Erran Serfaty (yahey) wrote in zenithrp, @ 2016-06-18 23:21:00 |
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Entry tags: | #day 038, erran, gemma |
Who: Erran and Gemma
When: Early morning
Where: Their room
What: Freaking out and an unfortunate coincidence
Erran and Gemma had got to bed late again last night, after watching both Stranger Than Fiction and A New Leaf in the basement. And yeah, there had definitely been making out, but when they shared the bed that night they still kept it PG-rated. Erran's whole intention with the scheme of old-fashioned dating was to make sure that the relationship didn't motor through all the fun early stages at turbo speed and go straight into "bored and taking each other for granted", which was otherwise the ordinary outcome of getting together with a housemate. Back at Zenith it would be easier because they'd both have their own spaces back (so he assumed, anyway), and for now, the glimpse of domesticity was nice rather than routine.
But nice as it was, this place was still throwing off his own routine, and that had consequences for his brain. As soon as he woke up the next morning, he could feel that things were not right. He could never describe it any more clearly than that, just a pulsating feeling of oh fuck in the back of his mind, from the first moments of waking up. He lay still for a few minutes, hoping that he was jumping the gun and getting anxious for no reason—taking the Ativan would mean today was pretty much a write-off, so he was always reluctant to take it unless he felt sure that something was rotten in Denmark. He rolled over in bed, trying to will himself back to sleep, then abruptly sat up again. Nope. Not okay. His water bottle on the bedside table was empty, so he got up to refill it.
Gemma had fallen asleep on her side, closer to Erran than she usually slept but not crowding him; it was too hot for that business, even though she'd always liked sleeping tangled up with someone else. She'd curled up beside him, her forehead resting lightly against the sleeve of his t-shirt, and had fallen asleep with the delicate numbness in her lips that meant she'd been kissing someone else for a good long time.
She must have moved during the night—she was sure she had, a vague memory of a bad dream, restless sleep—but she was still close to him when he got up, and it woke her. She didn't think anything of it until something tugged at her mind, some lingering malaise from her dream. It was going to be embarrassing if he'd just gotten up to go to the bathroom, but she said, "Erran? You okay?"
He took a second or two to reply, not because he was thinking but more like a satellite delay; it took some extra processing time to figure out that she'd said something to him. And even then, his first answer was, "Yeah, I'm okay," which wasn't really accurate. He filled the water bottle, a habitual, rote action that was easier right now than talking, and got the blister pack of Ativan out of the drawer before sitting back down on the bed. Answer her again, the first time sucked. "Yeah, I'm kind of..." he said and had to stop again because he couldn't remember the word he wanted, opening and closing one hand absently as he groped for the term. Started with P. Medical term, nice and clinical, not scary. He didn't have it. "I gotta take these," he settled on in defeat, popping two Ativan out of the package and putting them under his tongue.
She remembered what he'd said that day down at the pool about autopilot—he seemed robotic, and it woke her up much faster than she usually came to. This was twenty-minutes-and-a-cup-of-coffee awake. "Okay," she said, crawling across the expanse of the bed to kneel behind him, her hand between his shoulderblades. Four minutes, tops. She looked at the clock on the bedside table. Bottles on the bedside table. Write your goddamn dream journal later. "Okay, c'mere and lie down, then, okay? Turn on your side and face me so I know what's going on, just in case, because you sound weird right now..."
"I know, I know, yeah..." He obeyed her, because he suddenly had the feeling that this had all happened before somewhere else; it was as if he'd dreamed it months ago, down to their positioning on the bed and the way the early morning light was coming in through the windows. Fuck, yup, here we go, here it comes. He lay back down on the bed, automatically shoving the pillows aside so that he wouldn't accidentally smother himself. "It's okay," he said to Gemma, because he remembered that he hadn't really told her enough and this was going to freak her out. He couldn't give her any details now because he could barely string a sentence together. "It's okay, it'll be fine..."
"It'll be fine, I know, I know..." She was echoing him to reassure him that she could handle this, but saying it aloud reassured her too; this was a thing she was going to have to do if she was going to be with Erran, and she had to stay calm. She moved the pillows further out of the way since he wanted them gone, since it was something to do with her hands. "You told me four minutes, so I'm paying attention. I got you, Erran, I promise." Was he close enough to the middle of the bed that he wouldn't hit the nightstand? Could he bruise himself on the headboard? I don't want to see him like this, I don't want to see him go through this. She moved up to the head of the bed so she could guard his head if she needed to do it, her heart in her throat.
This time he didn't understand what she'd said at all, just vaguely registered that she was talking to him, the tone of her voice. But they'd been here before and she'd said the same thing, so the exact words didn't matter. Gravity seemed to pull harder, like the feeling you got on a plane during takeoff, and the last thing he felt was a radiant sense of joy, something bulletproof and beautiful. It never lasted.
