery.

Switching gears, he asked, "Do you think I'm needy?"

"Needy?" Bethany asked, tilting her head. "Not usually." She reached over and stroked her nails along his jaw. "You're usually very independent." She eased one leg over the other and didn't bother with pulling down the hem of the skirt that rode up her thigh.

The Slayer regarded the Dealmaker for a moment. "If anything this whole reflecting on your lifestyle is completely out of character, which makes me wonder what exactly is afoot."

"You think something is afoot?" he asked distractedly. Darian stared at her thigh. He couldn't resist the looking. His mouth was saying one thing while his brain went on a tangent about the color of Bethany's skin, poetically comparing it to picturesque things, like the white of a snow-capped mountain. But it was a bit pink, wasn't it? Perhaps the pale inside of a seashell.

Catching himself, Darian threw the pillow aside and scrubbed his hands over his face. "For fuck's sake, I hope something's afoot."

Bethany inhaled a breath and slid over on the couch, planting herself rather firmly in Darian's lap. "Darian," she muttered lowly as her hands found their way to the back of his neck where they gripped quite firmly. "This isn't you. I know this and you know this."

She tilted her head and rested her thumbs on either side of Darian's jaw. "Something is afoot. I don't know what but I'm pretty certain with our connections we can find out."

At first he felt relief, but then hyper-sensitive suspicion crept over him. "Which connections?" he asked, even as he held onto her legs. A terrible possibility dawned on him. "You're not planning to send Ralphael out to investigate, are you?" In his current condition, the Dealmaker wasn't sure how he'd react to that... Whether he'd cry, throw a fit, or break the man's neck. Perhaps he'd pull a tour de force and do all three at once.

Bethany rolled her eyes and planted a slender finger on Darian's mouth, giving a very firm shake of her head. "I know just how much you happen to despise Ralphael so I think I'll be leaving him well out of this. Besides which he doesn't have much fondness for you either and I wouldn't want to give him anything he thinks he might be able to use in the future."

She dragged her finger and subsequently her fingernail over Darian's chin until it settled against his Adam's Apple. "I'll take care of it myself."

Darian's facial expressions shifted, from satisfaction to confusion to displeasure. "Really, he doesn't like me?" What had he ever done to Ralphael, other than... glower, threaten him, talk an inordinate amount of shit, and date Bethany?

He was on the verge of having his feelings hurt, when something happened. It was an odd sensation of pinpricks in his skull, which he hadn't known contained physical receptors. It reminded him of the only time he ever lost consciousness. He pushed against his eye sockets until the moment ended.

Along with it, the pain in his chest subsided and a wave of apathy washed through him. Darian said, "Wait. Why should I care?"

It was at the moment of change that Bethany saw the difference in Darian and her lips curled into a smile. "And there's the Darian I know and love." She dipped her head and nudged his jaw, leaving the feeling of her mouth behind. "I was beginning to worry I might not see you again for a while."

She clasped his shoulders and leaned back to regard him. "Magic, maybe?"

The change was probably easier for Beth to process than Darian. He was muddled and unsettled. The smell of burnt paper served as a harsh reminder of what he'd been doing when she walked in. Not so subtly, he grabbed onto her waist and leaned around her, making sure no poems remained undestroyed on the stack of papers.

"If someone's responsible for this, I'm going to kill them," he said, all too serious. Darian shut his eyes and exhaled through his nose. Unfortunately it was not without witnesses. "I ran into one of your dancers." Which wasn't the worst of it.

He had left Bethany voicemails. "Delete your messages."

"Which one?" Bethany asked, mentally running every dancer through her mind's eye. It couldn't be Carla given that Bethany had fired her and hired Angelina a day after Carla's departure, she hadn't been able to keep up and business was business.

She smirked at the comment about the phone. "I have already listened to the voicemails but I can delete them."

"Juliet," he said. Darian leaned his head back on the couch and covered his face. "I went to the mall." The thought of the place was enough to make the color drain from his face. Each time he thought of another aspect of the past few weeks, things seemed more bleak. "She caught me picking out scarves. Don't worry. I didn't buy one."

Bethany slid off to one side and left her legs in his lap but allowed the couch to support the rest of her body. "Juliet?" She ran her teeth over her lower lip and shook her head. "More to her than meets the eye or that's what Vicky says and I trust Vicky's instincts about these sorts of things. Don't trust any of my dancers." Trust was earned not automatically given just because a girl was good at wrapping her limbs around a pole.

"Here's hoping she can keep her mouth shut."

"Please do me a favor," he said, running his hand up and down her shins. Her legs really were the color of pink-tinged white roses, but he didn't have to get fanatical about it. It was a minor miracle she hadn't severed ties with him over the Foreigner incident. "Don't allow me to leave the apartment for the next few hours."

Bethany's lips quirked in the corners as she reached out to curl a hand in Darian's collar, dragging the demon closer. "I think I can handle that." With one breath taken she leaned up and sealed her mouth over his, she could think of plenty of ways she could keep him busy for the next couple of hours.