multiversallogs | some die looking for a hand to hold

Entry tags:

some die looking for a hand to hold

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Ilde speaks four and a half languages and never has enough vocabulary for the things she doesn't actually want to say because words are hard when she's trying to use them to communicate; she thinks a great deal about the meanings of words, the dictionary definitions and the subtler implications of choosing this one over that one. She is very good at twisting words elegantly around painful silences, and she calls this poetry when lying at the bottom of the bathtub with her eyes closed isn't working, but...words. They're hard. And quiet is good.

People are loud so we know they're alive. Right after a crisis. Everything shifts, for a while, in all sorts of different directions; that's just one of many truths being lived in Baedal right now, and there's something appealing about it that she can't begrudge. Doesn't want to participate in, mostly, but appreciates being able to witness. The roar of noise that doesn't mean anything is people, sometimes, and as overwhelming and alien as it can be as an experience, it's also-- people, being alive, being near her.

In small doses, it's comforting.

(...in large doses it reminds her that she mostly doesn't like people.)

Wolfgang thinks about that for a bit -- actually thinks about it, because it makes sense. He is certainly the last person to judge anyone for their response to things like -- well, that. Instead he wishes he could be more like that, enthusiastic about celebrating life, and getting drunk in order to do it.

But he's not like that. He drinks so he can die for a little while, but without the commitment.

There are a lot of things he could say in response, like how he's glad that people are able to move on, that in spite of how horrible Baedal can be he likes the vibrancy of the city and how it's okay to be weird here. He likes a lot of the people, he's met a lot of them, there's a lot he could say. All of it feels pithy. He ends up not saying anything, which says enough; he looks out across the river instead, dead around the eyes. He's always quiet and he's never been good at putting on masks.

It used to be something she had a knack for - there's a reason why she's so temperamentally suited to skillful illusion. Sometimes, here and there, she can maintain it a little the way she used to; most of the time, she contents herself with opacity and an illusory face that doesn't pretend not to be false. The unreal quality of her appearance is one finger lifted at the rest of the world (you only get to see what I decide; you can't just look at me when you like), and that's her coping strategy.

Not the loudness, afterwards, but the ability to create her own small space of stillness. Baedal is the right sort of place for her, she thinks; she'd stopped waiting (Erik thinks she should wait) and it had been like breathing out, finally, and it had felt like maybe she could be still, a little bit.

She moves forward so she doesn't fall apart.

After a moment she signs, Yeah, as though he'd said something, because that's enough, sort of.

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.)

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I get tripped up by the sentence structure, mostly. It's worth noting at this point that Ilde is prone to spelling out words she doesn't already know how to sign as well; there are pauses, hesitations, and it's clear that while further opportunities to not just practise but to simply converse have improved her skill and her confidence, it's not an intuitive process yet. So there's that, as well. I'm not anywhere near conversational - I started with just a German to English dictionary, a lot of what's written about my species is in German. Since we are.

...well, yes, Ilde, that does follow.

Literal translation is about as useful as Babelfish dot com, though. It had, therefore, involved a lot of patience and guess-work when she started doing it on her own with precious little knowledge of the language to help her.

Less. Babelfish, now that is awkward to spell out, is funny sometimes. He raises his eyebrows in an attempt at the facial approximation of an upward inflection. This is interesting, thinking about how to express things which are non-verbal but still parts of auditory conversation, nuances like inflection and tone. Focusing on the nerdiest aspect of this is also a great distraction.

Is it really wise to judge something's usefulness by its entertainment value? Probably not, and yet.

There is room to improve with translation here. For individual translators, maybe not so much, it depends on the demand, but with all the magic and technology available to them, it surprises him no one's thought of something more specific and convenient. He pauses and cocks his head, then, wondering if that's actually something he can do.

Ilde's expression turns quizzical as Wolfgang veers off on that mental tangent at the end-- Is that a good idea or a terrible one, happening in your head?

This is probably one of those standard questions that she applies to most of her friends, for various assorted reasons; 'terrible' is a very, very broad category that doesn't always necessarily mean she thinks it's bad. At least not the sort of bad that doesn't get indulged, anyway.

Wolfgang smiles a little, reflexively -- he would protest that he never has terrible ideas, but then he would be a filthy liar, so.

Magic is new to me. Technically and technically not; it is an awfully strange situation to be coming into power you used to have, and several times he has found himself trying to do things he used to be able to but can't, anymore. I don't know what I can do with it. Translation maybe. Maybe to help people.

It's funny having to get used to something that's part of you, Ilde observes, of magic - she never had any prior experience because she never knew it was there and she trips over her own figurative feet sometimes, trying to run before she can walk because it feels like she should be able to do more than she actually can. It's a question of knowledge and not power, and she has more of the latter than the former. Mystical puberty. Except I turned twenty-two in December. Is it like that for you?

A little. I... Wolfgang stops, thinks about how to say this. We're supposed to... Awaken is, actually, a euphemism, and one that is disappointingly vague; it's poetic, sure, but it doesn't really mean anything to anyone out of context. It's also a term he never would have known if he hadn't had a bunch of run-ins with the Technocracy. They helped him more than they realised.

Anyway, he hesitates only to pick a better word. Manifest as young adults. I was born like this. But I forgot for a long time, now I remember it. It's more like --

His mouth quirks upwards again, slightly. -- learning a language you forgot. So not as frustrating as it could be, but still not easy.

After giving this explanation due consideration - which is a fair amount, actually, because it's almost more interesting because the similarities are mostly outweighed by the differences, in their nature and their practise - she settles on, I think that bodes well for me picking up French again, which is a compliment, in a roundabout and Ilde-ish sort of a way.

You never really forget anything when you learn it. Long-term memory supposedly has infinite capacity; everyone's walking around with things in their heads that they know and can't recall. It's odd and a bit upsetting initially, but then -- there is comfort, too, in knowing that he never really forgot anyone, not really.

Just couldn't remember for a little while.

Memory is kind of weird.

It's a nice thought, that it's all in there somewhere.

(It had been one of the problems Emery suffered from, in that period of time defined as a particular After; short term memory problems, things slipping his mind, misplacing older memories. She remembers it distinctly because it had been one of the more frightening aspects of his recovery, when he'd smiled at her and held her hands and hesitated, uncertainly, before he said her name.)

He nods, rather than sign agreement, both because it's easier and it's good to be quiet for a bit. (Well, quiet-quiet, neither of them have said anything out loud the entire time.)

After a moment, he says, I like talking like this. The quietness and the challenge of it, it's a very different way of thinking about language and that's. Interesting.

Words feel different with your hands. Which-- is a little obvious and simplistic, and Ilde makes a face of exasperated frustration with herself; it's true, but she's not sure it's really conveying what she means when she says that. It feels more intimate without being invasive - she feels like a part of the conversation and not a spectator, as she often feels reduced to. Like someone watching tennis and following the ball instead of the game.

some die looking for a hand to hold

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