He was completely still for half a minute, staring ahead blankly without blinking, and then made a sound like he'd been punched in the stomach, eyelids fluttering as he began to seize.
Gemma took a deep breath, almost as if she could breathe for him, a tactic to keep herself from tearing up. This was fine. Erran had done this a lot of times, and Erran was still Erran. What if this is the time it goes wrong? What if they did something to him? She reached up to cup her hand against his hair so that his head would have a barrier and bark against her fingers instead of the headboard—it would pinch, but it was preferable—and felt her stomach turn to ice. There was a small patch, a place that could be hidden if he combed his hair over it, that was shorn away. It hadn't been there last night. She'd had her hands in his hair over and over. The dream rushed back in: the figure at the foot of the bed, featureless but for that long black beak, emotionless, probing at Erran... what did they do to him, what did they do to him... "It'll be over soon," she whispered. "It'll be over soon, it'll be over soon, you'll be okay..." What did they do, what did they do...
The seizing itself slowed and stopped after two minutes, followed by another long few minutes of nothing in particular—he was breathing hard and deep, face slicked with foamy pink-streaked drool, but still staring right through Gemma with an empty expression that, out of context, would have looked like boredom. He didn't react to her voice at first, just picking at the blankets without purpose, automaton-like gestures. Finally he blinked a few times and focused on her again, trying to sit up. He couldn't talk yet and thinking was a pretty big challenge too. He was soaked with sweat but it seemed like this time he'd managed to avoid pissing himself, which was a big victory. He managed to produce a wordless noise, gesturing at the water bottle.
"I got you," Gemma whispered again, getting down off the bed. The big tree-bed like something out of Neverland, and the hulking figure like something out of a nightmare. Touching Erran, swabbing the inside of his mouth, writing things down. She was shaking. Caregiving mode. She'd done things like this for her grandfather, helped as much as she could, and she knew how to switch off the panic for a minute to do what had to be done. She slid a pillow under his head carefully and then gave him a long drink from the water bottle. "Hang on, I'm gonna be right back," she said, and she was true to her word; the washcloth she brought was cool, and she bathed his face first before folding it to the clean side and pressing it against his forehead. She wasn't sure what to say, but she could hear herself making hushing noises. It was still early enough in the morning that the room was dim, and the light from the bathroom cut across the bottom of the bed in a sharp line; she could see the sweat glistening on him.
He was still breathing hard, as if he'd just sprinted up several flights of stairs, and reality was beginning to set in: he'd bitten his tongue and his mouth tasted of blood, and his head hurt. It was taking a long time to remember where they were. Not home. Hotel? That was almost right, but not quite. Mountains. At the mountains of madness, like the story. Zenith. Except this wasn't Zenith, this was the vacation place. Island. That was why Gemma was here. Okay. He took another drink of water, washing away the taste of blood, and finally managed to say something. "Sorry, I'm sorry, are you okay?"
She laughed, not much more than an exhale. "You're asking me if I'm okay, that's rich, Serfaty." She stroked his damp hair back from his forehead, over and over, as if she could protect him by the gesture. Her fingers stayed away from that shorn spot. If she touched it again right now, she'd crumble. "This is part of the thing, Erran, it's okay. It's okay. Don't say you're sorry."
"Okay." He shifted to sit up a little more, because he was always obsessed with getting back up when he'd just had a seizure, as if to prove to himself that he still could. He no longer remembered the last few minutes before the seizure itself, although he could surmise from the colour of the light outside that it was early morning. Probably. Could also be evening, but that didn't feel right. He rubbed the heel of his palm over his temple and then reached up to hold Gemma's hand, meeting her eyes now and giving her a small smile. "So what'd I miss?"
"Some guy doing some super lame breakdancing moves. He was kind of just thrashing around. No real dance talent, I gotta say." She gripped his hand hard. Who did you talk to about your panic when you'd decided to start dating the therapist and he'd just had a seizure? She wasn't letting him meet her eyes, not quite. "What did you take before it happened? Just so I can know. And you probably want to take it easy today, right? I can message Cecilia, just let her know it happened so she's on top of stuff..."
"Mm. Did I take something?" He had to take a second to put that together, the question and the probable answer, based on the Ativan package that was still lying out on the bedside table. "Okay, that was...yeah, I guess I took the Ativan? I don't remember, last thing I knew I was going to bed last night. But sure, that sounds like something I'd do. I kind of know when it's about to happen, sometimes the meds can head it off. Wasn't fast enough this time. You don't have to bug Cecilia, everything's fine. But could you get me..." He stopped again, tilting his head back as he tried to find the word. "When we packed, there were the...Oliver put the things in the toaster boxes, they were—aspirin, oh my God. Could you get me a couple of those, please?"
