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General anxiety and panic attacks, will adjust if anything else comes up.
David was a lot of things, but okay was not currently one of them. He had been almost okay throughout most of his ordeal so far. He had accepted his arrival on a random street corner with the calm that only being convinced you’re in a fever dream can provide, and he’d quite happily played along when the DOA members had found him and filled him in on their utterly ludicrous account of where he was. The calm had begun to fade the moment he was out on his own, and it began to shift into a nagging dread when he realized that it felt like it had been quite a while and he still wasn’t waking up.
He did not, in actuality, believe that this was a theme party. Regardless of the fact that he could be a bit airheaded, David Rose was not stupid. There was no way in hell that anyone could have pulled off a surprise or a prank this huge and complex. James Cameron could have teamed up with Elon Musk and agreed to come together and pull all funding from sea and space exploration and they could not have pulled this off. Especially in the literal blink of an eye it had taken for him to go from Cafe Tropical to that random street corner.
Then the cicadas had shown up and he’d spent way more time running than he would ever have wanted to spend and okay was officially no longer a thing. If okay even made the list of things he was at all, it was at the very last bullet point. Way below “trying not to cry again, once was enough”, “both hungry and nauseous”, and “hyperventilating off and on for the last hour”.
He was currently breathing at a semi normal rate and his heart didn’t feel like it was going to explode anymore, so that at least was a plus. Everything else was just still decidedly a negative. The cicadas had, indeed, largely seen fit to leave him alone after he found a literal fucking dumpster to hide behind, but that didn’t mean he’d escaped the noise. It was better than them actively crawling on him, but not by much. The only thing that kept him quietly pacing in the small space behind the dumpster rather than curling up in fetal position was the knowledge that doing so would only serve to dirty his jeans, and that would only make him feel even worse.
Despite lodging his complaints publicly, he was not about to admit to exactly how fucking frightened he was. Nor was he willing to admit that the light at the end of that awful tunnel of sheer terror was his sister showing up in his messages. He couldn’t bring himself to be sincere, despite the fact that Alexis seemed to be having no qualms about doing so, but he was willing to admit to himself at least that he was probably going to hug her the second she actually got there. Even if she was sort of sending him back into panic mode with her comments about missing him and how long it had been since she’d seen him. Even if she had the gall to insist on bringing a muscle bound literal god along to rescue him when he expressly asked her not to.
He resisted the urge to rub at his eyes, well aware that doing so would only make the bags and redness from crying worse, but he did at least make a cursory effort with his hair. A difficult task without a mirror and with only the ability to sort of ineffectually comb through the tangled bits with his fingers. He regretted this decision when his fingers brushed against something dry and spiky, and he extracted it to find a large insect leg.
He would also not be admitting to anyone just how loudly and mortifyingly shrilly this made him scream. He’d been thinking a seven hour shower, but it was looking more like twelve now.