Gonna pull in the shutters on this heart of mine

"Jesus, you really weren't exaggerating," you hear a familiar voice mutter, kind of indistinctly. "She must have put away half a fucking bottle." Then the somebody is trying to shake you awake. "Birdie?"

You make an uncooperative noise and try to scoot away from Dex and his annoying hands, but he's not having any of it. "No you don't," he says. "If you roll off this pier you're going to get yourself fucking drowned, dummy."

"Maybe she can't hear you," says Scott, and you feel somebody taking your earbuds out.

"I was listening to that," you mumble.

"Was that English?" Dex asks, which makes you crack open one eye and look up at him, scowling.

"Fuck off," you tell him loftily, maybe loftily anyway, you're not sure if any of it is getting lost in translation, then close your eye again because it's very bright here.

"Think you can get her phone away from her?" Dex says, and you feel someone's hands trying to gently pry your fingers off your phone from where you have it clutched to your chest.

"Hey, Bridge-babe," Scott says soothingly, "How about you let me have this? We're going to take you back to the house in a minute."

"Don't wanna go," you complain, eyes still shut, maintaining your iron grip on your phone.

"Too bad," Dex says, beginning to scoop your hair into a ponytail, despite you trying to bat him away. "Can you—yeah, thanks," he says, as Scott catches both your hands in his and rubs your forearms comfortingly. Dex produces a hair elastic from somewhere and finishes getting your hair pulled back.

You crack open your eyes and glare at Scott. "You can't have my phone," you inform him. "Not giving it to you."

"Oh, well in that case," Dex says irritably, "feel free to dunk it in the lake and beg your mom to buy you a new one."

"Asshole," you mutter.

"Also," Dex adds, "he already has your phone anyway because you let go of it when you decided you needed to stop me from tying your hair back."

You grope for your phone and realize he's right.

"You can have it back in a bit," Scott says soothingly. "We'd feel bad if anything happened to it, is all."

"He'd feel bad," Dex clarifies. "I would see it as a logical consequence of extremely stupid decisionmaking. Can I see that for a sec?" he asks Scott.

You answer a belligerent, no! at the same time that Scott says, yeah, and hands it over. You sense that you're not coordinated enough right now for grappling effectively to reclaim it, so you settle for making an aggrieved noise that makes them both snort with **** amusement.

Dex unlocks your phone. "Jesus. What even is this playlist? You were lying out here baking in the sun the last two hours and crying to fucking America?"

"There's other stuff on it too," you complain without opening your eyes, then turn toward Scott when you feel his hand, cool on your forehead.

"I think she's gonna have a maybe-nasty sunburn," he says to Dex. "Unless she put on sunblock and I didn't realize it."

"Yeah. I agree," Dex says, not sounding very happy about any of it. "What the fuck were you even thinking, Birdie?" he sighs.

You make an annoyed sound at him instead of answering in words.

"Nah, he's right, babe," Scott says, patting you gently on the shoulder. "I thought the whole point of this getting-blitzed thing was to have fun."

"Have fun with you guys," you correct him. "And stop making fun of America," you tell Dex.

"Hon, you're slurring pretty bad so we didn't get all that," Scott says. "But I think we take it, that your basic point is you're indignant and this is all our fault and fuck off."

"More complicated than that," you disagree.

"Isn't it convenient I speak such fluent drunk idiot?" he quips to Dex, but if there's any reply you don't catch what it is. "How do you want to do this?" you hear him ask, and then there's a brief exchange you don't entirely follow, and then they're making you sit up.

"You okay?" Scott asks. "Need to throw up or anything before we go back to the house?"

You shake your head.

"You want to try opening your eyes?" Dex suggests. "Or do you want us to just drag you bodily back up to the house?"

"I can walk," you tell him.

Scott snorts. "Sure you can. Blind and sunburned and wearing your teeny-weeny-bikini. Have fun with that full-body poison ivy."

"Don't be a dick, Scott," you tell him scornfully. "Doesn't suit you."

"What's that you say, Bridge?" Dex asks. "Oh, you feel like carelessly verbally abusing the guy who's least annoyed with you for flirting with **** poisoning when you've already been in legal trouble for misadventures of a boozerly nature? You do? Well, by all means pick on Scott for trying to help your drunk ass, then."

You give him the finger, classily, without opening your eyes.

"To be clear," Dex replies, "I am the one who's annoyed. So you should probably be nicer to him."

There's some more discussion you don't catch, and then each of them takes one of your arms.

"Okay, babe," Scott says, in his annoying idiot-drunk-bitch-coaxing tone that makes it sound like he's trying to convince an unfamiliar dog to do a particularly humiliating trick. "Can you get your feet under you and give us a hand hauling you up?"

"Can't I just stay here with my music?" you whine.

"No!" they say in unison, and neither of them is letting go of your arms, so you grumble a little and give in, taking a little effort to get your feet positioned to at least not impede progress as they haul you up.

Once they have you upright, more or less, Scott takes your left side and brings up the rear while Dex leads. It seems to take forever to get all the way up the hill, and at one point they stop to let you throw up into some bushes, but eventually you get to the base of the deck stairs. After you've scaled those as a trio, Dex goes on ahead to get the sliding door opened up, while Scott slips his arm around your waist to keep you from simply buckling and slithering down to the deck. Together, the two of them steer you into the front room and pour you onto the couch.

You just completed an exhausting journey, with many trials and tribulations, so you immediately curl up and try to sink into blessed oblivion, but instead of letting you go to sleep Scott sits on the edge of the couch next to you and harasses you into a partially-propped-up semi-sitting position with some pillows.

The purpose for this soon becomes clear, and that purpose is: subject you to a lot of annoying and probably unnecessary ministrations while Dex acts annoyed and judgy about how cataclysmically drunk you are.

First Dex brings Scott a can of ginger ale, which he makes you drink in sips. "Could you grab a blanket or something?" he asks. "I feel weird about the fact she's wearing next to nothing."

"You shouldn't," you tell him, "I have very good boobs. You should admire them. They're meant to be enjoyed."

They both ignore you, even though you have your eyes open again now and you're practically sober. "I'll grab one from the other room," Dex says. "Though, maybe we should get some aloe on her to cool down that sunburn."

"Yeah," says Scott. "Actually we could skip the blanket, I guess. Maybe towels soaked in icewater would be better."

"Good idea," Dex says, and goes into the other room.

"At least you guys are getting along really great right now," you say to Scott, which only makes him sigh.

"Nothing's changed, Bridge," he says. "You gotta let it go, babe. We just... had to align temporarily to take care of you."

"But—"

"—don't hassle about it, Birdie," Dex orders you as he comes back into the room with an assortment of stuff. "Really not in the mood right now."

Well, that sort of hurts your feelings. As if you were in the mood for any of that shit they put you through over the last six months or whatever!

"One of us needs to put some aloe on you so you don't wake up tomorrow both hung over and looking like a victim of radiation poisoning," Dex tells you, not even stopping to give a shit about your hurt feelings. "Who do you want to do that?"