Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dexio’s hand reached up to fiddle with his necklace, only to find empty air.

Right. He’d had to surrender that.

Instead, his somewhat dry hands fiddled with the collar of his T-shirt, which luckily he’d gotten to keep, although it bothered him that he was going to be wearing the same one for a few days. Of course he’d managed to admit himself over the weekend—there was no way he was getting out until Monday at least, and that was assuming he didn’t accidentally manage to make his stay involuntary. (He did not have a history of behaving in a way that would result in such, but the fear lingered nonetheless.)

He was otherwise quite at ease here, though, as he was far more lucid than many of his peers. He enjoyed making small talk with the older folks, coloring pictures for the ones who weren’t going to have visitors, and listening to the winding narratives of the folks who spoke to entities that no one else could see or hear.

Dexio wasn’t the same kind of broken that they were, not necessarily. But he was still in need of mending.

He’d let his work and his studies overwhelm him again, and started slipping. Wondering why he was bothering at all, when the unforgiving cosmos would just do whatever they wanted with him, anyway. Whether he failed or succeeded was all dependent on the whims of this so-called fate, and there was no way to stop it, so why did it matter? None of his efforts would amount to anything. He would stay stuck where he was until there was something else for him to do, and he would be unceremoniously dumped onto the diverging path.

Ugh, but dwelling on it made it a lot harder to lie to people about how he was feeling. He was going to have to do some grounding exercises or something to make up for his head being so high in the damn clouds all the time. And anyway, Dexio kept telling himself that it would be a boring story if it was this mundane and pathetic—something had to give, eventually.

Seemed like today was that day.

“Why do I have to?” a girl nearby snapped at a nurse, who was standing next to one of those wheeled carts with all the (probably to some extent dangerous) medical supplies in it. The nurse was holding a needle.

“We need to make sure you aren’t sick during your time here,” she said, and the patient scoffed, clearly unsatisfied with the answer.

“Fine,” she said. She glared at the floor like she was going to personally murder each and every person who’d laid the tiles out as the nurse drew her blood. Dexio grimaced in empathy—needles suck.

Haha, that’s a good one. Because her blood was being drawn. Jokes.

Once that was said and done, and the nurse left with her plastic cart in tow, the girl just… sat there for a while, staring emptily at the table. Jaw set, trying to breathe evenly. Holding a marker. Clearly dissociated. So Dexio decided, in that moment, to break character and say something first.

“So,” he said, turning the slightest bit to face her, “What are you in for?”

She glared at him for the longest time, as if trying to read him. Eventually she must’ve decided he was harmless enough, because she snorted and uncapped her marker. “Suicidal ideation,” she said easily, as if he had only asked for her favorite food, or color. “Also I said a bunch of mean stuff to my now ex-girlfriend, so I feel like shit.” She returns to coloring.

“Ah.” Dexio nodded sagely. “I’d say ‘same’, but I’ve never actually had a boyfriend, so.”

Her eyes snapped back to him for a moment (probably because he passed the ‘not being a weird guy hitting on a girl’ test) before she asked, “So, you too?”

“That, and delusions,” he said. He glanced at the small stack of coloring sheets next to her. “May I…?”

She looked back up at him before following his gaze. “Oh, yeah, for sure.”

“Hell yeah,” he said, immediately going for the cartoonized Sprigatito playing with a ball of yarn the size of its oversized head. “I’m Dexio, by the way.”

“Sina. Fan of cats?” She said. Another test.

“I’ve got an Espurr back home,” he said. “He’s an absolute terror. The most wretched thing to walk Kalos, if not the world as a whole.”

She giggled, switching markers. “Sounds about right. My dad has taken a few in over the years and they always get into trouble once they’ve settled in. They’re sweet, though.”

He nodded, and for a while, they just colored in silence. An older patient coughed somewhere across the room. (Dexio wanted to crawl out of his skin, but it was fine. Everything was fine. Nothing was wrong, they were far away enough that he was fine. And if not, he could just die, and that would be fine, too.)

“So… can I pry?” Sina asked, capping her markers and setting them down before folding her hands in front of her, resting her chin on them.

“Huh?” Dexio stared at her blankly.

