Simon hated himself.
No one ever really meant it when they proclaimed self loathing. Or if they did, it was for stupid reasons like drunk texting their shitty exes or eating an entire cake by themselves on a Friday night. It made Simon want to scoff. Those people? Weak. Plebes. The kind of people that natural selection was named for. Sad sacks of meat who'd be the first to be killed off in a bloody free for all, to say nothing of the savage corporate world that Simon had grown up in. What did those people know about hating themselves? No, self loathing wasn't making dubious romantic decisions or breaking a diet ― self loathing was leaving your estranged father's funeral and heading to the nearest establishment serving alcohol and then proceeding to drink the place dry.
To be fair, it wasn't like he did these kinds of things often, despite the reputation he'd deliberately fostered for himself; anyone could pretty much say that the death of a father, even a distant one, counted as extenuating circumstances. Simon was thirty three years old but he could count on one hand how many times he'd gotten this shit faced drunk ― once when he was sixteen after which his father promptly sent him packing to a boarding school, and again during his senior year in college, which resulted in his father cutting him off for a month. Simon supposed that the only thing making this time any different was that his old man was too dead to punish him.
Parents shaped you. Even the absent ones. Maybe even especially the absent ones. Like a tree growing straight through a chain link fence, Simon had grown around the stern lines of his father's face, the blunted shape of his father's disappointment. They grew like seeds, and would come to define him as he grew up
No one had cried at the funeral, though the procession had stretched on for blocks. Hundreds of people had attended and through the veil of their sincere condolences, Simon could sense the vultures starting to circle overhead. Edward Procter had been a colossus in the business world, and already the scavengers were creeping forward to pick at his corpse. Simon wasn't surprised. This was the kind of world he'd grown up in, where people attended funerals just to grease palms.
His father wouldn't have minded. He would have urged Simon to use the opportunity to collect favours.
As it was, Simon wasn't in the position to solicit dead-father-sympathy favours. He was far too busy trying to replace all the blood in his body with booze. If he died of alcohol poisoning, he'd still get to see his old man in hell and punch him in the face like he'd always wanted to.
Simon caught the barman's eyes and waved up over with two fingers. "Pour me another," he said, sounding deceptively sober.
The bar tender eyed him with deep suspicion, looking at all the empty glasses. "Hey buddy, you're drinking me dry. Leave some for the rest of us. How exactly do you plan on paying for all this?"
Another side benefit of drinking in a seedy little shack that hadn't seen a new face in a decade was that no one knew who he was, here. Good.
Simon rolled his eyes and reached into his pocket, withdrawing his wallet with drunken flourish. He made a show of slowly counting the bills and dropping them onto the counter. "Here's a hundred for the tab I've racked up so far, here's another hundred for the bottle of whiskey I'm about to order, and here's another hundred for you to shut the hell up and leave me alone."
The bartender gave him a long look.
Simon returned it flatly.
The disgruntled man threw his hands up and left, returning with a bottle which he slammed down forcefully.
"My compliments to the chef," he snarked to the barman's retreating back.
He uncapped the bottle and gave its contents a dubious look. He didn't know what kind of swill he was drinking. He doubted it was worth even half of what he paid for it, but it smelled like bleach and burned going down. It'd get the job done.
He propped his chin in his hand a poured, watching the play of the dim fluorescent over the amber liquid, when suddenly an elbow jostled his arm, sending whiskey pouring into his lap.
Simon set the bottle down with a deeply aggrieved sigh and glanced over next to him, irritated. "Hey. Watch what you're doing."