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Talloran doesn’t realize it followed them, at first.
They don’t realize because nothing happens and then, a few months after they think it’s over, Draven shakes them awake one morning because it’s raining grape jelly instead of water, and they’re filled with a blinding panic that lasts until they leave the apartment building to get a better look and realize the jelly isn’t the only thing falling from the sky. It’s raining, real water, except maybe a fifteen-foot radius around them. They’re still confused and scared, but… less so, maybe.
They visit the site’s medical wing and get diagnosed with a minor Hume instability. Likely related to their previous experiences (and may I say I’m sorry you went through that, the doctor says, and Talloran nods and smiles because they have already heard this script from a lot of Foundation doctors) and do come back if it persists more than sixty days but usually this sort of thing is over in a couple of months.
You wouldn’t think, after three million years of suffering, that sixty days would feel like a long time, but Talloran is discovering a new form of frustration— their acute experience of 3999 was all-consuming and left no room to do or feel anything else; their present experience of it is that they have to ask Draven to open all the jars in the apartment because rubber snakes keep falling out of the ones they try to open. Not keeping them from living their life, but definitely keeping them from making sandwiches.
“It’s annoying, Dee,” they tell Draven, lying on the couch— they’re too tired and too not in the mood to see what their little extradimensional parasite will do next to leave it today.
“I know, sweetie,” Draven says from the kitchen. He’s baking, which is sweet even if he is probably doing it out of stress, and the apartment smells like cookies. They glance over the counter and see him looking back at them, worried. “Is there anything I could do—?”
“No,” they begin automatically, because he honestly asks that every few minutes these days, before remembering— “Wait, um, could you go back to the bedroom and get me a pillow?”
“Of course, Jamie,” he says, ducking away from the counter and into their bedroom. A little bit fast, maybe; he’s always this way when someone gives him something to help with.
He comes back into the living room and produces two pillows; they prop themself up, sighing at the relief from not holding themself up as much. The comfort is so great that they find themself closing their eyes and drifting off to the scent of cookies in the oven. Just a little bit.
When Talloran opens their eyes, the apartment smells like blood and burning plastic and they feel their chest constrict before they remind themself, again, that 3999 is for all intents and purposes gone, that this is just its death rattle. They push themself gingerly off of the couch and open the bedroom door; see? Draven is sitting there reading a book. Nothing is wrong. At least not in the way they’re afraid of. ( But it started like this when it was bad too… )
He looks up at them. “Why does the apartment smell…” they say, trailing off.
“Oh, yeah. Half the chocolate chips turned into miniature buttons and then the oven started bleeding. I had to use one of the bath towels, sorry,” Draven says. As if nothing is wrong.
“I— you’re not even a little freaked out by this?” Talloran says, voice edging into a little more worry than they’d like. Draven studies them before replying.
“…It’s not completely out of the ordinary for reality benders,” he says. Right. Draven’s job. They’re part of Draven’s job now. They don’t say anything for a moment. They can’t think of what to say.
“Well. Were any of the cookies salvageable?” they finally ask.
Draven laughs softly. “Yep. Not a lot, but I saved them for you.” He gestures to the bedside table; there’s a small plate of cookies on top of it.
They open their mouth to say something like “thank you” and start, inexplicably, crying. Draven beckons them over and, even as they climb into bed, they try to fight back the tears.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m crying,” they choke out.
“It’s fine, Jamie,” Draven says, wrapping an arm around their shoulder and pushing his fingers into their hair.
He strokes their hair and feeds them chocolate chip cookies. They fall asleep on his chest.
On the sixty-third day of their illness, they go to see the doctor again— he seems distinctly less pleased to see them this time— and get prescribed Hume stabilization pills. If the pills don’t work, the doctor says, there are a few other medications in this class they could try, but ultimately Hume instability isn’t well studied and there’s not a lot of other options for treatment.
On the way home, the lights in the train car turn into blacklights and reveal, glowing, graffiti in the form of lines from 3999’s file, covering the whole car. Talloran shoves their face into Draven’s jacket and doesn’t look up until Draven nudges them and says “It’s our stop, bun.”
The pills give them headaches for the first few days, which goes away eventually, and make them dizzy, which doesn’t; both of these are listed side effects, but they’re still surprised at how strong they are— it feels like they’re going to pass out if they stand up, and maybe also even if they don’t. At least this means the pills are doing something , they tell themself, propping themself up against Draven to sit up in bed.
Two weeks in, they open a pickle jar to actual pickles and feel like they’re going to cry.
Talloran is feeling on top of the world at their four-week checkup; the dizziness hasn’t gone away, but they’re getting more used to navigating around it, and in the meantime the world is no longer unraveling around them, hasn’t been for days— and then, in the waiting room, the magazines flicker.
They blink. Look at them. It’s just one of the anomalous print projects the Foundation follows, ostensibly for monitoring, something about anart celebrities on the cover— and then again, while they’re watching. RESEARCHER TALLORAN VOTED WORST DRESSED ANOMALOCELEBRITY, and a picture of them in pajamas on their couch.
They try to take deep breaths.
“Dee,” they whisper, “does that magazine look wrong to you?”
