Chapter Text
The two staff members, whoever they are, maybe nurses, or some other kind of medical professionals, both of them clad in scrubs, march Dew into the guts of the infirmary and bring him to a gurney nestled between a wall and a hanging curtain.
“Sit here,” one of them encourages, patting the neatly tucked sheets. “Here, sit here.”
Dew sits there. He feels like a spectator in his own body, like he’s in the passenger seat of his brain. He keeps himself packed tightly, his legs folded close to him, his shoulders hunched over.
One of the nurses tries to pull one of his arms away from where they’re tucked against his sides, elbows down and fists near his shoulders, pressed tight. All of their touches are accumulating, building and building to the point that he can feel them buzzing under his skin. There could be a million hands on him right now, or there could be none.
“Just checking your blood pressure.”
He can feel the rush of blood moving through his body. It knows everything, has been everywhere, like traffic on a highway network snaking down his limbs, branching into spiraling interchanges and all the way out into surface roads, neighborhood streets, back alleys in his fingertips. They have the map. He is utterly transparent.
She wraps the cuff around his upper arm. The machine pushes against his blood to see how hard it will push back, how firmly it will stand its ground. If someone pushed him right now, he would topple over like a felled tree, severed from its roots that cling to the solid ground. When the cuff deflates, he deflates with it.
Distantly he feels the nurse take his hand again. He looks down to see her squeezing a shiny bead of vibrant red blood out of his fingertip, outside of his body, bracing against the ambient air. Ice-cold horror washes over him, freezing him in place; he tries to pull his hand back but he can’t. His fingers twitch ineffectually, maybe imperceptibly.
The nurse utters a jumble of phonemes, something that sounds like words but isn’t, yet it still conveys a message — she wants him to submit, to lie down and stop struggling while she inspects him. He’s a lost hiker, shivering in the sudden chill after nightfall, holding as still as he can while she, a well-fed bear, sniffs him, her snout brushing against his windbreaker, deciding if he’s even worth the effort to chew.
When Dew looks at his fingertip again, she’s wrapping a band-aid around it. She places his hand down on the sheets. He lifts his hand closer to his eyes and examines it. His fretting hand, he registers, somewhere in the background of his mind. He taps his thumb and bandaged fingertip together a few times.
Another person comes in while the nurse is gathering all her devices and supplies and other detritus — a doctor, with a white coat and a stethoscope. Dew has seen her before, somewhere, in real life or in a dream or in a premonition. She briefly talks to the nurse, the two of them stepping away from him until they’re on the boundary of his auditory range. He catches words here and there, but more clearly he recognizes their tone. They’re talking about him, of course, and his behavior, which is wrong and laughable. He feels his face flush red, his blood betraying him again.
The doctor dismisses the nurse and approaches the gurney. She doesn’t stand close, only just within the perimeter of the curtain, as if she’s trying to be unassuming, to present herself as trustworthy. Her body language displays an intentional openness. It’s an act. What it really displays is her confidence, her dominance over the situation.
“Is it alright if I ask you some questions?”
Dew can’t bring himself to look directly at her. Her presence is too solid. He’s not sure yet if she’s threatening — she teeters on the edge of it in a sort of second-order ominousness that threatens of a threat, a looming parabolic trajectory of danger that could slip quickly out of control.
That’s not to say that he has any control at all — any he once had is gone now. That weakness tips the scales wildly out of balance. The presence of a simple inanimate object could be intimidating right now, if it were to present itself so plainly. And they are, all around him.
But they all bow in deference to her. Standing there with her hands clasped loosely in front of her, she is poised, unmovable. Dew doesn’t move either, doesn’t acknowledge her, doesn’t offer her any information.
“Could you tell me a little bit about what’s been happening tonight? Do you know why you’re here?”
No one has said it outright, but it’s clear he’s being held here as some kind of prisoner, or at least a dangerous criminal suspect. He probably isn’t supposed to say that to her — he’s not supposed to know, so he needs to pretend he doesn’t. What is he supposed to think, then? What’s the right answer? The thoughts that roll through his head are empty shells without content.
“Dewdrop?”
He almost tells her outright, caught off guard by her pressuring, drawn by the same pull towards obedience that’s been nagging at him all night, but he catches himself and decides against it. He shakes his head. He doesn’t have an answer.
“That’s okay.”
It’s surprising that she backs off so easily. It’s suspicious — she must have some other strategy, some ace up her sleeve, to be so unbothered. Her coat billows behind her as she leaves.
Dew is never let out of their collective sight, the three of them. Someone always has eyes on him. The weight of their observation, more than any physical restriction, prevents him from escaping, or even considering it as a possibility.
The nurse who scrutinized his blood is in the room almost always. Sometimes she’s joined by the one from the front desk. They exchange hushed communication, offer him furtive glances. They’re nearly out of earshot, but he can hear what they say — negative, disparaging comments, repetitions of his inner thoughts that they siphoned from him when they were nearby and their judgments of them. They laugh.
When the doctor returns, she stands in exactly the same place, with exactly the same pose. The two moments overlap; time threatens to fold in on itself, connecting by a point of congruence, a singularity.
