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Moments of clarity slide through thought like eels against black water. It catches a glimmer of pearlescent skin before being swallowed back down into murky depths. A writhing, fleshy mass of consciousness.
Subsists. Grows. Feeds. Expands. It’s hard to think past the thoughts. Swelling tides under fluctuating moonlight, a frenzy and a chorus all at once.
It is a siren song. Ugly and hypnotic and it is feeding.
It has a lot to feed on.
Memories that are flashbangs in his skull. That feel like pulsating anger and grief and loss and fear and guilt and—
It gets lost in the miasma. The shared agony. One agony becomes two agonies becomes three until the world is in his skull and it is agony.
Somehow, he still knows which agony is his. An anchor, abhorrent as it might be. He wades through the fractures and picks up the parts he knows are his own. How anyone can tell is nothing short of a miracle.
This one hurts deeply. It stabs into him like it wants to crawl home, to curl up and die in his chest.
“Can you try again?” Casper asks.
Miserable, Dylan replies, “No.” Irritated. “I’m tired. Can we go?”
And Casper is disappointed. Dylan knows he is. He can see it in his pinched expression, the reflection of his glasses catching in the unnatural light. He adjusts them, fixes his tie, smiles again in a way Dylan knows isn’t kind or patient.
“Just one more, I promise. We’ll grab lunch from the cafeteria after, alright?”
“That’s what you said LAST time,” Dylan shoots back, crossing his arms petulantly. “We’ve been here for HOURS.”
Casper looks agitated. “It’s been forty minutes. One more and we can go. Cross my heart.” He makes the little ‘X’ over his chest, and a part of Dylan relaxes, despite himself.
Stubbornly, he lingers with his hands tucked under his armpits, warmed by the jumpsuit. He doesn’t like wearing it. He misses his red coat, the one Jesse had given him.
He relents.
“Fine” he says. “You promise.”
Casper smiles, big and toothy, and Dylan doesn’t smile back. He feels lighter.
They get lunch after. C’mon kid. He eats a slice of pizza while Casper talks about something important and scientific, glancing at Dylan every few moments as if gauging how much he is retaining. Dylan doesn’t get most of it, but Casper doesn’t seem to mind. He likes moments like this. So he quietly listens.
Later, when Casper tells him something very urgent came up and he had matters to look into, Dylan grabs at the sleeve around his wrist. “Can I come?” he asks, and Casper smiles in that pedantic, demeaning way.
“Oh, God, no. This is stuff for us grownups to handle. Night, kid. Behave yourself.” He laughs a little. And he pats Dylan’s head, and he leaves.
Dylan ignores the lady that replaces Casper in the room with him, and curls up on his bed facing the wall. She asks him how his day was, and Dylan meets her with a fuming silence.
“Dylan? Can you rate on a scale of one to ten how you feel tonight? One being very bad, and ten being very good.”
“One,” he bites out. Hears the scratching of a pen on paper.
“And can you think of wh—” Dylan brings a blanket over his head and screws his eyes shut. He counts to ten, once, twice, three times. Counts until he drowns out the questions.
Casper doesn’t usually disappear for that long. A day, at most. He usually comes back with a swath of other researchers, murmuring to each other in inquisitive tones.
“Where did Trench go?” Dylan asks one day, after a somewhat successful showcase of his ability. His joints ache in ways he’d never known possible, but the glow of pride and fascination he sees on Casper’s face makes everything well worth it.
Casper seems unnerved by the question.
“Hm? What? Why?” He’s still writing something down on his notepad. “He didn’t go anywhere.”
Dylan frowns. “But he did.” The miasma swells. “He barely ever visits.”
Casper stops, and fidgets nervously with his tie, a chuckle eeking out of his throat. “He’s trusting me with keeping an eye on you. He’s just… busy. Being a Director doesn’t let you visit people often. What, if he were to visit every prime candidate, he’d never get any work done!”
That sends a nervous rattle down Dylan’s spine. “Isn’t that what I’m gonna be? Director?” He asks. Casper stops, assessing his next words.
“Sure. You’re shaping up for it real nicely.”
