Chapter Text
For the first time in what felt like an eternity, he felt ground beneath him. Beneath him, nothing else, in a body and mind that were just his own.
He was horribly weak and tired. He existed as a crumpled tissue of a person with bones and muscles in all the wrong places and a head too dizzy to remember who he was. But he existed. Probably. He probably existed and he could think on his own and he bet he could move if he really tried to. If he remembered how to. Which he probably did. Maybe.
But he knew for certain that he could see and feel, and he saw that he was still there, and he recognized the uneven floor he felt beneath him that was characteristic of that place, and he could feel that all too familiar dread rising in his throat again. He had seemingly gotten his body and mind free from the thing that had twisted itself into him, but he was still in those stupid hallways with their blinding colors that left afterimages wherever he looked and the hues that shifted with the view and the impossible dimensions and the ground that felt so horribly uneven but upon inspection was perfectly level, with the endless mirrors that shifted his appearance and the paintings upon paintings and mirrors upon mirrors stretching endlessly through hallways and doors and passages and the blinding blinding white prismatic lights. He was still there. And this time he didn't even have a map.
But he wanted out. And though he could barely move or think or remember what it was to be a human, somehow he shifted his mangled self into something that could stand. He clambered up to his full height, and with all the energy his fear gave him, he took off sprinting, running his hand along the edges of the walls to steady himself. He could feel the grooves where he had once clawed at the walls until his fingernails bled, and he could feel the shards of glass puncture his skin as he steadied himself against the edges of the broken mirrors he ran through. He was probably bleeding, but he didn't care. He could barely feel it. All he could think of was getting out, and that panic allowed him to run despite the hurt that radiated from his bones and the cuts on his fingers and the burning in his heart and his lungs.
He ran and ran and ran, pushing through doors and ignoring the cramps newly forming in his aching muscles. His mind was flooded with panic, but at the same time he barely felt anything. It was all very akin to a dream in that sense, where his movements didn't feel exactly true. He only felt the knowledge that pain and emotion were there rather than truly feeling it himself. He ran as if it were by the narrative of some dream, led by something other than his own will. But he ran nonetheless, opening more and more doors and jumping through more holes he'd left behind in broken mirrors until he could find one that would bring him anywhere but here, anywhere but the same fucked up halls and their dizzying proportions.
He went on for days or hours or weeks or months—it was all the same here—going on and on and on and on and on for a time that felt like 3 eternities shoved into the space of 3 seconds shoved into the space of 13 weeks, jumping through holes and through doorframes and only stopping to bang his hands against the wall and scream and cry without making any sound at all before running again and again and again.
Until he found it.
It was behind a door that looked exactly the same as the others he'd gone through. He'd almost run through it without thinking, before his eyes told his brain that what he was seeing was finally something else, somewhere different, and it caused him to pause for a second. It was oddly recognizable, not exactly to who he was now but to a version of him that had existed before all of this. He could see a simple cobblestone street, ripples in puddles from the pooling rain, lit in the orange light of the newly setting sun. He could hear the rain and the sounds of the outside world and he could feel the fresh air streaming in. He would've cried upon seeing it if his face wasn't already wet with tears. He let himself hope that it was true, and that it was real, and that it was something else, because if he didn't have hope he'd have nothing left, and he ran through with what little strength he had left into-
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The sun had nearly set as Gerry circled around the shop, doing a quick round of cleaning up before closing and going home for a late night dinner. He picked up trash and various items customers had left, wiping down the tables and chairs as he walked along. Occasionally, he peered out the windows, watching the raindrops stream down the glass, glistening in the light of the sun and the streetlamps, his view obscured by nothing but his reflection.
Gerry thought he lived a pretty normal life, though of course, normal was subjective. He had a simple part-time job as a barista, but it was enough to afford a flat on his own and to afford paint and canvases to make paintings in his spare time (some of which his boss had hung up in the coffee shop, which Gerry was of course endlessly happy about, but he had to admit he got a little embarrassed every now and then to see them and know he could probably do better). Today had been a fairly normal day as well. It was a bit busy in the morning, as it always was, but it had calmed down a lot by his closing shift which he was grateful for. All the customers were long gone by this time of day despite Gerry not having flipped over the open sign yet, as they always were, and he was the only employee who consistently took the closing shift, so on most days he was all alone. That was okay though, he didn't really mind being alone. He found the night and the rain rather peaceful.
