some die looking for a hand to hold

[gramarye]

Who: Wolfgang and OPEN
What: Antipsychotic medications have been known to exacerbate psychosis. There is a risk of permanent chemical dependence leading to symptoms worse than before treatment began.
Where: Badside, Mog Hill, Echomire, Brock Marsh, Raven's Gate, Chimer
When: Veerdi-Shundi
Notes: FEEL FREE TO SKIP THE OP it's me tl;dring. Thread starters in comments, if none of those work just... post whatever and I'll roll with it. Also, a polyvore.
Warnings: Medical/health care. For real. Specifically, this post touches on symptoms of mental illness, drug dependence, side effects and withdrawal, medical treatment, and seizures. Very possibly TW for suicidal ideation.

He's halfway down the block before he realises he left his body behind.

Panicked, he runs and hides, waits for whatever this is to end. It doesn't. He slinks back to his bedroom at five in the morning, watching his body sleep, pacing the length of the room and wondering if he can get back inside. Eventually, it becomes less terrifying, but it is frustrating to be outside of his body while the flesh sleeps and unable to do anything -- unable to touch anything, to speak to anyone, to even be seen. It further blurs the line between dream and reality; which is which? Which really happened?

It was supposed to get better. He was supposed to Awaken and this would stop. He'd be fine, he could stop taking the meds, he could get his life back, everything would be like it used to -- when he was young and wild and free and knew he could do anything he wanted, whenever he wanted. Only this time, he wouldn't have to be so lonely; people would understand...

Instead, it's getting worse. When he's not on them, he can't tell the voices apart, can't tell what's real and what's in his head, feels smothered under the weight of the irrational thoughts that plague him. He argues with people who aren't there in public, not realising he's the only one who can see them, or that maybe they're not there at all. He gets random pains -- swift, shock-like ones and longer-lasting muscle pain, stiffness in his neck, long-lasting headaches that aspirin doesn't fix. His hands shake so hard he can't use them. When he's on them, the side effects now outweigh the benefits. The sedative effect of antipsychotics makes day-to-day living harder when he is already sleeping thirteen hours a day. He falls asleep anywhere, at any time -- on the train, at work, in bars -- but no matter how much he sleeps, it's never enough. He is losing time. He'll sit down and the next thing he knows, the sun is much lower, or else it's dark out, and he's confused and disoriented. Once, he wakes up on the floor of his living room with a paintbrush still in his hand, and his entire body feels as if it was just tazed, just one giant, sore muscle, and there's blood in his mouth -- he bit through his cheek.

It only happens once, but it's enough to thoroughly scare the shit out of him.

Above all else, though, it makes it clear that no matter how many times he smiles and says "fine, thank you, how are you," he is not functioning. He is consistently late for work, if he manages to go at all, and when he gets back to his house, he has barely enough energy to collapse on the mattress he set up in the living room, and then he sleeps the rest of the day. He needs a drink -- or six -- just to get through the day, and if he has to go outside and socialise like a normal human being, he takes stimulants. After the incident last week, he has stopped answering his CiD, and he quits one job, gets fired from another, and stops showing up for the third. Having free time again is nice. It's not much, a few hours between sleep, and even then he doesn't use it very effectively. Does some work on the house. Reads, when he can muster up the energy, the big medical texts he borrowed from a public library.

Does not like what he finds.

Clozapine has been shown to lower seizure threshold and produce significant EEG changes. Although not a commonly used drug, both clinical neurophysiology technologists and interpreting electroencephalographers need to be aware of the effects of clozapine on the EEG...

CNS Effects of Haloperidol
Insomnia, restlessness, anxiety, euphoria, agitation, drowsiness, depression, lethargy, headache, confusion, vertigo, grand mal seizures, exacerbation of psychotic symptoms including hallucinations, and catatonic-like behavioral states...

The words keep ringing in his head, over and over. He has to read it over and over again because it takes that long for anything to sink in -- he sees the words, but he can't make any sense of them, and when he finally does, he just sits there quietly and thinks about what they mean. He is not sure how long that takes.

Maybe he should tell someone.

He thinks about that, those words still at the forefront of his mind, when he drags himself out of bed, forces himself to get dressed, and leaves the house, like maybe if he just goes out and does something, he'll be okay. He has always been able to push through this before. It has been one thing after another all year, and he thinks maybe it's indicative of some kind of personal failing that he can't take it in stride like the rest of the city. He has never been strong -- he thinks -- and ten years later he has been made more brittle by a lifetime of expectations and disappointments, by the slow reveal of an unjust world he is completely powerless in.

