Who: Oliver & Marco When: Afternoon Where: Oliver's room
By lunch time, Marco was starting to run out of ways to avoid his bedroom. The room had betrayed him, first by tricking him again, and then presenting him with his weakness. He tried to put the pills out of his mind, but the day hadn't given him anything better to focus on. He still didn't know what it was Juno had refused to tell him, which bothered him, but he supposed it was fair, considering that now there was no way that he would tell her about what he'd found in his room. He was worried about Juliet, and himself for having seen her. What if August was right, and They were inducing hallucinations? How much had They done, and for how long? August could still be wrong, but just the chance that he wasn't meant that Marco was questioning his reality again, which left him feeling unstable and scared. He'd only just started to feel better about himself.
Which brought him right back to the morphine, because he knew that he could get rid of that distrust of his own mind with just a couple pills, that were waiting for him, back in his room. If he was numb, then he'd be okay, at least for a while. And damn it, he missed the feeling. Nothing could hurt him when he was high. Not like now. He just wanted to feel like he was on solid ground, so it wouldn't matter what tricks his mind played on him or that They played on him or the person who wanted to trigger him played on him. He wanted the escape.
But he remembered the meeting, too. The serious way that people had talked about locking him up. How much he'd hurt Juno, and Lennon, and even Oliver, and they hadn't even been friends then. He didn't want to get to that point again.
He should have gone back to Juno's room, but that was complicated now. He didn't feel comfortable talking to her about the whole addiction thing. She had strong feelings about it, which were entirely reasonable, but added to his feeling bad for even thinking about drugs, which happened more than he would ever admit to her. She didn't like Marco the Addict. Again, reasonable.
So in the middle of the afternoon, Marco wandered over to his safe space, Oliver's room. There had been no answer when he knocked, but Oliver had said before that if he needed, he could go in and stay in there. So, Marco let himself in, grabbed the calm-down jar that he'd made for Oliver, and laid down, curled up on his side on the couch that he'd gotten so used to. He told himself that Juliet was fine, in a villa somewhere, just like Reginald had been. He told himself that August was wrong about this being a government conspiracy, and that they were regularly getting doused with hallucination gas. He told himself that he was doing better than he had ever been, and he didn't need to keep the morphine for an emergency. People wouldn't overreact if he just said that he'd found the bottle placed in his bathroom.
Why didn't he believe any of what he told himself?
He took a deep breath, then tried to focus on his breathing as he turned the calm jar over and watched the glitter swirl.