After he'd finished picking everything up and wiping down the counters and various other little cleaning things he had to do before going home, Gerry walked over to the back room to gather his bag and his coat and to turn out the lights, humming a song to himself that he annoyingly only remembered the chorus of.
It was then that he heard a jingle; the sound of the bell on the front door ringing. Someone had entered, and Gerry couldn't help but feel that something had shifted in the air.
"Sorry, we're just closing for the night!" Gerry called out, still gathering his items from the back room.
He could hear the person's watery footsteps from the room next to him, for some reason getting closer rather than farther. He found it odd that someone would be out this late in the rain, but it wasn't all too unusual. Probably just a late night coffee craving, or someone about to start a grueling night shift. Still, they were closed.
After gathering his things, Gerry stepped back out into the main room to make sure the mystery customer had left before turning out the lights. The person clearly hadn't, as there was now a man standing awkwardly in the center of the room, glancing around the shop with a puzzled expression and dripping water all over the floor. For a moment, they locked eyes.
The first thing Gerry noticed was that the man was soaked, evidently in need of an umbrella. His long, horribly tangled blonde hair dripped from the rain, various drops running along his face and nose and along his cheeks like tears, brownish-pink translucent streaks following any drops that crossed their way through a small scratch along his left cheekbone. He was tall, definitely over 180 centimeters, and he wore thick winter clothes—which were not only an odd choice of clothing due to the current temperature, but also an interesting choice considering that they were clearly way too small for him. The sleeves of his worn blue coat rode up to nearly his elbow, and his pants ended around his shins. He looked horribly tired, and held a confused and rather frazzled expression on his face, glancing around the room with eyes that somehow looked both panicked and unfocused. Gerry couldn't quite tell what color his eyes were, maybe gray or blue? He also moved and held himself in a very odd way, as if he wasn't used to his own body. That could've been just general awkwardness, though.
Most concerning however, were his hands, which were covered in blood. Clearly some of it had been washed away by the rain, but he appeared to have large fresh cuts on his palms and fingers that kept welling up, dripping rainy, watered down blood onto the shop's floor.
"Oh- oh my god, are you okay??" Gerry looked at the blood on his hands.
"Hi-I no, I-uhm-?" The man sputtered, looking at Gerry as if he hadn't said what he'd expected him to, and then glancing back at the shop, looking through the windows and at the buildings around them. His voice was shivery and hoarse, and he seemed to be having trouble standing.
"Isn't this the um- is-isn't-isn't this where…" He paused, clearing his throat, before trying again. "Isn't the..the Magnus Institute supposed to be here? I-I-I could've sworn it was here. I recognize the buildings and-and the street. Why isn't it.. here?"
Gerry tilted his head and squinted his eyes. "No I've... never heard of it? This shop has always been here, I think. At least as far as I can remember. Are you-?"
Before he could ask if he was okay again, Gerry could see the man start to stumble a bit. On what must've been instinct, Gerry dropped his things and rushed around the counter to where the man stood right as he crumpled over, his legs giving out from what Gerry could only assume was exhaustion. He caught the man before he hit the ground, grabbing him by his arms and helping him over to one of the nearby chairs. The man seemed shocked, but in a sort of dulled way, wincing in pain and glancing down at his hands as if he had just noticed his wounds for the first time.
With his palms covered in blood and his faded clothes and his weary demeanor, the man clashed horribly with the atmosphere of the bright happy shop and the calmness outside. Something about him was so very unusual, besides, of course, the obvious unusual-ness of his appearance. There were so many weird things about him, like his reflection being warped in the glass of the windows, and how Gerry found it a bit hard to perfectly focus his eyes on the man. It was as if something about him was inherently off. Maybe not in a bad way, though. No, Gerry had decided. Not a bad way at all.
It'd probably be best to stop staring.