And it has been following him into his dreams. The old nightmares -- memories of past lives, people he's been before. Some he's had before and some he hasn't, but they're all familiar because they all really happened, except something is wrong in them this time. The way the trees begin to curl in on themselves when he looks at them too long. The patterns of spiderwebs, reflecting rainbow from morning dew, too unnaturally perfectly round. The thin lines of clouds curling inwards, inwards.

Always in a spiral.

Every time it interrupts the dreams he knows he should be paying attention to, knocks him out of the memory and into awareness, but still dreaming. No. He runs from them instead, swinging from memory to memory like handholds, but when he sees it again he misses the mark and falls. No. This is real running, the background warping behind him and he has to get away, really away, because he's not even safe here and he can't tell if this is real. He only jerks to a stop because there is nowhere else to run, he's standing on the edge of a cliff that is wrong because there's nothing behind him except more ocean. The sea, all around. Deep, open water, impossibly grey.

There is more than one way to go. He looks upwards, but he can see the clouds beginning to move, twisting and starting to spiral, and -- No. Just one. He jumps.

Seven miles under the surface, there is no light. No sight. No sound. No smell. No feeling. He can taste salt water sometimes, but that fades eventually. Above him there are hundreds of pounds of pressure threatening to collapse or explode his body, but that fades, too, until there is nothing but this -- drifting in blackness, enveloped in it like an isolation tank. A Ganzfeld cocoon.

Safe. The only safe place there is.

But in the waking world he wanders around like a zombie, hollow-eyed, closer to broken than anything else and too tired to fight anymore. He would just go under, if he could.

This is his last-ditch effort to find a way to believe that not everything in the world is evil.

Comments

[gramarye]

I like the sea, he offers instead eventually, not wanting to dwell on the bad things, when it's quiet. He spends a lot of time by the boardwalk in Chimer but he never goes out on the beach because there are always too many people around -- there's not enough beach to person ratio in Baedal for the nice ones to ever really be empty unless the weather's really shit. He hasn't found any really out-of-the-way parts that feel private yet.

The river, too, even if it's not the same, and there's traffic in it a lot -- ferries escorting people from one side to the other, more practical in many places than trying to find a bridge. People living in it -- though they don't surface that often, he still doesn't like to disturb them.

Drunk people pissing in it. There's an image he could do without. He knows too many alcoholics. (Wolfgang does not consider himself an alcoholic.)

[gramarye]

Wolfgang still looks tired and sad but when he smiles, it's without that sick anger he had before and with the relief of understanding. "Yeah." His gaze moves towards the door, but... no, he won't go back in. He'll learn better than to try again someday. "I feel... bad, they have a right to their gods here, but... it's hard."

Feeling alone in the multiverse. Maybe this is how people felt thousands of years ago when monotheism was some weird new concept.

"No, ah -- it's fine. I just..." He gestures with his right hand, awkwardly -- he's just restless, wants something to do with them, and smoking is something to occupy the hands and mouth with. Something to hide behind.

[gramarye]

"Oh. We're in the same cohort then." Wolfgang hasn't been checking the network over the past week, so he's not surprised he missed a few new arrivals. Then again, not everyone introduces themselves that way. "Yeah -- good news, no one really cares... unless you're importing. Then they care. Um, a lot." His left hand twinges; he ignores it. "Or, like... selling crack to kids or something."

Yes... don't do that. Good life advice from Wolfgang Einhorn.

[gramarye]

"Ah, work, mostly..." That is a lie, most of what he's been doing is sleeping, not that that's obvious at all. Half the shifts he didn't show up for; the other half he was late to. And now he doesn't have any jobs, hooray. He shrugs, makes a side-to-side motion with his right hand like eh, so-so.

He can pretend to be normal all he wants, no one's buying it.

"How are you?"

[wontturntofoam]

"I thought so too. It was just what people called me, anyway. People here think it means I want to be a lady." Shrieky replies, somewhat sullenly.

He doesn't think about the strengthening of Wolfgang's grip on his hand, until they get to the pub, and he has to use his left hand to push open the door. Then he's suddenly hyper aware of how comfortable this has been, and he's a little reluctant to let his hand slide free of Wolfgang's, even though realistically, he needs his hands to carry things like drinks and to reach into his pockets for money and the like.