That time she did laugh, getting up from her perch on the edge of the bed to kneel down and rummage through his suitcase until she found the aspirin. She shook three out into her hand, bringing the bottle with her when she came back. "Two or three? I always cheat and take three. And I'm not bugging Cecilia, I'm figuring that the nurse in the house would want to be vaguely aware of how often one of her patients was having seizures." And that something might have set it off. She realized dimly that her breathing was too shallow, and she made a conscious effort to deepen it, slow it.
"I'm pretty sure it's just—three's good, thank you," he said, taking the pills from her when she brought them to him. He swallowed them with another mouthful of water and set the bottle back down on the table. So long as he took something immediately after the seizure was over, he could usually prevent the worst headaches, the ones that kept him pinned to the bed for eight hours. "What was I saying, I'm pretty sure it's...this was a weird week, I missed a couple of days of meds when the house was closed off. And I didn't get to sleep early enough the last couple of nights, so I was asking for it. Grown man has strict bedtime, that's not embarrassing. Are you really okay?" he asked Gemma.
"As far as I'm concerned, strict bedtimes are the most adult thing ever," said Gemma, trying to make him smile, but even in the dim light, there was an obvious sheen of tears in her eyes. "Um. I'm not really okay? I'm gonna sound crazy, Jesus." She pressed the heels of her palms briefly to her eye sockets. "Somebody was in here last night, Erran, I swear to God someone was."
"Someone what?" He didn't remember either of them waking up during the night, but right now that didn't mean much. "What happened?"
"I thought it was a dream." Gemma took his hand again, looking down at his fingers. "I dreamed that some... like I've seen it before, but I don't know what they're called. The masks, with the goggles and the long noses that doctors used to wear? I dreamed there was somebody standing at the end of the bed wearing that, and I couldn't get up. At all. I just was frozen there. And the person came over to you and turned you over, and they were writing things down, they swabbed your mouth and your nose and put it in jars. I should've known it wasn't a dream because I was thinking, I was thinking about Egyptian funeral jars—how stupid is that?" She was talking too fast. Erran probably couldn't absorb half this information right now, but the words were rushing up in her throat. "And it cut your hair. Right here. I felt it when I was stroking your hair before, that's what made me realize I didn't just have another weird fucking dream. Somebody was in here and then you—you seized—and—"
"It's okay, it's okay," he murmured, squeezing her hand as he tried to process what she was saying. Canopic jars. Doctors' masks with long noses. "You mean the masks with the beak, like during the Plague? That's—Jesus, you're right," he said when he felt his hair, a small chunk of it that was now shorter than the rest. That was just bizarre. "What the fuck did They want hair for? So you were—you thought you were dreaming but it really happened, you were awake?"
"Yeah. Yeah." It was all she could say for a few seconds, swallowing hard, struggling not to let her tears spill over. Erran felt like hell right now, and she owed it to him not to fall apart. "I couldn't move or I would've woken you up. And then it came over to me and poked at..." She gestured at the back of her neck. "The chip, I guess. And flicked me on the forehead like I was some idiot kid. But God, Erran, it just... it just stood there, it stood there and stared at us for so long and then it started touching you, it got out a razor and I thought it was going to cut you open..." It came back the more she talked, and the tears did spill over.
"Jesus Christ," he said in disbelief, pushing himself a little more upright. It made no sense; the people running this place had plenty of opportunities to examine and take samples from everyone, since the whole group had been knocked out twice this week alone. Why show up in the night, why let themselves be seen, even with masks on? What needed checking? "That's—here, come here, just sit with me and breathe, okay?" he said, putting his arm around her while he kept her hand in his. "I'd share the Ativan but something tells me it's a bad idea to piss off Cecilia..."
It was still too hot and he was still damp, something Gemma might have found distasteful in another situation or with another person, but instead she just pressed her forehead against his chest. "No, I don't... I've never had it, if it'd make me sleepy I don't want it..." She was trembling, actually trembling, a word that was reserved for tree leaves and scared animals. "What if it did something to make you have a seizure?" she whispered. "What if They did that on purpose?"
"Well, I'm not gonna say it's impossible because apparently nothing is, for these people," he said. "But it doesn't sound likely? If it just poked at me and took cheek swabs and messed with my hair, that wouldn't trigger anything. Just really lousy timing." They didn't know much about what the implants did, but even if They could affect his brain that way, there wasn't anything he could do about it. He didn't say that out loud, though. "This is pretty normal for me, that wasn't a bad one at all. Whatever They were up to, I don't think 'fuck with the epileptic guy' was the intention."
Gemma scrubbed her hand across her forehead and through her hair, feeling lost even with Erran's arm around her. Admitting that she'd been deliberately ignoring the more sinister aspects of this place was a hit to her pride, but she still said quietly, "This is the first time I've actually been scared here. Really scared. I feel like I want to fight off anybody that comes near you because you're the thing I have in here. Fuck them right up."