"Here, let me bandage these for you. We have a first aid kit in the back, just- just wait a moment." Gerry stepped back, before turning around and running over to the back room again, grabbing the gauze, bandages, and a cloth, before rushing back out to the man in the chair. Gerry then crouched by his side, slowly lifting the man's right hand and dabbing the cloth onto it to wipe up the blood and rainwater. Then he grabbed the gauze and wrapped it around the man's palm, before softly placing the band-aids on the smaller cuts on his fingers and fist. The man looked wearily down at Gerry—his eyes still unfocused and hazy—as he patched the man's wounds.
Gerry stood up and sat opposite the man, grabbing his left hand from across the table and resting it in the center. His hands were soft and warm, but oddly long and bony.
"How'd you get these?" Gerry asked.
The man seemed startled at the sudden noise, his eyes quickly becoming more focused. There was a short pause, before he registered that he should come up with an answer to Gerry's question.
"Um.. th-th-the mirrors, I think. I don't know, I don't really… remember? Haven't really.. noticed them until now." His voice was becoming less hoarse, and he flinched each time the cloth touched any cuts. "Sorry for, uhm, dripping blood on your floors."
"Oh no, no it's okay. They were due for a clean anyway," Gerry smiled. He figured it would be best not to bring up the fact that he'd just cleaned them. He also had no idea what "the mirrors" could possibly be referring to, but he could tell the man clearly wasn't well. He could ask him later. Assuming he'd see him again later.
"What's your name?"
"I.. I don't..hm.." He looked off to the distance as if in deep thought, a troubled look etching itself into his face as if it was a struggle to find the answer. "Uhm- Mi-Michael? I think? I…I think that's right, yeah. Michael Shelley."
He seemed to be telling himself that more than he was telling Gerry.
"Okay. Okay. Michael, then. It's nice to meet you." Gerry looked up at him with a smile, which got him a weak smile from Michael in return.
Gerry grabbed the gauze, carefully wrapping his hand with it, before again grabbing the bandaids and placing them on the smaller cuts along his fingers. Then he stood up from his chair and leaned down, gently lifting up his head and wiping up the blood on Michael's cheek. The scrape didn't really need a bandage or anything, it seemed to have closed up just fine on its own and it wasn't actively bleeding anymore, but his face was covered in blood and he figured he'd prefer it not to be. His face was warm, and he looked up at him with wide eyes.
He could see them clearly now. Michael's irises weren't blue or gray at all. Instead, they swirled with various colors, constantly shifting into different shades both natural and unnatural, never slowing and never staying stagnant in their form. They appeared entirely infinite, constantly spinning and changing and shifting in a spiral inching ever downwards towards his pupil. Even his eye-whites were abnormal, nearly imperceptibly changing into subtler hues and swimming with impossibly vague shapes, so vague that Gerry thought he might've just been seeing things. And to think that from far away they just appeared to be an odd shade of gray. They were mesmerizing. He couldn't help but feel that he could get completely trapped in them.
Despite the near impossibility of the task, Gerry somehow found a way to look away from Michael's eyes, gathering back up his medical supplies before stepping back from the man. He was definitely strange—maybe even inhuman. But, for some reason, Gerry seemed fine with that.
"There we go, that should help a bit." Gerry looked down at Michael, still slumped over in his chair and now examining the bandages on his hands. He wondered what it was like to see through those eyes.
"Thank you, uh.." He paused for a moment, looking at Gerry's name tag. Something shifted in his expression, but only for a moment. "Gerard?"
"Call me Gerry."
"Gerry, then. Than-thank you."
He seemed a tad more alert now, though still not much. He was very visibly tired, clearly needing rest and seeming far too confused to find anywhere on his own. He was less panicked though, his movements much slower than before. His breaths were shaky.
Gerry walked back behind the counter to grab his things before heading to the back room again.
"Do you need somewhere to stay for the night? My place isn't too far from here. Might be a bit messy though," Gerry offered.
