Staring Back to Happier Times

Gary yawned loudly. He had returned to the Travelodge several hours earlier, but couldn't seem to get to sleep. His brain was too awake, and the events of the past few days returned every time the manager closed his eyes.

He ambled through to the bathroom at a pace that would embarrass a turtle. Then again, he had no particular reason to rush. The more enrgy he used up, the easier he would find it to go to sleep.

A small row of glass bottles lined the small ledge above the sink in the room. Due to all being different heights and weights, the boys all had different prescription drugs, at different strengths, all for different reasons. Gary skipped his hand lightly over all of the clear bottles; he knew he wasn't looking for anything contained in them. The pills he were looking for were contained in one of the three mud-brown coloured bottles at the far end. He picked up the bottle in the centre, and poured three of the small circular tablets into his hand. The white circles were fairly common to most drugs, but Gary was sure he had picked up the right bottle. After all, it had been himself that had organised the bottles when they had first arrived.

Little did Gary know, as he swallowed what he assumed to be sleeping pills, that Ed and Alex had knocked the mini-procession over, and in a panicked state, had put them all back on the shelf in what they assumed to be perfect order.

But nobody is perfect, are they?

~~~

Alex was flicking through a magazine, reading some article about oral hygiene. The name "Gary" kept cropping up, again and again. It hadn't bothered him to begin with, but his paranoia had taken over, reminding him of a memory that was only a few days fresh in the young guitarist's mind.

"Shit!"

"Ed, what did you do?"

Alex looked over to Ed, who had a toothbrush in one hand, and was looking at Alex in horror.

"I just knocked over all of the pill bottles."

Alex leapt to his feet from his perch on the side of the bath, and walked over to stand beside Ed, who was now staring at the mess of bottles lying in the sink along with a tube of toothpaste like it was about to eat him.

"They just all fell over!" He whined, looking at Alex with puppy-dog eyes.

"Sure they did, Edward, sure they did," Alex laughed, grabbing the brown bottles, "These were at the left, right?"

Ed nodded, and grabbed the clear bottles, with their multitude of colourful pills inside, "And these were at the right. But what order are they in?"

"Well, the blue ones were at the far end, and...well...people will check the label before they swallow things, right?" Alex asked, looking at Ed, who nodded.

"Probably, yeah. So we just put them up in any order, yeah?"

"Sounds like a plan to me!" Alex laughed as he began to place the pills on the shelf in any old way.

Sleeing pills. Gary used them all the time, but they weren't that strong. The pills in the other two jars were for different things altogether; one in particular was stronger than every other pill on that entire shelf. They had been prescribed for Dan three weeks before all of this had happened, to help with the problems he had been having with his knee. The pills were almost identical to Gary's sleeping pills as well, both being small, circular and white. Oce he had added two and two Alex jumped to his feet immediately, hopping out of the bed quickly. He had to find someone, before it was too late.

Or maybe it was already too late.