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There weren’t many things that Toby could feel. Temperature didn’t exist. Pain didn’t exist, and consequently, neither did stinging, aching, burning, or cramping. Holding a jagged rock tightly? Just some pressure and maybe wetness from blood. Bumping into something? Just pressure. The many wounds he got while on missions? Pressure when they happened, some pulling, but that’s it. No sharpness when he cleaned out wounds. No ache when he pressed on week old bruises. No cramping when he forgets to eat for days at a time. No burn when he was sprinting after someone. But he could feel mental pain, so to say.
No headaches, of course, but something that he could only compare to what he thought was a headache when his head got to be too much. When the voices became so overwhelmingly loud that they overlapped each other in a way where he was unable to tell that they were trying to say something. When his clothes were touching his skin wrong. When he could hear the lights buzzing or faucet dripping. When food had a weird texture or tasted different for some reason. When too many things were happening at once. When he went out to get groceries with Brian and people wouldn’t stop bothering him or getting in his way. When he zoned back in after two hours and noticed he had chewed on his fingers the whole time after promising Brian he’d try harder not to. When the things in the corners of his vision got too close and too real. When his tics wouldn’t let him speak. When he had a burst of awareness during a mission and couldn’t do anything about it before the static came back. When he overheated and had a seizure and came out of it immediately overwhelmed by his surroundings. He had never felt pain, but at the same time, he felt so much of it.
Tim and Brian had experience dealing with Toby’s…outbursts. After living with the kid for the past few years they kinda had to or else he’d kill himself, and the boss would not like that. Tim was best with helping the man through whatever was going on in the moment, having had personal experience with hallucinations and sensory overload. Brian was much more suited for finding a solution to whatever was causing the episode, because despite studying psychology, he was always better at trying to find a solution to what was happening than just being there for Toby. He was a nerd, not an empath.
Tim would sit with him for hours, help him remember that the eyes weren’t there, that Lyra’s corpse wasn’t under his bed, that there wasn’t anything besides insulation in the walls. The episodes with his hallucinations had been becoming more frequent over the past few months, which just led to nights of Tim waking up to screaming, running in to see the boy curled up in the corner of his room, sobbing out incomprehensible apologies and pleas for it to stop, flinching as if he was being hit. Nights of Tim just ending up staying with him in his room, “guarding” him from his father. Nights of neither of them sleeping, just sitting together throughout the night.
Brian researched. Brian stole medications. Brian found dealers and got what he could in exchange for favors and stolen valuables. Brian gave himself missions outside of what the boss gave him. Missions to ransack medicine cabinets of people he knew were on certain drugs that could help. A few times he even broke into pharmacies and took whatever prescription antipsychotics he could find. The only one they’d found to work even slightly was Clozapine, but it was hard to get his hands on it. It was slow work to try and find a dealer to get more for his housemate since the only favors he could provide were being a hitman or giving them narcotics, which were hard to get since most sane people locked those up and pharmacies had a timed release safe for them. His only outlet was other dealers, but they already had very limited money to go around, so he was just offering hitman services to whoever could get him heroin and morphine to trade. He read through books from the library and printed out articles and research papers to figure out how to help, but all that came up was needing to switch the medication he was on, getting a therapist or counselor, or get inpatient treatment, all of which were off the table.
A lot of times after missions Toby would end up hiding in his room for hours, the curtains drawn and lights off, noise canceling headphones clamped over his ears and face down on his bed, letting gravity press him into the worn out comforter he so often found solace in. The leftover static that fell over his thoughts was overwhelming, making him want to tear out his eyes and peel his skin off, but the hours he spent in silence in his dark room helped it go away faster than if he tried to act like a person. It was like a factory reset.
It was an over glorified brain fog that literally made him see and hear static. It grated at his ears and became the only thing his brain processed, every other sense muted for hours on end. He knew he wasn’t under His control, that this was just the after effects of being under it for who knows how long, but it was still mind numbingly terrifying. He couldn’t feel the apparent pain it caused, so his body compensated for the lack by giving him a much harder hand.