just to push you down

[fish]

Who: Hamilton Fish
What: misadventures during this past event's reality-tearing extravaganza
Where: Mafaton and the Undercity
When: a couple of weeks ago
Notes: closed narrative; just a tentative attempt to break hiatus
Warnings: enclosed spaces, an incredibly condescending scientist

The first mistake Fish made was hiding under that little building. It had no basement, only a space between the floor and the earth where it was raised on blocks, sealed around the edges by poorly nailed boards. He saw a gap beneath it, pried at the wood to widen it and then slipped inside. Something hissed at him on his way in, so he kicked at it, swearing in alarm, and crawled quickly away from it until he ran out of room. When the noise of his own scrabbling panic gave way to silence, he could hear it whimpering, so he turned his head and saw it there in the dark: a child, scaled appendages held close, three eyes watching him with a dim firefly glow.

Declining to follow the child outside, it turned out, was another mistake. It crept cautiously to the opening, slipped out into the nighttime mayhem, shooting him a glistening dirty look on its way. And he stayed. He was alone for hardly ten minutes before one of the city's larger intruders felled the building with a single blow from its limb, and in that one roaring instant his hiding space became no space at all.

The pulverized remains settled around him as dust and splinters and crumbling gravel, and in the following stillness he awoke. He felt nothing at first, but as his awareness unfurled there came with it a sense of compression, of enveloping closeness. An abstraction of hard, uneven surfaces. No breeze. No light, and no shapes in the dark. Only weight.
The weight did not hurt, exactly, but it felt wrong. Wrong, all over. It was strongest in his limbs, squeezing, clutching, a pressure that never abated. He could move—barely—his legs and his hips, and he could suck in the shallowest breath, push it out again and still have room to draw another. But from the waist up he was pinned. His chest pressed flat against the earth. His jaw at a crooked angle, forced open and held there by this relentless weight. He moved his tongue around inside his mouth, felt drool spilling past his lip and pooling against his cheek and his chin, tasted the soil beneath his head. Pushed something around a little in the dirt that may have been a small stone or it may have been one of his own teeth. He focused on it, tried to feel some familiar ridge or texture, but his tongue only nudged it out of reach.

For hours he waited, listened, and with the faint movements he could make he tried hard to gain some traction, some leverage against the weight. He thought his foot had found a firm surface when something touched his left arm, which lay pinned just below the elbow; the sleeve was bunched up, and on the bare skin of his wrist there grew the unmistakable warmth of day. This derailed his mission entirely to make way for thoughts such as what the hell, and how has it been that many hours, and finally this is probably going to suck. And so he braced himself, hoping hard for overcast weather.

The light crept along his arm, very slowly changing shape as the day's long hours went on. He could not see, he could not speak, couldn't gather enough breath to shout, couldn't even grit his teeth against it. He tried to raise his voice and heard only the softest, reediest sound, as though he were calling to himself at a distance through water and stone. The relief of sunset was incredible. He did not sleep, only rested, focused on the cooling of his skin.

The sun came and went again and again, each stretch of day more painful than the last as the nighttime mending of his flesh lost efficiency.

On the sixth night, near dawn, things began to scrape around somewhere nearby. Vibrations through the earth. The occasionally interrupted rhythm of casual strides. Voices, too; vague, cottony impressions of speech. Then a tremendous dragging, gravel scraping, air moving in the wake of an object. Once again he felt the prickling warmth of sunlight and began to panic, tried to make a fist or to kick or scream and did none of these things, only breathed in faint puffs through his mouth trapped open, and waited there, pressed hard against the ground as though by the hand of god.

Someone grabbed the toe of his boot, moved it to check whether it was attached to anything, announced that they'd found another one. The weight came away in pieces, lifted into nothingness. He barely felt it. Strange hands rolled him over, another voiced asked is anyone home, and upon receiving no reply someone else likened his appearance to roadkill.
Lying there, blind and burning in the sun, Fish was unable to instruct this person to fuck their own face, and so through a monumental effort he showed them his middle finger instead. The ensuing chuckles shouldn't have made him feel any better, probably, but they did. A little.

All right, it was decided, take it below.


And so this brings us to now.


Hamilton Fish's legs dangle over the edge of a gurney as he slouches there, dressed in an ill-fitting set of medical scrubs, which he'd requested once the open backed gown had seriously lost its appeal. The white stick of a lollipop bobs at his mouth as he rolls his tongue over the candy's round shape. A pair of IV tubes is taped to his forearm, the clear one feeding in, the blackish one drawing out. He works a finger under the edge of his bandages to rub at an itch by his temple.

Stood at a table some distance away, the doctor warns him, "I can still see you." Laboratory glassware is not a particularly efficient visual obstruction, but that hasn't stopped him from trying. Again. "If you would like me to amputate your phalanges, by all means, keep touching it." He acquiesces with a roll of his eyes. The doctor shuffles his way, plucks the candy from his mouth and pries at his jaw with his cold leathery hand, exposed finger bones curling against Fish's lip. "Open," he says, and Fish does not gag this time because now he knows better than to inhale when spoken to at such a personal distance.

As prompted, Fish shows the doctor his tongue, bares all his teeth, works his jaw left and right, open and shut, and tolerates the peering and prodding that comes with it, his one working eye watching that withered grey face all the while. A moment of eye contact provokes the doctor into smiling. It's a horrible expression. He then lifts the lollipop within reach of Fish's mouth, expectant, and when those jaws snatch at it he hangs on, giving the candy—and thusly Fish's head—a little waggle back and forth, scolding him in a tone of voice typically reserved for dogs. "Gentle."
Judging by the state of his fingertips, this concept is a work in progress—albeit only in the sense that it's become something like a game between them. A kind of grudging familiarity.

Still, Fish reminds himself, once again rubbing under the edge of his bandages, as soon as he figures out how he's going to do it, he is getting the hell out of here.