"I hit 'really scared' the night they told us about the re-location thing," he said. "Which passed, but still." There was no way it hadn't been a deliberate attempt to scare everybody, or at least to see who got scared and who didn't. And like a kid with a short attention span, he'd forgotten that when distracted by something shiny. "And it's stupid, They said They wanted us to 'accept our circumstances' or whatever, but They also want to scare the piss out of us. Those two things don't go together! Make up your minds, assholes. The thing just touched you on the neck, right? It didn't hurt you?"
"I know. I don't want to see you scared, I fucking hated that. I kind of realized I was into this when I realized I wanted to like... to protect you. Prisoners of war and stuff." Gemma resettled her head on his chest to listen to his heartbeat. "No—no, it didn't hurt me, it felt like it thought I was some kind of malfunction. Which should not feel personal, by the way, but I'm still a little insulted. If I'm here, I want it to be for some kind of goddamn purpose, not because some spook in the middle of the night shows up to do fuck-all." She couldn't stop shaking. Maybe she'd ask Cecilia about Ativan, about the kinds of stuff it did—she'd been on anti-depressants before for a minute, but anxiety stuff was beyond her, tacitly outlawed in dancing because everyone thought it dulled your emotional edge in performances. "If they wanted to scare me then fine, job well fucking done, guys. I'm scared. Thanks for the vacation and the nightmares."
"Yeah, we're war buddies now. Semper fi, Charlie don't surf." He smoothed her hair down as she rested her head on his chest; he couldn't see any freshly-trimmed ends in Gemma's hair, so apparently she was right and he was the only one who'd gotten that treatment. Had it happened to anyone else in the house, or were they singled out for some reason? Nah, we're not that special, it must have happened to other people too. "I don't like seeing you scared either. We should probably find out if anyone else had a visitor last night, I bet it wasn't just us. If we're bugging Cecilia anyway she might want to know."
"Everybody would probably want to know, yeah. I doubt we're the only ones, since They seem to pull this stuff a lot, from what I've gathered." Just not with us yet. As far as bothering Cecilia, Gemma wasn't sure she was comfortable with people treating anyone as a de facto leader in this place; of course it was going to happen, but somehow it felt like one step closer to a Lord of the Flies situation. "And we are not bugging Cecilia, we are keeping a medical professional abreast of a situation." She raised her head and then sat up on her elbow, kissing his forehead gently. "You need anything? Give me a job to do."
"Can you phone God and ask why He allows suffering?" He felt gross and wanted a shower, but he'd have to settle for a shallow bath. With the door open. Later. "I really want to eat something, actually, so if you can just supervise me through breakfast I'll stumble back to bed right after. Where I'll probably be all day, but try to wake me up around dinner time? I do better if I eat regularly. This is such a pain in the ass, I'm sorry," he said. "I knew it was gonna happen sometime but this was really the worst possible day."
"Why was this the worst possible day?" Gemma smoothed his hair back absently, just one strand between her fingers. "I can just bring you something, yeah, don't navigate down to the kitchen. Tell me what to feed the vegan monster here."
"Because it was the same day as the midnight checkup from Doctor Paracelsus?" he said. "You should only have to freak out about one thing at a time. I can walk, I'm okay to—ow, all right, fine—" Moving his head made the pain worse. "Just cereal's good, I don't care which kind. Surprise me. The vegan monster's fake milk is in the fridge on the door. You're seriously so nice to me, thank you."
"Yeah, before it was pity, but I have ulterior motives now. I get to kiss you when I'm nice." She smiled as she crawled down from the bed, bending over to kiss his forehead again. Leaving the room and leaving Erran alone made her hesitate, looking down at him. "I really promise I'm going to leave here in a second," she said quietly. "Just one more second. God, I don't like this, I don't like leaving you alone."
"It's okay," he told her. He hated seeing his friends and family get understandably freaked out when this happened. It was nice when other people were around to help him through this post-ictal period of feeling like ass, but accepting that help always felt like he was making withdrawals from a very finite account. "I'm feeling the Ativan now so that means it's working its magic. I'll be fine here for ten minutes while you go to the kitchen, I promise."
"Yeah, well, what are you going to do when Creeper von Spookerstein shows up again? I know you know what you can handle, just..." Just. Her hand brushed his, then took it up and gave it a squeeze. "Okay," she said softly. "I'll fill up your water bottle too. Ten minutes and I'm back. Okay."
After a deep breath and a crooked smile, she left the room. It was still early enough that the house felt blanketed in quiet, only the distant roar of the waves to break the silence. She'd be fast. There was just no way she was going to leave him alone today.