Dylan picks at a scratch on his elbow, sleeves bunched up at his forearms.
“Ready to go again?” Casper eventually asks.
Dylan shrugs. Not really. He’s hungry and he’s tired and there’s a weight in his limbs all of a sudden. All the awe-struck faces behind thick glass shift into the usual cold, clinical pessimism that they always observe him with.
If he’s as special as Casper says, why isn’t Trench here?
Casper urges him anyway. “Think of all the hard work we’re doing here, kid,” he says. “Once you get a handle on this? Who knows what you’re capable of.”
Greatness. The word doesn’t mean much to Dylan—he doesn’t know what Casper wants if he’s already got so much potential. They want him to grow big enough to encompass the entirety of this place, but he’s tired, and he’s hungry, and his mind keeps wandering.
“Do you promise to eat pizza with me tonight?” Dylan asks. He’s thrumming with potential. Pulsing, flashing, loud potential. It chants in his head.
Casper glances over his shoulder briefly. Dylan sees it. He’s looking at his friends. All the people behind the thick window panel, and Dylan grapples with the compulsion to scream at him—to pay attention to him for once. It isn’t up to them!
Casper looks back at Dylan, and then awkwardly smiles. “If I can find the time.”
Dylan knows what that means. He just doesn’t know how to argue with it.
“Okay…”
The interviews start happening with increased frequency. A woman visits Dylan and calls herself Dr. Vaughn. She’s plain in the same way all the people here are plain. She wears a lab coat like everyone else and there’s an ID hooked into her breast pocket. Dylan reads the name Carla Vaughn.
He should like her, because she’s nice, but he doesn’t. She doesn’t really look at him when she speaks, she just stares at the spot where he’s supposed to be. She must see something he doesn’t, because sometimes her eyebrows crease on her forehead in the same way that Casper’s do after he answers a question. She writes something down on a notepad, and then nods and smiles carefully. Dylan is used to the careful smiles—nothing like the way that Jesse used to smile at him, the corners of her mouth wrinkling with the sheer force of it. She smiled at all his stupid jokes, and she’d laugh until her face went as red as her hair. Dylan tries to joke with Dr. Vaughn, but she only gives him a curt, tight lipped smile and then asks another question.
So he answers her questions, even the ones that don’t make any sense.
“Do you know what day it is?” Dylan kicks a foot against the leg of his chair, ankle bouncing against the support. Each time he does it, it hurts a little more.
“Um,” he says. “October 3rd.”
She nods and writes something down. “And in a single world, can you describe the world around you?” Dylan’s ears are ringing, and he rubs under his eye with a grey sleeve.
“I don’t know,” he says. She waits anyway, and the silence grows stifling. So Dylan stammers out an answer. “S-small. I guess.” He glances up, and tries to assess if that’s the right answer. Her face stays impassive.
“You find a rabbit in the woods. It is breathing, but not moving,” she says, measured. Practiced. She’s said this all a hundred times before. They think Dylan doesn’t understand that, but he does. “You cannot see any blood. What do you do?”
Dylan imagines the rabbit in his mind. It must be asleep. It doesn’t move when he approaches it—he’s not supposed to touch wild animals. His hands wring together.
“Dylan?” Dr. Vaughn asks, and his eyes snap back up to her. “What do you do?”
“I don’t know,” he says, nervous. There must be a right answer. This must be a test, but every answer feels like he’s failing. The thought pierces through the miasma—why was it always wrong? Why were the answers never good enough?
“You find a rabbit in the woods,” Dr. Vaughn says, and Dylan suddenly pulls his legs up to his chest, heart pounding.
“I said I don’t know!”
She ignores him. “It is breathing, but not moving.” He must not be moving.
He doesn’t recall the answer he gave her to get her to go away. The next time Casper visits, he has balloons—there must be an occasion.
Except Casper doesn’t explain what the balloons are for, and Dylan starts to realize it probably isn’t his birthday, he almost forgot; has it already been a year of this? Or more?
He asks about Jesse, then.
“Do you know where Jesse is?” Casper is in the middle of a long monologue about something. Altered Objects—somehow Dylan has something to do with it. He’s talking about the slide projector again, but Dylan doesn’t want to talk about that.