He told himself that the offer was a simple act of kindness, but in reality, he was so very interested in the man and his strangeness. He wanted to ask him so many questions, questions that would better be asked in the morning. He wanted to know him. Gerry probably should've been more afraid, asking a stranger with incredibly weird vibes to stay in his house. But he wasn't, not really. Not yet, at least. He seemed harmless, simply tired and afraid.
"M- no. No I-I'm fine. I just need to find..." His struggle to remember seemed to trouble him a bit. "The Institute. I need to find it."
"No, you clearly need rest. Here, I'll help walk you there once I finish closing up. It shouldn't take long, I just need to turn off the lights. I can help you find it in the morning."
Michael offered a small mumble of a final protest, before slumping over even more in his chair. "Okay, yea-yeah. I guess I do."
Gerry turned around, and as he began to walk towards the back room his footsteps pattered in the water that now soaked the ground. He glanced at the puddles awkwardly, just now remembering their existence. "…I'll let the openers clean the water up."
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Being carefully guided by Gerry to not fall over more times than he already had, Michael once again found himself walking down the sidewalk, his and Gerry's boots pattering in the rain and sending ripples in the surface of the puddles that rested on the pathway.
The weather had slowed down a bit, but raindrops still sprinkled upon the two and he was still uncomfortably damp. Much to Michael's chagrin, he was just now noticing how uncomfortable his clothes felt on his body and how badly it hurt just to exist, he winced with every step and with every movement he forced himself to make, and he wanted to rip his skin off with every reminder of how tight his thick clothes were on him. But the outside world was peaceful, the sun had fully set now and the night was as beautiful as he could've ever dreamed it to be, even with the clouds obscuring his view of the stars. He'd missed it so badly.
However, something about this world felt wrong. There was a little voice in the back of his head, telling him that something was horribly off, off about the location of the cafe and off about Gerry and off about everything that existed here. But when Michael looked at the world all he felt was a tired and pained sort of joy, and when he looked at Gerry all he saw was a kind and good-hearted person, someone real. It was his own body that seemed the issue. It was built differently now, his muscles still warped from his time as that thing and his joints not yet used to moving in the right directions. He barely knew how to walk on floors that weren't the halls of that place anymore, they all felt too even.
The paranoia was probably due to those hallways as well, he doubted he'd ever be exactly normal after that. He probably had directional issues now too, which would explain why he ended up at the cafe instead of the Institute. It was all explainable, he had to tell himself that it was. He just needed rest. God, how long had it been since Michael had a good full night's sleep? Too long, that was for sure. All he needed to do was to walk a bit farther. He tried to make his thoughts go quiet.
…
There was another thing, though, something that wouldn't leave the whirlwind of Michael's mind. Gerry's name tag, Gerard Delano. He knew that name, he recognized it from someone he knew a long time ago. It must just be a common name though, right? People can have the same last names and not be related. And, if they really were related, Gerry would almost certainly know what the Institute was. Eric had died about a decade ago anyway, he was surprised he even remembered him after everything that'd happened. He wanted to ignore it.
…
But when he looked at Gerry there was something recognizable about him, something familiar. His hair was the wrong color (though it was almost certainly dyed, unless people could naturally have black hair with auburn highlights), but his face did remind Michael of Eric if he really thought about it. The shape of his face and the shape of his nose and his warm brown eyes. He could barely remember his face anyway though, so he might've just been imagining things. He must've been.
Could he ever really, truly trust his mind again? Trust his memory? Trust his recognition? Trust that he wasn't imagining things? Every time he closed his eyes Michael couldn't help but see those horrible glowing colors, couldn't help but see himself running running running until his legs were on fire and his face was wet with tears and sweat, and his hands and throat raw from clawing at the wallpaper as if he could rip through the thing he was trapped in and screaming in anger and pain and hopelessness and the whole dizziness of it all. And he couldn't help but remember his warped reflection, and that thing that dared to call itself him and him that dared to call himself it and everything twisting and hurting and winding and how badly their very existence hurt the both of them and-
"If you don't mind me asking,-"
Gerry's voice startled Michael out of his thoughts.
"-what exactly, happened to you? What were you doing out there in the rain?"
Michael kept walking, staring down at his feet, watching the raindrops fall. How could he respond to that? There was too much.