"Do you need one of those?" Shrieky gestures towards a pile of nicely printed paper menus sitting quite close to the door. He tends to order food by waiting until he sees someone else with something he wants, and then telling a member of staff that he wants it, but he has noticed that this isn't what most people do, and he would really like to give Wolfgang some food. He seems as though he needs nourishing.

[gramarye]

"No," he says -- he's not planning on eating anything. He can't remember the last time he did, but he's certain it must have been a reasonable amount of time ago. (He would be wrong.)

Wolfgang lets go of him and sits, looking slightly dazed -- he's not high, but it's hard for him to focus on anything today between the lack of sleep and how he feels dead inside, like someone scooped out all his insides and left them somewhere on a cliffside in Flag Hill. When he props his chin in his right hand, it's mostly to keep his head upright.

"People can be jerks," he says slowly, mostly in response to what they were talking about earlier, but the long delay is odd. He's been thinking a lot about gender, lately.

[caoineadh]

"Oh!" A brighter smile; she's been looking over the network a little, but hadn't seen Wolfgang there, "It's extra nice to meet you." There's an awareness at the back her mind that she'll probably adopt the cohort as her family and start predicting for them. But that's later, not now, and she doesn't want to think too hard about it.

The way he mentions importing it has her curious, but she let's it pass, "Mm, it's probably for the best they don't let kids buy crack, they're bad enough without it." A joke? Sort of.

[rhinemaid]

The river is more my style. ...because she's a naiad, that's not really news to anyone who's been paying attention; her first experience with Baedal's ocean left a sour taste in her mouth that she sometimes sets aside and sometimes doesn't, depending largely on the state of her mood with everything else at a given moment. When Ruby was still here, and Katya, we went to the beach once, though.

It's a good memory; she misses both of them and feels strange thinking about the comings and goings of others now that she's certain she'll stay. (Will she, though--? Or will Baedal get tired of her, one day, and then it won't matter that she's dead anywhere else or that she'd built a home here-- but she doesn't think of it like that because she'll go mad. Madder.)

Everything feels so small here.

[gramarye]

It's good beaches. Very cold in winter. He shivers dramatically, knowing that yes, he is a big baby about the weather here, Baedal never actually gets that cold and the most snow they had was a bit of slush here and there. It snows sometimes in Jerusalem for a few hours, and he was in Ankara over the winter, but he grew up on the coast.

(When he doesn't understand a word, he repeats it back asking for a definition -- this is, if nothing else, a good learning exercise, actually having a natural conversation instead of repeating lessons out of a frankly kind of creepy book with moving pictures in it. And he did, actually, learn for her anyway; she's the only deaf friend he has.)

Wolfgang thinks about asking if she knows how far out the ocean goes, but... he had a conversation a few weeks ago where he realised that either the stars and moon and sun are all illusions to keep them all calm, or there is real space stretching out an indeterminable area around them, at least far enough for the sun to be visible, and around that would all be fog. With everything that comes in the fog.

No, he doesn't want to know.

Yeah, he agrees with that in mind. (He thinks he would prefer illusion.) He doesn't know the sign for 'claustrophobic', but he's thinking it. Lonely sometimes.

[rhinemaid]

(When she thinks he might not recognize a word she uses, she spells it out after signing it, preemptively; the practise is good for her and she doesn't mind making it easier for him.)

Ilde knows not only how far they can get across the ocean (which is not necessarily how far it is, but how far before it turns into the madness of the fog) but also that the space around them is small; the geomagnetic storms that came and tore holes in this reality should never have been as close to the city itself as they were, Sonja said. That means there wasn't enough space for them to be further away.

Even the sky is a small thing, wrapped around them like some twisted child's snow-globe. When she thinks of the gods, she imagines them with their hands around the glass, shaking it hard to see what happens next, like spoiled children who don't care about breaking toys they can replace.

Not always. Sometimes. Other times, she breathes in Shada's incense and wonders if this is what belonging feels like. The contradictions in her own perception suit her.

I used to travel a lot. Which is agreement, of a sort.

[gramarye]

Where? he asks, genuinely interested.