“I talked to Rain. I have an idea of what’s going on, but I want to ask you some more questions, is that okay?”
Does that mean Rain is still here? Maybe Rain is being detained somewhere too. He didn’t do anything particularly wrong, apart from occasional willful ignorance. Or maybe he’s on their side — he must be, if he’s giving them information, but that doesn’t seem right. Rain floats above the situation, enigmatic, resisting Dew’s attempts to fit him into the story.
“Have you been having any unusual experiences? Like your mind is playing tricks on you?”
That’s one way to put it, and not what he would have said. Those are two separate ideas, both of which he would endorse — if he were to tell her the truth, that is, which he doesn’t plan to. He has found himself in unusual, distressing situations recently, and he has also struggled to think clearly, but their relation seems coincidental.
“Does it sometimes feel like your thoughts stop, or are taken out of your head?”
He doesn’t want to tell her. He doesn’t want her to know that she’s right, but he can feel how open he is, how exposed, and he knows she can see it. She can read it straight through his skull. It’s an unnecessary cruelty, at this point, to subject him to this.
“Do you feel like people can tell what you’re thinking?”
It’s not a question but an intimidation, a warning. It’s a presentation of evidence, a revelation of the final piece of the puzzle. She’s not particularly tall, and the gurney is high off the ground, but it feels like she’s standing over him, poised with a sword at his throat. Give up, she’s saying. Surrender. There’s nothing left that you can do.
“Are you having trouble understanding what’s real and what’s not?”
That’s the core of it, isn’t it? Everything that happened earlier, the frayed timelines, being sucked into his own mind — this is what it all boils down to. This is her final move, her lunge for the kill. Checkmate.
“Dewdrop, I can tell this must be scary right now, but I’m asking because I want to help. Can you tell me anything about what’s going on for you?”
She’s waiting for him to tip over his king, to fold his cards, to raise a white flag, to afford some acknowledgment of his certain defeat by her cunning hand. He still has nothing to say, nothing she doesn’t already know. He shakes his head.
“I’m going to talk to another doctor about this,” she says. “A specialist. And I’m going to run some tests.”
And with that, she leaves once again, this time having dealt the killing blow. She stops to talk to the nurse on her way to the door at the far end of the room, which sets in motion a ripple of activity. The nurse swaps out for the front desk nurse, who leans against the wall opposite the gurney and stares at him. Dew averts his eyes.
The other nurse returns to the gurney with a round plastic bowl full of something, some assortment of items. She sets it on the sheets. If Dew looks at the contents, it would be proof that he’s interested, that he’s affected, that he’s afraid — a show of weakness. He doesn’t look.
She wraps an elastic band around his upper arm. He tenses under her manipulation. She’s saying something without words again, the same as before — be still, give up.
Memories condense, thin and transparent, like the film of wetness on the outside of a glass of cold water. This process she is initiating is a ritual that culminates with his blood being removed from his body. Again. Removed again, in a greater volume this time.
And again, he is somehow unable to pull away. He conjures the idea of himself climbing over the raised rails of the gurney and leaving, running all the way back to his room and locking the door, but the task of translating that concept into a series of concrete actions is an insurmountable barrier. The gurney rail may as well reach the ceiling. All he can do is tug weakly, feeble and ineffectual, against her one-handed grip around the back of his forearm.
“Just a little pinch,” she coos, venomous.
So patronizing, thinking that his only objection to having his blood removed from his body is the prick of the needle she’s going to use to do it, as if physical pain means anything to him right now. He doesn’t even feel it when it happens. All of his skin is buzzing.
He watches his blood pool into the collection tube, feeding its round body like a fat leech made of glass. She disconnects the tube and replaces it with another one. Growing fear makes his heart pound, which only drains the blood faster. He can feel his extremities becoming numb. This is the end. The edges of his vision fade to gray.
Suddenly the nurse is patting her hand against his shoulder. He’s lying back against the gurney, and she’s calling his name.
“Take some deep breaths, Dewdrop.”
It’s a resurrection of sorts, her coaxing him to breathe life, or perhaps undeath, into his bloodless husk of a body. Dread echoes through his mind as he realizes the significance of it. His sentence is something greater than death — not one death but a series of deaths, a torturous loop in which he is incomprehensibly able to be killed without being alive, and thus continues to suffer beyond the hope of relief.
What happens when he inhales now, without blood? His organs have already decayed into an amalgamated sludge in his thoracic cavity; he can feel what’s left of them sloshing around behind his ribs. His breaths now gust over his liquefied lungs like a sea breeze. He exhales the smell of rot.
The nurse drapes a blanket over his legs. He can feel it pressing against him in a million places. He waits until she steps away before he pushes it off. He sits forward again, too, curling in on himself, pulling his back away from the raised head of the gurney.
Time slows down, or speeds up, or fades away. It’s beyond him, irrelevant to his existence. He’s frozen in place like a stone statue, a mummy, his body in rigor mortis. The two nurses buzz like flies.
The next person to approach him, to crack open the lid of his coffin, is the doctor again. She’s holding something, a cup in each hand.