That stops him in his tracks, which Dylan finds some sort of strange victory in. Casper talks a lot. A lot. Dylan sometimes tries to ask questions, but then Casper always says: “I like your curiosity, kid.” He never answers the questions.
Casper, this time, doesn’t seem to know what to say. “Your sister?” he says tensely. Dylan knows it’s a buffer, because Casper knows everything. Dylan nods anyway, if just to urge him on. Casper glances off, as if in thought. “Well—not-not right now. But the FBC is always open to her. She just…isn’t here yet.”
“But she’ll come?” Dylan’s voice cracks as he says it, boiling over hopefully.
Casper looks down at him and smiles. Tight lipped. “Of course. She’s welcome whenever she wants. She’s nearly as extraordinary as you are.” He ruffles the top of Dylan’s head, and the relief is nearly crushing.
She’d come back.
She’d come back for him.
The pulse behind his eyes is red and violent, it rips his brain matter apart and for a moment he screams—it’s empty though. His lungs squeeze urgently expelling breath and closing too tight. He can’t bring it back into himself. He’s outside of himself. He’s thousands and thousands and thousands of versions of the same particle. The same and different. The same and different. The same and different. The same and—
And he’s in bed, thrashing and screaming because he’s afraid of how loud his head gets. It’s worse at night. He wakes up with a song in his mind too powerful to spool back in—resonance from a dream he had.
“Casper! Casper, please!” he sobs to the air as video cameras stare on, irresolute. It takes only five minutes before he’s there. With other people—like always, but he settles on the bed next to Dylan and lets him take his hand and squeeze until the chorus dissolves.
He doesn’t move from that spot for a while. Other doctors mill about the room, but Dylan doesn’t care about them. Casper doesn’t offer him anything either. He looks uncomfortable, and every once in a while he adjusts the shirt he’s in. He was probably asleep. He probably never leaves the building.
They bring Dylan a glass of water and migraine pills for the leftover headache. Casper tries to pull away, but Dylan doesn’t let him.
So he sits and waits. For once, he doesn’t talk.
Dylan falls asleep like that, leaning against Casper. The next morning, Casper doesn’t so much as mention any of it. He says something cryptic about one of the slides they’d found in Ordinary.
“You remember anything about that, kid? Did you notice anything anomalous from before the projector? How centralized were the effects??”
Dylan remembers Nosebleed Neil. He shuffles his feet uncomfortably, and then shakes his head. Jesse would remember better.
That’s obviously the wrong answer, because Casper purses his lips and furrows his brows the way he does when he’s frustrated. “Nothing? You don’t recall anything?”
“Some stuff, I gue—”
“Kid!” Casper says, before Dylan can say anything. “You gotta answer these questions truthfully!” He laughs, but he's nervous. Dylan hasn’t seen him this way before.
“Sorry,” Dylan says. Casper ignores him, already grabbing him by the shoulder and leading him to another grey room. There’s a poster on the wall that says Hang In There! A cat hangs upside-down from a treebranch. Dylan isn’t sure why he resents it.
His mind just gets more and more crowded. Casper asks him to do more, because he can handle it, and Dylan does more and he handles it and then Casper tells him to do it again so he does it again.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Forever.
Readings. Charts. Muttering behind windows. Throwing stones and breaking them. The ringing in his ears gets louder. His head hurts more often. Every day. It hurts every day. Dylan asks for medicine, and Casper says best not. Casper says it may impede your abilities in unexpected ways, kid.
He isn’t a kid.
“Where is Trench?” he asks, frustrated after accidentally moving something ten feet away to the left instead of the right. He isn’t focusing. Casper tells him as much. “He never visits.”
Casper taps his pen on his pad of paper, and only hums in reply.
“Casper!” Dylan barks, and that gets his attention. His glasses are askew for a brief moment as his head jolts up.
“What?”
So Dylan repeats himself.
“Oh, I don’t know. Somewhere in Executive, most likely. He’s handling business all around the Bureau. He came down a month ago, remember?” Casper laughs like Dylan is stupid for forgetting. “Can you try again? To the right, this time.”
