Re: Under the trees: Elijah/Klaus
Elijah looked like someone had tried to hit him at sixty miles an hour and caught in headlights. A rabbity sor t of expression appeared on his face as Elijah rapidly tried to calculate how to back-pedal. This was what sympathy got you, this was empathy. Wrongful firing of synapses, clusters of ineffective useless brain pathways that modelled concern as part of a wider driver toward sociability. The man was smiling as though Elijah had told him a secret instead of doing something unutterably stupid and if anything could have made the ugly, terrified look on Elijah's face stretch like a maw to take in more, it would have been the suggestion this was anything other than a temporary moment.
It was difficult to describe the precise way in which what Elijah did worked. He'd tried. With pen and paper, with voice recording, ponderous and slow and where he could switch the tape off intermittently, swallow mouthfuls of his father's drinks cabinet and feel the twisting, horrid mass of it rise like bile in his throat. It was quick, accelerated but it worked the way the bodily process worked and in that order, it simply transferred. No doubt Klaus was as clear-headed as he'd ever been. Elijah didn't answer, he couldn't. He had synapses firing and misfiring, his throat clotted closed and his pupils blown wide as stars and then as his liver macerated whatever it was that Klaus had stuck up his nose or down his throat or in his veins, he felt the pulverising headache that began deep in his temples.
Drugs, then, Elijah noticed somewhere deep beneath the gut-twisting pain of processing enough dosage to penetrate an addiction with the perverse emotionlessness of the observer instead of a man slurried with whatever the dosage had been. Didn't look at Klaus, didn't need to, that man was probably sober by now.
Elijah turned neatly to one side and was violently, albeit cleanly, sick.