“Hi, Dewdrop. I just talked to a specialist, and I want to offer you these medications that we think will help you feel better.”
She holds out one hand and shows him a small plastic cup with three pills in it. Dew glances at it.
“It’s two medications. One of them will make you feel more relaxed, and the other will make your thoughts clearer. Would you be willing to take them?”
To consume is the ultimate act of acceptance, of submission — to accept something she’s offering and merge it with himself. He won’t allow her inside him no matter which way she tries to enter.
“Do you have any concerns about taking them?”
She knows what his concerns are. They’re playing chess again; she’s setting something up, blocking off his routes of escape.
“If not, will you take them? I think you’ll feel better.”
She’s closing in, and he’s cornered. All he can do is avert his eyes and shut himself down.
“Dewdrop, I can’t help you like this, and I don’t think it will get better on its own. I need you to take the medication.”
So there was never a choice in the first place. It was a lie, a way to trick him into following instructions, to control him.
The doctor is saying something but she’s so far away. She moves the cup closer to him. He feels the instinct to flinch, but his body doesn’t do it. He can’t move. Distantly, maybe somewhere behind the curtain, a voice is pleading, help me.
The entire world fades into the background as his senses power down. He desperately wants to be anywhere else. He never should have unlocked his door. The abyss of chaotic thought would be preferable to this. The help he sought was unattainable, a mirage.
People come and go. There are words in the air. Time, a concept that has perplexed him, that has behaved so strangely, marches only forward now. If he could make it go backwards, he would go to the moment Rain grabbed his hands. It’s the only peace he’s felt all night.
That moment, the instant that his and Rain’s palms made contact, is orbiting him, swirling playfully, beckoning. Its appearance feels anomalous somehow, so spontaneous, unbidden — it means something.
Rain’s voice cuts through the fog, calling his name.
Dew looks up, a completely involuntary consequence of his own surprise, and Rain is really there, standing right next to the gurney. Dew asked for his help, and now he’s here, finally, closing the loop.
“You’re here,” is all Dew can say.
“I’m here,” Rain says, but he doesn’t dwell on it. “Dew, you need to take this.”
Dew grabs Rain’s hand when he extends it. It feels solid under his fingers, bones and tendons wrapped in warm skin. “You’re real,” he says, still in disbelief.
“I’m real.” He says it like it’s the most common sense thing in the world, a plain as day fact, yet there’s no judgment in his voice.
“This is real.” Dew is standing at the edge of a cliff, ready to let himself fall.
“It’s real.” Rain presses his hand forward. “Please, Dew, you need to take this.”
Rain is so utterly familiar in a sea of strangeness. His eyes are deep, like before, and magnetic. They represent unity, oneness, connection so strong it breaks down boundaries. He’s been fixated on boundaries all evening, on preserving them, but that was wrong; that’s not what he needs right now.
Rain presses his hand closer. “It’s going to help.”
Dew stares. It’s going to help? It’s an intricate concept, to be helped, one steeped in reality, multidimensional and nuanced. Dew is a plant growing towards the light, a single sensation, and Rain is pulling back the curtains to let the sun shine on him. He’s feeling a purely instinctual urge to reach out and grasp something that nourishes him. The only other option is annihilation.
Rain nods at him.
Dew touches the cup in Rain’s outstretched hand. It contains the same pills from before, but the context changes everything. Rain starts to move his hand away. Dew grabs it before he can get too far. That touch is the center of his world right now.
“Please, Dew,” Rain says.
Dew is wrapped in an all-encompassing love, symbiosis, something beyond words. It’s precarious. It’s delicate, like a baby bird held in his cupped hands, but its honesty is unmistakable. Rain is leading him towards a better place. Dew brings the cup to his mouth.
Rain nods again. The depths of his eyes beckon, a gravitational singularity of which Dew approaches the event horizon.
Dew opens his mouth and lets the pills tumble onto his tongue. He can taste them there — chalky, vaguely bitter, but overall inoffensive — as they start to dissolve, to merge with his body. There’s a cup of water in his hand now. He drinks, letting it drag the pills to his core.
It’s a sudden weight off his shoulders, somehow, despite everything that has transpired. Rain tries to pull away again but Dew holds fast. He’s not ready to let go, not ready to be without this visible representation of their fusion, this focal point he’s still relying on to ground himself. Rain stays.
Time grows pale. It’s nothing but a medium for oscillating events, breaths, heartbeats, his and Rain’s.
Dew’s limbs begin to feel heavy. Maybe this is what real death feels like — not fear, but peace and warmth. It’s the end of the cycle. He’s being freed now from his damnation.
His own thoughts float by him like fallen leaves on the surface of a river, distant, detached. He’s standing on the shore, so to speak. He could wade in and grab them, if he wanted to, or he could watch them drift away.
Don’t close your eyes goes past. Does he really think that? He wants to close his eyes. More nagging fears follow — resist, stay alert. He doesn’t need them. The riverbank is safe and quiet. The landscape beyond beckons.
He lies back against soft grass, still holding Rain’s hand.