Wolfgang had always wanted to travel, and as a child had had the means and opportunity to satisfy that desire whenever he wanted, but as an adult he was more limited by money until he had to leave. He was going north -- he would have stopped in Turkey if he were someone else, he had generally liked it there, but... while anti-Semitism is prevalent everywhere outside of Israel, the things people said to his face in Turkey, not knowing he was one of them, were especially bad. He couldn't have stayed there forever. He was thinking the UK or something, since he already knew English, and it would have been better if his family wanted to come see him --

Anyway, it's very odd to have been so many places but not know where most of them actually were. 'Somewhere in Europe, maybe, there were trees': not that helpful.

[rhinemaid]

Venice a lot, because my uncle had a place there and my godfather lived in it for most of the year. We went to the south of France, sometimes, and Paris because my mother lives there. Lived there; Annegret probably didn't last long, after everything went to hell, given the state of her health. This is not the first time that thought has crossed Ilde's mind, but she doesn't know what to do with it, so she doesn't touch it.

I didn't like France. We went to Baden-Baden when I was twelve, and St Petersberg because my godmother has family there, which is how I learned Russian, from her. I really wanted to go to Prague, but we never did. We did go to Stuttgart, and I loved it there, and we stayed at this place on the Nagold as well. We visited family in England.

...Wolfgang may get the impression that she could just keep going, and that would not be inaccurate. She shrugs, eventually: Some places I mostly only know from cab windows and hotels - we didn't really stay put. I think of myself as from Italy, but to my mother I'm French and my father thinks I'm English because he is.

(It is pleasant to speak of them in present tense, and there is no solid proof to the contrary. She will if she likes, when she likes.)

[gramarye]

"It's nice to meet you too." His expression is friendly, because he does mean it; it's good to get to know the cohort in person, and it makes dealing with the city less daunting.

"Hm. Especially the ones here. Little monsters." He's not quite smiling (he doesn't seem to very often) but he sounds very affectionate -- Wolfgang adores children and he spent a lot of time early on in Baedal working as a babysitter, up until his reputation was too shot to continue. There are still some families in Bonetown that like him, but he doesn't accept money from them anymore unless they literally hold him down and shove it in his hand. "So we're not a... lawless oasis, I guess. Thankfully."

[caoineadh]

"Do you mean that literally?" Her smiles twists a little, wry. She doesn't think he does, but it was an easy joke to pick out in Baedal. Where there are, probably, actual monster children.

There's also a comment about lawlessness and the law here on the tip of her tongue, but it seems a bit too - much to say to someone she just met.

[gramarye]

What's England like? I have a cousin who wants to study there.

Meira used to talk all the time about it. She was sixteen when he left; it bothers him that he doesn't know if she did. In his mind, she's still sixteen.

After a moment, he adds: I thought about France, but language. He makes a face. Turkish was hard. He spent four months watching kids' shows and struggling in broken Turkish before he knew enough to get a job doing anything other than cleaning toilets. He would have killed for this kind of auto-understanding field then; he suspects he understands as much of what she just said as he did because of it.

[gramarye]

"Well, 'xenian' is polite." And much less cumbersome a word than 'cruorvore,' which he's still not certain he even pronounces correctly.

Vampire babies, though: alarming!

He brings his cigarette to his mouth and takes a long drag, holding it in and then releasing slowly. It's nice here, quiet and empty, and maybe sometime when he's less sad he'll come back and it won't be such a downer.

[rhinemaid]

I went to boarding school in England, secondary, up to about lower sixth before, at this point she breaks off and it's not a sign, just a gesture, waving away 'getting kidnapped and also the fucking apocalypse' because that's not a conversation she feels like having right now, when they're talking about more harmless (sort of) subjects like travel and education.

It was all right, but very...very English. And I was used to learning in Italian. Foreign students tended to group together, but I wasn't one thing or the other because I knew a lot of the English girls anyway because of family. It wasn't bad, though. Too Catholic for my taste, that's all. You learn how to get around the dormitory rules pretty fast.

...says the former dorm prefect, yes.

After a moment, French was one of my first languages, but I'm terrible with it any more.

[caoineadh]

"I've heard," And that wryness shifts into something else, a little more bitter but it doens't last long because she's not sure whether broaching that topic is appropriate. She doesn't know if it's something he's open about. Instead, she clarifies, "It was a joke, though, I wouldn't call anyone a monster just because of what they are. And I've dealt with a baby Drake."

