“I don’t understand,” a voice remarks as someone takes a seat next to the isolated figure at the bar. As Dougie just stares down into his whiskey glass moodily, Harry studies him. “You do this every year.”

“I don’t do anything,” the blond mutters, his voice hoarse.

Harry just continues to watch him for a moment before gracing him with a response. “You think I haven’t noticed? You’re my flatmate, Dougie. I know your routine. And, every year on this day, you walk out the flat and don’t come back until the early morning- usually drunk up to your eyeballs.”

“Least I’m consistent, then,” Dougie says bitterly, raising his glass to his lips.

Harry lets out a low sigh, and signals to the bartender. After placing an order, he turns back to Dougie, “I want to understand. Why can’t you tell me what’s wrong? I don’t even know what I’m asking. Is it the day? Is it you?”

“It’s the day,” Dougie murmurs.

A frown creases Harry’s forehead, and he hands over the money for his drink without even looking at the barman, his eyes fixed firmly on Dougie. “What is it?”

“The anniversary…” Dougie says in a breathily voice, and his eyes are glassy as he sweeps his finger around the top of his tumbler, picking up the condensation on his fingertip.

“Anniversary of what?”

Dougie still has that dazed look in his eyes, and concern begins to creep into Harry’s mind. “Danny,” he says simply, like that answers everything.

Harry’s never heard this name before. He blinks, trying to remember if Dougie has ever mentioned him in passing, but he comes up with nothing. “Danny?” he repeated.

“Danny,” is the dreamy response.

“Who’s Danny?”

Dougie’s lips curve slowly now, his eyes still glassy, “He was my best friend.”

Harry sits back to absorb this revelation. Surely Dougie would have mentioned him before he’d been his best friend at one point. “So what happened?” he dares to ask.

The blond’s head turns slowly to stare at his current best friend, “I tried to help him. You can’t blame me, because I tried.”

Harry resists the urge to seize Dougie by the shoulders and shake him back to focus, but he understands that that probably isn’t the wisest of ideas at this moment in time. “What do you mean?”

“I tried to help him,” Dougie insists, a little wildness coming into his eyes now. “But… He was too far gone… He traded everything for suffering.” He bit his lip, leaning his head back, “And found himself alone. Was I wrong to leave him? Should I have stayed?”

Harry swallows nervously as Dougie levers his head back down to stare at him. He’s never seen this side of Dougie before- this reflective, drunken Dougie who’s telling a story that Harry has never heard anything about before. He’s not sure what to do. “I don’t know, Dougie. What was he doing?”

“He was lying.” Dougie’s brow furrows as he recalls this fact, “And then… I watched the lying turn into hiding.”

“Hiding what?”

Dougie shakes his head, “He was going… Going wrong… With scars…” He motions to his mouth. “On both his lips.” Then he freezes, his eyes fixed on his fingers, leaving them suspended in the air with fascination in his expression. Then he gives an awed whisper: “His fingertips were melted to the bone.”

Now Harry knows what had taken Dougie’s friend. Drugs. The friend had been a drug addict, and Dougie had had to watch him fall into it. “Dougie…” Harry says softly. “Sometimes people are just beyond help.”

A single tear slides from Dougie’s eye, but he pays no heed to it as it rolls down his cheek. He just stares over Harry’s shoulder, that glazed look reappearing in his eye. “But I can still remember…”

“Remember what?” Harry asks, his concern evident in his voice.

“What his face looked like…” he muses, his hand moving up to touch Harry’s cheek gently. The older man just watches his friend, allowing him the contact. Dougie swallows, tears shining from the blue of his eyes, “I can remember it… His face… When I found him in an alley in the middle of the night.”

Harry can’t help the gasp that leaves his lips. This is more, he realises. More than having an addicted friend. This is seeing that friend in his weakest moment, and being helpless. Harry doesn’t know what to say. What can he say? It’s not like he’s ever been in that kind of situation. He doesn’t know what it’s like. “Doug…” he all he can say.

“I went to the hospital with him,” he tells his flatmate, his hand dropping away from Harry’s face and returning to the whiskey glass. He takes another lucid sip, still in the spaced state that freaks Harry out so much. “As soon as the doctor came out, I said: ‘Tell me what you know.’ And he told me it was drugs. Then I went into his room, and said to him: ‘Tell me what you’ve gone and done now.’”

He breaks off, looking haunted now, “And he just laughed at me. He thought it was so funny. ‘Tell me what you know.’ ‘Tell me what you’ve gone and done now.’ He said that I sounded like his girlfriend. And that it was none of my fucking business what he was doing. He wasn’t hurting anyone, he said.”

“He was hurting you,” Harry pointed out.

“I didn’t matter. They gave him a happy haze. He didn’t care what went on outside of that haze. His own happy bubble…” He lets out a light giggle as he mimes a circle around his own head. “Not hurting anyone… I disagreed. I told him that he was hurting himself; told him that a gun would do the trick to get it over with if he wanted to hurt himself so badly. He just laughed again.”