“You said you were having delusions,” Sina reiterated. “I was curious about, like, the specifics.”

“Ah,” he said. He dug around through the markers, trying to find a green one that wasn’t miserably dried out. “Well, nothing too big. Mostly feeling worthless and stuff. Some auditory hallucinations here and there. Uh, then I saw some sort of huge bug casually walk across my bathroom floor and realized that I couldn’t tell if it was real or not, so I had my mom drive me here.”

Sina hummed in response, starting to pull out every green marker in the box. “That’s fair. That would probably also make me check myself in. Or burn the building down.”

Dexio started testing markers, enjoying the companionable silence for a few moments before asking, “So how about you?”

Sina grinned, raising her eyebrows in a way that suggested he was gonna be here for a while.

Chapter Text

So, the summary:

Sina was in a long-distance relationship with a girl from Galar. Said girl was in a bad living situation, and Sina had offered to help her move to Kalos to get away.

She was supposed to be here last year. She was still, notably, not here. Sina had been trying to make plans for months to work with the girl, to accommodate her every concern, but thus far, no dice. And with that alongside a litany of work-related nonsense, she had clearly hit a breaking point.

“And now she knows I’ve checked myself in, and I straight-up told her that she was part of the reason why,” Sina complained, carefully coloring in a flower petal with her jaw set in anger. “So now I’m being manipulative by being mentally ill in order to make her feel guilty enough to come over here.”

“Did she… say that?” Dexio asked.

“No,” Sina replied, “But I know she’s gonna end up thinking it sooner or later. Because I am. Obviously.”

Dexio sets down his marker—which he hasn’t really been using for the past fifteen minutes or so—and stares at Sina. “Are you… doing it on purpose?”

“Nope!” Sina chirped.

“Okay, so how are you being manipulative?” Dexio asked.

“I just am!” Sina said, voice full of false cheer. “Any time I have emotions, it’s just so I can get my way, and nothing else. Duh.”

“Oh.” Duh. “Got it, childhood trauma.”

Sina gasped, dramatically putting her hands to her face. “Whaaaaaaaat?” She shook her head, pretending to pout. “No, I’m… too young to have childhood trauma. And I don’t look like I was abused. Or something.”

Dexio stared at her, unable to stop grinning. “Damn, that’s true. I never thought of it that way. But seriously,” he picked his marker back up, “It sounds like you’ve really overextended yourself.”

“I have,” Sina agreed. “But…” her face falls for a moment, and her voice gets quiet, “She just doesn’t deserve to be stuck there.”

“Then she shouldn’t be fighting you on getting here so much,” Dexio said simply.

“But she—I mean, trauma makes these things difficult. And like, it’s mostly her parents.”

Dexio shook his head. “If she wanted to be here, she would be.”

Sina set her jaw, clearly not buying it. “Well anyway, she said she’s planning to come over soon. Bought a plane ticket to come visit for a week or so.” Hope laced her tone, “So that’s something.”

Dexio knew better than to press it; this girl was wearing some insanely rose-tinted lenses. “Well,” he managed, “Hopefully that goes well, then. Maybe it’s the push she needed.” He was lying to make her feel better. But he didn’t know Sina well enough to be honest with her.

“So about you again,” Sina said, and he wondered if she was plagued with the same fear of talking about herself too much, “Aren’t delusions supposed to be like, yknow. You don’t know you’re delusional?”

“Eh, kind of?” Dexio stared blankly at his coloring sheet. “Usually it’s not a big deal because I have, like, checks and balances in place. Like, I know that I’m not important enough in the grand scheme of anything for someone to really, like, hate me hate me, and I can usually tell when the things I’m saying and thinking don’t track logically.” He found a green colored pencil somewhere mixed in with the markers, and he suppressed the urge to go through and sort the entire bin. “But when I get stressed out, none of that stuff really works. So I just kinda have to ride the episode out, usually alone. Then usually after I cry it out, I’m good for a while. It’s episodic.”

“…and you manage that by yourself?” Sina asked, and Dexio felt a twinge in his chest.

“I have to,” he said bleakly, and didn’t elaborate. She didn’t push him to.