"It's.. a lot. A lot happened. Even I'm not sure what-what exactly it was. I.. I don't know how to explain it in a way you c-could understand. You'd think I'm crazy." He laughed. "Honestly, I prob-probably am."
Gerry looked at him with an achingly soft expression. "Try me."
Michael hummed, quickly looking back down at the ground to avoid his gaze. He really didn't want to talk about it right now. He hadn't even fully processed it yet himself. Even his thoughts about it scared him. But he wanted to talk about it with someone, he didn't want to be alone in this. He wanted so badly for someone else to understand. Even if it was, by nature, impossible to do so.
"Can… can we talk about it later? Tomorrow, maybe? I-I-I do want to talk about it, just…"
There was a pause, no sound besides the pattering of rain on the ground and Michael's shaky breaths.
"Yeah. Yeah, of course." Gerry looked away as well, out towards the street. His eyebrows raised. "Oh, We're here!"
Finally.
As they stepped up to the door, Gerry let go of Michael for a moment (he'd barely even noticed his arm around him, and as Michael nearly immediately stumbled he very quickly missed its presence), grabbing the door handle and opening it for him to walk through. He tried his best, leaning against the doorway as he walked in, Gerry following suit. His body ached with every heartbeat.
The door opened up to a rather cramped room. It was an entryway, with a small dying plant in the corner and an entrance to an incredibly short hallway directly ahead, with a staircase in the other corner leading upwards. It left him feeling uneasy, the stretch of doors, even if there were only a couple and even if he knew it was stupid to feel uneasy about it. He looked away.
Gerry grabbed him again, leading him over to an unassuming door to the side of the small entryway. He pressed a button and waited, until he heard a ding and a deceivingly roomy lift opened up. Michael stumbled his way in and leaned against the railing on the side, sighing and resting his legs as much as he could while still standing. Gerry walked over to stand across from Michael, where the panel of buttons were. He absentmindedly stared in his direction.
It felt simultaneously nice and awful, to know he was being seen. To feel perceived again. It reminded him of someone, someone who now left a sour taste in his throat. He didn't want to decide how he felt about her right now. Instead, he looked back down at his carefully bandaged hands, at his fingers that were longer than they'd been before. He didn't want to think about that either.
The bell of the lift dinged as the door opened (wow, that was fast), and Gerry stepped out from his corner and into the hallway. Michael followed to the best of his ability, Gerry walking off towards the second closest door on the left. Michael didn't follow though, he just stared into the hallway in front of him.
He wasn't even exactly sure why, it looked nothing like those halls. It was normal. It had an end to it that he could clearly see, and it only had about 4 doors. But he stared regardless.
"This is it!"
Gerry looked over at Michael (who was again startled by the sudden noise) before grabbing his key ring and beginning to flick through what was frankly far too many keys. "Again, excuse the mess. Wasn't exactly expecting company tonight."
Michael let out a weak laugh as he ambled towards him. "I'm sure it's fine. I've ne-never really minded messy rooms. My place was always horribly disorganized."
Referring to himself in the past tense now, huh?
He did wonder what had happened to his stuff, though. He knew he had spent at least a couple years as that thing, and God knows how long he spent in those hallways. His stuff must've gone somewhere after multiple years. Add that to the list of things to figure out in the morning.
Gerry slid the key into the lock, laughing playfully. "Oh, it's not disorganized, just organized a bit unusually! There's a system to it!"
He twisted the key until the lock clicked into place, then pushed open the door and signaled for Michael to walk through.
—
Gerry's place was comforting, in that sort of real way that Michael hadn't experienced in so long, at least not as himself (if that's what he was now).
It was a bit small but not uncomfortably so, his living room consisting of a good sized couch and a small TV, with an easel and stack of canvases in the corner that explained the paint bottles scattered across the place and the half-finished paintings on the floor. He had a few small shelves holding books and records and various other little items (photos, candles, figurines, etc) with a record player sitting on top of one of them. His walls had various posters and paintings, with a couple records hanging up near the record area and a couple of small plant pots hanging from the ceiling. It smelled like paint, and old incense.
