Sai took another swig of absinthe as Biz looked on in abject horror.

“Have you been drinking that straight?”

Sai turned and gesticulated wildly with the bottle as they turned to Biz and poked his chest just missing the blue enamel of his ‘He/Him’ badge.

“Ma’ dude I’mma not anything straight. Could a straight person do this!?”

Sai giggled inanely and Biz took a deep swig from his bottle of wine as he watched Sai attempt a cartwheel and faceplanted into their coat rack.

Sai pulled themselves out of the wreckage with jazz hands and a grin.

“SEEE, I’mm…I am …whatever I was trying to prove!”

They watched expectantly as Biz nodded thoughtfully, drained the last of the wine and threw the empty vessel in a vague arc towards the bin. He turned back to Sai before the bottle landed, but the sounds of echoing chaos indicated that it had not landed well.

“So, what’s next, your val-tines destract has been so far jus been a lot of booze?”

Sai nodded knowledgeably as they processed Biz’s barely coherent mumbling and threw themselves back onto the sofa with a dull thud as the bit of leather seating bashed into the long-suffering wall behind it. Sai looked thoughtful for a moment, raising a finger up as they assembled their thoughts.

“I have an idea!”

Sai punctuated the exclamation by lunging over the end of the sofa to root around in the assorted detritus, items fly through the air and tumble on the floor one after the other; A hot pink umbrella, a copy of the hobbit and a desiccated money tree bouncing across the glass strewn floor before Sai resurfaced with an enormous quantity of rope looped around their narrow shoulders.

“LET'S HAVE A WRANGLE OFF!”

Sai grinned wide as Biz looked up with glazed eyes.

“…what?”

Sai grinned wider, their drunkenness overwhelmed by sheer enthusiasm for a second as they jumped up and posed, pirate-like on the swaying sofa.

“YAARR MATY, WE BE ON THE HUNT FOR THE GREATEST PRAY WE CAN WRASTLE! ROPE IT UP AND PULL IT HOME – WINNER GETS THE RUM!”

They thrust an expensive looking bottle of brown liquid towards the celling with their free hand.

“WHAT SAY YOU MA-LAD!”

Sai punctuated the sentence with an uneven spin that ended with them reposing their finger wobbling a few centimetres from Biz’s face.

Biz promptly burst out laughing, the tears of joy leaving damp tracks across his dark skin, when he was steady, he wiped his eyes clear with the cuff of his wine smeared lab coat and shook Sai’s pointing hand.

“AYE AYE CAPTAIN! ”

The two friends looked at each other with a shared goofy smile and then abruptly began to sprint for the door. After a scrambled fight the pair tumbled into the street, each armed with a rope and a bottle and neither coat nor shoe between them.

And so, the race began with each choosing their route to victory. Sai took off down the street at an uneven clip whilst Biz fought against the billowing drift as he stumbled in the opposite direction. Sai had taken no time to consider the direction or their alignment of the street, the drunken haze of their brain acting quickly to counteract those pesky thoughts that might slow them down. As they ran, they considered, what even was the coolest thing to wrangle? They'd ask Charlie to judge of course, but he was a weird one so who knew what he'd most appreciate. As Sai ‘ran’ down the street, they spun the thought through their mind occasionally yelling it aloud in the hope that the words might resonate somehow.

They didn't, but as Sai slurred the words for the seventh or eighth time they tripped, and from the dusty pavement saw it; backlit against the pulsing colours of the night sky. A gargoyle, or maybe a grotesque? Sai was unsure of the difference-it was something about guttering maybe? Either way, it was their prize! After a few moments of sore necked staring Sai took a step back further into the street, their fuzzy thoughts attempting to pull together a plan but settling for a vague idea instead –Lasso the gargoyle.

It took Sai quite a while to tie a loop into the worn cord, their fingers struggling with the numbing cold and un-helped by their absolute lack of knot tying knowledge. The total absence of coordination that came with drinking a bottle of absinthe probably didn’t help much either, but Sai wasn’t going to let drunkenness, the cold or a complete lack of skill stop their plan.

With a noose somewhat tied into the rope Sai leaned against a nearby lamppost and took a sip from their bottle as they looked up at their target. As they considered the throw, they reflected on what they were doing. Drunken contests were fun, but Sai couldn’t help but wonder what their parents would think if they saw them now.

A visage of their father glaring at a young Sai surfaced crystal clear from the depths of their befuddled brain, the tall man's clenched fist shaking with rage as he yelled sections of scripture at the terrified seventeen-year-old.