Tiny fire faerie: also alarming!

[gramarye]

All I know of boarding school is movies. Long pause. His expression slowly changes, mouth pulling back and brow furrowing as a thought dawns on him -- Not that kind.

Yes, thank you for clarifying.

They're hard to keep, yeah? His Arabic suffered for a while up until he got a crash course refresher in Beirut. There are a lot of English speakers there, but English is, actually, his third, and about as bad. Here. The city makes practise hard. In terms of finding other people who speak a particular language well enough to practise, and then liking them enough to want to hold regular conversation with them.

Although he did notice the arrival pamphlets come in French, for more worldly condescension.

[rhinemaid]

Ilde laughs, when he corrects himself. I've seen some of those.

...yes, okay, move on.

Italian is easy - I talk to myself in Italian, I think in Italian. English is easy because everyone talks to me in English. There's a little shrug, an eye-roll; she's comfortable, it's fine, she's used to it, it just isn't what she prefers. It's a reminder that she isn't at home, even if she wants to make it one. Russian is harder. Reading and writing helps? I don't want to lose that one.

There's a lot she doesn't have, of her family and her home; it feels important to keep her words.

I'm trying to learn some German, too. Not great.

chimer, sunset/night.

[stitching_squid]

The evening hours are more to an illithid's liking than the cringing blaze of day, and so it is then that Manfelsashiir slips out of the inn to properly experience its new surroundings. The trains are something new and not unwelcome; no amount of curiosity can really make walking too far in a city on a bad leg a particularly wise course of action.

There are several neighborhoods that sound promising; one of them is Chimer, with both the river and a beach nearby and a reputation for welcoming "scholars and reclusive types" besides. If nothing else, it thinks, the humid air should make for a pleasant evening. So it is there Fel goes first, stick tapping softly, a peaceful observer. (A few people look mildly, briefly startled when they see it, but the surprise is never recognition. Here an illithid is simply one more xenian. Not even Sigil offered such freedom.)

The crowded areas offer crashing waves of every emotion, and for some time Fel opens its senses to taste them. It is a fast way to learn about the environment, if an eventually-overwhelming one. When the illithid has had its fill for the moment it moves away from the rush of beings in search of room to breathe.

Apparently one of the humans has done much the same. Away from the flood of other feelings the wisps of despair hang clearly in the air like dew-strung spiderwebs. Fel keeps walking, debates attempting communication. Those in such a mood tend to either welcome distractions or drive them away at once, but what's the worst that might come of it? To be asked for privacy is hardly an insult, and this does not seem to be an area where violence is a serious concern. An acceptable risk, then.

[Pardon me,] it murmurs in a soft, seashell-colored thought as its slow path parallel to the wall nears the stranger's perch. Not too close, some feet away, but just the same this seems the right phrase. [The sea is lovely, isn't it?]

A harmless pleasantry, for after Oryndoll Fel is still in a mood to keep its acceptable risks small indeed.

[bodilesswarrior]

Barbara nods; if she's sceptical, she doesn't show it.

"Same thing, more or less. I do a lot of tutoring." With a wide gesture to the buildings around them, "And I try to keep an eye on how the neighbourhood's doing."

She tries to keep an eye on Baedal as a whole, but that's another can of frustration and not something she should discuss in public.

"...I was just going to grab some lunch. I wouldn't mind some company."

[catiana]

Tatiana hesitates for a moment, glancing again at the bare spot at the end of the bench, before flashing a grateful smile and settling in next to him.

"Thanks." Again, she glances at someone she can't see. "Are there a lot of ghosts around?" Her voice is soft, and a bit sad. She can guess the answer.

[gramarye]

Wolfgang looks appropriately alarmed. "A baby what?"

He can guess, yeah, because... Baedal, land of weird.

[gramarye]

Wolfgang nods, because he understands -- he struggles to think of how to say what he wants to say in English, but it's easy to practise here. He's pretty sure it's the first language of the majority of their cohort. What's harder is finding things in other languages to read. Every trip to the bookstore is like an adventure.

I feel like I should. My family is German. Pause. Was. Came from there. An important clarification, because they're not dead, just... not really German anymore.

-- this begs the question, does he know what his full name means, and if so, is that why he's been so reluctant to give it out lately. (He wishes he'd thought to just... use his real name when he showed up, but he thought he was still on Earth, and... well.)

Is it hard to learn?