Work Text:
kai couldn’t breathe.
the splitting headache pained him too much to move. he couldn’t turn, he couldn’t think, and he couldn’t cry out for help. the feeling was so painful — so real and guttural and hurtful that he had no choice but to focus on it and it alone.
he knew why it was happening, and he was powerless to stop it. after he had glitched for the first time, he felt this immediately after, if not during it. the feeling of your limbs being taken away only to be replaced seconds later lingered in the air, and he supposed that’s why his brain was acting like this. maybe his brain was trying to figure out why he was able to live without a heart for seconds at a time.
it was worse when he lost his textures.
he found out he was... well, fake, years ago. he found out he was a character in a cartoon called ninjago, and that everything he had been through was for entertainment — that night, he realized panic attacks were different when you knew. his body would go a black and pink checkerprint at any given moment, and he thought it’d be fun to call it ‘losing his textures’. his therapist said it looked just like when video games bugged out, and kai thought he should make light of it.
regardless of that fact, it sucked ass. he’d feel a mixture of pain and numbness, and he wouldn’t be able to feel anything for hours after. at times he’d throw up a static-like substance that was far, far worse, but that was a story for another day.
he had yet to tell the other ninja. they would just worry, and he didn’t want that to happen — they’d try and comfort him, the person that knew they weren’t real, and he couldn’t deal with that. the fact that his sister and boyfriend weren’t real and never were real was too much for him to handle, which is why he hadn’t come out of his room in quite a few days.
late at night, when he was sure everyone was asleep, he would sneak out and grab some water and food to last him a week or so, but doing so felt... useless. his hands would shake, parts of his arm vanishing and reappearing in chunks, numbers floating around him in a frenzy, the word ‘ERROR’ appearing in front of his eyelids too many times to count. how could he feel like this over something as simple as food? was something he’d ask himself every damn week, and it was something that he knew would haunt him in his future. if he had a future.
his body glitched to the side.