Michael lay down on the couch as Gerry got something from the kitchen. His back hurt badly, so did all of his joints and his muscles and his head, but the couch was wonderfully comfortable compared to every other surface he'd interacted with recently, and he felt something akin to relaxation for the first time in so long. The room's lights were fairly dim as well, which made his eyes feel a bit less strained.
The muscles around his eyes had been hurting pretty badly, which probably had nothing to do with the fact that he hadn't been wearing his glasses. They'd broken at some point in the hallways, which made seeing through them a greater struggle than it was worth (especially in the pouring rain that already made wearing glasses a nightmare even if they weren't broken). He didn't really need them anyway, his sight wasn't too bad. It still gave him a headache to focus on anything without them though. He fiddled with them in his pocket.
"Here, drink some water."
Gerry walked over and handed Michael a glass, which he held incredibly carefully as to not drop it or hurt his hands. The pain was kind of unavoidable though, grabbing just about anything was going to hurt for quite a while. But he was alive. He was alive and he was out of the place he'd been trapped in. It didn't really feel real yet. Would it ever?
Slowly, he lifted the glass to his mouth and drank. He didn't realize just how thirsty he was until he felt the cold water wash down his throat, and before he realized it he had drank the entire glass at a truly incredibly speed. Gerry let out a small laugh, grabbing the glass and refilling it before handing it back, then walking back to the kitchen to make food.
Michael continued to rest, taking slower sips of his water this time, as Gerry paced around the kitchen. He watched him quietly, the smell of the water boiling making his stomach pang with hunger.
"You good with some ramen? I could crack an egg in there if you'd like, but it's kind of all I got right now. I planned to get groceries tomorrow," Gerry called from the kitchen.
"That's okay. Plain ramen is f-fine, thank you," Michael replied.
—
When the food was done, they both ate on the couch. Mainly due to Gerry's lack of a dining table, though even if he would've had one Michael wouldn't have wanted to move from his spot anyway.
He'd felt so hungry before, but when it came time to eat it was difficult for him to even finish his bowl. He couldn't eat as much as he used to, and he really didn't like that. But his stomach hurt as if he was far too full, so he sat on the couch for a while longer before attempting to move again, idly talking with Gerry as he did so.
He learned that Gerry had been working various part-time jobs throughout his life, selling his art occasionally, but only the pieces he didn't mind parting with. He wanted art to be a hobby he could come back to, not a job to dread, which Michael respected.
Michael told him that he used to enjoy drawing occasionally. Not exactly painting and certainly not at Gerry's skill level, but he'd draw people a lot, like his friends and coworkers and cool people he'd see walk down the street. He'd honestly forgotten that fact about himself until the idea was brought up. He wondered what else he'd lost about himself.
Gerry asked what happened, why he didn't draw that often anymore. Michael figured that telling him he'd been sacrificed to an entity of pure madness for a couple years would freak him out, so he'd just lied about losing motivation in a desperate attempt to keep the conversation going. Gerry could probably tell it was a lie, but if he did he didn't mention it.
Michael also talked about his job at the Magnus Institute. He didn't get too into detail and Gerry didn't pry, probably sensing that it had to do with whatever had happened to him, but he talked about his coworkers and the basic job description and the basic facts about the place. He went a bit quiet when he nearly mentioned Gertrude though, leading Gerry to change the subject.
Gerry talked about his family, about how his mom had died when he was too young to remember and how he'd lived with his dad and his godmother his entire life. Michael was getting too tired to focus though. He had started noticing his clothes on his body again and was probably becoming a bit irritable.
"Do you want to go to bed now?" Gerry had asked. Michael thought for a moment before answering.
"Mm.. I would like to, it's just…" He paused. "Coul-could I take a shower, first? I feel kind of gross."
While he was almost certainly unclean, the main issue was how horrible his tangled hair felt. It'd be best to brush it out while wet though, and at that point he might as well just take a shower.
Gerry said he could, and went to his room to gather clean clothes for him that actually fit. Eventually, he handed him some loose pants and an oversized band-tee, its logo so worn he couldn't read what it said. Michael grabbed the clothes, a clean towel, and a washcloth, before entering the bathroom and closing the door.
