InsaneJournal

WHO: Patrick Milligan, Tessa Lewis, and a brief mention of Melinda Milligan.
WHAT: Apparently even future!kids can stumble on horribly mangled bodies on the steps. GO TEAM FUTURE!
WHEN: After this.
WHERE: Right there on the front steps! Don’t you just feel so safe now?
RATING: Not very high. Unless you count Patrick’s heart rate.
STATUS: Complete/Narrative

Even Patrick could get tired of being cooped up. It took an awful lot longer, and when it did start to rear its head it often manifested a little differently at first. He was much more prone to just getting grouchy and restless than to actually do anything about feeling penned in, and more often than not ended up feeling ashamed of the penned up feeling at the same time. It led to a vicious cycle that escalated to higher and higher heights of self-sustaining angst until finally it reached a critical mass and even he could no longer just bottle it up. He could usually get around this by drawing or playing a few songs on his guitar, but sometimes even Patrick Milligan, tortured artist extraordinaire, had to get the hell out of the house every once in a blue moon. After the last few days, he was right about there. The party hadn’t been a good idea, and while a good bit of the upset it caused had been burned off while creating his tragic tale of a ghost’s slow degeneration into madness, there was still just too much there for him to fit into the little bottle in his mind. Much as he hated to admit it, he would have to follow Alex’s lead and find some uninhabited area to let loose in.

These forays out into the world didn’t mean he didn’t bring his security blankets with him. The sketchpad and the guitar were both packed in the heavy black case he lugged around all the time, and the earbuds of his fancy future phone blared a mixed playlist of Joy Division, Butthole Surfers, and Dragonforce directly into his ears as he headed for the doors out into the open air. He wasn’t exactly going out for a pleasant journey, and his quick, heavy steps made the point just as well as the scowl he directed at the world around him. His free hand was stuck in the pocket of his jeans, angrily flicking between the songs whenever he felt the need for a mood change. He hadn’t bothered with the coat and instead gone with a simple white t-shirt and black vest, knowing the chill on his mostly bare arms would help take the edge off the rage and give him a little added focus to cut through the rest. It wasn’t the first time he’d used a little discomfort to give him an edge against the roiling ragemonster in his head, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, either. But for now, he was actually ready to let it out of the little cage in his head. He needed to, or it would force its bars and probably at the worst possible time.

It was too bad for little Patrick Milligan that he didn’t realize that this was the worst possible time.

The earbuds kept him from hearing anything that might have clued him in to something being amiss as he stepped toward the lobby doors. His inward focus on his own thoughts kept him from seeing the human shape on the other side of the doors, lying crumpled on the steps, even when he should have. It wasn’t until he angrily pushed through the doors that he finally did register the wounded girl. At first, he didn’t even recognize her. He knew he was looking at a severely wounded girl, and there was something familiar about her that set his stomach to quavering, but for a moment he thought that he was just stumbling on some horribly mangled member of the complex. In that moment, he tugged out his earbuds and crouched down, opening his mouth to try and get some response from this girl-

-and then he finally saw.

Time slammed to an abrupt halt. For likely the first time in his entire life, every single thought in his head went utterly and completely silent. There was no rage. There was no jealousy. There was no fear. There was no shame. For an instant that seemed to stretch on forever, there was nothing but a cold void beyond even denial. He just…hung there, suspended in the void, staring at the mangled body of one of the few genuinely good things in his life. There was, of all things, confusion, confusion as to how something so wrong could even happen, how someone so close to him could be so hurt, that lasted for eternity and a microsecond.

Time sped up again. His stomach sank into his feet and his heart tried to leap out of his mouth and take up playing drums for a speed metal band. The void was washed away in a tide of horror so pure it might have spilled right from Lovecraft’s mountains of madness. He hurled the guitar case, containing easily his most prized possessions, away as if they were nothing, unwilling to just let them drop and risk falling on her but unable to carry their weight in suddenly numb hands. He heard someone screech and only afterward realized he’d just somehow screamed her name without his brain being aware of it. He started to lurch forward, responding to his inner emotional reactor rocketing well past Chernobyl, but suddenly stopped himself as he realized he didn’t know a goddamn thing about medicine and trying to lift her right now might do more harm than good.

Just like that, the cold steel blast doors he usually kept between his emotions and the rest of him slammed back into place. Tessa needed someone who could form a coherent thought, not a lunatic so awash with emotions that he thought time was actually standing still. Freak out later. Help now. And then, right on the cusp of that thought, another came unbidden to him, leaking out from the blast doors and the monster behind them. God, if you take away one of the few good things in my life, I will rip out your holy intestines and strangle you with them.

Then he was all business. He could have used his phone, but he didn’t need that to get the attention of the person he needed right now. He took a deep breath and then, louder than his loudest metal scream, he called out, “MOM!” He knew the way her whitelighter powers worked. All he had to do was call out for her and she would come. When he did, he tried to force every single ounce of the ocean of fear he felt into it, hoping it would somehow make the urgent cry more urgent. After that he immediately went back into a crouch, trying to find some sign of consciousness from the girl he’d been secretly crushing since before he knew girls didn’t have cooties. “Tessa? Tessa, it’s me, Patrick. You have to hang on, okay? My mom’s coming, she’ll heal you, I just need you to stay with me, okay?” Despite the terror he was feeling inside, not a single bit of it leaked out now. He was pretty sure Tessa would have enough of her own fear to contend with at the moment, she didn’t need more from him. Instead he tried to sound as calm and confident as he could, all the while fervently praying that he could keep it together for long enough to help her. A second later, Patrick felt another presence materialize on the steps and felt at least some tiny sense of relief that his mom was here. Quickly stepping to the side to give her room to work, he gestured urgently to Tessa and said just about the only three words he was capable of right now. “Heal her. Please?” He could read the shock on his mother’s face, but also the determination and a second later, she was doing her thing.

Patrick took an extra step back, watching as the glowing light common to all whitelighter healing began to build and pass from Mel to Tessa. Patrick knew from experience that this would take a few minutes, which gave him a few minutes to start thinking beyond the initial crisis. He took a deep breath to try and swallow his heart back to where it belonged, and also to cover the wince at the sudden sharp headache he felt at trying to hold his emotions in check right now, but he managed it. Thinking clearly now in spite of his emotions, he knew he needed to send up the word, and he’d have a few minutes to do that before the healing was over. Retrieving his phone from his pocket, he typed out a quick message, hoping people would excuse how terse it was. Then he dropped the phone back into his pocket, forgotten and unimportant now, and stepped closer again, hoping that maybe the extra body might provide Tessa some small comfort while her wounds were magically knit. With great effort, he forced the mountain of psychic crap back into the bottle it belonged in and sealed it tightly. His mental ship may have been creaking, but it was holding.

For now.