Dylan slams the mannequin against the wall to the right with a loud crack! A fissure forms against the window panel, and the jury behind all jump.
Casper is alarmed, before his expression breaks out into a grin. “Now that’s more like it!”
The praise doesn’t feel good. Dylan just stews in it, words meant to demean instead of uplift. He just wasn’t trying hard enough. Never hard enough.
“Can you do it again?”
So he does it again.
Casper brings pizza one day, after Dylan demands it for dinner. “Good work. We’re making progress out of you yet!” Casper gives Dylan’s shoulder a friendly punch, and Dylan just sways with the movement.
His head buzzes. The roaring picks up again, poking needles through the membrane of his amygdala. He scratches at the back of his nape, pushing nails through short brown hair. He used to have red hair, like his sister.
“So I’ll be Director soon?” Dylan asks, but he can’t figure out what he wants the answer to be.
Casper sets the pizza down on the table in his room and shrugs. “Well, that’s all subjective, and there’s a ton at play—plenty of moving parts to consider first. It’s progress! But you have got some learning left to do, bud.”
Dylan is getting impatient. He’s tired of waiting. He doesn’t want to be here anymore.
“How much longer?”
Casper chuckles. “Can’t estimate that just yet. Hey—” he motions to the pizza. “Brought pizza!”
Dylan stares at the box, and all he can muster is some muted emotion that only really resembles nostalgia. Jesse should have been here by now, if she really wanted to come. She’s probably glad Dylan isn’t around anymore. She probably doesn’t want a stupid little brother following her around everywhere she goes.
“Will you stay?” Dylan asks. Casper hesitates. Checks his watch, then looks between Dylan and the door.
A long moment passes, and then Casper gives a tiny nod. “I can spare a couple minutes.”
So they sit and eat pizza. Dylan makes an offhanded joke, and Casper laughs riotously. His glasses catch the reflection of the overhead light—Dylan sees the wrinkle under his eye that has him smiling faintly back. He remembers how funny he used to be, he's far too serious now. He forgot how funny Casper could be, too. He wishes it was like this all the time, without all the tests and the graphs and the scratching on notepads. He wishes Casper would hug him goodbye instead of simply leaving.
The night before it happens Dylan wakes up sweating and shaking and miserable. He’s only slept an hour, maybe thirty minutes. His eyes are red rimmed and he keeps dreaming about Jesse—he keeps dreaming about the Not-Mother, and the dung monkeys and—
Darling isn’t leading this test. Someone else, someone Dylan doesn’t care about. Roberts. No first name, as far as he’s concerned. The pounding headache in his skull makes him irritable.
“Dylan? Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” he snaps, which is only met with the same aloof, clinical upturn of a nose. “Just give me a second.”
Except Roberts keeps tapping his pencil.
And the lights in the room are humming quietly, droningly—why does the Oldest House even have these shitty lights? They shouldn’t be humming.
And the quiet murmur outside the room sounds increasingly like the quiet murmur that saturates his dreams at night. Except the murmur gets louder, and louder, and louder, and it keeps him up, and it makes it hard to focus, even as Dylan concentrates and holds an arm out.
“Dylan, we can’t wait fore—”
“Just shut up!” He slams the mannequin against the wall, and the wall breaks and the projectile of stone slams into Roberts’ head so fast that the initial splatter of blood doesn’t even register to Dylan until a moment after.
He remembers the shrieking. The red smear. Roberts.
Not much else.
Dr. Vaughn comes back, and she asks questions again. The rabbit is not moving again. The forest is bigger now. He hears it breathing.
It’s a prison. The gentle sound of tree branches and leaves rustling fade into the distance. Mountain birdsong—dark blended coffee and pinesap. It’s in him until it isn’t. The poster falls off the wall in a pile on the ground and Dylan doesn’t see much except tall grey walls and transparent glass panels.
Doesn’t even see Casper anymore—can’t spot his colourful sweater in a crowd anymore.
No one comes to visit him after Roberts except Dr. Vaughn and a team of other doctors that might as well not have names.