Which is how Michael ended up here, staring at himself in the bathroom mirror.
Everything had been so pleasant before, he had been feeling good and normal for the first time in so, so long during his and Gerry's conversation and he knew that looking at his reflection would ruin that. He'd even managed to take off his bandages without looking at it. But he couldn't help it. He needed to know what he looked like. He needed to see himself clearly.
It was, of course, a horrible mistake. He couldn't stop staring into those terrifying, infinitely swirling eyes that looked nothing like his. He looked at his head, touching his cheekbones that were far too prominent, feeling his once round face now left with sunken cheeks. He looked at his body that was so much lankier and thinner and taller than it'd been, looked at the bones in his ribcage that he definitely couldn't see before. He didn't look like himself at all. He could barely recognize it.
Some things were the same, his general bone structure, his hair, his nose, the gap in his teeth, the little imperfections in his skin. But that all just left his body so much more uncanny, little reminders that this was him, that this was what he looked like now. It wasn't him. It couldn't have been. It wasn't him. He may not have known who he was anymore, but he knew this wasn't it. He felt so horribly dizzy. He couldn't stop staring at it. It couldn't be him.
He peeled himself away from the mirror and gripped the counter, steadying himself before he fell over from the dizziness despite the pain that shot through his hands. It felt like he could barely control his body with how little it felt like his own. He slowly sat himself down on the floor, curling up in a ball with his arms wrapped tightly around his knees, and sat there for a while, waiting for the panic and the dizziness and that horrible, aching feeling to subside. The floor was cold, far too hard and far too flat beneath him.
Had he been in that place so long that even the real world felt wrong now? The idea made his heart sink, even though it probably wasn't true. He just had to get used to everything again, he knew that. But what if it was true? What if he could never be normal again, and no matter what world he was in it would always feel wrong? What if he'd been ruined? He tried to block out his thoughts, but he began to tear up from them anyway.
Michael sat like that for a while, curled up on the floor, breathing erratically and trying not to cry. But eventually, things started to subside—at least enough for him to stand up and enter the shower. But that horrible ache in his chest still remained. It had attached itself to him like a parasite in his heart, and he doubted it'd ever go away.
The warm water, as it poured down on him like the rain had earlier that day, soothed his aching muscles and his headache and the ache in his bones. He tried not to look at his body too much as he showered.
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As he stood in his room, gathering a pillow and a blanket for himself, Gerry heard the bathroom door open and shut from behind him. He smiled when he heard Michael walk in, and he turned around to speak.
"I figured I'd sleep on the couch tonight, so you could have the bed. I know…"
He couldn't finish his thought. Something was wrong. There was a new kind of distance and sadness in Michael's eyes. His face had fallen, his stance back to being that of someone awkward and afraid.
He had definitely taken a shower. His hair was wet and his hands were wrapped in new gauze for the night. He wore Gerry's oversized pajamas (that looked almost normal sized on him) and smelled like his shampoo. But he looked off into the distance, not at anything specific, not exactly focused even when he tried to look at Gerry. He was so different than he'd been an hour ago, when they'd talked about themselves and laughed together. He looked empty.
"Would it be okay if.. you..uh-" His voice was quiet, nearly a whisper. "Slept in your bed tonight too? I... I don't real-really want to be alone."
Gerry sat the pillow and blanket back on the bed, still looking at Michael. He tried to smile kindly, but it probably looked a lot more sad.
"Yeah. Yeah, of course."
He straightened out the sheets again, placing the pillow back in its original spot. He sat himself down on the bed, Michael following suit, practically falling onto it and curling up under the sheets. The room was quiet, and when he realized there'd be no more discussion Gerry leaned up and turned off the lamp on his desk.
Even as the darkness fell upon the two, Gerry swore he could still see Michael's eyes, as if they were faintly illuminated by some otherworldly light. He had so many things to ask him in the morning, so many questions he needed answered. But for now, he let the darkness and the silence meld into a kind of comfort, and slowly, the two began to fall asleep.