Draven turns to look at it. His face scrunches. “It’s not normal, no,” he says quietly. They grab his hand.
Before they can say anything else, the receptionist calls out “Researcher James Talloran to examination room B,” and after a moment of hesitation they grab the magazine and go into the room.
“Before we start, um, I noticed that this—” Pointing to the magazine, they realize it looks different out of the corner of their eye; looking at it clearly, it’s back to an examination of Iris Dark’s looks at whatever celebrity gala was held this April. They wince. “I, uh… it was different. My partner can vouch for me. I don’t know if that means the medication is failing.”
The doctor studies them. “Well, a certain amount of fluctuation is normal even on Hume stabilizers. 100% stability is considered rare, especially with cases like yours.”
“Oh,” they say. They can’t think of anything else. 3999 was so much a creature of extremes that part of them feels like it should either exist or not, even if of course that’s not how things work in the real world and of course the pills aren’t a magic bullet.
“But you’d say the pills are working, then?” the doctor continues. They nod.
The checkup continues as normal. The doctor asks if they’d like to switch to a different ontological stabilizer; they decline. The doctor asks about side effects; they tell him about the dizziness and he says it’s nothing to be worried about and they can try out a cane or walker if it’s really bothering them. Nothing flickers for the rest of the visit.
They go home and Draven asks if they want to talk about it.
“I don’t know,” they say, because they really don’t. “I’m not even sure how I feel about it. I knew I was going to be different forever after all that, but I didn’t think it was going to be there. Even like this. It’s just… a lot to adjust to.”
Draven sighs and runs his hand down their cheek, fingers tracing the scar at their jawline. “I know, honey. I know I can’t one hundred percent get it, but, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry this isn’t more straightforward.”
They laugh quietly. “You should’ve seen the speech I gave it. All that and I still need you to turn on the shower for me to make sure it’s water that comes out instead of silly string.”
“I’m happy to do it,” Draven says. Perfectly like him, always looking for something to help with.
They frown.
“Is something wrong?”
“I’m sorry you have to take so much care of me these days.” They look away from his eyes, big and green and sparkling with an amount of affection that’s painful to look at right now. “You already try so hard with everyone else.”
“I really am fine with it, you know,” he says.
“I know. I just wish I wasn’t adding more to the pile,” they say. He tilts his head, frowning, and looks like he’s about to say something but doesn’t.
“…You know you’re worth every bit of it, right?” he eventually says, lacing his fingers with theirs as he speaks. “Every ounce of inconvenience from helping you is competing with a pound of getting to have you in my life.”
“Really?” they say.
“Honestly,” he says.
Their self esteem is fine , honestly— they had to fix that through trial by fire— but hearing Draven say this soothes an anxiety they didn’t know they were nursing, about how much they know they now take to take care of, and even if they’re still a tiny bit worried about Draven’s eternal need to help people the thought that he doesn’t resent helping them makes them feel warm and something like safe as they fall asleep next to him.
For the next few weeks, Talloran gets used to it. The pills keep working their halfway-magic and Draven keeps doing things for them if they get too much of a bad feeling and all the while, Talloran thinks about adjusting their standards.
Because this might not be exactly what they were fighting for, but it’s what they have . And if no amount of doctor’s visits is likely to make Hume instability understood or curable, then they might as well figure out how to live with it instead of trying to be someone they can’t. Even if it goes against all their instincts.
This might be one of the harder things they've done. 3999 was millions of years of fighting— endless, unbearable struggle that was the only thing in their life, and they’re still geared into that. They still want to scream “I am sick of you” reflexively when some text rearranges itself into a LIST OF REASONS RESEARCHER TALLORAN WILL NEVER KNOW TRUE HAPPINESS or starts melting or just goes eye-burning neon purple for no apparent reason. But they can try living like this, they reason. It’s been three million years. They should be able to do anything.
One day, they’re lying on the couch, scrolling their phone because they don’t really have enough energy to do anything else. They’re slightly dizzy, despite lying down, and to be honest exhausted .
Their phone only makes a wet noise as warning before it turns into an umbrella octopus in their hands.
They flinch at first, on reflex, and then pause. Well. So their phone is an octopus now. Fine.
They push themself out of their pillow nest, carrying the octopus to the kitchen, and fill a pot with water and salt, dropping the octopus in and carrying the whole thing back to the coffee table.
They grab a book from the table and settle back into the pillows, opening it only to find that holding a book above their face is a little too much right now. Fine. They can be alone with their thoughts— and, they guess, the octopus— for a little while.
Despite their phone being a sea creature and the overwhelming exhaustion, they kind of feel better than they have in a long, long while, huh. When they interrogate this feeling, it unspools into something like relief and the absence of something else, some stress they had gotten very used to carrying.
It takes them a moment to identify it as the feeling that there’s nothing they have to fight at the moment.
They’re safe in their living room with their pills working as well as they possibly could and Draven, if they need him, at the other end of the phone— well, the landline, and 3999 not gone but not succeeding in hurting them and they feel, for once, like they don’t need to fight for anything. Like they can just exist.
They close their eyes and drift off thinking about that just-existing, about how relaxed they feel.