Ben Spiegelmann | The Nightmare (deadasleep) wrote in monsterheartic, @ 2017-04-14 04:28:00 |
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Current music: | Nick Buzz - The Birds of Lanark County |
now I'm the noise from the outer world
Who: Ben and Desi
What: Overeaters Anonymous
Where: Around the school.
When: April 12th, after school.
Warnings: None yet!
Status: In progress
Ben was back in school. His father had been scared and furious (mostly scared) to find that Ben had knocked out an entire high school after prolonged starvation. You could have killed yourself, why would you do this, you could have killed them too, suppose one of them was sick and you didn't know, suppose one broke his neck when he fell, why wouldn't you just do things the normal way, why didn't you talk to me, what's the matter, what's wrong? Ben didn't have a lot of satisfactory answers to those questions, and it had led to his parents deciding that he'd been living in the physical world for too long at a stretch. An unnatural environment. There had been also been one result of the Spring Formal Incident that was even weirder (by human standards), and it had required some personal attention on the dreamscape.
So his parents had pulled him out of school with the excuse that he had some highly contagious form of viral pneumonia, and Ben had only today managed to wheedle them into letting him go back to classes. Back to the real world.
Which was weird. Ben had always been adaptable, moving from one world to the other almost from the moment that he'd spawned, but sometimes it took him a minute. He was quieter than usual, zoned out, not even really taking notes—he had almost two weeks of material to catch up on, but all he could do was sit there lost in thought. It fit well with the story that he'd been sick, though.
There wasn't much opportunity to talk to Desi in class that day, as the teacher droned on about plate tectonics and didn't let the students break up into smaller groups, so he'd just passed her a note instead: got time to talk after school?
He met her by the main doors, since the weather was okay—misty and grey, but still springlike and warm. "Hey," he said when he saw her, pushing off from the wall where he'd been leaning. "Do you want to talk outside or can you...not...that was about to be a really stupid question, huh?" he said with a smile, self-deprecating. "Obviously you can go outside, I'm an idiot."