It’s because Casper is handling business—he’s always busy. Never too busy not to visit, but it’s fine because someone told Marshall that it wasn’t Dylan’s fault. It was an accident, after all. So he’s busy. He’s figuring that out.
People only speak to him through the glass, now. Dr. Vaughn still comes in, though.
And Casper isn’t back. Roberts didn’t have time to scream. It was just the shriek in the room next to Dylan—behind the poster. The forest screams too, and it pulses in red flashes behind his eyes.
We stand around you while you dream,
You can almost hear our words but you forget,
This happens more and more now,
The red is redder than blood, and it coats the glass panel in splatters. Coats the poster in viscera. Melts the mind and strings the thoughts. Paper cutouts that are joined by the hands. Her hand melts into his hand because there is no line and no cut and no scissors to snip, snip, snip it’s just the tear the uneven tear that pulls apart and fractures the little paper dolls it’s just folded on top of each other it’s just origami it’s just red and loud and thundersong splits the head apart too and—
And Dylan screams for him at night again. Thrashes around in his prison cell and screams over top of the dreams so that at least one voice will drown the rest. He screams for Casper to help him, please, please help him, I didn’t mean it.
But Casper doesn’t come.
Someone else comes. Someone else watches his body go limp and someone else leaves him there.
There’s no calendar on the wall—just empty space. They took the posters. They cut his hair too short, he can feel it against his palm in prickles. No more coloured pencils in his cell. Casper isn’t back yet, and they don’t let Dylan have pizza for lunch anymore. He knows he’s being punished for what he did, is his guilt not enough? Is the shaking in the corner of his cell, and the apologies not enough?
Why is nothing ever enough?
He remembers a TV and static. He remembers the word paracriminal. The toppled buildings and the sky splitting open into a giant, black astral spear. Blood spilling into the cosmic wound. It’s red.
He can control it now. He doesn’t want Roberts to be dead. He’s been practicing, and he’s been very diligent because now the mannequin moves the exact way he wants it to and the wall breaks and fractures into perfect shapes. He cuts with scissors—he doesn’t tear.
“Where is Casper?” he asks Dr. Vaughn.
She says, “Dr. Darling is out of the building today.”
But she’s lying, because Casper is always in the building. Because Casper is avoiding him, because Casper is afraid of him.
“You find a rabbit in the woods.”
The rabbit is not moving, it hasn’t moved in years. Dylan knows it’s because the rabbit is dead. The breathing is a trick of the mind—it’s something shifting underneath its skin.
Jesse isn’t coming back. Casper isn’t either. It’s because they’re afraid of him, and it’s because he doesn’t know what day it is, and it’s because they really don’t believe he’d leave the rabbit because the rabbit isn’t fucking real.
None of it is real. Dr. Vaughn’s scream isn’t real, and the blood isn’t real. It’s just one part of a bigger piece. Infinitesimal.
Dylan stares at the rabbit in his hands when it stops breathing and realizes moments later he’s the one that crushed its tiny neck. P6 in big white letters in his mind. Casper doesn’t call him Dylan—doesn’t even call him kid.
Casper doesn’t ask him to try again. He must have not had much potential after all, because they stop doing tests, and then they stop looking at him altogether. Out of sight, out of mind. A set piece. Just another object, altered or not.
A folded piece of origami, folded, and unfolded, and folded, and unfolded and folded again. The tear is uneven. Dylan sits in his prison and dreams of forests and folded paper and inkwells—of orange peels and worms. Of rabbits in dewy green grass, gathered gently between roots.
Of Casper’s colourful vest and Jesse’s red hair.
It slips back into the maelstrom until there’s no differentiating the dream from the dreamer. Something he made up, something he set into motion, and now it subsists past him. They’re pouring in through the hole in his head. They’re pouring in through the hole in the wall. They shove through the pinprick of light that the projector casts against the dark screen in his mind; he can see Trench now—he still hasn’t visited.
Like this, they’re one in the same. Director. Directed. Reflections—one will do. The other will not. One becomes two, two becomes four, and it expands until it subsumes the entirety of the world. The universe. Reality.
Dylan splinters.
The rabbit twitches.