Harry puts a hand on Dougie’s shoulder; trying to remind him, even on a subconscious level, that now he had someone listening to him. “He was too far gone.”

“‘You’re better off this way,’ he said,” Dougie recounts. “‘If I’d just taken a gun to my head, then you wouldn’t have me anymore.’” He closed his eyes, his face peaceful for a moment, “I wanted to tell him that I didn’t want him like this. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I didn’t understand why he was doing it. To take all that you’ve got and burn it on the spot just to get high. It’s not worth it, is it?”

“Was he always high?” Harry asks.

“Always,” Dougie says easily. “Every day for a year… High as a kite. High on some unknown substance. And then he got out of the hospital, and it all got worse again.”

Harry gives him a moment before asking the question, “How?”

“He’d only been out for three days.” Dougie’s glassy eyes open again, but they’re blank. “Three days. I lived with him, and I noticed that he wasn’t…sleeping. No sleeping. None. And he gave up eating. I knew it was bad for him. All those drugs and no food. It would be wrecking his system.”

“I’m sure that you did all you could.”

But he shakes his head again; pain seeping into his eyes now, “Not enough. And it was affecting everyone. He sold his mother’s rings. Her heirlooms. They were worth a fortune, and he pawned them for a mere fraction of their value just so he could buy more of his shit.”

Harry takes a steadying breath, knowing that he can’t break down while Dougie’s pouring his heart out. He has to stay steady. “What did she do?”

Dougie chuckles weakly, casting his eyes up towards the ceiling. “What could she say? She said nothing and… She pretended not to know. She was scared of challenging him, scared that- if she did- then she would lose him. He would walk away. But, soon, her jewellery wasn’t enough. So he started stealing. More objects, more people. From me, from all our friends, all his family, strangers.” His lips curve slightly, “I think he thought that we didn’t notice… But I always noticed…”

“Why did he…?” Harry stammers weakly, but he knows that he will never be able to understand the desperation that this Danny must have been feeling.

“To supply the feeling,” Dougie says easily, his voice hollow. “He did… Horrible things. After a while, I found out he pulled a knife on someone’s wife and held it to her throat.” He lifts one hand limply and pulled it across his own throat in a jerking motion. “My own best friend…threatened to kill someone.”

“Dougie, he must have been desperate.”

He laughs, but the sound is hollow and empty, “Yeah. Desperate enough to put him right back into an old situation. It happened all over again. I can still remember what his face looked like when I- once again- found him in an alley in the middle of the night. He just never fucking learnt.”

As more tears descend from Dougie’s still glassy eyes, Harry does what’s natural to him and pulls his friend close for a tight hug. Dougie doesn’t do anything, but he’s stiff in Harry’s arms, and it’s almost like he’s not even there at all. Not in the moment, but trapped in the past. “It’s not your fault.”

“But I could have done more,” he murmurs over Harry’s shoulder. “It was the same thing, the same questions. ‘Tell me what you know, doctor.’ ‘Tell me what you’ve gone and down now, Danny.’” His quotes are airy, and Harry feels his own eyes fill at the thought of Dougie being so torn up by this every year.

“‘Tell me what you know’,” he mocks into Harry’s ear. His voice is harsher now, and Harry tenses up as he lets out a loud giggle. “‘Tell me what you’ve gone and done now’. The same pathetic questions, and it’s not like I ever got any fucking answers. It’s not like anyone ever listened to me. There he was, in his cosy little coma, and I was left to pick up the pieces, like I always was.”

He moves away from Harry now and turns back to the bar, almost robotically. He motions to his tumbler and the barman picks it up to refill it. His eyes have gone back to the blank canvas, the anger gone for now. “I began to have…thoughts.”

Alarm bells went off in Harry’s head. “Thoughts?”

“Thoughts… Happy thoughts… I began to think to myself: ‘Why stick around…? A gun would do the trick to get it over with.’”

Harry shakes his head, “Suicide is never the answer.”

Dougie cocks his head to look at Harry, and his lips curve in that eerily calm smile, “Why not? You get to escape from everything. You don’t have to put up with the hell anymore. You’re better off. To take all that you’ve got…and burn it on the spot. I had so little at that moment, and what I had wasn’t very satisfactory… It seemed like a fantastic idea… He threw away his life just to get high. Why couldn’t I do it to be happy…?”

Harry grabs hold of Dougie’s face, forcing the blond’s dazed eyes onto his, “But you didn’t do it. Why didn’t you do it?”

“I wanted to see how he would be. I wanted to be there when he got out…and got high again… I wanted to watch him get high, and know that I had no regrets over what I was about to do. I wanted him to watch me do it and know it was because he kept getting high.”

“But what happened?”

“Nothing,” he says breezily.

Harry releases his face, but keeps his gaze steady on Dougie’s, “What do you mean?”

“He slept…for ages.” Pain came briefly into the blue, before it vanished again, “I tried to talk to him. Pleaded. ‘Tell me what you did and where you got it hid.’ I told him that once he woke up I was going to order him to show me his stock when he woke up. I decided I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. It had been too long… I sat with him, every day, asking him: ‘Is what you really want watching what you want slowly circling down the drain?’”