Sai snorted at the memory in disgust. On second thoughts Sai knew exactly what their parents would have thought of their oldest child planning to drunkenly steal a statue off a roof. Their stance on alcohol was well known, if less specifically hurtful that his stance on ‘the Transgender Ideologies that propagate dangerous delusions’. Sai shook their head sadly at the grim recollection, it still hurt to know how unwilling their family had been to understand.

After the moment of melancholy introspection, Sai pushed the thought from their mind with a long drink of the green liquid. They grimaced against the taste and pushed themselves back to their feet, there were more important things to do than revel in the disappointment of people they’d never see again. Their parents had stopped speaking to them years before their arrival on the street, and they’d be damned if they’d let them disrupt another night of drunken mischief.

Sai eyed the building blearily; it was one of those weird fake Greek ones with the pillars. A bank or museum was the best guess, but the long-gone Mahi had been adamant that the air inside was pure poison, and even a drunk Sai wasn’t willing to defy the advice of the dead.

Regardless of the danger inside, the outside structure of the building had always frustrated Sai, the weirdness of a Greek styled building with clashing gothic statues pulled at their thoughts whenever they saw it. Was it the original design? Or had some overly enthusiastic renovations occurred before the building’s arrival? No one on the street had any idea how you’d even go about figuring that out.

Sai shook their head and slapped their cheeks in a desperate attempt to refocus.

“Get your shit together Sai, we gotta win, throw the rope, loop the gargoyle and we all good. I mean, it’s basically upwards fishing, how hard can it be!”

After the first fifteen throws missed Sai began to suspect that throwing a lasso ten meters upwards was more difficult than cowboy movies made it seem. By the time the lasso actually caught on something Sai was sweating with exertion, the half empty bottle of absinthe long forgotten as they jumped around in the street yelling in celebration – So what if the rope hadn’t caught on the gargoyle itself, it was attached to something and that was good enough!

Thrilled with the way their scheme was going Sai leaped up and grabbed the rope from where it floated twisting in the drift. They managed to get a good grip on the rope, but after a moment elongated by the screeching agony of ill-used muscles, Sai realised the strength required to pull themselves up was severely lacking. Unwilling to give up, Sai swung themselves towards the building, their thoughts a hazy plan of rappelling up the side of the building with the aid of the rope.

Unfortunately for Sai’s plan, but perhaps fortunately for Sai’s overall health the jarring movements immediately loosened the ropes grasp on the roof, tearing loose in a scattering of broken stone and loose slate tiles as Sai fell to the floor with an audible crunch.

Sai winced as they pulled themselves up off the broken tarmac, the sharp shards of slate and stone cutting into their hands as they gathered themselves. Frustrated by the setback they glared up at the escaped gargoyle. Bruised and annoyed they grabbed a loose chunk of roof off the floor and in a rush of childish rage threw a piece of broken stone at the offending statue.

Surprisingly the chunk of rock struck true, the brittle slate exploding into pieces as it collided with the dense stone of the statue, the gargoyle rocking loosely as it recoiled from the impact. Sai grinned, this seemed MUCH more fun than climbing up. As the drift picked up around them, they gathered the broken shards of roof from the ground and began unleashing a rain of projectiles at the oblivious stonework.

The Statue wobbled increasingly violently on its pedestal as Sai threw the assorted chunks of loose stone. The shards pinged off the carved surface and Sai felt the drift begin to pick up propelling the projectiles with evermore force into the rocking statue.

Gradually the gargoyle succumbed to the assault of detritus, the base cracked as the centre of mass shifted before crumbling. The gargoyle tumbled and fell in a slew of loose slate and impacted the ground with a deadening crash.

Prize secured, Sai pulled out their phone and posed triumphantly with the felled gargoyle

“Suck it Biz! I got a gargoyle, looks like I win!”

A few moments later their phone buzzed in response, and after a moments fumbling Sai opened the message titled “You tink?” and immediately realised they had lost.

The selfie was simple enough, an awkward off-centre Biz starring in adoration at the huge grey wolf sleeping peacefully before him, the worn rope wrapped around her in a loose approximation of a harness and above captioned in block capitals the text ‘I CALL HER STEVE, SHE LOOKS LIKE A STEVE!’

Sai looked back at the broken gargoyle by their feet and swore to themselves, a wolf named Steve was way more impressive than a broken stone gargoyle.