Work Text:
In his dreams, Doug imagines that he can’t move.
Part of him knows it’s a dream. Part of him knows that the more he struggles, the tighter the restraints around his arms and legs will constrict and the more the beetles will jab and the other part of him knows that when he wakes up, he’lll be sore and aching. But the rest of him just knows that he’s scared.
He doesn’t know who’s there, but he knows someone is, and he knows that he’s totally and completely vulnerable.
The whole time he just can’t die. No grave can hold his body down but those thick belt-like loops can, and he’s alive. Worst of all, he’s alive.
He never wakes up grateful to be back.
He wakes up in an empty bed in a shitty apartment with no heat in the dead of winter, shivering under several quilts in three pairs of pajamas, wondering if he should be missing the daughter they told him he has.
That’s the problem with not remembering. You don’t know how you’re supposed to feel.
How can you feel if you’re not even real?
Doug’s basically a baby.
A baby with bills to pay and food stamps to take to the grocery store when he remembers how to be a person, because this is his first time eating food that wasn’t dehydrated and using toothpaste that doesn’t have icky chemical side effects and trying to maintain relationships when they don’t sleep one bunk over and it sucks, ok? It really, really sucks.
He’s got a call in a few hours with CPS about Eiffel’s daughter. His daughter.
His daughter, in the biological sense, after all she is his genetic offspring, but what relationship does he have to her? He has none of Eiffel’s hesitations, none of his traumas, none of his memories. His daughter will blame a man who looks like him for something he didn’t do, and Doug will still hate himself for it.
Curled up into a tighter ball, he isn’t any warmer.