“Do you think he heard?”

“He never listened while he was conscious… Why should it change when he was in a coma…?” Dougie smiles slightly again, recalling the memory of his old friend. “I was trying to right all of my mistakes by telling him all this… When he was unconscious… He couldn’t hear me. But I was sick of watching him… Watching him throw it all away. Just to get high.”

He sounds bitter again as he says those words. He doesn’t like thinking about Danny being high. He hated it. “But it was his own choice…”

“Yeah…” the dreamy voice was back. “And he chose to get high. He chose to throw it away and get high on that shit… Then he had to go and die…”

Harry’s heart constricted in his chest. Dead. Danny was dead. That was why Dougie was so haunted by everything. Danny had died before he’d had a chance to right things in his mind. “It’s the anniversary of his death.”

Dougie giggled, “Ding-ding. And we have a winner…”

“That’s why you’re always so distant on this day.” Harry watches Dougie as he picks up his tumbler and takes a sip. “What do you do?”

“I visit his grave… I curse him…” Dougie bites his lips even as they curve, “I laugh at him… I shouldn’t laugh at him. I say sorry… And then I go and try to forget.” His eyes meet Harry’s and- for the first time all night- they seem to have a little clarity in them, “But you wouldn’t let me forget tonight.”

“You shouldn’t have to go through this on your own.”

“I cope…” He swirls a finger around the top of his glass, once more collecting the wetness in the grooves of his finger. “Why should I burden you? I went to his grave earlier…”

Harry sighs, reaching out to touch his shoulder, “And what did you do?”

“I said all the same old things…” He cocks his head to the side, remembering, “Always the same old things. ‘Tell me what you know.’ ‘Tell me what you’ve gone and done now.’ ‘Tell me what you know.’ ‘Tell me what you’ve gone and done now.’ I’m like a broken record… Except that I don’t care anymore… I keep asking because I’ll always want to know… I’ll never understand him…”

“No more suicide thoughts?”

He shakes his head, “I was desperate. ‘A gun would do the trick to get it over with’? It made no sense to me. I was just confused, because I could never understand him…”

“Maybe you’re better off.”

“I never chose ‘to take all that you’ve got and burn it on the spot’. I wonder what would have happened if I had just ended it. Earlier. Would I have snapped him out of it…?”

“Probably not.”

Dougie’s eyes are glassy again as he nods his agreement, “Yeah. His ambition was just to get high… That’s all that went around in his head. High, high, high… But I stood there, at his grave… I was shouting at him… ‘Tell me what you did. You never did tell me where you got it hid. I wanted you to show me, you bastard!’” He gasps, “Bastard. I kept calling him that. Like he can hear me.”

“Dougie…” Harry whispers, drawing the blond’s attention back to him “Don’t you think that you’ve been dwelling on it long enough… Isn’t it time to…let go?”

“It’s only one day a year…” he murmurs.

“One day too many to regret something that wasn’t your fault.”

Dougie’s eyes focus on Harry’s ever so slightly, and Harry wonders if his words are actually registering with the blond. “It is my fault.”

“No, it’s not. He self-destructed. It was his addiction, his ignorance, his fault. Think about it, Dougie. Doing this to yourself, and you claim it’s only one day, but I bet you think about it more than that. Is what you really want watching what you want slowly circling the drain? Are you going to throw it all away?”

Dougie looks amused now, and he shrugs his shoulders, “Just to get high?”

“High?” Harry repeats, knowing that the message has gotten through. The weight is lifted off his chest and he allows himself to smile. “I can’t see you ever getting high. Not now.”

“Nah. I’m never getting high.” Dougie sighs, and rubs a hand over his eyes. They’re starting to clear. He’s coming out of his guilt-induced trance. “Danny may have thrown away his life just to get high, but I’m not. I have better things to do than get high.”

“Being high’s overrated.”

Dougie giggles- his normal, carefree giggle. It might take a while, but Harry feels he’s finally coming to term with years of guilt. “You’ve been high?”

“Only once. I don’t recommend it.” Harry slides down off his stool; offers an arm and a shoulder for Dougie to lean on. “Home?”

“Home.” Dougie edges down of his stool as well, then pales. “I feel sick… I might be sick when we get home.”

“As long as it’s circling the drain and not all over the kitchen floor,” Harry remarks as he helps Dougie to stagger towards the door.

Dougie considers, “Seems like a waste of alcohol. Drink, just to throw it all away by chucking it back up.”

Harry gives him an incredulous look, “I’d forgotten that you’re a contemplative drunk.”

Dougie attempts to pinch his shoulder, but can’t quite find a grip with his fingers so fumbling from the drink. Instead, he decides to bite Harry on the shoulder. “At least I’m not selling the TV just to get high.”

“You don’t need to get high,” Harry responds seriously. “There’s nothing wrong with your life, is there?”

“There was nothing wrong with Danny’s life… He always got high.” Dougie’s silent for a moment, and Harry gives him the space to be, “I think he got high for the sake of it.”

“Pointless.”

“Such a waste.”