InsaneJournal

Who: Kat & Simon
What: Simon won the 'who can I harass' lottery!
Where: Medbay
When: 3am-ish, China-time, aka sometime afternoon, Sunday, in Lawrence. wat.
Rating: Not low; Kat has weird disturbing imagery, and also swears.


Waking up from nightmares was becoming commonplace, as much as Kat hated to admit it. This was why she didn't sleep - the nightmares themselves, whatever. She could deal with them, it was just like a horror movie in her head, that was all. It was the waking up from them that made things harder - because the time between dream and full awareness stretched on for minutes, sometimes an hour or more, dragging her into dark corners of her mind and making things fuzzy and confusing and yet way too sharp and distinct, like someone had blurred pieces of a picture, and highlighted the edges of other parts of it, some distorted thing that made her panic.

In the moments after a nightmare, she was a monster again. In the moments after a nightmare, she found herself frantic and confused - looking for a gun, looking for a way out, because this wasn't what she wanted to be, she didn't want to be like this, she didn't want to hurt anyone, not really - but even so all she could think about was tearing into flesh and she was so hungry...

...and then the fog would lift, and she felt like an idiot. It wasn't real. She knew it wasn't, she knew better. But sometimes, she didn't.

So she took precautions. She'd left town, knowing Dark would likely have an opportunity to get to her, in times like these. She'd gotten rid of her gun. As much as she hated to admit it, as much as she hated the idea of disarming herself, in case another threat came along, she knew wasn't in the right sort of place to have one, and she knew first-hand how scary it was to know that someone who wasn't thinking straight had a weapon and might use it on themselves. John had taught her that.

She hadn't figured she'd end up like him, though.

Which... wasn't fair. She knew that wasn't fair. He hadn't exactly planned on being half-crazy sometimes, he hadn't asked to have his best friend die on him twice, on top of other issues he already had to start with. Just like she hadn't asked to be attacked by zombies and turn into one and then come back. Things just happened to people, sometimes. Bad things, things they just couldn't deal with very quickly, no matter how much they tried to. That didn't make them weak and it didn't make them morons.

Except, okay, it kinda did, at least in her case, because it was over and done now and she didn't actually want to eat people but sometimes she felt like maybe she did but that wasn't real, it wasn't real anymore, why couldn't she just get that through her head? Why couldn't she just ignore it, and move on? She was tired of all of this, tired of being stupidly neurotic and even more tired of trying to play it off and act normal. She just wasn't hungry, and she just wasn't in the mood to be around people, and she didn't know why there was a chair in front of the door, how'd that get there, weird, must've been something drunk-Kat thought was a good idea, yep, because sober-Kat would never do that, because Kat was totally and completely fucking normal.

And when she wasn't ignoring the issues, she tried to at least make light of them, make black-humored jokes about the effectiveness of the recovering-zombie diet, and you look good enough to eat, and just sheer unbridled flippancy about the entire thing, because that was what she did. She didn't do the needing help thing very well.

Which is why instead of waiting until she was sure it was a sensible hour, or getting any sort of permission or sending a message or anything like that, Kat found herself doing a quick mental calculation (weird o'clock in the morning in China was probably mid afternoon, in Lawrence, right?) and then teleporting from her hotel room to the medbay in the complex, hoping a specific and rather pretty doctor was on duty, because right now she just kind of needed to not be perfectly okay, and next to Bruce, who was gone now, and John (who she wasn't going to throw this on, he had enough to deal with, she wasn't going to make that worse), Simon and his sister had probably seen her at her worst, helped her not freak out more than she already had, talked her down and calmed her down, and he wasn't actively coddling her when they talked, or acting like she was a freak, which meant he was probably a decent enough human being that she could maybe kinda trust him. Probably.